TRANSCRIPT OF A WORLD WAR I VETERAN'S NARRATIVE, NICKELTON, KENTUCKY

I used to love cold early mornings when I woke up and could see my breath. Those hard frosts before Halloween ruined the last vegetables on the vine and meant I didn't have to weed anymore. Milking wasn't too hard in itself, but it was monotonous. I sat there many a morning with my forehead pressed to a milk cow’s flank, half asleep, pulling teats and dreaming of bigger things. 

Late fall was also killing season. We couldn't waste bullets for butchering—besides, they made the brains messy. Dads had me knock a hog in the head the first time when I was ten years old. I wasn't strong enough to swing with much force, and the ballpeen sounded an off-note on the hog's skull. The hog stood there and just looked at me, confused and shocked silent. That was the worst part, having him look at me like that, all hurt and quiet, and I had to hit him three more times before he went down. Reverend MacKenzie was up to the house that particular day, I remember, and just stood there watching me, saying, "Oh, Lord, young man," as the neighbor men laughed, and I was so embarrassed and scared I cried and ran back to the house. 

Later, of course, I learned to do the job right; I even had a reputation as a sticker in my late teens but never took to it. When the hog fell over, I stuck him in the throat with a sharp butcher knife and gave it a little flip. The trick was to do it quick and neat, so when you pulled out the blade it was clean. A sticker's reputation came from that. If the men holding down the hog got sprayed, the sticker would never live it down. Then we'd dip and scald the hog, scrape it, hang it on a gambrel, gut it, and carve up the carcass. A neighbor would get a backbone and ribs and a liver for his trouble, and the hog owner used everything else, stuffing sausage with the intestines, frying the brains with eggs, even hanging the lights, or lungs, for the chickens to pick at. 

Well, the trouble started in Europe, and by 1917, I was all for going "over there." Farm life was never for me. I was hoping to get a chance to visit the old country, where one grandparent from each side of the family was still alive. I figured I'd see a bit of the world, and who knew, maybe I'd settle in Scotland or go to sea if the war ever ended. Instead, I sailed out of Newport News in the bottom of an old rusty troop carrier, steamed right past Britain and up the Channel in the middle of the night to Cherbourg, France, and disembarked without seeing anything but the moldy farmhands and miners and laborers around me. The army made me a mechanic with the Expeditionary Force. 

We still weren't much ready for war, and our boys flew castoff old B.E. biplanes from the Royal Aircraft Factory that had the 90-horse, eight-cylinder, Vee-type engines that spun a four-bladed prop. Those poor old birds were called "Fokker fodder." The only armament they had was the occasional pistol or carbine the pilots took up with them. We were so short on men and ammo that I rode along on two flights over German lines with Lieutenant Frazer from Hayward, Wisconsin, and he let me throw bricks down into the trenches, while he yelled, "Fuck the Huns!" When we were finally issued real weapons, they weren't designed for aerial combat, but we didn't know better. Eddie Paine from Clarksville, Tennessee, shot his own propeller off with a Lewis gun he'd mounted where he could sight down the barrel onto a target. That same afternoon we watched him coast down behind German lines, and that was the last of Eddie Paine. Later we got two-pound bombs that our pilots threw over the side onto trucks and massed troops. We eventually figured out the Germans’ interrupter gear that let you fire a Vickers through a spinning propeller, and hell broke loose then! We'd sit at the aerodrome and watch those brave bastards struggle up to dogfight a couple miles in the air, where it was cold as Billy Hell and the air was too thin to breathe.

The Great War was over right quick for us, just a year and a half, but afterwards I took a job near Bedfordshire, tearing down engines in a squadron of Avro fighters, and then there was the long sea journey home. I finally returned to the homestead in 1919 and discovered that Mum and Dads had died a few months earlier in the flu epidemic. The one sound business decision Dads ever made was buying insurance, and it "bought the farm" at his death. 

So here I am, nineteen years old, a veteran of the Great War, with nothing to keep me in West Virginia but a farm I don’t want. I'm more interested in motors than milk cows, so I sell the farm at a loss and buy a shop in town, where I live in back and do some milling and a little smithy work and knife sharpening. One night a couple of years after the Armistice, a man comes through in a Model T that needs a ring job real bad, and he tells me about an auction in Washington at the Navy Shipyard, where they'll be selling JN-4D biplanes the government had trained American pilots in for the war. Jennies are the same planes as the Avros I had patched up and even learned to fly a little in England, and I sell my belt-driven power tools and tool-and-die gear and make the trip up to Washington on a train. 

