Chapter 8 - Leaving

John walked slowly home in a depressed and half drunk state, eyes glazed over from whiskey and cold air. He came upon the front of the Salina Mercantile and Exchange Company, they had already locked up for night, but an electric lamp on the front porch cast light on the front wall of the store, where posters and notices, help wanted signs and for sale items were tacked on a large wooden panel to the side of the store window pane. By compulsion to take in new words, John paused to read the notices and one new poster caught his attention.

WORK IN THE APRICOTS!
In Sunny Aromas, California!
Enjoy the Scenic Monterey Peninsula!
Swimming, Camping, Beaches!
Free Wood and Water to All Workers!

Under the coaxing headlines was a picture of women and children diving and swimming at a reservoir or a pond. Their bathing suits and bathing caps on and children on a diving board made the scene serene, and so much in contrast to the cold and cruel world that Salina had become to John. The caption on the poster read: Swimming at the beautiful Aromas dam!

John forgot his troubles for a moment and smiled at the thought of sunny California, and the ridiculousness of actually “working in the apricots.” “The boys would love to be able to swim all year round.” He thought to himself. John pulled the poster down, rolled it up and tucked it into his coat.

“Now no one else will know! He he heh.” With drunken humor he said aloud to himself as he tucked the poster in his coat.

After supper John spread the poster out on the kitchen table and gathered everyone around to gauge reactions. He wanted them to want it, to want the move, to want the change. Dissent and negative reaction would be out of the question and so his anticipation was noticeably positive, exuberant. The excitement was unanimous. Thelma less so, having to say goodbye to her family and the Jenkins. But John promised her that he would send for them anytime that Thelma wanted to see them, and that perhaps they could later come to California as well, to live nearby. Sydney had a crush on a girl six houses down the street and this became his main concern. O.W. became infatuated with the ocean and beaches and became anxious to go almost immediately.

John had to act with haste for fear of what Mr. Auburn and Godfrey, or even Burrows, might do to him, to quiet him, or worse to get rid of him. He began planning the evacuation immediately. He found a real-estate lawyer and placed the house in trust to him, to sell and later forward the proceeds. He telephoned St. Louis and ordered a brand new Ford Model T, with side tool box, spare wheel, four doors, a slanted windshield, electric start and headlamps, four wheel hydraulic brakes, and a nineteen and one half horsepower engine with a top speed of forty-five miles per hour.

The following Tuesday morning was business as usual on the second floor of the Kansas Home and Trust Company Bank, except John was planning an exodus while he busily worked in his usual manner. John loved his job, he loved the farmers he worked with, the merchants he saw almost daily, he felt as though he were a civil servant, aiding and providing monitory comfort to those in need and especially because they were of his community. John wanted to ease his conscience about leaving this behind, those people behind, he wanted to fix something, for someone before he left.

“Robert Kingsley! Principle two thousand and seventeen dollars! Good ole Bob, jeez what a great guy, old man Auburn would deserve it and probably not miss it at all!”

John would pay-off Robert Kingsley’s loan, buy the farm, on paper only. All he needed to accomplish this for the Kingsley family was right there on the second floor, he could bring the papers to the assayer’s office and the deed out to the Kingsley farm himself. The first thing he needed was the file folder, easily obtained from the office main floor room. Then he would need Mr. Auburn’s signature, a more clever trick, it would have to be forged.

“But Robert is an honest man, what will I tell him? If he knew, he would return the deed, or if he did not return it, that might even be worse, I would have aided in his corruption.”

Allowing Robert Kingsley to knowingly steal would be putting a rusty nail into the delicate and honest psyche of an innocent and hard working family man. John had known Robert too long to assume he might be able to handle that emotionally, for the sake of saving his farm, or not. Robert had never lied, cheated at cards, or stolen anything. John would have to have a lie prepared for Robert that would free his conscience and prevent him from ever discussing his forgiven loan to anyone else, and especially to Mr. Auburn.

