by Pamela Morsi
“Bud, you’ve got to snap out of this,” Geri pleaded with me. “You got to try to get on with your life.”
“Why should I?” I asked her.
“Because it was part of our bargain,” she answered. “All those years ago. I kept care of your mother so you could go see the world. I did that, Bud. I did it because I wanted to have a life with you. You’re the only man I’ve ever cared about. And when you don’t care about yourself, it’s the same as not caring about me.”
The new senior’s center held a Valentine’s dance on a Tuesday night at the Jitterbug Lounge. Of course, it wasn’t the Jitterbug Lounge anymore, now they called it Boot Scooters Dance Hall, but it was the same old place it had always been. Geri insisted that we go. I groused about it all afternoon and then all the way there. I refused to wear a suit and insisted I looked good enough for Catawah in a white shirt and suspenders. We went inside and the place reminded me of a prom. The ladies had decorated it in cardboard hearts and crepe paper streamers. Up in the bandstand the musicians in their white sport coats were as old as we were. They knew all of our songs and played “Stardust” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Stormy Weather.”
From the moment we walked through the door, Geri wanted to dance. She didn’t ask me directly. She was tapping her foot and swaying to the music. I left her alone and stood over by the bar just to be contrary. The ladies had laid out a variety of cookies and such on the bar. And the only drinks being served were soft drinks and lemonade. I found an empty bar stool and seated myself for the duration. I was tired. I was cranky. I was determined to be a stick in the mud.
Geri should have danced with someone else. Several guys came up and asked her. I watched her smile and thank them and shake her head. I knew my Geri. If she wasn’t dancing with me, she wasn’t dancing at all.
“Hey, Bud, how you doing these days?”
I turned to see Piggy Masterson. He looked just like he always did. Except of course that his hair now only grew around the rim of the back of his head. And his nose had somehow taken on unreasonably sized dimensions. Piggy took the stool next to me. He had a paper plate loaded up with chips and cookies and chunks of cheese. He had a coffee mug that he set on the bar. Even from a distance of four feet away, I knew he was drinking bourbon.
“I’m doing fine,” I answered, not willing to claim the truth. “I’m retired now, just living the life of Riley.”
Piggy sighed and shook his head. “I wish I could retire,” he said. “What in the devil do I make money for if I don’t get a stinking chance to go off and spend a dime of it.”
“I thought your son-in-law was running the business now,” I said.
“That numb-nut pinhead? I wouldn’t trust him to clean my toilet, let alone run my dealership. I just let him work there to try to keep Melinda on my good side.”
I didn’t comment on that, but inside my mind I was remembering when J.D. said that Piggy didn’t think he was good enough for his daughter. Piggy got just exactly what he deserved to my way of thinking, and I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit smug about it.
Myra Tobin walked up to us. I was surprised to see her. Her dress was too short and too tight and she was too young to even be at this function.
“Pig,” she said, “if you’re not dancing with me, I’m finding another partner.”
“Go ahead, honey, have fun,” he answered, as if giving her permission.
She walked away in a bit of a huff.
“What’s that about?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “The gal is angling to be my fourth wife,” he said. “I’m mostly resisting when I think about it.”
I gave that a small chuckle.
“Your Geri sure looks pretty tonight,” he said.
I followed the direction of his gaze. Geri did look good. She’d never been a true beauty, but she was always attractive with that slim figure and the defiant chin. She was a woman who went out in the world and got what she wanted. It was hard not to admire that about her.
“You know,” Piggy said, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “I envy you. You found a woman who loves you. Not when you buy her things or take her places or do what she wants. She loves you all the time. Do you know how rare that is?”
The man was practically up in my face by then and the booze was strong enough to nearly knock me over.
“What in hell did you ever do to deserve that?” Piggy asked me.
I didn’t have an answer. But I did think about it and a few minutes later after Piggy was gone and I was there all alone, I got up from the bar stool and walked across the room.
“Hey, Crazy Girl, you want to dance?”
As always with my wife, there were no recriminations, no tit for tat. She always found a way to forgive me, even when I couldn’t manage to say “I’m sorry.” Apologies weren’t necessary, but I made one anyway. Not for leaving her a wallflower, but for everything else.
“I spend too much time thinking about all I’ve lost,” I admitted. “And not nearly enough time on all that I still have.”
She smiled up at me. “Well, at least you finally noticed,” she teased.
“I would never have made it this far without you, Geri,” I told her.
“You and I will just go on together,” she said. “We still have each other and that’s a lot, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Bud, the only thing that I’ve ever really wanted was a happy life with you,” she said. “I miss my son. I miss my grandson. I hate what that awful war did to you. But I can’t let those things cheat me out of everything that I have. I’ve decided that I’m going to be happy, and like it or not, you’re stuck with me, so you’re just going to have to be happy, too.”
I laughed at her joke, but I knew that she was also speaking truth.
“I haven’t been able to give you much, Geri,” I told her. “But I’ll try my dangest to give you this.”
I pulled her tightly into my arms.
