After the Flag Has Been Folded

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” I said as the man took another step onto the bus. Prison officials were scurrying around us, rushing us off before Mama arrived. They locked us in the office of the supervisory nurse. The small window in the door had been covered with a sign that said DO NOT DISTURB. A desk cluttered with files and loose paper stood in one corner. A clock ticked away.

  Mama worked the swing shift. It was nearly 2:30 P.M. Frank still hadn’t arrived, but Linda and I could hear Mama talking outside in the hall.

  “What do we do if she comes in here?” I asked.

  “She won’t,” said Beth, the supervisory nurse. “She never comes in here if I have that sign up.”

  Mama had been a prison nurse at Shelton for eighteen years. She had first worked in a prison while living in Alaska. She claimed it wasn’t as hard on her physically as working in a hospital’s intensive care units.

  It always struck me as odd that Mama had been drawn to the most difficult jobs. Much of her early career was spent tending to heart attack and stroke victims, most of whom died in those years. In her later career, Mama cared for some of the most god-awful folks in the entire nation. Murderers. Rapists. Just plain mean and evil people. I could never figure out if growing up the only sister of all those brothers had toughened Mama or if Daddy’s death had scarred her so badly that the only pain she could feel was so sharp that others naturally recoiled from it. Whichever it was, Mama never shied away from tough jobs.

  The door opened and finally Frank slipped in, laughing. “Can you believe they let me in this place?” he said.

  “I can’t believe they ever let you out of prison in the first place,” I teased.

  Frank hadn’t been behind bars since he was released from Fort Leavenworth. “The great thing about this visit is knowing I get to leave when I want,” Frank said, laughing again.

  Linda rolled her eyes at the two of us. Our baby sister can be the most pious person in the world. Sometimes she acts as if God dropped her off with the wrong family. Nothing about prison humors her in the least. “You look nice,” Linda said to him, changing the subject.

  Frank was wearing dress slacks and a plaid-print shirt with a tie. He’d dropped about thirty pounds since I’d last seen him at Christmas. He’d been diagnosed with diabetes since then and was working to control it with diet and exercise. He’d also quit smoking a year earlier.

  I was wearing a pink shirt I had made for me at the silk market in Hoi An and a pair of black silk pants. Linda was dressed in black slacks and top. We all looked festive.

  None of us had ever expected Mama to retire. She’d worked since Daddy died. It was hard to imagine her rolling around the country in a recreational vehicle. She had friends, but most of them were people she worked with. She had given up any hopes of a sustainable love life once she moved west at age thirty-seven. She’d dated sporadically over the years, but nothing of any consequence. If she was lonely, she never let on, at least not to us.

  Beth opened the door and motioned for us to follow her down the hallway. Mama was already there with most of the infirmary staff, from all shifts. The break room was narrow, so people were spilling out into the hall. Beth squeezed by them, followed by Linda, Frank, and me.

  Mama was across the room, holding a Ritz cracker with a slice of deli meat in one hand and a napkin in the other, talking to a coworker. She wore a blue wool blazer, a pair of jeans, and high-heeled boots. In December she’d shocked us all by bleaching her dark brunette hair a golden hue, the color of harvest wheat. Mama didn’t need a man in her life to make her feel desirable. The right clothes could always do that for her. These days she buys her padded bras at Victoria’s Secret.

  Linda walked up to Mama and gave her a hug.

  “What are you doing here?” Mama asked. Then she saw Frank and me. “How’d you get in?”

  I hadn’t seen Mama since Christmas, since my trip to Vietnam, but she’s simply not the kind of gal who whoops and hollers. Her smile and the moistness in her dark eyes told me more than any words ever could. We hugged. “I can’t believe you drove all the way up here,” Mama said.

  “I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” I replied.

  For the next hour or so we lingered in that room, picking at the melons and deli foods spread across a banquet table underneath the sign that read HAPPY RETIREMENT, SHELBY.

  Person after person welcomed me to the prison and told me what a wonderful mother I had.

