Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Autumn 1943
Autumn 1943
Autumn 1943
Ebook632 pages11 hours

Autumn 1943

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp and tries to get to the Danton POW facility; attempts to heal battle fatigue, especially a case involving a heinous crime perpetrated by German captors on a U.S. soldier later liberated; an itinerant evangelist gassed in France in WWI and his musically gifted wife; the wisdom of a one-legged, railroad-crossing watchman, a veteran of the Spanish-American War; the searching for meaning by a ministerial student; a night-club/big-band songstress; and how it was in small-town U.S.A. in the precise time-frame of autumn 1943.
LanguageEnglish
PublisheriUniverse
Release dateDec 9, 2002
ISBN9781469745312
Autumn 1943
Author

James Clark

Prof James Clark is a founding director of the world-leading Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence at the University of York, UK.

Read more from James Clark

Related to Autumn 1943

Related ebooks

Historical Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Autumn 1943

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Autumn 1943 - James Clark

    All Rights Reserved © 2002 by James L. Clark

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

    Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

    For information address:

    iUniverse, Inc.

    2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

    Lincoln, NE 68512

    www.iuniverse.com

    ISBN: 0-595-25890-5 (pbk)

    ISBN: 0-595-65409-6 (cloth)

    ISBN: 978-1-469-74531-2 (ebook)

    In memory of Bertha and Lester, who made the sacrifices and left behind indelible legacies of spirituality and decency.

    Contents

    C H A P T E R 1

    C H A P T E R 2

    C H A P T E R 3

    C H A P T E R 4

    C H A P T E R 5

    C H A P T E R 6

    C H A P T E R 7

    C H A P T E R 8

    C H A P T E R 9

    C H A P T E R 10

    C H A P T E R 11

    C H A P T E R 12

    C H A P T E R 13

    C H A P T E R 14

    C H A P T E R 15

    C H A P T E R 16

    C H A P T E R 17

    C H A P T E R 18

    C H A P T E R 19

    C H A P T E R 20

    C H A P T E R 1

    It was called the invitation hymn, sung at the end of most evangelical revival services. On this night, the hymn was titled Just As I Am, and the congregation was standing and singing from the thin, worn, paperback songbooks the preacher, an itinerant evangelist, and his wife had brought with them. The service had begun at seven-thirty with a song service directed by the preacher, who had also sung a solo. Then came the sermon, or message, as the Baptists called it, and finally the invitation hymn, during which the preacher pled with sinners to repent, or backsliders to confess and be revived.

    There had been no takers this night—there never were many—and all five verses had been sung; but, the preacher said he felt the spirit was moving and had everyone put the songbooks away, bow their heads and pray while his wife, who served at the keyboard of the ancient, yellow-keyed, upright piano, played through the song again. It was nearly eight-thirty and the folks, a handful of mostly blue-collar families, were tired, especially the children. There were still no takers at the end of the softly played gospel song, so the preacher asked everyone to bring someone the next night—a Wednesday, Sept. 22 and the third night of the series, which usually lasted two weeks—and pronounced the benediction. It was the beginning of autumn, 1943.

    At about the same time Cecil McToon was ending his disappointing service at the church—now simply called the West Danton Chapel by its downtown owner, the First Baptist Church—Major Samuel McNeill Ross stepped down at the depot from southbound train number 43, waited to make sure his small trunk was off-loaded from the baggage car and looked around for a cab. Half-carrying and using a cane, and struggling with his brief case and a heavy bag, he started limping toward the only one he saw, but was not in time. Two women who had also just left the train beat him to it, and he stood watching it disappear up Walnut Street toward town. Well hell, he muttered to himself. On the successive legs of his train journey from Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, he had given up his seat to women, half of whom were pregnant and most of whom seemed to him to be herding a gaggle of children, had sat on his bag in the dirty, noisy coach-vestibules or stood painfully in the smokers (rest room areas), and was tired, sleepy, and, now, in ill humor. After lighting a Lucky Strike and taking two deep draws, he picked up the bag, slung the briefcase over his shoulder with a strap he had devised, and, using the cane, headed for the crossing watchman, who had just gone into the shanty adjacent to Walnut Street, where he kept some coffee hot and stayed out of the weather when not having to stand at the crossing and hold his STOP sign, mounted on a pole about five feet high, during the daylight hours, or swinging a red lantern fueled by kerosene, at night. Poking his head in over the half door, Ross said irritatingly, "Wonder if you could tell me where Boyle College is. I would try to call a cab, but I bet there’s not another one in this one-horse town."

    The grizzled, old watchman, Amos Hadley, was pouring his coffee, with his back to Ross, and started to suggest that Ross could just try to find that one horse and help himself, when he turned around and saw the major. Well, general, you might try walkin’ a block or so up the street here, and when you see some brick buildings, that’ll be Boyle College. But, if you’d like to fortify yourself with a cup o’ joe here first, come in and I’ll git somebody to run you up there in my old car over there. The east-side yard crew is havin’ a late supper, and one o’ them old boys’d be glad to take you. Amos, who missed little that happened, both when he was working and off-duty, had noticed the limp when Ross was getting off the train, but, of course, did not know until he turned around that it was Ross who had spoken through the doorway. The old man had made the charge with Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill in ’98, and now had one grandson in the Marines. Another grandson had died in North Africa. Anyone wearing a uniform was special to him, now in his sixties. After an accident had cost him a leg when as a brakeman switching out a train some years before on a snowy day in Oneida, Tennessee, he slipped and fell under a boxcar, the railroad, instead of just cutting him off, had given him the cross-ing-watchman job.

