Every Day by the Sun Page 5

  William was the overlord of all neighborhood wars, safaris, circuses, and entertainments. One day he decided to build an airplane in the toolshed. When Jack and John, and cousin Sallie Murry, could think of no objections, they collected odd planks, nails and sacking, and began to hammer and saw.

  When the rickety fuselage with a wing and a tail looked airworthy to William, he instructed his exhausted crew to drag it to the edge of a ravine. Then he mounted the pilot’s seat and told them to push. With a great heave the brothers Falkner and Sallie Murry launched the wooden crate—which only in the mind of its creator resembled an airplane—and down he slid into the “bottomless abyss.” He emerged seconds later to thank his crew and supporters, telling them not to worry. They’d get it right next time. His only regret was that he bore no marks or scratches to bolster his claim that he was “the first man (or child) to become airborne in Mississippi—well, almost.”

  The boys were thriving in Oxford—yet 1906–7 were difficult years for Maud. Her mother-in-law, Sallie Murry Falkner, died in December, and six months later her mother, Lelia, “Damuddy,” was dead of cancer after a long, painful struggle during which Maud and Mammy tended to her, carefully hiding from the boys her addiction to laudanum. Maud was pregnant with her fourth child.

  Shortly after her mother’s funeral, Maud moved her family into the Big Place so that her own home could be fumigated to eliminate the medicinal smells and memories of laudanum, dirty linens, and death. As Jack Falkner described his mother, she was “the eternal enemy of dirt and disarray in any form.”

  The fourth son of Murry and Maud was born two and a half months later on August 15, 1907, two days before his father’s thirty-seventh birthday. “He’s my birthday present,” Murry told Maud. “Let’s name him Henry.”

  William Henry Falkner was the oldest son of the Old Colonel William Clark Falkner and Lizzie Vance (his second wife). Henry was a “handsome ne’er do well … a gambler, a womanizer,” and pretty much worthless. When a crippled jeweler found out that Henry had taken up with his wife, he shot and killed him. When the Old Colonel was informed of the shooting, he is said to have responded, “That’s all right. I’m afraid I would have had to do it myself, anyway.”

  Maud’s response to Murry’s suggestion that they name her baby Henry was Over my dead body.

  They named the child Dean Swift Falkner in honor of Maud’s mother, Lelia Dean Swift. Maud was thirty-six years old and her childbearing days were done. Dean was the darling of the family, a present for his father and brothers, William, ten, Jack, eight, and John, six—a gift that brought them joy all of his life.

  In a formal portrait of my father as a little boy, Dean bears a striking resemblance to William’s description of John Sartoris as a child in the novel Sartoris: “The steady eyes looked quietly back … and from the whole face among its tawny curls, with its smooth skin and child’s mouth, there shone a warm radiance something sweet and merry and wild.” In this warm radiance William sensed the free spirit of his youngest brother, the boy he loved, the man upon whom he would later rely.

  When Dean started the first grade, Maud noticed that Mammy disappeared every morning shortly after he left for school, only to reappear in the afternoon once he came home. It did not take her long to figure out that Dean, at seven, and Mammy in her seventies, were both attending school; Dean on the inside, Mammy outside sitting under a shade tree and visiting with passersby until school let out. She took two ham biscuits wrapped in a linen napkin in her apron pocket for lunch.

  Maud could not stop Mammy from following Dean until Mammy was satisfied that he could take care of himself. One afternoon he got into a playground fight with a bully two years older. Mammy proudly reported to Miss Maud, “My Deanie come out on top.”

  The Falkner boys loved their ponies but also came by their love of cars naturally. Their grandfather J.W.T. owned one of the first cars in Lafayette County, a yellow Buick roadster. He and his driver were a regular sight on the unpaved streets of Oxford, spooking horses and frightening women, children, and dogs.

  As the story goes, J.W.T. began celebrating his acquisition even as his driver, Chess Carothers, was learning how to steer an automobile. J.W.T. sat in the rear seat and drank whiskey while Carothers taught himself how to crank the engine and operate the clutch and gears. Away they went, Carothers quickly gaining confidence as he circled the courthouse, then drove back and forth from the square to the university campus. When J.W.T. ran out of whiskey he instructed Carothers to turn around and head for home. Carothers said he would be glad to as soon as he figured out how to stop the car. “The Lord is with us!” J.W.T. declared from the backseat.

  “Well, he’s taking an awful chance,” said Carothers.

  Dean’s love affair with automobiles can be seen in an undated entry in his school notebook:

  a Jeffrey four is the Best auto in the world.

  We have an Overland and we work on it all

  the time. A Overland is not any count A cole 8

  is a good auto if I could have my choose I

  would take a Jeffrey It can go every where I

  want a Jeffrey and a cole I wish my mother had

  a cole 8 and Jack had the kind of auto that he

  wanted and dad had the pretties horse in the world

  A Jeffrey Four was a “runabout” sports coupe, whereas a Cole Eight was a luxurious sedan and thus, in his eyes, most appropriate for his mother. Dean knew his father well and “the pretties horse in the world” suited Murry’s temperament and attitude. He was a nineteenth-century man all his life. An excellent horseman, he rode twenty miles or more every day until his health failed, calling the rides “the best hangover cure known to mankind.”

