After the Flag Has Been Folded (2 page)

“I love you, Karen.”

“I love you, too, Daddy,” I said. I sat up and gave him a hug. He flipped off the overhead light, and I fell back to sleep, confident that there would be plenty of time for more hugs from Daddy.

In June our family returned to Rogersville in anticipation of that
promise. Daddy said he'd be home in time for my tenth birthday on November 12. Perhaps even on Veterans Day.

Daddy kept his promise, in a way. He did come back. Via airmail, in a cargo plane full of caskets.

 

T
HE TEARS STREAMING DOWN
Mama's face frightened me.

Grandpa Harve didn't rise from his lawn chair until the man in the jeep pulled away. And if he ever hugged or comforted his daughter in any way, I never witnessed it. But tears trickled from beneath his dark glasses throughout the rest of the day. Grandpa Harve loved Daddy as much as any of us.

As I tried to sleep that first night, fear blanketed me. Never warm, it at least wrapped me up real tight. I took refuge in fear's cocoon. Sometimes I still do.

I could hear Mama's cries through the thin panel boards that separated our bedrooms. She had cried all day long. Loud, wailing cries. Bitter water. That day I'd seen Mama raise her head and plead with God Almighty Himself. She kept asking Him the same question over and over. “Why me, God? Why me?”

If God gave her an answer, I never heard it.

I wasn't bold enough to ask God why myself. I figured you had to know Him well enough to ask such a personal question. Still, I prayed each night. Clasping my throat, I prayed the only prayer I knew: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallow'd be thy name.”

Sometimes I fell asleep before I got to the part about “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But not usually. Getting to sleep is hard when you're worried about having your head cut off. It was a notion I obsessed over after I overheard some kinfolk discuss whether somebody had tried to cut off Daddy's head. From that moment on, for years to come, decapitation haunted my slumber. Avoiding dismemberment became my focus early in life.

Prior to Daddy's death, I had never even thought much about my neck before. The only times I ever noticed I had a neck were when
Mama told me there was enough dirt in its creases to grow cotton. But nearly every night hence, I fell into a fitful sleep with my hands resting on my throat. I figured being asleep was too much like being dead. No telling what people do to you when you're dead or asleep.

Once, years later, I slept with a man who didn't understand my fallow fears. While I lay sleeping, he took a pair of scissors and cut off my panties. When I awoke the next morning and found myself nude from the waist down, I was frantic. I couldn't figure out where my favorite pair of underwear had disappeared to. Nor could I recall any particular dream that would have enticed me to discard them. My panic came out in a scream.

I know that poor man never understood the violation of cutting a pair of panties off a woman while she slept. And I tried hard to believe that was the only way I was violated. But when one is asleep, one is never sure what is going on.

I fret that being dead renders the same effect. Perhaps it's different for the dead. Perhaps the dead know what's going on in a way the sleeping don't. But can they really offer any help? Or is it just like those dreams where an intruder climbs into your bedroom window and he's stealthily coming toward you, and you begin to scream for help? Then you wake up and your mouth is open, but there is no sound at all. Just the clock ticking, the refrigerator humming, and dark silence.

I suspect if Daddy really saw how hurt we all were, he would have done something to help us. But he didn't. I hope it's because he couldn't—not because he was so busy rejoicing up in heaven that he didn't care about the hell he'd left us in.

It's hard to explain what losing a father does to a family. Daddy's death is the road marker we kids use to measure our life's journey. Before his death, ours was a home filled with intimacy and devotion. After his death, it was filled with chaos and destruction.

I thought about our family's loss decades later while reading an article published in
The Oregonian.
It was the police account of a young
man whose body had surfaced in the Columbia River. Hoping that somebody could help identify the boy, the newspaper ran a photo of the shirt he was wearing. It was a custom-made T-shirt with the picture of a skull on it. Law enforcement officials couldn't identify the boy because his head was missing.

That shirt was his only legacy. And unless someone recognized it, his headless body would be buried in a grave marked “John Doe.” Whatever thoughts or memories his soul would carry into the afterlife would literally be cut off forever.

