It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The Chester Chronicles, #1

By Chester Oliver

From the moment he was born, Chester Oliver found life to be a puzzle. Worse, it was a puzzle to which, it seems, he hadn't been given all the pieces. Even his name was a source of bafflement. For years, he thought his name was Butch. Then, when he reached school age, he learned the truth. What the hell! In those days, the name Chester conjured up images of Matt Dillon's limping, drawling sidekick on Gunsmoke. Chester Oliver might as well have handed the bullies a "kick me" sign. And that was just for starters. Like his namesake, Chester Oliver shuffled his way through ticks and snakes, bicycle and car wrecks, girls with clothes on and off—even an ornery horse aiming to throw him. All the while, he was trying to answer the question: "How did I get here?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chester Oliver
• Release date: Dec 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733861526

Book preview

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

by Chester W. Oliver

Copyright 2010 by Chester Oliver.

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-7338615-2-6

Cover inspiration by Jan Oliver

Cover design by Kyle Bateman

Edited and formatted by Self-Publishing Services LLC

www.SelfPublishingServices.com

TABLE of CONTENTS

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Grandfather & Grandmother

Grinding

Lynn & Family

Pauline

Early Casualties of War

The Karskys

The Smiths

Television

Kindergarten

An Accident

The Cottage

An Unexpected Swim

Pappy in Repose

Buddy and Ethel

Old Man and the Lake

First Love/Lust

The Holidays

Before that, my Mother Married Red

Red’s Place

The Hook

Life in Moline

On to the Next

Bonnie & Chuck

S.N.A.F.U.

Given to God

Then my Mother Married Bud

On to Texas

Into Africa

The Local Flavor

Hurricane

New Neighbors

First

Reading

The One That Got Away

Oceanside

The Coming of Florence

The Leaving of Florence

Moving... Again

Fishin’

Refreshments

High School in Texas

Charlie’s World

The Wreck of the Chrysler

The Healing

Healing Up

Home Again

Back in Texas

Epilogue

Biography

Dedication

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This book is a love letter to everyone who brought me to this juncture in my life.  Namely my sister, grandparents, my mother, aunts and uncles, and son without whom I might have chosen a terrible road.  And most especially to my wife of forty-five years, Jan Oliver, the most understanding, patient and compassionate person I’ve ever known.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

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No, really. It was.

The sticky August air was alive with lightning and thunder, rolling and flashing, the promise of a deluge behind the sudden blast of chill air that comes with summer storms. The rains came. Then I came...all gooey, purple, and squawking, covered with that cheesy crap that all new babies are covered with. No wonder new fathers faint when they see what they’ve created; it’s just not what they expect their firstborn to look like. First-time fathers expect the kid to pop out eight years old and ready to go fishing. It’s a tremendous shock, all that purple wriggling.

That may have been one reason my father wasn’t there.

Another reason was that he was a war hero. One who spent much of his time down at the tavern, spending all of his pay on his pals. He did this every week, whether or not a son was being born. But it wasn’t his fault. He was a veteran of World War II who, after taking a nap in France, awoke to find himself separated from his company and surrounded by a single Wehrmacht trooper with a heavy Mauser wobbling on one arm and a puppy in the other. He was just a kid, that German, and he was scared, but apparently he could not bring himself to kill this exhausted American.  So, in the end, he did his duty to Fatherland and Fuhrer and made my father a guest of the Reich at one of their spiffy stalags.  The fate of the puppy is unclear.  Anything from a company mascot to a stewpot surprise.

Pop suffered immensely at the hands of his captors. There was no beer in the stalag. Three months later, the war ended, but the crushing effects of alcohol deprivation had taken their toll.

After liberation from the stalag, the man got drunk. When he got home to the US of A, he got drunk. When he met my mother, he got drunk. I think she must have been drunk, too. Why not? That terrible war was finished, and everybody was celebrating. My mother found herself on the arm of a handsome, charming son of a bitch, whose tales of deprivation at the hands of the Krauts wrung the sympathetic heart of that teenage girl nearly dry. My mother’s brother, Uncle Paul, once told me that my father’s parents hoped that my mother would turn him into a responsible man. But she was just a girl. Their prospects as a couple were grim.

