Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,99
and he lied to his girlfriends and to his little sister, Rosemary—but lying to an official representative of the federal government? That, Harm had assumed, would be difficult.
It wasn’t. It was the same. He stood in front of the man at the recruiting station in Charleston, who gave a quick, bored look at the form Harm had just filled out. “Okay,” the man said. He was wearing a uniform, but he did not seem much like a soldier to Harm; he had a belly on him, for one thing, and Harm was pretty sure that a real solider would not have a belly. “Okay, you’re fine, kid,” the man added. He reached for the knobby black handle of a chunky rectangular stamp. He brought the stamp down upon the top sheet of paper. Thunk. He re-inked it on the moist red pad, and stamped the second page and then the third. Thunk. Thunk.
“Okay,” the man said again.
On that paper, Harmon Arthur Strayer had scribbled this in the blank for AGE: “16 yrs.” Alvie and Vic were sixteen, but Harm was only fifteen. He would not be sixteen for another three months.
Harm’s heart was beating fast and loud, so loud that he was pretty sure other people could hear it. He had been told that lying to the government meant you could go to prison. What if that was true?
I don’t care, Harm thought. To hell with it.
The man stood up. He motioned for Harm to join him in a corner of the room. He measured Harm’s height—six feet, one inch—and then he weighed him: 157 pounds. “It’s a little low, but you’ll fill out,” the man said. He chuckled. “Once the Navy gets hold of you.”
Harm was embarrassed. He had always been on the skinny side, and his chest was a narrow cage of curved bone. After supper that night, when he had told his mother what he’d done, she had cried out, “But you can’t! Look at your legs!” His legs, it was true, were like toothpicks, thin and white. Harm’s father told her to shut up. “He’ll be fine,” he said. Growled, really. “He’ll leave a boy and come back a man.” His father had read that phrase somewhere, or overheard it, and he repeated it several times that night before Harm was able to slip away, finally, to go be with his friends. Harm’s father was very big on the whole becoming-a-man business. His own father—Harm’s Grandpa Sam—had, Harm’s dad had told him, served in World War I. When he came back to Norbitt, nobody recognized him. The gentleness was gone. He was a brute, and people feared him. Harm’s father said that with admiration.
In a few days, Harm, Vic, and Alvie were going to get on a bus and travel to the Naval Station Great Lakes in Lake County, Illinois, for basic training. It was near Chicago. That was all they knew. When they asked for details, that was all they were told: “It’s near Chicago.” As if invoking the name of a big city—a city out in the great world beyond Norbitt, beyond West Virginia—made all other information extraneous.
Well, maybe it did. Because that was why they had decided to join up and go. They wanted to get the hell out of town. Naturally they did not say that—they talked about patriotism and duty, like everybody else did—but there was no future in Norbitt. There was only the past. Teachers in school talked about how old those mountains were, about how many thousands of years had gone into their making. Every time he heard that, Harm thought: Well, yeah. You only have to look at them to know. Old. Old, old, old. Everything’s old around here, and used up. The roads were old. The buildings were old. Jesus. Nothing ever changes here. Especially the people.
Frank Plumley confirmed it: People never changed. That was what he had told them, the single time he talked about what happened along that dusty road just outside Caneytown.
The conversation happened in 1938, about a month and a half after the death of the old lady and the kid. The three boys were sitting on the back porch of the Plumley house, in the same general configuration they had formed on that other day: Vic leaning back against the top step, his legs stretched out in front of him, and Harm and Alvie seated on either side of Vic, like palace guards surrounding the king.