The Deuce and A Half – Part II

I don’t know really anything about how my parents met or about their early days, months, and years together – I was told that Dad was working at a gas station that Mom took her car to, that’s all I know. When Dad wasn’t drinking he had an outgoing and attractive personality, since my parents had little in common other than not knowing their fathers it was a case of opposites attract, beyond that I’ll not speculate, at least not in writing.

Mom used to talk about the farms of Illinois and that is why I like to think that the first time she headed out to Loudon County, VA to visit Uncle Caskie that it was something she was looking forward to – even though the rolling hills of Northern Virginia were not the flat prairie lands of Illinois, in the late 1940s and early 1950s there were farms in the area and I like to think that she enjoyed the countryside. As far as I can tell she only returned to Illinois once after I was born, she and Dad took me and we visited her friends (I don’t know if there was family still living in Illinois at the time); I was too young to remember anything of the trip.

Once a couple from Illinois visited us in Maryland, friends of Mom’s from college; they cut short their visit due to Dad’s drinking; I still remember waking up one morning and looking for them and Mom telling me that they had to leave because of Dad.

When did Dad first get drunk on a visit with Mom to Caskie’s? Was it the first time? The second time? The third time? Whenever it was you can bet that all future trips to my uncle’s were never the same, you can bet that there was always the fear of Dad’s drinking to the point of not being able to drive, you can bet there was fear for the safety of her children and herself.

I have two memories of Dad’s drinking at Uncle Caskie’s – both are clouded in mists, but both have clearly defined moments. The first memory has us walking down Uncle Caskie’s long driveway, past the country store, down a country road. It is Mom and Bill and me – I don’t know if Jimmy had been born yet; Jimmy is in the second memory, but that comes later.

It’s summer and it’s hot, it gets hot and humid in Virginia if you haven’t heard. We walk down the rural road until we get to a main road, then we walk along the shoulder, a mother and two little boys. We’re walking because Dad is too drunk to drive, at least he is too drunk to drive with my Mom’s little boys in the car – so she’s walking – that’s my Mom, she’ll do what she needs to do and I guess if we have to walk from Virginia across Chain Bridge to Maryland that that’s what we’ll do. Her Daddy was killed in an automobile accident, she isn’t going to have her boys killed the same way…she’ll walk, we’ll walk.

After we’ve walked a good way a big Army truck pulls up in front of us and a couple of soldiers get out and come up to us. The truck is what is known as a Deuce and a half, it’s called that because it weighs 2 ½ tons. As an adult in the Army I’d have many rides in Deuce and a halfs but this was my very first ride in one because when the soldiers asked Mom if she needed a ride she said “yes”. I still recall being boosted up in the back of the truck with the benches lined with soldiers – maybe that early memory influenced my decision to join the Army as opposed to the Navy?

I don’t remember how we finally got home but I remember those soldiers and that truck; I imagine we took a cab at some point but I really can’t remember.  

You see as a child I was always excited about going to Uncle Caskie’s, I loved my cousins and I wanted to be with them, but my excitement was not my mother’s excitement. What to me was akin to a trip to Disney Land was a venture of foreboding for my mother – I know that dread for I lived that dread with my Dad in my early life, I knew that dread later as an adult with Dad (though not to the same degree as when I was a child); I can only imagine how Mom must have felt when she prepared for a daytrip to Uncle Caskie’s. Would there be another ride in a Deuce and a half? When would the drinking start? How would she and her boys get home?