  “She’s one of the best,” one lady said. “Tough, but smart. She taught me a lot.”

  “Are you the writer?” another woman asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “I feel like I’ve known you for years,” she said. “Your mother is so proud of you. She brings your articles to work for all of us to read.”

  “She does?” I asked, blinking back hot tears. It had never occurred to me that Mama talked about me or my work to her coworkers.

  “Didn’t you just go to Vietnam?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That must’ve been some trip,” she replied.

  “The trip of a lifetime,” I answered.

  Later that night Mama and I sat in the den of her home watching the videos I’d taken during my trip. I thought about how our relationship had been changed by the events surrounding this book.

  When I began this search in 1996, I just wanted to find the men who served with Daddy. Somebody who could tell me what happened the day he died. Somebody who could tell me what kind of soldier and man he’d been. The sorts of stories Mama couldn’t or simply hadn’t shared with me over the years.

  Granny was the only person I’d ever felt I could freely discuss my father with, and she was dead. Sometimes Linda and I talked about Daddy, but not as much as we talked about raising kids. Frank and I had never really discussed our growing-up years, Mama, or how Daddy’s death had devastated us.

  Mama had mailed me all of Daddy’s letters in December 2001. I had not asked for them. I knew about them, of course. As a teenager I had snuck into her bedroom and pulled down the box where she stored them. I would hold my breath as I opened the red-white-and-blue-striped envelopes. And I would invariably weep as I read the words my father wrote to the woman he loved. I would cry not only because I missed my father but because I missed the woman my mother was before his death. The mother I lost to America’s most unpopular war.

  When Mama mailed me those letters, she and I were not on the best of terms. She’d left my house in a huff in June following my twin daughters’ graduation. The long days of summer had passed without either of us uttering a word to each other. There wasn’t any one thing that had caused the rift between us. It was a pile of discarded rubbish, the sort that sits in a heap for years in the backyard while everyone ignores it.

  Finally, I relented and called her shortly before the girls and I went to Hawaii. I had not been back to the island since 1966. Our last years with Daddy were spent enjoying the paradise that is Oahu. I looked forward to sharing my memories of Daddy with my daughters. I wanted them to visualize their grandpa as a young father, playing horseshoes in the mud, riding a moped through the pineapple fields, fishing the surf of Oahu’s North Shore, marching around cannons at Schofield, and hiding Easter eggs under banana trees. I urged Mama to make the trip with us. She flatly refused.

  Mama simply didn’t understand why I was going back to Hawaii. Or why as a writer I wanted to poke around such a sorrowful story. She was certain it was just my way of making her look bad. All that condemnation I’d directed toward her as a teen had taken root and embedded itself into her psyche.

  I tried to explain that that wasn’t it, that I felt that this story was something God was directing me to write, for whatever reason. I told her that my feelings toward her as a teenager had long since been resolved. I understood things as a woman that I could not understand as a child. Like why a woman might confuse sex for love, the way I had with Wesley Skibbey, the way she had w
ith countless men. I told her that I looked at her and our past with different eyes now—eyes more level with her own.

  But she didn’t believe me. Mama had never gotten over the feeling that she didn’t measure up. In her quiet moments she saw herself as the timid young girl who used to deliver laundry to the back door of the big houses of Rogersville’s wealthy families. Or as the sassy young widow who wore red hot pants and embraced “Harper Valley PTA” as her theme song.

  Things had softened greatly between us. That change was the result not of any one pivotal moment but rather of the little, day-by-day communiqués. I had to know things only she could answer. We talked by phone several times a week and e-mailed more often. Mama was still reluctant to talk about Daddy and his death, her hurt, and the longings she’d suffered, but she knew that I wasn’t going to give up and go away. I could be just as mule-headed as Mama, and I was determined to get this story down.

  Even so, she wasn’t making it easy for me. When Mama mailed me Daddy’s letters, she sent them along with a warning. In a handwritten letter, she told me she expected two things from me in return—that I make copies of Daddy’s letters for Frank and Linda, and that I not use them to shame her because “your father loved me very much, Karen. And he would be very disappointed if you used his letters to hurt your family.”