After my mother wearied of his tales of tribulation, he found another audience. This audience was willing to listen to anything, as long as Dad was buying the drinks (an activity he never tired of). Still, you can only tell so many war stories before even your drunkest friends remember having heard them. Some of them might even begin to wonder if you’re not exaggerating. Where you once decimated a whole platoon before your inevitable capture, it now seems that, somehow, you’ve decimated damn near a division. It’s gotta be discouraging when your welcome wears out, even when you’re the one buying the drinks.

So when, after a night of drunken revelry, our hero finally stumbles through the door to face the teenage girl who is now his wife and the very pregnant mother of his first child, he is heartily offended by her scornful inquiries. How dare she ask about the groceries he was supposed to pick up or where the hell the rent money went. What can a guy do?  He ain't got jack in his pocket. So pounding the crap out of the ungrateful little bitch seems like a pretty good option. After all, he's the man.  Nobody knows the trouble he's seen.

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And now that tempestuous night.  Here comes the boy! Dragged with forceps naked and cold into the glare of the delivery room lights, he gets his tender fanny spanked to force that first breath.  It is no wonder that a baby's first breath is followed by a cry of anger and shock.  Who the hell wants to leave the womb?

Now toothless and swaddled with a tiny cap to keep his head warm, he has been made ready to take his place in the peace of the postwar world.  Superior, Wisconsin, August 25, 1946.  The war in Europe is over, and the Japanese have suffered the scalding retribution of American engineering and anger.

I, along with several hundred thousand other kids, was a product of that visceral urge to repopulate a world that had known nothing but death and despair since 1939. The year when a vicious little corporal from World War I, having bullied his way into power, unleashed all the darkness the world could stand. Whole generations of families had been ground into dust and ash in a frenzied attempt to remake the world in the image of brooding Wagnerian hopelessness. Here I was at the end of that global ordeal, all shiny and new (after they got me cleaned up), the fresh promise of a bright future. An American future. Dazzling in its sunny prospects of gentle, even-handed strength.

Almost exactly one year later, my sister was born. She was a fat, squalling bundle of stubbornness with whom I would fight for the next sixteen years. Our birthdays were exactly one week apart, something that always mystified me as a child. I just couldn’t figure out how my mother had managed that. Later, when I was old enough to be told about where babies come from (although I didn’t believe it for a minute and couldn’t imagine my mother doing something that icky), I realized that it was a week and eleven months.

Mom got the baby part out of the way right off, and then she left, not telling the old man that she was knocked up again. When he found out he was, apparently, so unhappy that he ran away and never talked to any of us again. That’s how we came to live at 1606 North Fifty-Eighth Street in Superior, my grandparents' house, where we spent our early days learning how not to crap in our pants.

Grandfather & Grandmother

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My grandfather was Paul Mielke. He was not a tall man, but he had huge, heavy hands. This was undoubtedly the result of working on his father’s farm while he was growing up. His family had come from Posen, Germany, which is now part of Poland. They had sold a very prosperous farm to come to America, so his father, our great-grandfather, could avoid compulsory military service. They’d sign you up and then march you off to some stinking colonial Hellhole, where you’d likely get your leg shot off. If you made it home, then you’d get your one-legged pension. My great-grandfather didn’t see the percentage in being a one-legged man. It’s tough enough to farm with two legs, much less with one, and almost impossible with none, which happened plenty of times, too.

Instead, my great-grandfather’s family came to America in 1903. Once they’d been stirred good and proper into the great American melting pot that was Ellis Island, they headed for Baraboo, Wisconsin, where Great-Grandfather had made arrangements to purchase a small farm. The Mielke family had embarked on an adventure in a new land. Hard work and perseverance would see them through. Prosperity was theirs for the taking. Their hearts were filled with hope. Poor suckers.

The coming darkness in Europe was unforeseen.

But, even in America, there was darkness.

