Nick Durand grows from childhood to adolesence in St. Ives, a small mining town in the hard coal region of upstate Pennsylvania during the Depression years of the 1930s. As the adult world around him struggles with economic hard times and reacts to explosive national and internatioinal crises, he witnesses outbursts of social violence in the street outside his home, hard fought political campaigns, acts of personal kindness and treachery,and games of adult passion and ambition that he only dimly understands. At the same time he experiences with a loosely knit gang of same-age friends adventures, torments, and startling joys of eary youth. In the course of the book one of Nick's mother's closest friends, the vivacioius Thelma Lark, becomes entangled in a dangerous affair with a charismatic local politician, Nick and his father try to solve a mysterious apparent murder, Nick fears that a "hex" has invaded his home, holidays and weddings are celebrated, mysteries of life and death are pondered, prayers are raised, and Nick feels budding drives of desire and romantic love while discovering moral complexity in his family and friends as America moves toward entrance into the Second World War.
TIME BEFORE TIME
By A. James ReichleyAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 A. James Reichley
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4670-3712-9 Contents
LIFELINES..................................................11. Second Son/Only Child...................................32. Christmas Candy.........................................63. A Knack for Addition....................................124. The Night They Blew Up the Bank.........................225. The Morning After.......................................306. The Good Son............................................357. Homer's Roundtable......................................448. Heaven Bound............................................529. The Dreamer.............................................55ENCOUNTERS.................................................6910. The Gang...............................................7111. Words..................................................8012. Wanamaker Christmas....................................8713. Mortality..............................................9814. The Road of Life.......................................10315. Discipline.............................................11516. First Day..............................................12417. The Boy at the Bottom of the Shaft.....................13318. Colored Chalk..........................................14419. The Black Hole.........................................150INTERSECTIONS..............................................16120. Munseytown.............................................16321. The Family Business....................................17022. The Big Fear...........................................17923. The Great World........................................18724. Landslide..............................................19625. Talking Dirty..........................................20426. Death and Matrimony....................................20727. The Girl Almost Next Door..............................21128. Growing Up Christian...................................21529. Betrayal...............................................226BRAINSTORMS................................................23730. Camelot................................................23931. Really Not Far Away....................................25131. Restoration............................................25733. Character Building.....................................26634. Body, Mind, and Spirit.................................27435. Lady in Trouble........................................27836. Google.................................................28537. Petty Crime............................................29238. The World of Tomorrow..................................30239. War Games..............................................313NORTHERN LIGHTS............................................31940. "We Want Willkie!".....................................32141. Dirty Politics.........................................33042. Hot Passion and Early Love.............................33943. Falling Star...........................................35244. Mystery................................................36045. Passage................................................37146. Aurora Borealis........................................379
Chapter One
Second Son/Only Child
Nick Durand was born in the coal-mining town of St. Ives in the hard coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania at fifteen minutes to midnight on the day before Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as President of the United States. When Nick was a boy his father used to tell him that if he had been born fifteen minutes later they would have called him "Hoover"—a statement that in childhood he accepted as literal truth.
Nick's first squalls came from his parents' brightly polished brass bed on the second floor of his family's home on Second Street, St. Ives' main business artery. Being born at home even in those days was regarded as unusual. Most of the boys and girls Nick grew up with, he later discovered, had entered life in the Lassinger Hospital in Peelsburg, the nearby county seat. He never asked his mother, let alone his father, why they had chosen to have his birth at home. Their decision may have grown out of a longstanding family distrust of hospitals. Or it may have been because his mother at the age of thirty-eight had gone through a difficult pregnancy, her second, and Dr. Jim Bingham, the family physician and a high school classmate of his father, thought she would be more comfortable in the surroundings of her own bedroom.
On the morning after Nick's birth, Homer Gearhart, his father's first cousin, took a fresh box of Phillies cigars out of the glass display case just inside the entrance to his Drug Store, two doors down Second Street on the other side of the Bijou theatre. Lifting the lid with his penknife, he put the box beside the cash register with a handwritten note: "Take One on Durand." When Nick's father came down later that morning to the Drug Store (Nick always thought of it with capital letters, designating the Gearharts' home as well as the pharmacy) he saw the note on the half-empty box. He paid Homer for the cigars that had already been taken but told him not to put out any more.
