The Tattler's Almanac

By Don Bliss

As seasons march ever onward, stories of love, tragedy, loss, heroism, and faith transcend from private lives to public knowledge throughout every small town. Spend some time in Hilltown where the folks are friendly, the trees have ears, and prattle is never out of season.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257280452

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Autumn

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

– Samuel Butler

The Hilltown War Memorial

Time Out

Cabbage Night

A Psalm of Ruthie

The Hilltown War Memorial

My little hill town was torn apart this year. The little town nestled in the Berkshire Hills has always been considered a quiet, bucolic little place where life is simple and the pace is slow. Folks back there always joke about the town being thirty years behind the times. I think that’s an understatement. In the middle years of this century, I was going to school in a four room public school that featured corporal punishment, combined age classes, and other vestiges of nineteenth century public education. But there’s something about that environment. Something in the crisp mountain air maybe, or the raw milk, or maybe it’s the acrid smell of cow manure everywhere, I don’t know. Those Hilltown kids would graduate eighth grade and go off to the regional high school, and each year, the top ten seniors - eight of them were Hilltowners. Seems like each graduating class, we had the top eight and the bottom two.

That’s the way of the world I guess, but the Hilltown world was somewhat isolated from the outside. The values there were given directly from generation to generation, without interference from outsiders. The kids in that community grew up with compassion, hard work, and discipline as their ethical code. Those things went without saying. Doing for neighbors as a duty was never questioned, even by the youngsters. In the outside world, folks were demonstrating against the war, and bashing each other, lighting fires in the name of peace. But in Hilltown, duty was understood. There were over six hundred names on the honor roll inscribed in stone on the Hilltown War Memorial in front of the Community House, and there weren’t but 517 people in the population! A Hilltowner gave his life in every armed conflict the U. S. was ever involved in. Even Billy Stevens was shipped back from Afghanistan in a box. His name is on the stone a little fresher than the rest - a little lighter in the stone.

Every Veterans Day, the whole town turns out for one of two public celebrations the town has each year. They leave the big hoo-hah holidays to the big towns down in the Pioneer valley. The Hilltowners put everything down to celebrate Flag Day in June, and Veterans Day in November. Most of the folks still refer to it as Armistice Day. Those celebrations are a might different one from the other. Flag Day is a big deal. They get out the fire truck and ring the bell. There are decorated cows and tractors, pick-up truck floats sponsored by the Grange and the Scouts. Flag Day is a festive break between the time all the heavy plowing and planting is done, and while we’re waiting for the hay to grow up so we can start cutting it around the first of July. Veterans Day, by contrast, is a darker and more solemn affair. It seems like the Hilltown sky reserves its grayest hue for Veteran’s Day each year. The leaves are off the trees, and you can hear the wind coming through the bare branches as it rushes down from the ridge top and through the village. The chill burns the cheeks and noses of the men as they make their way down the village street. Marching would be too grandiose a word to use here. The closest these men ever get to rhythm is the swish and clack of the hay mowers or the steady pumping of the milking machines. Out there on the street, the whirring of the wind in the trees and the irregular beat of the muffled drum is the only sound to keep these former warriors in step. They lurch and roll, skip and limp along - too many hours astride the Allis-Chalmers. Freshly scrubbed and stuffed into dress uniforms from their various service branches, these men make their solemn way in the late autumn chill to the Honor Roll, where Ken Moore plays taps, and old Bill Stanek recites "In Flanders’s Fields" for the thirtieth or so time. Although, he always clutches the open book in front of him in case he forgets a word, he never has, which is a good thing, because between the vanity of leaving his reading specs home, and the tears welling in his eyes, he’d never be able to see the page anyway. Tears don’t stain the cheeks of these hard old farmers but once a year - during the reading of that poem.

When I was in school, there was a girl a few years ahead of me - Sue Martin. Sue was a pretty girl who was popular with everybody. She had long brown hair which she tied back in a pony tail. She had big brown eyes and cute dimples when she smiled, which was often. She was the one who always fixed the little broken animals and wrote poems about them afterwards. All the parents in town wanted to hire Sue as a babysitter for their kids. All the high school boys wanted to go out with her. To my knowledge, Sue never went out with any of the boys in town though. It wasn’t that she was shy, but rather I suspect that she just hadn’t met a boy that could compete with Emily Dickinson, who was her constant companion, always under her arm.

After graduation, Sue was accepted to, and went off to the New England Baptist School of Nursing, which surprised just about nobody. Her folks were mighty surprised though, when they got a letter from her through the APO post office in San Francisco. Sue had joined the Army, and shipped off to Viet Nam as an Army nurse. She had to do it that way, because her Pa would never have allowed it, had he known in time. He would have brought her home from Boston, and that would have been that. Her folks got lots of letters from Sue for a while. At first, she was at a big hospital in Saigon. It was 1968. She wrote a lot about meeting the local children and how good it felt to be helping the boys in their convalescence. Then the letters got less frequent and shorter. Sue had volunteered to serve in a Mobile Army Hospital north of Da Nang where some of the heaviest fighting was going on, and she was too busy to write, she said. She would work for thirty-six hours straight and sleep for eight.

