the mountains. Land that’s flat. Empty. Cheap.”
Julius sighed, and made a note, or pretended to.
The vice president for Employment crossed his legs and slipped a
folder from his case, signaling his readiness to report. Henry turned to
him.
“If you’re planning a very large expansion,” he said, “we’ll have a
labor problem. It’s hard enough to collect ’em in the cities. If you head
out into the desert someplace, I don’t know.”
“Not the desert, ” said Henry mildly.
“We’re doing all right now,” the VP said, looking at his numbers.
“But it’s tight. Men with skills are the tough job. Otherwise we’re
making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the
handicaps. We’ll soon be running out of them.”
“Go out into the highways and the byways,” Henry said. “Bring in
the lame, the halt, and the blind.”
“No place to house them if we can find them,” the VP responded.
Henry Van Damme could just at that moment see, down on the
floor many feet below, two men gesturing to each other strangely, but
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 35
not speaking. Deaf men, he realized, talking with their hands. He
remembered reading about them in the last issue of the Aero. No prob-
lem for THESE fellows communicating on a noisy shop floor!
“We’ll build them houses,” Henry said. “Houses are easy. Sell them
on the installment plan, no money down. Or rent them. Surely we can
design a little house. Or get a plan someplace. Build it cheap.”
He turned to face them all, though mostly they saw his broad sil-
houette against the windows.
“Clinics,” he said. “Free clinics. Dentists. A staffed nursery, so the
ones with kids can come work. This isn’t hard. They’ll come if you give
them what they need.”
“You’d think,” said the Employment VP, who had a son in the Army
Air Corps, “they’d come to help win the damn war. Not ask for so
much at a time like this.”
“They’re just men,” Henry said. “Men and women. No reason to
blame them. They want what they need. We’ll get it for them. We can
and we ought to.”
On the floor now a piercing horn began to blow, not urgently but
imperiously, in a steady rhythm. Henry turned back to the windows to
watch; the line was about to move. The far doors slid apart, opening
onto the falling day. The last ship on the left end of the U-shaped track
was moved out, finished; a new unfinished one was poised to move in
on the right end. All the other ships moved down one place.
“Pax,” Henry said.
“What?” Julius looked at his brother.
“The name,” Henry said. “For this new plane. Not a sword or a
spear or a hammer or any weapon.”
“And why not?” Julius asked incuriously.
“It’s not going to be for war,” Henry said. “If the war even lasts
long enough for this plane to get in it, it’ll be the last one built. You
know it.”
Julius said nothing.
“It’ll be a peacemaker, peacekeeper. Or nothing.”
“All right,” Julius said, uncapping his pen.
“Pax,” Henry said. “Remember.”
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive strikes, none
greater than the fabulous Burbank pool discovered in the Osage
country. Around there in the 1940s we could still get those
comic postcards of hook-nosed Indians piling their blanket-
wrapped squaws and papooses into Pierce-Arrows bought with their
royalties. In Ponca City, oil money built the pretty Shingle Style man-
sions, the great stony castle on the hill, the Spanish Oriental movie
palace, the new high school (1927), and the straight streets of houses
that by the time the war started were beginning to look settled and
placid, tree shaded and shrubbery enclosed. Beside the proud little city
another one arose—the towered and bright-lit one of the refinery. Its
tank farm spread to the southwest, uniform gray drums picked out
with lights. All day and night the flare stacks burned off gases, some-
times blowing off a bad batch with a noise like thunder and lighting
the night, millions of cubic feet, “darkness visible,” as though the city
beyond was a nice neighborhood of Hell. By the time the Van Damme
brothers settled on the empty land outside the city for their plant and
town, the oil boomers were dead or bought out, the oil was just a
steady flow, the natural gas was firing the town’s ovens and refrigera-
tors, but the smell of crude and the wastes of the refinery lay always
over the place; locals had ceased to notice, or liked to say they had.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 37
Van Damme Aero worked out an arrangement with the Continental
Oil Company, taking up land a couple of miles to the north of the refin-
ery dotted at wide intervals with the black nodding pumps called grass-
hoppers. A hundred blue Elcar trailers came first, bringing workers and
engineers and surveyors to build the settlement that Julius jokingly called
Henryville and then wasn’t able to change, not to West Ponca or Bomber
City or Victoryburg. It was Henryville. A spur line of the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa Fe was laid to reach the Van Damme acreage, and
while huge Bucyrus steam cranes, brought in on railcars, lifted and fitted
into place the steel beams of the plant buildings, surveyors laid out the
streets, all lettered north to south and numbered east to west, with
hardly a natural feature to be got around, though Henry Van Damme
insisted that as many trees as possible be left, to breathe out healthful
ozone. Even before the sidewalks were laid or the tar of the roadways
was hard the houses started to arrive in boxcars, and the workers
offloaded them and they went up like things built in a film where magi-
cally everything takes but a second, people flit like demons, and build-
ings seem to assemble themselves. The Homasote company’s Precision
Junior was the model chosen, fifty-six of them a day sent out ready to go,
all the lumber—sills, plates, joints, rafters—cut to size and numbered
like toys to be assembled on Christmas Eve for Junior and Sis. Homasote:
a miracle building material made from compressed newspaper, heavy
and fireproof and gray, strangely cold to the touch. It took two and a
half days to set a house up on its concrete slab, then they’d tarpaper the
flat roof, hook up the water and electricity, and spray the outside walls
with paint mixed with sand to give the stucco effect. Metal-framed win-
dows that never quite fit, the wind whispered at them, woke you some-
times thinking you’d heard your name spoken.
Van Damme signed on with the Federal Public Housing Adminis-
tration to borrow the money to build the houses and public buildings,
and the FHA guaranteed the mortgages, which you could get for a
dollar down; you could own the house for $3,000, or lease it, or rent it,
or rent and sublet (there’d be guest entrances in the houses for sublet-
ters to enter by, or for others to use who might not want to bang on the
front door toward which the neighbors’ windows were turned). You
got a stove and a tub and, most wonderful, that gas refrigerator, Van
Damme’d insisted, and got them all as necessary war materials. Faint
38 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
crackle of the ice cubes in their metal trays when you opened the
door.
A couple of large dormitories (Henry Van Damme had toyed with
lodge and residence and habitation before giving in to the standard word) were put up too, one for women and one for men, this because