  In 1914, the Falkner brothers witnessed the first airplane landing in Oxford. Dean heard the plane fly over and ran to the First National Bank, where William was working as a clerk—a job his grandfather had given him and which he despised. “Billy, there’s a plane!” Dean whispered excitedly. The two of them slipped outside and rode double on Dean’s bicycle as the plane circled over a pasture north of town. It had rained recently and the field was muddy. As Dean and William watched with other spectators, the biplane landed and quickly became bogged down in the mud. William took off his shoes and trudged across the field after his barefoot brother. They marveled at the flying machine. To their delight the aircraft was stranded for a week until the ground was dry enough to take off. Dean went to see it every day and ran his hands over engine, propeller, and fuselage until he knew them by heart.

  That was the year that William quit high school, then reenrolled to play quarterback on the football team, then dropped out again when a broken nose ended both his football and academic careers. Years later he would take pride in referring to himself as the “world’s oldest living eighth grader.”

  Murry ruled his sons as tightly as his father had ruled him. None of them except William gave him much trouble. To William’s contemporaries, “Mister Murry” seemed reserved and uncompromising. Everybody in town knew the story about William borrowing his father’s car to take Dean for a ride. Perhaps to entertain his brother, William started to pass a car. The cranky old gentleman at the wheel recognized the Falkner brothers and speeded up. The race was on. William put the pedal to the metal. For a few exciting moments the two cars raced up South Street. William roared by the other car, no doubt to Dean’s delight, and circled the square in triumph. When they returned home, they found that the irate motorist had reported William’s reckless driving. Murry accepted the man’s story at face value despite William’s insistence that he “was not racing any more than the other man was!” He never drove his father’s car again.

  Dean was Murry’s favorite, but none of the brothers resented this preferential treatment, perhaps because Maud showered affection on all four. In return, they worshipped her, especially William, confident that he was her favorite. Dean was probably the only son who loved and understood his father. As Jack would observe, �
��Murry shared a companionship with Dean that seemed closer than any he had enjoyed with the others.”

  All four boys were caught up in the excitement of the First World War. At seven, Dean imitated his teenage brothers as they pored over the morning paper, laid out maps of the continent in front of the fireplace, and traced the lines of battle. Dean pretended to understand both the geography and the battle reports. They spent hours drawing planes with exotic names such as Albatros, Sopwith Camel, Fokker. They hated the kaiser but respected pilots who won the Blue Max. They were fascinated with the ten-month-long Battle of Verdun, following its lines daily. (After the war William told Jack that he “trudged the length and breadth of the battle ground” while on a walking tour of France.) During a recruitment drive, the army shipped a tank to Oxford by train. When it arrived at the depot, the Falkner boys were at the front of the crowd watching the tank being unloaded and racing alongside as it was driven to the square.

  Around 1917, William fell in love with Estelle Oldham, one of the belles of Oxford. Her parents took a dim view of the romance, however, and were determined to break it up. The Oldhams did not approve of Falkners in general, much less one with literary ambitions, nor did the Falkners approve of them. Major Oldham was the postmaster, which in Mississippi was a high-paying Republican-appointed position. Maud and Murry derided Oldham’s honorary title, “Major,” conveniently forgetting that Murry’s father, J.W.T., was known as the “Young Colonel.” The closest either came to a battlefield was probably a tour of Shiloh, ninety-five miles northeast of Oxford. The two families lived a block apart, and Major Oldham walked by the Falkner home on his way to work. I can still hear the disdain in my grandmother’s voice when she spoke about “that man in the double-breasted suit with a red carnation in his lapel, strutting past our house every morning on his way uptown to do nothing, at which he was very, very good!”

  In early summer of 1918, the Oldhams arranged for Estelle to marry Cornell Franklin, a rising young attorney in Columbus, Mississippi. William, frustrated and embarrassed, his hopes dashed, left Oxford, intending to join the Royal Air Force in Canada and prove himself equal in war to his brother Jack. He may have chosen the RAF because of its glamour, or perhaps he figured that the RAF would be less likely to reject him on account of his short stature. He claimed to be five foot eight. (I think five foot five was closer.) While waiting for his application to be processed he went to New Haven, Connecticut, and briefly worked at the Winchester Arms Company.

  He stayed in touch with his family, sending Dean two sketches from New Haven.

  The first, marked “FOR DEAN,” is a rough sketch on typing paper of a football player with small shoulders and a prominent nose—Dean’s nose rivaled, even surpassed, his brother William’s, broken or not—carrying the football tucked under his right arm, his left arm extended to stiff-arm a tackler who is slicing his legs out from under him.

