Growing Up True: Lessons from a Western Boyhood

By Craig S. Barnes

Written in a compellingly simple style, Growing Up True evokes the struggles of a boy stretching for manhood in rural Colorado during and after World War II. But the lessons and demands of real life always nipped at the edges of his fantastic dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781555917890

Book preview

Postlude

Preface

Frank and Erik thought that a person could become a man if he was to fix fence, pull wire, skin logs, wear out the gloves. My mother thought that same person would develop moral character if he would carry water to her maple saplings. Not the close ones by the house, she said, but the far ones, over by Savage’s wheat. My father said a small person should learn to plan ahead, think a problem through, be lighthearted, cheerful, ready to help whenever needed. It would also be good to do the algebra homework, and geography, too, and it would be good to clean the barn, and it would be good not to be so sullen on just any old gray February afternoon.

Which was fine. But a man needs the thin edge of the sword every now and then. My father said, Well, forget the sword, this is not Horatio Hornblower country. Swing a sword around here and you might stick a chicken. So there was the real world and there was my world. I was ready to cast away on a frigate for the Indies, but the only water around was the Highline Canal, which was dry all winter and in summer washed up at City Park Lake in downtown Denver, definitely not the Indies. I wanted to twirl from a lanyard in a typhoon, maybe save a king. Nobody in Arapahoe County knew what a lanyard was, but it was right near there with great waves and winds and frigates and some kings and I liked the combination. Well, said the father—who substituted for king in most situations—the rains come and the winds blow and the universe does not stand still for small boys who swagger. Cheer up and pull the weeds in the asparagus.

This is to say that in cottonwood country there was no way for an ordinary boy to become a man without serious mental bending. Frank said to skip the Woolworth’s candy: leave it lie, he said, and save your egg money for college. Erik said that if a person was to clean his chicken coop and keep the boards tight on the hog pen and keep the irrigation ditch cleaned, all on a regular basis, this would be a person who pretty much had the makings. Work and Erik were like slop and hogs. He thought it would be honorable to die of exhaustion. Get it done now … won’t have to do it tomorrow, he said.

It didn’t make any difference, as far as I could tell. Tomorrow, there was always plenty of wire still to pull. Erik just naturally liked to sweat and huff and pull and yank on things. My father was a victim of the same attitude. He said, Try holding off acting brave and proud, swaggering your hips when you are only carrying water buckets to the pig. Brave and proud is not needed to slop the hog.

Out where we lived, the most important things were wheat and calves and a long walk under the cottonwoods to school. In spring the wheat greens up slow and in fall the leaves brown down slow. Summer races by too fast to get a grip before Fair is over and Curtis School begins its annual program of small-boy-mind numbing. I never saw a stagecoach hold up or a real shoot-out or a revolution to overthrow the Mexican government. We never discovered gold after 1858 and there had not been a calf rustling even in the memory of Mrs. Fredrickson, who had been teaching school longer than I had been alive. If Fredrickson did not know, it was not known. There was therefore almost nothing ever to be brave and proud about except sneaking up on ground squirrels or winning a horse race or surviving the great Big Bend suicide.

Still somehow I eked brave and proud from nothing. This is the story of how I did it. Other people have the fortune to grow up deprived. They can complain and snicker and dishonor the rich. We grew up lucky. Enough money for weekly hamburgers. Snickering generally disapproved of. Every advantage except one and this was permanent. I was the youngest. My two older brothers sat through and passed Mrs. Post’s math class with flying colors, as if they were born to know certain stuff. They could also turn a lathe and they could ride Smoky the gray mare like Apaches on the wind. I could ride that mare until I hit the sharp turn at the Big Bend and fell off. I could not pound a ten-penny spike worth a darn. It was too big and I was too small. Things like that upset a man. Over the years it was pretty much the same. No matter how much smarter I got, my brothers stayed ahead, like lead cranes in a V going south and I flapping along behind.

My father said I could learn how cheerfulness comes from work, sort of like freedom from slavery. So this book is about how cheerful comes when a person is corral-gate high, until he gets to about the age where he starts pressing his Levi’s to impress certain people of the other type who stand by the fence and watch when he goes past. This is cottonwood and wheat country, the 1940s, the Great War just over. The time we got was borrowed from a world that was always fighting. My parents were trying to make me reasonably honest, honorable, hardworking, and humble. I was just a little too attracted by what is wicked and famous. It took awhile to get everybody stretching the same wire.

1.

The First Leaving

THE RUSSIANS CALLED IT the Great Patriotic War, a name far more hallowed than simply World War II, as if wars could be numbered without meaning, or as if we might say here’s one, there’s another one; this one’s six, that one’s seven. The Russians still speak about that conflict as if the history of the world turned upon that one great event. And they were right. At least they were right for me. It changed my history, too.

