When the Men Were Gone Read online

  Dedication

  With love, for my family and for Tylene’s grandniece Jean and mother, Mary

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Brownwood, Texas: 1910

  My father and I climbed into our horse-and-buggy and began our three-mile trek. We had prepared for a squall moving through town, but we couldn’t have known that the wind and rain would swirl so heavily that it would nearly toss me from the cart. At one point, my father had to catch me by my wrist to keep me on board. Just as he steadied me, the wind about swept away his cowboy hat. He clutched it, continuing to steer both horses with his left hand while holding his hat firmly on his head with his right. I hunkered down beside my father beneath the comfort and protection of my mother’s homemade quilt.

  “You okay under there, Petunia?” he shouted.

  I pulled the cover back a bit, fought the rain from my eyes by squinting up at my father, and assured him all was well. The only thing that bothered me about the weather was that it slowed us down.

  Once we arrived at the high school, he lifted me from the wagon. “Perfect timing,” he said. He squeezed the quilt to rid it of some water and then hung it over the buggy’s wooden side. “Looks like the worst has passed.”

  He was right. The rain had stopped, the wind had subsided, and the Brownwood Lions had yet to kick off.

  I ran to the field’s entrance ahead of my father, a giant of a man in my eyes, though slender and probably not quite six feet tall. He had a distinguished look about him, with his deep-set blue eyes, wavy jet-black hair, and Grover Cleveland mustache, as my mother, with her keen sense of humor, had described it. I’d laugh when I’d hear her remind him, “Time to trim the Grover, George.”

  My father, slowed by a hip injury he had sustained a year earlier, eventually caught up with me. We entered and wove our way up the packed wooden bleachers to our regular spot, right off the press box near the far corner, if you’re looking up from the field. We settled in, and when the Lions dashed out, I jumped to my feet. Soon after, the crowd of what I figured was nearly half the town’s seven thousand residents also stood while the band led us in the school fight song:

  For when those Brownwood Lions come down the field

  They look a hundred per from head to heel . . .

  And then the game began.

  Shorty Wilkerson took the opening handoff. He was Brownwood’s best running back, but on that night, he drove me crazy.

  “Keep your knees high, Shorty!” I shouted. I knew he couldn’t hear me above the cheers, the band, and the shouts of grown men yelling at the refs. But that didn’t stop me. Although I was merely ten years old, my father and I hadn’t missed a Lions football game together since 1907, and I knew right off that Shorty was far too sluggish.

  “Come on, Shorty! Draw in your tackler and either speed up or slow down! Change your pace!”

  I gnawed at my fingernails. I blamed it on Shorty. Then I turned to my father. “If he doesn’t sidestep or accelerate, he’ll never get into the open field.”

  The men around us began laughing.

  “When are you going to call the shots out there, Tylene?” Mr. Periwinkle asked.

  “I’ll go down there right now if they’ll let me,” I said.

  My father turned to the men. “Don’t kid yourselves. She might just take over before the second half.”

  Chapter 1

  1944

  Wednesday

  Hit a bull’s-eye on a Texas map, and you’ve found my home. Brownwood, located in the heart of the Pecan Shell, three hours southwest of Fort Worth. It’s a small town, where people praise Jesus, fix home-cooked meals for suffering neighbors, and play ball with kids in the streets. I’ve lived here since 1909. By then, my big sister, Bessie Lee, had already married and moved to south Texas, so when we arrived in Brownwood, it was just my father, mother, and me. Shortly thereafter, we were joined by Spot, our dalmatian. Well, he wasn’t really a dalmatian; he was a mutt with spots. And he wasn’t really ours. He belonged to the neighbors, but he was more often than not at our house. Brownwood is that kind of town. You share what you have. Sometimes that means sharing a dog. Other times, it means sharing the pain. We shared the pain last week when we got word that our football coach, Burl Young, had been killed in France while laying wire behind enemy lines.

