Charley

Somebody said the superintendent’s house was on fire, so the five of us walked down the hill from school to watch it burn.

Four of us were juniors that spring of 1963 - Larry, James, Jimmy and me. Charley was the fifth member of our group. He was a sophomore, and we let him run around with us as long as he didn't do anything stupid, like embarrass us in front of girls.

The day was chilly. Larry, James, Jimmy and I had on coats; Charley wore a short-sleeved shirt. If Charley owned a coat, I had never seen him wear it. Charley’s family was poor. Lots of families were back then, but Charley’s even more so. His father was a pulp wood cutter. His family lived back in the woods, the deep woods, down a dirt road somewhere.

Charley was a bright kid, quick and intelligent. Everybody has known a kid like Charley, known that somewhere behind those quick remarks and comic attitude was an ability to do more than he did. Charley could have made excellent grades, but he chose not to. Teachers wouldn't have known what to do with him if he had. Besides, in Charlie's life there was reality, then everything else. And the reality was that Charley was the son of a pulp wood cutter. Barring some great miracle, Charley would always be the son of a pulp wood cutter.

The superintendent's house was really burning by the time we got to the bottom of the hill. The fire had burned through the roof . Dark gray smoke, almost black, went up a distance and then flattened out, the way smoke does on a cold day.

The five of us just stood around for a minute or so, watching the house burn. Then Charley said, "I bet we can save some of their stuff," and before we could stop him, Charley opened a window and crawled inside the burning house.

“Hey!” Jimmy said when Charlie climbed through the window. “You can’t go in there!” Jimmy was that way sometimes – doing what was proper, and proper right then, to him, was that a boy like Charley was not supposed to go into the superintendent’s house.
James didn’t say anything or do anything at first. He waited to see how things would turned out before making a commitment.

Larry and I stood near the window, moving aside now and then when smoke boiled through the window. Then Charley appeared, passed out a small lamp table, and went back into the smoke.

It went that way for a while – Charley passing things through the window to Larry and me, and to Jimmy and James after a while. Pretty soon we had a pile of chairs, small tables and books stacked beside a pecan tree.

Charley had just started on a closet when the fireman arrived. The school was between two towns, each four miles away, and it took the volunteer fireman a little while to get to the fire stations and then to the house. Charley was handing out a armful of clothes when one of the firemen ran up to us yelling. "What do you boys think you're doing? You're giving the fire more oxygen! Shut that window!" Grownups knew more than us kids, so we got Charley out of the house, shut the window and watched the fireman spray water on the house.

After the fire was out, we went inside the house. Everything was burned; nothing usable was left. We went back outside.

The basketball coach came up and said, "I hear you boys saved a lot of stuff from the house." One of us said, "Yes sir, but it was Charley’s idea. He went inside. All we did was take what he handed out the window."

The coach turned to Charley, who stood there with his hands in his pockets. The day had turned colder. The coach said, "You look cold. Where's your coat?" Charley replied, "I don't have it with me." The coach just nodded. He said, "You did a good job. I think you've done enough for today. Why don't I drive you home." Charley said, "It's only one o'clock." The coach laughed. "I know. But I don't think the superintendent will mind."

A funny thing. I don’t remember anybody – teacher or student -- saying anything about the fire next day.

We four seniors graduated the next year. Larry went to work for a telephone company. In September, James and Jimmy went off to college. I joined the Army.

In August of 1967 I met up with Larry at Camp Martin Cox, base camp of the 9th Infantry Division, at Bear Cat, Republic of Vietnam. Larry had been drafted in 1966. We sat around in his hooch for a while, drank beer, talked about people back home.

After I got back home, I learned that James had graduated from college and had a job with NASA in Houston. The space program was more important than a war several thousand miles away, and the jobs came with a draft deferment. I ran into Jimmy at a high school foot-ball game in 1969. He had put on a few pounds, didn't look like the all-district tackle from high school. Jimmy was married, had a kid, taught at a junior high. He said we were doing the right thing in Vietnam. We had to stop those Communists somewhere. But: "I've got a wife and kid, Bob. I can't become involved in a war thousands of miles from home."
That takes care of everybody but Charley.

See, the thing is, Charley didn't have to go in that burning house. He could have been just like the rest of us, stayed outside and watched it burn. But Charley wasn't like that. Peoples' things would be lost if somebody didn't do something. And although Charley had absolutely nothing in common with the superintendent, he went inside the burning house. Charley knew what had to be done, what he had to do. “Maybe we can save some of their stuff.”
In 1965, Charley enlisted in the Army. He went to Vietnam and he died there.

In 1989, I was in Dallas on Army business. I went to Fair Park. There's a monument there, lists the names of Texans who died in Vietnam. There were a few names I wanted to see; one in particular. I found him.

COLLIER, CHARLEY HOLTON
9 MARCH 1947-15 NOVEMBER 1965
Mt. Pleasant, Texas

I never knew Charley's middle name.