  While I was grateful for the letters, Mama’s warning didn’t faze me. Nobody could make me any more aware of the responsibility I had as a daughter and a writer to get our family’s story straight. For me, writing is like being a mother, hoping to bring life to a child. I hold in my hands this miracle of beauty, awe, and wonder. Along with it is a burdensome responsibility.

  It’s a terrifying role, one I approach completely aware that it’s going to take a power beyond me—a power I don’t control and can’t manufacture by sheer will. All life is a precious gift, even the life of words.

  In retrospect, my search to reclaim my father did parallel that of Meg in the fictional tale A Wrinkle in Time.

  “If you want to help your father you must learn patience,” Mrs. Whoo had warned Meg. “To stake one’s life for the truth. That is what we must do.”

  This search demanded that I risk my career and my relationship with my siblings and my mother. During that summer of silence, when Mama and I weren’t speaking to each other, I asked Linda why she thought Mama was so upset with me.

  “She doesn’t understand why you keep bringing up all this stuff, why you feel like you need to write about it,” Linda said. Linda isn’t keen on revisiting the trailer park days herself.

  “Sometimes I’m not sure why I need to do this myself,” I replied. “But I’m not trying to hurt you or Mama or anyone else. I just know in my bones this is something I’m supposed to do.”

  This journey has taught me that my greatest flaws, and yes, Mama’s too, could be a source of unfailing strength. “What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was Meg’s faults that she turned to to save herself.”

  Mama could be mad at me all she wanted, but she couldn’t deny that the reason I wouldn’t let go of this is because I’d inherited her lockjaw grit and determination. She couldn’t turn me away as she had when I was a child with her usual flippant rhetorical remark, “Why do you want to know all that for? You writing a book?”

  Yes, ma’am. As it turns out, I am.

  My incessant questions gave Mama the thing that had been denied her and the thousands of women like her—permission to talk about how difficult her life had been as a war widow.

  As world news focused on the war in Iraq, Mama finally began to open up about how abandoned she’d felt by her country and her family.

  “I didn’t know what to do after your Daddy died,” Mama told me. “Once he was buried, the Army was gone. Their whole attitude was ‘We’ve done our duty.’ I didn’t know what to do. I’d been an Army wife since I was sixteen. I didn’t know how to be a civilian. Where do you go? Where do you live? Where do you take three children to grow up? I didn’t have a home. Hell, I’m surprised we survived at all. Shit, why didn’t somebody help me through all of that?”

  I’m glad Mama didn’t expect any answers from me because I certainly didn’t have any.

  “I just don’t know how everything got so screwed up,” she added.

  It was in that same conversation—the one we had there in her living room shortly after I returned from Vietnam and following her retirement party—that Mama revealed to me a long-held secret. “When your Daddy went to Vietnam I’d had a dream that your father was going to be killed. I knew from that moment on that it was going to happen. I wanted to stop it. But I couldn’t.”

  Mama said she had been around the Army long enough to know that once Daddy was dead, she was on her own, completely.

  “Once your sponsor’s dead, you’re not part of the Army anymore. Once he’s dead, you’re totally cut off. I wanted to tell the Army: But you killed my sponsor! I think about that all the time. Especially now, what’s going to happen to all these guys who are coming back to Fort Benning from Iraq now and those who aren’t? And their families?”

  There’s simply no way for a family to prepare themselves for the enduring loss war creates. Grief counseling might help some, but it can’t erase the pain.

  “I’ve always felt some loss,” she said. “Even now.”

  Several times that night Mama commented on how surprised and glad she was to see me at her retirement party. We laughed over and over about Frank being back behind bars again. We talked about her plans to move to a beach house, in Westport, near Linda. And I told her about how I had sensed Daddy’s presence at the base of Dragon Mountain and again as I stood looking over the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

  Before we turned in that night, Mama told me that she thought I favored Daddy the most. “You have your daddy’s eyes,” she said.

