Checkers on the Hill, page 1
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
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Dedicated to all who choose that fork in the road.
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The dialogue of some of the characters accurately reflects the conflicting beliefs and social norms of the story’s setting and may be disturbing.
Chapter 1
Hillside Farm 1954
“Did you get enough this time?” I asked my older brother as he walked toward me with handfuls of discarded bottle caps.
“Yeah, but I have to straighten ’em.” Karl put a bent cap on the top of a stump we used for splitting wood and killing the chickens when we had to. Then he took a rounded stick that fit exactly right inside the crimped edges and hit the end of it with the hammer. “There, fixed it,” he said and, satisfied, he held it out on his hand. The cap looked good as new.
We needed those caps for checkers. Karl’s job had been to collect all the Rolling Rock beer caps Dad tossed away in the house, around the yard, and in the barn as he drank his favorite beverage. On balmy days like this, when the air hung heavy and humid and there was no hint whatsoever of a summer breeze, Dad popped a lot of those caps.
Karl was six years older than me. There were other siblings with whom he could play checkers. Most of them were a lot smarter than me and would have given him competition in the game. We all got along well most of the time, but I think he liked that, being older and smarter, he could easily beat me at any game, especially checkers.
We needed a checkerboard, so I had studied the one at school our teacher let us take out at recess time. There were sixty-four squares total. I took measurements of the outside of the board and jotted down the size of the squares. Mom had some old white muslin she let me have, and I used my wooden ruler to carefully mark out all the squares properly. Then I drew lines like a big tic-tac-toe game and colored in every other box with my black Crayola, used so much it got soft and bent in my hand.
Karl got a small paint brush and painted twelve of the metal beer caps with some red barn paint leftover from painting the outhouse earlier in the summer. That old outhouse sure did need fixing up. It was getting shabby looking, and even the leaves of vines sticking inside through the cracks between the aged gray boards did not improve its appearance. The other twelve caps left had the words Rolling Rock written in silver across the blue top. We set up our game on the shady side porch of the house. It was screened from the annoying, buzzing insects and was out of the hot summer sun. The red barn paint dried quickly, and soon we were ready to play. Karl went over the rules of the game.
“Now put your checkers on the black squares closest to you, not on the white ones,” he said. “You should have three rows of them.”
“I know. I know how to do this,” I told him. I had played the game in school, but he insisted on going over all the rules as if he was the master and only authority on how to play. He put his Rolling Rocks on the three rows nearest him and kept telling me what to do. “Now, you can only move corner to corner on an empty black square. You can’t move to a white square, and you can’t jump over a white square, remember that.” He repeated, “It’s a rule, you can’t move to a white square, and you can’t jump over a white square, you got that?”
“Yup,” I answered, nodding my head and getting impatient. “Now, can we play?”
“Well, there’s more. I’ll tell you about kings when we get that far.”
“Can I go first?” I asked with my hand already hovering over my red cap.
“No, Rolling Rock always goes first.” He quickly grabbed a checker and moved it one square to the right. “Now, you can go.”
I moved my red checker diagonally to a black square. We continued in that manner, one checker at a time, getting closer to each other with every move. Soon our checkers were almost at the center of the board.
Suddenly he barked, “Look at where your checker is!” I hadn’t noticed anything wrong. “Your checker isn’t sitting all the way on the black square. Look at it,” he said, pointing to my red cap. “It’s halfway on the white and halfway on the black. It can’t be that way. It has to be ALL the way on the black. Get it back into its place where it belongs.”
I quickly adjusted my checker, wanting to make my brother happy and play the game according to the rules. Now, my checker was resting correctly within the boundaries of its black square. We continued playing. He captured some of my checkers and I got a few of his. I was getting close to jumping another of his Rolling Rocks when he yelled at me again.
“You did the same thing. Your checker is half on the black and half on the white. I don’t know where it’s supposed to be. Are you trying to cheat?” he asked me, leaning in and pushing his face close to mine.
“No, I’m not trying to cheat, and stop hollering at me!” I told him. “You don’t know everything!” Then, looking at the board, I saw another move, used the chance, and jumped his Rolling Rock. Satisfied, I straightened my back, sat up tall, and grinned ear to ear at him. He scowled back at me. Then he saw a move, jumped over one of my red checkers, and glared right back, wrinkling his nose.
Soon we reached the time to king a playing piece, and Karl went over the rules. “A king can move in any direction,” he said. “He can move left, right, forward, or back.” Perhaps it was my strong ability to visualize the game that gave me an advantage. Soon, I was capturing more of his Rolling Rocks than he was getting my reds. I was going to win, and my older brother knew that. Suddenly, he shouted, “You did it again, you little turd! Look at your red checker. It’s almost all on the white square! I’ll repeat. It-has-to-stay-all-the-way-on-the-black-it-can’t-be-on-the-white,” he said very slowly. “What are you, dumb or what? I told you too many times already what the rules are. I quit!” With that, he swept his arm across the checkerboard, scattering checkers everywhere, and stormed off, mumbling, “You little turd” again.
