Only the Rain Page 18

  For some reason I feel like I needed you to know about this. Don’t ask me why. You always seemed to like me for some reason, which I could never understand, a bright guy like you. Anyway, now you know. I never deserved a minute of your friendship.

  I wonder what ever happened to Stewart. I could probably find out, but I’m sort of afraid to go looking. Once a coward, always a coward.

  You always told us every time something bad happened, whether to us or by us, you always told us to not think about it. Try not to think about it, you said. But you thought about it, Spence. I know you did. The way I’d catch you looking at us sometimes, that sadness in your eyes like you knew something we didn’t. Thing is, we knew it too. Shame. Grief. Fear. Disgust. There wasn’t one of us over there who didn’t know it and feel it every single day.

  Thing is, they shave our heads and dress us in the same clothes and try to make us all look alike—hood rats and farm boys and poor white trash and everything else we were before they threw us all together. Then they drill us and teach us to shoot and fight and they do their damnedest to make us despise the enemy. They program us like machines so we’ll use our weapons like the voice for our fear and anger and hatred, the only voice they let us have. The only one that will get us a word or two of congratulations from the company commander.

  But deep down we’re all still men. Boys, really. Deep down we all miss our homes and families and just want to get back to them in one piece. We all just want to feel loved and safe again, want to sit at the table with people glad to be with us, people who don’t hate us because of the uniforms we wear, people who don’t want to kill us.

  And when some of us do come back in one piece, and we take off the uniforms and let our hair grow out, and we try to look like we were never in those places and never did what we know we did, deep down there’s a poison in our blood that will never go away. More than ever now we just want to be loved and safe but there’s always a dirtiness inside us. It won’t wash out and the more we try to not think about it, we only think about it more.

  That’s what they really did to us, Spence. Every single one of us. Every war they’ve ever made us fight. They start by shaving our heads, but it’s our souls they destroy.

  For quite a while now I haven’t been sure I’m going to be able to hold myself together. I keep thinking about what a good little boy I used to be, never getting into any real kind of trouble, doing everything Mom and Gee and Pops asked me to do. Growing up right with Jesus, as Gee used to say. And now the things I’ve done since then. Most days I can’t even look at myself in the mirror.

  It’s getting a little better lately, though. For one thing, I keep getting busier and busier, and it’s good to have stuff to focus on. I got that job at Lowe’s after all. The manager called me out of the blue, said he’d run through all the other applicants and not one of them stacked up very well against me. I’d only been there a month and they offered to send me to North Carolina for their management training program.

  Cindy’s belly keeps growing, of course, which means I spend more and more time helping out with the chores when I’m at home. And having a girl in first grade—who’d have thought a first grader could be involved in so many activities? I can’t imagine what it will be like when she hits junior high.

  Pops and I still talk on the phone a couple times a week, not saying anything we shouldn’t, only asking “How you feeling today?” and stuff like that. I brought up the way he was behaving the night of Shelley and Donnie’s wreck, the way he’d been walking lopsided and mentioned he’d had a little pinch in his chest, but he wouldn’t talk much about it. “Getting old,” was as close as he’d come to admitting something was wrong with him. “Getting older every day.”

  Last week I tried to get him to go to a thing Dani was having at school, a little poem recital thing her teacher set up, but he said he was down with a bug and wanted to stay close to the toilet. Dani recited a poem called “The Caterpillar” that she’d been practicing at home all week long. I even know it by heart now too from listening to her practice. She did so good at the recital. Both Cindy and me had tears in our eyes watching her. Isn’t that silly, Spence? To cry over a children’s poem? I still tear up every time I look at the photos I took on my phone.

  Plus sometimes I look at Dani or Emma or even Cindy while she’s sleeping, and when I do, those last two lines of the poem are what I hear in my head.

  Spin and die,

  To live again a butterfly.

  I hate the first of those lines, but I love the second one, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why the poet put those two lines together like that. Especially in a children’s poem. I mean Jesus, Spence. I want all my babies to be butterflies. But I can’t bear the thought of any of them having to die first.

  But here’s the thing: until I heard that poem, I never thought the caterpillar really dies. I always figured he went into his cocoon and started changing, growing wings and legs and antennae and all, and of course thinning down that fat green body of his, but actually dying? And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made that the caterpillar would die and out would come a full-blown butterfly. Right? So I looked it up. And the truth of the matter is a whole lot weirder. The caterpillar disintegrates. Literally. It turns into a kind of caterpillar soup. Nothing left but a few random cells. And out of those cells comes the butterfly. Is that magical or what? Magical and terrifying all at the same time.

  Anyway, overall, back to me and the family. I guess things couldn’t have turned out any better for us. Except that when things get good like they are now, I know it’s time to be ready for something bad to happen. That’s pretty much the way life is set up to work, isn’t it? You gain, you lose. You win, you fail. You spin, you die. Maybe too you liquefy and start yourself all over again as a butterfly, but maybe you’re turned into a moth instead. And maybe something eats you before you ever get a chance to spread your wings.

