Late in January, his unit was ordered to proceed to the delousing station at Le Mans. The weather was cold, and there was a light snow on the ground. They reached Le Mans at eleven o’clock at night, after a twelve-hour ride. When he climbed down out of the truck, he had difficulty walking. He took off his boots and discovered that his feet were frozen. (“For a week thereafter, my feet were so swollen and blistered that I was unable to wear a shoe or leave my quarters.”) During the two weeks he spent at the delousing camp he ran into several boys from Springfield that he knew. They had seen hard service with the 8th Illinois Infantry and showed it.
The unit made its final train journey from Le Mans to Brest, where thousands of soldiers were now crowded into the area around the port. The barracks were long wooden shacks with a hall running through the middle and small rooms opening off it. The only heat came from two stoves, one at either end of the hall. (“The weather was extremely damp and chilly at Brest, the raw wind off the ocean penetrating to the marrow.”) There was more sickness.
On the morning of February 22nd, the 317th marched to the port. They had been informed by a bulletin from headquarters that if there was any disorder in the ranks they would be sent back to camp and detained indefinitely. Their packs uniformly rolled, their guns and shoes polished, they moved in utter silence like a funeral procession. The Aquitania rode at anchor in the harbor, and they were loaded onto small barges and ferried out to it. Lieutenant Dyer’s cabin had mahogany fittings and a private bathroom. There were taps for fresh water and salt water, and the soap did not smell of disinfectant. While he was in the tub soaking, the room began to rock, and he realized that they had put out to sea. There is more, but why not leave him there, as lighthearted as he was probably ever going to be.
3
OF Dr. Dyer’s roughly forty years of medical practice in Kansas City there is no record that I know of. The pattern of his days must have been regular and consistent. I picture him with a stethoscope in the pocket of his white coat and a covey of interns crowding around him.
In 1946, Hugh Davis, who was then living in California and an architect, came with his wife to Lincoln for a family visit. While he was there, he got Dr. Dyer’s address and wrote to him to say that they would be going through Kansas City with a stopover of several hours and would like to see him. The answer was an invitation to dinner. There had been no communication between them for a good many years. The walls of the Dyers’ Kansas City apartment were covered with Bessie Dyer’s paintings, which the Davises liked very much. She was self-taught, with the help of a book that she got from the public library. They all sat down to a full Thanksgiving dinner, though actually Thanksgiving was about ten days away. And the friendship simply picked up where it had left off.
Two years later, when the Dyers went out to California, they were entertained at Hugh and Esther Davis’s house in Palo Alto, along with a medical acquaintance the Dyers were staying with. My younger brother was also invited. He had just come out of the Army after a tour of duty in Germany, and was enrolled in law school at Stanford. He remembers Dr. Dyer as soft-spoken and very friendly, if a trifle guarded. He seemed to want, and need, to talk about the situation of educated Negroes in America — how they are not always comfortable with members of their own race, with whom they often have little or nothing in common, and are not accepted by white people whose tastes and interests they share. He was neither accusing nor bitter about this, my brother said. My brother mentioned the fact that Dr. Dyer’s mother had helped take care of him when he was a baby, and Dr. Dyer was pleased that my brother remembered her. Three or four times he interrupted the conversation to say “I never expected to sit down to dinner with a grandson of Judge Blinn.”
Hugh Davis’s widow let me see a few of Dr. Dyer’s letters to him written between 1955 and 1957. They are about politics (he was an ardent Republican), the hydrogen bomb, various international crises, a projected high-school reunion that never took place, his wife’s delicate health, and — as one would expect of any regular correspondence — the weather. They are signed “Your friend, Billie Dyer.” In each letter there is some mention of his professional activity — never more than a sentence, as a rule; taken together they give a very good picture of a man working himself to death.
In January 1956, at which time he was seventy years old, he wrote, “I suppose I should apologize for not having written you sooner but believe it or not, I am now working harder and with longer hours than ever before. Silly, you say, well I quite agree but the occasion is this. In the last four months I have been put on the staffs of three of the major hospitals in our city. I thought at first it was an honor but with the increase in activities which such appointments entail, my work has increased twofold. Since it is the first time that one of my race has had such appointments, I have been working diligently to make good, thereby keeping those doors open.” He was still acting as a surgeon for the Santa Fe Railroad, and also for the Kansas City, Kansas, police department.
Three months later he wrote, “Since I have taken on new hospital assignments I have been working much too hard. I was in Chicago this week three days attending the Convention of American Association of Railway Surgeons and derived great benefit from the lectures and demonstrations on recent advances in medicine and surgery.”
In June he spent a couple of weeks in the wilds of Minnesota fishing and had a glorious time, though the fishing was poor. In August he wrote, “I am still working as hard as ever altho my physical resistance is not what it used to be & I find I must resort to more frequent short periods of rest.”