John needed a document that was freshly signed by Mr. Auburn, with it’s ink still wet. He left the door to his office open so that he could clearly see the left hand corner of Mr. Auburn’s secretary’s desk and the Out box. About a half an hour went by before a document arrived to the double layered in-out box. But the secretary did not get up for anything, allowing the ink to dry, that sheet of paper would be no good to him. Another forty minutes passed and the next sheet arrived. John left his own office with his empty coffee cup in hand, already having had five cups that morning, his bladder ready to burst through his abdomen, he was afraid that if he went to restroom he would miss the golden opportunity to grab a fresh document while the secretary was away from her desk. Pouring coffee from the machine at the other end of the office floor and returning with it to his office availed him a chance to grab a freshly signed document should Mr. Auburn’s secretary get up for something. Passing the secretary’s desk he glanced down at the out box, he could see Mr. Auburn’s signature still shining from the wet ink of his old style quill pen. Again, she was still there, no chance to grab it. He reached the coffee machine and took his time, keeping a careful eye on the desk.

“Miss Jones would you come in here please and bring a tablet, oh, would you bring me a cup of water please.” Mr. Auburn pleasantly commanded from his office

John walked by the desk and with two fingers acting like the postmaster in the moving caboose grabbing the depot mail bag, he lifted the sheet off the outbox with grace and the paper flew to his front side like a bird gliding on the wind, hidden from the view of the others in the office. He removed a sheet of thin stationary from his desk drawer and carefully covered the document so as not to smudge the document. Over Mr. Auburn’s signature, he gently rubbed his thumb flat from left to right, then back again. He lifted the stationary sheet and revealed a faint perfect copy of the signature. He could now trace it over Robert’s deed, absolving him of the loan liability. Now he could relieve himself and it was all he could think of. Walking delicately so as not to spring a leak, he stopped at the secretary’s desk and bent over to reveal the document from behind his back.

“Here you are Miss Jones, this must have fallen from the box.”

After work John climbed into his old Model T and drove out to the Kingsley farm to deliver the deed with it’s lien absolved. Delighted with his cleverness, his new found form of corruption , he imagined himself a modern day hero.

“Robin Hood! Robin of Salina. Robin of Salina Forest? Robin of Locksley! Sir Robin of Salina? Sir Robin of Salocksley! Foils the dastardly Sheriff of Salingingham! Savior of the poor, foe of the rich, arch nemesis to the evil bankers of Salingingham! Turns corruption upon the corrupt in favor of the downtrodden victims! Rescues maid Robert. Maid Robert? Maid Mrs. Kingsley of Salina Forest! He seeks no favor, no recognition, he remains anonymous, a mystery, a legend in these parts! Sir Robin Irwin’s good deeds, the stuff of lore for decades to come.”

Sitting at the Kingsley’s kitchen table with Robert and his wife, John placed his briefcase on the table, flat and opened it. He pulled out the deed in a large wax and string sealed envelope and holding it upright on the table explained the good news to Robert:

“It’s was called the Farm Reclamation Act Robert, it was passed by the U.S. Congress two months ago and it’s specifically designed to save farms like yours, of less than one hundred acres, from bankruptcy and from banks like mine. I applied for the clemency under the act, by wire, and got an answer back this morning. You’re in the clear Robert. All paid for. No more loan. The farm is yours to keep so long as you pay the taxes every year.”

Robert and his wife’s jaws dropped open as their eyes darted back and forth from the envelope to John’s face. They were incredulous and in awe, and taken aback by this unexpected gift, nearly in shock. They both began to smile slowly. Robert reached out and took the envelope, he broke the seal and unwrapped the string on the flap. Pulling out the gold-leaf trimmed deed to reveal the embossed seal of the State of Kansas, and signed by the County Register of Deeds. Mrs. Kingsley and Robert’s smile grew full and their eyes wide with wonder and they gasped and struggled for words.