  I need to tell you about what happened one nice afternoon back in the third week of October, one of those Indian summer afternoons when the temperature is back up near eighty and the sky is so clear and blue. After I had come in from mowing the yard for what I guessed would be the last time that year, I found Cindy sitting there at the kitchen table with nothing in front of her and nothing in the stove or even thawing out on the counter. I got a glass of water and sat down across from her. “Everything okay?” I said.

  She smiled like she’d been far away somewhere in her mind and wasn’t all that happy about coming back but knew she had to. She said, “I think we could all use a night out, don’t you?”

  So everybody got a bath or a shower and then we picked up Pops and drove to this seafood house out by the mall. There was a parking space near the door, right beside one of those handicap spots with a shiny clean van in it, but when I went to pull into the space Dani said, “Not there, Daddy. What if there’s somebody with the van who’s in a wheelchair? There won’t be enough room to get the wheelchair in and out.”

  Cindy looked at me and smiled and I sort of knew what she was thinking. That’s some girl we’ve got, isn’t it, Russell? So I found us another spot, and we all went inside, and darned if we didn’t get seated not six feet from a table with a guy in a wheelchair. He looked to be at least ninety years old or more, this wizened little guy who didn’t even have the strength to hold his head up. His wife was all dolled up in a sparkly dress and pearls, and she was enjoying her lobster bowl without hardly even looking at the old guy beside her, who I’m guessing was her husband. Sitting on the other side of the old guy was some young burly dude feeding the old guy his seafood bisque. The young dude would spoon up some bisque, then drain off the liquid and lay any chunks of seafood on his own plate, do this four or five times then go back to the bowl for some broth, which he would feed to the old guy. Half of it would run out of the old guy’s mouth, so the young dude would dab a napkin at it. It was that over and over again—pick out the chunks, spoon up some broth, feed the
old guy, dab up the dribble.

  Of course Cindy told the girls to quit staring, but none of us could keep our eyes off them, including Pops. I don’t think he’d said a word since we came into the place, and now he was sitting there like he was hypnotized by the old guy’s face. And then I sort of got hypnotized by watching Pops watch the old guy, because I swear I could tell what Pops was thinking. He was thinking, all that money . . . a wife who must’ve been a beauty in her day . . . a fancy van and a fancy wheelchair and a personal attendant . . . and what good is any of it doing the guy?

  And then Pops turned his head all of a sudden like he knew I was watching him, and there’s no way he couldn’t have seen what was in my eyes, and we had this moment, you know? This moment when he knew that I knew, and vice versa.

  Fortunately the salads came then and kind of broke up what we were all feeling, and then we had our dinner and talked and laughed a little but there was always something hanging in the air that made us want to keep our voices low and filled us with a sad kind of tenderness for each other.

  It was about a week after that Sunday, six days to be exact, when Pops called me in the morning and asked if I could get away for a few hours in the afternoon. All he would tell me was that he wanted me to drive him somewhere. “You can tell Cindy I’ll have you back in time for supper,” he said.

  So I pick him up and he still won’t tell me where we’re going. “Head north,” he told me.

  “Anywhere in particular?”

  “Straight up 62 North. It will take us a while to get there.”

  I noticed right away that Pops wasn’t his usual self. A lot quieter, for one thing. But there was a stillness to him too that he didn’t usually have. I think I told you before about how fidgety and restless he always used to be, always having to do something with his hands, whether it was cleaning his nails or tinkering with an old toaster or fixing some crack in the plaster that only he had ever noticed.

  So we’re riding along, and I’m giving him his quiet time and enjoying the fall leaves and all, when he comes out and asks if I ever hear from my Army buddies anymore.

  And so that’s when I told him what I hadn’t even told Cindy, I guess because I’d never wanted to hear the words out loud. Now seemed the time to do it though.

  I told him about how you went back for another tour, this time in Afghanistan, and how you and your boys got pinned down on that hill for most of two days, taking mortar fire and sniper fire the whole time, and how you all must have been huddling there listening nonstop for the sound of a drone or a jet or a missile or anything, but that when it finally came, everybody had already stopped listening.

  I bet it took me fifteen minutes to tell him that story, what with me running out of breath right at the start, and having to stop talking again and again to keep from just losing it. The more I talked, the more the sunlight coming through the windshield stung my eyes. By the time I finished, my throat was thick and hoarse and my chest felt like it’d taken a direct hit from an RPG.

  Afterward Pops was quiet for a while, and of course I was too. And then he started talking.

  “When I came home from the A Shau, you know, I was so full of hate. Hated everybody, never trusted a thing I was told. Seeing your own gunships blowing your buddies to pieces all around you, and for what? For a useless chunk of land. That’ll do something to a man. Plus the way the country was back then, that didn’t help. Nobody ever said ‘Thank you for your service’ to us. Baby killer, that’s what we got called. It was tough living with that every day. Tough living with what we did over there.

