Had a Good Time

Stories from American Postcards

Robert Olen Butler

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555846206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"Gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories" inspired by vintage twentieth-century postcards, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author ( Booklist, starred review). For many years, author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century—not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler here creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition. In "Up by Heart, " a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In "The Ironworkers' Hayride, " a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving "Carl and I, " in which a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar "The One in White, " in which a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these short stories are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age. "A wonderful collection."— The Atlantic Monthly

UP BY HEART

Sparta, Tenn.	Miss Maude Knowles
Feb. 15, 1909	Route #1
	Walling, Tenn.

Feb. 14, 1909. Hello Miss Maude how are you standing the times all o.k. I guess please excuse me for not ans sooner. Wish I could see you we are all well except bad colds Hurshel said he had the bible up by heart and was fixing to go to preaching and is now learning to make his a.b.c. said when he got through preaching he wanted Mr. P. for a clown, he was going to start up a show, he said to ask you how it would suit to bring Charlie H. down some Sun. he was coming any how and would bring C.H. with him will close ans soon Beulah & Hurshel

So he’s coming again tonight, the stranger in the white linen suit and with the razor burn on his cheeks, like he prefers keeping a big beard and he’s not used to shaving, and he’s pretty much said who he is, though I knew right enough ‘cause I’ve got the Bible up by heart and I’ve done my preaching and spoke the word as it’s writ and not just the words you pick out to suit you, and he’s done this before, now and then, he come to Moses plenty and he even rassled Jacob in the dirt, which is told in the book of Genesis, chapter 32, and Jacob rassled him to a draw and some folks who won’t hear the real word think it was only an angel rassled Jacob but when Jacob asks his name, he says, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” and instead of saying, he gives Jacob a big blessing, and then Jacob declares, clear as can be, “I have seen God face to face.” Jacob also gets himself a shrunk sinew in the hollow of his thigh from one of the old man’s holds, which is dirty fighting down in our part of Tennessee, like biting a nose or gouging an eye. But that’s one of the things I know about God, from hearing all the words. And from looking around me. This is a fierce neck of the woods, the planet Earth. And God’s a roughhouser, all right. I ain’t afraid to say it. We got to live in the world he’s made for us. Every living thing is eating some other living thing every second of the day. It’s just how it goes. I myself ate old Jeb just last week, who was as personable a rooster as you could find and who’d walk right up to me to say howdy whenever I come near. But times is lean and we had to eat him. Though often I had to hold it against Jeb, for in Proverbs, chapter 27, it says, “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.” In the midst of all the carnage you need to keep your voice down in the morning. That’s the word of God.

Beulah helped me. She is my helpmeet. When I hadn’t got my abc’s, she read the Bible to me over and over, and the words of God were like sticky burrs on the pant leg of my mind. I have walked through his field, and though I stumble on the rocks in his high grass, I am covered with his burrs. Beulah my sweet wife. Who is sleeping now in our bed and my sweet boy Charlie sleeping beside her, for the bad dreams he’s been having. I think about the bad dreams of a boy and I think of my visitor coming tonight and of my pa. I had bad dreams for a long while as a boy from a riddle my pa told me and he wouldn’t tell me the answer of it. “Old Pap coming down the side of the hill. He has my gait, he has my face, the trees fall before him and there’s no place to hide.” What’s that riddle mean? I’d ask my pa, and he’d just laugh low and shake his head, and over the years I been thinking the answer to the riddle is my pa himself coming to whup me, ‘cause we looked alike, him and me, everybody said so. Charlie looks like his ma, which I count as a blessing to me and to him.

I don’t know what God is wanting with me next. He ain’t said real clear yet and I suppose I’ll find that out tonight. I finished putting up the Bible in my head this past winter and then I decided to spread his word like I understood it from the spirit. It moved me one night in February to say to Beulah, “I’ve got it all up now, hon,” and I tap the side of my head with my forefinger.

“Hurshel Hudgens, you’re a right wonder,” she says in reply, closing the Bible and reaching across the table and placing the palm of her hand on my cheek.

“You’re the wonder,” I say, “for putting up with me.”

She just pats me with that hand laying there against my face.

“You know what I got to do now with all these words,” I say.

“You’re going to go out and do like Billy Sunday,” she says.

