In the Glory of the Morning

By Jennifer H. Calvert and Brenda Hamilton

Sometimes life will spoon up an adventure when you least expect it. Certainly my sister Becca and I were not expecting (or deserving) one on that sweltering southern day in 1949. Little did we know then that three exciting things would come together to make that summer unforgettable: our father bought a silver Cessna airplane;

• Language: English
• Publisher: Green Bough Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990059627

Jennifer H. Calvert

Jennifer Hamilton Calvert has been a freelance writer and photographer. Her bachelor's degree in journalism is from the University of Tennessee. She has contributed numerous articles to newspapers, magazines, and literary journals, and has been a guest panelist on TV and radio programs. She was recipient of a Kodak International Newspaper Snapshot Special Merit Award. Her work was exhibited at National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, and EPCOT Center, Lake Buena Vista, Florida. She was named Guest Editor at Mademoiselle Magazine, won a Seventeen Magazine prize for fiction, and received the Jean Lieberman Poetry Prize. She was named to Marquis Who's Who in the South and Southwest.

Book preview

1

The Invitation

Sometimes life will spoon up an ADVENTURE when you least expect it. Certainly Becca and I were not expecting (or deserving) one on that sweltering southern day in 1949.

It was late July and we’d run out of things to do. We’d played all the games we could think of, exhausted our paper-doll pretends, and read every last library book we figured was worth reading.

Even Knoxville’s outstanding attractions had become commonplace and familiar: movies at the magnificent Tennessee Theater; trains with visitors arriving and departing at the L&N Depot; Family Night specials at the S&W Cafeteria featuring balloons, cartoons, and organ music played by a mysterious lady who looked, we decided, like a sphinx.

Now, on this humdrum day of nothing happening, we were just hot and cross and crabby. Pressing our sweaty little bodies into the flat flagstones of the side-porch floor, we tried to soak up some cool.

I’m steaming, I griped. I feel like a boiled noodle.

Well, I’m melting, Becca grumbled. Holly, can people melt?

Dunno. What if we just turn into puddles… puddles with faces… ?

We giggled a little at the idea.

Nothing to do, I said. Steaming and melting and nothing to do . . .

Steaming and melting and nothing to do, Becca echoed.

Suddenly we were both chanting, picking up speed like an L&N locomotive: "Steaming and melting and nothing to do; STEAMIN’ AND MELTIN’ AND NOTHIN’ . . . "

"Uh-oh!" I said abruptly. "We’d better tone it down. If Mother thinks we’re bored, you know what that means. . ."

"Chores!!" we whispered, making terrible faces.

Just then we heard the mailman chunk letters through the front-door slot and heard Mother’s footsteps in the hall as she went to collect them. Becca and I seldom got mail and, if we did, it was usually an invitation to a birthday party. Right now the very thought of having to dress up – ever again – in a starchy, itchy, organdy party dress was more than I could stand. I just wanted to stay home, slurp icy Popsicles, and mind my own business.

In a short while Mother came onto the porch. Girls, she said. Here’s something . . .

We both groaned. Not another birthday party!

It’s a note from Aunt Mary Bee . . .

We lay still, torpid as toads, barely listening to the family news while she read. Then, without warning: SHAZAM! Becca and I sat bolt upright, shocked.

Read that part again, Momma, I said. "Please!"

"I thought that might get your attention. Well, here it is: ‘We’d love to have Holly and Becca come to Bethel for a week. When do you think you could spare them?’ "

Becca and I leapt into the air, screaming: "Yes, yes! We want to go! " A whole week with our cousins, the Chisholms! We’d visited them in the daytime at their house way up near the Smoky Mountains, but we’d never, ever spent a single night with them.

I don’t know, Mother said. You might be too young for an experience like this – you’ve never been away from home for that long.

No, Momma. AMY is too young, Becca said, referring to our baby sister. "Holly and I are big enough. I am seven and she is nine and THAT is big enough!"

Hmmm, said Mother. We’ll discuss it with your daddy at supper tonight.