“Bud, you’re holding me too close,” she whispered.
“Are you afraid the old ladies will gossip?” I asked.
She laughed. “More likely they’ll all turn green with envy.”
In the months that followed, I really did try harder to be happy. With the arrival of spring, I moved my sleeping camp back out to the garden and got by better that way.
During the summer, Jackie came up for the weekend with his family. Toni was expecting a new baby and Dr. Van Brugge was obviously delighted. But it was clear that he cared about Jackie and included him in everything.
“I don’t want Jack to ever feel like he’s not a part of our family,” Toni told me. “Every boy needs a father and I’d like for Jack to think of Ernst as his.”
That seemed like a reasonable consideration. J.D. would have wanted what was best for Jackie. He would not have allowed selfishness to stand in the way of that. Geri and I talked it over and decided that we would support her decision. We made a determined effort not to even speak J.D.’s name. Of course, having to guard our words around the boy created a strange wall between us. Geri and I could both see it, we both wanted to overcome it, but somehow we were never able to breach it.
In the fall a new doctor arrived in Catawah. Geri liked the young man, Dr. Williams, and trusted him. I was still struggling with my health so she insisted I go see him.
He looked me over head to toe, had enough blood drawn out of me to please a vampire and inquired in detail about my eating and drinking habits. I answered as best I could. Then out of the blue it seemed, he asked the question that nobody ever asked.
“How are you sleeping?”
I hesitated long enough that the man raised his eyes up from the paper he was writing on to look at me.
I was tempted to lie. If I just said, “Fine,” that would be the end of it. I wouldn’t even have to lie, I could say, “Same as always.” Which would be the truth and have the same result as a lie. But I didn’t do either of those things.
“I don�
��t sleep unless I just have to,” I admitted. “And then I don’t sleep well.”
He raised an eyebrow and set his clipboard on his lap and waited for me to explain myself.
“I’m troubled by dreams,” I said. “I have been ever since the war.”
“How often do you have these dreams?”
“Pretty often.”
“Have you ever talked to anyone about them?”
I shrugged. “I talked with the flight surgeon when I was still in the service.”
“And what did he say?”
“Learn to live with it,” I answered.
“Have you?”
“Well, I haven’t committed hara-kiri, so I’d call that some level of success.” I chuckled at my own joke.
He nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. “I’d like to refer you to somebody,” he said.
“I’m not big on headshrinkers,” I told him.
“They’ve learned a lot about this in the last few years,” he told me. “I think he might be able to help you. At the very least, he can tell you more about what you’re living with.”
I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I was curious so I agreed. The fellow he sent me to was in Oklahoma City, which was a heck of a long drive to just sit and talk for an hour. I had my doubts about doing it. But after the first couple of visits, I found myself looking forward to it. It was such a relief to be able to say things that were in my head.
“The weirdest thing is that it’s always about the water,” I told the man. “I see it all exactly as it was and it’s always the water.”
The psychiatrist nodded without comment.
“Now that time in the water, that was bad,” I admitted. “It was bad and scary and I gave up hope of living. But it wasn’t the worst thing that happened during the war. I saw so many worse things. The years after that when we were taking those islands, my God, it was a damned slaughter day in, day out. I saw things that no human ought to ever put his eyes on. I never dream about any of that. It’s always the water.”
“What do you think was the difference in you, before the water and after?”
I hesitated.
“I don’t know if I can explain this where it makes any sense to anyone else,” I said.
“Just say it how you feel it and we’ll try to sort it out,” he said.
“It was like I died out in the water,” I told him. “I gave up hope of being saved. I no longer cared about living. I decided to go ahead and die. If I’d been able to get that rusty latch undone on my life vest, I’d be bones scattered on the bottom of the ocean right now.”
“But you’re not,” he said. “You’re here.”
I shrugged. “They pulled me out, but I’d already made my peace with death. Living had lost its value to me. When I got back to my squad, I realized what a great fighter that made me. It was like being a kamikaze day after day after day. If you’re already dead, then you can’t be killed and those who can’t be killed never hesitate.”
“So you took your living nightmare and adapted it into a positive force—that’s laudable self-preservation.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess you could say it saved me. But it killed my son.”
The doctor didn’t say anything, he just waited in silence for me to say it myself.
“J.D. thought I was a hero. He thought I’d done all the things I’d done because I was brave and noble, and that I was willing to sacrifice myself for freedom and country. I let him believe that of me. He admired me and wanted to be like me. That got him killed.”
The two of us sat for a few minutes letting the feel of those words soak in. Finally the doctor spoke.
“Let’s say a man is walking by a house and hears a child screaming and looks up to see smoke billowing out of the window. He doesn’t stop to think about what might be happening in the house, whether the fire has reached the roof or how dangerous the smoke might be. He rushes into the house to save the crying child.”
“That man’s a hero,” I said.
“Are you sure?” the psychiatrist asked. “What if that man was just coming from his doctor and had been told he had an inoperable brain tumor and that he only had six weeks to live? Would that make his action any different?”
