by Joe Cassilly
I was shocked by the appearance of the right side of my father’s face. The upper eyelid was closed over the eye, while the lower lid sagged away revealing the lower portion of the eyeball. The eye had crusted drainage at the corner. The muscles under the cheek had atrophied and the pale gray skin hung limply from the cheekbone. The corner of his mouth drooped down and a trail of saliva had run over his lower lip across the stubble on his chin. I shuddered.
“Hey, Dad.” I waited. “It’s me, Jake.” I felt the eyes stare through me and out the window on the other side of me. I went to a table and got a Kleenex. An old man standing, faced into the corner, mumbling to himself, was the only other person in the room. I returned to my father and wiped the spit from his chin and wiped his eye. The fixed stare never changed.
“Can you hear me?” I raised my voice and then I looked over to see if the other man was listening or if anyone was by the door. Then, I spoke louder. “I came here to say something to you. Do you know that I am here?” The straight stare continued. “If you can hear me, then blink.” I watched his face and, after a few seconds, he blinked, or at least one eye did. I pushed slowly around my father. He was dressed in a set of hospital pajamas and his own bathrobe. A urine drainage bag hung under his chair and the hose went into his pajama pants. I stopped my wheelchair beside his and looked out of the window to see if there was something out there that he was looking at. I blinked into the bright sunshine.
“Do you know that I’m twenty years old now?” I did not look for a response and, in fact, turned my head so that I could not even see him from the corner of my eye. “In all that time, I never remember you telling me that you loved me. Even when I was a little boy. Why couldn’t you have ever said that to me?” I worked at keeping the speech coming from my head and not my heart, no emotion, nothing to interfere with what I had waited so long to begin. “You could never see any good in me. When I got an A on my report card, you condescendingly pointed to the C. When I limped off the football field, you didn’t ask how I was. You launched into a rant of what I should have done.
“Do you know why you never told me you loved me?” I waited for the answer, and then I gave it to him. “You didn’t love me. You were waiting to love the person you were trying to make me into.” I looked sideways at him and then I pushed around so that I was directly in front of him looking at that expressionless face. “You never, never listened to what I wanted or what I decided.” My voice wavered between pleading and anger. “You never said, ‘Good luck, son, nice going, boy.’ Never a pat on my back or an arm around my shoulders. We never had a conversation, you lectured. All you could hear when I spoke was how wrong I was, how I was making a mistake, how I would not be what you wanted me to be. All you could do was nitpick and find fault. You could never accept and love just me.”
I pushed in a halting circle around him as I spoke. “I wanted to be a chopper pilot. I wanted to fly, but that wasn’t what you wanted. It wouldn’t look good on your resume.” I finished the first circle. “Sure, I might have gotten shot down, crippled, or killed, but it would have been my decision, my responsibility and my triumph or blame. Do you know the frustrations I go through every day? Are you sitting there raging with anger in your mind because you can’t walk, get into bathrooms? Do you piss in your pants or shit yourself? I do. Do you have frustrations? You want to know the worst frustration?” My voice rose to a shout. “I don’t know why the hell I am in a wheelchair.”
I stopped and faced him and said fiercely, “It was my goddamn life, but now neither of us has our lives to live because they belong to these fucking wheelchairs. Did you want me to love you or hate you or didn’t it matter?” I pushed back to the table and got Kleenexes, one to blow my nose and some more to wipe my eyes. I took a breath to calm down and glanced at the open doors. I pushed back.
“I want to know something. Is this how your old man treated you, or was it to the other extreme?” I searched the face in front of me to see if it was registering, but I could see no change in the eyes. “Did your old man make it clear to you that he just didn’t give a damn who you were? Is that what you learned?” I reached over and put my hand on his arm. I lifted it and drew his hand into my lap and put it between my hands. “I don’t know whether I will be lucky enough to have a son, but if I do, I will hug him and I will tell him that I love him and I will love him for being just what he is. The whole time we lived together, did you ever open the door to my bedroom while I was sleeping and whisper that you loved me?”