The letter he wrote in November is largely about the suppression of the Hungarian uprising: “My heart goes out to those people. I was in France in the First World War & I saw refugees going down the roads with a little cart pulled by a donkey & all of their earthly possessions piled high on it. They had been driven from their homes by the advancing German Armies & it was a pitiful sight to behold.” He also mentions the fact that the vision in his right eye is somewhat impaired because of a small cataract, and adds, “I am still working at a tremendous pace but realize that I must soon slow down.”
In March of the following year he wrote, “I hardly have time to breathe. Indeed I know that at my age I should not be trying such a pace but having broken thru a barrier which was denied me so many years …”
In July he wrote, “I too am having my troubles with a nervous dermatitis which all of the skin specialists tell me is due to overwork.… I am planning on spending a couple of weeks on the lakes in northern Minnesota for I am very tired and need a rest.”
And in August: “I will be 71 years old the 29th of this month and am in fairly good health for an old man of my years. I therefore thank the good Lord for His blessings.… I thought I would get out to California this summer but I had to buy a new car, so will have to defer my visit another year.… I agree with you that Ike has been a little wishy washy since he has been in the White House. It seems that he speaks softly but does not carry the big stick like Teddy Roosevelt once did. Hugh I shall never forget the political rallies and torchlight processions they had in Lincoln when we were boys. We don’t see anything like that any more, and when the circuses came to town with their big parades. How I pity the generations of kids today, who are denied such thrills. Remember the old swimming hole in Kickapoo Creek where we used to swim naked and have so much fun. Hugh those were the days.”
In January there was a notice in the Lincoln Evening Courier: “Dr. William Dyer, a native of Lincoln, was found dead in his car after an automobile accident at Kansas City, Kan., Tuesday morning. He apparently suffered a heart attack while driving.”
THERE have been at least three histories of Logan County. The first was published in 1878 by a firm that went through the state doing one county after another. It has portrait engravings and brief biographies of the leading citizens, for which they must have paid something. The style is a little like First and Second Chronicles: “Michael and Abram Mann, John
Jessee and Thomas Sr., Lucas and Samuel Myers were from Ohio and are now in their graves.” Many natural wonders that the early settlers remembered found their way into this book — prairie fires so numerous that at night they lighted up the whole circuit of the horizon. And mirages. Also extreme hardships — the ague, caused by hunting their horses in the wet grass, and a drop in the temperature so great and so sudden, on a rainy December afternoon in 1836, that men on horseback were frozen to the saddle. And primitive artifacts, such as a door with wooden hinges, a wooden lock, and a buckskin drawstring.
Another history, published in 1911, was the work of a local man and is overburdened with statistics. The most recent is a large book — nine by twelve — heavy to hold in the hand and bound in red Leatherette. The likeness of Abraham Lincoln is on the cover, embossed in gold, as if somewhere in the afterlife his tall shade had encountered King Midas. There are hundreds of photographs of people I don’t know and never heard of, which is not to be wondered at since we moved away from Lincoln in 1923, when I was fourteen years old.
Someone who had never lived there might conclude from this book that the town had no Negroes now or ever. Except for the group pictures of the Lincoln College athletic teams, in which here and there a dark face appears among the lighter ones, there are no photographs of black men and women. And though there are many pictures of white churches of one denomination or another, there is no picture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — only a column of text, in which the buildings it occupied and the ministers who served it are listed. And these sentences: “Mr. Arian [surely Aaron misremembered?] Dyer and wife Harriet moved here from Springfield, Illinois, in 1874.… The sinners in Lincoln found the hope in Christ and joined the church. Among them were Alfred Dyer and wife Laura.…”
I go through the book looking for the names that figured so prominently in the conversation of my elders and find almost none. And realize that the place to look for them is the cemetery. The past is always being plowed under. There is a page of pictures of the centennial parade, but nowhere are the names of the Ten Most Distinguished Men called to mind. What is one to think if not that the town, after celebrating its hundredth birthday, was done with history and its past, and ready to live, like the rest of America, in a perpetual present?
In the index I found “Dyer, William, 90, 202.” Both references turned out to be concerned with a white man of that name.
Love
MISS Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter in flawlessly oval Palmer method. Our teacher for the fifth grade. The name might as well have been graven in stone.
As she called the roll, her voice was as gentle as the expression in her beautiful dark-brown eyes. She reminded me of pansies. When she called on Alvin Ahrens to recite and he said, “I know but I can’t say,” the class snickered but she said, “Try,” encouragingly, and waited, to be sure that he didn’t know the answer, and then said, to one of the hands waving in the air, “Tell Alvin what one-fifth of three-eighths is.” If we arrived late to school, red-faced and out of breath and bursting with the excuse we had thought up on the way, before we could speak she said, “I’m sure you couldn’t help it. Close the door, please, and take your seat.” If she kept us after school it was not to scold us but to help us past the hard part.
Somebody left a big red apple on her desk for her to find when she came into the classroom, and she smiled and put it in her desk, out of sight. Somebody else left some purple asters, which she put in her drinking glass. After that the presents kept coming. She was the only pretty teacher in the school. She never had to ask us to be quiet or to stop throwing erasers. We would not have dreamed of doing anything that would displease her.