“John. John! This is amazing. I can’t believe it. This is the answer to our prayers! We are going to be alright! We can keep the farm, the house, stay in Salina, raise the kids right here! John! How can we thank you?”

“You don’t have to thank me at all, this was the Congress’ doing, all I did was look up the solution and file the application. It’s all within the realm of my work Robert, a day’s work.” John was getting more comfortable with the lie.

Mrs. Kingsley’s eyes welled up with tears, her cheeks blushed with color and her smile was as wide as a train track.

“You’re staying for a while John while we celebrate, you just sit your fanny down right there!”

Robert pointed at John with a gleeful smile and traipsed into one of the back rooms for a moment, returning with a hammer in his hand. John watched as Robert knelt down at a floor board near the front door and began pulling up nails, lifting a two foot long board, Robert revealed a full bottle of Scotch Whiskey and three shot-glasses.

The three got roaring drunk. Mrs. Kingsley fell to the floor while slurring something about a sewing machine and quickly passed out around eight o-clock. John and Robert finished off the bottle as Robert rambled on about plans for the farm, new fences, stables, new livestock, clothes for everyone, shoes and all the comforts that an income can provide. Listening to this hopeful future for the Kingsley’s was a bask in the sunshine of hope for John. The glow of the Kingsley household that evening could be seen for miles and it was not just the glow of every electric and oil lamp in the house lit by Robert that night, but it was also the warm glow of the laughter and of the dreaming aloud that could be heard from the nearby wheat fields. John drove back to town swerving all over the road until he crashed the old Model T into a drainage culvert just a few hundred yards from Santa Fe Street. He had hit his head fairly hard on the steering wheel and did not care, he was far too drunk to be concerned with the blood dripping down his face. He left the old Model T where it lay, on it’s side, and as he walked away from that night his fond goodbye was expressed by kissing the front hood, while steam vented out from the radiator cap. An openly sentimental man who truly loved his machine, might have named his automobile by this time, but John thought that a disrespect to old man Jenkins who owned hit before him. He waved farewell as he got further down the road into the dark night. He stumbled home on foot, drunk as a skunk in love, head pounding he still smiled as he staggered home. In his mind he was a modern day hero like Sir Robin Irwin of “Salinocksley.” Knowing he was leaving Salina made his deed of devious favor easy to accept in his otherwise clear conscience.

On February the twenty eighth of nineteen twenty one, John and the boys and Thelma, packed a small trailer, five feet high with furniture and personal belongings, and drove out of Salina south east, towards Witchita and to find the famous Chicago to Los Angeles route, then westward never to return.

The oil that the car factory had used to treat the leather of the seats was an aroma of success. Thelma got to sit in the front seat the whole way and John would not allow any other arrangement. It took two days just to get to Tulsa, Oklahoma. John had packed two tents and camping gear in the trailer but he tried to stay at motels along the route when ever possible. Once in Texas the weather changed from cool mornings and wind, to dry and warm with still air and a lot of flat land.


#

Billy Wilkes would walk until his legs felt like rubber. It was a hot and dry stretch of road that seemed far straighter and longer than any that he had walked before. Since he chose to leave St. Louis he had counted fifty three rides, mostly in pick up trucks, mostly on hay. He had stopped putting out his thumb for cars, because cars hardly ever pick up hitch-hikers, they just speed by him, often not even hugging the center of the road to give cautious way for him on the side. Drivers and passengers of cars would watch him from their mirrors as they grow smaller on the horizon ahead, because they are curious, but not curious enough to pick him up, to take the risk of kindness, or to take a chance on a stranger, just curious enough to bend their necks ever so slightly and get a look at the face of the man they could not decide upon in time enough to pull over. The leather on the bottom of his shoes was wearing very thin with his left shoe almost scraping gravel, and he had started playing a game of sorts, lifting the worn leather foot more lightly than the other to even-out the wear created by the down-fall of the shoe, hopefully to allow both of his shoes to last longer. It was silly, he knew, because he could not keep it up, but it was something to do out on the side of the road. In his coat pocket a folded and creased and worn poster that he looked at ten times a day. A poster promising hope, shade trees and fruit, and most importantly, steady money: “Free Wood and Water to All Workers!” The banner under the advertisement read. Billy would walk and think, he would imagine how he would contact his family once he got there and show them that his life was on track to success. He would telephone his home town and speak to everyone at the general store in the center of Hawkeye Missouri, and he would tell them how lush everything was, and how much work there was for everyone. He would send Mary roses and chocolates by special delivery with a note of love attached to ensure her that she was in his thoughts. Billy would pace the gravel and tar in the hot sun and in his thoughts, for perhaps the thousandth time would compose that note to Mary:

“Dearest Mary,
My heart is sore and tender without you near to me. My thoughts are of you alone when not attending to my daily activities. I wish you could see this place. The fruit trees are everywhere! They are so much in abundance that one only needs to reach upwards and grab a cool and sweet snack. I pick apricots and sometimes strawberries. My boss says that I’ve got promise and that one day I’ll be foreman and really make the big bucks out here. Soon I will arrange for your travel to California to be with me and we will marry, just like I told you. That is my darling, if you’ll still have me, if you still hold a place for me in your heart . . . .”

Billy’s letter would always stop there, at the fearful part, where his fantasy of success is replaced by his insecurity of love vacant, of intimacy displaced by miles and miles of dirty gravel, of hot road and of no method of contacting Mary. Billy knew this adventure would be hard on him, but he did not count on it being this painful.

“Not this damn hard!”

Billy shouted down to the ground, his outburst disturbing a small area of desert as he paced along side of the road, his mood disrupted by reality.

The Merchant Marine had been the toughest three years Billy might ever have to face in his life. Torpedoed off the coast of France by a German U-boat, Billy clung to life in the chilly waters and burning sun of the choppy surface of the Atlantic Ocean with three other men on a section of deck boards that wouldn’t carry any one of them whole, but was large enough to embrace by four men, taking turns holding each other’s hands and arms across the boards to allow each other to sleep without slipping in and drowning. For six days they floated thinking they would likely die, before the night of the sixth day found a shore for them to crash upon. The breaking waves on the shore of France, were waves of joy, waves of salvation, waves that awoke them under a starry night, they all thought they were hallucinating, but with all the energy they could muster Billy and the other men let free of the decking that had been there only hope, and they waded and rode the waves that brought them to the beach of a fishing village in France, named Crozon. Billy would never forget the leathery and bearded face of the fisherman who found them. His friendly face became to him an image, like that of a child’s image, of God, a friendly and kind God. His first sight on that beach, on that bright morning, was of the fishermen pouring water into his dry mouth, and over his cracked lips, and the pain of his split and dehydrated mouth and lips alerted him to reality and his salvation.

Returning to Hawkeye, Missouri, six months later might as well have been a trip to the Moon. He couldn’t escape the feeling of being so totally different from everyone else around him. No matter how many times he told his story to someone, the feeling of the adventure could never be conveyed with sufficient emotion. His father couldn’t understand, Mary would look at him puzzled when he told the story, people were distracted, nearly bored, when listening to his tale of near death, of intensely traumatic feeling. He recalls telling his father before he left; “If my story were in a comic book, they might pay attention and enjoy it!” Billy had become an alien in Hawkeye. He grew silent and frustrated.

