After the Flag Has Been Folded (15 page)

As the cabbie drove out past Shoney's Big Boy Restaurant, a couple of churches, and Parkhill Cemetery, I began to wonder if I'd scribbled down the right address. When we passed Macon Road Barbecue, the place Mama took us out to eat occasionally, I really began to fret. There weren't many housing developments past Reese Road. We dropped the drunk off in front of a red-brick colonial in an obscure cul-de-sac.

The cabbie must've sensed my nervousness. “It ain't much farther now, ma'am,” he said. Looking into his rearview mirror, I could see the whites of his eyes flashing.

“Okay, sir,” I whispered.

My palms were sweating, a nervous habit that plagues me to this day. I watched out the window, but I couldn't see much. There were no streetlights. No moon. No houses with porch lights on. Nothing but the dark shadows cast by pines, oaks, and mimosa trees. And the dark driver in the seat in front of me. He might rape me, cut me with a knife, and leave me bleeding in a dirt ditch out here. Nobody would ever see him. He's as black as midnight.

My next thought was of Mama. I hated her.

“I think the turnoff's right up here,” the cabbie said, startling me. I craned my neck to get a look at the corner. There wasn't a convenience store, gas station, or school nearby. A sole streetlight marked our path. A sign, painted blue and white, sat back off the corner, to the right:
CRYSTAL VALLEY ESTATES.

Going by name only, a person might think the blacktop at Crystal Valley was sprinkled with rhinestones and the homes were all Georgian manor houses, replete with ornate pillars, stone porches, and sweet-faced women wearing antebellum skirts. Instead it was a sprawling neighborhood with chain-link fences and row after row of trailers with rippled-aluminum skirting.

The cabbie made a right-hand turn. He looked again at the scribbled address and called out the space number of my new home. He drove over several speed bumps, past a lake and lots of single-wide trailers, some with cinder block steps. Finally, at the very back corner of the park, there was our trailer. “That's it!” I said, pointing toward our porch light. The driver pulled the taxi over and jumped out to open my door. Mama must've been waiting up for me, because she was out the door and by my side before the cabbie had time to retrieve my bag from the trunk. Mama thanked him and gave him a fistful of money.

“Long trip?” she asked, turning to look at me. Mama wasn't the embracing sort. Picking up my suitcase, she led me to the trailer's back door. There weren't any steps to the front door yet, and it sat about four feet off the ground because of the slope of the lot.

Inside, the trailer was the same. Same three bedrooms. Same hallway. Same awful couch. But it all felt so strange to me. Like returning to elementary school as a high school senior. You recognize the water fountain you used to struggle to reach on tippy-toes, but now you tower over it. Everything feels familiar, but you don't fit into the spaces anymore. The house smelled of Mama's Salem cigarettes and Chanel No. 5 perfume. I could hear Frank's heavy breathing through
the stapled plywood walls. But I felt as if I didn't belong in my own family anymore. It was the most lonesome feeling I'd ever had.

“G'night,” Mama said. “Good to have you home.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled as I slid open my bedroom door. It was attached to a roller that hung from the ceiling, and it often fell right off if I pushed it too hard. Since Linda and Frank were sleeping, I gave it only a light push. It glided open.

I crawled into bed without slipping out of anything but my shoes and fell asleep saying the only prayer I knew: “Our Father, which art in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done…”

I hadn't yet learned that it's okay to cry out in prayer, or I might have gone to bed that night hollering: “What's the matter with you, God? If you're so all-powerful, how come you let Daddy die in some foreign country? And if you're so all-loving, how come you don't do better by us kids and Mama?”

What I didn't know then was that Mama was pondering the very same questions. Only she wasn't waiting around for God to get it all figured out. She had a plan.

I
N THE FALL OF
1969, M
AMA ENROLLED IN A NURSING PROGRAM AT
C
OLUMBUS
C
OLLEGE.
S
HE'D DECIDED THE
best way to make a better life for us was to make more money. The only way she could do that was to become a registered nurse.

It was an admirable plan, one that left us kids marveling at our mama once again. Despite all her obvious shortcomings, Mama was the hardest-working person I knew. She never accepted things as status quo. She was forever trying to figure out how to give us kids a better life. Problem was, Mama defined a better life in material terms. This was the result of her impoverished childhood, I reckon. Plus, I guess Mama thought that if she could give us everything our father would have, then we might not miss him so much.

