by Silas House
All the floats were done up in some patriotic way. The First National Bank of Refuge’s float was a giant Liberty Bell made of dyed Kleenex, with bank tellers dressed as Betsy Ross walking alongside, throwing suckers to the crowd. A scattering of Dum Dums skidded to the toes of my and Edie’s shoes, but neither of us had even bent forward to get the candy before the little kids on either side of us burst in and snatched them up. The college’s entry was a man dressed as Paul Revere, sitting on the back of a beautiful chestnut horse that stomped diagonally down the street and looked around wild-eyed every time the tuba sounded. The man, who was too fat and soft-faced to play Revere, shouted, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” in a very unconvincing way while he waved to the crowd. Everyone laughed as he passed. The chamber of commerce sponsored a float that was made to look like Washington’s crossing of the Delaware; the JC Penney employees were the wounded and nurses of a Revolutionary War hospital. There were scenes of the Declaration of Independence being signed, and the high-school debate team was dressed in period garb, sitting on the float in front of the principal, who was dressed like Lincoln and delivered only the first line of the Gettysburg Address over and over while he held on to one lapel. Josie burst out laughing at this one. There was a Boy Scout troop and the high-school ROTC, looking especially sinister and stoic. A string of fire trucks held the county’s assorted cheerleaders on its back. They all smiled down with Vaselined teeth, and suddenly the captain started clapping as if her life depended on it and began a cheer: “Firecracker, firecracker, boom boom boom. Refuge Redbirds go zoom zoom zoom.”
But then one of the fire trucks let out a deafening wail from its siren, and at first I only noticed that several people were laughing and covering their ears, looking around at each other. A baby wailed. I didn’t yet realize that behind me, my father had been so startled by the loud noise that he had jumped from his chair, sending it to fall back against the knees of people who stood too close at his back. He stood, hands suddenly out in front of him, his eyes wide, his head darting around like a frightened bird’s. My mother rose and put her hands on his arm carefully, the way some of the men walking alongside the horse had tried to steady it when the tuba boomed too loud.
I read her lips over the noise of a group of cloggers who were making their tap-heeled way up the street. “It’s all right,” she said. “Only a fire truck.” I could see him relaxing — it was a visible thing that started by a slump in his shoulders and continued down his arms and chest — and finally, he sat back down. Some teenage girls standing behind him snickered into their hands.
About this time, Nell came floating up the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette with one hand and eating a caramel apple with the other. Charles Asher took his arm off the chair he had been saving her, and she plopped down, digging the toe of her sandal into my leg to say hello. I wished I had my composition book so I could write down everything I wanted to remember. Lately I had been trying to use my mind to do this better, for just such occasions when I didn’t have my notebook handy.
Half the parade was made up of beauty-pageant queens and runners-up. They all sat atop the backseats of freshly waxed cars. Charles Asher commented on each vehicle as being sharp, souped up, too flashy. When my father had himself back together, he joined in, identifying the make and model of every car. Miss Refuge was in a powder-blue 1968 Corvette. I thought she was ugly, with too much green eye shadow and lips that looked huge by way of glopped-on lipstick. Her smile was fake, as was her wave. She held all her fingers together closely and did no more than tip her hand back and forth through the air. Then there was the high-school homecoming queen from last year, the county queen, all the way up to the state queen, who was even faker-looking than the rest of them. She wore a huge tiara that caught the sunlight and a dark blue dress that matched the Cadillac in which she was riding.
Josie made fun of all the beauty queens as they passed. “Horse teeth,” she’d say to no one in particular. Or “She stuffed her bra — it’s so obvious.” Or “Is it a requirement to have no soul to be Miss Refuge?”
Then all down the sidewalk we could see anyone who was seated rising. Their standing up was accompanied by a wave of rustling that made its way to our ears. Then the clapping started, and we could see who everyone was honoring: the veterans of World War I, who were all being wheeled along in wheelchairs or hobbling along behind walkers. Then the World War II veterans, who got a louder applause and seemed much cockier in their medals and pressed uniforms. And then the Korean War veterans, who didn’t get as much feedback but still seemed to walk along very proudly, waving with their arms high in the air or saluting people in the crowd. But there were no veterans of the Vietnam War in the parade. I started to comment on this to my father, but when I turned to him, I could see his own recognition of this in his eyes and I knew that it was something I shouldn’t mention. My mother looked as if she were trying to overlook the great disservice that had just been done to my father. Her face showed that she had realized, too, but she continued to clap without actually looking at anything at all. Before long she noticed me staring at the two of them and looked down, then nodded her chin back toward the street to redirect my attention back to the parade.
The ladies’ auxiliary had baked a flag cake about the size of a car hood and were wheeling it down the street on a specially made wagon that had several handles running down its side so the old women could push it. They were all dressed in similar flower-patterned dresses, and a few of them had walked so far and hard that their slips had worked down to peek out from under the hems. They were gray-haired and small-eyed and looked especially pleased to be taking part in the parade.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea!” Nell said in the cheery voice she used to signal sarcasm. “Children are dying of hunger, so let’s bake a gigantic cake and let it melt as we wheel it down the street. It’ll be great!”