I laid his hand in his lap and pushed to the window to clear the lump in my throat. Looking into the bright sunshine, I remembered bright sun on a snow-covered hill. My father pulled me to the top of the hill on a big sled and we would ride down together. We went up and down that hill for hours. When I started to shiver, my father gathered dried branches and lit a fire and rubbed my arms and shoulders to warm me up. Then, he trudged home, pulling the sled and me under a purple and pink winter sky. The sense that I was being watched caused me to jerk my head around. I saw no one but my father. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but his stare seemed to have shifted slightly.
I rested my forehead on my hands. “I met a little boy named Tommy last week and I realized how much he is like me. The only thing he needs is a father to love him.” I looked into the pale face—the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes. “You know all those years in Catholic school, high school, and with you and mom and no one taught me that the hardest thing to do is to love someone the way they are—crippled, retarded, whatever. It is probably something you can’t be taught—and only a few people learn it.” I rolled to him and put my arm around his shoulders. I did not want to cry now. “I love you—just the way you are—or in spite of it. But I love you.”
I turned to leave and almost ran over the aide who had come up behind us. “Man, he don’t understand a word you sayin’,” said the aide.
I licked my lips. “Are you sure?”
The aide thought. “Well, no, I ain’t for sure.”
“Well, I don’t want to take that chance.” I pushed to the table and got a Kleenex and came back to the man in the wheelchair. I wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth and then wiped a tear from his eye. I turned and left.
After I had pulled the chair into the car, I lay across the front seats and went to sleep. I was in the Michelin rubber plantation, rows on rows of rubber trees. We were in a circle in total darkness. I held my hand in front of my eyes and saw only black. The luminescent hands on my Timex told me it was midnight. I arranged the ammo belt to the machine gun by feel and moved some vines away so that they would not get tangled with the belt. Suddenly, a hand shook my leg and a whisper said, “A light.” We looked into the blackness. There was nothing. Somebody asked, “Do they have fireflies in Vietnam?” But it flashed again for a second, a flashlight. Then, off to the side another and on the other side of the circle another. “Everybody stay still,” whispered our team leader. “They know we’re out here, they are trying to draw our fire to see exactly where.” We watched the lights come on and off at different points around us for maybe an hour.
Slam! The door of a car parked beside mine closed. I woke up and started driving in time to get caught in Philadelphia rush hour traffic. It was around seven when I drove up in front of the big old house. I was puffing up the ramp to the porch when the front door swung open and Ann came bounding out. “EEK,” she yelped, startled to see a head coming over the edge of the porch. “Jake, I didn’t know you were coming home.”
She glanced at her watch. “Um, your mother drove into see your father, and I’m supposed to meet Hank for dinner. Do you want me to help you fix something to eat?”
“No, you get going. I need some time to myself.”
“Bye, honey,” she said with a kiss on my cheek and she skipped down the steps. I pushed through the huge, quiet house and dropped my knapsack on my bed. I headed to the bathroom. Then, I went to the kitchen for two big glasses of water. Our well water was always the best.
Then, I fixed a scotch chaser and took it out to the sun porch. I slid onto the bed and rolled onto my side. I pushed the curtains aside and, just outside the window, a beautiful red rose bud hung at the end of a long stem.
My shoulders began shaking and I began crying. Between sobs, I kept repeating, “Why, God, why do you keep messing with me?” Someone sat on the edge of the bed and put their hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me onto my back. Through the tears in my eyes, I saw the blurred face of Valerie.
She answered my question before it was asked. “Ann drove by the house and told me that you had come home. Why are you crying?”
“Could you please just hold me?”
She lay on the bed beside me and we entwined our arms around the other in a tight embrace. I inhaled the scent of her hair and felt the pressure of her hands on my back. “This was all I needed,” I whispered, “someone to welcome me home. I’ll be fine.” We lay there for a long time. What a day, I thought, I started in bed with a beautiful woman and ended the day in bed with a different woman. There will never be another day like this.
