Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  Joe’s two tours in Vietnam, in 1967 and 1968, were harrowing enough, but he was never in any real danger. During his first tour he was based at Quang Tri, where his unit was occasionally shelled or strafed with small arms fire while building airfields and railroad bridges, and his second tour in 1968 was conducted during the explosive fury of the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive, though generally his unit was involved in major construction projects far away from the major fire fights. Joe would later seem almost defiantly unreflective about Vietnam, not at all troubled by the post-traumatic stress or humiliation over the political divisions at home endured by so many returning Vietnam veterans. But this was mostly because the antiwar protests—largely an urban and college campus phenomenon—seemed so far away. In between his two hitches, Joe had returned to West Virginia to relax and work on his father’s farm, or to share his new tales of Asia with the neighbors. Around Salt Rock, the military was respected and no one questioned his service in Vietnam.

  Joe cut an antic figure among his fellow Seabees in Vietnam. He was a monster for work who could fix almost anything, was considered a genius at extricating heavy equipment from rice paddies, and never stopped talking. Joe regaled his friends with tales of the bizarre mishaps on his father’s West Virginia farm—this draft horse that kicked him all the way across a stall, that mule that ran away with the plow—and then he’d drone on and on about his extravagant dreams of owning a draft horse farm some day. There were elaborate asides, and Joe’s listeners soon learned that the only way to end a Childers tale was to stand up and walk away. Mail calls at the end of the month, when everyone’s magazines arrived, were another Childers legend. While everyone else looked forward to receiving their Playboy or Newsweek, Joe was probably the only serviceman in Vietnam to receive both The American Horseman and Dairy Goat Journal. The Seabees in his unit howled with delight and chided him mercilessly when the magazines arrived, but Joe didn’t care. Stretching out on the tarmac or against a pile of I-beams, he devoured his farm journals cover to cover, jawing away to anyone who wandered over about the latest in creamery barns or Tennessee Walkers.

  Joe and Judy met at a USO party in Oxnard, California, near the Point Mugu Naval Air Station, just before Joe shipped out for his second tour of Vietnam. They corresponded regularly all through 1969, were engaged halfway through Joe’s tour, and married within three days of his return. After a brief visit home to West Virginia to meet Joe’s family, they were stationed back in Oxnard for several months before Joe was assigned to finish out his Seabee tour on Midway Island in the Pacific. The variety of their junkets around the world would be expressed by the birthplaces of their three children. Sandra, the oldest, was born on Midway in 1970, Shane was born in West Virginia in 1972, and Sam arrived during Joe’s tour of service at Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.

  Judy knew that she had married an armful, an energetic dreamer and doer who always had a dozen outdoor projects going at once. But she was the first to tell Joe’s Seabee pals that she was no cupcake herself. Naturally matriarchal and take-charge, she would prove adroit over the years at managing her rambunctious brood during Joe’s frequent absences with the navy. From the start, however, they shared a love of adventure and a strong sense that they were running away from the same thing. Judy liked to say, “We never looked back and jumped right into life.”

  Joe would fail at an initial attempt to escape the economic orbit of the navy, but in a way that would establish his colorful reputation and career. After returning from Midway in November 1970, Joe used the GI Bill to enroll in a horseshoeing school in Porterville, California, north of Bakersfield. Joe loved the course and enjoyed slowly feeling more competent at clipping and filing down hooves, forging and fitting the red-hot shoes, and then driving home the nails at just the right angle so that they could be clipped off and rasped against the hoof, all the while entertaining his fellow students and teachers with his glorious talk. The family’s needs were simple, and after Joe’s savings from the navy ran out, they subsisted on state unemployment insurance. Judy and Sandra lived in a converted motel out near the edge of town and soon fell into the relaxed pace of a tourist town that called itself “The Gateway to the Sequoias.” In early 1972, after he heard that a lot of quarter horses were being imported into West Virginia and that the trade was taking off, Joe moved the family back to West Virginia to follow his dream of building up enough of a stake as a blacksmith to buy a farm.