    Ross hesitated, but there was something about the old man that was irresistible—and, he was tired and in pain anyway—so he put down the bag and entered the small building, which smelled of kerosene, coal dust and coffee. He took the cup from Amos, savored the coffee’s strong smell, started sipping it and sat on a stool in the corner opposite the coal pile while Amos scared up a temporarily off-duty switchman to drive him the short way to the college. Ol’ George’ll be over in a pair o’ minutes, Amos said as he swung the door open, he’s just finishin’ off some apple pie his missus surprised him with. I guess you’re reportin’ to the cadet school, huh?

    Yeah, you might say that, replied Ross. The truth was that he was arriving to take command of the pre-preflight school, and he was not happy about it. In fact, even though his executive officer at the college had known about when to expect him, Ross had decided to just surprise everybody, slip in and…well…admittedly do it the wrong way—and for what? He didn’t know—maybe just contrariness. Otherwise, there would have been an Air Corps car and driver waiting for him, ready to pick up his baggage and take him to his quarters. As it turned out, since he didn’t know exactly where to go, he had to tell George, the switchman, to please take him to the nearest hotel, which was the Gilcher, located in the center of the business district on Main Street, close to a mile away. George wouldn’t take any money for the ride—neither would old Amos for the coffee—so Ross thanked him and made his way into the lobby, which was not all that back-woodsy, he noticed, and secured a room for the night. He actually wasn’t due to be on post until Thursday, the twenty-third—the day after tomorrow—and sort of welcomed a bit of time to rest up and maybe get his attitude rearranged, if that was possible. He shuddered to think that he might have had to lug his gear and walk that distance on his gimpy leg if it hadn’t been for the unexpected help, gave thanks to whatever force or God existed, took a long hot bath, slept well…and dreamed of her.

    As Ross slipped into sleep in the Gilcher, Reinhold Heinschauer stared up in the darkness from his bunk at the unseen ceiling in a barracks in Camp Campbell, about 165 miles west of Danton, unable to go to sleep, but not because of the usual snoring or other noises all around him; rather, he was almost afraid to close his eyes. Pressed into the German army from his school-teaching post in Hamburg in 1940, he had been sent to North Africa, where he became part of famed German General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Though he had seen a great deal of action in the back-and-forth fighting with the British in the hot desert, he had escaped unscathed until the previous March, when he was slightly wounded by shrapnel during an artillery attack and captured in a fierce battle with the United States Seventh Army, commanded by General George S. Patton, at El Guettar. U.S. medics had dressed his wound, and he was ultimately placed aboard a troopship and sent as a prisoner-of-war to the United States, none the less for the wear. Indeed, though he didn’t know it at the time, he had been inordinately lucky just to have escaped the war and almost certain death if he had been sent into the fighting in Europe.

    At first, Heinschauer had been ensconced in a POW camp on the east coast. Though he had been careful not to express his anti-nazi feelings, since hard-core nazi prisoners had been known to murder those they considered anti-nazi and make the killings appear accidental or as suicides, he suspected that his feelings had been obvious, if for no other reason the fact that he did not enter into the pep rallies held by the hardened and arrogant nazis in the prison compound, when there would be speeches of belligerence, martial-type singing and many repetitions of heil Hitler. The American guards would jeer at these times and call the hated Germans every vile name they could think of. Also, his loyalty had been questioned by some of the captured German officers simply because he had not opted to train for an officer’s commission when he had entered the army. He had the qualifications in terms of both age and education. He was twenty years old at the time, but had graduated from secondary school a year early, had earned his teacher’s certificate a year early by going to school year-round, and had just begun to teach. It was precisely because he was well educated that he held his anti-nazi views, having read enough history and politics to see where Hitler was headed and realize the enormous and bloody consequences of what the despot meant to do.

    Along with teaching classes in mathematics and music (he played the reed instruments and was an excellent singer), he had also taught one English class, a subject he had studied diligently in college, and had mastered quite well. This would have advanced his career as an army officer or draftee, but he had not let it be known that he could use the language, and his examiners had missed that possibility probably by not having the time to thoroughly examine his school transcripts. Though he and his parents were nominally Lutheran, none of his family had practiced the faith, though he had sung in church choirs occasionally. His anti-Hitler position was simply the result of both his thinking and his natural aversion to bloodshed and the manipulating of people. He had been a good soldier, however, but more on account of the survival-instinct and the protection of his comrades than for any other reason. In fact, it was his hope that Hitler would be defeated, but he never mentioned this, nor had he ever let it be known that he understood English, though this was sometimes hard, since he had to be careful not to respond to any command or danger connoted by anyone’s spoken word in English, and especially hard when he knew that American interrogators were making the effort to determine this by catching him up, either in private sessions or through shouts in the compound. He always had to face the fact that his captors would have spies planted within the compounds to find any scrap of information available, whether of a military or personal nature, such as the ability to speak any other language. English-speaking German prisoners were in demand. In fact, he had once let a fellow prisoner who was carrying a long piece of lumber trip over a barrel and take a nasty fall by refusing to acknowledge the danger and helping the man when the likelihood of the accident was shouted pointedly at him by a guard. He simply wanted to be left entirely alone by both his comrades in the camps and his captors, and faking ignorance of the English language was one of the best ways to accomplish this.