We had went to see him in a tent in Chattanooga. But I knew there was words Beulah read me from the true and holy scripture of God that even Preacher Billy Sunday wouldn’t want to talk about. For example, Billy hated drink. But Paul said in his letter to Timothy, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.” I stand ready to drink wine every time I am tempted to take water, but Billy wouldn’t, I’d wager. And he slipped on around the word of God in Proverbs where it says real clear that kings and princes shouldn’t drink, but for all the regular folk, you should “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” That’s right there in chapter 31 and I know a bunch of boys in these hills who, in their misery, are more godly by the word of scripture—which you aren’t supposed to subtract even one syllable of—than Billy Sunday is ready to allow for.

“Maybe not like Billy exactly,” I say to Beulah.

“You need to quit at the mine?” she asks, very quiet and helpful, like she wishes to put no stumbling block in my way if God’s word is calling on me. At the time and for a few years before, I was working at the sandstone caves mining saltpeter.

“Work’s irregular now anyway,” I say, and so it was.

“Things happen for a reason like that,” she says.

I put my hand on top of hers, which had recently gone back down to the tabletop.

“What kind of preacher are you fixing to be?” she says.

That was a good question.

I went on to spend a while studying that. You can’t go putting your light under a bushel. God always made a good show of it, with the pillars of fire and the floods. And hanging his own flesh-and-blood son up on a cross was quite an attention-getter,I don’t need to say. Billy Sunday played baseball for a living when he was young and when he’d get to preaching real fierce he’d wind up and pitch his words right at us from the stage, going through the motions of his work. I thought for a time about that, but sweating out sandstone cobbles from the wall of a cave don’t look all that interesting in mime. Though I come to real-ize the prophecy in my work, saltpeter being a pretty holy thing, having within it both the Old Testament and the New, as it makes both gunpowder and a potion to keep your pecker from rising. It tokens both the God of Moses, Joshua, and David, who between them wiped out more nations from the earth—man, woman, and child—than pretty near anyone, and the God of Paul, who would, if he had his druthers, stop all the peckers of a holy world from rising. Both of which, of course, is one God. Like saltpeter.

Well, I tried out a few things for a preacher show.

I went into town and down to the general store where the boys hang around of an afternoon if the mines don’t have any work, and I go in and some are playing checkers and some are sitting and whittling things that might be graven images if you’d ever figure what they’re meant to be, the boys of our town saved from perdition by their poor knife skills. My friend Ernest Porter was hanging around the pickle barrel sampling a gherkin on account and I go over to him and I say, “Ernest I’m fixing to be a preacher how that I’ve got the Bible up by heart and I’m trying to work out the show of it. I’m thinking a Church of Humility is a good way to go, since we’re facing some tough lessons and there’s no use trying to stand up proud to them. So let me try washing your feet.”

Ernest stops right in the middle of a bite into his pickle and he sort of holds it there thinking about what I’ve asked. The checker game has also come to a stop. “You boys too,” I say to the players. “Elmer. George. Come on over and let me wash your feet. This is like Jesus done.” I look at the whittlers, but they’re keeping their eyes hard on the sticks in their hands.

“Listen here, Hurshel,” Ernest says.”I appreciate your wanting to be humble and all if you’re fixing to preach, but my feet are shy boys. They’re not much for other fellas working at them.”

“That’s just why you’re the right man for the job,” I say. “Ain’t we done foolish things together plenty of times?”

This was true. For example, we made up like clowns in a show for the orphan home they started in Sparta. These very feet Ernest was being shy about did a hopping-mad dance in the show and then he went to winding up to hit me, his right arm going like a windmill faster and faster and me standing there, my own fists up like to block his blow, and then all the sudden he kicks me in the shin and the little orphan kids laugh like they’re going to shake off all their buttons. If I could find some words about clowns in the holy scripture, I’d do him and me up both for my preaching. But for now I just say, “Ernest, have another gherkin and sit on down there on that barrel and let me do this.”

Ernest was just finishing off that pickle he’d already started and he sighed and took another and sat down. “Roy,” I say to the groceryman. “I need a bucket of water and a bar of that pumice soap.”

“Wait now,” Ernest says. “Don’t you go rubbing the skin off.”

I say, “This ain’t no job for pretty perfume soap, do you think?”

“You’re going a shade more than humble, ain’t you? No need to go a-scourging.”

“Just leave it all to me,” I say. “I’m trying to work this out.”