The Russians sent off 20 million, and I sent off only one. But I remember how that one was sent, and how it was the end of one time and the beginning of another.

I remember how the five of us were crammed into the ’41 black Chevy, how we drove into the mountains for one last camping trip. How on Monday he would be gone. How this one weekend, this winter campout, was supposed to hold all the memory, hold all the love, be a symbol, be a metaphor, make the leaving be only physical, but not real, not in the heart, not where it mattered.

He drove, of course. He always drove in those years. And I remember her in the front seat beside, the three of us wedged in back. One last chance to have fun, she said, before he goes. She wouldn’t say, before he goes to war. That would let in some recognition, the unspeakable, that war and death go together. So she just said, before he goes, and we sat grimly, the three of us under twelve, me coming on to seven, knowing that wherever he was going it would be uncommonly long this time, and it would be awful. There was snow in the forest. The black road turned and weaved through the hills. The wind was cold. God had not picked good weather for our last weekend.

We twisted and turned until finally my father stopped in the middle of some desolate cold woods and said, as he always did, This will do.

He led the way into the forest beneath barren trees and tromped down snow to make a place for a fire. Then we scattered like refugees through the woods searching for dry wood. I remember how frosted leaves crunched under the thin crust; I can still hear their crushing sound, can still feel my cold toes. I don’t know what month it was, but it was winter on our faces, winter as we hunted for dry firewood, winter in our hearts, winter at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

My woolen mittens soon were sopping wet, and then my fingers hurt. In no time I stood by the fire site stomping my feet, holding my arms, whimpering. Snowy branches, snowy leaves. No place to sit down. Snow on my steaming shoes, inside my gloves, in my eyes; blubber rolling down from my nose. For once my mother seemed helpless; wait, she said, the fire will be warm soon. But there was no hope in her eyes. This fire would not warm her fingers. This fire would not cure her cold. She would not show it, of course. We were all having our last weekend, and she wanted his memory to be sweet.

Somehow we slept the night there in the snow. We rolled thin sleeping bags as close together as we could, and each time anyone moved, which was all the time, I awoke shivering. In the morning there was no cereal, just leftover steak from the night before. Cold steak in the snow tasted too salty, too dry, too much like the last supper. Then we drove silently home. On Monday morning she put the three of us boys on a school bus and said that when we came back he would be gone.

I came home that afternoon under a dusky sky to a quiet house. There were no lights on. I found her sitting alone in the living room. Darkness slid down leafless branches to hover at the window where she was staring. I crawled into her lap. I did not know what she knew. I did not know what war meant. I did not know where Germany was. I only knew he was gone. Our gentle, good man, she said, would be gone a long time. A very long time.

I do not remember that ever before I had seen her so sad. I began to cry. She held me. I went on for a long time, whimpering softly. She did not say anything and I did not say anything but she kept me close.

The sun went down. My brothers came in. I sat quietly in her arms. For us the war had begun.

2.

The War Effort at 23rd and Holly

AFTER MY FATHER’S LEAVING, my mother thought London had become the world capital. She listened to war news before, during, and after dinner. Frank and Erik talked about landings, air raids, and Germans. You can contribute to the war effort by not making such a difficult face, she said at dinner. Maybe she did not realize that I was seriously facing down a mess of beets. The war effort was part of everything. It seemed to require cleaning up the yard and forgetting absolutely about chocolate. I did not think the Japanese would make me eat beets and secretly thought that rice might be better, so I was slow to clean up the yard.

We were outside the city of Shreveport on that last weekend when father left and it was out near the Louisiana bayous that I watched the darkness fall while sitting in my mother’s arms. But Louisiana was not home. The Army had taken us there. It took us before that to Tucson, and before that to Iowa, and before that to Virginia, and before that I don’t know. We will go wherever he goes, my mother had said, as long as they let us. And so we were in Shreveport when he shipped out, but she looked around and said that that was not where she wanted to wait. She wanted to be near the mountains, where she could see the sky, and watch the storms coming. So she packed us into the black Chevy and drove to Denver. We moved into the attic of one of her old friends. The lady’s husband was in the Pacific and she was a stickler for table manners, which meant she was like us. Then one day my mother found a red brick bungalow at the end of the streetcar line at 23rd and Holly. There were four rooms, high elms, and a narrow strip of grass. We can wait here, she said, and rented the place immediately.

Mornings, afternoons, late at night, she waited by the radio. By this time, the Allies were crouched in England ready to pounce. She liked to listen to Ed Murrow: This … is London…. Murrow’s voice was like a preacher’s on the first day of school. This … he said, this is London…. He was like somebody announcing a measles epidemic, only once in a while you could hear the bombs falling. At first, when we were done with that, my mother allowed me to listen to Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy or Yukon King. Later, when times were better and she could look around and see the evil effects of idle time on her third son, she clamped down. She did not approve of boys lollygagging around the radio when they could be out in the fresh, open air, cleaning the yard. But in the beginning, she was concentrating like everyone else on the weather over the English Channel.