Somebody wormed it out of her when her birthday was. While she was out of the room the class voted to present her with flowers from the greenhouse. Then they took another vote and sweet peas won. When she saw the florist’s box waiting on her desk, she said, “Oh?”
“Look inside,” we all said.
Her delicate fingers seemed to take forever to remove the ribbon. In the end, she raised the lid of the box and exclaimed.
“Read the card!” we shouted.
Many Happy Returns to Miss Vera Brown, from the Fifth Grade, it said.
She put her nose in the flowers and said, “Thank you all very, very much,” and then turned our minds to the spelling lesson for the day.
After school we escorted her downtown in a body to a special matinee of D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World. She was not allowed to buy her ticket. We paid for everything.
We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We intended to pass right up through sixth, seventh, and eighth grades and on into high school taking her with us. But that isn’t what happened. One day there was a substitute teacher. We expected our real teacher to be back the next day but she wasn’t. Week after week passed and the substitute continued to sit at Miss Brown’s desk, calling on us to recite and giving out tests and handing them back with grades on them, and we went on acting the way we had when Miss Brown was there because we didn’t want her to come back and find we hadn’t been nice to the substitute. One Monday morning she cleared her throat and said that Miss Brown was sick and not coming back for the rest of the term.
In the fall we had passed on into the sixth grade and she was still not back. Benny Irish’s mother found out that she was living with an aunt and uncle on a farm a mile or so beyond the edge of town. One afternoon after school Benny and I got on our bikes and rode out to see her. At the place where the road turned off to go to the cemetery and the Chautauqua grounds, there was a red barn with a huge circus poster on it, showing the entire inside of the Sells-Floto Circus tent and everything that was going on in all three rings. In the summertime, riding in the backseat of my father’s open Chalmers, I used to crane my neck as we passed that turn, hoping to see every last tiger and flying-trapeze artist, but it was never possible. The poster was weather-beaten now, with loose strips of paper hanging down.
It was getting dark when we wheeled our bikes up the lane of the farmhouse where Miss Brown lived.
“You knock,” Benny said as we started up on the porch.
“No, you do it,” I said.
We hadn’t thought ahead to what it would be like to see her. We wouldn’t have been surprised if she had come to the door herself and thrown up her hands in astonishment when she saw who it was, but instead a much older woman opened the door and said, “What do you want?”
“We came to see Miss Brown,” I said.
“We’re in her class at school,” Benny explained.
I could see that the woman was trying to decide whether she should tell us to go away, but she said, “I’ll find out if she wants to see you,” and left us standing on the porch for what seemed like a long time. Then she appeared again and said, “You can come in now.”
As we followed her through the front parlor I could make out in the dim light that there was an old-fashioned organ like the kind you used to see in country churches, and linoleum on the floor, and stiff uncomfortable chairs, and family portraits behind curved glass in big oval frames.
The room beyond it was lighted by a coal-oil lamp but seemed ever so much darker than the unlighted room we had just passed through. Propped up on pillows in a big double bed was our teacher, but so changed. Her arms were like sticks, and all the life in her seemed concentrated in her eyes, which had dark circles around them and were enormous. She managed a flicker of recognition but I was struck dumb by the fact that she didn’t seem glad to see us. She didn’t belong to us anymore. She belonged to her illness.
Benny said, “I hope you get well soon.”
The angel who watches over little boys who know but they can’t say it saw to it that we didn’t touch anything. And in a minute we were outside, on our bicycles, riding through the dusk toward the turn in the road and town.
A few weeks later I read in the Lincoln Evening Courier that Miss Vera Brown, who taught the fifth grad
e in Central School, had died of tuberculosis, aged twenty-three years and seven months.
SOMETIMES I went with my mother when she put flowers on the graves of my grandparents. The cinder roads wound through the cemetery in ways she understood and I didn’t, and I would read the names on the monuments: Brower, Cadwallader, Andrews, Bates, Mitchell. In loving memory of. Infant daughter of. Beloved wife of. The cemetery was so large and so many people were buried there, it would have taken a long time to locate a particular grave if you didn’t know where it was already. But I know, the way I sometimes know what is in wrapped packages, that the elderly woman who let us in and who took care of Miss Brown during her last illness went to the cemetery regularly and poured the rancid water out of the tin receptacle that was sunk below the level of the grass at the foot of her grave, and filled it with fresh water from a nearby faucet and arranged the flowers she had brought in such a way as to please the eye of the living and the closed eyes of the dead.
The Man in the Moon
IN the library of the house I grew up in there was a box of photographs that I used to look through when other forms of entertainment failed me. In this jumble there was a postcard of my mother’s brother, my Uncle Ted, and a young woman cozying up together in the curve of a crescent moon. I would have liked to believe that it was the real moon they were sitting in, but you could see that the picture was taken in a photographer’s studio. Who she was it never occurred to me to ask. Thirty or forty years later, if his name came up in conversation, women who were young at the same time he was would remark how attractive he was. He was thin-faced and slender, and carried himself well, and he had inherited the soft brown eyes of the Kentucky side of the family.