The Forgiven

by Mike Shepherd

  “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out,”

  When the meeting closed with our recital of the Lord’s Prayer in unison, all attendees held hands in a circle with the other attendees. One passage struck me hard, ...forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. I thought about my relationship with my mother. If I was going to work the program in earnest then it was time to forgive her. The next time she called in the middle of the night, drunk, I vowed to tell her that all was forgiven, but the next time she called was in the middle of the day, and, to my surprise, she was sober. She had been for two years, she said, thanks to AA. She was pleased to hear that I, too, attended meetings.

  The purpose of her call, she said, was to tell me that she was working on steps 8 and 9. In a sense, we were working the 12-Step program over the phone. Drunks were known to have a compulsion about talking in excess on th phone – even recovering drunks.

  There was no doubt she’d changed. I could hear it in her voice – she sounded at peace.

  In response to her desire to be sober, I was inspired to do the same. If a woman I considered an incorrigible drunk could quit drinking, so could I. I worked the program diligently, one step at a time, but I ignored the central concept of AA, abstaining from alcohol “one day at a time.” Instead, I got ahead of myself and set a goal of remaining sober for an entire year.

  On the 365th day, in a bizarre fit of “stinking thinking,” I celebrated my year of abstinence by getting drunk. The relapse was devastating. I lost all confidence in my ability to stay sober. If I hadn’t been able to do it through AA, it probably couldn’t be done. I gave up trying, and continued to drink, but only occasionally. I was a controlled alcoholic who managed to maintain a certain level of sobriety -- enough to re-enroll in college to work on a masters degree in Communications, using what was left of my GI Bill eligibility.

  I was delighted to learn that the book I was writing would qualify as a thesis, because it was creative writing, an integral aspect of the Communication curriculm. This was added incentive to proceed with the book, which might be published someday.

  The first chapter was a reflection of what I felt while leaving the U.S. for Vietnam, and my first impression of that mysterious country after I arrived.

  Before 1964, Vietnam was just a foreign word I heard vaguely coming from the front room on our old black and white TV. We didn’t keep up with the Joneses and I didn’t keep up with the news. My head was buried in the sports page. Classic escapism. Counting Sandy Koufax strikeouts was more pleasant to me than hearing about body counts.

  Ironically, that’s where it finally grabbed my attention, in the sports page, when Cassius Clay proclaimed he would not submit to the draft to fight in Vietnam because he said he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong.

  I soon became acutely aware of ‘Nam when Glen King, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting guard on my high school football team, who opened holes in the line big enough to drive tanks through, was killed there. Ironically, while he was crawling through a bamboo thicket, the grenade on his belt snagged on a stick, which pulled the pin out.

  Then Mike Gabriel, our team captain and a wrestler with Olympic potential, took some flak while flying a solo recon mission over enemy territory. Struggling to stay conscious, he wiped the remains of his leg from his face, applied a tourniquet and landed the plane safely. Now he’s the captain of a wheelchair basketball team.

  Tommy Joyce was next, the day before his baby was born back in the States. Then it was muscular Don Schroeder, handsome Blaine Miles, wild Billy Martin and little Larry Whitis. One-by-one they fell, like dominoes, and my number was coming up fast. Uncle Sam’s fateful finger was about to point at me, so I joined the Air Force, hoping to avoid combat. Out of a class of 50 at Armed Forces Journalism School, however, I was the only one with orders for Vietnam.

  So me and 200 other shave-tailed nephews of Uncle Sam, soaring off into the wild blue yonder, talons poised, combat ready – to kill some gooks for God.

  Taking off at sundown in a pink Braniff jet, I glanced back at San Francisco, partially shrouded in blue-gray mist. The Golden Gate Bridge, spanning the city’s skyline, looked like a crown on the head of a queen watching her knights depart for a distant war. As I turned away, I caught a glimpse of light glowing softly in a tower on a hill; it appeared as a teary eye.