One disappointment that it took weeks to finally put his finger on, was the difference in trust. In the Merchant Marine everyone trusted each other implicitly. If you didn’t trust a shipmate, you wouldn’t make it and your distrust put everyone else in danger. Every task on board, including friendship and camaraderie, discipline and safety, required trust in your shipmates. But back home in Hawkeye, trust was a commodity of short supply. Trust had to be reevaluated every day, as if it disappeared overnight, or was never genuinely there. Friends Billy had known as children were looking at him as though he couldn’t be trusted. Billy was never sure if what he was perceiving was a result of his Merchant Marine service, being that sometimes the Service is often spoken of as a pack of wild sailors who rob and rape and steal from port to port. Or whether this new observation of the absence of trust, is only new to him, because of his personal experience of implicit trust that he was a part of, on board ship. The cars and trucks that pass him by on the side of the road, who clearly had room for him in the back, remind him of this trust issue. He wonders what he has missed out on, which wonderful people he may have met, what he could have done to enrich the lives of those people who generally distrust and drive past him, peering at him like Crows would while sitting on fences, from the rear views of their mirrors on the past that might have been.

Back in Hawkeye, so many sights around town would remind him of the sinking, being marooned at sea, everything from boards on the porches, to well water buckets, starry nights or someone being thirsty, or hungry. He could not escape the experience and it chased him. In his dreams he would feel himself floating, feel heat on his face, parched, sweating, he would awaken in the night to find his fingers gripping for life onto the edges of his headboard.

Brought to alertness from deep thought about Hawkeye and the sinking, Billy stopped hearing the dirt grinding under his feet, he ceased to hear the dry brush to the side of the road that had been bristling in the wind and he heard the familiar sound of a vehicle approaching behind him. He did not turn to look as he usually does, he could tell the sound of a fairly new car from an old truck. He heard the sound of rubber screeching and gravel grinding under wheels, still he didn’t turn. “They’ll see me, they always do.” He thought as he kept pace and his head down. The screeching then grew closer and Billy couldn’t help himself but to look. As he turned his head to his left he was just in time to see a boy’s face almost pressed against the rear passenger window with his hands on the glass, jaw hung open and looking right at Billy. The four door Ford with a trailer in a fish-tail swerve behind it, swerved left and right over the center of the road, seconds later the driver straightened out, got back onto the right side of the road and then slowly the car and trailer grew small within the wavy heat on the horizon of the hot tar and gravel road. “Queer.” Billy thought to himself. He returned to trying to step more lightly on his worn shoe and more heavily on his still good one.

On the fifth day through Texas John was driving along at top speed at about eleven o’clock in the morning and the boys wanted lunch. Thelma was preparing sandwiches from the front seat where she kept the basket of food and drink with her. Thelma was leaning over the back seat to clean up a juice spill from O.W., John took a few moments to enjoy the global shape and proximity of Thelma’s rear-end, so close to his head and face. John began to veer off the road and the gravel and bumps got loud under the tires. Sydney noticed first and yelled out to his father:

“Dad the road! The road!”

John quickly returned his gaze to the road to see a man directly in front of the car about one hundred feet ahead, he was driving right for him and the man was walking along the shoulder with his back turned and would not have warning. John had overcorrected the wheel and the car swerved back into the road violently, he attempted to correct, the car swerved back again, this time nearly hitting the stranger, then he managed to slow enough to straighten the car out. The family continued, startled, realizing the fear of the road, remembering their close call, for themselves and especially for that stranger walking on that empty and dry and hot stretch of road.

#

The oil rigs seemed to grow out of the desert and became more plentiful as the city grew closer on the highway. A half days drive from the coast, a group of about twenty cars was pulled over on the shoulder of the road, and some people were running across the road to see a spectacle. An oil well in the near distance from the highway was spouting a black plume for what may have been two hundred feet into the air. John pulled over just behind the group and he and Thelma and boys piled out to join the onlookers of this amazing sight. Around the other travelers in the group, several were smiling, kids were yelling happily, “oohs,” and “ahhs,” abounded in the crowd. Like a cloud of blackness that could be good or could be bad, the oil filled a piece of the sky, dirty yet pure, wasted but valuable. It’s shadow darkened the desert ground and concealed the chaparral and cactus like nightfall. The oil that had been airborne, thrust from the unknown deepness of the Earth, splashed with force nearest the well, the sound was loud even from the highway, like giant hands clapping off rhythm, the falling pools of oil drummed on the dirt below. At the rig could be seen a dozen or so men, wet and black, their eyes so white and visible against the black liquid, they could easily be seen clearly from the side of the road. They scurried about and yelled to each other instructions in effort to cap the well. An air of excitement was unmistakable. The most memorable event of this long automobile trip had occurred. John was glad that something wondrous could be experienced by the boys on this otherwise grueling trip. O.W. and Sydney leaned against the back seat to stare out the rear window, as the Irwin's left the scene behind them, and they watched the oil rig until it was but a small pin on the horizon, wondrous. Within minutes it was decided by both of the boys that they were going to be “Oil Men.” John let them have this fantasy as he pondered it: “Oh no you’re not!”

