by Silas House
I looked away. I could never remember Nell jumping on me for anything. “I was just worried about her,” I said, which was only half a lie.
Nell was fluffing her pillow. “Maybe you were, but you were also listening when she wouldn’t have wanted you to. And that’s wrong.”
I rolled over and faced the screens instead of Nell. I could feel her disappointment standing in the night air between us. Even if it wasn’t a big falling-out, I still couldn’t stand the thought of not having her full respect.
After a time I realized that Nell had gone to sleep — her breath caught in the back of her throat, causing little halfhearted moans to escape each time she exhaled — but I lay there a long while, listening to the night sounds, wondering if Edie was doing the same.
The cry of a morning cicada, high and shrill, like a tiny scream that climbed until it contained a note of pure panic in announcing the day’s heat. A moment of blinding light as my eyes came open. And then I saw Edie sitting on the glider, eating from a bowl of Froot Loops while she studied me.
“You sleep like the dead,” she said, talking around the cereal.
“What are you doing?”
She nodded toward her house. “Waiting. Loretta went over there to talk to Daddy.”
“What about?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It had taken me a minute to remember that something stood between Edie and me now. But she was talking to me in her normal tone, at least. It was as if she had decided to pick up our friendship again. Maybe she appreciated the fact that I had seen her at her lowest and hadn’t made fun of her, the way some people might have done. I’m sure that I would have not been big enough to forgive her if she had said the things to me I had said to her.
“I guess she’s lining him out. She said he needed help, that he was depressed.” She swung her bare feet, one time a piece. “But he’s just a drunk.”
“He misses your mother,” I said.
“Last night, before he passed out, he told me he was going to cut down my willow tree.” She let her spoon fall into the bowl with a small clank. I could see the milk in there, turned a sickly pink by the few remaining circles of soggy cereal. “I said if he did I’d leave and never come back. I told him I’d hitchhike to Atlanta. Or kill myself.” She turned the bowl up and drank down all the pink milk, then wiped her mouth on her forearm. “I’d never do that, but he doesn’t know that.”
“He was just talking out of his head.” I was trying to think of the right things to say and I didn’t know whether I was succeeding or not. Her face did not reveal her feelings. She looked out at the garden, where Stella was hoeing her green beans.
“I’d sure never go to Atlanta. I hope I never see her again.”
I sat up, threw the sheet off, and let my bare feet come down hard on the porch floor. “You want to read some more of Daddy’s letters?” I said. I had run out of comforting words and didn’t know what else to say.
“No,” she said, without further explanation. “But we could go swimming, after he leaves and I can get my bathing suit.”
I was getting braver. Or maybe stupider. My mother always said there was a fine line between the two.
Braver because I had snuck into my parents’ bedroom while Mom was at home. She was out on the porch with Edie and Nell, explaining to Edie that her father was having a hard time accepting her mother leaving and that he was going to try to do better. I watched her from the door a long time, then said I was going to put on my cutoffs. After I did, I skipped into her bedroom, opened the box — a great wash of cedar scent rushing up over me — and grabbed the stack of letters from within. I took them into my room, put aside the ones I had already read, and stuffed the rest into my canvas bag that I sometimes strapped to the back of my bicycle. I was very careful with them, afraid I might bend or harm them in some way, so before putting them into my canvas satchel, I had sealed them in a plastic sandwich bag I had lifted from the pantry.
I hung my satchel on a high hickory limb so that our splashing wouldn’t reach the letters that lay within like a promise. Then I took a high-stepping run and pressed my toes against the sandy rock, pushing my body up into the air before I pulled my legs up, latching my arms around them so I could make a perfect cannonball. I hit the water and plummeted down until my feet touched the bottom of the river. The ground there was so cold that it sent stints into my legs.
It’s miraculous, the wild places that exist in hiding. All the secret places of the world that are able to remain cold despite the hum of a blazing summer.
I sat down there as long as I could, holding on tight to my nose before exhaling all of my breath and letting the bubbles peck against my face. I thought about how it would be to die and thought this might be how it felt. A comforting but anxious feeling. All darkness and the sound of water. The thought of death was too much, though, and made a large, expanding feeling rise in my chest. I put my arms out and allowed myself to float back up.
Edie had jumped in, too, and as soon as I wiped the water from my eyes, she started splashing me. By the time we had been swimming for a few minutes, it seemed we were back to our old selves again. I suppose children are able to do that, although I’m not sure whether adults are. But I believe that Edie still thinks about the hot words I said to her that night. I certainly do. But that day we were just pleased to be swimming and together, and for a little while, at least, all was forgiven.
When our hands and feet were wrinkled from being in the water so long, we lay on the rocks and let the sun bake us. The sun broiled on the sky, a living thing that pulsated and grew larger. The heat bugs seemed to call out with the fury of the sun, screaming in the weeds lining the road. We lay there like dead people, our legs slightly apart, our arms straight down at our sides. If I had moved my little finger a half inch, it would have touched Edie’s. We breathed in rhythm and didn’t speak for a time, thinking only of how the sun felt on our wet skin.
