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In memoryas well as in actuality, Christmas is the time for coming home. Many a father lives for these homecomings of a scattered brood, but it is the mothers who make them. Fay Yauger’s “I Remember� suggests something of almost universal contrast:
My father rode a horseAnd carried a gun;He swapped for a livingAnd fought for his fun—I remember his spursAgleam in the sun.My father was alwaysGoing somewhere—To rodeo, market,Or cattleman’s fair—I remember my mother,Her hand in the air.
My father rode a horseAnd carried a gun;He swapped for a livingAnd fought for his fun—I remember his spursAgleam in the sun.My father was alwaysGoing somewhere—To rodeo, market,Or cattleman’s fair—I remember my mother,Her hand in the air.
My father rode a horseAnd carried a gun;He swapped for a livingAnd fought for his fun—I remember his spursAgleam in the sun.
My father rode a horse
And carried a gun;
He swapped for a living
And fought for his fun—
I remember his spurs
Agleam in the sun.
My father was alwaysGoing somewhere—To rodeo, market,Or cattleman’s fair—I remember my mother,Her hand in the air.
My father was always
Going somewhere—
To rodeo, market,
Or cattleman’s fair—
I remember my mother,
Her hand in the air.
My own mother has been dead five Christmases now. She was eighty-seven years old when she died and had been a widow for twenty-eight of those years. Maybe every mother is a matriarch; matriarchy was very strongly pronounced in mine. She invariably wanted her children and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren home at Christmas, and they generally got there. If I live to be a hundred, at every Christmas I’ll be remembering the brightness of her face, the eagerness of her greeting, the love in all her conduct—including cooking.
There was a kind of homecoming in our family—the returning of a presence without the immediate returning of the person—that seems to me to belong to Christmas, though it did not actually occur at that season. Not long after the United States entered the First World War, my mother and father had three sons and a daughterin the service. The baby of the family, Martha, was still in school and so was Henry, the youngest son, eighteen years old. My mother was thinking how she would have him for a time at least, as a stay while she cared for a sick husband and her own aged mother.
During World War I, millions of youths who joined the army volunteered. One day Henry came to my mother and said, “Mama, I wish you wouldn’t feel as you do about my enlisting. I want to go. I feel like a slacker staying at home.�
“Son,� she replied—and it was never her nature to take all day to make up her mind—“if you feel that way, go ahead and enlist. I’d rather you’d go and never come back than stay home feeling like a slacker.� Nor would it ever have occurred to her to try to pull wires to get him into a soft place.
Henry joined the Marines and within a few weeks was across the Atlantic. He was the only one of us four brothers who got a shot at the Kaiser’s young Hitlers, but when he was fighting in the Argonne, he wasn’t calling himself lucky, I guess. In October, 1918, Mama had a letterfrom him and knew he was somewhere on the front.
November 11 and the Armistice came. I had been in France myself a few weeks at that time. I can still hear and see the French peasants around the artillery camp where I was stationed, going about all day saying to each other and to any American soldier they met, “Fini le guerre, fini le guerre—The war is finished, the war is finished.� Some had tears in their eyes. They were in a kind of daze. They were in a transport as if peace on earth and good will to all men had suddenly arrived to end all wars. They were kind and simple people, like the masses of people of all nations, whether red, white, black, yellow, or brown.
The Armistice had been declared and battling had ceased. November passed, and no word from Henry. Had he survived? One by one the days of December passed and Christmas came, little sister Martha the only child at home, and no word of assurance from Henry and no dreaded word from the War Department either. One by one the long nights of January and the days made longer by waiting for a letter that did not come, passed.
Nearly every family in Beeville had a boy in the service. A few were not coming back. Some had come. The others had been heard from. Everybody knew that Henry’s whereabouts were unknown. The post office had been so besieged over the telephone, every day and Sunday too, with inquiries as to whether a letter had come from this boy or that, the inquirers too eager to wait for the mail, that the postmaster ordered the phone taken out. He was a good friend of my family.
One day in February, 1919, my mother answered the ring of the telephone in her house. A post-office clerk was calling. The postmaster, he explained, had sent him across the street to telephone from a store. The postmaster wanted my mother and father to know that a letter had just arrived—from Henry. Yes, from Henry, postmarked U. S. Army of Occupation, in Germany.
With Mama and Papa in the house at this hour were an infant grandson, lying in a baby buggy, and his mother, Elizabeth, my brother Lee’s wife, Lee being in the Air Corps.
“I can go faster than anybody else,� Elizabeth cried.
The post office was about four blocks away. As she tore out, Mama and Papa followed as rapidly as they could, pushing the baby buggy. There was no pavement to roll it over. The streets were sandy and gullied, but the baby buggy was more than halfway to the post office when Elizabeth met it coming back. She was running, hand stretched out holding a letter that had already been torn from the envelope.
There in the middle of the street the little group read it through—a father enfeebled beyond his years by a disease that was soon to carry him off, a young kinswoman of eager sympathy, and a mother, still wonderfully vigorous, who had said, “Go, son. I’d rather you’d go and never come back than stay home feeling like a slacker.� I asked her years later for her definition of bravery. “A brave person,� she came back, with steel-spring energy, “is a person who is scared to death and goes ahead anyway.�
I don’t remember now why no letter had come from Henry. Anyway, a letter now brought him home in safety and changed the world for a few people who had been waiting in utter anxiety.