  Settling in for the long flight to Vietnam, I wondered, which of us would not return? The baby-faced kid sitting next to me? The black guy across the aisle with an uncanny resemblance to Glen King. He was smiling with his eyes closed. Maybe he was thinking about a girlfriend, a wife and kids, his mother, or the joke his father told him last night over a farewell beer. Or the loudmouthed jerk behind me, yakking about how many “slant-eyed gooks” he’d kill? The Asian-American Marine sitting next to him? Me?

  I gazed at my reflection in the window. My mother used to say I looked like Van Johnson, the war movie hero, with my reddish-blond hair, blue eyes and smattering of freckles, but now I thought I looked like some scared little kid on his way to the dentist. I could see fear in my eyes – fear of the unknown, and what awaited me on the other side of the big pond.

  We leveled off at 45,000 feet above the Pacific and sped for ‘Nam in a race with the sun hoping to prolong our last day of innocence. It was a race that we ultimately lost when the last glint of light was swallowed by the sea. We drifted all night, farther and farther away from home; and for some, perhaps me, there’d be no return.

  A few hours later, we hydroplaned down the runway at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon, through a heavy monsoon downpour. The weather outside the plane looked cool, but when we disembarked, reality sank in. It was actually hot as hell, and within seconds I was soaked from head to toe with sweat and rain. Running would have been an exercise in futility, so I just went with the flow, and sloshed my way, one soggy step at a time, to the terminal building.

  Inside, ceiling fans turned at a lazy pace as Vietnamese women, dressed in plain white linen blouses and black silk pants, shuffled about in flip flops, chatting incessantly as they swept up bits of trash and cigarette butts. Once in a while they’d pocket a keeper.

  They looked so mysterious with their little round Asian faces peering out from the shadows of pointed straw hats. Their teeth were caked with red betel nut, a mild stimulant similar to chewing tobacco.

  Soldiers wearing the uniforms of various countries rushed around trying to catch flights. I recognized the Aussies and New Zealanders because of their Bermuda shorts and bush hats, and they spoke English, of course. The Koreans’ muscular builds, and stern, square faces set them apart from other Asians fighting in Vietnam. Cambodians, Laotians, Filipinos, Indonesians and Thais were harder to distinguish. They all looked pretty much the same, to me anyway: similar uniforms, complexions, facial features and stature.

  Orders were being shouted in languages I could not understand, except for one, “Hey airman!” a mean looking MP yelled.

  “Who me?”

  “Yeah, you. Get your head out of your ass and fall in over here; on the double. Hurry up, let’s go, can’t fight this fucking war without you!”

  After processing my orders, and a quick lecture on social behavior, “Use rubbers, they’ve got strange diseases over here…” I was sent to a bus and driven to transient quarters to await further assignment.

  By this time the rain had stopped and a scorching sun shone. The bus felt like a sauna, even with the windows open. As we rode along Tan Son Nhut’s busy flight line, I saw every kind of aircraft imaginable, flying in and out, civilian and military, loaded with refugees, soldiers and bombs, bound for combat or escaping it. A Pan American 707 lifted off with a deafening roar, and I saw someone’s bare ass pressed against one of the plane’s windows. The driver of th
e bus blew it a kiss, and shouted over his shoulder. “I spot one of those every time an airliner takes off for the World!”

  “The World?” I asked.

  “Home, man. This place is like another planet, compared to the States. They say going home is like going back to another world.”

  As a huge full moon rose above the base that night, silhouettes of helicopters and palm trees appeared before the bright lunar light. The mosquito net around my bunk softened the glare, giving the scene a dreamy look.

  While drifting off to sleep I thought about home, and my buddies at Di Lello’s Tap, and my girlfriend Rose Marie, who I last saw standing on the porch in the gloomy gray dawn just a day and half before, waving goodbye. It seemed so long ago, like another lifetime in another world.

