Photos by Eric Nicholson. The Amity Boys gather for breakfast at the home of Tom Hollingshead, left.
Originally published in the Texarkana Gazette and on writeforarkansas.org on March 7, 2011.
AMITY, Ark.—Sausage patties sizzle in the frying pan, filling the kitchen with the slightly sweet smell of seasoned pork. A skillet of shredded potato browns on the adjacent burner while two pans of biscuits brown in the oven.
Tom Hollingshead, an apron draped over his front, tends to the food, ignoring the truck he can hear pulling into the driveway. A handful of men, silver-haired and jovial, enter through the enclosed porch.
“How’s it hanging, Tom?” one of them, Sam Doughty, asks as he steps into the kitchen.
Hollingshead grins, barely looking up from the hash browns. “Miiiiiighty low,” he rumbles in a deep baritone.
The men shake hands all around, and the conversation comes easily as mugs of coffee are passed.
Burning daylight
They call themselves the Amity Boys, a fitting description though their hair has turned a pale gray and they can feel old age creeping into their bones.
There are seven of them now, and they converge every month or so upon Amity, a town of about 750 tucked in the thickly wooded Ouachita foothills of Clark County. It’s where they spent their formative years, and where they return to reminisce and catch up.
The town’s name, given to it by the founder in hopes of fostering peace and brotherhood, seems to have taken root in the men.
Hollingshead is the group’s elder statesmen. He graduated from Amity High School in 1952, in time to play in the school’s last-ever football game (a 7-0 victory over Murfreesboro) and serve in the Navy during the Korean War.
He returned to live in his hometown after a threedecade career with a highway construction company in Dallas.
Olie Adams is the junior member. He moved from Amity to Texarkana in the fifth grade and graduated from Arkansas High School in 1962. He frequently returned to Amity to visit relatives and friends so was able to maintain close ties in the community.
The rest graduated from Amity High School in 1960. Ed Garner, like Adams, is retired from Domtar paper mill in Ashdown, Ark., and lives in Texarkana. Doughty also lives in Texarkana, where he is partially retired from the electronics business he founded.
“Sam tried to join the Navy,” Adams explains. “They told him he had diabetes. Now, he only eats Hershey bars and Dr Pepper.”
Gerald Loyd, a retired sociology professor from Henderson State University, joined Hollingshead in Amity. Bobby Huffman worked as a telephone lineman in Magnolia, Ark., where he stayed after retiring. James DeWoody settled in Hope, Ark.
Hollingshead puts the sausage on a plate and begins cracking eggs with one hand, dropping them in the frying pan.
Garner asks him to leave the yolks “barely runny.”
Hollingshead scoffs.
“You can’t tell a Navy cook ‘barely runny,’” he explains. “Whatever you want, you tell him right opposite.”
Yet, when Garner cuts into the egg with his fork, the yolk oozes out slowly. Just right.
Based on breakfast, the Amity Boys’ days together seem unstructured and relaxed. But as soon as plates are cleared from the table, it becomes clear that they run a tight ship.
“Well,” Sam says after a few seconds of idle chatter. “We’re burning daylight.”
Changes
Before the days of Walmart and paved highways, peddlers used to travel the Clark County backroads selling tobacco and knick-knacks from the backs of old buses.
Hollingshead remembers his father would always buy a pouch or two of tobacco, typically Gentleman’s Choice. His two older brothers were constantly scheming to get their hands on it, but, though they scoured the house, it was too well-hidden.
One evening, Tom, as usual, curled in his father’s lap for the radio broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry. When Tom had dozed off, his father slowly reached behind the radio and began fixing himself a smoke.
But Tom wasn’t quite asleep, so he told his brothers where the goods were. They smoked happily, but Tom never got a puff.
Amity has changed since Hollingshead was stealing smokes from his father’s tobacco stash.
In the center of the town’s main square, traffic swirls around a circular outpost of landscaping and concrete benches. The area is attractive and pedestrian friendly, but a sorry replacement for the movie house that once stood there, the Boys said.
And they each remember when electricity first reached the homes of Amity, back in 1947. It was a revelation.
“You didn’t need to have a battery for the radio anymore,” Doughty recalls.
Passing the outskirts of town, Garner points the way to his childhood home, an indistinct, weed-choked tract that juts from the highway only to vanish into the underbrush within a dozen feet.