    Though he was also not aware of it at the time, the U.S. Army had designated for their own protection three camps for prisoners who were deemed to be anti-nazi. The practice of murder within the camps was known to U.S. authorities, and, in fact, some of the murderers had been caught and dealt with. The army had professionals whose job it was to discover the prisoners with anti-nazi sympathies and have them transferred to one of these camps. Having spies within the compounds was one way to do this, especially in having them listen to conversations within the barracks at night, as well as simply having observers watch the conduct of the prisoners from outside the barbed-wire enclosures and listen in on their conversations when guarding the prisoners in their work details. This is how Heinschauer came to be transferred to Camp Campbell, one of the three camps, located on the Kentucky-Tennessee line between Hopkinsville in Kentucky and Clarksville, Tenn., the larger of the two towns, and the point at which he and his comrades were herded from the POW troop-train into buses to be taken to their new confinement, after entering Kentucky at Covington, across the river from Cincinnati, and traveling over the L&N Railroad diagonally the width of the state. The camp, constructed in 1942, was also an important training base and would later become the home of the 101st Airborne, known as the Screaming Eagles.

    Only after he had arrived at Campbell in early June had he discovered why he had been sent there, through overhearing a conversation between two American officers who had no reason to suspect the unassuming enlisted man could understand them. This news came as great comfort to him, though he heard a few days later that there was a network of hard-core nazi prisoners throughout the camps, that they had found ways to communicate, and that they were known to infiltrate the anti-nazi camps by appearing to be what they were not. He had not been too disturbed by this, however, until sometime in August, when he had the distinct impression—sort of an extra-sensory feeling—that he was being watched. This, coupled with the fact that he thought he recognized a new arrival from his old camp, had made him uneasy. The new man also had not shown enthusiasm for Nazism publicly, but in private conversations Heinschauer had heard, though probably no informants had overheard, indicated hard-core sympathies. Heinschauer could have reported this, but, of course, made no effort to do so.

    Since all the Campbell internees were considered anti-nazi, he could see no reason why he would be targeted; but, then, there was that interrogation session during the El Guettar action, and the high number of German casualties the next day. He had been the only prisoner questioned that day (as far as he knew), and had given only his name, rank and date of birth, as required by the Geneva Protocol. But, what if,he wondered, other Germans had thought he provided strategic information. For the month preceding his capture, he had been his commanding officer’s radioman, and, as such, could not help knowing practically all the German battle plans during that period, either through overhearing staff-officer conversations or simply being told. After all, he had been a good soldier. His commanding officer had survived El Guettar, but, Reinhold had heard before being transferred, was taken prisoner in later action. Could revenge be a motive, and could there be such a network? Sleep came hard.

    As Reinhold finally drifted into a fitful sleep, Rita Ransom was finishing her gig at the glitzy bar/lounge called the Michigander Oasis, located in Chicago’s Loop only a few blocks from the lake from which it got its name. She did a stint of two shows a night three times a year at the fashionable watering hole, a favorite of Chicago’s elite, mostly the wealthy, a handful of politicians and various and assorted practitioners of the arts—painters, dancers, etc. Of course, since the beginning of the war, there were always a number of servicemen in the audience, and they were usually treated to drinks on the house or by some of the regulars. Possessing a voice she could turn sultry, husky, high-spirited, bitingly clear or sweetly sentimental, she sang the whole repertoire of currently popular ballads and high-jinks songs, as well as the patriotic ones. In the thirties and early forties, she had sung with some of the best-known big bands of the time and still occasionally did gigs with one or the other of them, but now mostly sang with her trio (piano, bass, drums) in high-class venues all over the country. She made all the money she needed—and then some—and didn’t have to face the constant one-night stands, the long trips in between stops, and fronting the band for hours at a time before of a bunch of people dancing. In the clubs, she had the feeling that people were actually listening to her, not just using her as an accompaniment for the jitterbug or tango. She was a torch singer, and could do a love song better than most—a female Mel Torme. She had all of the moves that went along with selling a song, and could hold an audience—particularly the men—in the palm of her hand.

    Her first performance had been at nine. Then, she had a snack, rested, and appeared again at eleven. She was winding up the show with her signature tune, Stardust, the Hoagy Carmichael/Mitchell Parish classic that many bands and singers had done over the years, probably the best band-effort being Artie Shaw’s rendition; but, nobody sang the beautiful ballad better than Rita Ransom. As she sang the opening words, the eating and drinking stopped. She held the crowd until the final note, and the applause was, as always, enthusiastic and long. It didn’t matter if she was in Las Vegas or New York or Philadelphia—the response was always the same. She never got away with actually ending a performance with the song, of course. The crowds always clamored for encores. Usually, she did a couple, at least, one of them always being something patriotic, like Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree or Over There, which was done last. If she did a ballad, it was often the popular, pensive chorus of More Than You Know from the Youmans/ Rose/Eliscu 1929 musical Great Day (substituting the word man for the word girl and occasionally doing the first verse), and she always had one guy in mind when she sang it.