When Sue came home from Viet Nam, she was different. She never smiled anymore. She never read poetry, said it was all senseless. She took a job down at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in the valley, and she met and married a Northampton man. When her parents passed away, fairly close together, Sue and her husband moved back to town and started working the family farm. They never had any children, which was odd if you knew Sue when she was a girl. She was going to have six, she always said. She said she couldn’t picture her life without being surrounded by children, but she never seemed to turn up pregnant, and after a while, folks stopped asking her about it. Then one day Sue’s husband Frank came in from the fields and found every stick of furniture gone from the house, and Sue gone with them. The girls who were closest to Sue admitted to Frank that they never saw it coming. He sure didn’t. Frank worked the farm alone for a while. I suppose he thought that she’d just come back one day, and they’d pick up right where they left off. I guess the heartache was too much for him, because the next Christmas he found someone to lease the place and he moved back to the valley.

A couple of years ago, Sue did move back to town. She rented one of the homes in the village, and would never go up the road to see the house she had grown up in. She took a job over in Dalton as a school nurse. When she didn’t show up for work a couple days running back this past February, Alton Streeter, the constable went to her place, shoveled his way in and found her in her bed. There were empty bottles of sleeping pills and vodka next to her on the stand.

Well, as I said, this year the town was torn apart - not so much by the tragic suicide - as these Hilltowners are no strangers to cruel fate and hardship, but rather by the events which followed the funeral. It all started when her casket was brought into the church without a flag on it. There was no family to oversee the details, and some of her girlhood chums had made the arrangements. Karl Riker at the funeral home in Pittsfield said that she was just an Army nurse, and wasn’t entitled to military honors. This didn’t sit well with the women, but nobody said much until two weeks later when Bill Stanek got a letter from Sue’s friends requesting that her name be added to the Honor Roll. Bill was adamant. The memorial stone was only for the men that had died in battle or as a result of their wounds. He flatly denied the request. Ruth Haller and Karen Streeter, Sue’s friends then showed up at Town Meeting in March dragging a fellow in a suit from the VA hospital in Northampton. Bill Stanek knew what they were up to and he moved to oust the man from the meeting, as he wasn’t a town resident, and they had never let outsiders dictate town business before, and he guessed it would be a cold day in you-know-where before they would in the future. The only problem was, all the women in town knew just exactly what the girls were up to, and they were all there to see that the man was seated, and that he got to speak.

The men folk there (who were in the minority) weren’t accustomed to this women’s solidarity thing, and it left a funny feeling in the pit of their stomachs when the meeting voted to hear the man’s presentation. As I said earlier, things come about thirty years late to Hilltown, and equal rights for women is a topic that’s about as unexplored as some of the old cellar holes up around there. Come to find out, the man was a psychologist at the VA, and had treated Sue for several years, right from the time she had come home. People were pretty shocked to hear that one of their own Hilltowners had actually been to see a therapist. That was pretty unusual, and was thought to be reserved for those neurotic city folks. It was generally thought that a little hard work in the fresh mountain air, laced with a hint of manure, was all the tonic anyone needed to restore perfect health and happiness. The man went on about something called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and other psychological mumbo jumbo. He told the folks that Sue’s death was most certainly caused by her service time. He told of Sue’s inability to function in a marital way. He told of her waking up to the screams of little Vietnamese children in her ears, and how she couldn’t rid her mind of the images of charred bodies and bloody amputations. He told of her sense of unrecoverable loss when, after sitting by an eighteen year old boy for thirty hours, she went off to the latrine and came back to find a new boy in his place. He said her subsequent depression and suicide were directly related to psychological scars from Viet Nam.

But still, suicide is suicide, said Bill Stanek. Hell, we’ve all seen the horror of war, and none of us took our own lives because of it. Many of the men and some of the women thought that this was sad but true, and by a margin of just three votes, it was voted that the memorial would remain unchanged.

But something started happening in town. Men that had found their underwear folded in the upper left hand drawer for years suddenly were running out of clean underwear. Instead of finding their boots under the bed as they had each morning for twenty years or more, they had to search the house, only to find them wherever they had taken them off the night before - usually in front of the recliner, or by the T. V. That nice hot dinner they were accustomed to after coming in from the barn was cold, or late. Their church clothes stayed in the same heap all week long, and were pretty wrinkled when it was their turn to usher the following Sunday. All through the long summer months, and into the fall, life appeared normal on the surface, but underneath, there was unrest, as folks began to reconsider the roles which have been faithfully fulfilled by men and women for generations.

It all came to a head this past Sunday, when dozens of men returned from the afternoon milking to kitchens that were dark and completely devoid of the smell of dinner. Returning outside, the men found their cars and trucks were gone, and their women with them. The calls started with Harry Joyner down in the village, and swept through town with stunning speed. The women were up to something outside the Community House. When Bill Stanek got there with a handful of the other men, dozens of the town’s women were standing at the War Memorial having a candlelight service for Sue Martin. Women who would no sooner defy their husbands as wear red in church were there, instead of at home doing their chores. When those women, out of the corner of their eyes spotted their men approaching the outside of the circle, they held their candles a little higher, their cheeks burned a little hotter, and their hearts pounded in their chests a little harder. The men had the good sense to slip their crusty old Agway caps off their heads and stand in reverent silence. Ruth Haller made her way to the front and shared a few words she wrote for Sue.

"I learned today that my friend is dead. She couldn’t go on living in the nightmare of her memories. And so she killed those memories by killing herself. Susie could never escape the bitter images which she protected us all from by keeping them to herself. In the end, I guess she was not able to hold them all in, and now she’s gone. We hope that Susie now knows that God holds her safe in his arms - so would we, if we had only known. And as we women stand here tonight, mourning and remembering, let us remember that too; so that we may have the courage to live our lives according to what is right, not just according to what is usual. Let us