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superhero-daugthers11 · 5 years

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Hadestown epilogue

*fan made of course! I own nothing. I have listened to the soundtrack over a dozen times, but have not YET seen the musical live. So I may be off on some of the visual stuff a bit.

*Eurydice sits by the wall with a little girl sitting aside her. The area where she sits is filled with green grass and flowers. Eurydice holds a guitar and smiles at the young child. The child had short black hair and pale skin.*

Eurydice: *singing* he fell in love with a beautiful lady

Who walked up above

In Persephone’s green field

He fell in love with Eurydice

Who was gathering flowers in the light of the sun

And I know how it was because

She was me

A man fell in love with a woman

Singing la la la la la la la

La la la la la la la.

*song done*

Pentha (child) : *spoken* that man was my dad!

Eurydice: *smiles* Yes! He lives in the world of the living, among the beautiful sun and green grass. He is a great man, a man who believed he could change the world with a song. He almost did... he tried to set the workers of Hadestown.

Pentha(child): Was he handsome?

Eurydice: *with sadness* The most beautiful man I had ever seen.

Pentha(child): He was a brave man too? You once told me how he stood up to Mr. Hades.

Eurydice: He is one of a kind.

*hermes enters*

Pentha: mr Hermes! *the child runs to Hermes and hugs him*

Eurydice: how’s Orpheus? Have you seen him?

Hermes: I bumped into him a few times on my runs. He’s...well the same, he gave me this letter for you. *holds out a piece of paper to her*

Eurydice: *smiles and quickly grabs the piece of paper*

Hermes: what does it say?

Pentha: Read it out loud mommy! I want to hear it!

Eurydice: dear, eurydice

I been traveling around the world and playing my song everywhere I go. I hitched a few rides on the trains for awhile. Then word spread of my song and people were inviting me to there towns to sing! They even been paying me! You should see the places I have seen: Paris, France, England! My music has brought such happiness to people. I have met people from all walks of life, rich, poor and everything in between. My song didn’t just have the power to bring back spring, it’s brought hope and done so much more!

I wish you were here to enjoy this with me and I wish I could hold you in my arms again. I love you so much and even with all that’s going right for me. Your really the only thing I keep thinking of. I miss you everyday and it becomes harder and harder to be without you. I been trying to keep positive, but knowing your in such a depressing place just breaks my heart further.

Forever yours, Orpheus

Eurydice: *crying* he needs to move on! I want him to be happy. Can’t you talk to him?

Hermes: I tried, he’s as stubborn as they came.

Eurydice: He doesn’t even know about the baby.

Hermes: If he knew, it would be too much for him. He might do something stupid, one can only handle so much pain.

Eurydice: I don’t understand, everything is going right for him. He’s making money, he has food, he brought back spring, and people want to hear him sing. Why can’t he let me go?

Hermes: Because you are his true love and once you find your true love....it’s hard to let go. The human heart is a strange thing.

Eurydice: Maybe if I don’t answer his letters he’ll move-

Hermes: Theres nothing you can do, it’s his choice to move on or not.

Eurydice: Well I have to try! It’s my fault he’s like this! If I was stronger, if I could have held out longer.... *sobbing* If I didn’t die, we would be happy...togther.

*in the living world. Orpheus stands in front of a big crowd in the middle of the town square.

Orpheus: *singing* la la la la la la la la la

la la la la la la

*the dead plants start to bloom by the homes and the grass goes from brown to green. The audience applauses and cheers.*

Orpheus: *singing* la la la la la la la la la

La la la la la la

*The Fates are seen in the audience.*

The fates: *singing* doubt comes in

And meets a stranger

Walking on a road alone

Where is she?

Where is she now?

Doubt comes in

Orpheus: *singing, as he leaves the crowd.*

Who am I?

Where do I think I'm goin'?

The fates: *singing*

Doubt comes in

Orpheus: *singing*

Who am I?

Why am I all alone?

The fates: *singing*

Doubt comes in

Orpheus: *singing*

When will I see her again?

Who was I to think she wouldn’t follow me home?

The fates: *singing*

Where is she?

Where is she now?

*end song*

Orpheus: *to the fates* what happened to Eurydice? Has forgotten me? She hasnt been writing... she told me she would write me. She promised she would never forget me!

The fates: Eventually everyone forgets who they used to be and there memories are replaced by their after life in Hadestown.

Orpheus: I know but I thought if I kept sending her the letters it would help her remember me. She can’t forget me! She can’t become like the others! I won’t let her! It’s my fault she’s still there, I couldn’t save her.

The fates: Things will unfold the way they are meant to regardless if you like it or not. Your fate have been set in stone from the moment you both were born. You were never meant to save her.

Orpheus: No your wrong! I can save her memories! I can at least do that! Has she forgetten everything?

The fates: not everything.

*Orpheus spots Persephone in the window of a tarvern. He runs toward it and goes in.*

*hermes walks up to the fates*

Hermes: Orpheus is a poor young boy. Why must this be his fate?

Fates: it’s how it was written.

Hermes: You fates aren’t too kind.

Fates: never said we were kind.

*inside the tavern*

*Orpheus runs up to Persephone.*

Persephone: Hey look who it is! Orpheus! *She is clearly drunk. She hugs him with one arm and takes a sip of beer with the other one. She then looks to the crowd of drunk men and woman surrounding her* Why don’t you play your song for these guys? I heard you performing outside, its still as beautiful as I remember.

Orpheus: Persephone, I need your help!

Persephone: I can’t help you get to her, if I could I would. Ever since you came, Hades had that wall built bigger and more sturdy. Nobody can get in or out.

Orpheus: Is it true she forgotten me?

Persephone: *laughs* Of course not! How could she with that baby at her side. It’s certainly a constant reminder of you?

Orpheus: A baby? What are you talking about?

Persephone: Well I guess she isn’t really a baby anymore, she’s almost four years old now.

Orpheus: Eurydice wasn’t pregnant....she wasn’t...she-she would have told me...She would have said something!

Persephone: *she takes another sip of her drink.*

*orpheus takes the drink from her hand*

Orpheus: Tell me the truth!

Persephone: *she puts a hand on his shoulder and they move away from the crowd and go outside.* I’m sorry, I thought you knew. I thought she would have told you.

Orpheus: what happened?

Persephone: Normally the fates inform Hades when a woman dies who was pregnant. Hades didn’t want children in Hadestown, he didn’t put children through the torment of Hadestown. Plus children bring problems. He doesn’t offer the deal to expecting mothers. With Eurydice the fates made a mistake, they told him she was not expecting and Eurydice didn’t know she was pregnant. Hades was furious, when he found out, he created a eruption and killed a whole city of Pompeii. Everyone town was amazed and in awe of the situation. It was a miracle! The workers began talking to each other, buzzing over the coming arrival. When it was the day of the birth, everyone gathered in astonishment, even some of the gods of Olympus came! The stood over the child’s bed, in disbelief. Oh she was beautiful! The most gorgeous thing I have ever seen! A little girl, so small, so pure and fragile...and her smile brought happiness to all that saw her. The workers played with her and protected her as if she were there own. She gave them purpose, something to care for. once She had rammed into Hades while playing and he just started yelling. ...but the most amazing thing the workers all stopped working and then stood up to hades. She’s changing our world, she’s doing what you couldn’t. Isn’t that great? While you help people here, she helps them down there.

Orpheus: She sounds amazing. But all this over a child that isn’t even theres? Why?

Persephone: She sees the good in everything and everyone. She finds happiness in the darkest, most miserable place in the world. She gives them hope.

Orpheus: what’s her name?

Persephone: Pentha.

Orpheus: *frowns* we always dreamed of having a family together...we had our whole lives planned out. I would bring back spring and then everything would be perfect. We would get married and travel the world. .... are they happy? Eurydice and Pentha?

Persephone: I think so. Orpheus, you have something that all those people in Hadestown would kill for. You get to live and you could live a full and happy life if you would let yourself.

Orpheus: I can’t...Not without her. I have tried, I have! Nothing is the same without her.

Persephone: Well what she wants more than anything is you to be happy and for you to move on. You know, you have a great gift! not just your song, but your heart and your courage. You can do great things if you let yourself.

Orpheus: I can’t, she’s always on my mind and in my heart. Now knowing that she had my kid, how could I move on? She can’t. Pentha doesn’t have a father. She deserves to have a dad like any kid does. To have two parents who love her and watch out for her. She -

Persephone: Orpheus-

Orpheus: My dad wasn’t there for me and I hated him for it. I promised myself I would never abandon my kid! She’s gonna grow up never knowing me!

Persephone: it’s not the same, it isn’t your fault.

Orpheus: IT IS MY FAULT! I COULDNT SAVE HER!! I didn’t trust that she would be behind me and I looked and she was.

*orpheus cries*

*persephone hugs him*

Persephone: Anyone in your place would have done the same thing, Hades knew that.

*the scene changes Orpheus sits alone in a bedroom. He takes a knife from under his mattress and stabs himslef in the heart.*

*Orpheus sees the railroad station to Hadestown. When he gets off the train he sees Eurydice working along with the others on the wall.*

Orpheus: Eurydice!

*she looks up and sees him*

Eurydice: *with tears in her eyes* Orpheus.

*He runs to her with tears in his eyes and hugs her then kisses her lips*

Eurydice: are you-?

Orpheus: yes.

Eurydice: h-how?

Orpheus: ....I couldn’t live without you.

*Eurydice hugs him as she cried.*

Eurydice: Im sorry!

Orpheus: I’m not, *he grins hugely* I’m here with you. Oh I missed you so much! *he kisses her again*

Eurydice: *sadly* I wanted you to be happy to live out the dreams you had of changing the world.