    Born in Chicago in 1910, she came of age in the speakeasy era in the late twenties and early thirties, before the end of prohibition. She started out as a singer in the smoky, smelly bars where alcohol was not legit but available in large, bootleg quantities, and everything from bookmaking to crap games in a back room were part of the action. Not only could she sing, but she was a green-eyed beauty, as well, with hair so deep red that it was almost auburn. She still was that, and the dimple in her left cheek added to her appeal, especially when she smiled in doing a song. With a ready laugh and a way of easily fending off would-be suitors—she could have had any of a number of rich politicians or gangsters—she became very popular, working her way up from the seedier joints to the best Chicago had to offer. She and her piano-player boyfriend, who was as good on the eighty-eight as she was with the voice, made the climb together until she was noticed by some of the people who had connections with the big bands. After doing their thing in the music halls or dance venues, some of the bandleaders started coming to her late show wherever Rita was singing, and it wasn’t long before she got an offer she couldn’t refuse from one of them. Breaking up with the boyfriend had been thought impossible, but the lure of real success became too great, so, in a tearful episode she still remembered (and later regretted) she bade him goodbye and became famous as a big-band girl singer, traveling all over the country doing the one-night stands as well as singing in the popular ballrooms.

    The parting was hard for both of them, and made harder because a decision had to be made almost on the spot. The job was offered as the two finished up at about two a.m. on a Saturday night in one of the fanciest, best-paying establishments in town, with the stipulation that she would have to join the band in Detroit on the following Monday (by now, the next day) if she wanted the job. It was in September of 1933, and the Great Depression was in full swing. Because of the speakeasy gigs, the two hadn’t felt the financial sting, though. The boyfriend told her, of course, that she should do whatever was necessary for success, but he loved her—she suspected—and she knew it was hard for him to see her go. She asked the bandleader, Jimmy Delaney, if he would take on her accompanist, too, since he knew her moves better than anyone else, but was told simply that piano players were a dime a dozen and that, anyway, he had one of the best already. They talked through the rest of the night, then met during the afternoon for what was the tearful, goodbye session. They wandered around the Loop hand in hand, talking about the good times and everything else but what they were thinking about, had an intimate dinner in one of the city’s best restaurants, then went their ways at her front door with just a brief kiss at about nine, she to pack and catch a train just after midnight, and he to continue wandering until he was too tired to walk anymore. On the train, she began to realize how deep her feelings for the talented piano player were—the difference between just taking someone for granted and actually loving that someone—but the die was cast. They tried to keep up a correspondence—brief phone calls as well as a few letters—but eventually the effort petered out, and they lost track of each other, except that he occasionally heard or read in the paper where she was singing. Three years after she left, he even went to one of her gigs, but he decided against trying to see her. It was just as well, because by then she was engaged, although the consequent marriage didn’t last long, and there were no children.

    The first thing Sally O’Shaughnessy’s new boss demanded she do when she joined the big band was change her name. DeLaney finally came up with a name he thought sounded just right—Rita Ransom. She agreed, and Sally had been Rita Ransom ever since.

    About the time Rita Ransom got to her hotel, Lawrence Cox was closing his second-year Latin textbook in his neat upstairs room in Charlotte Sexton’s large house on West Broadway, just a couple of blocks from the business section. A sophomore at Boyle College, he was studying for the ministry, and was not in the military because of a freakish auto accident (caused by a wheel coming apart, resulting in the ’34-Ford roadster’s end-over-end slide down a steep embankment) some years before in which he was so badly injured that it took a year for him to get reasonably back on his feet, and his left arm had been broken so badly that he could use it for little more than buttoning his shirt and stretching the skin under his jaws when he was shaving. He was riding in the rumble seat and was thrown from the vehicle. He had tried joining all the services, lying about the first turndown in the subsequent attempts, but to no avail. He marked down his rejection to being God’s will and applied himself with great fervor to his studies. He had often been tempted to question if it was God’s will that he be in the wreck in the first place, but did not allow himself to think much about that, since he had been taught to believe that God knew everything that would ever happen in the world before He created anything. In fact, that was the belief among adherents in most, if not all, Christian denominations. Sometimes he thought that particular belief, as well as some others, didn’t make much sense, since that meant that God could have prevented the wreck in the first place, foreknowledge being the same as foreordination by the Creator of it all, but his Presbyterian upbringing, seen to almost fanatically by his mother, Martha, who was a dedicated believer and had died two years before, included the study and unquestioned theology of John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformation theologian, after whom the belief system called Calvinism was named, and he accepted what he had been taught. The scholarly line was that the Bible unmistakably taught this—he had looked at the many references noted for its proof—and that it constituted a mystery that, while known only to God now, would be made entirely understandable in the hereafter, presumably to those who made it to heaven, God already having made up His mind who those (called the Elect) would be, according to Calvinistic doctrine—a claim that made the mystery so much more a mystery.

    He was the son of Jason Cox, a wealthy manufacturer in New York, who had been a football player at Boyle College when, though small and mostly unheard of, its teams were national powerhouses some 20-25 years earlier. It was where his father wanted him to go, had the money to keep him there and provided everything he needed, including a car. Since steering with his left hand was problematical while he shifted gears with his right hand in his 1940 Buick, a mechanic friend had rigged a small shift-lever just under the steering wheel, which was easily and quickly reached on the right side of the steering column—in place of the longer standard handle—and a clutch that could be depressed at any time after the lever was moved, to effect the gear-change. It was a sort of forerunner of the automatic transmission that would come on line a few years later.

