Wally Reads a Letter, Pt. 1

Secret City, Chapter 1

The mailman was running late, and since he was my ride home from school, I was too. I knew my folks were going to be hopping mad about it. 

To be clear, they weren’t going to be mad about me being late. They’d be fine with that. Daddy always said our farm was easier worked when I wasn’t involved. He probably would have said the same thing about his life, too, if anybody would have asked.

No, they were going to be as mad as hornets on account of the tardy mailman. See, they counted down the minutes every day until the mail arrived. And it wasn’t because they liked their bills or the catalogs or anything like that. But what they were anxious for was their hope that the  mail would bring word on the war and whether or not General MacArthur was still keeping my big brother, Billy, alive in the Pacific. 

Living without Billy was the worst state of being my folks had ever been in. The only things getting them through that horrible war were those occasional letters and notices we got. Most days we didn’t get any word at all. Some days we’d get a letter handwritten from him, which warmed Momma’s heart and set my mind at ease. Every day we dreaded getting a letter straight from the US Government, because those letters always carried bad news — news about sunk boats and lost causes and dead soldier boys.

That was why I hitched a ride as often as possible with the mailman, so I could prepare myself for my folks’ faces when they saw the mail. 

And also so I could help him with his crossword puzzle. 

I love a good puzzle, don’t you?

As we made our way up the dirt road to my house, I stared at our bundle of mail in his mailbag. A letter with the United States seal pressed into the envelope was sticking out of the middle. My stomach ached with every bump in the road.

“Can’t I please read one? Just the one and I won’t tell nobody,” I asked.

He clucked his tongue. “You'll find out what’s in your mail once your parents go through it, just like every other boy your age.”

Thing was, my parents didn’t read nor write, so they’d actually find out from me. But that wasn’t a fact meant to be common knowledge, so I bit my tongue.

He looked down at the newspaper, open on his steering wheel. “Now, what about seventeen across?” He pulled the pencil from behind his ear.

I looked over at the clue. Gold Rush Territory. 

“Alaska,” I said.

“Second letter has to be an X.”

“No it doesn’t. You you got seven down wrong. The Great Prophet is Ezekiel, not ‘Hendrix.’ I don’t believe anyone in the Bible is named Hendrix, let alone a prophet.”

He muttered and scratched through the letters. “It didn’t say it had to be a Bible prophet. And I’ll have you know, Abernathy Hendrix was as good a prophet as any, what with foretelling this Second World War all the way back before the first one had even happened. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him.”

Oh, I had heard of him. It was yet another fact not meant for common knowledge that Abernathy Hendrix was my daddy’s step-daddy. But we didn’t claim him. According to Daddy, Abernathy was a crazy old coot, cruel as the devil himself, and when he died, the whole valley celebrated for a week.

Daddy also liked to say that I reminded him of Abernathy. 

We didn’t talk about that either.

“He sounds made up to me,” I said.

“Then your parents have failed you,” the mailman said as he swerved around the big pothole just outside of our gate. 

He pulled up to the gate, finished filling in the letters on the crossword, and put the twine-bundled packet of letters into our mailbox. He knocked on it three times and then nodded for me to hop off his truck.

I hurried to get the parcel of envelopes out of the mailbox before he even pulled away, and then I ran up the hill to our house.

Momma and Daddy were waiting on the front porch. Daddy was leaning on the doorframe, smoking his pipe, and Momma was rocking a mile a minute in her rocking chair, wringing her hands like they were wet rags.

“She’s fit to be tied,” Daddy said. “Got herself all worked up, convinced there’s something bad brewing in the mailbox.”

I handed him the bundle. When Momma saw the envelope with the big government seal on it, she covered her mouth and let out a cry.

Daddy blew a big puff of smoke before he opened it. “Now, we don’t know if it’s bad news. It might be good. They might have given him a medal. You don’t know.” He looked over the letter, even though he couldn’t tell the words from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then handed it over to Momma. She barely even looked at it before she handed it to me.

“What’s it say about Billy?” she asked. “Is it good news or bad?”

I scanned the paper to get the answer.

And, it turned out, the letter wasn’t about Billy at all.

But that wasn’t a relief. 

Not even a little bit.

The letter was about our farm. 

Uncle Sam wanted it.

And what Uncle Sam wanted, he took without asking or apologizing. Especially if, as the letter claimed, it was “to help win the war.” Seemed like just about anything could be justified with those five words

Momma covered her mouth when I read that line and Daddy groaned. It reeked of Abernathy’s most famous prophecy, made just outside our farm gate.

The letter didn’t say if the similarity was intentional. It also didn’t say how on earth our farm would help America beat the Nazis and the Japanese.

But what it did say was that we had thirty days to vacate the premises our family had built and lived in for over a hundred years. The place that Billy probably dreamed about every night over in the Pacific. The only place where I felt sort of like a normal human being.

The worst part of it was, this horrible news didn’t surprise me. I had seen it coming from a mile away. 

No, not because I’m a prophet like Abernathy or nothing like that. It was because I’m strange in a different kind of way.

My hobby was collecting newspaper clippings. Now, I wasn’t the only one who collected comic strips and puzzles, or the occasional sports score if my favorite baseball team did real well. But I didn’t just collect those things. I had shelves of shelves of scrapbooks, every page full of newspaper articles that I reckoned were all connected, telling their own story as it unfolded across time. 

It was by following all the stories that I picked up on the pattern, the storm brewing just over the horizon. The papers had told about this sort of thing happening seventeen times to other families in Clinton County over the past two years. They even kicked out everyone in the tiny communities of Elza, Bethel, and Scarboro, little farming villages with families that had been living there for over a hundred years.

I actually got so fired up about it, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel, warning them and everybody in our community that something bad was fixing to happen to us all. To make it look official, I used cut-out words from the newspapers instead of my own chicken scratch handwriting. Which was probably a little Abernathy-like, come to think of it.

At any rate, after that, it seemed like the government had stopped taking people’s homes from them. I even started believing my letter had made a difference, like maybe I had somehow been able to stop what my step-granddaddy set in motion so many years ago.

But what if I actually helped the prophecy come true?