While Miss Cruley still objected to so much family participation, the Editor’s warm acceptance of her Poetry Corner had made her a trifle more mellow. With great curiosity, I waited to see what she would do the second week. On Tuesday, I found out. At the bottom of the column she had inserted:
Our new feature, Poetry Corner, has been received with enthusiastic response. Undoubtedly there is unknown and unsung talent hidden in our town. Your original contributions are solicited.
My father winced when he saw this, though he let it pass. He knew that some terrible verse could be submitted, and in a small town, how would the Editor reject contributions without causing hurt feelings?
Miss Cruley printed another of my poems in the second Poetry Corner, one I had written about my beloved locust trees on the hill behind our house. Miss Cruley used this one before I could rescue it from Dad’s desk drawer to improve the last line.
The Locusts
Tall and gnarled, gaunt they stand
Upon a windswept hill,
Majestically, with arms outstretched
Dignified and still.
Others seek, but do not know
My trees upon the hill—
Torn by wind and bruised by storm,
And yet unconquered still.
You ask me why I love them so?
I really do not know—
Except that they’re a part of me,
A part I dare not show.
Actually, the enthusiastic response by Sentinel readers had impressed Miss Cruley more than me—a total of one verbal comment and a single letter. But my reward was not so much reader reaction as just the thrill of seeing in print something I had written.
Meanwhile, our old Babcock press was giving more and more trouble. Dean Fleming, who had previously known nothing about printing presses, was having to spend so much time repairing the Babcock that he was rapidly becoming an expert.
Ordinarily Dean would be the last one to give up on any piece of machinery. But it was he who finally persuaded Dad that the laborious Babcock was a relic and could expire any day.
Soon after that, Dad heard of a good secondhand Goss press being offered for sale in Langley, Pennsylvania; the bargain price was $3,000. The elderly owner of its weekly newspaper, the Langley News, had finally been forced to sell out because of a long-overdue mortgage. Dean offered to check out the press.
He came back with a favorable report. “It’s covered with dirt and grease,” Dean admitted. “Hasn’t been taken care of right. But the Langley News has had such a small circulation that the Goss has gotten almost no wear and tear. I’d say the signal is go.”
There remained the matter of money and here the Editor was very resistant. “Dean, we’re hardly making it now. You saved us with a loan back in January. Then the government bailed us out after the flood. I don’t see how I can take on a bank loan now, even if I could get it.”
Dean then pointed out what a big step forward for the Sentinel buying the Goss would be. The Babcock had to be hand-fed and could print only four pages at a time, after which the operator had to “back it up”—flip the paper to print the other side. Even this was accomplished only by operating the clutch, starting and stopping the press with the left foot.
In contrast, the more modern Goss was automatic and could print eight sheets at a time, or a total of 3,500 an hour.
“I know all that,” the adamant Editor protested, “but I can’t put myself and my family under more financial burden.”
“I’ve got real respect for that wish, Ken. But on the other hand—”
At this juncture, two factors made my father decide to take the plunge. A second order for the Yoder booklet came in, bringing the total payment to $2,700. This was followed by a spurt of advertising activity by local merchants. The Editor paid $1,500 in cash and the First National Bank then agreed to accept my father’s note for the balance of $1,500 at 3½ percent interest.
The deal was made and the Goss press was ours. Now came the problem of transporting it. The way Dean handled that was an education in itself. He borrowed a bigger truck for Saturday, rented a block and tackle, then enlisted the services of three volunteers who would drive his own smaller truck to Langley. On the day of the big move, the Editor and Dean agreed to let me go along with them in the borrowed truck.
The Langley News office turned out to be a converted pool hall, so old, musty, and rundown that I was surprised it contained any usable pieces of machinery.
First the press was washed down with gasoline. Then Dean started it up and watched it run for a while before he pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket and began numbering the parts—on the larger pieces adding arrows and hieroglyphic messages to himself. Only then did he begin loosening bolts and taking the press apart. When the huge piece of machinery was dismantled and moved, I was amazed to see a big hole in the floor underneath it.
Once the two trucks were parked in the alley behind the Sentinel office, a problem arose that not even Dean Fleming had anticipated: the main parts were too large to go through any door.
“Let’s rest a moment while we figure this out,” Dean suggested. When I took cold drinks to the men who were seated on top of the Goss press in the back of the truck, their heads were bowed. Praying?
I drew back, somewhat embarrassed. One man opened his eyes, saw me and winked. “We need all the help we can get,” he said.
A few minutes later I saw Dean measuring the frame of the large display window in front of the Sentinel office. “That’s the solution,” he said jubilantly. “We can get the press through here.”
Soon he and one of his helpers had removed the glass pane. Then the truck was backed up to the new opening at the front of the building and the cumbersome parts were lifted out onto heavy skids on the floor inside. By the time the window had been replaced, it was dark and time to call it a day. Dean insisted that he would be back at eight o’clock the next morning.
“But tomorrow’s Sunday,” Dad protested.