Josie let out a peal of her good laughter.
“Shut up, Nell,” my father said without taking his eyes from the parade. This was the first time he’d spoken to her since he’d destroyed the guitar.
“It’s so easy to bake a cake, though,” Nell said, with some amount of apology in her voice. “To hold a flag.”
My father still didn’t look at Nell. I was turned almost completely around now, my eyes on my family instead of the festivities. “Some of those women lost sons in the war,” he said, and Nell looked embarrassed, but didn’t reply, so he added, “You think that was easy? What’s easy is to judge too quick, to jump to conclusions.”
Nell looked more taken aback than I had ever seen her before. She didn’t reply to him. Instead, she made a curling motion with her finger, which was a signal to me that I should turn around and watch the parade instead of her face.
The parade went on for ages, it seemed. More beauty queens, more cop cars, more floats, more Shriners marching past in their fezzes and brown suits. Somehow I found it all very sad. I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe because I didn’t have Edie to enjoy it with because she wouldn’t speak to me. But it was more than that. Somehow, I believed that we were all celebrating something we didn’t completely understand or agree upon. My history teacher, Mr. Worley, had said that America was a very young nation, which puzzled everyone in my class when we put his statement together with the fact that this was the country’s two hundredth birthday. Two centuries seemed like an eternity to us. But now I thought I knew what Mr. Worley meant. We were young because we hadn’t really figured ourselves out yet.
When it had finally ended, with a line of majorettes twirling batons high in the air as the band played the national anthem at an abnormally fast pace, I leaned over to Edie and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She kept her eyes on the street, watching the baton twirlers passing. Her mouth barely moved when she spoke. “Go to hell,” she said.
Soon the gloaming stretched itself out over us and all was bathed in the rosy glow of a slowly dying evening. The heat did not die down. In fact, it som
ehow became more noticeable. The air was heavy with the metal smell of sparklers and firecrackers, which rattled constantly down by the river, sending my father into little starts that ran up his right arm and trembled up his neck, causing a tremor to run across the large vein in his forehead. He was a nervous wreck with all that noise about him, but he didn’t complain. When some kind of small explosive wasn’t making its sound known, then people were calling out happily to one another, or an announcement was being made on a loudspeaker, or pumping music played on the big speakers in front of the courthouse. Sometimes he looked embarrassed when he jerked his head around at the sound of a thumping drum or crashing cymbal. Other times he jumped at the yapping of firecrackers and got mad at himself for being so leery.
I watched his reactions with a mix of wonder and amusement. I had never seen my father scared of anything in his life. I had seen him exposed to loud noises plenty of times, but this was different. Beads of sweat stood on his brow. But we all tried to deny what was happening. I believe we knew, even if we didn’t want to admit it to ourselves. The war had come back for my father.
This had been happening on and off awhile now, but on that bicentennial evening, it bloomed like a plume of smoke. Maybe it was the celebration itself, the fervent patriotism that everyone was surprised to see once again, as no one had been particularly patriotic since before the war. Or maybe it was the news that obsessed my father: the union of South and North Vietnam had occurred only two days before that Fourth of July, and he made it known that he was greatly bothered that there now existed a country called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. If the war had played out differently, there would have been democracy instead of communism there, he said. Perhaps the breaking point for him was seeing that his community had not acknowledged the service of Vietnam veterans in their grand parade. That had hit him like a punch to the kidneys.
He tried to cover up all of that this evening, though. The war played out in his eyes, but his face was a complete mask. He smiled and laughed, tousled my hair, bought cotton candy for Edie and a mood ring for Josie at one of the booths set up along Main Street. As my parents walked in front of us, he spread out his big hand on my mother’s back, her slender shoulder bumping into the warm space under his arm. They swayed like a movie-star couple, so confident and beautiful. I can still see them that way so clearly, as if their image at that age has been burned into my brain. It is a puzzlement. I am not sure if it is imagined or not, but I recall everyone on the street turning to look at my parents as they moved along the sidewalk. In that summer when it seemed many marriages were crumbling, my parents’ union was an illuminated thing, shining for everyone to see. Their love for each other caused a white light to announce them. He kept his hand on the small of her back. She looked up at him, already laughing as she pointed her long finger out toward something she wanted him to see. They were magnificent.
They floated through the crowd, my father nodding to people he knew, my mother occasionally hugging one of her former students. Some of them told her she was still their favorite teacher or that she had changed their lives or that they missed her since graduating. Edie and I shuffled along at their heels, not speaking, a palpable distance simmering between us. Nell swayed behind us, looking up at the sky, the flag-draped courthouse, taking in everything, as she always did. Charles Asher had moved everyone’s chairs over to the courtyard after the parade, and he and Josie sat there waiting for us. On the courthouse porch the DJ and the lazy, half-naked girl were handing out numbered pieces of paper that people latched to their clothes with safety pins. The whole time the DJ talked into the microphone with its cord snaking behind him as he walked back and forth. The speakers pumped visibly every time he spoke in his overblown newscaster voice.