That evening the Peelsburg Chronicle—St. Ives had no newspaper of its own—carried among the "Personal Announcements" on one of its inside pages a terse report that a baby boy had been born the day before to Blaine and Sarah Durand. No name was given for the new arrival, since Nick's mother and father, under conflicting cross-pressures from the Harbeson family on his mother's side and the Durands and Gearharts on his father's, had not yet reached agreement on what the child was to be called.
A few days later in the distant mountain community of Munseytown in southwestern Pennsylvania, just above the Maryland panhandle, a slightly fuller account of the birth, though still without a given name, appeared at the bottom of the front page of the Munseytown Gazette, a weekly newspaper:
An event, the news of which traveled over the wires to Munseytown, occurred Monday, March 4, at the home of Blaine G. Durand of St. Ives, Lenape County. At 7:40 that morning a boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. Durand, he being their second child. Grandfather J. N. Durand of Munseytown assumed his new honor with becoming dignity and pleasure. As for the boy, it was an auspicious day to be born—the presidential inauguration day. With the incentives provided by the successful firm of Durand Bros., Lumbermen, and the thought of the highest elective office in the land, the little lad will have plenty of scope for his ambition.
Beneath this report a brief message from the Munseytown Grain & Supply Co. announced: "We have Frederick County burr ground Buckwheat flour in stock. Buckwheat sausages go fine on these frosty mornings for breakfast."
Except for being wrong by one day on the date of birth—which may have resulted from simple confusion or perhaps from the editor's wish to establish a closer connection with the inauguration of the new president in Washington—the story in the Munseytown paper was correct. J. N. Durand, always known to Nick as "Boppa," had indeed for a dozen or more years made his legal residence for voting and tax purposes in the home of his brother and business partner, Frank, in Munseytown, though he still spent almost half the year in St. Ives, sharing the house he had built almost forty years before with his son and daughter-in-law.
It was also true that an earlier child had been born four years before to Nick's parents. Baby Blaine, as he was remembered within the family, had lived for a little less than a year—tormented during most of that time by a painful colic, symptom of a condition that in those days proved to be incurable. When Nick was growing up his mother and father did not often speak about the loss of their firstborn, but Baby Blaine's death and the months of suffering that preceded it must have left scars on their lives that Nick never really understood.
Being both second son and only child almost surely also deeply affected Nick's own inner psyche. He did not himself consciously realize this until it was pointed out to him years later—actually on his fortieth birthday—by the ever surprising Stephanie Oppenheim, chief of research at Lucre magazine, in a bistro on the Rue St-Germain in Paris. "Think of all the second sons in the Bible who later did well in life," she told him, perhaps trying to cheer him up.
The question of Nick's name was not finally settled until three days after his birth when the county insisted that a completed birth certificate be issued. He then was given the first name and initials of his paternal grandfather, Jacob Nehemiah Durand, who had been named after his own father. The middle initial N, however, was not to stand for Nehemiah, but for Nicholas, the given name of his mother's adored older brother, Nicholas Harbeson, a lawyer and rising politician, actually at that time mayor, in the even more distant town of Brunswick Falls in northwestern Pennsylvania near Lake Erie. The boy was to be known as Nicholas—soon shortened to Nicky, as he was called within the family during childhood and by his mother for the rest of her life. This compromise was acceptable to Boppa, Nick's father later explained, because he disliked the nickname, Jake, which he had never allowed to be applied to himself but was afraid his young grandson might not be able to resist. Thus: J. Nicholas Durand.
Seven months later the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.