  Oh yes, Rose Marie and that fucking “Dear John” saying she couldn’t wait one damn year for me to return from Vietnam. In retrospect, I realize that letter affected my relationships with other women over the years. I entered them with the expectation that sooner or later I’d be dumped. It concerned me about my budding relationship with Cathy of Carbondale, who seemed fickle. I feared that inevitably she’d two-time me on a whim if I stayed around instead of moving to Austin when I did.

  But since then much water had passed beneath the bridge that I hadn’t burned, subconsciously keeping the possibility of at least a long distance relationship between the two us alive. I wrote to her to see how she was doing, and, much to my surprise I received a letter in return, inviting me to visit her in Makanda, Illinois, a small village near Giant City State Park at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest south of Carbondale.

  “I bought a farm house and five acres of land with the money I inherited from my grandfather. I’m planning on growing organic vegetables and raising free range chickens and goats for the eggs and milk and cheese to sell at Mr. Natural’s Health Food Store and coop in Carbondale, and I could use some help getting the garden started. Could you come down and give me a hand?”

  Having been an urban kid who grew up in apartments, except for the short time I lived with my grandparents, I knew nothing about gardens – except for the tomato patch down the alley that I raided when I was young. Nothing like a sun warmed tomato straight off the vine, especially when you’re hungry, which for me was most of the time. The cupboards at home were usually bare. I was raised for the most part, by an alcoholic father for whom buying groceries was low on the priority list.

  Early in April, I headed south through Carbondale and into Makanda, where I stopped at a funky little general store and asked directions to Cathy Riggnin’s place. The man knew who she was and he directed me to a lane that led to a house on a wooded hill. Her name was on the mail box.

  Small green leaves had begun to appear on the trees. A smattering of red buds bloomed in their midst. It was a breezy, early spring day, cool but underlaid with warmth from the sun which shone in the clear blue sky. On a garden plot in the south hillside I saw someone pushing hard on a hand plow. It looked like a woman, probably Cathy. When she saw me approach, she stopped plowing and waved. I parked at the house and walked down the hill to her. She greeted me with a smile and a hug.

  “Glad you could make it.”

  A big black Lab, wanting in on the action, wagged its tail furiously, and smelled at my pant leg, while two calico cats, backs humped, circled around my feet.

  “You’re just in time to help me spread the compost and manure. Bring boots?”

  “Sure did. I’ll put them on.”

  I went back to the car and changed shoes. Cathy guided a wheelbarrow up the hill to a wooden frame packed with decomposing material. She shoveled it into the wheelbarrow until it was full, then rolled it back down to where she had been plowing. I joined her, and, following her directions, helped spread the compost on the soil. It stank. Cathy mixed it into the soil with a rake, while I went for another load. When the compost had been thoroughly mixed into the tilled soil of the plot, we took a break. Cathy took off her boots and nodded for me to do the same.

  “I’ll show you your room,” she said.

  We went inside the house. Full of house plants it looked like a jungle. Cathy led me upstairs, down a hall and into a room. It was furnished with an old wooden bed, a chest of drawers, an easy chair and a night stand with a lamp beside the bed. There was a lush Boston fern on a glass-topped brass pedestal in front of the window. The cool breeze stirred the curtains and I was glad to see a quilt on the bed. I’d probably need it on these early spring nights.

  “There’s a bathroom across the hall,” Cathy said. “Let’s go downstairs for a bite to eat.”

  We washed up in the kitchen sink, and Cathy made sandwiches: cheese, lettuce and tomatoes with mayonnaise on whole wheat bread. She poured two glasses of milk.

  “The cheese and milk come from the goats,” she said proudly.

  “Where are the goats?”

  “Out grazing with the chickens.”

  “Chickens graze?”

  “They’re free range. I spread feed in the grass and they eat both. Makes for great eggs and a neatly-trimmed yard. Hope you’re a morning person, Mick. I like to start work early, at sunrise. That’s when the rooster wakes me up. Beware of that rooster. He’s very territorial. He’ll peck at your ankles all the way across the yard. He chases the cats too, and Sport, the dog. The goats head-butt and kick him, though, so he doesn’t bother them.”