    He loaded the car on Sunday mornings with some of his fellow students and headed west out Walnut Street to a small church on the Marion Road, the Gethsemane Presbyterian Church, about 12 miles from town, where the group held services in a small church much like the West Danton Chapel for a small band of mostly farm families in what was called the knobs, a series of low mountains that straddled the county line and marked the western boundary of the region known as the Bluegrass. One of the women students was a gifted pianist, and they had spirited singing. Cox usually did the preaching. At first, the sermons had been short, the young man running out of anything to say soon after he began. As he became more familiar with his task, the sermons grew in length, but were still short enough not to bore his listeners, at least because of their length. Their substance was what might be expected of a twenty-one-year-old sophomore (the accident had put Cox behind in his schooling), but many small, rural churches were served in the same way. The parishioners were usually under-educated conventionally and totally uneducated as far as religious matters and/or theology were concerned, so the system seemed to work fairly well, their understanding being that the college student, on merit, had knowledge superior to their own. Many preachers, using anecdotes in sermons or other speaking venues when they got older, looked back on such student days and speculated, usually causing ripples of laughter in their audiences, about whether or not God might have made a few mistakes in their calling. What the young preachers lacked in knowledge and ability, however, they made up for with their fervor.

    The elder Cox had expressed the desire that his son, an only child, prepare himself for what he considered a useful occupation, meaning anything but the ministry, and hoped that the younger Cox would see the light, as he had said to him many times, but did not threaten to withdraw support if the young man insisted on the ministry. Though not a religious man—in fact, he could be quite hedonistically ruthless in the business world (some even claimed, criminal)—he had always doted on Lawrence, had perhaps made his life too easy he thought at times, but had always been caught up thoroughly in what his son was doing and took great pride in the young man’s intelligence and work ethic. Lawrence had worked hard in his father’s enterprises during summer vacations and had proven to be a quick study, no matter what the projects in which he worked involved. If it was to be the ministry, all his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, then Jason Cox would probably build him a church—a fine one, at that—if a church was ever needed. For his part, Lawrence, who actually knew little about his father’s businesses/business practices, had probably based his decision for the ministry, whether consciously or as the result of a subconscious process, on the realization that he had so much, while the people who punched clocks every day in his father’s factories seemed to have so little. He had also accompanied his father one summer on a tour through the east-Kentucky coal-mining region where Jason Cox held partnerships in a number of mining operations, and had seen poverty and poor living conditions up close and personal, not just in the families of miners—who actually were better off than most people, though they lost most of their possessions as the result of strikes every three years—but in the non-mining families where men tried to eke out a living on the hillside farms. Though, like other young men, he had sown a few wild oats, he, especially after the accident which could have just as easily cost him his life, had decided that making money was not his thing, especially when compared to making other people’s lives more bearable and their hopes, spiritual and otherwise, more viable.

    In this September of 1943, Cecil McToon was 45, had a full shock of salt/pepper hair and carried a slight paunch on his six-foot frame. He had never seen the inside of a seminary, but had spent a year in his twenties at a Bible school in East Tennessee near where he was born, before setting out as a traveling evangelist. Before that, he had joined the Army in 1916 at age 18, had been exposed to Mustard Gas in the fighting in France in World War I and been mustered out in 1919. His wife, Amelia, also an east-Tennessean, a little hefty at 43 and with black hair streaked with gray, at one time had been a music major in college, but at the end of her sophomore year had deserted what might have been a promising career to follow the Lord, which meant following McToon all over mostly the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia and Indiana. The couple had no children, though Amelia had miscarried three times many years before. Practically their only means of support were the offerings lifted during the services and small earnings from odd jobs McToon took when they were available. As McToon and Amelia had often said both in private and in the services, they just depended on the Lord, though they admitted, at least to each other, that the Lord provided fairly slim pickings most of the time. McToon would have been even more hard-pressed to carry out his calling without the small government pension he received as a result of being gassed in the war. Nearly 30 percent of all American casualties in that war were caused by the gas, dichlorethyl sulfide, which caused blisters to skin and lungs, burns to the eyes and cancers in the mouth, throat and respiratory tract.

    Just as they had done two years before, they had parked their tiny trailer, which they towed with a 1939 Chevrolet, in a vacant lot two doors from the little, white clapboard church in the part of Danton, Kentucky, called West Danton, and asked at the First Baptist Church downtown (or uptown, as most folks called it) if they could use the church for two weeks or so. Some members of the downtown church in the town of 11,500 held Sunday school in the little church on Sunday afternoons, but that’s about all that ever happened there. It had been built about 20 years before and had once been the scene of a thriving membership, but the congregation had split over a doctrinal question—not unusual, especially in evangelical churches, when people sometimes felt too strongly about biblical interpretation—and the First Baptist Church had picked up the mortgage used for the church’s construction—since the members who were left could not make the payments—and taken ownership during the Great Depression of the thirties, when the bank was happy to release it for fifty cents on the dollar.

    There had been regular services and a mission pastor for the few families still interested until World War II broke out for this country at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Until then, there were few cars among the families, so the church, within walking distance of every house in West Danton, served a unique purpose. With the onset of the war, the men of the church—mostly railroaders too old to volunteer or be drafted—and many of the women worked all the extra days and overtime they could stand, and bought used-cars before they bought anything else. Besides having virtually no members equipped to teach and/or supply the small group with other leadership capabilities, the congregation had only a small, pot-bellied stove midway of one wall for heat and a few bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling for light, so most of the members opted to attend the churches downtown, to which access could be gained by car in a matter of minutes, and where there were ordained ministers, large Sunday schools and other programs and much better facilities. At one time, the little church had a furnace, as well as attractive light fixtures, but maintenance had gone by the wayside during the hard times, and its lack had meant a perpetual state of disrepair.