Orpheus: you are my biggest dream and spend eternity here with you is more than I could ever want.

Eurydice: i love you. *she put her hands on his cheek and kissed him passionately*

*a playground ball rolls by Eurydice and Orpheus. Pentha runs over to get it. As she picks up the ball she looks up at the strange man holding her mother in his arms.*

Eurydice: *she looks down* Orpheus there’s something I have to tell you. I didn’t know how to say before-

Orpheus: I know about Pentha, persephone told me.

Eurydice: Pentha, this is your dad.

Pentha: *smiles big then immediately hugged him*

Orpheus: *singing*

You take me in your arms

And suddenly there's sunlight all around me

Everything bright and warm

And shining like it never did before

And for a moment I forget

Just how dark and cold it gets

Eurydice: *singing*

All I've ever known is how to hold my own

But now I wanna hold you

Orpheus and Eurydice: *singing*

Now I wanna hold you, hold you close

I don't wanna ever have to let you go

Now I wanna hold you, hold you tight

I don't wanna go back to the lonely life!

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raspberryparker · 5 years

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these foolish things | one

Bucky Barnes x Fem!Reader — WWII AU

← previous | series masterlist | next → (coming soon)

word count: 5,207 summary: july 7th 1944: on his way to normandy, bucky is tasked with a special assignment and made to join an infamous platoon (not my gif) warnings: PLEASE read the masterlist (implied smut for like.. one paragraph)

read it on ao3 add yourself to my taglist! like my work? consider buying me a coffee!

━━━━━━━━

The first time he’d thought about going to Paris had been with a girl in his arms.

He didn’t remember much of their time together now—it was all so faded and out of reach—but he still knew her name. Dolores. She liked it when he called her Dot, and he liked the way the blush that spread over her shoulders and neck masked the freckles there like ink bleeding through paper when he did.

The idea to visit the city of lights came to him as she lay before him, sixteen and perfect from head to toe. Bucky had been eighteen, with hardened calluses over his fingertips and a growing collection of scars over his chest, but she’d traced each one with first a fingernail and then her lips and made him believe that maybe they weren’t as ugly as he’d thought. Her hair seemed to glow against the white of his pillowcase, spread out around her in a fiery halo. She reached for him with ghostly touches and he swore she shone like a star. The only star that mattered.

She was under him, naked and shimmering like the sun, grasping at every part of him she could reach. He felt the press of her nails into his back, her teeth at his shoulder, as he pressed himself against her, tried to meld their bodies into one whole mass of tangled limbs and sharp breaths. It was as she mouthed the mark of her teeth in a silent apology after the fact that he’d had that brilliant thought.

“Let’s go to France.”

The words were spoken against her hair into the darkness of his bedroom, but they rang in his ears as if he’d shouted them from a rooftop.

She pulled back from his neck, a hand coming up to grasp his cheek and rub softly at the stubble that grew along the length of his jaw as she smiled at him. The moonlight that bled through the open curtains behind him made the beads of sweat along her hairline shine like mercury, but he thought it only added to her afterglow.

“Bucky, we can’t go to France,” she sighed, the smile still playing on her lipstick smudged lips.

“Why not?” he argued, rolling over onto his back and pulling her against his chest on top of him. Her hair fell around them like a curtain, and for a moment Bucky could pretend that it was only the two of them in the whole city. Nothing mattered except the way her cheeks rounded underneath her eyes as she giggled and the weight of her breasts against his chest. Dot lowered herself atop him, folding her hands over his ribs and resting her chin upon them. She kissed the line of his jaw and gave him another smile.

God, how he loved that smile.

“Because,” she said, bringing a hand up and tracing it over the skin of his chest. She felt the dip in his clavicle and tapped the bone there with a finger as she spoke. “We can’t just pack up and go. Our lives are here in Brooklyn, Buck.”

“I think I’d rather run away to Paris with you,” he sighed.

Dot laughed again. “I know you don’t mean that.”

She removed her hands and pressed the top of her head under his chin, her temple resting against his throat. Bucky ran his fingers through her hair, untangling the knots that had formed there. She sighed at the feeling of his fingers against her scalp.

“I have my family, and you have your brothers and your sister.” Her voice was so quiet as she spoke that it was barely above a whisper. “At the very least, we can’t go now. Maybe one day, though.”

He felt her smile against his chest before she pressed a kiss to the skin there.

“One day I’ll let you sweep me off my feet and whisk me away to Paris,” she said. “We’ll have champagne by the Eiffel Tower and walk at night hand in hand through the city of lights.”

“I’d like to think of it more as the city of love,” Bucky grinned.

“Alright then,” Dot agreed with a laugh. “You and I, and the city of love. I’ll hold you to that, Barnes.”

The memory of her was faded now, blurred at the edges and sun-bleached like a worn photograph. He held onto the dream of seeing Paris long after she broke his heart on the night before his twenty-first birthday, running off with that railroad worker who promised her a better life on the west coast. Through the ache she’d left behind, he still felt a desire to see the world beyond New York. His motivation for doing so had simply changed, he’d reasoned.

Though he wasn’t necessarily a man of faith, he believed that if he wanted it badly enough it would happen one day. It wasn’t prayer—more like a desire so strong, he’d will it into existence simply by wanting.

As he’d predicted, it had come to be. It came about much faster than he’d wanted and under vastly different circumstances, but it happened nonetheless.

And there was not one thing he regretted.

━━━━━━━━

The first time Bucky Barnes laid eyes on the coast of Northern France, it was between gasps and coughs, and with the sting of ocean spray in his eyes. If he hadn’t been so incapacitated while pitching ropes of seasickness over the side of one of the many Liberty ships that moved across the English channel that cloudy afternoon, he might have taken the time to… relish the moment a bit more, at least.

The coast seemed to stretch endlessly to either side of the horizon, looking more like a long beige shadow against the stark grey curtain of clouds than anything else. It gripped the scalp of the sea with rising bluffs as black as charcoal along almost the entire length of it. He could barely make out of the shape of the landing craft and other troop ships much like the one he was on that still lay against the shore, their forms only tiny spots amongst the gargantuan beaches.

His stomach bubbled once more, the muscles in his abdomen constricting painfully, and he bent over the railing. His fingers burned as he gripped the metal threaded with dark bits of oxidation and weather-worn spots along the starboard side of the trooper. Bucky’s stomach squeezed in time with his throat, the entire organ seeming to bang up against his esophagus and forcing him to retch into the sea. He was sure the tone of his skin matched the overall pallor of grey that the afternoon offered, ghostly ashen and green.

He thought he’d be alright, yet he was anything but.

Wiping his forehead with the sleeve of the olive green jacket he and all others like him wore, he felt the press of the metal railing against his ribcage and allowed himself to sink into it. It was grounding. How close the sea was to him despite the size of the trooper, and how frightening. He’d only ever seen it from the beach at Coney Island before, where it looked the least menacing; nothing but a rolling blanket of blues and greens that softly smoothed away the footsteps in the sand. But now it undulated beneath him, writhing and foaming against the side of the ship, spitting angrily up at him. It was no longer rolling but roiling, folding against itself a thousand times over, deep pockets of it as dark and silken as velvet. It wasn’t blue anymore but black. The water looked more like an abyss than anything, ready to swallow him up whole if he happened to lose his footing for only a moment.

He was half tempted to jump, recalling something from his high school English classes about the sublime. Something so beautiful—a striking vision of grandeur and excellency—that it was absolutely mortifying to look upon it. He felt that same dread in his gut when he gazed over the ocean. He held onto the rail tighter, his knuckles turning white.

Trying to compose himself, Bucky licked his lips and squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on the sound of the creaks and groans of the ship as it glided across the angry sea. He was surprised to find his face damp, his lips salty. He hadn’t recalled the spray hitting his face, so he wasn’t sure when the sea had found him.

He pushed himself up with the railing, legs stumbling slightly. He spit into the sea, watching it fall into the churning foam as he made a mental note to wash his mouth out and rid himself of the stench of bile.

“Barnes?”

He’d been so caught up in his moment of nausea that he hadn’t heard anyone approach, the sudden calling of his name causing him to jump and hit his knee against the metal in front of him. Bucky sucked a breath between his teeth and turned to face the man who’d called his attention.

To say he was surprised to see his platoon leader standing behind him, his boot-clad feet spread to keep his balance on the moving deck and his arms crossed over his broad chest, would be a great understatement. Lieutenant Hudson looked angry for a moment, the creases below his thick brows darkening his expression as he looked at Bucky with his sharp nose tilted into the air (no doubt noting the horrid smell that came from his person), before his features softened into one more akin to understanding.

“Sir?”

Bucky cringed inwardly at the hiccup that followed his voice. He must have looked like a mess if the way he felt was anything to go by.

“You alright there, Sergeant?” Hudson asked as he stepped forward. He leaned against the rail to the right of Bucky, a more casual feeling washing over their conversation for which Bucky was grateful.

“Just finding my sea legs, sir,” he replied.

The ship rumbled and hummed below their feet, and Bucky felt the movement in his hands that were still gripping the metal before him.

“Yeah, aren’t we all,” Hudson agreed. “You seem to have it pretty bad, though.”

“Never been too fond of the water,” he explained.

“We’ll be on land soon enough.” Strings of chestnut coloured hair fell into Hudson’s dark eyes, the moisture in the air combined with the spray of the sea below them weighing it down and wetting the strands. He ran a rough hand through his locks, pushing them back into place. Bucky knew he liked keeping it longer on the top, but he was still unsure how he got away with it. “But I doubt that’ll be any better.”

Bucky cleared his throat, turning to his superior and watching as he looked over the vast ocean. Back home, he might have even made friends with the likes of Noah Hudson. He was only a year older than Bucky but had been in the army much longer. He’d wanted to be here, had enlisted the second he graduated high school, and although he wasn’t one for stereotypes, Bucky had to admit that the man before him was the poster boy soldier. He wouldn’t be surprised if all the propaganda back home was drawn in Hudson’s likeness. With just the right amount of rugged mixed with an aura of authority, Hudson demanded respect simply by existing.

It was actually kind of intimidating. Though Bucky supposed that might have been a good thing.

“Did you need me for something, sir?” he asked.

Hudson turned to him, a serious expression falling over his features once again.

“Not me,” he said. “Bauer wants to see you.”

“Bauer?” Bucky asked. “What does he need me for?”

“No clue,” Hudson said. He pulled a pack of Luckies out of his breast pocket, shaking one out of the carton and placing it between his lips, muffling his next words. “Son of a bitch never tells me anything. How am I supposed to lead my platoon if I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing?”

Bucky stayed silent, watching as his Lieutenant cupped the end of the cigarette to block the wind coming at them and lit it, tossing the still burning match into the water. He was mesmerized by the glowing band eating it slowly as Hudson took a long drag. With smoke still in his lungs, he said, “Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Of course.”

“He’s up on the bridge with the rest of command.” Silky tendrils of smoke spilled from his nostrils as he exhaled. The lazy curls rose from the lit end of the cigarette, the shifting veil of grey blending in with the cloudy atmosphere. Bucky inhaled sharply, the familiar scent of tobacco and burning paper a welcome and comforting relief from his spinning mind. “Told me to come find you and let you know.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bucky said. He squeezed his eyes shut one last time, before pushing off from the rail completely and balancing himself on his own two feet once again.

“Yeah.”

It might have been his vision playing tricks on him, but Bucky was pretty sure he was swaying slightly as he stepped toward the stairs that would lead him up to the bridge of the ship. Or it might have just been the movement of the craft itself that threw him off. His stomach was no longer bubbling but his head hurt from the force of his retching and white spots appeared behind his eyelids, growing like ink blots.

“And Barnes?”

At the sound of his call, Bucky turned to face Hudson once again. He was leaning with his back against the railing, elbows anchoring him in place and the cigarette still between his lips as he watched Bucky’s retreating form.

“Might want to wash up before you go,” he smirked.

As if he wasn’t already pale enough, Bucky felt all remaining colour drain from his face as he nodded quickly.

“Yes, sir.”

━━━━━━━━

The water smelled of metal and stung against his cheeks as Bucky leaned over the small steel basin. It was tucked behind the last row of barracks in the cargo hold that had been repurposed to house troops as they crossed the channel, the only somewhat secluded area the troops had amongst one another. Bucky curled his fingers around the edge of the steel wash bin sink, watching the water drops fall from his nose as they landed and plinked like little bells against the drain. He tried to drown out the chatter of the other troops in the hold, the sounds of a lost poker game or a shouted demand for breakfast leaving his ears ringing.

When he was sure he’d rinsed his mouth out well enough, though the taste of copper remained on his tongue in place of the burn of stomach acid, he inspected his appearance in the small, dirty mirror mounted over the sink. He looked like every other soldier on the ship—tired and broken from the road behind them, and entirely unprepared for the journey ahead.

He almost didn’t recognize himself, and it wasn’t because of the cloudy glass.

Bucky’s face was lined with evidence of the war, creases in his forehead and under his eyes that hadn’t been there two years prior now catching his eye. It was nearly impossible to get a close shave in the conditions the men were in, so his cheeks and jaw were perpetually shadowed by stubble. His deep brown hair was the only thing that still somewhat reminded him of the man he’d been when he left New York. He’d always maintained the same style even before the war, but now the government-issue crew cut was getting increasingly messy and long enough to grip between his fingers. He made a mental note to cut it before they landed ashore, lest Hudson reprimand him for it (that damned hypocrite).

But what concerned him the most as he stood there gazing upon his withered reflection were his eyes.

“You have such beautiful eyes.”

He remembered the words his mother told him again and again during his childhood with an ache in his heart. Bucky could almost feel the press of her hands against his baby soft cheeks, squeezing him firmly but ever so gently as he’d try to squirm out of her grasp, but she always held him close regardless. He closed his eyes and watched the light dance against his eyelids. Just to remember her. To hear her. To smell the perfume she wore every single day for twenty years, the one his father had bought her and that smelled like home and comfort to Bucky.

“They’re like your fathers. Like river rocks through a stream in the summer. Like cloudless skies. You need to smile more, my love. It brings out the stars in them.”

He should have thanked her for everything she did for him more often. But he was too young to regret so much.

When he opened them once more, he saw none of that. Bucky saw only the hardened crease of his brows and the sag at the outer corners. Skies that had once been clear were now storming with darkness and the edge of war, the light of the stars his mother once described long snuffed out. He was a shadow of the young excited boy he’d been when he received his first deployment only two years before. At twenty-seven, Bucky finally began to understand why his father’s expression would darken sometimes in the evening, why he’d go days without leaving his room, and why when Bucky had told him he’d enlisted, the irises of the eyes that his eldest son mirrored grew sombre.

His father once said that the Great War had eaten him alive. Bucky had been confused at the time, still only a child and wondering how that could have been if his father was right there in front of him.

But now, on his way to Normandy aboard a crowded ship full of frightened men and boys who had already written the letters that would be sent home if the worst came to pass, he knew exactly what his father had meant.

With a frustrated sigh, Bucky wiped wet hands against his face one more time, pulling himself out of the saddened stupor he’d been in as he looked in the mirror. He was needed on the bridge. This was no time to be reflecting on his past.

It was cramped in the hold as Bucky moved through the barracks, the conversations of the men he served with buzzing around him like a swarm of bees. He passed a table where men had gathered around a particularly intense game of poker, cigarettes and any form of valuables being deemed a valid substitute for money, which there was no need for on the ocean. The men cheered and shouted, egging their friends on to win something for their squad, cries of “He’s bluffing!” following Bucky until he reached the stairway that would take him up the tween deck and eventually the bridge.

But just as he was about to pull open the door, he was interrupted.

“Hey, Bucky!”

As he turned to face him, Bucky wondered how it was possible that Walls kept a smile on his face through all of it. He wore that same smile now, beaming broadly at his friend as he approached with his lips curled back to show off his (still somehow pearly white) teeth. The Corporal’s squad had fought alongside Bucky’s own for some time in Italy, and the two had grown close to each other despite the obvious difference in rank. Bucky refused to be called ‘sir’ by anyone, even his own squad. He was Bucky to everyone, even if Hudson clicked his tongue in distaste whenever one of the young Privates addressed him as such.

“Walls,” Bucky greeted. “How you holdin’ up?”

“Heh,” he replied with a humourless chuckle. “About as well as anyone else.”

Bucky refrained from pointing out the fact that his hands were shaking as he brought one up to scratch at his cheek.

Corporal Oliver Walls was a good man, one that Bucky came to trust with his life during their time fighting together. He remembered the young boy’s smile as they sat in an abandoned home in Sicily, a photograph between them on the rubble covered floor. “That’s my Ma,” he’d said, pointing to a round looking woman on the left with eyes as soft as clouds. “When we get back, come over and she’ll make you the best apple pie you ever had in your life.”

That had been just under a year prior. And while some men seemed to have lost their ability to smile, Walls’ was like a beacon of hope.

“You wanna get breakfast?” Walls asked, jerking a thumb back towards the barracks. “Johnston managed to smuggle some oranges out of the pantry. They’re real fresh.”

“I can’t,” Bucky sighed, looking down. Even if he could, he wasn’t sure he could stomach anything more than some crackers at best. A hint of nausea still lingered at the base of his throat, after all. “Bauer needs me.”

“Bauer?” Walls looked as perplexed as Bucky had when Hudson had told him the same thing. “You in shit or something?”

“Hope not.”

“Well, tell him to get us some better coffee,” Walls said. “The shit we got now tastes like cat piss.”

“I’ll be sure to deliver your message,” Bucky laughed.

The clanking of his boots as he climbed the metal steps to the bridge was so loud that his ears began to ring.

On the deck, the air was like sweat. It felt like a trapped breath, swelling hot and salty around him as if he were caught in a bubble. He continued to climb steps, this time much fewer, as the door to the bridge loomed in front of him.

He sucked in a heavy breath through his nose and tasted salt on his tongue before swinging it open.

There was no way that they could have fit more people into that room even if they tried, lest they be unable to move without bumping limbs. It was more crowded than the barracks if that was possible. There were a few men he recognized, but many of whom were inside were unfamiliar to him. Some were crouched over maps, designating the best route of travel through Normandy based on radio communications from the troops on the mainland, others sitting with chunky black headsets over their ears in front of the large radios as they received those incoming transmissions. The sheer number of dials and buttons and numbers that lined the wall underneath the large window that made up the entirety of the front of the room was enough to make Bucky’s head spin. He recognized the Navy Captain that had been working closely with Bauer standing next to a smaller man holding a notepad, the Captain dictating something to him that he would then take to either a typist or a radio operator. The bridge was alive with chatter and men bustling about, making last minute preparations before the ship landed on the coast.

“Can I help you?”

A rather large man, broad shoulders clothed in the sharp black dress uniform that was far more decorated than the one Bucky had at home, approached him. Glancing at his left sleeve, Bucky noticed the insignia he bore. A golden oak leaf. He looked back into the Major’s eyes and nodded.

“Lieutenant Colonel Bauer asked to see me, sir,” he explained, but the upturn in his tone that made the statement sound like a question betrayed his nerves at the situation.