These Jennies have hundreds of hours on their engines, and maybe thousands on the airframes, which are just piano wire and silver spruce covered with flax. But they sell for a few hundred dollars, and how I love those aircraft. Yes sir, I do. I buy one of the ones that seems like it’s in better shape than the others, dismantle it, and ship it home. After overhauling the engine and straightening the landing gear, I sell my shop building to a lawyer who wants the land, and have just enough money to patch the holes in the fabric and dope it. I paint "Jenny" on the side, since I was never too clever, load my last toolbox with my remaining wrenches, fill Jenny full of gas and rise up out of West Virginia on a beautiful summer morning with the sun in my face and about ten dollars in my pocket. I'm thinking my asshole is studded with diamond chips, and though I'm ashamed to admit it, I'm wearing an outfit I had ordered from Sears Roebuck: a leather jacket and helmet, jodhpurs, puttees, a set of goggles and a white silk scarf, the very picture of the flying ace, the great Immelman himself.

So I fly across the mountains into Tennessee and on into Kentucky, giving rides to pay for my gas, and sleeping under the wing at night or in a haystack, dreaming of flight without a plane, and cadging meals off lonesome old women, or baking potatoes in the coals, that sort of thing. I'm beginning to understand that I have Dads' business sense, except I can't even afford life insurance, and Jenny is all I have in the world. In the beginning I get $12.50 cash money from townspeople for a fifteen-minute ride over their houses. Now granted, there aren’t many takers, and pretty soon the rate falls to $3.00. 

Barnstormers are everywhere and doing crazier stunts all the time. Men are talking about flying across the Atlantic, and somebody eventually flies across The Channel, upside down. Some crazy bastard even lands on Pennsylvania Avenue, right outside the White House, to deliver a personal message about Prohibition to Woodrow Wilson. Me and Jenny can't draw a crowd to save our lives. That, coupled with the Red Scare and a general suspicion of strangers and city-folk, gets me dejected. I have it in my head to fly to Hollywood and use Jenny to carry cameramen around in, get some money, and then head north to British Columbia. No wires over the roads then, and many fields are smooth enough to land on, so it seems the whole world is just a tank of gas away. That's when I come up hard in Little Egypt.

They call Southern Illinois Little Egypt for one of two reasons: either because it's fertile, a land of milk and honey for those running from the Reconstruction South, or because it's a locust-ridden, gaunt-cow wasteland to Chicago politicians annoyed at how backward the bottom of their state is. All depends on who you want to side with, don’t you see. In the early twenties, it's also called Little Hell because of the Klan, the gangsters, prostitutes and such, and a year before I get there a big riot breaks out in the coal mines, and the good citizens lynch and shoot a bunch of scabs. This county I've chosen is called Bloody Williamson, and a government lawman has been shot down. Tensions are running high, and folks don't feel much like joyriding in an airplane, least that’s what a mechanic in Eldorado tells me when I land on the county road leading into town and taxi a quarter-mile to his gas station for a fill-up. Still, if there's money for liquor, I figure there's money for other thrills, and the disturbances are nothing I haven’t seen or heard about before in West Virginia, so I fly a few minutes south to Herrin to try to drum up business.

So I'm walking up Park Avenue, through this typical Midwest ville—a bunch of small businesses, Masonic Temple, First Baptist Church, a trolley line and a railroad track intersecting next to the hospital but apparently both unused--when this Studebaker Big-Six Sedan roars up and squeals to a stop next to me. The guy in the passenger seat says his name is Blackie Armes, and asks am I the flyer of that aeroplane parked out in Jensen's field.

"I guess that's the place," I say. "I couldn't find anybody at home to ask permission to be there."

"What's your name, brother?"

"Elmer Wilson," I say. "You know the owner of that field?"

"Of course," Mr. Blackie says. "We know everybody here."

I say, "You interested in going for a ride? See your house from the air?"

"I'm too busy to know what my house looks like from the ground," he says. "Hop in, I'll buy you a beer."

Mr. Blackie takes me to a roadhouse out of town, chatting amiably, though I see the Thompson gun lying on the floorboard under his feet. At the tavern I meet Carl Shelton, leader of the Shelton gang, who Blackie works for. The Shelton gang is at war with the Birger gang over liquor rights and other matters, such as Birger thinking he looks like Tom Mix, and Mr. Shelton says I've come along at a most opportune time. Charlie Birger and his men have shot up a Shelton roadhouse from a homemade tank made from a Lincoln Sedan plated with sheet steel, and the Sheltons can't let that go unheeded.

"What I'd like to hire you to do, Mr. Wilson, is fly over Birger's hideout, the Shady Rest, and drop dynamite bombs on his head."

I laugh. "It's not really my line of work," I say. "I'm just a flier."

"But you were in the war, I suppose?"

"Yes, but...."

"I can understand you don't want to kill the son-of-a-bitch yourself. This isn’t your war. How about we send Blackie up with you? He can drop the bombs. You just concern yourself with flight."

I laugh again. The whiskey makes them funnier than they are, dressed up in their formal overcoats and fedoras, a bunch of hicks playing like Capones. 

Carl Shelton laughs too. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? Ridiculous that they've forced us into this, ridiculous that it'll be the first aerial bombing in the United States of America, after we come out of that god-awful war with no battles on our own soil. And it's really ridiculous what I'm prepared to pay you." His mouth is set tight now, not a grin at all. I sober up.

The deal is struck: a thousand dollars and a brand-new Stutz. I try to trade in the Stutz with Carl Shelton for more cash money, but he says the thousand is all he's got, that the car will be a gift from a neighboring town’s mayor, who owns a Stutz dealership, and whose house happened to get shot up recently by Birger’s men. I arrange to meet the Sheltons out at Jensen field the next afternoon. They'll bring the cash, the car, and an extra man to drive it to the mechanic's station in Eldorado. I plan to drive the Stutz to St. Louis immediately and sell it, since it'll probably be stolen anyway. Mr. Blackie will bring the dynamite.

The next day they get to the field late, and everybody is nervous. Carl Shelton hands me a hundred dollars in an envelope, and before I can say no, he orders two men to fill Jenny's tanks with cans stashed in the trunks of the cars. 

He says, "You'll get the rest of your goddamned money when you accomplish your mission, and if you don't knock out the Shady Rest, you'd better hope Birger and his gang shoot you out of the sky. You hear that too, Blackie?" 

Blackie’s idea of a bomb is several sticks of dynamite, so old they’ve sweated out waxy drops of condensation, wired around a pint Mason jar of what he says is homemade nitroglycerin. He’s carrying three of these bombs in a gunnysack stuffed with rags. Shelton’s brother is there, too, but doesn't say a word. Joe Adams, the baldheaded mayor of West City, sweats mightily and keeps pointing to my new car like it’s really something. The odometer shows only thirty miles, but the clutch pedal is well worn, and the body has a few dings. I'm all ready to run for it, but for Jenny, and for the sawed-off shotgun I see under the elder Shelton's coat.

Blackie and I bump down the field in Jenny, me in back and him in front, and turn around into the wind. We roar over the men below, clear the elms and maples on the property line and head west. I steer with one hand and fasten myself in with my harness that I made out of parachute webbing, and yell at Mr. Blackie to do the same. He ignores me and futzes with the baling wire holding his bombs together, tightening everything up with a pair of pliers out of my toolbox, which I usually keep strapped to the floor of the forward cockpit. We fly along the state roads for fifteen minutes. Blackie looks up occasionally and waves when he wants me to change course.

We circle around over the Shady Rest at top speed, about eighty miles an hour, and Blackie drops his three bombs over the side, one after the other. I can tell by the angle that he's missed, but it doesn’t matter anyway, since one of the bundles breaks up in mid-air, and none of them detonate when they hit the ground. The closest one plops into what looks like a cockfight ring under some floodlights behind the log house. Three men run out of the hideout and look up at us with their mouths open. Then I crank Jenny over hard and head back.

From a mile out I see all the cars right where we left them, the Sheltons and their men standing on the running boards. I climb to three thousand feet and change course.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Blackie yells over the engine.

"I don't go in for lousy business deals, Mr. Blackie," I say. "I'll set you down a couple miles to the east."

"Fuck you, brother," he says and pulls out a .38 pistol and turns around to point it in my face. “You set this crate down right where Carl told you to.”

I start a slow descent and the bank to port, when it comes to me to let Jenny just keep on going over, and she does until we’re flying inverted, heading in the general direction of Shelton and his gang. I always insist passengers wear their harnesses when I give joyrides, and I’m pretty sure I told Blackie Armes to put his on that day, so I forget he isn't buckled into the seat. That’s why I'm nearly as surprised as he is when he drops his pistol and grabs at the gunwales to stay in the aircraft. He's hanging by his ankles, with his feet hooked under two exposed spars in the cockpit, and most of his pudgy mass is already dangling free a couple thousand feet in the air. If I move or try to recover, the jarring will shake him out. With my right hand I reach forward and grab his jacket, more to give me time to think than anything. Then old Blackie looks at me, you see, turning red from hanging upside down and from the strain on his legs and the wind in his face; he already looks like a bloated corpse, like some drowned dog you feel sorry for but it’s too late to do anything, and he bares his teeth at me. With my hand on his collar, Mr. Blackie slides out of the passenger cockpit as slippery as a newborn calf that's already breached. My precious toolbox rains its contents down after him, my only wrenches and screwdrivers and such, including the pliers and wirecutters he’d been using, and then the box itself falls out.

With the sudden loss of all that weight, I over-correct, and Jenny goes into an inverted stall, hesitates at the top, and begins to spiral down. I’m so mad and scared I scream, thinking in a flash about better pilots than myself who were killed in tailspins in the war and later in barnstorming shows. I cut the power and stand hard on the right pedal. For a while, it's earth, sky, and Blackie in the in-between. Earth, sky, Mr. Blackie. He looks up at me through the uncertain air and kicks at the cloud of my tools around him with legs pumping like a frog’s. My metal toolbox appears to be gaining on him. Jenny recovers with only a couple hundred feet to go.

Dead ahead, the Sheltons are racing to intercept me. They had to see their man burn into the dust, and they bounce across the fields in the Studebaker, shooting from the car windows with a Thompson and pistols and the ineffectual shotgun. At first all they manage is to put several holes in the fabric, and they miss the struts, but then one of the bullets nicks a cylinder head, and Jenny lurches as scalding oil splashes across my goggles and exposed face. In total frustration I pull off my right boot and throw it at the car below, but I miss.

I know right then and there it's the end for me and Jenny. The oil isn’t spraying badly, but I smell her rotary engine heating up enough to singe the paint, and she starts to run rough. 

If I land in Illinois, the Sheltons will run me down. I head east, throttle way back, and manage to clear the Ohio River, forty miles away, before Jenny's engine seizes up for good. Just inside Kentucky, as the light fades below, I take a last look around at altitude at the rolling hills and the dark blue summer sky. I think about killing myself right there and then, what with my plane a total loss, my folks and my inheritance gone, hell, even my only tools buried next to the remains of that dumb bastard Blackie Armes. I could just as easily bore in and call the whole damn thing a draw. But instead I try to get my bearings and coast in quiet like a glider on a hard-packed dirt road. As much as I love flying in Jenny, she’s just a machine, and I climb out in rage and relief and torch her fuselage with my old trench lighter. That doped canvas goes up quick. She burns to the bones, and then the bones fall apart, and all that is left is some wires and screws and engine junk.

I limped off then, heading in the general direction of West Virginia, and there was never a more laughable sight. My silk scarf was tattered and smeared with oil and dirt, and my bare foot sank lower than my booted one with every step. I lurched along until I found a town, and in the town I traded a young boy his father's brogans for my aviator jacket, cap and green glass goggles. He was happy with the deal, and so was I. Two counties later, here in Nickelton, I got work as an auto mechanic, then started at the factory, and stayed at it until I retired in 1968. I met Reenie before the second war, and we had a good life together, though she always claimed she was my second wife; Jenny was my first, she said.

I hadn't thought of old Blackie for many years. It's funny I brought him up now, when all you asked me about, young man, was the Great War. You’ll have to take what I say with a grain of salt. I was never a real aviator to begin with, and now I’m stuck with a set of legs that don’t even work right, yet I still feel the need to talk about soaring free like the birds. That's as silly as old Blackie flapping along in his trenchcoat over Little Egypt, pumping his legs, just flying like hell--until he hit the ground.