    West Danton, located on the west side of the Southern Railway mainline and rail yard, was actually in the city limits of Danton (shortened version of Danielstown), named for famous pioneer Daniel Boone and located in the fringe area of the state known as the Bluegrass, one of the best farming areas in the country, especially for tobacco and corn. The town featured a clothing factory, a small college with campuses on opposite sides of town—one for men and the other for women—and the rail yard incorporating a crew-change point and a fairly large switching operation handling freight and passenger traffic between Louisville and Cincinnati and points south. Most of the families in West Danton were headed by railroaders who mostly worked the freights between Danton and Oaktree, Tennessee, or in the switching crews or the yard’s offices or shop area known as the roundhouse, where the noisy steam engines were serviced and repaired. Though the often dangerous rail jobs paid better—because of the union—than any other local jobs, many, if not most, of the townspeople looked down on the railroaders as rough, uneducated and often drunk, though the somewhat justified drunkenness claim was ameliorated significantly when the town and county voted dry in the late thirties, meaning that no alcoholic beverages could be sold legally after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 had opened up all the watering holes again. Railroad money was much appreciated, however, by both the tax agencies and the businesses, and the railroaders’ children were on a par academically and athletically with the rest of the town’s public school students, a fact that bothered some of the bluebloods who traced their family histories back to the 1600-1700s. The railroaders had been recent arrivals, for the most part, in the town, and their forbears had been among the flood of immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    Though the prevailing westerly winds mostly carried the smoke and steam from the rail yard eastward over the main part of Danton, they sometimes shifted and brought the gray-black clouds over West Dan-ton. On rainy, damp days, the smoke held close to the ground and made a sort of dirty fog throughout the town. On sunny days, the washes hanging on the backyard clotheslines nearest the rail yard were often spoiled by the black spots formed in the drifting-down exhaust steam filtered through the clouds of dark, billowing smoke. The women complained, but accepted it. That’s the way it had been since the advent of the railroad in the late 1800s.

    The men’s campus of Boyle College was only one block east of the rail yard and was being used by the government as one of 281 colleges and universities throughout the country for pre-preflight school for future military pilots and navigators, the Boyle campus being used by the Army Air Corps. The first 200 cadets had arrived by train on the last day of February, with 225 more on April 1. They were housed in the men’s dormitories. During their five months at the school, they were taught math, engineering and other courses on the main campus that would prepare them for pre-flight and flight training and, ultimately, their assignments abroad. They also received about ten hours of flight introduction in single-engine trainers operating out of the small airport about four miles south of town. The regular curriculum was still in effect, however, for the handful of male students who had been classified 4-F (physically unfit or too old) for the military, and for the women students. Previously, the women’s campus on the east side of town had been the facility for a women’s college, but the two colleges had been combined some years before, and the school, with the men’s campus becoming the main campus, had a working relationship with the Presbyterian Church. Because of the government program, the men students were housed in off-campus residences, and all the college classes were held in the women’s facility.

    Walnut Street ran the east-west length of the town, through the men’s campus and across the rail yard into West Danton. Between the campus and the tracks it was bordered by boarding houses used mainly by the out-of-town railroaders, mostly from Louisville and Cincinnati, and by a small 24-hour restaurant called THE EATERY, patronized mostly by railroaders and male students. A crossing watchman was on duty 24 hours a day to stop traffic whenever trains or engines were about to enter the crossing. Another crossing was located on Perrytown Street about a block north, on the other side of the attractive, tiled-roof train depot, its traffic governed by lights and bells operated by a railroad employee in the adjacent telegraph tower. To get to school, all the schoolchildren in West Danton had to cross one of the crossings, one or both of which (usually Walnut Street) were often blocked. This section of the Southern carried some of the heaviest freight traffic east of the Mississippi River, and 14 passenger trains a day stopped in Dan-ton, the longest ones blocking at least one crossing while taking on and discharging passengers, baggage and mail. The constant nightmare of parents was the fact that school kids, especially high school students, would get hurt or killed crawling under or around the trains when they were stopped, then unexpectedly started moving. In fact, some of the boys thought it was fun to make it under when the freight cars were moving slowly. The Air Corps cadets, as part of their fitness program, used the Perrytown crossing in their morning run out into the country and back. By 1950, a bridge would be built over the tracks and both crossings closed.

    As was the case throughout the nation, the war had greatly changed the sleepy town by September 1943. To begin a long, bloody battle that would last into May of 1945, U.S. and British forces had just invaded Sicily in July and mainland Italy earlier in the month. Just a few days before, on Sept. 13, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, had announced on radio the news of Italy’s surrender, the first such event to be broadcast via radio. The Italian soldiers, even though their Axis government had seen the light and tried to save its skin by declaring war on its German allies, allowed themselves to be disarmed by the Germans instead of joining the battle to drive the Nazi troops from their country, thus costing thousands of American lives. The North Africa campaigns had cost many American lives already, as had the air war in Europe. Earlier in the year, the Japanese had been driven out of the Aleutians, Guadalcanal had been secured, and the successful but bloody island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific were about to begin in earnest. The blue-and gold-starred flags were displayed in windows throughout the town, as families worried about their wounded and grieved for those of its sons who had met death.