  “Your grandmother, though, she waited it out with me. She kept right on loving me, you know, and waiting for things to heal. Then your mother came along, and it all kept getting better. Then you. My grandson. And I finally came to realize that nothing else really mattered. There wasn’t nothing could touch the way I loved the three of you, and the way I knew you all loved me.”

  I felt like there wasn’t anything I could say to that. Like he didn’t want me to say anything. He only wanted me to listen.

  “People don’t have to be perfect for you to love them,” he said. “You understand what I’m saying? Sometimes you love them because they aren’t perfect. You love them for their imperfections . . .

  “One thing you probably don’t know is that I never entirely agreed with your grandmother’s view of things. Church things primarily. I went to church with her, every Sunday, regular as clockwork. But I went because of her. What I mean is I went for her, not for myself or for any other reason.”

  I could see him struggling with it a little, not knowing exactly how to get to what he wanted.

  “What is it you want to tell me, Pops?”

  “Your grandmother would have told you, in fact she always did, that good can only come from good. You have to do good to be good.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “Well . . . she never went to war, did she?”

  “Sir?”

  “Good don’t always beget good. And evil don’t always beget evil. In fact sometimes it’s the opposite that’s true.”

  I kept driving, staring straight ahead, trying to keep my eyes clear.

  “You did things over there you’re not proud of,” he said. “I know you did. I knew it the moment you came home and I looked into your eyes. It was like looking at myself in the mirror, that’s how I knew. You don’t have to tell me what it was, because that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you did what you had to do to get back home again. To get back from a place and a situation not one of us should ever have been sent to in the first place.”

  And I wanted to tell him, Spence. All the horrible things I saw and did and failed to do over there. I just couldn’t get it out. All these years it’s been stuck in my throat, half choking me. I guess maybe it always will be.

  Pops didn’t say anything for a long time after that. And all I could do was to keep driving with the road all blurry in front of me. After a while he put his arm up on the back of the seat, and he let his hand rest there on my shoulder. And that’s where it stayed until we got to where we were going.

  He had me pull off the side of a road out in the country. Off to the right was a cornfield, must have been a couple hundred acres or more. All the corn had been harvested and the stalks were mostly stubble now, short brown spears looking almost white in the sun.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “We came out here for a cornfield?”

  “Out there beyond it. See that hill with the one tree on top?”

  “I do.”

  “Back when I was even younger than you, that hill out there was a dream of me and your grandmother’s. I don’t know how many picnics we had up there, but it was a lot. I’m pretty sure we made your mother up there one night.”

  He opened up the truck door and climbed out. I shut off the engine, then popped open my own door.

  “I don’t want you coming with me,” he said. “In fact I don’t even want you sitting down here watching me.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I want to be alone with your grandmother a little while. And that’s the best place I can think to do it. I’ve been cooped up in that little apartment too long. The place is always noisy and filled with a bunch of busybodies won’t give a man a moment’s peace. And I miss her. I miss her every night. Are you going to begrudge me a little privacy while I spend a half hour or so with your grandmother?”

  “No, sir. I’m not.”

  He stepped up closer and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Tell you what. About twenty miles back, on the far end of Main Street—the town’s called Jamestown. You remember it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “There’s this little store, red and white striped canopy out front. It’s an old-time soda fountain. Your grandmother and I used to stop there sometimes. We’d get some hamburgers and a couple of root beers to go, and we’d bring them with us up to that hill.”

  “You think i
t’s still open?” I said.

  “We drove right past it not thirty minutes ago. Big red Open sign hanging in the window.”

  “What is it you want from there?”

  “You go in and ask them for that old-fashioned root beer they sell. I can’t think of the name of it now, but they’ll know. See if you can get us a couple bottles.”

  “It will take me most of an hour probably.”

  “I’ve driven it plenty of times, son. I know how long it will take.”

  I looked toward the hill. “That hill’s a good quarter mile away from here, Pops. I don’t even see a path anywhere.”

  “You go through the corn. That’s the only way to get there. But from up on top of that hill, you can see miles and miles all around. You can see a river, half a dozen little towns, mile after mile of trees and woods. Think how it must look on a day like this. I want to see it all again. Just me and your grandmother.”

  I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t want to disobey him either. I could see how important it was to him.

  “Promise me that if you get tired . . .”

  He looked back through the truck at me. “I’m not stupid, Rusty. Give me that much credit anyway.”

  “I’ve never once thought you were stupid, Pops.”

  He gave me a wink and a smile. Then he turned away and went into the field of stubble.

  It took me twenty-five minutes to get back to Jamestown. I spent another fifteen driving up and down Main Street, looking for that red and white striped canopy. Finally I climbed out and asked a fellow not much younger than Pops where I could find the soda fountain. He pointed across the street to a Tru-Value Hardware store. I asked him how long the soda fountain had been closed down, and he said the early eighties. Eighty-three. Maybe eighty-four.