The Major—whom Bucky now recognized as Major Walters, the commander of Charlie Company—eyed the name and insignia on Bucky’s own jacket with an air of displeasure, as if he simply didn’t have the time to be concerned with the likes of him. Which might as well have been true, given how busy the bridge was. But he squared his shoulders and nodded nonetheless, turning away from Bucky to gesture into the room.

“Go ahead, Sergeant.”

Bucky gave him a curt nod, and gazed into the room once again, trying to locate his battalion commander. He finally spotted him, speaking to the Major General that was leading their division for the operation.

As he stepped carefully between rows of tables covered in documents, maps, telegrams and ashtrays, he wondered just how he hadn’t noticed him before. Lieutenant Colonel Adam Bauer was a man unlike any other Bucky had ever encountered before. Just the man’s stature in itself should have been the dead giveaway when trying to find him, as he stood about a head taller than everyone else in the room. His broad shoulders were tense as he wrung his scarred hands together, the marred skin of his fingers playing loosely with the cuff of his uniform jacket. He still hadn’t lost his habit of fidgeting when he was uncertain or nervous about something. But that was the only thing to give him away.

As Bucky approached, his conversation with the Major General ended and their eyes met, and Bucky felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Bauer only ever held one expression; no one had seen him smile in the three years since the United States had joined the Allied fight against Nazi Germany, and Bucky had a feeling no one would until it ended. And even that was unlikely. He watched carefully as the young Sergeant walked toward him, hooked nose tilted slightly into in the air as if Bucky’s mere existence displeased him. His static black eyes were as bottomless as the ocean had been, shadowed by the hard line of his thick eyebrows. As soon as Bucky was in standing in front of him, he pursed his paper-thin lips and spoke.

“Sergeant Barnes, glad to see you.”

His southern accented voice was throaty and low and sounded as if every breath he let out held some purpose or meaning, every word weighted by its value. Bucky swallowed thickly, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously as he replied.

“I came as soon as I could, sir,” he said.

“Good to hear, good to hear.” Bauer looked at down at his hands, still clasped together, and shook them out, resting them at his sides. He was silent for a moment, almost eerily so, as he looked up and to his left toward the beachhead that loomed closer by the second.

“I have an assignment for you,” he said finally, after what felt like millennia, eyes still glued to the only part of France they could see.

Bucky shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “For me, sir?”

“Yes.” He turned back toward the young man again, eyes much more serious than they had been before, a feat which Bucky would have thought near impossible. “I’ve been asked to choose someone from my battalion for this particular assignment. I spoke to Lieutenant Hudson, as I did with each other platoon commander, and we both came to the conclusion that you were the right fit for the job because of everything you did during your time in Italy. Hudson spoke very highly of you, Sergeant.”

“Well,” Bucky said, glancing down at the metal floor beneath his boots. “Thank you, sir. I’m… honoured.”

“And yet I haven’t told you what you’re going to be doing,” Bauer said, turning once again to the glass window. “In that way, you’re just like every other man on this ship—ready to throw yourself at whatever order comes your way for the sake of your country’s safety. And I admire that in a man. But it’s what sets you apart that made me choose you.”

Bucky stayed silent, unsure of what to say. He sucked the inside of his right cheek between his teeth, gnawing softly on the skin with the blunt surface of his molars. It was a habit he hadn’t been able to drop.

“I’m going to have to pull you from Oscar Company for the duration of the mission,” Bauer explained. “I’ve spoken with both Major Kelly and Lieutenant Hudson and they have agreed to this arrangement. Once we land, you will be joining Able Company of the 107th, who arrived this morning and are waiting for you on the beach. More specifically, it is Able Company’s first platoon that is entrusted with carrying out this assignment. You will be joining them. And believe you me—” Bauer sighed then, bringing two fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “—they have a reputation for being… eccentric on the battlefield. But that was why they were chosen. Why you were chosen.”

“May I ask what this mission entails, sir?” Bucky inquired. He set his jaw and pressed his teeth together as Bauer looked at him from the corner of his eyes.

“You’ll be debriefed by the Lieutenant in charge when we land,” he said. “Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to say anything at this time.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” His back straightened then, those broad shoulders only drawing his frame up higher. “That is all, Sergeant. You may go back to your barracks unless you have any further questions for me.”

“Actually, sir,” Bucky said, his brow furrowing the slightest bit. “You said it was Able Company’s first platoon, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Do they have a name?” Bucky asked, and at Bauer’s frown he added, “It’s just that it would make finding them a lot easier and quicker.” Almost as an afterthought, he mumbled a quiet, “Sir.”

Bauer’s frown only deepened, and for a moment Bucky was scared he’d said something to upset him, but then he brought a scarred hand up to his chin and held it in thought. His brow furrowed, but this time Bucky recognized it as confusion.

“They have an official title, but refuse to go by it so it’s almost been forgotten,” he explained. “I do believe they gave themselves a name, though.”

“Do you happen to remember what that name was, sir?”

Bauer thought for a moment longer, before his dark eyes lit up with realization, and he brought his hand back down to his side. He straightened his jacket by tugging on the end of it and cleared his throat before he replied.

“Yes,” he said. “I do. Unless I am mistaken, they have given themselves the name Howling Commandos, or Howlers, as some refer to them. And if that is not indication enough of their unconventional style of warfare, then I do not know what is.”

Bucky nodded, though mostly to himself as he repeated the name in his mind. And then the words found their way up his throat, spilling out of his mouth before he could stop them. He tested the name out, rolling the syllables over his tongue and seeing what taste they’d leave behind.

“Howling Commandos.”

Though at the time Bucky had been unaware, that name would come to change his life forever.

As tacky as he may have thought it to be.

━━━━━━━━

A/N: this is the first part of my new series. i’m incredibly passionate about it even though it might not be for everyone. i’ve also adjusted my writing style to fit the time period i’m writing for, so please let me know what you think !!!

read it on ao3 add yourself to my taglist! like my work? consider buying me a coffee!

← previous | series masterlist | next → (coming soon)

taglist + mutuals (let me know if you don’t wanna be tagged please! i won’t take it personally, just pm me): @psychedelicmagnum @jazmins-main-hoe @skelkitt @tomshufflepuff @sassylibrarygirl @fuckyou-imspiderman @scatterbrainedgenius @nedthegay @hazsterfield @yoinksholland @naturallytom @hollandroos @loverholland @peterstrainingwheels @marvelsswansong @stardustparker @themarauderstheoutsidersandpeggy @moonkissedtom @spideypeach @hollandsosterfield @maryjparkers @trustfundparker @skykitten78 @awkwardfangirl2014

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thedisturbeddad · 3 years

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That’s the Tooth

Dear Ms. Johnson,

I wanted to write something for Teacher Appreciation Week:

You have no idea (or probably you do) how much you’ve done for my son Skander. You might remember he had to miss school recently, when I had to take him to the dentist to have a baby tooth pulled. Back home, while his mouth was numb from injections (and he was drooling everywhere), it started feeling like those days he didn’t talk. We’d moved to Springfield when Skander was 4, and even as old as 5, he was still doing a lot of those “da da da” sounds.

But that’s years ago. Early Childhood tested Skander up on College St. when we first moved here, and Skander started kindergarten at Mark Twain with an IEP for his speech disability. It’s been so long ago it gets hard to remember what it was like to not understand him. But, after coming home from the dentist last week, I asked him if he needed anything, and we both started laughing when he said, “Muh nhhh ta ha.” I’m not being dramatic when I say it brought up old trauma with the kid. But then the most amazing thing happened: He started writing on a pad of paper what he wanted to eat!

I know a lot of people like to give awards to teachers: instead of actually finding a way to make teaching a lucrative career. I don’t have the power to do anything about that, and I don’t want to insult you with a meaningless ‘thank you’ either. I’m a veteran; so I know how that feels. I just wanted to say that I don’t know if you’re the best teacher in the world, but I do know that I couldn’t have gotten through the last 2 years without you.

And it’s not just because of Skander’s special needs. It’s Covid, and all the worries that it brought with it. I can remember how crazy it was when I started working from home early this year, (due to the fact my coworkers at Grizzly Industrial wouldn’t wear masks) and I was too worried about my mom’s life to try arguing with them. Even though the pandemic made me feel like I wasn’t in Kansas anymore (and all alone), Skander was at home with me. And you were there too! And we all tried, badly, to figure out how to make Zoom work, and we all tried to make it through the curtain.

I was doing my taxes this last January, hoping Biden would pass the stimulus he promised, and the TurboTax AI kept asking me if I bought supplies for my classrooms.

I couldn’t help thinking, “Why do teachers buy supplies for their classes?!”

I wouldn’t even bring doughnuts to my last job. Though I’ll admit they paid me a lot less than a public school teacher, while I expertly sold their expensive machines. This last February, Grizzly eventually had me listen to a recording of a customer who was urging me to go pick up my son from school at the end of my shift. I tried to tell him I couldn’t leave and had to continue taking his long order, even though that would have made me late. “It’s important” he’d said. That didn’t change the fact that I got a final warning for doing what he told me to (but I know now that he shouldn’t have had to tell me). In any case, I don’t work there anymore, and I’m not sure if I’ll find a job in time to make sure Skander and his brother go to Twain next year. But I wanted you to know that I understand what working for an employer who doesn’t pay you enough feels like.

But let’s get back to teachers appreciation week! And congratulations for getting a whole week, by the way! Must make you feel special. Veterans don’t even get that kind of guilt induced holiday. But society needs teachers more than veterans. Society probably feels that veterans have already been used up, but all you educators are still such juicy little morsels that people can throw into our American economy so we can pretend we’re not subsidizing child care for greedy companies (who pay parents, like me, such low wages). I’m sure Grizzly liked all the free babysitting you gave me. Don’t get me wrong. I know you guys do a lot of things, but let’s be honest about why y’all are considered essential workers.

But, all these things you do helped my son (and my family) make it through these last two years and got Skander to start talking. And, it’s not just you. It’s all of Mark Twain Elementary. It’s Ms. Richardson, his kindergarten teacher, and Mrs.Goodman the art teacher. It’s Mrs. Rhodes and Mrs. Wills who help him with his IEP. And Mr. B, who helps us with his stop sign in the mornings, as I drop Skander off each day. It’s everyone there.

You’ve all helped me communicate with my son and kept this city going through one of the worst pandemics in modern history. You guys are magical for how you adapted to these changes. And yet, magically, nothing ever changes for teachers and their wages. Don’t you just want to say ‘blah blah blah’ at how we all know this old story? I mean, it’s getting old to me.

But now I want to share a little magic of my own with you:

I’m not sure if Skander has told you, but we found out recently that half our family tree lived right here in Springfield. There’s a church cemetery north of town, called Mt. Comfort, which is basically a treasure trove of our DNA. I mean, if you think about all those dead bodies buried under there, which I try not to. But isn’t it amazing that we lived in a house, for over 2 years, that was a fifteen minute drive from that graveyard full of my dad’s ancestors?!

Skander and I don’t have my dad’s last name. My father’s name was Paul Reed, yet I took my mom’s last name of Barlow, because I never knew him growing up. Even though Skander and I have his Y chromosome, we were unaware that we descended from the Reeds in Springfield.

I’ve found a lot of colorful characters in our family tree, but my favorite Springfielder was Sherman Reed, a city firefighter, who was born in 1867. Around the time Billy the Kid was being shot and killed, Sherman would have been a teenager when his family moved to Springfield. I first found the Reeds in the 1900 census records for Greene County, where Sherman’s dad lists himself as a blacksmith, working for the railroads. Sherman’s occupation was fireman. When I read old newspaper stories about him, Sherman talked about how he liked taking care of animals, particularly horses. You see. Back when Sherman was helping to keep everyone in town safe from fire, the people of Springfield weren’t sure about the new fangled fire engine they’d bought, so Sherman made sure that the horse drawn fire wagons were always ready to roll. Skander was the one to point out that the horses would have been scared of all that fire. We figure’d that Sherman must have been good at keeping the animals calm while putting out fires.

Sherman had a couple of kids (one of them my great grandfather), but got divorced before his kids were grown. I found him living in an apartment on College St. by himself when he was middle aged. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Harry Potter. If you have, then you may remember why Dumbledore always sent Harry back to the Dursleys each year.

I find it strange that most people don’t talk more about how cruel it was to send him back to those muggles every summer, but the old wizard explained to Professor McGonagall one time that it was because of an old magic spell his mother had placed on him (which ended up giving him his scar). Dumbledore talked about how older magic (based on blood and bone) were basically keeping Harry safe from He Who Could Not Be Named, and Harry needed to be housed with his kin each year to keep it working. Petunia was the only one Harry had left with his mother’s blood, you see.

You might think I’m weird, but it feels magical that Sherman once lived a few blocks from where Skander was first tested at the Early Development Childhood center on College St., before I even knew my family had lived here a hundred years ago.

I’ve included an article I found about Sherman, right before he died. He was 70 years old and had worked all his life without retiring. He’d never received a pension from Springfield. After all that invaluable service, he literally had nothing to show for it. If you read between the lines of the strangely familiar editorial piece I’ve included, you realize that, at age 70, Sherman was still hanging out at the firehouse like an old dog. Too old to do anything, but no one wanted to take him off the payroll because they knew he would have nothing to live on.

Isn’t that great? Thanks Springfield!

What was this whole letter about? You might be thinking. Well. I don’t have any way of really thanking you. And I’m not going to bring you fattening doughnuts as a gift either (I’m not saying anything to offend; I just know most people added a few pounds over the last couple of years).

But. I just wanted you to know. From experience. That, maybe, someday – some great granddaughter of yours might end up in Springfield, needing help. And when that future descendant of yours does…. If there’s still magic left in Springfield…. Then there’ll be somebody who works for the city (and who doesn’t get paid enough) who will be there to help. Cuz they’re hard workers who care. I know that doesn’t do you any good right now, but if Sherman is any indication: it’s all you’re going to get.

Thanks anyways,

Jeffrey Reed/Barlow

#essential workers #teacher appreciation day #teacher #teacher appreciation week #genealogy #firefighter #pension #pandemic #late talking children #einstein syndrome

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daveykid · 5 years

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A Deeper Look into Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."

I'm not sure how much specifically you know about this album, possibly aside from the album's title track. (Which so happens to be the ultimate embodiment of the theme of this deeper look, and quite likely not so unintentionally.)

First, the obvious side.

This record is the best seller for Bruce & his band at an estimated 30 million units. It's also estimated to be the 25th top-selling album of all time. It had seven singles in the Billboard Top Ten from June 1984 to February of 1986. Seven Top 10s out of the twelve total tracks on the album - and a string of hits that lasted for over twenty-one months. (For a musical 'frame of reference', an album we know intimately, Drake's Scorpion had eight singles that reached Billboard's Top 10 list, but hung around a total of only eight months. Obviously, time, trend, and music consumption moves at a much different pace these days so it's not a direct comparison but again just a frame for reference.) The title track as a single is certified Gold status, and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) placed the song 59th out of 365 for their Songs of the Century list. (The list is based upon "promoting a better understanding of America's musical and cultural heritage." In the top twenty of this list are songs like "Over the Rainbow", "White Christmas", "Take Me out to the Ball Game", "Stars and Stripes Forever", and "God Bless America". Very different than a song like "Born in the U.S.A.") We today, still hear classic rock and classic hits stations playing "Born in the U.S.A" and "Dancing in the Dark" seemingly on a once-every-hour basis.

And now to the dark side.

If you take the catchy & fun-loving choruses, the mostly-upbeat instrumentation, the seemingly pridefully patriotic title of the album and its' greatest hit, and ignore the rest - the sales, the awards, and the recognition that this is one of America's most glory-freedom-working man-red, white, and blue-centric albums of all time makes a lot of sense. However, if you discard the album cover, mute the comfortable sounds of the Cougar-Mellencamp style 80s Americana-Rock & Roll, and read the lyrics - then you might discover this album to be one of the greatest misunderstandings in pop music recordings.

From here, I'll just let selections from Springsteen's lyrics speak for themselves. I limit the following to selections, not to try to take away from a 'Heartland-Americana' message, but simply because some of the songs are actually just somewhat silly love songs, and their lyrics don't take either side of my 'argument'.

We'll start with the title track of the album and the first song on the album.

"Born in the U.S.A"

Born down in a dead man's town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground End up like a dog that's been beat too much 'Til you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A Born in the U.S.A

Got in a little hometown jam So they put a rifle in my hand Sent me off to a foreign land To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A

Come back home to the refinery Hiring man said "son if it was up to me" Went down to see my V.A. man He said "son, don't you understand"

I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong They're still there, he's all gone He had a woman he loved in Saigon I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary Out by the gas fires of the refinery I'm ten years burning down the road Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go Born in the U.S.A I was born in the U.S.A Born in the U.S.A

Okay, actually those are the EXACT lyrics for the ENTIRE song without any REDUCTIONS. Holy shit. That's heavier & more critical than even I knew. Enough said - on to track two.

"Cover Me"

The times are tough now, just getting tougher This whole world is rough, it's just getting rougher Cover me, come on baby, cover me Well I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

Now promise me baby you won't let them find us Hold me in your arms, let's let our love blind us Cover me, shut the door and cover me I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

Outside's the rain, the driving snow I can hear the wild wind blowing Turn out the light, bolt the door I ain't going out there no more

This whole world is out there just trying to score I've seen enough I don't wanna see any more, Cover me, come on in and cover me I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

Outside's the rain, the driving snow I can hear the wild wind blowing Turn out the light, bolt the door I ain't going out there no more

Here the lyrics aren't specifically anti-government, US-critical, etc., but they certainly aren't happy lyrics. These words are expressing heavy depression, intense anxiety, and forlorn frustration. The narrator is searching for a romantic partner to willfully blind himself and be ignorant and shielded from the world outside.

"Darlington County"

Driving into Darlington County Me and Wayne on the Fourth of July Driving into Darlington County Looking for some work on the county line

We drove down from New York City Where the girls are pretty but they just want to know your name Driving into Darlington City Got a union connection with an uncle of Wayne's

We drove eight hundred miles without seeing a cop We got rock and roll music blasting off the T-top, singing

Little girl sitting in the window Ain't seen my buddy in seven days, play it boys County man tells me the same thing He don't work and he don't get paid

Little girl you're so young and pretty Walk with me and you can have your way And we'll leave this Darlington City For a ride down that Dixie Highway

Driving out of Darlington County Eyes seen the glory of the coming of the Lord Driving out of Darlington County Seen Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford

This song is probably the most jingle-jangle, pop-friendly tune on the record, but again, the lyrics tell a different story. And also nothing really political here, but it is a story of two somewhat morally decrepit, sleazy guys who, even though they are unemployed and looking for work, are pretending to have a lot of money in order to get with pretty girls. The narrator even describes her as a 'little girl' who is 'so young and pretty'. The listener can assume that the narrator leaves town with this girl and leaves his buddy stranded, only to see him getting arrested by a state trooper. There's nothing to be proud of in this story.

"Working on the Highway"

I work for the county out on ninety five All day I hold a red flag and watch the traffic pass me by In my head I keep a picture of a pretty little miss Someday, mister, I'm gonna lead a better life than this

Working on the highway, laying down the blacktop Working on the highway, all day long I don't stop Working on the highway, blasting through the bedrock Working on the highway, working on the highway

I met her at a dance down at the union hall She was standing with her brothers, back up against the wall Sometimes we'd go walking down the Union tracks One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back

I saved up my money and I put it all away I went to see her daddy but we didn't have much to say "Son, can't you see that she's just a little girl She don't know nothing about this cruel, cruel world" We lit out down to Florida, we got along all right One day her brothers came and got her and they took me in a black-and-white The prosecutor kept the promise that he made on that day And the judge got mad and he put me straight away I wake up every morning to the work bell clang Me and the warden go swinging on the Charlotte County road gang I'm

Working on the highway, laying down the blacktop Working on the highway, all day long I don't stop Working on the highway, blasting through the bedrock Working on the highway, working on the highway

This is another song that seems to be just an upbeat, pure-pride working man's Americana ballad about hard work and the simple life and simple pleasures. Look closer and we see the story unfolds in another dark direction. The narrator is a highway construction worker who's got nothing better to do during his workday than to fantasize about a sexy girl. He eventually meets someone that he feels fits that description. They like each other. They quickly elope to Florida. Her brothers come and get her and take her back home. Turns out she was not even the age of legal consent, sending him to prison for statutory rape where he's forced into manual labor where, you guessed it, he's working on the highway. Not much joy here. No pride to be found. Nothing to be proud of.

"Downbound Train"

I had a job, I had a girl I had something going, mister, in this world I got laid off down at the lumber yard Our love went bad, times got hard Now I work down at the car wash Where all it ever does is rain Don't you feel like you're a rider on a downbound train She just said, "Joe, I gotta go We had it once, we ain't got it anymore" She packed her bags, left me behind She bought a ticket on the Central Line Nights as I sleep, I hear that whistle whining I feel her kiss in the misty rain And I feel like I'm a rider on a downbound train

Last night I heard your voice You were crying, crying, you were so alone You said your love had never died You were waiting for me at home Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods I ran till I thought my chest would explode There in the clearing, beyond the highway In the moonlight, our wedding house shone I rushed through the yard I burst through the front door, my head pounding hard Up the stairs I climbed The room was dark, our bed was empty Then I heard that long whistle whine And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried Now I swing a sledge hammer on a railroad gang Knocking down them cross ties, working in the rain Now, don't it feel like you're a rider on a downbound train

Shit. Another song that ends with the narrator getting arrested for a seemingly-honest act of desperation. There's nothing from the lyrics that need elaboration. Guy gets laid-off from a low-skill, low-education job. Marriage suffers. Woman leaves. Man gets an even shittier job. Man dwells on his broken heart and becomes delusional. Man breaks into either his old home which he doesn't own anymore or to the home where his ex-wife lives. Either way he ends up doing forced labor in prison.

"I'm on Fire"

Hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Mhmm I got a bad desire Oh oh oh, I'm on fire Tell me now, baby, is he good to you? And can he do to you the things that I do? Oh no I can take you higher Oh oh oh, I'm on fire Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby Edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley Through the middle of my skull At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet And a freight train running through the middle of my head Only you can cool my desire

Another song that has nothing to be happy about. I won't even touch the 'hey little girl, is your daddy home?' part, because that could either be the narrator's way of talking sexy to a woman who already has a man, or it could be taken literally: a pedophile trying to have sex with a non-adult girl. The last two verses of the song are again describing severe mental and emotional instability. The narrator feels like he's been cut through the middle of his mind with a long, but dull knife. He also frequently wakes up in sweat and feels like a freight train is running through his mind. This is definitely not a love song, and there is nothing to be happy or encouraged about here. I'll skip "No Surrender" because though that is another song of run-out-of-options desperation, it is the most hopeful and resilient story on the album, which doesn't say much.

"Bobby Jean"

Well, I came to your house the other day Your mother said you went away She said there was nothing that I could have done There was nothing nobody could say Me and you, we've known each other ever since we were sixteen I wished I could have known I wished I could have called you Just to say goodbye, Bobby Jean Now, you hung with me when all the others Turned away, turned up their nose We liked the same music, we liked the same bands We liked the same clothes We told each other that we were the wildest The wildest things we'd ever seen Now I wished you would have told me I wished I could have talked to you Just to say goodbye, Bobby Jean Now, we went walking in the rain, Talking about the pain that from the world we hid Now there ain't nobody, nowhere, nohow Gonna ever understand me the way you did Maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere In some bus or train traveling along In some motel room there'll be a radio playing And you'll hear me sing this song Well, if you do, you'll know I'm thinking of you And all the miles in between And I'm just calling you one last time Not to change your mind, but just to say I miss you, baby Good luck, goodbye, Bobby Jean

This is another song of broken relationships, inevitable endings, and filled with regret. The narrator loses the only person he feels he could express himself to, the only person who truly understood him - and it seems obvious to the reader that this connection and love was unreciprocated because he didn't even know she was leaving, let alone gone. Another song of disappointment and sadness. The music is seemingly light-hearted with a doo-wop, Jersey boardwalk kinda sound.

"I'm Goin' Down"

We sit in the car outside your house I can feel the heat coming 'round I go to put my arm around you And you give me a look like I'm way out of bounds Well you let out one of your bored sighs Well lately when I look into your eyes Down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down We get dressed up and we go out, baby, for the night We come home early burning, burning, burning in some fire fight I'm sick and tired of you setting me up yeah Setting me up just to knock-a knock-a knock-a me down Down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down I'm goin down, down, down, down, hey now I pull you close now baby but when we kiss I can feel a doubt I remember back when we started My kisses used to turn you inside out I used to drive you to work in the morning Friday night I'd drive you all around You used to love to drive me wild yeah But lately girl you get your kicks from just driving me down

And yet another about the dying embers of a love soon to be lost. Simply put, it's a couple who's been together for quite some time, and it's growing boring, regular, even poisonous.

"Glory Days" Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight And I'm going to drink till I get my fill And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it But I probably will Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture A little of the glory of, well time slips away And leaves you with nothing mister but Boring stories of glory days

I employ only the last verse here to encapsulate the overall meaning of the song. The story features an ex-great high school baseball player, a formerly popular talk-of-the-town beauty, and (assumedly) the narrator's father who's recently been laid-off and can't find work anywhere else. The common denominator the three characters share is their sadness, their brokenness, their strong nostalgia, and their fruitless desire to be young again.

"Dancing in the Dark" I get up in the evening And I ain't got nothing to say I come home in the morning I go to bed feeling the same way I ain't nothing but tired Man I'm just tired and bored with myself Hey there baby, I could use just a little help You can't start a fire You can't start a fire without a spark This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark Message keeps getting clearer Radio's on and I'm moving 'round the place I check my look in the mirror I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face Man I ain't getting nowhere I'm just living in a dump like this There's something happening somewhere Baby I just know that there is You can't start a fire You can't start a fire without a spark This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark You sit around getting older There's a joke here somewhere and it's on me I'll shake this world off my shoulders Come on baby this laugh's on me Stay on the streets of this town And they'll be carving you up alright They say you gotta stay hungry Hey baby I'm just about starving tonight I'm dying for some action I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book I need a love reaction Come on now baby gimme just one look

This the second most successful and well-known song and also the second most often misunderstood song from the album. Most folks tend to just focus on that strong, driving backbeat and the cute little dancing chorus. Read these lyrics and we have the story of ANOTHER unskilled, undereducated, lonely and isolated man who is working third-shift, going through a monotonous depression, and desperately reaching out for any kind of emotional & physical connection. There is no resolution that gives us a happy ending. The 'baby' referred to throughout the song never speaks, is never addressed, doesn't have a name, and the reader has no way of knowing if this person even exists. It's just a bare and desperate man appealing to the world for anyone.

"My Hometown" I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around This is your hometown This is your hometown This is your hometown This is your hometown In '65 tension was running high at my high school There was a lot of fights between the black and white There was nothing you could do Two cars at a light on a Saturday night in the back seat there was a gun Words were passed in a shotgun blast Troubled times had come To my hometown My hometown My hometown My hometown Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back To your hometown Your hometown Your hometown Your hometown Last night me and Kate we laid in bed Talking about getting out Packing up our bags maybe heading south I'm thirty five we got a boy of our own now Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around This is your hometown

Thought this one was going to be different? You thought Bruce wouldn't... couldn't let us watch the record stop spinning in its' final seconds and send us off into the night in darkness, desperation, gloom, regret, heartbreak, inevitable sadness, etc. etc.? You were hoping for a shot of love or light or hope or anything that will make us glad and happy about life and the world we live in? Well, you were wrong and embarrassingly naive for hoping. This song is a saddened look at the narrator's hometown. Violent and unstable relationships between black and white residents fueled by racial tension and inequality. Someone was murdered in the heat of this friction which caused an economic and cultural downward spiral to which the narrator's only answer is to move himself and his family away. The story ends in the same way it began, but not so proudly and optimistically - the narrator offers his son one last look behind the wheel at his old hometown. No pride. No resolution. No tribalism, no nationalism, no patriotism. No union pride nor worker's pride nor industry pride. Just a river slowly drying up. Just individuals and communities growing more desperate as their already-small window continues its' shrinking.

And that is a lyrical examination of literally EVERY song on the album whose title track the RIAA says proudly promotes a better understanding of America's musical and cultural heritage among songs like "Over the Rainbow", "White Christmas", "Take Me out to the Ball Game", "Stars and Stripes Forever", and "God Bless America". It looks like what we've got here is a failure to communicate.