    At home, gas-and food-rationing had long been in force, though no one had suffered because of these inconveniences. A brisk ration-ing-stamp trade flourished, but there was little black-market action. Radios were kept turned on throughout waking hours so that every scrap of war news would be heard. The clothing factory was kept in operation 24 hours a day making specific parts of uniforms, as well as parachute material. Troop-trains (many made up of steel boxcars converted into what amounted to little more than uncomfortable, rolling bunkrooms) streamed through the rail yard, as well as trainloads of war materiel. The prisoner-of-war trains, made up of comfortable sleeper/ coaches and dining cars more amenable than the troop carriers to the guarding of the hated Germans and Italians, had begun passing through the rail yard, as well, transporting large numbers of the 400,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese captured throughout the world and interned in camps all over the United States by war’s end. It was ironic that the POWs traveled so well while the GIs had to endure the rough rides in the converted boxcars. The state mental hospital, located four miles north of town, had been taken over by the government, which made it into a facility for the confining and treatment of soldiers suffering from Battle Fatigue, known as Shell-Shock in World War I. Passenger cars containing these war-weary and psychologically devastated young men were shunted onto tracks near the depot, where their inhabitants, some wearing straitjackets, were unloaded, sometimes very roughly, sometimes literally jerked bodily down the coach steps and jammed into buses for the ride to the hospital.

    It was their blank stares and the rough treatment of these mentally and emotionally wounded soldiers that haunted eighth-grader Johnny Baxter every time he traversed the Walnut Street crossing, walking to and from the grades-seven-through-twelve high school, which was located on the same side of Walnut Street as the men’s campus of the college and just east of it, across College Street. He was fascinated by the rail yard and spent much time hanging around it. He had seen the soldiers pulled from the coaches one day in the spring when he was standing on the north side of the depot, which was located at the end of the track where the coaches were spotted by the switch crews. He had seen the same thing on other occasions since then, and became angry when he saw the POW trains being snaked through the yard, with guards at the end of each coach, as well as on the caboose. Often, the prisoners could be seen eating in the dining cars, apparently in the lap of luxury. He had heard, too, that German and Italian prisoners, because of the shortage of men who had been called from the farms into the military, were being forced to work on farms in parts of the state west of Danton. Many of them had been interned at Camp Campbell in western Kentucky not far from Hopkinsville. Campbell was one of three camps in the country to which anti-nazi German prisoners were sent, thereby saving their lives in many cases, since hard-core nazi prisoners were not above murdering their anti-nazi comrades inside the prison camps, though the murders could be covered up as accidents or suicides.

    Johnny lived on Sycamore Street, just around the corner from the West Danton Chapel, which was on Quisenberry Avenue, in West Danton. Henry Baxter, his father, a brakeman who had been killed in a train wreck six years before, had been a boomer, the name given a railroader in the first thirty or so years of the century who traveled from one railroad to another to find work. Confined mostly to single men, this approach was much like that of the hobos—except for the pay, of course—allowing for work in the South during the winter and work in the North during the hot days of summer, and work out west when things were boring or slow in the more industrialized East. Henry’s boomer days ended in Danton in 1928 when he married Nancy Woodson, a schoolteacher, and settled down to work on the rat-hole division, so named because of its many tunnels, between Danton and Oaktree. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression following close on its heels, combined with his lack of seniority, meant that Henry would receive very little work in the thirties, and he worked at whatever he could find, Nancy’s fifth-grade school-teaching job at Maple Avenue School, though low-paying, keeping the family afloat financially. Henry had worked off the extra board, getting a trip maybe two or three times a month, but had died in 1937 when the caboose he was riding derailed in the small town of Burnside and careened off a bridge—one of the few of any length with a curve in it—a hundred yards farther on, into the shallow shoreline of the Cumberland River.

    Henry and Johnny, an only child, had been close—the boy fairly worshiped his father—and Johnny had never become reconciled to his father’s death, withdrawing into himself enough to concern his mother and becoming more and more of a loner as he got older. Though Nancy had stopped going to church after Henry’s death, Johnny seemed drawn to the Sunday afternoon sessions and always attended every service when an itinerant preacher settled in for a series of revival services. Nancy thought this was probably because the little church formed a tangible—maybe even spiritual—connection for the boy with his father and did not discourage this, though, by her own admission, her faith had evaporated the day Henry had not come home. She felt this was also the reason her son spent all the time he could in and around the rail yard. Though once very active in the West Danton Chapel, she had never been inside a church in the six years since his funeral, except for weddings and other special occasions.