So she, began a rigorous schedule, attending college during the days and working part-time, 3
P.M.
to 11
P.M.,
at various nursing homes and hospitals. It was a grueling routine that our entire family endured from the fall of 1969 until the spring of 1971.

Mama had worked the swing shift pretty much since she'd completed the Manpower Program. So there was never much supervision for us kids. Thelma, Floyd, Grandpa Harve, and Aunt Mary Sue had provided some consistency in our lives. Now that we were older, Mama didn't feel we needed as much oversight. Frank was fifteen, Linda, ten, and we were all big enough to be left on our own.

After Frank got us kicked out of Lake Forest Trailer park, Mama sent Grandpa Harve to live with Uncle Carl again. Her plan was to finish her degree and buy a house. Then she'd bring Grandpa back to live with us, forever.

So our entire family began school that fall. Mama at Columbus College, Frank at Columbus High School, me at Arnold Junior High, and Linda at Waddell Elementary. We all went our separate ways in the mornings. And when we kids came home in the afternoons, it was usually to an empty house. Sometimes Mama was there, but if she was, she had a thick medical book propped opened in her lap or on the kitchen table. She was determined to be the best nursing student enrolled at Columbus College.

The college is now known as Columbus State University, and is part of the University of Georgia educational system, but in those days it was often referred to as Cody Road High, a title that offended many of the professionals who staffed the school. So, like most second-ranked schools, they tried harder and pushed their students to their limits. Mama didn't shirk from the challenge one bit, and she repeatedly earned her place on the dean's list. Not bad for a rural Tennessee gal with a ninth-grade education.

One nursing instructor in particular was always giving Mama grief. Not much of a whiner, Mama didn't usually talk much about how difficult school was for her. Although as a kid I didn't understand the magnitude of Mama's accomplishments, I was proud that she was trying to make things right for us.

One particular afternoon, Mama came home frustrated to no end. She said her instructor, Sister Marianella Senft, had chided her in front of the entire class over some procedural thing she thought Mama ought to have mastered already. A shy woman by nature, Mama doesn't like to be singled out for any reason and certainly not for public humiliation. As I listened to her recounting the day's events, I decided right then that somebody had to put the sister in her place, and it might as well be me.

I gathered up a fistful of change and left the trailer. I didn't tell anyone where I was going or what I was going to do. I wasn't too sure myself. But I knew there was a pay phone at the other side of the trailer court. I intended to have a little chat with Sister Marianella.

I found the college's information number in the thick black book dangling from the end of a chain. I plunked a dime in the phone and dialed the number. “Could I please speak to Sister Marianella, ma'am?” I asked the receptionist.

“Just one moment, please,” she replied.

There was a long pause before a voice came on the line. I'd half expected the nun to talk in the same deep-throttle voice that Coach Bush employed when instructing the mighty Rams, Arnold Junior High's football team. But Sister Marianella's voice was pleasant, not imposing. That bolstered my resolve a bit. “Ma'am,” I said, “you don't know me, but my mama, Shelby Spears, is a student in your class.”

“Yes?” she responded, no doubt curious about why some student's daughter was calling her.

“Mama's been having a tough time in your class. She comes home upset all the time. I don't know what you said to her in class today, but she came home almost in tears.”

I didn't pause to take a breath or give Sister Marianella a chance to take one either. My voice was growing louder, more intense. “Did you know Mama is taking care of three kids while she goes to school? Did you know that my daddy died in Vietnam? Did you know that when Mama leaves school she goes to work all night? Don't you understand how hard she's trying? She's really trying. You ought not be so mean to her. Can't you see she's doing her best?”

There! Whew! I'd spit that all out.

“How old are you?” the nun asked.

“Twelve,” I said.

“Well, young lady, I think it is impertinent of you to make such a call,” Sister Marianella said. I wasn't too sure what she meant, but I didn't interrupt her for an explanation. “If your mother wants to be
a nurse, she's going to have to earn the right to be one. Perhaps she ought to reconsider, given all you've just told me. I will talk to her about it tomorrow.”