A mile or so farther down is the field where they once played baseball—in a cow pasture rather than baseball diamond. It seems impossibly far to aging men passing in climate-controlled trucks. They marvel at whatever youthful impulse drove them to pedal their bicycles so far.
Even the landscape’s seemingly permanent features have morphed. The hardwoods once liberally strewn through the hills have all but vanished, replaced by the spindly but fast-growing pines the timber industry prefers.
Corn and other crops have also yielded to encroaching timber, eliminating backroads navigational aids—since one could always know that a right at such-and-such cornfield would lead to Antoine.
It’s pretty, but not like it once was.
“Used to be real pretty country before they clear-cut it,” Adams says.
Gerald Loyd, center, examines a grave with Tom Hollingshead and Ed
Garner. Five years ago, this remote cemetery, accessed only by logging
roads, was overgrown with brush. The Amity Boys have restored several
such cemeteries.
Hunting Hidden among a maze of logging roads, a ramshackle white house stands against one of the clear-cut areas. Scrawled across the front in red spray paint are the words “Billy Must Die.”
Until a few years ago, the house was occupied by an elderly man who lived a lonely, bare-bones existence. He shuffled between that house and another nearby until debris and vermin became intolerable.
Loyd and Huffman met him on a couple of occasions. The first time, they noticed a small, odd-looking mark on his cheek that he dismissed as a cat scratch. When they spoke to him again six month later, the cancer had spread and covered half his face.
He died in 2006 and was buried in nearby Thomason Cemetery. His was the first new headstone in the past half century and will likely be the last.
But he’s lucky. The graveyard, though remote and rarely used, is surprisingly wellkept. That’s because for the past several years, the Amity Boys have taken the cemetery under their wing. They mainly mow and bush hog but also repair headstones and fell trees that get too close to the barbed wire fence.
“I was hunting my grandparents,” Huffman says about an earlier visit to the graveyard.
He thinks his grandmother at least is buried here, but she could also be a few miles away in Alpine, where her father was a preacher. Because she lacks a death certificate, she could be in any number of other cemeteries.
Huffman’s search has taken him to many of these—some orderly and fenced off, others scarcely more than random collections of graves. And, it turned out, he had family in just about all of them.
About a decade ago, he decided they could use some dedicated caretakers who could visit a few times per year to do basic maintenance, and the rest of the Amity Boys agreed and have been maintaining cemeteries ever since.
Olie Adams and Bobby Huffman stand
next to one of three graves the Amity Boys recently cleaned up. The
plots are deep in a stand of pine trees and were discovered by loggers.
Maintainence The pavement ended miles ago. Even the comfortably level and well-packed dirt has yielded to a deeply rutted pair of tracks.
“The timber companies used to keep them up, but if they’re not using ‘em, they don’t do anything to them now,” Huffman explains as his pickup lurches from side to side.
Flanked by decade-old pines, the tops of which rise a foot or two above the head, the trucks move slowly but methodically. Suddenly, the trees fall back, leaving a clean and neatly mown parcel of land.
Rectangles of stone, flat but crudely hewn, jut from the ground at regular intervals. Interspersed are blocks shaped by a more expert hand, bearing a more-or-less elegantly etched name and pair of dates.
Not long ago, this was more wilderness than cemetery.
“We visited in 2000,” Loyd says. “We came back here and said, ‘Man, we ought to do something about this. Then the ice storm hit. … Boy it was a mess.”
“Took us two or three weekends to get it cleaned,” Hollingshead says.
“More like three or four,” Loyd corrects.
They pause occasionally to squint at a name and try to recall exactly where the person’s descendants have taken root on faded mental maps of the county, of which each seems to carry a slightly different version.
“You know you’re getting old when you recognize more people in the cemetery than you do in the town,” Huffman muses.
The talk moves briefly to Jerry Hollingshead, an Amity Boy who died about two years ago. He was a lively, garrulous man, built like a house.
“Yep, I sort of miss him,” Doughty says sadly.
After a few minutes, the conversation lulls. The men stand momentarily still, peering thoughtfully at the ground or into the trees.
“Well,” Loyd says with an air of finality, moving toward his truck. The others follow.