    Nancy Baxter, like many other teachers at the time, was teaching on a two-year certificate when she met Henry at a going-away party for one of her friends, who had married one of Henry’s buddies who had accepted a trainmaster’s position with the railroad, and was moving to Chattanooga, Tennessee, a Southern Railway hub featuring a huge yard and passenger facility. Though not a raving beauty, Nancy, with her auburn hair, deep-brown eyes and trim figure, was not only quite attractive, but irrepressibly witty, as well. Though she was only 20 years old at the time, she found the 33-year-old Henry to be the man she thought she had been waiting for ever since as a teenager she had dreamed of meeting a sailor who had been everywhere and would take her everywhere. Henry had been in the navy during World War I, had made a number of trips across the Atlantic serving on troopships, and had survived one torpedoing by a dreaded German U-Boat. He was also ruggedly good-looking, played the fiddle, was willing to give up drinking alcohol and didn’t mind going to church—in this case, the little church in West Danton, where Nancy lived with her railroad-engineer father and mother and one brother and two sisters on Beech Street, about two blocks west of the church, a thriving congregation in 1927 when they met. The brother, 25-year-old Matt and the youngest of the Woodson children, was in the U.S. infantry and had just been in on the invasion of Italy. Though Nancy’s father took a dim view of them boomer brakemen, especially one thirteen years older than Nancy, and was against the courtship that ensued, Nancy and Henry married about sixteen months after they met and moved into the little house on Sycamore Street, where Nancy and Johnny still lived. Though she was only 30 when Henry died, Nancy had never dated since his death, though she had had ample opportunities. The two were—as Nancy’s mother often said—uncommonly devoted.

    Between them, Henry and Nancy had managed to keep up the payments on the house, and, shortly before he died, Henry had even managed to buy a ’35 Plymouth auto to replace the old Model B (1930 vintage). To make ends meet after Henry’s death, Nancy had taken a part-time, bookkeeping job during the school year for a local law/real estate firm, and added it to full-time summer jobs at such things as waiting tables, operating a drug-store soda fountain and clerking in a dry-goods store. Teachers were not paid during the summer months in the thirties and forties. During the preceding summer, she worked in a bank, but had dropped the part-time work in the spring, devoting her full time to teaching.

    C H A P T E R 2

    Cecil McToon awoke at six the next morning, as usual, and put a pot of coffee on low flame on the kerosene stove, then trudged over to the outhouse behind the church to empty the receptacle (some called it a slop jar) used for carrying away the human waste. The town had installed water lines in West Danton many years before, and a sewer line in 1940, but the church had never been connected to it, though it had been connected to a septic tank, which, unhappily, had failed and never been fixed. It could accept small amounts of water, but no solid waste. Some way to live, he muttered as he entered the church to wash the container in a rusty sink and draw water in a bucket he had brought, but then they didn’t even have water taps in Jesus’ day. At least I don’t have to pump water from a well like I did when I was young.He would have parked the trailer on the church lot, but it would have been out of place in the front of the church and the land behind the church fell away so steeply that the vehicle would have been nowhere near level, even if he could have driven it back there—which he couldn’t, anyway. Though the trailer was small, he had managed to partition it into two tiny rooms—one a kitchen and the other a combination bedroom/sitting room—and a closet affording some privacy for satisfying the human needs. He had built a sink into the kitchen, but needed a water supply to use it. Two years before, the family in the house adjacent to the lot had allowed him to fasten a hose to an outside faucet beside the house and connect it to the trailer, and, though they didn’t attend his services, would not accept any payment. There had been no one at home since he and Amelia had arrived this time, and he wouldn’t make the connection without permission. He smiled as he walked the short distance back to the trailer, since he noticed lights in the house and felt sure he could again gain permission.

    The coffee had perked until it was strong and aromatic by the time he returned. Amelia was a sound sleeper, and not even the smell of the coffee awakened her. He poured himself a cup, then poured some from the cup into the saucer—for quicker cooling—and settled down to some serious prayer and Bible study. From his seat in the little kitchen, he could see the sunrise, the sight tempered a bit by the gray haze over the rail yard and filtered through the still-green, dew-dripping leaves of a big maple tree. The air was crisp, though late September in Danton was still warm and the leaves wouldn’t be changing colors for a few weeks yet. This was his time of day and he savored it. He also savored a cigarette with his coffee and Bible study, and lit a Chesterfield, blowing smoke rings along with sipping coffee and giving thanks for life itself. He had never forgotten the mustard gas, the lives he had seen lost, either through the gas or the fighting, and never failed to give thanks at the beginning of the day for being alive. Gotta watch this cigarette-smoking, though, he mused, a lotta these church folks consider them a sin, even though they—including a lotta deacons—raise the stuff and sell it for good, hard cash—a lot more than I have, at that. Indeed, there were a number of tobacco warehouses—with their sky-lighted roofs—on the streets on both sides of and near the rail yard, where the tobacco was stored in the fall and auctioned during the winter months. Many of the owners were church people. McToon never smoked in public, but had a hard time hiding his nicotine-stained fingers. He enjoyed the smokes more than most people for the simple reason that, because he wouldn’t let himself be seen smoking in public, he smoked fewer of them. This also kept down the intensity of the nicotine stains. He was not an addicted smoker anyway, but one who smoked for pure pleasure. Those smokers always smoked fewer cigarettes than their addicted counterparts. He never smoked more than half a pack a day, and much of the time not that many.

    He was a serious preacher, however, and an excellent one. Though not altogether self-taught—he had attended that Bible school—he was an astute scholar of the scriptures, probably having read more extensively than most ministers and many theology professors. He also had that rare gift of being amenable to having his mind changed—by anyone, including himself (through his own study)—if someone else’s approach made more sense. In addition, he had spent a good part of life outside the ivory tower, as he called it, in the real world. During much of the thirties, no one could have existed on revival preaching, so McToon had been forced, like Henry Baxter, to work at whatever he could find. He had worked on farms, as a sawmill hand, truck-driver, and in many other occupations. These experiences enabled him to identify with the people to whom he spoke night after night,

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1