In the living room later that afternoon, while Amy couch-napped and Mother studied the pages of LIFE magazine, Becca and I talked about the trip and the Chisholms. Ordinarily we saw them only once or twice a year at kinfolk-crowded reunions. At these events, where far-flung family connected like crochet work, our favorite relatives were unquestionably the Chisholms. Sarah Jo, fourteen, was fascinating to us and friendly; Dixie, ten, could always be counted on for agreeable mischief; and the kids, Reid Henry and Melissa, eight and five, were cute and not too pesky.

Reid Henry is not like the dumb ol’ boys around here who just want to play ball, said Becca. He knows nature things – ’member that jar of tadpoles he brought to Aunt Lucy’s house? And he gave me a shiny rock he found in the woods.

Of course we’d long known the main points of the Chisholm history. But today it seemed newly important. Their daddy was Uncle Jesse who owned the general store at Bethel, the biggest enterprise there except maybe the church and the schoolhouse.

As for Aunt Mary Bee, Mother now chimed in, reminiscing: Oh, she was once absolutely gorgeous – like a movie star. She had a neat little figure, perfect cupid-bow lips, and those enormous dark eyes. It’s no wonder Jesse fell for her. They eloped when Bee was a mere slip of a high-school girl, and Jess Chisholm was the county’s leading bachelor.

Such facts belonged in the dim past as far as Becca and I were concerned. The way we now saw Aunt Mary Bee was plump and pleasant-tempered, famous in the family for her wonderful laugh and her cooking. Although her real name was Mary Beatrice – Bea (with an a), we preferred her nickname – Mary Bee (with an e). Bees make honey, and she had a way of making life sweet. Not too sweet, though, but just right – sweet with a twist of tartness, like her rich and delicious deep-dish blackberry cobbler.

Momma and Holly! cried Becca suddenly. "Listen! I have an idea! A really good idea. Why don’t we FLY to Bethel?"

I looked at her, astonished. "Fly? Sprout wings, I suppose!"

"No, you big silly. What I mean is: go there in Daddy’s new airplane."

Mother looked amused but tried to explain. Honey, Bethel is at the back of beyond, way off in the country. There’s no airport.

Well, Becca persisted, people ride airplanes to New York and Cincinnati. I’ll bet Daddy could fly us to Bethel. We could land in the grass.

I rolled my eyes heavenward. Sometimes the gulf between seven and nine seemed huge. You are nutty, I said. "Nutty, nutty, NUT-TY!"

Daddy’s airplane was a fairly recent novelty. He’d always wanted one, and when a great-uncle left him an inheritance, Daddy went right out and found a Cessna that suited him. He’d swiftly completed lessons, received his pilot’s license, and then taken to the air as naturally as a bird to flight.

Soon we LaMotts were slipping earth’s surly bonds (as Daddy quoted) on a regular basis. You would think I would have been wildly enthusiastic about going up in our personal plane. Was I? Maybe, the first time. But it was also sort of scary: sometimes my stomach lurched and I felt dizzy, especially once when Daddy did a loop-the-loop over downtown Knoxville – to give those courthouse cronies down on Main Street a thrill or two (not to say ourselves). However, I did not want to admit these embarrassing facts to anyone. There were, after all, expectations. I was Hollister Houston LaMott – three family names to live up to, a rising fifth-grader of some standing, and a Girl Scout presumed to be courageous in all circumstances.

Daddy was hardly in the door that evening before he was hearing all about our amazing invitation. And then Becca sprang her crazy brainstorm on him.

"Daddy!" I interrupted, "I tried to tell her this is goofy."

He laughed and his blue eyes sparkled. Then he seemed to be thinking about something.

Becca-baby, he said after a minute, why NOT fly?

Mother and I swapped looks of bewilderment. Becca just beamed.

Before we could absorb such a prospect, Daddy was picking up the telephone and placing a long-distance call to Chisholm’s General Merchandise at Bethel, Tennessee.

