THE BOMB By: Ruthie (Haynes) Carter ==================================================================== © Ruthie (Haynes) Carter ==================================================================== It's not often given to us to know the line of demarcation between the different eras in a century but I know the exact time that two of the 20th century eras changed for me. We hear about the Roaring Twenties, the Depression Thirties, the Wartime Forties, the Bomb Scare/Hide Under the Desk Fifties, the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties, and so forth. But I know my border line. It was on a hot July day in 1949 in the swampeast section of Missouri. The first six years of my life was spent in the quiet little backwater town of Qulin and it was in this same dusty diminutive hamlet that this point of separation arrived in my world of childhood innocence. Go with me back to Qulin in July of 1949. No locks on the doors. Hot dusty gravel streets. Cypress log sidewalks when there was a sidewalk. Cardboard signs in the windows for the iceman. Heat oozing from every pore of the little ramshackle houses along the tracks. Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" blaring from every radio. Young'uns out running, screaming, shouting, scuffing up dust clouds with their bare feet, soles hardened from a summer of running on the gravel. There were only three things in Qulin worth doing then, because they were the only three things forbidden us younglings by our parents. One was to play in the sawdust pile from the old sawmill up near Grandma and Grandpa Scott's house on the north end of town. You see, the big kids would dig tunnels under the sawdust and make underground caves. We little ones didn't know where the tunnels were. Our parents told us that we could run over the top of a tunnel and cave it in and smother to death! The delicious spurt of fear when a grimy foot went through the crust of the rotten sawdust was incomparable. The second thing was to play in the old graveyard in the north end of town; hiding in the dim coolness of the tangled maze of vines and trees, getting gloriously covered with chiggers and envisioning ghosts behind every gravestone. Ah, the chill of it all. The third thing was to play in the abandoned railroad depot near the graveyard. To us small ones, the depot was a huge cavernous delight where Indian yells resonated magnificently. This was the only place in town to set off firecrackers that would do full justice to the wonderful cacophony assaulting young eardrums. The depot was where we all were on this dusty sweltering July morning. The sky was a glorious deep blue with big white puffy clouds drifting in it. Every once in a while we would look up at a buzzing sound and wave at the crop duster overhead. We were an inseparable bunch of little ragamuffins that summer, we five cousins. Our mothers were sisters and we all lived within 3 blocks of each other. There were my two younger brothers, Butch and Mike; June Sue (oh, how she hated that name) Whittington, Aunt Kat's daughter, and Delmar Crane, Aunt Jullean's son. Brenda, Delmar's little sister, was sometimes with us, but not often. Brenda was always a lady even as a child and rolling among the tombstones with the chiggers and emitting Indian yells didn't much appeal to her. Then there was me. I'm Ruthie and the second oldest, my mama's pride and joy. She was so glad to get a baby girl when I was born. Little did she know she just got a boy dressed in girl's skin! June Sue and I were young hoydens. Anything the boys could do, we could do better - or know the reason why! This particular day we were doing firecrackers in the old depot. Delmar had reached the lofty age of eight years and was the oldest by two years, so we all worshipped him and thought he knew everything in the world there was to know. He taught us to climb the big tree in the graveyard and how to walk safely on the rotten sawdust without sinking in and smothering. Now he was teaching us how to get the most fun out of firecrackers. You could stick those Black Cats in the cracks in the masonry and they would explode with a most satisfactory shower of concrete to get in your eyes. You could put them under wood chips and make bunches of splinters, which would eventually end up in your feet. Or, most wonderful of all, you could put them under cans, and, if you got them placed just so, the can would go straight up for what seemed like a hundred feet and the most wonderful ka-BLAM would deafen you. We had all satisfactorily gotten our cans to levitate and Delmar was showing off by holding the firecrackers in his hand, lighting them, and then throwing them up toward the ceiling. Oh, the envy we young ones felt when our hero did this! After magnanimously accepting our adulation, he grandly gave in to our pleas to teach us this wonderful trick. We progressed rapidly. A couple of us even got to where we would actually get our firecrackers and barn burners together and cause a spark before the wild butterflies in our tummies translated into excitement in our hands and the firecrackers would go indiscriminately flying. Then it happened, the thing that sets this day apart from all the rest for me and marks the division from the peaceful world of childhood our parents knew and the ominous crazy world our children know. Delmar had thrown a firecracker way up high and we were all watching for the explosion when a silvery glint pierced the deep blue of the sky. We all watched to see the crop duster again. But this coruscating flash wasn't the crop duster, it was something else - something that floated gently down out of the sky over the rooftops, something that was shaped like an enormous silver football - something we had never seen the like of before in our tranquil little village. We stood there open-mouthed with astonishment that began to be tinged with fear. We slowly began to group around Delmar, instinctively knowing that if anyone could handle this, our Delmar could. My mouth was dry and my pulse was pounding. My utter faith in our hero was all that kept me from trying to crawl under a pebble out of sheer fear of this enormous silver invader becoming increasingly more huge and dominating our sky .You could have heard a butterfly in its flight, we were so quiet. Then Delmar shouted, "It's a bomb. Run!" And we ran! Brenda and Delmar ran left to their house a block away and June Sue, Butch, Mike, and I all ran the other way the block to Sue's house where Aunt Kat was babysitting us. We were all screeching like we were being chased by a dozen axe murderers. Aunt Kat had polio as a young child. Her hands turned under themselves and she walked with a limp on one side of her right foot. She could barely take care of herself and found it nearly impossible to move fast. But she managed to meet four hysterical kids in the yard and hold all four of us at once. Everyone was yelling and crying and screaming so that the only words she could make out was "Bomb! Bomb!" Finally someone got her to look up to see the bomb. She was dumb-founded! She sat down right in the middle of the dooryard, put us all four in her lap and laughed so hard she couldn't breath. Finally, after a million years of this silver death floating over us and our Aunt laughing hysterically under us, she managed to gasp out that this wasn't a bomb. I started breathing again then. After awhile, when her gales of laughter had quieted down into breezes of little chuckles and titters, Aunt Kat explained to us that this quiet silver death floating over our heads was what was called a blimp, and this one was made by Goodyear, the people who made tires right here in America, and that no Germans or Japs were going to carry us off to P. O. W. camps. Then she took us all inside and made her cure-all for us, graham crackers with powdered sugar icing! Aunt Kat believed there was nothing in childhood that graham crackers with powdered sugar icing couldn't cure, and I think she was right most of the time. I know it made me feel better that day. A lot of problems in my life have been cured by graham crackers with powdered sugar icing. But like the snake in the Garden of Eden, something sinister crept into childhood that day my world changed and sent the innocence away. That memory has stayed with me and that fear. I never went back to that total naiveté I had before the bomb floated over Qulin that hot dusty July day. Do any of us retain that purity of heart after the snake, whatever form of knowledge he takes, has crept into the garden of childhood?