Click.

I couldn't believe it! That old bag had hung up on me. She didn't listen to a word I'd said. And she obviously didn't carry an ounce of mercy in her deep pockets. I fumed all the way back home. But I didn't say a word about the phone call to Mama. She was upset enough. No reason to get her more riled up. Besides, I was pretty sure the sister was going to tell Mama all about the phone call.

She did.

It was the first thing Mama wanted to know about when she got home the next day. “Karen?” she called out, walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. “Did you call Sister Marianella yesterday?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I replied, pretending to be occupied cleaning up the toiletries on my dresser.

“You had no business calling my instructor,” Mama said.

“She's being mean for no reason at all,” I said. “I just told her how hard you're trying.”

“I know what you said to her,” Mama remarked. “She told me all about it. Don't ever do such a thing again.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

Mama spoke sternly to me, but I knew she wasn't really mad. Otherwise she would've grounded me. I suspected when she repeated the story to her girlfriends that in her own quirky way, Mama was kind of pleased that I'd called the sister. I figured she probably wished she'd been able to tell Sister Marianella a few things herself, if it wouldn't have been such a risk to her future.

I don't think Mama or I realized it at first, but that phone call marked a change in the way we began to relate to each other. Months later, Mama summed up the change this way: “Sometimes I can't tell who is the mother and who is the daughter here.”

She was popping off at me at the time. Angry over yet another
battle we'd been waging. But she got it right. Our roles had reversed. From the moment I confronted Sister Marianella Senft, I viewed Mama as a needy person, incapable of properly caring for herself, much less us kids. And although she'd never said so, I suspected Mama doubted her own capabilities at the time.

When she wasn't studying or working, Mama was drinking more than ever. Not alone and not usually at home. She often spent the weekend evenings partying with her nursing buddies. I hated Mama's honky-tonking. I was fearful of being left alone at night. Sometimes I made desperate attempts to keep her at home. I'd cry that I had a bad bellyache. Or I'd take the thermometer and scratch it across the bedsheets, trying to raise the mercury level and convince Mama that I was running a bad fever. Sometimes I would tell her that I was scared to be alone and that I wanted her to stay with me. For the most part, Mama ignored me and my fears. She labeled me her “hysterical child” and often laughed off my silly sicknesses.

I didn't make any attempts to hide my disgust with her indulgences. Mama said that before Daddy died she didn't drink at all. Not even one beer. But then again, back then she didn't have any screeching sorrows to quell. As long as she stayed busy, Mama could ignore Daddy's absence. But at night an imposing shadow rested on the pillow next to her. The memories of the man she had loved with her whole heart, mind, body, and soul haunted her. Death is a cold companion to snuggle up next to. No wonder Mama often soaked her slumber in firewater first.

T
HE VERY BEST THING ABOUT
A
RNOLD
J
UNIOR
H
IGH WAS
M
RS
. A
NN
A
NDERSON
. M
RS
. A
NDERSON SPORTED A
backcombed hairstyle and sometimes wore white boots that made her look like one of Nancy Sinatra's go-go dancers. But it was her laughter that captured my attention. She was the sort of teacher who kept her frustration burner turned down low and her giggle monitor cranked up high. If a kid acted up in her class, she'd put a dunce hat on him and tell him to take a seat in the wastebasket next to her desk. For that reason alone, very few kids ever acted out in her class.

But it was the stories we read that made me most eager for her English class. Mrs. Anderson introduced me and hundreds of other pubescent television devotees and comic-book readers to good literature. The backbone of our class that year was John Gunther's
Death Be Not Proud,
a father's tribute to his dead son.

The title comes from a sonnet by the classic poet John Donne. Gunther wrote achingly of Johnny, the son he lost in 1947 to a brain tumor. He summed up his son's battle with cancer this way: “A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force—this was what went on in Johnny's head. What he was fighting against was the ruthless assault of chaos.”

I read Gunther's words in class under Mrs. Anderson's watchful
gaze and fought back my own fury against the “brute unthinking force” that had snatched Daddy from our family and the subsequent “ruthless assault of chaos” we were now enduring. Sometimes, as I read, Mrs. Anderson glanced my way and we locked eyes. I suspected in those moments that she knew how Gunther's book was affecting me. I lived in a home haunted by Death, yet, no one ever spoke its name.