So I get down and unlace Ernest’s shoes and take them off and his socks too, which are in bad need of mending. As are poor Ernest’s feet, which are twisted and gnarly like a lost soul and in plenty need of washing. So I grab up the soap and I dip it in the water and I take to rubbing pretty vigorous, ‘cause I’m always one to do a thing right and thorough, and I’m trying to think of a passage from scripture on that virtue and I’m hoping to find something along the lines of “Blessed are they that do a thing right and thorough.” I’m feeling sure there is one. But instead, all I can think of is Moses in the book of Numbers, chapter 31. He was full of wrath at his captains come from the battle where they’d killed every male among the Midianites, who happened also to be descended from Abraham, and who happened to take Moses in and protect him when he was running away from Egypt after killing a man for smiting a Hebrew, and whose priest gave Moses his daughter to be his one and only wife. But Moses was in a serious lather ‘cause his captains had killed all the men in Midian but they kept the women and children alive. They hadn’t done their job right and thorough. So he went ahead and had them kill all the boy children and all the women who weren’t virgins and then he gave all the virgins to the captains and his men. Which wasn’t as thorough as he done with most other of the tribes in his way, but what’s a fella to do when the help don’t get it right the first time? He treated those captains right kindly. Ernest is starting to make an awful racket. Not in words exactly. To his credit, once in for this job, he isn’t trying to back out. He’s just wailing a little in pain. But like Moses with his captains and the virgins of Midian, I figure I can go a little easy on his feet. Besides, I’m getting kind of shaky, thinking, as I have been, about one of the tougher lessons of the holy word.

“Why don’t you leave him some skin left,” says Roy who’s standing watching all this.

I look up at him. Now, Roy has a bald head, not a hair on it. I’m a little touchy about my calling from the Lord and consequently not ready to take casual criticism, so I’m about to make a comment on the scant leavings at the top of his skull. But scripture come to me once again. I think of God’s beloved prophet Elisha who’s walking along the road right after healing Jericho’s water supply and, as it says in Second Kings, chapter two, “there came forth little children out of the city and mocked him and said unto him, ‘Go up, thou bald head. Go up, thou bald head.’ And he turned back and looked on them and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.”

And the mood I was looking for with this here foot washing has sort of disappeared. Ernest is still whimpering. Old Baldy—I keep that nickname to myself—is watching with a critical eye. I’m not even going to consult the checker players and the whittlers. I just put down the pumice soap and look Ernest in his watery eyes. “You’re a good and true friend,” I say to him.

“That I am,” he says.

So I give Ernest’s feet back over to him and I go on out of the general store and head back to home, and I’m still working on what sort of preacher to be as I come down a little gully on the dirt track to our place, and up ahead a bad-boy rattler is crossing from one side to the other, not in any real hurry but slithering along kind of meditating about snake things, maybe. Now, by rights, though it’s one of those mild days that can come once and again to Tennessee of a February, he should be in a cave somewhere waiting out the winter. I take it the Lord has sent him forth just for me, ‘cause I’m put in mind of another kind of show: Jesus himself says of his preachers in the book of Mark, “They shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” The rattler has already heard me coming—maybe he’s even heard me thinking—and he’s stopped in the middle of the path and has curled up to consider the notion with me.

So I come near and he lifts his head and sticks out his tongue and takes to shaking his tail something fierce. But I don’t back off. I come up even closer, till I’m right inside his striking range, and he’s rearing back in amazement like he can’t believe I’m doing this, and then I crouch down to his level and look the serpent straight into his beady little eyes. He’s making so much noise I expect his rattles are fixing to fall right off.

“What’s it to be?” I say to him.

He flicks his tongue and sways his head back and forth.

“You gonna let me take you up?” I say.

He’s not acting like it. But I think maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. If the serpents you take up just roll over like pups, it don’t make a show of any kind. The folks might not think it’s the Lord’s doing but that you found you a sick snake. I’m fixing to put my hand out to grab this here rattler by the throat, to the glory of God.

And then I think what kind of world it is that’s been created all around us. Roy the groceryman lost his only grandson to a rattler bite just last fall. When he’s not killing children, the snake’s eating lizards what’s eating bugs what’s eating other bugs and them snakes will get eat up by a weasel and that weasel will get tore up by a coyote who’s going to end up a wolfs meal who’s a good dinner for a bear and everybody’s young ones are apt to die by somebody else’s tooth or claw, the wolf taking the baby bears in return, and that snake is also going to end up a pair of good boots for some old boy. Not to mention the stars exploding out there in space, which Beulah has read to me from a newspaper, and it don’t surprise me one bit. So I think of the gospel of Matthew in the fou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Hotel Touraine
• Mother in the Trenches
• The Ironworkers’ Hayride
• Carl and I
• This Is Earl Sandt
• The One in White
• No Chord of Music
• Christmas 1910
• Hiram the Desperado
• I Got Married to Milk Can
• The Grotto
• Up by Heart
• Uncle Andrew
• Twins
• Sunday