  Burl had been drafted in 1942, a week after his high school graduation, but the army opted not to take him once it discovered that he was the family’s lone provider and the only son of a disabled father who had never recovered from a stroke. Burl stayed home and began coaching to provide for his father, Earl; mother, Mena; and two younger sisters. An assistant for one year, he had taken over the team last season soon after legendary local coach Gene Fox had taken a job in Dallas, his wife’s hometown. But in the two years since he was drafted, Burl’s sisters had proved they could care for themselves and their parents, too. Then one June morning when Burl read a newspaper account describing the heroics of the Normandy Invasion, he told his family he could no longer stay home. He packed a duffel and caught the first train out.

  In his stead, Joseph Francis, a young fellow from a west Texas outpost who had answered a newspaper advertisement, had been hired in July. Two days after the publication of advertisements our principal, Ed Redwine, had placed in several Sunday-edition newspapers throughout central and west Texas, we got a call at the high school from a man who said he had seen the ad and had just arrived by train from a tiny town south of Lubbock. Mr. Redwine was off-campus attending a meeting, so I drove out to the station to pick up Mr. Francis. As I approached, I saw a tall fella, all gussied up, wearing a fedora and a pair of spit-shined shoes. He was carrying a small green suitcase in his left hand, and with his right hand, he was tossing a coin into a cup that belonged to a pair of little girls who looked like sisters—one playing an accordion and the other dancing to its melody. When I got out of my truck to greet him, he introduced himself.

  “Joseph Francis, ma’am,” he said as he tipped his hat. He said he had had a fine trip out and hoped the school had not yet found its man. Mr. Francis told me he had enlisted in the army in the fall of 1939, served for four years, and had come to town to begin his coaching career.

  I brought Mr. Francis to the school, and for the following three hours he waited for Mr. Redwine. Upon arriving, Mr. Redwine hired the twenty-three-year-old Johnny-on-the-spot. I volunteered to show Coach Francis the lay of the land.

  “This is a dream job for me, Miss Tylene,” he said as we walked to the field house. “When I was a little boy, my dad introduced me to football, and I’ve been hooked on it since. Played three years for Post. Some of the best days of my life.”

  I told Coach Francis that I, too, had been taught the game by my father. We then discussed what football meant to a community, and I made it clear to him that while football reigns in Texas, there is no place better to be on a fall Friday night than in the stands of the Brownwood Lions football stadium—unless, of course, you’re on the field.

  “I guess that makes me the luckiest fella in Texas,” he said.

  Then just as unexpectedly as he had
arrived, Coach Francis was gone. Last week, when he got word that his kid brother had been taken as a POW, he reenlisted.

  SO ON THAT first Wednesday of September, there was no coach, no team, and no hope. Still, just as I had for every inaugural practice date in the three years since becoming the school’s assistant principal, I moseyed on down to the field at three thirty. I expected to see nothing more than our crossbars standing tall in each end zone hovering over an empty playing field like parents at the dining table waiting for their children to fill the seats between them. I wanted to sit for a moment. To imagine the boys preparing for the season. To deal with my emotions of fear and uncertainty—without a football season to look forward to, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys may prematurely go off to war.

  When I arrived at the field, I was surprised to find two seniors, Jimmy Palmer and Bobby Ray Brashears, playing catch. As I sat on the bottom bleacher, neither appeared to notice me. Jimmy, the senior quarterback, had been designated captain during team meetings last spring. He was throwing deep to Bobby Ray, a senior flanker who had gained the attention of the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane, a perennial New Year’s Day bowl team. Jimmy and Bobby Ray were in blue jeans rolled up at the ankles, Keds sneakers, and plain white T-shirts, playing on an unlined field of grass, brown and beaten by the sun.

  At one point, when Bobby Ray ran a route, Jimmy overthrew him, and the ball rolled end over end, skidding off the grass and across the dirt track, heading straight for the stands. It stopped directly in front of me. As Bobby Ray started my way, I picked up the football and gripped it tightly in both palms.

  “Stay back!” I yelled. He stopped. I held the ball in my right hand and used my left hand to adjust both sides of my dress, then I kicked off my heels and stepped onto the field in my stocking feet. “Run five yards out and cut right!” I shouted. He appeared confused, but he did as I asked. I pulled the ball back in my right hand, and as I let it fly, my string of pearls slapped up beneath my chin. Bobby Ray caught the spiral in stride.

  Stunned, Bobby Ray looked at me. “Nice pass, Miss Tylene! Where’d you learn to throw like that?”

  “My father,” I said. I adjusted my horn-rimmed glasses.

  Jimmy ran toward us. “Wow, Miss Tylene! Any chance you can teach me to throw like that?” I was flattered for a moment, but mostly I was reminded of Jimmy’s southern charm. I reached down to grab my heels, and at that second, Jimmy, Bobby Ray, and I heard a plane, and our smiles disappeared.

  President Roosevelt had converted the town municipal airport and placed it under control of the Brownwood Army Airfield, and though its purpose was to train and prepare ground combat crews for overseas deployment, it was also used to receive the bodies of the central and west Texas deceased. Until the Brownwood Bulletin reported that week that Coach Young’s body would arrive soon, no one had been certain when to expect his return. Not even his mother, Mena. But on the rare occasions when a plane was spotted making its way to our tiny airfield, folks were pretty sure a body would be aboard, whether it be from Brownwood, or San Angelo, or Big Spring. Knowing that Burl’s body would be next, when Jimmy, Bobby Ray, and I looked up this time, we knew our coach was on his way home.

  The boys and I walked off the field. I then jumped into my truck and headed for Mena’s. I found her on her front porch swing, facing west in the sweltering heat. She wasn’t crying. She was rocking slowly with her eyes locked on the cloudless blue sky. A couple of neighborhood women were leaving as I arrived.

  “Hasn’t said a word,” one told me as we passed on the front yard walkway.

  I was determined to wait my dear friend out, so I sat beside her. Back and forth on that swing, neither of us spoke. Finally, perhaps thirty minutes later, while her eyes were still locked skyward, she whispered.

  “Best we go get him.”

  Mena had never learned to drive. Her husband, Earl, had suffered the stroke five years earlier, and in an instant my dear friend’s husband had gone from someone who could spin a yarn with the best of them to silent and bedridden. Because his face was without expression and he could no longer speak, we could not have known if he was aware that the body of his only son, at last, was home. Earl stayed behind.

  By the time Mena and I arrived at the airfield, nearly a hundred townsfolk had jammed into the hangar. Mena and I weaved our way through the crowd of mourners and stood silently up front as Burl’s body, forever tucked away in a plain wooden box, was carried from the cargo bay. Across the way, I spotted Jimmy and Bobby Ray.

  That night, my husband, John, sat at the kitchen table while I prepared supper. At six feet, two inches tall, he looked uncomfortable and oversized for our wooden kitchen chairs, which he and his auto shop buddy, Walter, had built about five years earlier. John had a slender but muscular build, likely because of all the heavy lifting required at the auto repair shop he purchased just months after high school. As I chopped the vegetables, we talked about Burl, and then the room fell silent for several minutes, my mind wandering in so many directions. Finally, in an effort to lighten the mood, I told John about the spiral I’d thrown to Bobby Ray.

  “I suspect he’d never caught a spiral from a lady,” John said, wiping sweat from his thick, wire-framed glasses. Then he smiled, and I went on to remind him of the first time we had thrown a football together—the first time he caught a spiral from a girl.

  I was a junior in high school, working after class crunching numbers at the rolltop desk on the second floor of his auto shop, when he shouted up, asking if I wanted to take a break to toss a football outside. I agreed and ran down the tight, wooden spiral staircase to meet up with him. We stood about ten feet apart, and John, four years my senior and the most handsome boy I had ever met, flipped it to me. Underhanded.