After he left, I picked up all the caps and bundled them inside the cloth checkerboard I was so proud of making. We would play checkers another day. My brother did not stay angry long and there would be another chance to beat him.
When Karl was seventeen, right after our parents divorced, he joined the navy, then later married and left New York State to live near the San Diego naval base, where he had been stationed during his service. He raised his family there. Time passed, and we lost touch with each other.
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On Another Hill 1967
“Mom . . . Mom . . . it’s your turn!” my daughter, Grace, said while shaking my arm. It brought me out of my mental wandering and back to the game of checkers I was now playing with her.
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I was thinking of a time I played checkers with my brother, Karl. I’m having trouble concentrating today. Did you beat me yet?”
“No, not yet, but I’m going to!” she said, grinning confidently from ear to ear.
“I bet you will,” I told her. Then, realizing my mind was too distracted to focus, I asked, “Can we please finish this game later? We’ll leave everything right here in place. Why don’t you watch the Mickey Mouse Club while Daddy rests?”
“Okay, if you promise we can finish the game after supper,” she told me and left the table to watch the show already playing.
Samuel sat slumped in a chair, half-awake. He was tired from a busy day at work.
I touched his shoulder. “Hon, will you keep an eye on things while I take a walk?”
He gave me a sleepy nod. “Sure, I can do that.”
“You really have to stay awake now . . . okay?” I told him.
“I will, don’t worry,” he answered.
I left to go outside. The jingle for the children’s television show was playing in my head: “Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y--M-O-U-S-E . . . Hey There, Hi There, Ho There. You’re as welcome as can be . . .” Not wanting to keep repeating that jingle, I shook my head, trying to focus. It was late afternoon, and I needed to take a walk and think clearly. I headed toward the big field on our hillside just past the boundary where our mowed lawn gave way to wild field. We had built our home on seven acres there, and our house was surrounded by old, overgrown pastures and long hedgerows.
As I walked, the breeze that gently moved my hair carried the scent of wild ripe strawberries and timothy hay ready to cut and bale. It was a late June afternoon, and the sun was warm on my face. I felt like twirling around and singing as Julie Andrews had done in The Sound of Music. But I had too much on my mind for singing or dancing. Decisions were weighing heavy on my shoulders.
This land was my country world, the fields, the woods, the tall, rounded green hills surrounding me, with a ceiling of clear cerulean sky above. My home looked much smaller now that I had walked far away from it into the field. I looked toward Lester’s hill across the valley. There, high on the top, between an opening in the trees, I could see the small silhouette of his two-story farmhouse with its peeling white paint, his big, old gray barn, and a cluster of haphazard outbuildings. I heard the sound of his small herd of sheep baaing to each other and wondered if Lucy was one that I now heard calling.
We had talked Lester into selling us a pregnant ewe we named Lucy. I wanted to start my own flock, but after relocating her, Lucy wasn’t happy away from her home and everything familiar. She was homesick, very homesick. Soon after we got her, she broke through our barbed wire fence, ran down the steep hill, crossed the winding creek at the bottom of the
Looking around, I thought it would be tough for me to leave my familiar surroundings too. I gazed at the hedgerows of trees lining the borders of our fields. Gray stone walls, built decades ago, had divided those fields into areas for crops and pastures. Rabbits and other small animals were secreted away in fur-lined nests among those rocks, bushes, and trees, and raised their litters of young. I thought of the robins I looked forward to returning each March. They often came back before the snow fell for the last time, and we would see them hopping around in a late blizzard. Bluebirds, sparrows, and orioles built their nests in the trees in those hedgerows as well. Other animals, like toads and frogs, salamanders, chipmunks, and anything looking for shelter lived there too. During springtime, clouds of white blossoms covered the Juneberrys like a clean tablecloth, and pink blooms dressed the wild scrub apples the color of a blushing bride. The large open fields were no longer being worked. However, you could still see divisions where sunny hayfields had produced bales, fertile plowed earth had yielded corn, and cows had pastured and laid down to chew their cud in the grass.
I slowly walked out further into the field, lost in thought, as I distanced myself further and further from my home. Soft feathery seed heads of timothy grass tickled my hand as I ran it over their fuzzy, seeded tops. Every so often, I would see the bubble-like home of a small spittlebug glistening on the stem of the tall green grass. An orange and black butterfly skipped from yellow buttercup to yellow buttercup near me, and I watched its journey as it lit briefly to taste the flower’s sweetness, then travel onward. There were no close neighbors near us on this hill. Only the tall, two-story, slate gray farmhouse further down the road that belonged to my mother-in-law. I looked wistfully that way and wished it had been different.
