THE TURKEY REBELLION
THE TURKEY REBELLION
BY JOHN TUFT
It was the day of the annual Turkey Bowl, a football game played Thanksgiving Day, between the Hatfields and McCoys. No, not those ones. The ones who lived in the Blue Horizon Development tucked away in a corner of Beaver County in western Pennsylvania. They invited me to be one of the turkeys, as they referred to themselves for the purposes of this particular game. If you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m somewhat of a competitive soul. The game is full on tackle because, c’mon, what’s the point unless someone might get hurt or if you can’t unleash the satisfaction of laying some hurt on another? So, if the annual Turkey Bowl is a grudge match, so much the better.
The Hatfields are those who are rooted in the area and staying put. Fred is a coal miner, Bilco is a tow operator on the rivers, Jamal works the coke ovens at LTV in Aliquippa, Jeff just got back from Nam and always will be just getting back. I’m one of the McCoys, people who went to college and come back for visits. As is Iris, who drives long haul trucks while working on a degree from community college in forest management, Bill, who is a studio musician in New York while studying to be a minister, Barb who is going to go on to coach women’s college basketball, and Seymour, a psychiatric nurse in the VA hospital. Before the game gets going, we pause to remember Grady, a dust-off medic who bought it in Da Nang. At the age of 19.
As we’re walking off the markers for the end zones, conversation turns to where we were when we heard President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I was in Mrs. Wilson’s fourth grade classroom and ran all the way home terrified at this dark force stalking the land. Porter, Grady’s little brother says his big brother was ready to go hunt the bastard himself, at the ripe age of 10. Then we set the rules: full tackle, count to five Mississippi before rushing the quarterback, call your own penalties and fight it out in the arena of the Turkey Bowl brawl. Meaning, whoever shouts loudest or is most threatening wins the call and the ball goes back ten paces. Five-minute breaks if someone is bleeding, first team to score ten touchdowns wins. Simple. Flip a coin to see who kicks off, either a real kick or deep pass. Makes no nevermind.
It is a seesaw battle, the teams pretty evenly matched although the people working labor are holding up much better and wearing down us who are soft college types. About an hour into the game, Jeff takes the ball on a sweep right and is gang tackled. For a moment, there is silence as the tangled heap of bodies glories in the full contact competition. But then soft crying is heard, coming from the bottom of the pile. Suddenly the soft crying turns into screams of panic. We unpeel the pile and there is Jeff curled up on the ground, somewhere else altogether in his head. Seems under the stifling pile of bodies his mind has him back being a tunnel rat in Viet Nam. His job was to crawl through the ubiquitous tunnels of the Viet Cong with a flashlight and a .45 revolver and his nerve.
Back in the pitch black tunnels, terror awaited at every turn. Booby traps or the muzzle flash of black pajama clad soldier. If you were injured, you were on your own to kill the one in front of you while looking into his or her eyes, smelling his breath, his sweat as odorous as yours. Then get yourself out of there. Under the pile of bodies who tackled him, Jeff is suddenly thrust back there. He frantically pulls at his shirt, tugging it off. Then his jeans, stripping down in the cold November afternoon. Everyone is afraid to approach the distraught teammate, the next-door kid gone berserk. We don’t know what to do, how to console him. He is naked and afraid.
It is Iris who knows. She peels off her sweatshirts, down to her bra. And if you don’t think she would, you don’t know Iris. Then her jeans. She sits down beside Jeff, not touching him, just sitting. The coal miner is next. Then the tow guy, the studio musician, basketball coach, coke oven stoker, yours truly. We all strip down to our underwear and sit in a circle with Jeff, our wounded brother. In the cold air, Hatfields and McCoys alike shiver in silence. Nobody, but nobody, says a word. Stripped down silence is the point. The only point. No singing or kumbaya. No Godtalk. Silence. The prayer of the naked and afraid.
After about a half an hour, Jeff comes out of it. He looks around the circle at his near naked friends. No one laughs, no one makes any wisecracks. It is the Turkey Rebellion of 1979. We all stand in silence and put our clothes back on, our brother restored to us, if only until the next time. We all hope that we will be there. As he will be there for us when we are naked and afraid. We lost the game 10–6. But we all won the day. We leave the ball in the middle of the field in case Grady should pass that way in the evening for one last dust-off…
Words are magic and writers are wizards.