“I know,” was Dean’s prompt response, “but there’s no way you’ll get the paper out next week unless you and I work tomorrow. Today was the easy part.”
Easy? The weary faces of his three helpers denied that anything had been easy.
“We’ve got almost a day’s work before we begin reassembling the press,” Dean continued. “The Goss has to have a crawl hole beneath it for repairs and maintenance. That means sawing out a five-foot-square hole in the floor and riveting in a metal frame. Even that’s just the beginning.”
Dean found another volunteer for Sunday and the three men worked straight through the day. When I got to the Sentinel after church, the crawl hole had been sawed out and the frame was under construction. Dean explained that the press’s ink fountains had to be filled from underneath in a process pressmen called loading the chassis. After the Goss was reassembled and in place, he would build steps leading down into the pit. Next, pipes would have to be run from underneath the press to the coal furnace in the basement to keep warm certain metal parts of the Goss. This would prevent the ink fountains from congealing in cold weather and would guard against static electricity.
“Some country editors still use kerosene lamps underneath the ink fountains to keep them fluid,” Dean told us. “But that’s makeshift. I want to do better than that by you.”
By Sunday afternoon it was obvious that the Editor knew Dean’s volunteers quite well. He was familiar with their jobs and spoke to them about their wives and children. There was real camaraderie here.
But why were they so closed-mouthed to the rest of us? Why so much anonymity? Still so many unanswered questions.
By early Monday afternoon, Dean was reassembling the press. As I watched him at work, studying his chalk-mark arrows and messages to himself, it was obvious that he was enjoying the challenge, like putting together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. He would hum or whistle or burst out in snatches of boisterous ballads, or laugh when he succeeded in puzzling out an especially trick
y part.
While Dean’s hands were busy, he and my father fell into quiet, serious conversation. I was at my desk, working on my steel-mill paper. I think they forgot I was there.
“Dean,” I heard the Editor say, “I’ve a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Say you’re the pastor of a church and the chairman of your trustees began an affair with your church secretary. How would you handle it?”
Down in the hole in the floor, Dean paused in his work to look up at his friend. “I’ve never been a pastor, but it seems to me that the Bible answers the question directly and common-sense-like. If a member of your church strays, you go to him in love, point out what he’s doing wrong, let him know that God will forgive him, and ask that he give it up.”
“Yes, but suppose you do that only to have the trustee hotly deny he’s done anything wrong. Yet you know he’s lying.”
“How do you know?”
“Because all this happened in my church. The secretary came and told me the whole story, submitting her resignation. Said the weight of guilt was crushing her, that the trustee had a wife and three children.”
There was the clang of a heavy tool flung down on metal. Dean maneuvered his crippled leg so that he could vault out of the pit and sit on the edge of the sawed-off flooring, where he could look into Dad’s eyes.
I stared at the Editor, my mind awhirl. A missing piece of our life in Timmeton was being put into place.
“So the square-off between you and the trustee failed,” Dean continued. “The next thing is to take one or more trusted Christian brothers with you to face the man. If his heart is still haughty and hard and he won’t receive any correction, then it’s up to the pastor and his officers to remove the man from his position until he confesses and gets right with God.”
“But, Dean, the trustee happened to be a very powerful man in a small town. The others wouldn’t go along with those Biblical directives because they were afraid of financial retaliation.”
Dean nodded. “Then the pastor hasn’t much choice, has he? He can’t compromise his faith, else God would withdraw His blessing from the ministry. So he should resign.”
There was silence for a moment. From where I was sitting I could see my father’s clearly chiseled features in profile as he looked Dean full in the face. “Eventually I did resign.”
“Then, Ken, you did the right thing.”
“But this was months later. And I resigned from the whole Church and left the ministry. I see now that I should have used this episode as the reason for leaving. With the exception of one dear old retired hardware merchant, the trustees said I should just forget it. Their viewpoint was that it was all solved anyway by the secretary’s resignation.”
“The secretary’s resignation did nothing to change what was inside that trustee’s heart,” Dean observed mildly. “And he was still an officer of Christ’s Church.”
“This trustee remained unchanged. He came to see me in my church office. Threatened me. Said that if I ever again raised any question about his morality, he would personally see to it that I’d be booted out of my pastorate.”
“How long after that did you leave Timmeton?”
“About eleven months.”
“What happened during that time?”
“Not much, really. Everything went on just as though nothing had happened. Except that something had gone out of the church and out of me. I felt I had been weak and was a failure. I went into depression, then became ill. You know the rest.”
“Your father won’t be here for dinner,” Mother announced when I arrived home. “He just called. He’s out with Dean tonight. I wonder what they’re doing this time.”
“Probably working on the new press,” I replied.
Later, the two of us were alone in the family room. I had finished some schoolwork and had started to my room when, for some reason, I turned to look at Mother. I really looked at her for the first time in months. Her face was more lined, she was thinner. Suddenly I wanted to tell her how much I admired her strength and patience with Dad—and with all of us. The words stuck in my throat. Instead, I knelt by her chair and kissed her on the cheek.