Like John Gunther and his wife, Frances, I wanted to know “Why? Why me? Why him? Why us?”

Frances Gunther summed up her family's loss this way: “Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one's fellow human beings, of the earth.”

I didn't know if Daddy's death made me more aware of life, as much as it made my world a much scarier place. I was keenly aware that I could lose Mama, Frank, or Linda. Or my own life, in a lightning-flash moment. Reading about Johnny's brain tumor only heightened my ever-increasing anxieties. My head echoed with the sound of dirt being shoveled onto a steel coffin.

Shoving my way through the school's crowded hallways between classes helped silence the voice of fear growing within me. Arnold Junior High was situated in a cul-de-sac in a middle-class neighborhood. Brick homes with white Corinthian columns and well-tended azalea bushes stretched out in every direction. There were no trailers, no cinder blocks, no rusted-out cars, and no tires with pansies planted in the middle of them. It was a working-class neighborhood, but no people of color lived nearby or attended the neighborhood schools.

There was only a smattering of black people at Arnold Junior High. Mr. James Bell taught math and Mrs. Uretha Gilmer was the librarian. All the other blacks worked in the kitchen or the bathrooms. Segregation didn't seem strange or wrong to me at the time. I didn't think much about it, really. It wasn't something we kids talked about, and it wasn't something Mama was talking about at home. I'd seen the occasional riot on television news. I'd heard Uncle Ray and
Aunt Helen talk about the marches in Selma, but, frankly, since I didn't know any blacks except Thelma, the plight of blacks in general didn't affect me much.

The irony is that I knew what it felt like to be part of a population that others ignored, avoided, or even hated. I'd felt racism's sharp sting as a freckled-faced towhead living in a Filipino village and attending Oahu's Helemano Elementary School. And I felt that singled-out isolation again after Daddy died.

As a child, I was incapable of distinguishing between my father the soldier and the policies and practices targeted by protestors who were sincerely concerned about politicians' misuse of military might. Certainly, the nightly newscasts and the headlines in the daily papers did little to help me make those distinctions. There was nobody sitting beside me explaining that the protestors burning effigies of U.S. soldiers or shouting obscenities about the Vietnam War weren't necessarily angry at
my father.

Their rage against the soldiers returning from Vietnam terrified me. The more virulent the protestors became, the more shame I felt over my father's death. I feared telling anyone about Daddy's death. I worried that they would label him a murderer and me the killer's daughter. It was the sort of confused shame a sex-abuse victim might feel, as if I was somehow responsible for hurt that had been inflicted upon me. But I didn't talk about my fears or shame with Mama, Frank, or Linda, or with teachers or friends. Frankly, I just didn't even have the verbal skills to articulate my feelings.

For much of my life, I was embarrassed and conflicted over my father's death in Vietnam. I thought he should've known better. All those intelligent people protesting the war certainly seemed to know better. Why didn't Daddy? It was a question I pondered almost daily as I listened to Walter Cronkite's latest war report and heard the growing casualty numbers during dinner each night. Yet, I never worked up the nerve to ask Mama why Daddy didn't just run off to Canada. I knew that the simple answer was Daddy was a professional
soldier. Like it or not, going to war was his job. It was a job he took seriously and did honorably.

Daddy, of course, was dead by the time the antiwar, antisoldier, antiestablishment fervor reached its zealous, screeching pitch. For that, I'm thankful. For my hardworking and honest father, coming home to a nation full of ugly folks spitting and spewing vulgarities at him, to people who neither respected nor honored his efforts as a soldier, would've been a death of a different sort, one I'm glad Daddy never had to endure.

Throughout his military career, my father kept a sense of humor about his job. It's evident in a poem he wrote from Camp Gordon. (It's probably a good thing he was a soldier because I don't think Daddy could've earned his living as a writer.) Mama saved the piece of lined notebook paper with the poem scribbled across it in blue ink, the title written in Daddy's best cursive script:

Daddy's keen humor also comes through in a letter he wrote to Mama, postmarked July 22, 1966, two days before his death: