''The old black hen, which was frequently seen wandering in front of the courthouse and leisurely crossing the main street of Bakersville, is dead. She was run over by a streamlined '41 model car and so thoroughly squashed that there was nothing left but a handful of black feathers.
"She belonged to another era when a self-respecting and well-behaved chicken could stroll along the main street of any rural town and never come to harm. But now the old black hen and the times she represented are gone, with nothing to mark their passing but a few feathers blown away by the breeze."
So read a bold-faced, boxed, front page story in the August 7, 1941, edition of the Tri-County News. I learned of the hen's demise last winter, while researching the history of mica mining in the Toe River Valley in Western North Carolina, where I live. A woman had loaned me a complete set of the News from 1941-47, when the mica vein running through the weekly paper was rich indeed. Importation of the strategic mineral from India had been interrupted by the war, prompting a resurgence of local mica mining. Mica was big news—and a major source of income—in the Toe Valley during the war years.
Mica stories notwithstanding, nuggets like "Progress Overtakes the Old Black Hen" and other rich deposits—stories about construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway through the area, a fire sweeping through Spruce Pine's business district, plane crashes and blizzards—continually threatened to divert me. Mitchell County, one of the three counties the News served, has been my home for 20 years. The old newspapers illuminated its past like a flashlight beamed into the recesses of one of its abandoned mines.
Prospecting those papers was to produce more than mica—or diversions—I was soon to discover. As I dug my way through 1942, I became aware of an increasing preponderance of stories like one in the September 10 issue, "Mrs. J.P. Martin Has Had Six Sons in Two Wars: Three Now Serving." In 1943, I started noticing the black stars. That was the way the Tri-County News highlighted stories of men killed in service to their country. Not all died in battle. More than one succumbed in stateside accidents. But as 1943 bled into the horrifying year of 1944, more and more often the stars appeared above stories of lives lost in France, Italy and the Pacific.
The paper's editors weren't working from an official list; they had to rely on family members. A boxed, bold-faced story asked anyone with service news to call, write or bring it in. Front pages weren't laid out then the way they are now, with two or three big stories and a couple of shorter ones. Some of those old papers had 15-20 stories that began on page one. All the stories with the stars were there; most of them were nearly as brief as the accounts of soldiers wounded or missing in action.
By the summer of 1944, hardly a week passed without at least one front-page star. Often there were two or three. Occasionally four. Frequently the black stars appeared over follow-ups of stories from a few weeks or months earlier, when their subjects had been reported missing. The paper ran photographs of the young, unlined faces of soldiers like Cpl. Ray Glass and S/Sgt. Oval Willis, who wouldn't be coming home. Sometimes the photos ran with the death announcements, sometimes a couple of weeks later. Double stars appeared above a photo of Pvt. Jack Burleson and Pvt. Henry Burleson, standing side by side in uniform. Both died in Italy—Jack in February, Henry in June.
August, 1944, when the Burleson brothers' picture ran, was the worst month of all. There were two stars in the August 3 edition; three on August 10; two on the 24th; three more on August 31. The stories with the stars were surrounded by others—of soldiers wounded, taken prisoner, others—of soldiers wounded, taken prisoner, missing. Still others told of medals awarded (including one about a Purple Heart presented to the four-year-old son of a dead soldier), of soldiers home on leave, of wounded men recovering and preparing to return to the front.
I found myself grieving for young men who'd died before they'd barely begun life, for families from whom a child had been untimely ripped. My growing interest in the war surprised me. I'd never given World War II much thought, nor understood others' fascination with it. I'd been born in its last year and had no first-hand memory of its terrible cost. The numbers it involved—more than a million U.S. casualties, including nearly 300,000 battle deaths; the extermination of 6 million Jews—were so huge as to be mind-numbing, incomprehensible.
Seeing the war through these old yellowed newspapers—working my way through the weeks and months and years it held sway over this little mountain county I'd come to love and call home—was something altogether different. Here was a picture of Albert Canipe in his sailor uniform. I'd known Albert well during the years he was a county commissioner and I a newspaper reporter. He was a man who loved spinning a good yarn; until his death a couple of years ago, at the age of 77, he'd told me plenty of them. He regaled me with tales of his youth, and with more than one war story. I'd always envisioned him, even in those stories, as the elderly man he'd become. Yet here was the young fellow he'd been talking about.
Albert had been one of the lucky ones, a participant in five invasions—North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Southern France and Okinawa—who came through the war without a scratch. He returned home, ran a service station with his brother, was elected to many terms as alderman and then as mayor of Spruce Pine, became a state senator, a Democratic county commissioner in a solidly Republican county. What might these others have become, the subjects of these stark, minimalist accounts, these privates and sergeants and lieutenants whose names appeared below black stars?
I once attended a writing seminar in which the instructor described what must happen in a short story—something of such significance that the main character cannot return to the place he was when the story began, because he is no longer the same person he was at the beginning of the story. I believe that that is what happened to me reading those newspapers from 1944, the year before my birth. I can even pinpoint the turning point, the moment at which my probing flashlight, seeking mica history, exploded like a grenade and became a floodlight illuminating a world.
It occurred as I read a story in the September 7, 1944, issue, headed "Pvt. McKinney Died in France July 9." Below the headline was the usual black star; below that a photo of a young man in uniform, one hand on his hip, the other on the hood of a jeep. The story began the way most of them did, with the report received by Claude McKinney's mother of the death of her son. It had been her second loss of the summer. Her husband had died June 17, of injuries sustained in a fall from a cherry tree.
The story said Claude McKinney had volunteered for the service in January, 1941, and was one of the earliest inductees to leave the country.
After two years stateside, he'd been sent overseas in January, 1944. There are no details about his death, not even the battle it occurred in, or the town. The list of surviving brothers and sisters is a long one: three siblings at home, and six others who'd married and moved off. But this story ends the way most of the others do not, with Pvt. McKinney's last letter home. It is a condolence letter and a letter of advice, written to his mother.
"Dear Mamma," it reads, "I know there is little I can say or do that will be of any comfort to you. But please, mamma, don't worry too much. I know you have troubles beyond my knowledge but worry will only make things worse. I know the tragedy was more a shock to you than anyone. But Dad is resting in a better world today, away from all troubles. We have to go sooner or later. Let's just live a life now where we can meet Dad again.
"If I was only home. I don't know what to tell you to do. You can't run the farm. I think I would sell everything but one cow. If you have out a very large crop, let someone work it on shares. Please don't worry. Your loving son, Claude."
I see it all. A mountain farm in summer, the bees buzzing, the cows flicking away flies as they graze, the corn growing fast and green. It'll be knee high by the Fourth of July. High on a slope above the pasture, the blackheart cherries are ripening, attracting the birds and the squirrels and a 67-year-old farmer, who'll climb the tree—no dwarf this one—to pick the cherries for the jam his wife is planning to make. A branch he's putting his weight on will give, and he'll fall. They'll find him there in the grass, the broken man with the broken branch and the broken cherries. They'll transport him over unpaved roads to a hospital 35 miles away. He'll die there without ever regaining consciousness, on a Saturday night when the air is redolent with the smell of honeysuckle.
The morning Robert McKinney climbs the hill the sky is blue, with a few wispy high clouds. With the exception of the calling of the birds and the buzzing of insects, the day is very still. Halfway round the world, one of the farmer's sons is living and breathing under the same blue sky, though there it is obscured by smoke and wracked by the sounds of war.
In the farmhouse in the hollow below the hill, Maude McKinney believes she is preparing for an afternoon of jelly making. In point of fact, she's being prepared for a pair of shocks to her life, a life which will, before the summer is out, be scaled back to something she would have trouble recognizing this beautiful morning. She's a natural born worrier though, and later she'll wonder why she didn't sense an ill wind blowing.
Two cracks, neither of which she'll hear—one in an old, leaning, blackheart cherry far up a hillside she's looked at every day of her married life, the other on a hill she'll never see, in a country she'll never visit—are about to reverberate through her life. They will cleave the world she's grown so accustomed to she's barely noticed its beauty. The beauty of it will appear again as she grieves, not to soothe her, but to cleave her still further. She will read her dead son's last letter again and again. She will take his advice, which sounds portentous, because, while it's written simply, it comes from the pen of a young man who is about to die. She will sell all but the one cow. She will look for someone to work the crops on shares.
She will treasure the letter and the Purple Heart she's accepted in place of the beating one. She will fold the letter and the clipping from the September 7, 1944, edition of the Tri-County News. She will place them in the family Bible, where they will yellow and dry. She will put them with the obituary notice she's already taken from the June 28 issue of the paper, the paper that lists Claude "of the U.S. Army" as one of the survivors of Robert V. McKinney, a "prominent farmer" of the Fork Mountain section of Mitchell County.
"If I was only home," Claude wrote. Maude's heart aches. So does mine. I'm reminded of a collection of letters I read a few years ago from a farmer from another section of Mitchell County. This man had left his young wife Sally in charge of their farm when he enlisted in the Confederate Army, 80 years before Claude McKinney went off to war. Like Claude, he did not come back. During the years between his departure and his death, he wrote out detailed advice to help Sally keep the farm going—how many bushels of corn she'd need to put by for the winter, how many cows to keep. His advice sounded a lot like Claude McKinney's. I believe Sally followed his advice, much as I believe Maude followed Claude's, though of course I do not know whether either of them did.
What I do know is this: During the 60 years between that Confederate soldier's death and his wife's, she made repeated ( and unsuccessful) efforts to discover the location of his body and to bring him home. She is buried in a little hilltop cemetery in Rebel's Creek, a community a few miles down the road from where I live. I once visited her grave, and I have thought about her in the same concentrated way I am now thinking about Claude and Maude and Robert McKinney. I can see the McKinney family and the world they lived in, the world before World War II descended on Mitchell County, a world in which a well-behaved chicken and a farm boy from Fork Mountain could stroll along the main street of a rural town and never come to harm. But the times they lived in are gone, with nothing to mark their passing but some yellowed newspaper clippings in a family Bible and a few feathers blown away by the breeze.
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.