  “So what’s next?” I asked, after finishing the sandwich.

  “We’ll plant marigolds around the border of the garden. They’re natural insect repellents.”

  “What vegetables will you plant?”

  “Lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, beans, cucumbers and peas, broccoli and cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.”

  “Wow, you sell all of that?”

  “At Mr. Natural’s in Carbondale, and at a farmers’ market.”

  “What’s Mr. Natural’s?” I wasn’t familiar with the place from the time I had gone to school in Carbondale seven years ago in 1972.

  “A coop health food store and café. They also have poetry readings and live music on Friday and Saturday nights. We could go there this weekend, if you’d like.”

  “Do they serve alcohol?”

  “You can bring your own. Some people bring bottles of wine. I’ve got some bottles in the cellar that my neighbor traded me for goat cheese. We can take a couple of those – one for you and one for me. Well, let’s get started on the marigolds.”

  It took most of the afternoon to plant the marigolds. It had become a warm day and I worked up a thirst. The first thing I thought about was a cold beer, but Cathy provided iced tea. We sat on the porch and drank it.

  “Tomorrow we’ll start planting. I started some of the veggies this winter in the house. The rest I’ll start from seed. When everything is planted, we’ll put straw down. That’ll help control the weeds and keep the soil moist.”

  After baths and supper we played Scrabble long into the night. I grew tired, and tired of being beaten, so I excused myself and went to my room. I left the window open and lay awake for a while, listening to the sounds of the night -- sounds so different from those in Springfield. Having emerged from their winter hibernation in the mud, frogs trilled incessantly down by the pond. I heard the faint breeze in the budding trees, and an owl hooted in the distance. Before drifting off to sleep I thought about how much Cathy had changed, both physically and psychologically. I noticed right away, because she was wearing shorts, that she didn’t shave her legs. Her hair had grown long, and her face was slightly weathered from being outside so much (her big blue eyes were just as bright and beautiful as before), but she wasn’t flighty and insecure anymore. She seemed more grounded, and focused on her efforts to live off the land.

  At sunrise I was awakened by the rooster crowing, and I smelled bacon frying. I arose slowly, sore and stiff from the w
ork I had done the day before. I washed, dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. Cathy was standing at the stove, cooking breakfast. I startled her when I said, “Good morning.” She gasped, then laughed.

  “Sorry. I’m not used to somebody else being in the house. Hope you like bacon and eggs.”

  After eating, we went out to the garden and worked for the rest of the morning, until lunch. We ate in relative silence, sitting on the porch and watching ominous clouds approaching from the west. There was thunder in the distance. A cool breeze smelling like rain rustled through the trees. Soon it began to pour.

  “Good time to milk the goats,” Cathy said. “I’ll be trading a couple gallons for some more bacon and a pork chop or two with the neighbor down the road, who raises pigs. Bartering is alive and well around here.”

  We hurried through the rain to the barn as lightning cracked all around us. Thunder rolled like bass drums. Hail pelted the metal roof, making an awful racket. It was truly a severe spring storm. The goats were restless, but one by one they quickly calmed as Cathy sat on a stool and milked them. Despite the noisy storm, the goats’ eyes, which normally appeared intense, were glazed over as if they were in a trance. The milk poured out in abundance, as she squeezed on their tits.

  “Wanna try?” she asked.

  “Uh, well, yeah, I guess.”

  “Here, sit down at this one. Now just grab one of the tits and pull and squeeze the milk into the bucket. Go ahead, it doesn’t hurt them, in fact I think they like it.”

  Just as I began to milk one of them, a lightning bolt struck. It sounded as if it hit the weathervane on the roof. The goat jumped and kicked me, and I fell back off the stool into a pile of hay. Cathy began to laugh, and she dropped to her knees beside me. I pulled her down on top of me, and we kissed. We rolled over until I was on top of her. I forced my hips between her legs and pressed my pelvis hard against hers.