  Joe loved the rural smithy’s life, an occupation that fit his talka-holic, makeshift style. Outfitting a pickup with a portable forge, anvil, and tools, he ranged out over the hollows as far as Kentucky and Ohio, picking up jobs by word of mouth and often leaving before light in the morning to make his distant appointments. He roamed all the local auctions and horse sales in three states, lingering afterward to swap tales and learn about new breeds. But it was a tough, economically unstable life, especially after Shane was born in June that year and Judy began to complain about the loneliness and isolation of living in a house two hollows over from her in-laws in Salt Rock. Over that summer, when jobs opened up at feed stores or a railroad car foundry, Joe worked a regular day job and then struggled to meet his blacksmithing obligations at night. But these were the “stagflation” years of the Nixon economy and companies always seemed to be hiring just before they changed their minds and announced layoffs. Regular work got in the way of lining up horseshoeing jobs, and horseshoeing got in the way of regular work. In fact, even though few people saw it clearly at the time, West Virginia was in the midst of a massive deindustrialization, as basic industries like steel and transportation foundries either died or moved overseas. Joe was just skidding from job to job, a dreamy blacksmith in a nascent Rust Belt.

  So two days after Christmas 1972, he reenlisted in the navy Seabees. But Joe’s youthful economic defeat laid the foundations for a future that was both secure and alluring. Their first assignment was a Seabee unit in Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, and Joe was overjoyed to learn that the navy’s generous freight allowances for traveling families permitted him to ship all his blacksmithing tools. For Judy, the navy housing compound at the edge of the base in Roosevelt Roads seemed like a tropical paradise after the dark, rainy hollows of West Virginia, and she soon fell into a comfortable routine with the other navy wives, taking Sandy and Shane to the base swimming pool and playgrounds. Raising Shane was not at all like the experience Judy had with Sandra. By the time he was walking later that spring, Shane was ferociously energetic—the family pediatrician would eventually conclude that he was hyperactive. So Judy loved having the long Puerto Rican beaches and a fenced-in backyard where she could turn him loose. Scrambling up tree trunks or digging holes in the wet sand, Shane would literally run himself dry, collapsing into a deep sleep right where he sat, the beginning of a lifelong trait. His energy was a lot like his father’s—boundless and spread across a half-dozen madcap diversions all day.

  Joe was infinitely happy in Puerto Rico and kept up his own frantic pace. By day he roamed the navy base with his crew, entertaining everyone with his tall tales while he repaired hangar doors or built ports, and by night he roamed the fringes of the base and even a few of the neighboring farms, shoeing horses. There were more than one hundred pleasure horses on the main Roosevelt Roads base, and several dozen more at a smaller navy facility on the island, and he loved the schedule—finishing up with his Seabee crew by late afternoon, wolfing down an early dinner with the family, and then shoeing and talking, shoeing and talking while the sun slowly fell over the green Puerto Rican hills. As Shane got older, Joe often brought him along, teaching him how to hold a pile of nails or hand over his hoof clippers, and then draping a blanket over a bale of hay when he fell asleep.

  Joe had his own rationale about his horseshoeing rounds. In West Virginia, most of the fathers he knew were essentially absentee parents because they held down an extra job or two, an admirable display of the work ethic. He and Judy also felt strongly that at least one parent, preferably the m
other, should be home with the children all day, but meanwhile they needed a second income to save for a farm back in the United States. Horseshoeing was the family’s second job. But it also appeased Joe’s enormous energy and wanderlust, his joy at discovering a new audience for his tales as he bent over a hoof and shoe pounding in the nails.

  Roosevelt Roads set Joe on his course. Evenings and weekends he gypsied around in his truck, pulling on a big leather apron as he sized up each new job. He was a horseman and a smithy now, well known on a sprawling navy base. And it was at Roosevelt Roads that Joe Childers established his personal best. One weekend in the spring of 1973, with just a ten-hour break for dinner and some sleep, he completed hoof trims or full shoeing jobs on a grand total of twenty-one horses.