A sob rumbled in her throat and she threw her arms around my neck. “Oh, Julie . . .” The words she wanted to say wouldn’t come out either. We stared at each other with tear-filled eyes for a moment, then I kissed her cheek again and went to my room.
When I tried to go to sleep that night, I kept seeing that vulnerable look in my mother’s eyes. The strong one, I had always called her. Was it human nature for us to withhold affection from the strong ones?
Late that Wednesday afternoon I was at my desk when my father burst from his cubicle office, a glint of excitement in his brown eyes. He headed for Dean Fleming, who was still tinkering with the newly installed Goss press.
“Dean, what do you know about McKeever’s private railroad car?”
Dean straightened up from his work. He twisted his torso from side to side and massaged his lower back. “Called the Vulcania. Pretty fancy. The Old Man uses it mostly to go from Alderton to Pittsburgh and back. Parks it on a bluff overlooking the town.”
“That tells me something.”
“What?”
“I just received an invitation to lunch tomorrow aboard the Vulcania. More like a command.”
Dean frowned. “Any way to get out of it?”
“Why should I?”
“Because the Old Man will badger you. He’s a bully.”
The Editor shrugged. “I think I can handle him now.”
“Don’t be too sure. I’d feel better if you’d cancel out.”
I could see that my father had no intention of declining the invitation. Meeting McKeever in the Vulcania intrigued him. Besides, Dad had a throbbing curiosity about trains and railroading. Mother teased him about filling the entire bottom drawer of his desk at home with an assortment of railroad timetables. Before Tim was really old enough, Dad had given him an elaborate electric train and had kept adding to the layout ever since.
With that kind of obsessive fascination with trains, I knew that our family would get a full report on every detail of the Vulcania. Could be, I thought, that the McKeevers had hit upon the surest way to impress Dad and then put pressure on him.
We did get that description of the car. But it was weeks, even months, before I learned the whole story of what had happened at that lunch in the Vulcania.
McKeever’s Bluff was a natural ledge, reached by a side road, one fourth of the way up Seven Mile Mountain. Dean said that Yoder money was used to construct a spur from the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, which ran from Altoona through Yancyville, Alderton and on to Pittsburgh. The ledge was widened to accommodate the Vulcania, plus a parking lot for automobiles. Yoder also installed the telephone and power units there to connect with Vulcania equipment.
The project had taken years of work, no one seemed to know how much money, and caused much comment from local people, mostly negative. Some said it was unsafe, others muttered that it was McKeever’s way of exercising his physical dominance over Alderton; board members at Yoder were supposedly upset over the cost to the company of a ridiculously expensive and inefficient office.
The Editor had driven the Willys up Seven Mile Mountain to the ledge as directed. There he was treated to a breathtaking view of the entire Alderton area. The small parking lot—large enough for only six cars—was bounded by a metal fence to protect the unwary from a fall of several hundred feet.
The Vulcania, painted green and burgundy red on the outside, was longer than he had expected. The back end was an open observation area, its railing of ornately designed brass, with a scalloped striped awning overhead. The word Vulcania was painted in big gold letters on the side of the car; beneath this was a mural of fire, with a raised arm and an anvil depicting the Roman god Vulcan.
A uniformed footman was waiting by portable steps beside the car. The uniform—navy with brass buttons, the Vulcan embl
em in gold over the breast pocket, red and white stripes down each side of the pants legs—seemed to the Editor ridiculously elaborate.
“Right in here, sir.”
Young Tom McKeever met Dad with a hearty handshake. “Welcome to the Vulcania. Best restaurant in town, we can guarantee it.”
My father was amazed at the spaciousness of the interior: large arched picture windows with leaded art-glass lunettes at the top set off by brocaded gold-colored draperies; a raised dome ceiling; wall-to-wall crimson and gold carpeting; overstuffed chairs.
Behind a large ornate corner desk at the other end of the car, the older McKeever rose ponderously to his feet. His eyes were a deep-set blue under shaggy eyebrows. His massive head seemed still larger because of a wealth of bristly white hair around his ears.
“Good to see you again, Mr. Wallace.” He made a little welcoming gesture with his right hand and sat down again.
McKeever’s desk not only was oversized and heavily carved, but to my father’s surprise, it was raised up on a small platform. As the Editor and Tom sank into comfortable overstuffed armchairs, they had to look up to Thomas Yoder McKeever Sr.
A white-coated waiter was now hovering about, the right side of his face badly scarred and drawn to one side, most of the hair on that side gone, little of his ear left, and his right eye covered by a gold patch. Dad tried not to stare, but a second surreptitious look revealed that the waiter was still a young man.
“A glass of white wine before lunch?” young Tom suggested.
My father hesitated for an instant. “Fine.”
“It’s a Niersteiner 1923,” the deep voice behind the desk volunteered.
While the steward was gone, preparing drinks in the galley, the younger McKeever answered my father’s unspoken question. “Karel is a Slovak, was a first-helper in the plant. Most unfortunate accident three years ago. A crane arm with a ladle of molten steel gave way. Exploded as it hit the floor.”