She pulled back and leaned on her elbow to look at me. Her soft fingers wiped away a tear. “What are you thinking?”
I could not answer that honestly. “I was feeling sorry for all the cripples in this world who don’t have anyone to give them a hug when they need it.” She squeezed me again. “And I was thinking of a friend named Ben and wondering in two years how many hugs he got.” Valerie pressed her lips against mine and her mouth opened. I slid my hand over her shorts and rubbed her thigh.
It was 11:30 when Ann came home. She came into the sun porch and was surprised to see me there. “What are you doing here? I mean, where is your car?”
“I let Valerie drive it home. I didn’t want her walking in the dark.”
“Oh no! It’s bad enough when you give a girl a ring, but when you let her take the car home,” she said teasingly, “you might as well have set a wedding date.”
“Get out of here and go to bed,” I said with a laugh.
“Are you ready for me to help you get ready for bed or did Valerie do that?” She blushed when she realized what she was suggesting.
“I am ready for bed. I made some changes in the last three weeks so that I don’t need as much help. Although, if you think we can mange it, I’d like to try the tub tomorrow.”
“Well, if I can’t get you out by myself, I can always call Valerie.”
“Yeah, right. Go to bed.” She kissed me goodnight and turned off the light. I heard her heels on the steps. As I was falling asleep, I thought, I told my father I love him.
44
Back on the River
I was sitting on the porch sipping coffee when I heard music from the road, then saw my car coming up the drive. The windows were all open and music with a heavy beat was blaring from it. Valerie stopped and she and Diana and Julie climbed out. Valerie was carrying a bag of doughnuts. “I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see the car again,” I said.
“Valerie said she wanted to bring you breakfast, but,” said Diana, moving away from her older sister, “Julie and I know she just wanted to drive through town so that all of the seniors could see her in that car.” Valerie hit Diana in the breast with a powdered sugar doughnut, leaving a white ring on her navy shirt.
“You, brat,” they shouted simultaneously. I stared laughing. We all went into the kitchen for coffee. Ann came running through the kitchen holding a towel around her naked body. She ran to the dryer and dug out some clothes and turned to see us staring.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were here. Well, do what you were doing.” She ran out.
The girls turned to look at me. “I don’t know what this looks like,” I said, waving my hands, “but it isn’t what it looks like. She doesn’t run around the house naked.” Just then, Ann came back in wearing a shirt and panties and dug into the dryer and pulled out a pair of shorts, which she slipped on. As she was toweling off her wet hair, she said, “I’m sorry but I overslept and Hank will be here any second.” On cue, Hank walked into the kitchen.
“Are you getting married soon?” I asked in jest. The looks they shot each other answered that question.
Hank was there to take her out on the boat. “You guys want to come fishing?” Hank invited me and the Robinson girls. Ann and the girls went to the garage to get our fishing poles. “Hank, wouldn’t you rather be alone with Ann?”
“Jake if we were going to the theater or to dinner, yeah, but pulling slimy fish out of a muddy river isn’t exactly the place you plan to be alone with a woman.”
We drove to the marina in two cars. Hank managed the chair down the steep ramp to the pier. When he had the boat in the water, he brought it up to the pier. I swung the footrests out of the way. Ann and the girls each took an arm or leg and lowered my butt to the wooden planks, which was kind of a controlled fall. I started to slide my butt toward the edge of the pier when Hank said, “Look out for splinters.”
Julie nudged Diana. “It’s all right, Jake, Valerie will help look for splinters.” For a second, I thought one of them was going to get pushed into the river.
“Is this going to go on all day?”