Great-Grandmother fell ill and died, leaving my great-grandfather with five children to raise in a land that was foreign and wild. The promise of America had dealt him and his little band of Germans a devastating blow. The new farm was an unruly affair and defied his every effort to bring order. For a while he was lost, but he was an uncompromising old son of a bitch.  He woke every day and faced whatever challenge confronted him. Great-Grandfather’s innate German stubbornness would not allow him to admit defeat or entertain despair

In short, pragmatic order, he found another suitable single woman and, somehow, managed to convince her that being matriarch to this ready-made family was a good idea. The girls, after all, needed a strong mother figure to guide them through the coming struggle to become women and find suitable farmer husbands themselves.

In this endeavor, Great-Grandmother was entirely successful. Each of the three girls married farmers of good German stock, and each outlived their husbands. She and Great-Grandfather managed to bend the land to their united will, and, after several strife-ridden years, the farm prospered.

Their boys, Emil and Paul, did not choose to become part of that success story. They hated the dawn-until-dusk drudgery of farm work, and, because they loved their new American lives in the north woods, decided to trade the drudgery of farm life for the rollicking life of a lumberjack.

There was no excitement in plowing and reaping, no immediate gratification in milking and shoveling shit, but there was a definite thrill in knocking down big trees and dragging them out of the woods. They liked the hard work, and they liked spending their money on beer at the end of the week. They weren’t afraid of a good fight once in a while. They rather enjoyed putting their hard-earned young muscles to the test in a competition of fisticuffs on Saturday nights. This was America, after all, and you didn’t have to be a farmer if you didn’t want to be. You could be a lumberjack or a train engineer. Hell, you could be a cowboy or a hard-rock miner. You had choices!

But alas, many sweet dreams end with the new day. All it takes is one Serbian malcontent and the murder of a hoity-toity archduke and his wife to throw a monkey wrench into the works.  Next thing you know, everyone is taking sides.

My grandfather Paul was tiring of work in the woods. There was a certain sameness to it, just like farm work. His brother, Emil, had gone to California to turn the ancient redwoods into two-by-fours, but Grandfather had had enough of lumberjacking. So when America asked for soldiers to fight the war to end all wars, my grandfather signed up. He figured the army would be less drudgery than farm work and not as dangerous as lumberjacking. 

He’d got that partly right. After the army taught him how to march in step and do rifle drills, they taught him everything he ever needed to know about volunteering.

One particularly rainy morning, as he and his comrades in arms stood at military attention in the mud, a gruff sergeant (aren’t they all) shouted, We need some goddamned truck drivers, and I want some goddamn volunteers right now!

Having lived on the farm in Wisconsin, my grandfather knew something about trucks and tractors and mechanized power, so he shot his hand up. Driving a truck was no big deal to him, and he’d be above the mud and out of the rain. He knew how to shift gears. He understood the art of the double clutch. He harbored an intimate understanding of what made the internal combustion engine combust.

The sergeant’s eyes met his, and the sergeant shouted, Mielke! You're a farm boy, report for truck driving!

My grandfather was ecstatic. No more drilling in the mud in a wet, woolen uniform. Grandpa was gonna drive a truck!  Yahoo! So Grandfather and the other volunteers marched with that sergeant through the mire until they came to a field filled with piles of gravel and lined with wheelbarrows. There was confusion and consternation in the ranks, but the sergeant quickly cleared that up.

There’s yer trucks, boys! he shouted, pointing to the wheelbarrows. Get ‘em loaded and start drivin'.

When Grandfather wasn’t driving trucks, he was busy studying the art of the machine gun. This field of study required that the student become as intimate with his machine gun as he was with his truck. Shooting straight was not enough. A soldier had to be able to take that thing apart and put it back together in record time. At night.

Don’t think the Hun is gonna give one fat rat’s ass if your gun jams because it fell in the mud! the machine gun instructor shouted. "He’s not gonna tell his fellow Huns, ‘Oh wait! Let's give them American boys a chance to get their machine gun cleaned up, so we can make this a fair fight!' No, Sir!

You can be certain, gentlemen, that the Hun will press his advantage! You’ve got to know this gun! Be able to take it apart and put it together in the dark! Your life depends on this one skill! Remember, the average lifespan of a machine gunner once the enemy is engaged is fifteen minutes! Think about it!

My grandfather thought about it, then he practiced assiduously until he and that damned gun became one. By the time his unit shipped out for the killing fields of Europe, he was well versed in the intricacies of that wicked machine.

The night they boarded the ship in New York, bound for the glories of the great global conflict, World War I suddenly ended. The armistice was signed. Great cheers went up. They were going home victors without a firing a shot.

My grandfather never bragged about his army exploits, mainly because there weren’t any.  And he was keenly aware that he’d been the recipient of either dumb luck or divine intervention. Not so the husbands of two of his sisters. One had died in the frozen mud of France. The other had come home blinded from the gas, and demoralized and numb from the unrelenting melancholy of the trenches. He returned to his wife and his farm, but he was never again a husband to her or a keeper of the land. He died one winter afternoon while gazing out on the frozen snow, believing he was still in France.

After his discharge from service, Grandfather returned to the daily chores of his father’s farm. He hated it more than ever. In the army, he’d seen a bit of the country.  He’d damned near seen the old homeland. There was a popular song of the day that asked the question: "How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?!!" Grandfather hadn’t seen Paris, but he had seen the north woods and New York City. He’d seen enough to know that in America, you didn’t have to spend your life smelling horse farts behind a plow to make a living.

One summer night, at an outdoor dance in Merrill, Wisconsin, he met Minnie Kopp.

My grandfather was very handsome. In old photos, he looks so very German, with his high cheekbones and rugged features, all beneath a thatch of dark brown hair that was pomaded and combed straight back. He sported the ruddy complexion of a man who worked outdoors and took no bullshit from anyone. Not man, nor beast, nor recalcitrant machine. I can only imagine that my future grandmother was quite flustered when he crossed that floor and asked her to dance.

She was a good Catholic girl, and there was something so disturbingly Lutheran about this young man who now invited her into his embrace for a turn around the dance floor. She was not an obvious beauty. Her lips were not full in the classic Cupid's bow and her nose was rather round and large, but her eyes were dark and bright, and her figure was petite. She was no farm girl. Her hands were not callused from physical work, and she was educated. Minnie was a schoolteacher, recently graduated from Normal School. She lived at home with eight brothers and sisters in Merrill, Wisconsin, in a house built by her father, a cabinetmaker from Austria. She was employed by the Merrill School District in a one room schoolhouse, not far from the Mielke farm.

Minnie’s family had immigrated to the United States at roughly the same time as Grandfather’s. They hailed from a dirt-poor village above Steinburg appropriately named Obersteinburg.  A lone goat path connected the two.  Minnie was two years old when the family left for America. 

Now here she was, at a local dance, in the arms of  Paul Mielke, a handsome German boy, on a warm summer night with love and mosquitoes in the air. So they danced once, then twice, and then again...and again.

The announcement, some months later, of their intention to marry was greeted more with resignation than joy. Good Catholic girls with educations simply did not marry Lutheran farm boys, but this was America, where anything was possible.

Grandfather and his new bride worked Great-Grandfather’s farm for a while after their marriage, but Grandmother, being a lady of extra education, couldn’t abide the numbing chores and persuaded my grandfather to move to Baraboo, Wisconsin. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus wintered there, so the town sported at least some small amount of culture, if you counted the clowns. My grandmother had also gone to school there. But work was scarce, and scant pay created friction, so they fought.

The primary bone of contention, in Grandmother’s eyes, was Grandfather’s steadfast refusal to convert to Catholicism. She loved the son of a bitch, but she couldn’t make him see the true light. His solution to the rift was to quit attending church at all, his or hers. Her solution was to attend Mass every single day and pray for his redemption. Together they created an impasse that would last for sixty-three years. But it really didn’t have anything to do with either silly-ass church. It had to do with money and pride. Between them, they had plenty of pride, but money was harder to come by.

Then came the day the stock market crashed.  Many paper millionaires threw themselves from their mighty perches, and the entire world was plunged into the Great Depression. Though Grandfather’s piddling job as a mechanic survived for a while because he was good at what he did, he arrived at work one morning to find the doors padlocked.

That same dreadful week, my mother, Mary Mielke, was born. 

My grandfather was luckier than many.  He was a mechanic who could fix nearly anything that rotated or pulsed to the beat of small, synchronized explosions.  He was a wizard with a torque wrench, understood the gifts and failings of gaskets left to the mercy of ham-fisted amateurs, and knew by the growl of the grease quotient the fragility of soon-to-fail wheel bearings. 

He could always make a buck here and there, but one buck always needs two. 

Dependable employment was a haphazard affair. 

He moved his wife and daughter back to the hated soil of his father’s farm, where he dutifully toiled in Great-Grandfather’s fields of the Lutheran lord until President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the formation of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Grandfather signed up as a mechanic and was awarded a job in Superior, Wisconsin. When he went north to check out the opportunity, he discovered that he did not like Superior.  It was May, it was cold, and it didn’t warm up until August, just about the time winter started again. But any job was a good job back then, and doubly so if it got him off the farm. And Grandmother was pregnant again.

The doctor, after examining her, took my grandfather aside and informed him that he didn't have just one new mouth to feed.  Twins.  Jumping Jesus!  

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My grandfather told me once that leaving the farm for Superior was so much harder than he’d expected, not because he would miss it, but because his father was so bitterly disappointed at losing another son. Brother Emil had gone to California to seek his fortune.  Now Paul was pulling up stakes. No male child was left to inherit what Great-Grandfather had built by clawing the land into fertility. Yet, he understood that in America, even with the advent of the Depression, there existed opportunities undreamed of in his homeland. 

Pattison State Park just south of Superior was slated to be built by the Works Progress Administration using Civilian Conservation Corps labor, and my grandfather got on as a mechanic. The job was to dam up the Black River above the Big Manitou Falls, creating a lake for swimming. There would be camping areas, picnic areas, concession buildings forged from local rock, and a tunnel that ran beneath the highway to a lookout over the falls. My grandfather was the man at the camp who kept all things mechanical greased, lubed, and humming. The pay wasn’t great, but it was steady. They rented a tiny house in the suburb of Billings Park near Superior and made do with what they had.

With the birth of the twins, Paul and Pauline, the deficiencies of the Billings Park house became apparent. Grandfather’s job with the CCC was winding down, but he’d been offered a position as a mechanic at a local garage. The job paid only slightly more than the CCC, but it was enough to allow the family to buy the modest house on Fifty-Eighth Street in South Superior. They met with the Realtor and offered $1,700 for the white house with the gambrel roof and three bedrooms. My grandmother, as the family’s money manager, figured that with diligence, they could pay it off in just a few years.  Despite the ravages of the Depression, the ship that carried their American dream somehow managed to stay afloat.

Grinding

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When Grandfather got his pay envelope every Friday, he took it home to Grandmother.  She made the house payment, paid the electric and gas bills, and paid the grocer. Holderman and Koenig were the neighborhood grocers, and they extended fairly liberal credit to their employed clients. After paying the bill, Grandmother would phone the grocery and recite the week’s list of necessities to the clerk there.  Later in the day, one of the Koenig kids would pedal over on a bike with side baskets bulging with Grandmother’s order.

Grandfather’s pay was spent in an orderly and organized manner. Every penny was properly pinched, even the pittance she kept out for the collection basket at Sunday Mass. Grandmother always made sure that the Catholic church got a cut. After all, if not for the Church and Grandmother’s prolific prayers, spiritual and economic disasters might rear their ugly heads at any moment. And so the routine was set. Diligence, thrift, and prayer were the order of the day.

Except for one little thing...

Grandfather was still a Lutheran, a fallen-away Lutheran at that, and now and then, after his week of work, he liked to stop off at the local watering hole and hoist a couple. Grandmother could not abide this occasional lapse in judgment. Not that Catholics didn’t imbibe, too, but Grandmother figured Lutherans were more prone to it, being already damned to Hell for their stubbornness in not repenting their wicked Protestant ways. 

Clearly, she did not understand the differences between the Irish and the Lutherans when it came to their consumption of alcohol. 

Grandfather would return home on those Friday nights enveloped in the glow of a week’s labor rewarded, and she would lower the boom. She would storm into the kitchen to berate him for his poor choice; he would storm right back, defending his need to blow off a little steam.

Who are you, he’d shout, to deny me my small pleasure, after  I’ve worked my ass off all week?

Drinking was an activity that filled her with fear. Men who drank beat their wives and ruined their families. They descended to the very depths of