  The second drawing, more detailed, also pencil on typing paper, is entitled “The Hand Organ.” It is a street scene of an Italian organ-grinder, complete with mustache and goatee. The figure is off-center, looking toward a crowd that has gathered to watch an off-stage monkey. Only the backs of the people can be seen. In the center is an animal cage, and in the distance, tall buildings with smoke stacks. The drawing is bordered by two distinct figures. To the left, a boy with hands cupped around his mouth as if to call to someone. On the right, another boy has climbed a street lamp to see over the crowd. William obviously was projecting his little brother into the sketches.

  William reported to RAF duty at Toronto on July 9, 1918. As a cadet he threw himself into the training and became “one of the chaps.” He sent Dean sketches of himself standing by the barracks and other drawings of warplanes and cadets.

  Jack had already joined the U.S. Marines Corps and gone to Quantico, Virginia, for basic training, while John was working in a power plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Jack would later see action in France. At eleven years of age, Dean was the only son left at home. That fall, the family eagerly awaited news of the war. Jack’s letters from France came every week. When the letters abruptly stopped, Maud was beside herself. Dean was worried sick. Murry went to pieces.

  A businessman in Oxford, it was rumored, had “bought” his own son out of the army. Every morning at eight o’clock, to Murry’s disgust, this man paraded about the square waving an American flag. One morning, Murry opened his hardware store just as the draft evader passed by. Already distraught at not hearing from Jack, Murry became furious. He grabbed a singletree—a wooden yoke for harnessing mules—and started for the man, shouting, “I’ll kill that son of a bitch.” Fortunately, two employees held him back. Jack, they would later learn, had been wounded at the Argonne Forest, though not critically.

  Although Murry obviously cared deeply for Jack, his natural reserve caused him to hold back his feelings. Jack wrote in his memoir, The Falkners of Mississippi, “As I look back over the years I realize how little I actually came to know him, and, perhaps, even less to understand him. He was not an easy man to know.… His capacity for affection was limited, but I’m sure that to such extent as it allowed he loved us all.”

  The war ended before William completed RAF flight training. He had failed to receive either a pilot’s wings or a commission. News of the war’s end reached town before the peace agreement was signed. Dean and his friends and their parents rushed to the square, beating on buckets and pots, celebrating victory over the Huns. The impromptu parade had just reached the Ole Miss campus when word arrived that the Germans had not signed the armistice. Deflated and disappointed, the celebrants took their pots and tin pails and went home. Dean glumly reported to his mother that the war “was not over after all.” Two days later, the official signing of the armistice was received with little or no fanfare. Oxford had worn itself out on November 10. The good news for the Falkners, however, was that their three oldest sons would soon be coming home.

  In December 1918, Dean, along with his parents, welcomed John home from Muscle Shoals, Jack from France, and William from Canada. The Falkner house resounded with young voices, energy, and hope. Jack would later observe that they “came together again … for several memorable and sometimes uproarious years.” In addition to this happy homecoming, the family had something else to celebrate. Murry had been appointed assistant secretary (business manager) at the University of Mississippi. A house on the campus would be provided for them in one year’s time.

  ALL DEAN WANTED FOR HIS TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, AUGUST 15, 1919, was a Boy Scout uniform so that he could look like William, who returned from Canada in a dashing RAF uniform. In spite of the heat, he put on his Scout uniform the day it arrived. Although it was as stiff as a hair shirt, Dean kept it on all day and marched around the house and yard. Soon, he and William were seen walking on the square, Dean in his Scout outfit and William in his RAF uniform with silver RAF wings, a swagger stick, and trim little mustache. Neither Dean nor anyone else knew that William had bought the wings in a Toronto pawnshop. The war having ended before he finished flight training, he commissioned himself and came home to Oxford a WWI veteran. In 1980, his biographer Joseph Blotner, upon seeing the silver wings up close for the first time, identified them as insignia of the British Royal Flying Corps, not of the Royal Air Force in Canada. The RFC had flown the majority of combat missions and had more prestige and military luster. William, with the luxury to choose, had purchased a set of RFC wings.

  William had fun dressing up and teasing the townsmen who ridiculed his literary ambitions and aloof manner. He sometimes walked with a cane and claimed to have a silver plate in his head implanted by surgeons after his plane was shot down in France. Other times, he sported a natty British bowler, spats, and a walking stick. The wags called him “Count No ’Count.”

  The fact is, William never got too old to enjoy dressing up. The more he aged, the more handsome he became. With his white hair, beautifully shaped head, aquiline nose, and small ears, he was stunning and he knew it.
He bore himself like a five-star general and could carry off any style of dress with the insouciance of a male model.*

  In 1919, Murry assumed the duties of the secretary at the University of Mississippi. The Falkners lived in a house previously occupied by the Delta Psi fraternity. Located on a bluff overlooking the railroad tracks, “it was a charming house,” recalled Ben Wasson, William’s friend and classmate from Greenville, Mississippi, and later his literary agent, “like a miniature Walt Disney castle with a tower room and stained glass windows.” A three-story redbrick dwelling with a wide porch, it stood on its own large lot on the edge of the main campus. The backyard was big enough for William and Dean to set up a tennis court. The whole family enjoyed the house and its location, especially Maud. Provided by the university, it was rent-free.