Los Angeles was beautiful, warm and dry and decorated with office buildings with granite walls and beige and white adobe homes with curved corners and palm trees in yards groomed close. In the late afternoon when the Irwins arrived the clouds above could not be ignored, for they were small and puffy, oval and round, so unlike the drawn out wisps and smears of cumulous they were used to seeing in Kansas. The gray and white marshmallow shaped clouds marched over Los Angeles in a wide parade at four thousand feet above the hot streets, from the south west, ending a tour of the pacific islands, towards the north east, a trip to the mountain ranges beyond the central valley and the desert. The clouds tried to join, to conjugate and form larger clouds, but the high altitude winds that carried them were too strong to cooperate, so the march would be linear, keeping direction. Later the clouds would meet with the intense rising heat off the desert outside the city, the dry sand underneath becomes a bellows for hot rising wind that will change them, change their shape, cause disruption, some joining becoming more dense, more heavy, then they would cry and release new rain, newly formed dense hydrogen droplets to lighten their load. They wept for their journey as the unique formations they had been were now over.

Settled into the three separate rooms at the Royal Arms Hotel on La Cienda Boulevard, the boys ran and played across the green and trimmed lawn as John and Thelma watched from them from their side by side balconies which overlooked the grounds below. O.W. was doing cartwheels and Sydney being a little more in control because there were girls at the swimming pool nearby. Two weeks and two days in the car, twelve motels, three campgrounds, fourteen quarts of oil, headaches, stomach flu, sore bottoms, a flat tire, almost hitting that hobo, it was enough to exhaust everyone and John decided they would stay in Los Angeles for a few days before moving on north along the King’s Highway to the Monterey peninsula. The boys were unwinding like tight industrial springs just broken free from their mechanical moorings, running about the hotel grounds, exploring and playing hide and seek on the stair wells and among the gardens and palm trees on the front lawn. John chose to let them wander as a small part of a new beginning on the west coast. He had decided during long contemplation on the drive out, that they would know freedom unlike any other children, and especially unlike his own childhood. They would learn responsibility through their own mistakes and they would have to learn the value of their father’s advice by their own resolve, choosing right and wrong and their ramifications through effort.

John lay on his hotel room bed, his tie thrown on the floor and his clothes and shoes still on, he watched the electric fan turn on the ceiling, fanning his forehead with cool winds and casting flickers of evening orange sunlight onto the walls of his room. Hearing the sounds of the boy’s voices outside he contemplated their existence in what might be a new life for all of them.

“It’s so easy to decide this is how I’ll raise them from here on out, to say this new method of child rearing will be the new discipline. To concoct these new alternative and progressive ideals in my head. Will I adhere to my own rules for them? Will my temper interfere with their new freedom? What about punishments? Shall their own choices be their own punishments for choices made wrong? Am I just dreaming up another scheme that won’t work the way I plan? Uh oh . . will Thelma go along with this?”

A tiny tapping sounded through John’s hotel room door, it was the door knock he and Thelma has agreed to use when they wanted to meet without the boy’s knowledge, the coded rhythm was the womanly light handed soft landing of her knuckles asking the question, “ . can we be together?” John smiled impulsively and rose up to let her in.