  All day Sunday, when he wasn’t interrupting his rounds on the ranch to meet with reporters, Joe was surprised by the number of markers of Shane lying around, reminders that he hadn’t even noticed before. The Buena Vista saddle Shane had used when he was helping Joe break his foxtrotter filly was sitting on a pile of tack near the barn entrance, and a stainless steel coffee cup Shane had brought back from one of his Pacific cruises, engraved with the initials USMC, was gathering dust on a piece of two-by-four framing near the horse stalls. Joe picked up the coffee cup, cleaned off the dust and the cobwebs with his handkerchief, and then leaned against a pile of mule saddles and cried. There wasn’t anything he could do except surrender to these “moments” for Shane and reflect on the memories they evoked. Often, when Shane was home, they would sit out in the barn together in the evening, sipping coffee and chatting, trying to decide which horse they should break first for the big trek up to Jack Creek, or discussing the next step in Shane’s marine career.

  All weekend Joe was rushed with gratitude about something else. On his last day home at Christmas, before he stepped into his red pickup and raced off for Oregon, Shane had stood up from the dining-room table, hugged Joe and Judy good-bye, and then deliberately tried to leave in a hurry, hoping to avoid a painfully drawn-out departure. But Joe wouldn’t let Shane leave before he said one last thing. Now those words returned again and again as a mantra, and over the next several days Joe would repeat them when friends asked him about Shane’s last visit home.

  I loved him, and I told him that I loved him. I was proud of him and I told him that too. Now I’ve lost him and I’m sad. No shame in that, Joe Childers. Every time I saw him, every time he left, I told him that I loved him, that I was proud of him. Sorry folks if you remember another Joe Childers but that’s what I said every time and now I’m okay with my tears.

  There were a few happy, distracting moments on Sunday, too. Just before lunch, as Joe came in from feeding the cattle, a delegation from the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen pulled up the drive in their pickups. Joe was overjoyed to see them and blurred up again as he paused for long hugs with his friends. In their pickup cabs the wives all had tins of baked meals and desserts on their laps, so that Judy wouldn’t have to worry about cooking. The pickup beds were filled with haphazard piles of equipment—folding tables and chairs, gas generators, extra garbage pails—which the Horsemen figured Joe might need to accommodate guests.

  For a while, Joe enjoyed feeling useful, even festive about the arrival of so many friends. The house overflowing with guests reminded him of his boyhood in West Virginia, when the small farms along the hollow would fill up with visitors because someone had died. Funerals were social occasions, a time to visit and tell stories. Stepping inside, Joe checked that someone had made coffee and then ran out to the refrigerator in the barn a few times for cold drinks for their guests. Back in the house, Joe heard Judy repeating something she had said to Captain Hutchison and Sergeant Morgan the day before.

  “Oh, I’m okay for now,” she said. “Joe’s the one we have to worry about. He’s really taking Shane’s death hard.”

  Joe wasn’t sure that this was really accurate—maybe Judy holding so much in wasn’t a good sign. But as a couple they had settled down to a kind of unspoken agreement about the matter. Joe was bawling his head off in front of friends and Judy was preserving her reputation as the rock of the marriage. So what? Whatever it took. Shane’s death seemed so irretrievably unfair and final right now that he was willing to face almost anything just to get through each day.

  It was blustery and gray when Joe joined the men out by the open shed doors of his shop. They could see the long, bluish ravines of the Pryors and the Bighorns, and the half-mast flag for Shane snapped in the gusts. Joe and his friends talked about mule-breeding and the weather, all the packing trips they were dreaming of this year once the snow melted off the peaks. When Joe told them that he was actually enjoying being alone on his first day home, his friends stepped inside for their wives and discreetly moved toward their pickups.

  Over the winter, Joe had purchased two new Levi’s jean jackets, one for himself and one for Shane. One of the wives of the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen was a talented seamstress who had promised to stitch the lettering and logo of the group on the back of the jackets, the kind of goofy, all-American gift that Shane loved. Joe hadn’t heard from her after he’d given her the jackets, but she was among those who visited on Sunday and he asked her about it.

  “Say, did you ever manage to get that logo stitched on the jackets?”