Eavesdropping on his end of the conversation we learned there was, strange to say, a likely landing field about seven miles north of Bethel – a long pasture with an old windsock still flying atop a tall pole. This proved, we reckoned, that SOMEbody had once used it for that purpose. The Chisholms, for their part, would be more than happy to motor over to meet us there on the appointed Monday morning. By the time Daddy hung up, all details were glued neatly into place. And that was that.

Well, ladies, he said, it looks like we’re in business!

Mother began to raise down-to-earth objections to the whole thing – our staying without our parents and flying if we did go.

Don’t worry, Daddy told her. It will all work out OK, and they’ll be fine. It’s time these girls started having some adventures of their own.

The days until we left passed quickly while Becca and I excitedly planned what to pack in the old Gladstone suitcase we would share.

You’ll just need a week’s worth of play clothes, Mother said. Then of course you’ll have to take something nice to wear to their church services on Sunday.

I wanted to look my best in Bethel. But with my still-shapeless figure and spindly limbs, I looked about as beautiful as a beetle. My one claim to vanity was my hair, long and thick and sunny blond, and I gloated over it admiringly every time I passed a mirror.

Becca was as yet totally indifferent to matters of glamor. Usually quick-moving and wiry as a little monkey, she fidgeted and complained while Mother rushed to comb her light brown hair into whatever style could be managed in a minute.

Finally it was the night before our trip. I lay in bed tossing and turning. I wanted to go to Bethel and I didn’t want to go. What was the matter with me? I shut my eyes and imagined flying in the plane and looking down where the Chisholms lived. It was really just a small crossroads in the country, but for some reason it seemed to shift and change, becoming, in my mind’s eye, the picture of an ancient map our teacher had shown my class at school. At the edges of the map were the words "Terra Incognita," a shadowy space featuring fearsome ocean creatures and fire-breathing dragons with wings.

She had explained it to us: "What Terra Incognita meant," she said, "was unknown territory. This was back in the days when most people thought the earth was flat and that you could fall off the edge into something unknown."

I pounded my pillow and wished I could stop thinking about this. Then I shed some silent, salty tears, ashamed of myself. Did Christopher Columbus feel this way before leaving Spain and sailing out into uncharted seas? Finally I managed to fall asleep, dreaming fitful dreams of ships falling off flat earths into dark voids full of sea monsters.

2

Flying High

The sound of the Cessna engine roared in our ears: the single wooden propeller was spinning so fast it had become invisible. Becca and I perched in the tiny rear compartment braced by our suitcase stuffed fat with more than enough outfits to last a week. (She and I had thrown in plenty of extras.) Our parents sat forward, strapped into bucket seats. Amy had been left at home with the babysitter.

We taxied onto the runway and waited for clearance. Suddenly the call came and Daddy, thrusting the throttle forward, gave ’er the juice. The plane seemed to move at tremendous speed, the tires bouncing noisily against the concrete runway, the wind slapping the underside of the wings. It was thrilling, almost heart-stopping – the moment that made me feel I was going up in a very swift elevator.

All at once the tires went silent: we had lifted off and were airborne. The nose of the plane pulled steadily upward through filmy clouds into the vivid blue above. Below us the world grew miniature – roads, fences, and houses looking like embroidered turkey-tracks and French knots on one of Grandmother’s crazy quilts. The Tennessee River unfurled beneath us, a shimmering length of watered-silk ribbon. We followed its course eastward from Knoxville toward Bethel.

This visit had been the subject of endless plotting between ourselves and Dixie Chisholm every time we got together. And now it was finally happening. We were on our way in the Cessna, floating in the air as lightly as dandelion fluff over the tall towers of the Volunteer Portland Cement Company and on past the John Sevier Railroad Yards at Mascot.

Somehow, in the brilliance of early morning, my middle-of-the-night fears evaporated. I felt excited again. I grinned at Becca and she grinned back at me. A friend of Mother’s once remarked that for all our differences, Becca and I made a good team. Having spent half my life with my nose in a book, I was a dreamer, with a brain well-furnished for plays and pretends. Lively Becca was a do-er who enjoyed zipping around gathering up clever and unusual