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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IBM revenue has fallen for 20 quarters — but it used to run its business very differently (IBM)

IBM shares fell sharply Wednesday after the company reported its 20th quarter of declining revenue, and earnings that were worse than analysts expected. Profits have been eroding for years as competition and the internet displaced the hardware services segments that were once its core businesses. In recent years, it's spent a lot of its money buying back its own shares, a practice some say runs counter to innovation.

But IBM used to run its business very differently. In its heyday, profits were just one of its priorities, and for much of the 20th century, that was a formula for success.

It sounds like a corporate fairy tale. Imagine for a moment an employer that takes care of you from cradle to grave, a company that hosts lavish carnivals for your family, a place where workers feel intensely loyal because they are treated so well. That company was IBM.

"In the middle of the 20th century, it was the most famous, the most admired, the most widely respected company in the world," says Quinn Mills, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author of "The IBM Lesson" and other books about the company's history and culture.

Listen to an audio version of this story:

By the late 1960s, IBM had become a leader in how companies treated workers and thought of their roles in society.

Its culture was called "cradle to grave," meaning that if you got in, the company would take care of you. Around the country there were even country clubs and golf courses where workers at all levels could play for virtually nothing.

I visited the former IBM country club in Poughkeepsie last year. It's called Casperkill now. IBM sold it more than a decade ago, and you can still find retired IBMers grumbling about the changes.

"I used to play for nothing," Ron Dedrick says from the seat of his golf cart. He's a retired programmer who started in 1966. "Now it costs me like $3,000 a year."

The ending of fringe benefits like the golf course are symbols of a larger transition both at IBM and at most American corporations in recent decades. At IBM, they meant a change to one of the company's three core values outlined by its founder, Thomas Watson Sr., and his son Thomas Watson Jr., who together ran the company for much of the first half of the 20th century.

The best known of those values was what they called "respect for the individual," and with it came one of the most astonishing policies in American business. For more than seven decades, IBM never laid off workers. If business changed, workers might be retrained and forced to adapt. There was the possibility of being moved across the country or overseas, giving IBM the internal tag "I've Been Moved."

But as long as you did your job, if you worked for IBM, you had job security. Thomas Watson said it was good for business.

"He believed people worked better when they were secure, not insecure," Mills says. Watson "believed people would make a full commitment to the company if they knew they could count on the company to make a full commitment to them."

And it's true. IBMers interviewed for this story who worked there starting in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s are still intensely loyal, even when they criticize some of the changes in recent years. Many say they would do anything for the company back then.

Changing norms

Most companies weren't as generous as IBM. It was the most extreme example of a big-business norm in the middle of the 20th century, one quite different from today's.

"Most corporate executives in this period, when prosperity was widely shared, thought we could make a profit, and we can take care of the workers, and we want to make great products for the customers, and we want to be fair to our suppliers, and we want to be good citizens to the community," says Richard Sylla, an economic historian at the New York University Stern School of Business.

We think in terms of profits, but people continue to rank first.

Thomas Watson Jr. absolutely believed that. As the son of IBM's founder and its postwar CEO, he gave a series of speeches in the 1960s outlining the IBM values that he and his father developed.

"As businessmen," he said, "we think in terms of profits, but people continue to rank first."

Before we get to how and why that changed, let's review the history of the corporation.

A brief history

In the late 1800s, the coast-to-coast railroad network linked US states, creating the world's first mass market. That allowed companies to build large, efficient, centralized factories, and with them, came the first tycoons.

"The corporations that were most efficient, like Rockefeller in oil and Carnegie in steel, grew to become very large corporations," Sylla says. "Hundreds of millions of dollars. So then America had big business, and that continued into the 20th century."

At their simplest level, corporations allow a group of people to put their money together to do things they couldn't do alone. They can grow by reinvesting their profits, and issuing stocks and bonds, growing much faster than if they had to raise and use their own cash.

Corporations brought us electricity, automobiles, and radio, and then the public started pouring cash into the stock market. And you probably know what happens next.

The stock market crashes, and that leads to the Great Depression and then the New Deal, and that brought modern financial regulations. For the first time, companies had to reveal a lot of information to investors, quarter by quarter and year by year.

"Wall Street hated it at the time," Sylla says. "But not long after World War II, they realized it was probably the best thing that ever happened to them because the public — because of New Deal regulations — had a new confidence in Wall Street, and it boomed in the 1950s and '60s."

'The world to themselves'

After World War II, American companies "pretty much had the world to themselves," Sylla says. Most of their rivals in Europe and Japan were rebuilding amid the war's destruction, so big companies were raking in cash and didn't have any issue being generous.

"When we compare that time to today, we find everyone seemed to share in the prosperity, from the corporate executives right down to the assembly-line workers," Sylla says.

There was a lot of work to be done, so companies paid well, and with IBM in the lead, started to offer benefits like pensions and health insurance.

Meanwhile, unions and Washington grew stronger.

"The notion was there were three sources of power in society: government, business, and labor," Mills, the Harvard professor emeritus, says. "Those three elements of society would work together to manage the economy, society, et cetera."

So by this period, those forces led more companies to look like IBM.

For IBM, Watson Jr. was making big bets, shifting the company from mechanical tabulating devices to a new thing called a computer. The System/360 was its first major mainframe.

Watson's strategy paid off. Hundreds of thousands of IBMers brought us into the modern computer age, leasing and servicing those room-size mainframes to companies around the world.

But while IBM powered ahead, the rest of corporate America ran into problems in the 1970s.

Spending on the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty led to inflation. That made it more expensive for American companies to do business at the moment Japan and Germany were ready to compete.

"Corporations were kind of squeezed," Sylla says. "So American corporations began to rethink their whole models."

And that rethinking led companies to focus almost entirely on the bottom line.

As Sylla puts it, companies began to forget about the workers.

"Build your factory in Mexico or someplace else where labor is cheaper" became the thinking, he says.

In the 1980s, IBM's management tried to protect the mainframe business against new competition from PCs. It didn't work. By the early '90s, IBM was running out of cash. There was talk of splitting the company into pieces. Then IBM hired its first outsider to lead the company, Louis Gerstner, who came from RJR Nabisco.

'It's no longer respect for the individual'

Sylla says this was the moment "IBM got a big dose of shareholder value," the focus that has transformed American business over the past 40 years.

One morning early on in Gerstner's tenure, Thomas Watson Jr. joined the new CEO in the back of the car that drove him to the office. Gerstner says Watson told him to take whatever steps were necessary to get the company back on track.

But in many ways, the steps Gerstner took were a repudiation of the values Watson outlined in the 1960s. In one speech, Gerstner said what IBM needed was "a series of very tough-minded, market-driven strategies" — strategies that delivered performance in the marketplace and shareholder value.

Then in 1993, IBM did the unthinkable: It laid people off. Sixty-thousand workers had to go.

It was basically look to the left, look to the right. Some of you won't be here.

Even for workers who knew the company was in bad shape, it was tough. "It was basically look to the left, look to the right. Some of you won't be here," says Marcy Holle, an IBM communications manager at the time. "That's when my heart went through the floor."

Holle soon became busy strategizing how to tell workers, and the public, what was happening at one of the most iconic American brands. But around the office, that IBM dedication was fraying.

"Productivity decreased because people were looking for jobs, talking in the hallways about who they thought would get laid off," she says.

Many credit Gerstner with saving IBM and keeping it together. (Gerstner declined to be interviewed for this story.) To get there, Gerstner said, in effect, that IBM needed to look more like its peers. That meant cutting back on pensions and perks, like those golf courses, where Ron Dedrick plays.

"So many things have changed," Dedrick says now. His wife actually still works at IBM.

"In the past, you got rewarded for good work."

In more recent years, critics contend that IBM has moved into the financial-engineering business, failing to grow revenue but still generating profits with financial strategies such as buying back its stock.

IBM declined to make its current CEO, Ginni Rometty, available for an interview.

Workers like Robert Ochoa, who retired last year, say the company is not the same.

"It's no longer respect for the individual," Ochoa says. "It's respect for the stockholders."

"The Price of Profits," our series with Marketplace, looks at what happens when profits become a company’s product. For more, visit priceofprofits.org.

Join the conversation about this story »

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/donald-trump-supporters-watching-next-four-years-closely/

Donald Trump supporters watching next four years closely

One thing we learned from Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States was that many people who had voted for Barack Obama voted against Hillary Clinton. They wanted change, and they haven’t forgotten all the promises that Trump made to them.

There are actually many who take him at his word even though he has trained his press secretary Sean Spicer to create many versions of what he did say. These voters aren’t stupid, and as their stories show, they’re watching, and if Trump doesn’t deliver in his four years, they’re open to another change.

She tugged 13 envelopes from a cabinet above the stove, each one labeled with a different debt: the house payment, the student loans, the vacuum cleaner she bought on credit.

Lydia Holt and her husband tuck money into these envelopes with each paycheck to whittle away at what they owe. They both earn about $10 an hour and, with two kids, there are usually some they can’t fill. She did the math; at this rate, they’ll be paying these same bills for 87 years.

In 2012, Holt voted for Barack Obama because he promised her change, but she feels that change hasn’t reached her here. So last year she chose a presidential candidate unlike any she’d ever seen, the billionaire businessman who promised to help America, and people like her, win again.

Many of her neighbors did, too – so many that for the first time in more than 30 years, Crawford County, Wisconsin, a sturdy brick in the once-mighty Big Blue Wall, abandoned the Democratic Party and that wall crumbled. The rural county lent Donald Trump 3,844 votes toward his win. More came from formerly blue counties to the north and to the south, and on and on. Some 50 counties stretching 300 miles down the Mississippi River – through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois – transformed in one election season into Trump Country.

They voted for Trump for an array of reasons, and the list of grievances they hope he now corrects is long and exacting: stagnant wages, the cost of health care, a hard-to-define feeling that things are not getting better, at least not for people like them.