Chapter Two
Christmas Candy
Nick could never be sure what his first memory was—certainly not of political campaigns or elections. St. Ives, seen from the front window or front porch of the family's brick residence, built flush to the sidewalk, or along the short public space in which during early childhood he was permitted to play, going no further than Feldman's dry goods store two buildings below the Drug Store to the south, or the A&P grocery store just beyond the Safe Investment Bank that stood next to their house to the north, seemed usually a calm and friendly place, punctuated by winter snowstorms, the annual Halloween parade, the bustle of Christmas, and the fabulous Fourth of July fireworks display—glistening sparklers that Nick himself was allowed to hold on the front porch, while his father on the sidewalk discharged Roman candles, skyrockets, torpedoes, and cascading flowerpots, accompanied by similar eruptions set off by the Gearharts, the Feldmans, and other families in their block up and down Second Street.
Life on Second Street, however, was not always placid. Late one night while he was still sleeping in his parents' second floor front bedroom the silence of the street outside was suddenly shattered by sounds of gunshots and roaring motors. Nick's father, closely followed by his mother, jumped out of bed and rushed to the front bay window. Hijackers in a grey sedan, they saw, were pursuing a heavily loaded truck driven by bootleggers right down the middle of Second Street. The truck, carrying illegal booze, was escaping an attempted holdup on the Broadtop Mountain road just north of town. Gunmen in the two vehicles exchanged shots as they came. Nick, roused from sleep in his crib, was more startled than scared.
The whole incident was over in no more than a minute. Nobody, however, got much sleep for the rest of that night. Talk about the exciting event, fully covered in the Peelsburg Chronicle the next afternoon, continued for days. (The bootleggers, employees of Big Red O'Toole, as the story later was told, escaped and delivered their cargo unharmed. Two nights later, Skippy Melinsky, one of the reputed hijackers, was shot and killed coming out of the Seventh Ward Club, a speakeasy in Peelsburg.) Nick sometimes was certain he remembered that night—clearly recalled hearing the shots—but at other times he was not sure—he had heard the story repeated and enlarged on so many times that perhaps his memory, at least partly, was fed by myth.
Nick could call up other early memories, less dramatic than the gunfight on Second Street. He had dim recollections of being in his playpen in their living room, hanging onto its sides before he learned to walk. Most of these memories, however, were simply pictures, mere fragments without any beginning or end.
Many included Grandma, his mother's mother. He could see Grandma, a lean, bright-eyed woman, sitting beside the playpen, urging him to stand. Her grey hair was pinned up with combs, and she wore printed dresses with a white collar and buttons down the front and a long skirt, much longer than those worn by Mama—the name by which he then knew his mother. She read him stories from books made of cloth about the Three Little Kittens who had lost their mittens and Jack and Jill who went up the hill. When she was not reading to him she sat on the davenport crocheting doilies, which she was making as gifts for Mama or her other children or relatives. Although she said she could no longer see very well, her fingers flew over the crochet needles—she wore iron-rimmed spectacles.
Grandma was Nick's special friend. She was the oldest person in the household, older even than Boppa, Daddy's father, who lived in their house when he was not somewhere in western Pennsylvania running the family logging operations. Without anybody having told him, Nick at some point realized that Grandma was deaf. Often she could not hear when other people, even Mama, spoke to her. Once he tried moving his lips without making any sound to see if she could tell the difference. She realized, he thought, what he was doing. He knew at once that it was a terrible thing to have done, probably a sin, and hoped that Grandma would forgive him. But that memory came from a later time, closer to his fifth birthday.
One memory from the earlier period did extend into a story. The time was about a week before Christmas. The family—Mama and Daddy along with Grandma and Mama's maid, Anna Kostas, just graduated from St. Ives High School—had gathered in the kitchen for supper. Nick was in his highchair, which had a broad wooden tray that flopped down over his head and was fastened with a hook on the side.
Snow was on the ground outside and the nights had turned cold. Daddy, had just come home from his office. He had brought the Christmas candy—two carefully wrapped bags of candy from Weyerhauser's Ice Cream Parlor two blocks down Second Street. The Weyerhauser aunts made the candy in the confectionary behind the store. One bag contained "clear toys"—red or yellow sugar candies moulded to form figures of dogs, rabbits, trolley cars, cannons, Christmas trees—more than two dozen figures in all. The other held small candy canes, muffs, pretzels, and apples, in peppermint, anise, and spearmint flavors.