  John had cupped his hands in front of his gut and said, “Try to get it here.” Instead, I dropped back. I looked left. Looked right. Bam! I smacked him with a pass John compared to a Jack Dempsey gut punch. We laughed at the memory.

  “I looked down at the ball, and then up at you, and I knew,” he said. “I was in love.”

  Thursday

  The next morning, I drove to campus in my black Ford pickup. John and I had bought it off the lot in 1938, and I’ve kept it as clean as my freshly polished silver. Unlike a usual morning, I wasn’t much in the mood for singing that day, but when my favorite song, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” came on the radio John had installed just a few months earlier, I figured it was just what I needed, so I cranked up the volume and joined in with the Andrews Sisters.

  I approached the school and spotted Jimmy in the school parking lot. I gunned it, not so hard that I’d send gravel airborne—didn’t want to hurt anyone or scratch the truck—but enough to get me to a spot in time to catch up. I parked, grabbed my handbag, and dashed. He had just lifted a box from his truck bed and was hightailing it to the field house.

  “Jimmy,” I shouted above the steady hum of machines churning at the nearby cotton plant, the largest in Texas west of Fort Worth.

  He turned back and smiled as he saw me weaving hastily through the gravel in my one-inch pumps. He stopped and waited.

  “Morning, Miss Tylene,” Jimmy said. “Me and Bobby Ray intended to return the footballs after messing with them yesterday. We just forgot.”

  I wasn’t concerned about the footballs. “I saw you and Bobby Ray at the airfield,” I said.

  Jimmy nodded and looked down. We began walking side by side toward the field house when Jimmy broke the silence.

  “I got a letter from Stanley,” he said.

  Stanley, Jimmy’s older brother, had played Brownwood football just three years earlier. He was a small but elusive running back, and the town considered him one of the finest to ever wear the Lions jersey. After high school, Stanley enlisted in the navy. Two months ago, he lost his left leg in the South Pacific. Amputated just above the knee. He was shipped stateside to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, and since then, Jimmy said he and his bro
ther had exchanged letters almost weekly.

  As he spoke, I looked down and saw Jimmy’s letter jacket stuffed among the footballs, placed at the bottom of the box.

  “Going to keep it in my locker,” he said.

  I nodded. “How’s Stanley doing?”

  “He was transferred to a Dallas hospital a couple weeks ago. Might get discharged sometime soon. My folks and I are keeping our fingers crossed.”

  “I will, too.”

  I’d known Jimmy’s folks, Curly and Letta, since they were high school sweethearts. They’d graduated a year behind my husband, John, so they were seniors my freshman year, and like every freshman, I looked up to them in awe. Curly was a quiet guy, an intellectual type who never played sports. He was always tinkering with equipment, saying that someday he was going to invent something big. He was still on that journey. Letta was the outgoing popular girl, and I’d hear other seniors say they thought Curly and Letta were an odd combination. I didn’t see it that way. I thought they were perfect together. Curly proposed to Letta on graduation night, and they’d gone on to have three children—Stanley, Jimmy, and a bright and always smiling grammar schooler, Lucy, a childhood victim of polio who struggled to walk.

  Jimmy and I parted ways. He continued on toward the field house, and as I turned and walked toward the high school, I got to thinking about that letter jacket. Lying in a box.

  I ENTERED THE school to the embracing smell of wooden lockers freshly painted red, the first time they’d been painted since they’d been constructed ten years earlier. I passed the glass trophy case and headed straight for Mr. Redwine’s office. Like so many Brownwood residents, Mr. Redwine had been at the airport hangar to honor the arrival of Burl’s body. He understood the pain. Mr. Redwine and his wife, Angie, had lost a son a year earlier, but not to the war. His name was Tim, although he went by Mit, Tim spelled backward. It was a nickname he’d been given in grammar school, because he always seemed to be on the wrong side of life. Then, at the age of thirty-six, unhappy, unmarried, and unemployed, Mit took his own life while visiting his parents’ home.