  Captain Osborne told me the same thing. But I suspect Mama’s comment was motivated more by the way I view the world now than by the blue of my eyes.

  When I visited Mama that summer in her new beach house, she whipped up a batch of banana pudding with a golden meringue topping. It’s a treat she’s made only a half dozen times since Daddy died. Daddy loved banana pudding, black coffee, and peaches with cream. He enjoyed fishing with Frank and speeding through the pineapple fields on a moped he’d restored, with Linda perched between his legs and me holding on from the back. And from the letters he wrote to her from Vietnam, I know Daddy missed making love to Mama under a tin roof on a rainy night. It rains a lot at the beach.

  While she gave me a tour of the house, I thought of all the times as a teenager I’d begged God to send Mama a good man to take care of her. As I walked through her home, admiring the gleaming planters perched in an alcove above the stairwell and the spacious master suite off the dining room, I thought how far she’d come from trailer life. Then I realized that God had answered those long-ago prayers of mine.

  No. He hadn’t sent Mama a man to take care of her. Instead he allowed her to learn to take care of herself. And with one glance around her home today, it’s easy to see that Mama took that lesson to heart.

  Mama finds ways to fill her life, tending to flowers in her garden or taking long walks on the beach with her dog, or painting. Sometimes, when Frank or Linda drop in, Mama cooks up a mess of beans and rolls out some biscuits. Daddy always loved Mama’s beans. And she is always happy when one of the grandchildren drops by.

  Family pictures, framed in glass and silver, litter coffee tables and bedside tables throughout Mama’s home. There are photos of Uncle Carl and Uncle Charlie. Of Frank, Linda, and me and our families, and of Grandpa Harve, Granny Ruth, and Aunt Cil. Mama displays pictures of everyone in her house but Daddy. Even though nearly four decades have passed, Shelby Jean Mayes Spears just can’t bear a constant talisman of the love she lost.

  During my visit to the Wall for the twentieth-anniversary ceremonies, a news reporter stopped me and asked about
the picture I was wearing around my neck. So I showed her my father’s name, David P. Spears, on the East Panel.

  “I was blessed to have two heroes in my family,” I told her: “my father and my mother.”

  The reporter wept when I said that. Afterward she sent me a note that said: “I just wanted to say how touched I was (and still am) by your story. It really puts the effects of the Vietnam War into perspective.”

  Long before I met Peter, before I laid eyes on that towering statue of Hero Mother in Da Nang, I knew my mother was every bit the hero my father had been.

  Mama didn’t always handle things with grace. She made her fair share of mistakes and then some. We all did. But for all Mama’s faults, for all of mine, I realized that the best decision Daddy ever made was asking Shelby Jean Mayes to marry him and to have his babies.

  I suspect Daddy had a premonition about that, too. I figure he knew that no matter what came our way, Mama would never give up the battle. Come hell or high water, she’d hold the line of defense. She would soldier on. And she’d teach each of us to do the same. She may not have slept on any pillow long enough to fashion a crown of chicken feathers, but I suspect someday God will give her a glistening diamond-and-ruby crown of her own.

  Mama’s steadfast love for Daddy is a reminder to me that the men who went to Vietnam were some of our nation’s finest. They were professional soldiers who served their country honorably. Each one was someone’s beloved son, someone’s brother, another’s faithful husband or friend. And thousands were devoted daddies to an untold number of children.

  I am blessed to be the child of such a soldier. I am proud to be the daughter of a Vietnam veteran. And I’m equally proud to be the daughter of Shelby Jean Mayes Spears, my very own Hero Mama.

  THE SHELBY SPEARS “HERO MAMA” SCHOLARSHIP FUND provides financial aid to single moms seeking to obtain a nursing degree at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the “Hero Mama” Scholarship Fund, Columbus State University Foundation, 4225 University Avenue, Columbus, GA 31907–3645. Or visit www.heromama.org