One day, riding my bike home from school, to my great surprise I was suddenly flying through the air and then skidding along the concrete gutter on my elbows. I had hit a car. It did not hit me. I hit it. Before that time I had thought I was more or less like everyone else. But that day I learned I was a serious space cadet. Just before I hit the car I was looking up, dreaming a cowboy song, all alone in my own world. Suddenly this black vehicle was in my way, so I hit her. A very flustered lady stopped and rolled me up into her backseat. She put my broken bike in her trunk and asked angrily, Where do you live? I had definitely ruined her day.

I wanted to cry, but looking at the woman to consider the prospects for sympathy, I decided against it. She did not look happy and, anyway, a person in the war effort was not supposed to talk to strangers. Someone might be listening to pick up little secrets. Especially when a person was hurting, that was when he might tell a secret to some spy. Like, My father is in England. Ohh, she would say, and what is his unit? Oh, I would say, he’s in the Engineers, and that would be like putting butter in Hitler’s hands. We all knew that. So I just sat in her backseat and did not cry. The lady maybe thought I was a spy, too, and did not say a word until we got to my house. This will take care of you, she said, trying to get her distance. But then, just in case I was a normal kid, she said, You should be more careful.

Yes, I said, I know, not giving her any secrets, either, and dragged my bike to the front porch and laid it down to die forever.

Just for the record, we eventually lost a lot of tanks and battleships in the war; we also lost one bicycle. Maroon, with nice white trim on the fenders and a fine black seat. Aunt Betsy, my mother’s sister who was visiting from California, heard me moaning over this loss on the front porch and came out to look me over. She looked at the bike, the wheel shaped like a right-angle corner, and then looked at me, seeing the bumps on my head. I was a little bloody. She said, I think we should find a doctor, don’t you?

I just hung my head.

She said, I just don’t know where there is one. Your mother will be home pretty soon. She’ll know. Betsy was older than I, but she was more pretty than old. She said she thought a doctor would tell me if my head was broken.

I didn’t want the details. I had already lost a bike; if my head was broken I was not going to be able to clean up the yard or any other useful thing that would help me become a man. I had done about the dumbest thing a kid could do, running right into a car.

My mother came home. She said that a doctor would be unnecessary. She was not pleased. I said I missed my dad. She said she thought I had been daydreaming again and she missed him too. There was a war on, and it was no time for daydreaming. I got my hands and elbows bandaged and the blood cleaned off my head. I did not get any extra sympathy. I had to walk to school after that. Erik said that if the bump on my head was hard enough, it might be an improvement. Frank said when there is a war on, people get hurt, that’s all.

We went hiking on weekends high up in the mountains, near timberline. It was a Saturday routine. I went straggle-mumble along the trail to Lake Isabel or Brainard Lake. There was a lot of going up: up along creeks, up over boulder fields, up over rocky, wind-cold passes. My mother thought that going up was good for the kind of moral weakness that led small boys to drive their bicycles into cars. She said these walks made us all stronger. Unfortunately, hiking over the passes at ten thousand feet, I usually felt nauseated. The thin air made me even more spacey than normal. I wanted to lie down a lot. I thought everyone else got altitude sickness, too, so I never mentioned how I felt, except to hang back and look down at the ground. I was sure that my brothers had each overcome their weakness and it was only a matter of time before I would overcome mine.

The week before Christmas 1944, I discovered a shiny, wooden tommy gun in my mother’s closet. I knew it was for me. The good news was, I wanted a tommy gun really badly and this was a good one. The bad news was, I couldn’t seem to enjoy it once I found it. I felt scared and unhappy. I sneaked into my room and lay on my bed, expecting to be struck dead.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, lying half asleep, I pretended not to see my mother come to fill the bedside stockings. I was hoping that there was not a real Santa Claus who kept a list of who was good and who was the kind of person who would go spying in closets. Then, in the dark of Christmas Eve, I listened to the crumpling of little packages sliding into the wool sock that was pinned to the window above my head. My mother left the room. I opened one eye slowly and felt the sock. It was full and near overflowing! I was probably the only person in the world so happy to find out that there was no Santa and no list.

Half the world was fighting; the other half was waiting. Every Sunday night we were summoned to the dining-room table to write a letter to my father. We called him by his first name. I said, Dear Don: How are you? I am fine. That was that. Two sentences. It would have been good to say something about the tommy gun or the bicycle wreck, but those were tricky subjects. So I stuck with being cheerful and made a little decision not to let the truth spoil the occasion.

The radio told us about the Allied invasion of Normandy. We held our breath. We saw stars going