I had met Samuel one summer while visiting my married older sister. Although Samuel and I lived almost sixty miles apart and a river separated us, we became best friends and sweethearts early in high school after that meeting. We married the year I was a school senior, and not long after that we started a family. We had built our home on a section of land parceled off from the family farm. In the beginning, living there seemed like such a good idea. Samuel had gotten the land in a settlement when he was eighteen. His father had left his family to live with another woman and he abandoned the dairy farm, his two children, and Samuel’s mother. Samuel was deeded half the farm by his guilty father in the divorce agreement. His father deserved to feel guilty because he was heaping so much onto Samuel’s young shoulders. From that time on, Samuel had to do all the heavy work of the farm by himself with just a little help from the others.
After his father left, Samuel held down a part-time job to make ends meet, worked the farm, and at the same time tried to console his distraught mother. By that time, his father had moved several states away. Samuel’s father did not help him or give advice or even stay in touch. It was like he had just been a few chapters in Samuel’s life and now he had closed that book and was moving on to author another story and end the one he had been living. Just a couple of years later, Samuel’s mother said, “Samuel, I need to get your name off the deed as being co-owner of the farm. You aren’t twenty-one yet and I want to take out a mortgage. The bank does not like you being underaged with your name on the deed.” She promised half the farm would always be there when he wanted it. He trusted in his mother’s word and signed all his rights back to her and only kept the seven acres for himself. That was where we had built our home. It was right down the road from that tall, old gray farmhouse where his mother still lived.
Some years passed and the dairy was gone. Samuel’s mother sold off all the cows and farm machinery one day. Samuel now worked full time as a mechanic for a trucking company, and we had two young children, Grace and Lucas. Recently we had a feeling of panic when we got the shocking news that the shop where Samuel worked was cutting everyone’s hours and even might be closing in the near future. A gas shortage was going on all over the United States. Television broadcasts showed angry, impatient drivers waiting in long lines at stations everywhere to get the scarce, high-priced gas. The economy screeched to an abrupt halt, and many businesses were closing. The recession hit the long and short-haul truckers harder than most groups. Besides the inflated cost and scarcity of diesel, truckers had little merchandise or supplies to move. Production of goods had fallen way off too. When the truckers were not making money hauling on the road, their trucks didn’t need work done on them. Repair shops, such as the one Samuel worked at, were now going bankrupt and closing their doors for good.
Unemployment was way up, especially in the rural area where we lived. New homes were not being built, new cars were not selling, and people were extremely cautious about purchasing anything that was not absolutely necessary. There was an atmosphere of fear everywhere. Everyone wondered if we were going to have another depression like the one in 1929. Samuel and I also wondered how we could survive financially if his shop did close. It was hard to get a decent job in our rural area, and work that offered a real chance for advancement and benefits was even scarcer. Could he get another job right away if that happened? We didn’t think so. How could we survive without him working? We had never needed welfare and the thought of requiring help like that was frightening to us.
There was the option of Samuel joining the army. The Vietnam War was going on overseas. Even though we were winning the war, there was always a push for more men to join the fighting. More than 400,000 U.S. military men and women were fighting in that faraway jungle. If he signed up, he would have a secure job with regular pay and benefits. Samuel was young and healthy enough to be a soldier. However, neither of us wanted him to make the sacrifice of being away from his children. When his father left without warning, it struck Samuel awfully hard. My father had left my mother too. We did not want our children to be raised without a dad around for any reason. And the possibility of Samuel losing his life in combat was a risk we certainly did not want him to take. If there was a critical need for men to go to war, he probably would do that, but that was not the case right now. Many young men and women were gladly serving. I didn’t know how military wives could spend their days raising their children alone. Military men and women gave up so much to serve, plus they put their lives in danger for all of us. Their spouses and children served our country too. I did not think I had the courage to sacrifice as they did.
Trying to make life-altering decisions about what we should do in the looming future was heaping more stress onto our already overburdened lives. Word came that the parent company approved of his work record and skills so much, they were offering him a transfer to a large truck shop in Hyattsville, Maryland. They asked Samuel if wanted to take that position and transfer there if the shop had to close down.
The thought of moving several states away had never crossed our minds. Now, it was an option we needed to consider. He was one of the few lucky ones in his shop offered a transfer. There wasn’t much chance of him finding other work near our home, so it was a blessing in more ways than one that we could seriously think of moving away.
We had both been raised in small, country towns. We had gone to school with the same neighbors year after year and had never even spent time visiting a big city. If we moved, we would experience a different side of life, a side that sounded more exciting than living on a dirt road where little change happened day to day. If Lester’s favorite cow had twin calves, it was big news around here. Even the town’s snowplow accidentally knocking over the math teacher’s mailbox was news in our small local newspaper.
A move like that would mean a more challenging job for Samuel plus the perk of a higher hourly wage. There would be more money to pay bills and get things for our children. We might even be able to put money away for the future. That would be a change. Samuel would also receive additional training to improve his mechanical skills. He would become a more valuable employee that a company would want to keep. Things were only getting worse, staying on this hill. It was an offer we really needed to consider.
