Tommy and Me

By Al Stevens

Rural southern America in the 1950s, a great time for a boy to grow up. Joey, eleven years old, begins the summer of '51 with a new best friend, Tommy, the new kid next door. Tommy is thirteen, with a down-to-earth country attitude, and wise to the ways of the world with much for Joey to learn.

Boys that age could roam, explore, and experiment with their environments without supervision and with the only curfew being, get home in time for supper.

Wander along with Tommy and Joey who, left to their own devices, get into one scrape after another, pushing the limits, exasperating their parents, and confounding the neighborhood. Sometimes hilarious, other times sad, always thought-provoking, these stories remind us of times we thought were simpler, easier, and better for all to live. But were they really?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mockingbird Songs & Stories
• Release date: Sep 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393844198

Book preview

Dedication

To the fond memory of

Tommy Booterbaugh

My Town

I’ll start by explaining what went on around our town and our house in the early 1950s. My Dad was an accountant, and my Mom was the high school librarian. I’m Joey, their only kid, and these stories began the summer I turned eleven.

It wasn’t really a town. It was what they called after the war, a bedroom community, there to provide safe housing and the usual support systems for commuters and their families. Often called suburbs, our community was more rural than the typical post-war housing developments springing up around the country. We were mostly single-family dwellings, no two alike, with plenty of space between each house.

Our house was small and surrounded by patches of forest with foot-worn paths connecting the houses for those who didn’t care to walk the roads and preferred shortcuts. My dad said a small house was more efficient and economical and all we needed since there were only three of us. He also liked the isolation. You could not see another house from our place. Just woods. With pathways. Dad said, A fellow needs a home where he can go out back and take a leak any hour of the day. Mom scolded him for talking that way. Particularly around me. She liked our home too, especially the distant view of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west.

We had outbuildings too. A detached garage stood off to the side. It had never seen a car, or so I was told and so I remember. Dad used it for a workshop and a place to house and tend the goats. Goats? Yep. More about them later.

We had a chicken shed but no chickens. Dad used it to store garden equipment, which we had, although I do not recall us ever having a garden. And a shed, housing for Sinbad, our resident billy goat and my only pet.

People said my parents spoiled me because I was all they had. I wouldn’t say so. I didn’t get everything I wanted, although I did have more freedom than other kids my age. They were both gone all day, and when I wasn’t in school, I was by myself, reading at home, out playing in the woods, swimming in the creek, or at the elementary school basketball court shooting hoops. As long as I got home for supper, they didn’t worry about me.

Things were easier in those times.

I had to work too. I made my own breakfast—cereal and toast, usually—cleared up the table after supper, and sometimes washed the dishes. I had to keep my room neat, which I did whenever Mom looked in and saw the mess. She didn’t look in often, though. I guess she was in denial about what a slob her pride and joy, their only child, was turning out to be.

What I really wanted was a typewriter. I was an avid reader of fiction, reading every book my mom got in her book-of-the-month club and anything else I could find at the library. I also read non-fiction if the subject interested me. These books gave me a passion for the written word, and I intended to become a writer. I already wrote every story that occurred to me, but it was in longhand in a legal pad notebook. I wanted a typewriter but my father spoke of the expense and said if it wasn’t a passing fancy, if I stuck with it, maybe I could get one when I went to high school.

I said we had goats. We did. We had two main goats, Bambi and Sinbad, and at any given time, several others. I served them their food in coffee cans and their water in buckets every night before supper. My Mom was clear on that subject. People don’t eat until animals are fed. Dad and I both milked the nannies depending on his schedule and whims, and they provided all the milk we needed. They’d produce milk as long as we milked them. When one of them would start to dry up, Dad would put her together with Sinbad, and about five months later, we’d have one or two baby goats. Three months after that, he’d sell the kids, and we’d have plenty of milk for a while.

One time Dad butchered one of the kids. Mom cried all day and refused to cook the meat or eat any of it when Dad cooked it. That put an end to that.