  “Oh gosh, Joe,” she said. “I’m sorry. The jackets are done. I’ll get them back over here pronto. I promise.”

  “No rush, dear, no rush,” Joe said. “Either way. It’s just that I’ve figured out what I should do with the jacket meant for Shane.”

  A couple of hours later, after a round-trip drive into Cody, the woman delivered the finished jackets to the Childerses, and Joe put them aside inside the house.

  John Van Valin dropped by that night to help Joe feed his cattle, hopping the fence and grabbing a bale as he walked out to the spot where Joe was spreading hay for his steers. Joe was glad to see him and launched into one of his tales, so that John experienced the familiar feeling of having joined him in mid-sentence. When they finished outside, they went in the barn and carried hay and oats for the horses. When they were done and had stepped outside to the lit barnyard, Joe asked John to wait for a moment. He had something for him in the house.

  Joe came back out through the side door carrying a Shoshone Back Country Horsemen jean jacket, the one that had been stitched for Shane.

  “Say, John, I had one of these made up for Shane and, you know, Shane’s not going to be able to enjoy it now. I’m pretty sure it’s your size. Try it on. Considering his feelings for you, I bet Shane would get a real kick out of you having it now.”

  John was almost speechless but thanked Joe as he put on the jacket, and then turned around into the beam of the barn light so that Joe could admire the bright red and blue of the logo and lettering. They stood there and talked for a while, with lavender and pink tendrils of light out over the Beartooths in the western sky, before John had to leave.

  A couple of afternoons that week, while he was waiting for Shane’s body to return and he was distracted by the details of making funeral arrangements, Joe suddenly had the urge to be with John and drove over to see him. He wasn’t afraid to wrap his big, bear like arms around Van Valin and cry until he felt better. Deb Van Valin called this “Joe getting his John fix.” John tried to have his new Shoshone Back Country Horsemen jacket on whenever Joe appeared, and he always wore it when he drove over to the Childerses himself.

  One afternoon after John left in his pickup, Joe was crossing his yard when he was struck by an idea so contradictory yet sensible that it had to be true. If he said so himself, he had to admire his own thinking about it. Parting with that jacket was all wrapped up in his “separation process” from Shane. A side of him, he knew, still expected “old Shane to come diddly-boppin’ down the lane any minute now and say something to make us all laugh.” He probably wouldn’t be able to get over that wishful thinking until Shane’s body was returned and they faced the fina
lity of a funeral. In the meantime he just loved seeing John in that jacket and decided that it was useless to try to untangle all the emotions he had about that.

  KNOW HOW TO BE

  On Monday morning Captain Hutchison and First Sergeant Morgan rode back down over the dark, moody Pryors in their government Suburban, glumly reviewing the pile of government forms bulging out of Hutchison’s black canvas satchel. They were both concerned that they might overwhelm Joe and Judy Childers with the mountain of paperwork that had to be completed in the next several days and agreed to keep this first visit under two hours. Besides, they were planning on visiting the local funeral home and the police chief in Powell to begin making arrangements for what they expected to be a complicated, crowded funeral event. After clearing the last foothills east of Cody, they bumped across the Childerses’ dusty drive. Once more Hutchison’s heart sank as he took in the panorama of wobbly fence lines, swayback horses, and piles of farm machinery stretching back to the Polecat Bench, but then he caught himself just in time.

  Hutchison knew that noticing the disorganized, Steinbeck-clutter of the Childers place was just a social judgment on his part, and that he would be much better off recalling his lifetime motto, a Spanish concept called saber estar. The term literally translated into English as “know how to be,” and Hutchison had first heard it from an avuncular, grizzled Mexican janitor with whom he had worked as a boy in southern California, when he accompanied his father to his office on Saturday mornings. (His bilingualism had emerged even earlier when his nanny, Maria, who adored young Kevin, insisted on speaking to him only in Spanish.) In prep school, his Spanish teacher had encouraged Hutchison to write an essay on the importance of not only understanding saber estar, but also the usefulness of adopting personal credos to guide his life.