From the earliest time in his childhood Nick had treasured the Christmas candy as a special treat, more for the shapes and colors of the figures than for the taste. Actually, the clear toys were a little too sweet for him, and their stickiness often came off on his fingers and clothes. He did, though, enjoy sucking the peppermint canes.
Daddy put the two bags of candy, still sealed by gummed paper, on the tray of his high chair. "This is the Christmas candy," he said. "Santa Claus gave it to me to bring home a little early. After supper we can open the bags, just to look at what's inside." Supper was the evening meal. Dinner, for which Daddy also came home from his office, was promptly at noon, except on Sundays, when it was a little later because it had to wait until Mama got home from church.
Nick looked forward to seeing the clear toys in the elegantly shaped glass jar, a wedding present from Mama's best friend, Jesse Hawkins, that was kept on the buffet in the dining room. Despite what Daddy had said, he expected he would be allowed to have a candy cane and maybe a candy pretzel that night before going to bed. He did not eat the clear toys before Christmas, sometimes not even then.
"That will be fun," Anna Kostas said. Anna had graduated from St. Ives high school the spring before. She would go home to her family's house in Baker's Connection, up the hill on the west side of St. Ives, after the supper dishes had been washed and put away.
"If Nicky eats all his supper," Mama said, "we might let him have one piece of candy before he goes to bed. But we must be sure that we keep most of it for Christmas."
"Have you made up your list yet for Santa?" Grandma asked.
"No. I think I want a bike." By a bike he meant a tricycle, like the one ridden by Berny Feldman, who lived two doors below the Drug Store and was two years older than Nick. Only much older boys, like Sammy Hawkins, the brother of his best friend, Tim Hawkins, second son of his mother's friend, Jesse Hawkins, who lived further down Second Street, had actual bicycles.
Just then there was a sound from the front of the house. The front door had been opened into the vestibule, the small entrance chamber between the front door and the hall.
"That must be Papa!" Nick's father cried, his voice ringing with pleasure and excitement. Almost knocking over his chair, he jumped up from the table.
Nick knew that Boppa had been expected to arrive that night for Christmas. Nick recognized among the sounds coming from the vestibule the voice of his father's cousin, Homer Gearhart, the druggist. Looking out through the window of the Drug Store, Homer must have seen Boppa's car pull up in front of the house, and, probably not bothering to put on his overcoat, had hurried across the slippery sidewalk past the Bijou theatre to their house.
Everybody, even Grandma, rose from the table. Even Anna Kostas seemed excited. They rushed out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and down the front hall to the vestibule.
Still locked in his highchair, Nick could not see what was going on but could hear the chorus of voices. Everybody was talking all at once. Helping bring in Boppa's things, the entire group, including Homer, moved into the hall and then into the living room. Uncle Frank and Aunt Tess had sent packages from Munseytown. Boppa said the turkeys he brought every year from Frederick County were in the trunk of the car—there was a turkey for their house and one for each of the Gearhart households, and about a dozen more that would be sold by Boppa's old friend, Pat McCool, from his tavern, now a speakeasy, in the lower part of town. More than fifty years before when they were boys, Boppa and Pat's father had started working together in the Keystone colliery. Though he had begun in politics as a Republican, Pat was now the boss of St. Ives' Democratic Party machine. Boppa and Pat split the profits from the sale of the turkeys. There was nothing, Boppa said, like a Frederick County turkey, and many people in St. Ives seemed to agree.
A happy jabber of voices flowed back from the living room. Some were asking Boppa about the drive from Munseytown. There was snow, he said, from Shippensburg to Carlisle, but the roads had been plowed and were kept open. He had stopped in Harrisburg at noon to eat at the Penn Harris Hotel with Carl Schumacher, the director of the Pennsylvania Lumbermen's Association. Nick's father inquired about Uncle Frank and asked if Aunt Tess's cold was better.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TIME BEFORE TIMEby A. James Reichley Copyright © 2011 by A. James Reichley. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