Here in Crawford County, residents often recite two facts about their hometown, the first one proudly: It is the second-oldest community in the state. The next is that it’s also one of the poorest.

There are no rusted-out factories to embody this discontent. The main street of Prairie du Chien butts up to the Mississippi River and bustles with tourists come summer. Pickup trucks crowd parking lots at the 3M plant and Cabela’s distribution center where hundreds work. Just a few vacant storefronts hint at the seething resentment that life still seems harder here than it should.

In this place that astonished America when it helped hand Trump the White House, many of those who chose him greeted the frenetic opening acts of his presidency with a shrug. Immigration is not their top concern, and so they watched with some trepidation as Trump signed orders to build a wall on the Mexican border and bar immigrants from seven Muslim countries, sowing chaos around the world.

Among them is a woman who works for $10.50 an hour in a sewing factory, who still admires Obama, bristles at Trump’s bluster, but can’t afford health insurance. And the dairy farmer who thinks Trump is a jerk – “somebody needs to get some Gorilla Glue and glue his lips shut” – but has watched his profits plummet and was willing to take the risk.

There’s a man who owns an engine repair shop and struggles to keep the lights on, and a bartender who cringes when he sees “Made in China” printed on American goods.

There’s also Holt, who makes $400 a week as a lawyer’s assistant and whose husband doesn’t do much better at a car parts store. She is enthusiastic that Trump started quickly doing the things he said he would, because she worries that by the time their sons grow up there will be nothing left for them here.

In this corner of middle America, in this one, small slice of the nation that sent Trump to Washington, they are watching and they are waiting, their hopes pinned on his promised economic renaissance. And if four years from now the change he pledged hasn’t found them here, the people of Crawford County said they might change again to someone else.

—

Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined a name for what’s happened in her state’s rural pockets: the politics of resentment.

She spent years traveling to small towns and talking to people at diners and gas stations. And when she asked which political party best represented them, their answers almost always sounded something like, “Are you crazy lady? Neither party is representing people around here.”

“People have been looking for a politician who is going to change that, going to listen to them, do it differently,” she said. “People a lot of times don’t have specifics about what that means. They just know that however government is operating currently is not working for them.”

In Crawford County, with just 16,000 residents, that dissatisfaction stems from feeling left behind as other places prospered.

There are plenty of jobs in retail or on factory floors, but it’s hard to find one that pays more than $12 an hour. Ambitious young people leave and don’t come back. Rural schools are dwindling and with them a sense of pride and purpose.

Still, much of the economic anxiety is based not on measurable decay, but rather a perception that life is decaying, said Jim Bowman, director of the county’s Economic Development Corporation.

There are higher-paying jobs – in welding, for example – but companies can’t find enough workers with the right training, Bowman said. The county’s $44,000-a-year median household income is $9,000 less than the state’s, but the cost of living is lower, too.

Just 15 percent of adults have college degrees, half the national average, and yet the ratio of people living in poverty is below the country as a whole.

Crawford County and all the other places in the county cluster along the Mississippi River that switched from Obama to Trump rank roughly in the middle on a scale of American comfort in one economic think tank’s county-by-county appraisal of community distress.

Yet for many here, it doesn’t feel that way.

“If you ask anybody here, we’ll all tell you the same thing: We’re tired of living like this. We’ve been railroaded, run over by the politicians and run over by laws,” said Mark Berns, leaning through the service window in the small-engine repair shop downtown that he can barely keep open anymore. He drives a 14-year-old truck with 207,000 miles on it because he doesn’t make enough profit to buy a new one.

Berns watched Trump’s first days in office half-hopeful, half-frightened.

“He jumps on every bandwagon there is. It’s a mess,” he said, bemoaning what he described as a quantity-over-quality, “sign, sign, sign” approach to governing. “I just hope we get the jobs back and the economy on its feet, so everybody can get a decent job and make a decent living, and have that chance at the American dream that’s gone away over the past eight or 10 years.

“I’m still optimistic,” he said, sighing. “I hope I’m not wrong.”

—

Marlene Kramer gets to work before the sun comes up and spends her days sitting at a sewing machine, stitching sports uniforms for $10.50 an hour.

Kramer, who voted twice for Obama, used to watch Trump on “Celebrity Apprentice.” ”I said to myself, ‘Ugh, I can’t stand him.'” When he announced his candidacy, she thought it was a joke. “Then my husband said to me, ‘Just think, everything he touches seems to turn to money.'” And she changed her mind.

She’s 54, and she’s worked since she was 14, all hard jobs: feeding cows, pulling weeds, standing all day on factory floors. Now it’s the sewing shop, where she’s happy and gets to sit. But there’s no health insurance.

Her bosses, brothers Todd and Scott Yeomans, opened the factory 12 years ago. They said they’re trying to do the right thing by making sportswear with American-made fabrics and American labor. But they compete against factories overseas.

They’d like to offer insurance. The other day, a trusted worker quit for a job with benefits. But they’ve run the numbers, and it would cost $200,000 a year – far more than they can spend.

Kramer said she’s glad the Affordable Care Act has helped millions get insurance. But it hasn’t helped her.

She and her husband were stunned to find premiums over $1,000 a month. Her daughter recently moved into their house with her five children, so there’s no money to spare. They opted to pay the penalty of $2,000, and pray they don’t get sick until Trump, she hopes, keeps his promise to replace the law with something better.

Kramer thinks Obama did as good a job as he could in the time he had. She admires him, still, but went with Trump. That doesn’t seem incongruous to her, just a simple calculation of results.

“His things aren’t going the way we want them here,” she said, “so we needed to go in another direction.”

Across town, Robbo Coleman leaned over the bar he tends and described a similar political about-face. He held up an ink pen, wrapped in plastic stamped “Made in China.”

“I don’t see why we can’t make pens in Prairie du Chien or in Louisville, Kentucky, or in Alabama or wherever,” said Coleman. “Trump brought something to the table that I haven’t heard or seen before. And if it doesn’t turn out, then, hey, at least we tried.”

Coleman doesn’t love Trump’s moves to build a wall or ban certain immigrants – all Americans descended from immigrants, he said, including his own relatives, who migrated from Germany too many generations ago to count. But he’s frustrated that other politicians stopped listening to working people like him.

“We’ve got to give him some time,” he said of Trump. “He’s not Houdini.”

Even some rural Wisconsin Democrats agreed with Coleman’s assessment, and think their party’s leaders are among those who stopped paying attention to those just trying to get by. On the same day that Trump took the oath of office, a group of them huddled in the back room of a tavern, still trying to grasp how the election went awry.

Bob Welsh met Hillary Clinton at a rope line in Iowa and asked her to visit Wisconsin. But she didn’t come a single time during her campaign against Trump, and Welsh thinks that confirmed in the minds of many that Democrats are disinterested in white working people.

Welsh wears flannel shirts and suspenders. He grew up on a farm, worked as a herdsman, and drove a school bus until he was 76 years old. He’s 78 now, and knows his neighbors as kind, hard-working people, and could barely believe they voted for a man he finds reprehensible. But the left-right, blue-red vitriol that has cleaved apart the country has not left the same scars here, where wives reported not knowing how their own husbands voted and husbands said they never asked their wives.

Welsh said he hopes Trump finds a way to keep his promise to build his friends better lives.

“If he does that then he’ll change my mind,” he said. “And I’ll be the first to admit it.”

—

Bernard Moravits hosed the mud and cow dung off the boots pulled up over his jeans and headed for his truck, to drive to town to talk to a banker about keeping his farm afloat.

Moravits – everyone calls him Tinker – works on his farm outside of town at least 12 hours every day, and usually a lot longer. He diversified to minimize risk and has dairy and beef cows, and acre after acre of corn, beans, alfalfa.

“You don’t hit a home run that way, but you don’t get your ass kicked either,” he said. “But this year could be the ass-kicking year.”

The price of milk and agricultural goods has plummeted, and it’s hard to keep things running.

Change is what he looked to Obama for and now expects from Trump. He wants the president to reduce red tape and renegotiate trade deals to benefit American farmers. And he hopes people make more money and spend more money, which eventually trickles down to him.

“I think he’s a shrewd businessman,” he said. “He’s been broke several times. He keeps bouncing back, and he knows how big business works.”

He has several choice words for Trump’s move to build “his stupid wall.” Moravits employs Hispanic workers who have been with him 15 years. He built them apartments. He trusts them to do a dirty, difficult job that he says white people aren’t willing to do.

“A lot of people don’t treat them like people,” he grumbled.

Unlike many transfixed by Trump’s presidency, Moravits doesn’t stay up-to-the-minute on the news. In the morning, he checks the agriculture prices and the weather. As protests over Trump’s immigration ban raged for days, Moravits wasn’t paying attention.

“The play-by-play don’t mean bullshit,” he said. “It’s like watching the Super Bowl. What counts is how it ends.”

He took over this farm at 18 years old, when his father died of an aneurysm while milking cows. He said he plans to die here, too. He’ll retire when “they close the casket lid.”

But if nothing changes and changes soon he might have to borrow against his equity.

Moravits isn’t sure Trump is going to “Make America Great Again” for farmers. But he feels he had to take the gamble.

“He might have us in a war in two weeks,” he said. “We’ll come back here in six months, drink a 30-pack of Busch Light and talk, because no one knows now what’s gonna happen.”

He laughed, then shrugged and pantomimed rolling the dice.

var VUUKLE_EMOTE_SIZE = "90px"; VUUKLE_EMOTE_IFRAME = "180px" var EMOTE_TEXT = ["HAPPY","INDIFFERENT","AMUSED","EXCITED","ANGRY"]

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