Home to Harmony by Philip Gulley Read Free Book Online

at the basketball games, holding car washes, and selling Christmas fruitcakes door to door. People would see us coming and bolt their doors.
    I remember the year it was our turn to go. The first Monday of summer vacation, Uly and I stood, bleary-eyed, on the sidewalk in front of the junior high school at five in the morning. We waited in the damp air with the other kids and Mr. Squier and a few adult chaperones, waiting for the charter bus from the city to roll down Main Street, past Harvey Muldock’s car dealership, and up the park hill before pulling to the curb in front of the school.
    It was a blue diesel bus with reclining seats and headrests and a bathroom at the back, which was in constant use the entire trip. It was pure fascination—a bathroom on a bus. We wondered what happened when you flushed the toilet. Uly thought maybe everything just sort of fell down on the road. We weren’t sure. We asked Mr. Squier where it went.
    He said, “There’s a holding tank at the back of the bus. It goes there. The only thing is, if the bus gets hit from behind, that tank will explode, and if that happens, you want to be sure to duck.”
    Uly and I moved up front behind the driver and put on our raincoats.
    Â 
    U ly was lucky to be going. For the past twenty-three years the eighth graders had gone to Washington, D.C., but Mr. Squier was tiring of that city. Twenty-three years in a row had tested his enthusiasm. He was looking for something new, something fresh, which was when he hatched the idea of our class touring the Civil War battle sites of the South.
    We’d start with Antietam and move on to Shiloh, then to Chancellorsville and Chickamauga. We’d point the bus toward Charleston, South Carolina, where the Great Sorrow had begun on April 12 in the year of our Lord 1861. On the way home, we’d stop at the Appomattox Court House, where the war had limped to its tired end.
    Mr. Squier sent home a note to our parents announcing the trip. That’s when Uly’s father, Ulysses S. Grant IV, said Uly couldn’t go.
    He told Uly, “Us Grants aren’t welcome in those parts. It’s not safe. They’d make you disappear. There’s people down there; they still remember it. They’re bitter. You’d end up in some jail and never see the light of day. That ain’t Mayberry down there, son. Not for us Grants. You’re staying home.”
    This troubled Mr. Squier. Uly had sold more fruitcakes than anyone, so this just wasn’t fair. Mr. Squier went to Uly’s house to talk with his father. He brought a brand-new wallet with him. He sat at their kitchen tableand opened the wallet to the plastic picture holders and pulled out the paper I.D. card and began to write. Except he didn’t write Uly’s real name. He made up a name, Bob Lee, and showed it to Mr. Grant. Uly’s father studied it a moment and asked, “You think it’ll work?”
    â€œI think so,” said Mr. Squier. And that’s how we smuggled Ulysses S. Grant V, alias Bob Lee, into Chickamauga, Georgia.
    Â 
    I didn’t see much of Uly after high school. I went on to college and Uly stayed behind to take over the Grant Hardware Emporium from his father. The Emporium was in shambles. Uly’s father had forgotten the Lord and the Emporium and, despite the pleas of his sainted mother, had taken up drink.
    I remember, as a child, watching Uly’s daddy lifting a bottle from his desk drawer and taking a long pull. I remember Uly staring in fascination. I remember smelling alcohol on Uly’s breath in high school, our senior year. I thought it was a youthful urge that would fade with time, but for Uly it only grew stronger.
    In college, when I would come home for Christmas, my mother would tell me about seeing Uly wobble out of the Buckhorn Tavern. But now Uly didn’t even bother with the Buckhorn. The conversation there distracted him from his main purpose, which was