After a while I got up and snatched the satchel from the limb. I made sure that my hands were completely dry and free of sand before I pulled the letters out of the sandwich bag.
“You shouldn’t’ve done that,” Edie said, sitting up. She held a hand at her brow, unused to the bright sun after having her eyes closed for so long, and looked down at the letters.
“She won’t know,” I said, but as these words escaped my mouth, I could picture my mother going into her bedroom and lifting the lid of her cedar box, peering in to find it half empty. Part of me thought my mother knew all things.
“It doesn’t matter if she knows or not,” Edie said. “It’s not right. They’re not yours to read.”
“My daddy wrote them, didn’t he?”
“He wrote them to her.” Edie stood and grabbed her shorts from the outcropping of limestone. She stepped into them with two hard stomps, then pulled her Jaws T-shirt over her high-necked green bathing suit. “Don’t you feel bad?”
“It happened again, the night before last,” I said.
“What?” she said, and leaned against a low-hanging branch from a mimosa tree that burst out of the riverbank.
“He had another nightmare. He hollered out in his sleep like someone was killing him.”
“Did he do anything to Loretta?”
I shook my head. “But he jumped out of the bed and knocked everything off the dresser. He felt along the wall while he screamed and raked all the pictures off. Broke them. It took Mom and Nell both to get him calmed down.”
“Well, reading them letters won’t help you figure it out, Eli,” she said. She was so sure of herself, so confident. I wished I could be like that, wished I could really feel that way deep down instead of just occasionally mustering up the strength to act as if I felt that way. “But I’ve got to go on home anyway,” she said. “Daddy took off work today. I guess he wants the Father of the Year Award or something now.”
She didn’t leave, though. She stood there, looking down at me as I took one of the letters from its envelope. “He’s taking me to the Tast
ee-Freez,” she said at last. “You want to go?”
“Nah, you all should be alone.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said, skipping a rock across the river. It glided along, touching down five times before sinking. “Why don’t you come over later and watch The Waltons with me? And Hawaii Five-O?”
“I don’t know. Mom likes for us to all watch The Waltons together.”
“Well, I’ll see you then,” she said, quiet, looking away. Before I could say more, she had slid onto the path and was folded up by the woods. I had wanted her to at least stay with me while I read the letters. I didn’t know what I might encounter. At the same time, I liked being alone with the letters. I held the flimsy stationery out from me so that the glints of sunlight on the river shone through the paper. It was so light and thin that if I had let go, the letter would have drifted away on the breath of air that was stirring. The pages would have separated reluctantly and winged just above the surface of the river, dipping and rolling over on itself, drifting away like a paper bird. So I held tight, my thumbs on one side, pressing onto my forefingers on the other side, and read:
29 April 1967
Dear Loretta,
Hey baby. It’s the same old same old over here. Walk for days, hunker down and shoot it out awhile, go on night patrols. Same old. Our last hike lasted four days and I didn’t take my boots off the whole time. When I finally did, my feet had changed completely. I looked down at them and couldn’t believe they belonged to me. It’s like my bones are knots. My toes are all scrunched up and laying atop one another. I asked for the medic to look at them and he just laughed. He said those were Vietnam feet and I was a real soldier now.
I don’t even know what that means, to be a real soldier. This is really our war, though. You people back home don’t know what it’s all about but when you are here you get a different picture. You see, I am going to give these people over here my best even though it may mean my life. I’ve signed up and now I’ll do my duty.
But I don’t want to talk about the war or what’s happening over here. I just want to think about you and Josie and the baby and the way home looks, the way the sky is smaller there. Remember that one time I took you up in the woods and showed you my old tree where I spent so much time as a boy? I hadn’t been up there in years before I left home but I keep thinking about that little spot. In my dreams I am sitting beneath it and I can look up and see the wind passing through its leaves. Seems like I can even smell them woods in my dreams.
I have been taking lots of pictures of the trees over here. There is this one tree that I love in particular. Fruit grows everywhere on it, red and small like tommy toe tomatoes or cherries. Not just on the limbs, but even on the trunk and the roots. It is a sight to behold. But still it is not the trees back home.
In your next letter send me some more writing paper because it is hard to get over here. I can’t get it, period, to tell the truth. And envelopes. And some new pictures if you can. Little ones so I can carry them easy. That’s all that gets me through the day, my picture of you three. I better go and save my light. Write me when you can, and when you pray, pray for me. I’ll see you very soon, darling. Until then, you have my love.
Always,
Stanton Book
On this one he had signed his last name, which I thought strange. By that time they had been married six years. But maybe he was trying to hold on to himself. I thought that maybe he repeated his own name to himself over and over, the way he had once said my mother’s name — Loretta Loretta Loretta — in a sort of prayer to save himself.
My Dearest Dear,
Do you remember that song, “My Dearest Dear”? My mother and Nell used to sit on the porch and sing it in the cool of the day. Sometimes I hum it to myself because I can’t remember all the words but I always think of you because you are surely my dearest dear.