Josie whispered and laughed about most of the dancers who were moving pretty pitifully to “Let Your Love Flow” by the Bellamy Brothers. Only one girl had surrendered to the music like my mother did, and she was the best. She had a tight red braid that struck her below the waist. She closed her eyes and let the music take control of her, her arms swimming through the air, everything about her moving. “She’s beautiful,” Nell said, and everyone’s silence agreed. But besides her, everybody else was pathetic. Still, the song made us all tap our feet. Edie watched with a blank, firm face. She looked completely washed out.
After a couple more songs, the winners were picked and we booed when the prize went to a boy who had only been showing off and not really feeling the music. The red-braid girl sauntered away gracefully and my mother called out to her that she should have won. The girl smiled and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Book,” addressing my mother by her teacher name.
Then the DJ screamed into his microphone — causing my father to lift both his feet off the ground in surprise — that it was time to do the Twist, and then he put the needle to the record and the song started and everyone seemed to get up at the same time, rushing to the makeshift dance floor on the porch or on the grassy yard.
The music twined and built, and everyone’s joy seeped out over the crowd as if a bucket of paint had been spilled. And then my mother was rising, slipping off her Aigner sandals. She couldn’t stand it anymore; she had to dance. She was an expert twister, going up and down, holding one arched leg up in the air as her lone foot twisted, then both feet on the ground, and she twisted heartily at the waist, smiling the whole time, eyes closed, throwing her head back so that her auburn hair trembled about her shoulders.
I didn’t realize she was doing anything out of the ordinary until I heard a mountain of a woman in a big flowered dress lean over to her tiny husband and say, “My schoolteachers never acted that way.” Then I saw how free my mother was, how she was using her whole body to draw out each note of the song. She shook all over, abandoning herself to the song. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She knew that people are never comfortable with others having too much freedom, so all she cared about was the music.
My father beamed while he watched her, moving about and clapping in his seat. Josie cupped her hands up to her mouth and hollered out for her. Charles Asher looked ecstatic to be part of a family such as mine, one where the mother would get up and dance on the courthouse yard and not care what anyone thought. Nell threw her head back and laughed, a release of uncontainable joy.
Every once in a while Mom would glance over at us and smile but mostly she concentrated on her dancing. We were all mesmerized by her, by the music, by the peace and freedom and joy that came at last that day.
Darkness seeped in at the edges of the sky, a great purpling at first, then the sky became the tight, ripe skin of a plum before blackness and starlight took over. We were all so caught up in the booths and people-watching and dancing that night had settled in before anyone really noticed. I did, though. I had been watching the sky for a long while, mostly because I was anxious for the fireworks to begin, but also because I often looked to the sky for some kind of comfort. The way light changed and shifted was a balm to me.
We all gathered on the riverbank to watch the fireworks. They were let off in the football field just across the river. Some of us lay back on quilts; some sat in wooden chairs, others right on the grass. Children ran here and there; their sparklers burned onto our eyes even after they had fizzled out.
Just like in every other little town across America that year, this was the best fireworks display we had ever seen. Huge showers of red and yellow and green and blue and white exploded on the sky, blossoming like giant willow trees. The booms were huge and square-sounding, echoing several times down the hills lining the river. Between explosions, blue smoke hung in the sky.
The whole crowd expressed satisfaction with each burst of fire. An entire chorus of “Ooooh” and “Ahhh” drifted down the riverbank. After a while, though, a sort of reverent silence fell upon us. All the children stopped running about and screaming, and everyone became still. Perhaps we were all understanding that we had been free for two hundred years, or as free as people can possibly be.
I like to think that everyone was filled with a brief melancholy, a moment in which we took into account everything we had, and appreciated it all, and felt blessed and lucky to have been born in this country, in this time and place. Or maybe everyone was taking into account all of the wrongs done to others to gain this freedom, the freedom that had been taken from others for our gain. Things like this were too complicated to think about; they caused a rock to sit in my belly, and even though I had only recently discovered the power of constant thought, I tried to turn my mind elsewhere. Years later I would realize that this was one of the world’s great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose to not think, and that’s how the whole world gets into trouble. My only excuse that day was that I was a child.
Without them knowing, I looked at all the people I cared about the most as they watched the fireworks bloom on the black-blue night sky.
My parents’ faces turned pink with the burst of a red shower above us. My mother had a strange little smile on her face. She looked happy that evening; she didn’t know everything was about to be shattered. My father’s expression was harder to read. He looked like someone listening to a moving song as he watched the fireworks. He blinked very solidly, didn’t take his eyes from the sky. There was something square and final about his face. I wondered if he was back in Vietnam in his mind. Was he seeing the explosions in the fields around him, hearing the screams of his best friends, feeling the pierce of shrapnel in the tender meat of his back and left arm? Maybe he could smell the damp ground, the musky trees.