Valerie retorted coolly, “Not if they would just grow up.” The girls pulled the boat against the pier while Hank and Ann got me into the boat. It wasn’t very dignified. Ann put my chair back into the car. The boat pulled away from the pier. The roar of the engine, the gurgling of the exhaust into the water, the rush of the wind in my face, the smell of wind, water, bait buckets, the spray on my face; there were a million memories of years of fishing on this big river. Hank maneuvered between some rocks where the fish were known to hide. He tossed a rope over a downed tree’s limb to hold us from drifting. Six lines went into the water and six people settled into the reflection that makes patient fishermen. Ann was talking softly to Valerie and Hank was giving Diana and Julie a hand. I wondered what was happening twelve thousand miles away, a Sunday evening in the war. I had not read or watched any of the news coverage of Vietnam.
The tall trees on the bank made me think of the tall towers on the perimeter of the base camp. Four huge poles supporting a platform, about forty feet up, with low walls of timbers and sandbags and a tin roof. I could see those trees being cut down and shipped to be used for the poles. One night, the ARVN troops had a fire fight with the Viet Cong in the village outside the base camp. An armored personnel carrier opened up with a machine gun. Whatever he was aiming at caused his bullets to ricochet and I watched as red tracers came floating in wild paths at me in that tower. I hit the floor and heard the bullets whine by and thud into the sandbags.
Suddenly, the strike of a fish on my line brought me back to the river. It jerked the pole from my hands, but I was able to save it by hooking a hand on the reel and pinning the pole against the boat. I had to catch myself with my other hand and push.
“Quick, somebody grab it!” I shouted. Julie reached over the side and grabbed the pole and held it out to me. “I can’t do it,” I said.
“Go on, bring him in,” said Ann, taking the pole from her and helping me to get control of it. I put the butt of the pole between my legs, put my palm under the pole, and used the flat of my other palm to turn the reel. It was a slow process, especially with everyone watching and calling encouragement. Hank netted the fish and I felt proud of the accomplishment.
“Just like the old days,” I said.
We didn’t stay out too long since there was no bathroom for both sexes. The job of getting me back onto the pier had been thought through by Hank. Julie and Diana held the boat against the pier. Hank got onto the pier. I sat on the edge of the boat with my back to him and put my arms above my head so he could grab my wrists. Valerie and Ann each grabbed a leg and on the count of three they heaved me up. Then they lifted me into the chair.
Hank could not get my chair around the corner into the men’s room, so we stopped at the sink and he stood guard at the open door while I got the cathe
ter out. Later, as we sat around a fire, dangling hot dogs on sticks into the flames, I looked around at the sunburned faces of my friends. “Thanks, everybody, for helping me today,” I said sincerely. “This is what coming home is about.” And yet, it was not the same; doing what I used to do did not erase the paralysis or the wish to be able to do it on my own without their help.
45
Widows, Orphans, and
Cripples
May 31, 1971, Memorial Day, I was up early. My mother was still in Philadelphia. Ann was sleeping in on the holiday so I did not worry about pushing through the house naked. In the kitchen, I made two cups of coffee and balanced one on the arm of my chair as I pushed back to the sun porch. “If I spill this, I am going to have a lot of embarrassing burns to explain.” I sipped the coffee between struggles with my socks and pants. I put on my boots and then closed the door. On the back of the door, my camouflage jacket was hung, pressed, and starched. I put it on over a white short sleeve shirt. I glanced at my watch; I had to get a move on. I had seen the Walls at church on Sunday. They reminded me. I pushed to the kitchen and gulped down the other coffee. I made a phone call.
I went to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror. I put the black beret on my head and adjusted it just so. I drove my just cleaned blue car to Drier’s store and around back to the lane that lead to their house. Hank was sitting on the steps. He stood and entered the passenger side. I drove back to the highway but, shortly, I turned and drove up a steep hill that led to a bluff that overlooked the river. I parked and unloaded the chair. It was a struggle to push the chair through the lush grass around the gray headstones. I had to rest my arms many times. Hank started to help me. “Not this time,” I refused. “I need to get there on my own.” I stopped by a small stone that had a bronze Marine Corps emblem on it.