We enjoyed life in a rural suburb, close to the city and yet as far away from urban influence as you could get and still have the benefits of a nearby town. Our little village was just a random and sparse grouping of single-family houses, a grocery store and filling station, a firehouse, and a post office. And the train station too, which stayed in operation until well into the 1960s and then stood abandoned until years later when they tore it down to widen the road.

Trains don’t stop at those little towns nowadays. Travelers use other modes of transportation, and trains don’t pick up and deliver mail pouches like they used to. They call it progress, and I’m all for it, but I kind of miss the sounds of the old locomotives huffing to a stop to pick up and discharge passengers and then pulling out, whistle screeching, to head to the next town down the rails.

They didn’t stop for mail, though. They threw the incoming mail pouch out as they roared by and snatched with a hook the outgoing pouch from a bracket on a pole next to the tracks. The station master hung the pouch for outgoing and retrieved the incoming pouch from wherever it landed. He’d walk it up to the post office where they’d sort the letters and parcels and put some in numbered combination P.O. boxes inside the post office and deliver the rest to R.F.D. addresses.

At the time the stories in this book begin, most trains were pulled by steam-powered locomotives. Later they were replaced by the diesel-powered monsters of today. Back then you could hear a train coming for miles, and you could see the white puffs from its smokestack over the horizon. No more. A diesel engine is quiet and makes no announcements of its pending arrival. It’s there roaring past before you know it.

I recall after the diesels took over. How many times had I read and saw on TV the news accounts of close encounters with tornadoes? Lots. The people always say the same thing. The tornado made a god-awful noise that sounded like a freight train roaring by.

I can attest to that. I was sitting in the station’s outhouse, which was next to the tracks, reading a book when a freight train went by. No warning, just the sudden and loudest continuous racket I’d ever heard. If my drawers had been up, I’d have messed in them. As it was, I was in a good position for that alarm.

Later, for the heck of it, I told people the train sounded like a tornado going by. They didn’t seem to understand.

The station master, a gentleman named Mr. Jenkins, sported every day the same tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a plaid flannel shirt buttoned to his neck, no tie, khaki slacks, a fedora hat, and a pipe that wiggled when he talked. His ruddy complexion spoke of his days outdoors in all kinds of weather, and that pipe was always going out, a permanent fixture clamped in his teeth, what he had left of them.

I stopped by almost every day after school to visit with Mr. Jenkins. He was usually found sitting at his telegraphy desk reading the paper. If it was cold, he’d be near the potbellied wood stove that stood majestically in the middle of the main room and held silent court over the small groups of neighborhood men who’d stop by for gossip, jokes, a snort or two of moonshine, and the occasional game of checkers.

On the increasingly rare occasion when a local citizen received a telegram, Mr. Jenkins would have me deliver it on my bike. I pictured myself in a gray uniform with an official cap and insignia, but that was never the case. Just the usual T-shirt and jeans. Mr. Jenkins always reminded me that if the recipient didn’t give me a quarter, I should let them know casually that a tip was appropriate.

Tell ’em tipping ain’t a city in China, he’d say, the same joke every time, and he always chuckled at it.

Mr. Jenkins’ jobs included selling tickets to passengers, hanging the mail pouch on the hook to be snatched up by the passing train, picking up the incoming pouch from wherever the mail car attendant tossed it on their way through, and keeping the potbellied stove going in the winter. He was also the telegrapher, and he sent and received Morse code messages on those rare occasions when one of the townspeople received a telegram or had one to send.

I guess Mr. Jenkins is dead by the time of this storytelling, but he was alive when the stories took place. There is no station master now. There’s nothing for him to be master of because there’s no station. Nobody takes the train into town anymore or sends or receives telegrams, and the mail is picked up and delivered at the post office by trucks that haul the pouches to and from the airport.

E-mail has replaced most of that. Progress seems to want to replace and improve that which means anything. Memories, though, are irreplaceable until they die with us.

A New Best Friend

I had barely turned eleven when a new family moved in next door across a patch of woods. Dad said they were hicks from West Virginia. That was before he got to know them.

One day at the start of summer, a boy from the family of hicks showed up at our back door. He was a couple years older than me, taller, with straight brown hair that hung across the front of his face, dirt-lined fingernails, and, as it turned out, Southern charm nine yards wide and a mile high. The broad grin he brought with him turned out to be standard equipment.