I can hear my mother and Nell singing that just as plain as day, just like I am back on that porch. It don’t pay to study on old times, though, so I’ll move on.
I have to write this down to make it real, although I do not want to. This letter will be short as I don’t know how much I can bear to write. My best friend was killed last night. We were out patrolling this big rice paddy that went on for ages, a field that seemed big as the world to me. The worst thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. Storms over here are a thing to behold. When one comes up it seems like the whole world is ending. He was there, right beside me. And then a bolt of lightning come down like it had been hunting him and struck him right in the top of the head. He fell down beside me and it looked like there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. I had always heard that lightning will burn you up or at least burn your clothes off. And I had heard you weren’t supposed to touch a person who had been hit with lightning or you’d be shocked, too. But I didn’t think of that — I just grabbed hold of him. I didn’t feel anything. He looked just fine except that his eyes were rolled back in his head and when I shook him he didn’t even flinch and before long I realized that he was solid dead. I carried him on my back. A person is awful heavy when the life is gone from them, especially in that wet field. It was like walking through concrete with that rice paddy up to my knees almost.
I don’t want to go on about it. His name was Larry Caudill. He was 21 years old. A good way to go, I guess, although a person don’t expect to come to a war and be killed by nature. You’d think that’s the last thing that would get you in a place that doesn’t even seem real.
Thinking of you always,
Stanton Book
And then two letters where he asked for more paper, where he talked about missing home, the trees, Josie’s laughter. In all the letters he was holding back, not saying all he wanted to. Even a ten-year-old could see that. Maybe he couldn’t bear to write it all down. But in each one, there is something else that is left unsaid. The lines of the letters are like waves on the middle of the ocean, each of them covering a whole world beneath.
In one he said that I was eight months and two days old and he had never laid eyes on me. I will make it up to him someday, not being there. When I can I’ll be with him every minute of the day, he had written. That hadn’t worked out like he had wanted, because when he got home he worked most all the time, fixing something on his truck or mowing the yard or breaking up the garden. I suppose he had tried his best to be one of those fathers who is always there, tossing a baseball and all that, but he wasn’t, and I was okay with that. I knew that he had to work, and that was all right. The problem was how quiet he was with me most of the time, the way he hardly ever noticed me. The last time I had felt like he was truly mine was when he had left me drive to the gas station, more than a month ago. I remembered the way he had kissed the back of my head.
And then, this letter, which was the last one of his I ever read:
. . . I felt the shrapnel tear into my back but I couldn’t even take the time to put my fingers to the torn places in my skin because I had to do what needed done. I have to tell you, Loretta, that I was scared to death. I’ve seen a lot over here that I’ll never be able to work my mind around properly but this time I felt terror. I know what that’s like now, and I can admit that. It helps to admit it. You see everything in flashes, like a fast slide-show. You can feel the blood in your veins and you can remember everything about your life and all that is in your head but at the same time you are only thinking of pulling the trigger, of surviving. It’s a funny thing, the way your mind works, the way survival takes over. All I can do is count the days until I am gone from this place and this lousy army. I close my eyes to go to sleep at night and I relive it all. The thing is that I accepted death, Loretta. I was certain that I would never see the light of day again. But I am here.
Love, as always, yours,
Stanton Book
There was something about this particular letter that got to me in a way no other had. Maybe it was everything that he wasn’t saying. Or maybe he was too much like a real person to me, something we don’t think of our
parents being until we are much older. When I finished reading it, I found that my breath was heavy, as if I had been running a long time. I should never have read those letters at my age. It was too much for a child to properly digest.
The next envelope was blank and much heavier than the others, and I could tell right away that it contained a few pictures. Seven of them, all in color except for one:
1. A little boy in a long-sleeved, pin-striped shirt, smoking a cigarette with a small smile. A younger boy stands beside him, thumbs and forefingers together at his belly, looking into the camera. A hut and palm trees behind them. The inscription on the back reads: Ton and Tin, Phuoc Vinh.
2. My father, shirtless, holding what looks like a machine gun with a wooden stock. He doesn’t look as old as Charles Asher, except in the eyes. He and another man (who wears black plastic glasses and has a wet rag around his neck) are looking up into what resembles a persimmon tree. There is a monkey sitting within the crook of two branches, and he looks like he’s laughing. The man with glasses is laughing, too, but my father is not. On the back my father has printed: Me, Robinson, and our monkey, Woody.
3. A dirt road, palm trees on either side. A white sky. I have to squint to see, but it is undeniable: there are twelve dead bodies lying in the road. One of them is almost completely red with blood. One tire of a jeep is visible in the lower left corner. At the far end of the road there is a green tank with a large white star on its side. I don’t notice for a long time that there are several American soldiers standing near the bodies, looking down at them, as frozen as the corpses. I studied this one a long time. There is no writing on the back.
4. A dark-skinned man sits on the ground with a cloth bag over his face. The picture is full of movement — I can imagine his head darting about, trying to figure out the sounds around him — except for my father, who is standing very still in this photo, too. He is looking away from the hostage, far out over the fields, which are brown and yellow and dead. There is no writing on the back.
