III-A: The Ready-Made Family

Pete: They called me Pete. William Edward Hawthorne on the papers, but Pete every place that mattered — a name I got as a boy for following my great-grandfather Peter around the farm till it stuck for life. I was born in nineteen-ten and I'll be gone by fifty-nine, but there's a day in the middle of that I want to tell you about. It's a small day. It's a man signing a piece of government paper. But sometimes the whole shape of a family is decided on a small day, and this was one of mine. Pete: It was the sixteenth of October, nineteen-forty. The place was Patmos — a little spot in Hempstead County, Arkansas, the kind of place that's mostly a name on a church and a store. I went in like every other able man in the country was going in that autumn, and I registered for the draft. There was a war on the far side of the world and everybody could feel it coming for us, the way you feel weather before you see it. Pete: Now a younger me, a me without anybody depending on him, might've wanted to go. Men did. There's a pull in it — to stand up, to be counted, to do the thing your country asks. But by the autumn of nineteen-forty I was not a man who belonged only to himself anymore. And so when they sorted us into our classifications, they stamped mine III-A. A deferment. Two reasons for it, and both of them were the same reason really: I was a farmer, and I had a family that depended on me. Pete: But here's what that little code, III-A, doesn't tell you. It doesn't tell you what kind of family. Pete: I had married a widow. Pete: Her name was Maggie — Mary Maggie Lee Winbury before life put two other names on her. Her first husband, a good young man named Clayton, had died back in 'thirty-six, sudden and cruel, and left her with four children and a Depression for company. And I had a little girl of my own, Vera Kaye, and no wife to help me raise her. So you see what the arithmetic was. Four that were Clayton's. One that was mine. And me, a quiet farmer in Arkansas, standing at the edge of that arithmetic deciding whether it added up to a family or just to a lot of mouths. Pete: I decided it added up to a family. I decided it the way you decide to put a crop in — not because you're sure of the weather, but because that's what the land is for, and that's what the season is, and a man does the work in front of him. I took Maggie, and I took her four, and I put my Kaye in among them, and I did not — the record can't prove this, but every child who grew up under my roof will swear to it — I did not ever let one of those four feel like a child I had only agreed to. They were mine the day I signed on. More would come, Maggie's and mine together, and I loved the whole lot the same, which is to say completely, which is to say the only way I knew how. Pete: So when the government looked at me in nineteen-forty and saw a farmer with dependents and stamped me III-A and sent me home to my fields — they thought they were making a small bookkeeping decision about manpower. What they were really doing was letting a ready-made family stay whole. Some men served their country on a beach a world away. I served mine in a chicken yard in Hempstead County, raising up five, then six, then more children, four of whom had already buried one father before they were old enough to know what it meant. Pete: I'm not saying it was the harder duty. It wasn't. Those men on the beaches — God keep them. I'm only saying it was mine, and I'm not ashamed of it, and I'd stamp my own papers III-A again every morning of my life if it meant Maggie's children got a daddy and my Kaye got a mama and all of them got each other. Pete: They called me Pete. I was a first-born son of a first-born son, soft-spoken like all my people, and the biggest thing I ever did I did by staying home. Remember that, when your turn comes and the loud duty and the quiet duty are both pulling at you. Sometimes the whole of a family hangs on a man being willing to be counted for the small day, and the field, and the children already at the table.