I shrugged. “It might have made it easier to go into the house,” I said.
“But it was the same act, the same heroic act,” the shrink said. “And the child was saved, the man’s motive or his future or lack of it meant nothing to that child, only the man’s actions.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Heroes are defined by heroic acts, not by the emotional baggage behind those acts,” he said. “You are a genuine hero. There is nothing you can do to change that.”
“But what about my son?” I asked.
“I am so sorry about your son,” he said. “I can see why he wanted to be like you. And from what you’ve told me about the fire fight he died in, he managed to do that. Do you think that after seven months in Vietnam he hadn’t learned as much about war as you knew? Give him some credit. He did what he did for the same kind of reason that propelled you forward. He made peace with death, too. He just didn’t get a second chance to act upon it.”
I continued to see the psychiatrist for the better part of a year. I’m not saying the man cured me. He had me do relaxation techniques that helped me sleep better. The dreams still came, but I learned that they weren’t really dreams, they were just stark memories. Knowing that’s what they were and that they were in the past, helped somehow.
Geri and I continued to be happy on a day-by-day basis. Our ties with Jack got fewer and fewer. When he brought his new wife to meet us we were delighted. She seemed like she would be good for him. And we had hope that now he was grown, we could be closer. It didn’t really work out that way, but we were happy for him. We bragged about him to friends and family and anyone who would listen.
“Our grandson, Jack, has a lovely wife.”
“Our grandson, Jack, has a very successful business.”
“Our grandson, Jack, has a beautiful, healthy daughter.”
“Our grandson, Jack, is now the father of twins!”
Of course, we wished they lived closer and we could be more involved in their lives, but we weren’t alone in that. A lot of our friends were in the same boat. That we lived long enough to know our grandchildren was probably gift enough.
When Geri died, Jack came home to stand beside me at the funeral. I was so empty, so at a loss, I couldn’t even think of a word to say to him. Geri had always kept our conversation going. Without her, I found myself speechless, even among the people I loved.
And now I was here in the hospital myself. This crazy hospital with all the loud dance music. It seemed especially loud today. Then strangely, I felt a warm hand clasp mine.
“Grandpa Bud? Grandpa Bud, it’s me, Jack.”
It felt so good to hear his voice, his very human voice and the one most dear to me on earth.
“I just want you to know that I love you,” he said to me. “I love you and I appreciate all the time that we had together. I wish we had more time, but I know you miss Grandma Geri. If you want to go to her, I understand. I just wanted to say goodbye.”
Goodbye, I tried to say, but my lips and tongue and the breath in my lungs would not cooperate. Goodbye, Jack, I’ll miss you.
Saturday, June 18, 3:30 p.m.
Bud’s funeral was held in McKiever’s Iglesia de Jesus. The family section of the church was full to bursting with every Shertz relative in attendance. Jack was glad to have his own family, as well. Claire was at his side, and Toni and Ernst had driven up bringing the children with them. None of the kids had ever been to a funeral before, but they all behaved well through the songs and the eulogies, and at the ceremony at the cemetery where the American Legion did honors and folded the flag, which they handed to Jack.
Afterward the twins went racing off with their cousins, but Jack got the chance to show Zaidi his father’s headstone.
“So you didn’t know him at all,” Zaidi said.
Jack shook his head. “No, I didn’t get a chance,” he answered. “Just like you didn’t get a chance to know Grandpa Bud. But sometimes, even when you never get to know people, you can still know them through the people that they loved. So I know my father through the love that my mother and my grandparents had for him. And you can know my grandparents through the love I have for them.”
Zaidi thought about that for a moment and then nodded.
“Cool,” she said.
The community did a huge outdoor dinner at the house. It was ostensibly for the family, but in Catawah, a lot of people were part of the family, or were married to people in the family, or felt as close as family. A huge crowd showed up. Car after car parked up and down the street and every visitor brought a pie or a salad or a bean casserole.
Nearly all of these people had a story they wanted to tell about Bud. And Jack found himself learning more about the old man in death than he’d ever known in life.
Jack and Claire were the center of attention among the crowds of friends and relatives. They spent most of the afternoon shaking hands, meeting people and thanking everyone. There were the townspeople who’d been friends of the Crabtrees all their lives. There were professional people in the recycling industry who had known Bud and Geri through their volunteer work. And the guys in the veterans organizations, who knew Bud from his war record. There were even members of the Stark family who claimed to be relatives. Though Cousin Reba made of point of telling him that the Shertz family didn’t claim any kinship to them and warned Jack to keep his distance. Jack shook hands with a tall, robust man of about sixty. “I’m Lester Andeel,” he said. “Bud and my dad were best friends in high school. My parents and Bud and Geri had a double wedding. That was the first time they got married.”
Jack laughed. “You know I didn’t even hear the two weddings story until a couple of days ago,” he said.
“Yes, the four of them ran off to Arkansas on graduation night,” Lester said. “My father was killed in WWII, but my mother stayed a friend to Geri and Bud all her life. She always bragged that she was the only person in Catawah who had been at both their weddings.”