Hi. I’m Tommy Hunt. You got a best friend? a unique opening to be sure.

Uh, no, I said. It was true. I was a loner, a bookworm, and not a jock, although I wanted to be, so the other kids kind of ignored me. Except when they picked on me. Being small and a smart alec, I was a natural target for the neighborhood bullies. So I did my best to avoid them, which accounted for the lone wolf persona that grownups hung on me. I got no best friend, I told Tommy candidly, trying not to show the need I felt for companionship and my doubts about ever fulfilling it.

Me, neither, he said. Hows about we operate a probation?

Huh? A what? I knew what the word meant, but I didn’t know what he meant by that usage and in that context.

Give it a run. Be best friends. You ’n’ me. Iffen it don’t work, we’ll can the idea and just be neighbors. I’m a good neighbor but I’m a better friend.

I stared at him for a moment, hardly able to believe what I was hearing. This was a godsend. I already knew it would work if I could mind my Ps and Qs. I needed a best friend, an ally, someone to talk to, play with, and protect me. Tommy Hunt would be a good friend to have when the other kids ragged on me. He was somewhat bigger than me and he carried himself with confidence. With Tommy by my side, the local bullies would leave me alone. I definitely wanted him as a best friend.

This is unusual, I said. I don’t remember anyone ever asking someone else to be a best friend. Usually it just happens.

You know that from experience?

No. Just simple observation and deduction.

You some kinda Sherlock Holmes?

I wish. Just a kid who watches, listens, and pays attention.

Good way to be.

But I’ve still never heard of anybody going out of their way to recruit a best friend. That’s a first for me.

I s’pose. But ain’t that how folks gets married? Gets a new job? Buys a car? Somebody has to ask, bring up the subject, make the other party aware. Nothin’ important ever just happens without someone askin’.

I couldn’t argue with his logic. I thought I’d better warn him. You’ll find that I’m not the easiest kid to be friends with. It was true. Most of my contemporaries did not appreciate my candor and what they called my thinking I was so smart.

Well, I was smart. Can’t deny it. Why shouldn’t I think it? What I hadn’t learned was how to hide it so as not to anger my contemporaries. That’s why I thought this new friendship might not endure. You see, I was mostly quiet, but when an opinion formed that was out of step with what other people believed, I was always quick to voice my opposition. And usually in ways and with logic that the opinion holder couldn’t effectively debate. When reason, logic, and facts failed most of the boys around town in a dispute, they’d make it physical, an arena in which I was duly lacking.

Here I was about to launch a new companionship. I needed it and didn’t want to spoil it with my self-superior manner. I couldn’t help what I thought, but if only I could keep my mouth in check. We’d see.

Whaddaya say? he asked.

Yeah, I said. I need a best friend. You’re hired.

Careful what all you wish for. Tommy said. That comment alone endeared Tommy to me. His backwoods dialect notwithstanding, it told me I might have at last found my intellectual equal in this small-town cultural wasteland. I thought like that in those days. It always got me in trouble.

Come on in, I said. I’m making lunch. You want a sandwich?

From that day on, Tommy and I were inseparable. We spent nights at each other’s houses, roamed the countryside together and pushed the limits of well-behaved boys in a rural town. We went everywhere together, and Tommy’s dog, Duke, a brown mutt of unknown heritage, usually went with us.

I’ll bet that over the years, Tommy and I started to build three different cabins in the woods. We wanted a clubhouse, a hideout, a place to escape the everyday rigors of being a kid. Our materials were pine logs, and our tools were a saw and hammer. We used nails we’d pulled from old boards and straightened by hammering them flat on a rock. Then we’d pick four trees to be the frame and start nailing logs around them. For some reason, the cabins never lasted long, and we never got around to building a roof.

We went fishing in the creek, although I told Tommy there were no fish there.

He laughed as he rigged his fishing pole with a hook and worm. No fish? What we want fish for? You don’t go fishin’ to kill fish. You go fishin’ to kill time.

Who lived in that ol’ shack? Tommy asked one day when