Huffman, Garner and Doughty grumble about “the Colonel”—Loyd retired from the Army and is the group’s recognized taskmaster—but only once they’re back in the truck.
They move from graveyard to graveyard, stopping to examine individual plots—they find one from 1909, one of the earliest they’ve come across—and how they’ve fared the winter.
At one site, they spot a tall pine leaning at a precarious angle. They discuss how best to fell it, but it won’t be today.
“I can’t do it,” Loyd explains. “I’m not on schedule today.”
“He’s union,” Doughty explains.
Another drive takes them to a fork in the road, marked by a white cross. It was placed there by a mother whose son killed himself at a nearby hunting camp after falling out with his father.
Farther on, they park along the side of the road and trudge up a small embankment. Fifty yards into the trees, bouquets of cloth flowers and a few stones mark a trio of otherwise unmarked graves.
The plots were stumbled upon not long ago by loggers, and the Amity Boys have adopted them as their own.
On the way to the day’s final destination, an old man appears on a four-wheeler, traveling in the opposite direction. The man, his face gaunt beneath the camouflaged hood of his hunting jacket and his eyes hidden by flimsy plastic sunglasses, takes out his earphones.
His voice is strangely muffled, as if he’s speaking underwater, but he manages to get across that he’s from Little Rock and has brought his grandson hunting. Adams mentions their work on graveyards, and it turns out the man has just visited the one they’re traveling to.
“It looks good,” he says, before mounting his fourwheeler and disappearing down the dirt road.
Indeed it does.
The plot is tucked among trees like the three others but better marked, piled with a waist-high mound of stones. The original headstone still stands, but the inscription has worn almost flat with the surface of the stone.
The Amity Boys have done away with any worry that the words will disappear completely. They commissioned a replacement marker, the words etched deeply into granite, which rests on the ground in front of the original.
The grave belongs to Nathan W. Philips, born to sharecroppers out of Texas. He died in 1867, a month shy of his 16th birthday.
Even 144 years after his death, someone besides the Amity Boys is keeping his memory alive. A pair of quarters, still shiny, rest inexplicably atop the new headstone.
‘Come and went’
Graysonia, near Amity, was once a bustling mill town of close to 1,000 people with a railroad, three hotels and a movie theater.
It was where Huffman’s mother was reared. (His father grew up in Shawmut, within sight across the Antoine River. The postman used a boat to carry mail between the two.)
Today, most indications of Graysonia have been obliterated. It collapsed with the timber market during the Great Depression and quickly yielded to the timber that once fueled its existence.
Railroad tracks crossing a dirt road are the only apparent sign that people once lived there.
Another sign of the erstwhile town is tucked deep in the forest, hidden even from the seldom-traveled timber roads: Graysonia sawmill. Once one of the largest in the South, the sawmill still stands, if feebly. Its floors have dissolved into a bed of soil and decaying leaves. Its walls, where intact, are entwined with thick vines. Trees reach effortlessly through the ceiling. A perennially swampy mill pond festers nearby.
As teenagers, the Boys saw the vanished town only as a backdrop for chasing the wild horses that once roamed the area. Now, though, it seems like an omen that hangs over their banter for the rest of the afternoon.
Talk turns to wives and friends who have died, whose funeral they last attended.
“They say people die in their sleep,” Adams muses idly. “I reckon you wake up, then you die, right?”
But if someone’s heart just stops, Garner counters, then why would they wake up?
The question, unknowable to the living, is left unsettled.
Adams speaks admiringly of a friend who was diagnosed with cancer. He refused treatment and spent the last year of his life doing what he chose, saving himself from uncertainty and torturous bouts of chemotherapy.
Huffman knew a woman in Magnolia who did the same.
“I think we’re slowly poisoning ourselves to death” Garner sighs, thinking of pollution and disappearing wilderness and processed food.
Huffman wonders why he never took up smoking anything stronger than the grapevine kids in Amity used to puff on, though cigarettes were practically part of a soldier’s diet when he fought in Vietnam. With the lung problems he discovered later on, he reckons he would have died years ago had he smoked.
But he and the others know in their bones that, heedless of their own wishes or decisions, time marches inexorably.
“I tell you what, it does fly,” Huffman says. “February done come and went.”
Garner nods. “Be 2012 before you know it.”
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