I think that's what losing Daddy did to us. With him gone, we were headless. It was as if somebody came into our home with a machete and in one swift slice decapitated our entire family.

B
Y NIGHTFALL
M
AMA HAD STOPPED
W
AILING AND WAS TALKING ON THE PHONE.
S
HE WAS LISTENING AS HER
girlfriend Nita Thorne listed all the reasons why Mama shouldn't just lie down and die herself. “Shelby, think of the children,” Nita said, talking Mama through the first of many anguished nights. “What would they do without you? They need you, honey.”

Mama wasn't thinking of killing herself or anything like that, but she was frantic. She'd never felt so frayed and torn up in her entire life. Not even when her own mama had died. Back then she'd had Daddy to cry out to. Now she didn't have anyone to hold her and tell her that everything would be okay. The worst kind of stomach flu couldn't have made her gut hurt more than it already did. She could not comprehend that Dave, her beloved, was gone for good.

 

S
HELBY
J
EAN
M
AYES
and David Paul Spears had fallen in love on a blind date at a county fair in the late summer of 1953. She was sixteen. He was twenty-two.

Daddy was already a seasoned soldier when he met Mama. He'd dropped out of school after the eighth grade and worked as a laborer at Townsend Electrical Company in Greeneville, Tennessee, before enlisting in the Army in August 1951. He did a tour of duty in Korea and was back in Tennessee, working at the steam mill in Persia.
Mama was a schoolgirl, getting ready to start her sophomore year at Rogersville High.

They fell in love from the get-go. Daddy was smitten with Mama's lean, tanned legs, boyish hips, and dark-as-coffee-bean eyes. He liked the way her naturally curly hair cascaded around her neck, and that she didn't have a prissy bone in her shapely body. Mama had grown up with five older brothers. She didn't giggle, gossip, or give a shit what other people thought of her. She was as independent and stubborn as the day is long, and Daddy liked that. It gave him something to laugh about. Shelby Jean Mayes also liked the things he liked most—fishing a riverbank on a sunny day and making love under a tin roof on a rainy night.

In one of the letters he sent Mama from 'Nam, Daddy referred to their first date: “I remember when I took some good-looking girl to the carnival in Kingsport. Do you remember?” The letter arrived shortly after Daddy died. In that same letter, he teased Mama with the following note: “It sounds like Frankie is learning to get around there the same as he does everywhere. Tell him to watch out for those city girls around there for that is where one of them caught me. Ha!”

Mama dropped out of the tenth grade after the first two weeks of school. Five months later, on February 13, 1954, the eve of Valentine's Day, my parents married. Mama was five months pregnant with Frankie.

Daddy had been talking about reenlisting in the Army for months. On January 8, 1954, he signed up for a three-year stint. Daddy was due to report to his station at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Valentine's Day. Mama stayed in Rogersville with her parents until Frankie was born on June 16, 1954. Daddy wasn't there for Frankie's birth, but he arrived in Rogersville later that evening. Mama moved to Fort Campbell with Daddy when Frankie was a couple of weeks old.

From that moment on, Mama was a military wife. Her independent streak came in handy whenever she was required to pack up and move kids and caboodle on short notice. She made sure we had up-to-date
shots for overseas travel, kept our school records in order, and learned the quickest route for finding new dentists, new friends, and new churches. She mowed the lawn, starched Daddy's uniforms, and made sure Grandpa Harve had an ample supply of cigarettes nearby.

After Granny Ruth died, Grandpa Harve moved in with us. Mama's daddy was disabled. A stroke had rendered his left side useless. He could walk with the aid of a cane, but it was a slow step-shuffle. His speech was equally lopsided. But Daddy always took the time to converse with Grandpa. They were good buddies. They would sit on the porch or under a mimosa tree, drinking cups of black coffee, passing cigarettes and matches and stories between them.

When Daddy got called up for a second tour of duty in Korea, Mama birthed and raised Linda alone for the first fifteen months.

“I called a taxi to take me to the hospital when I went into labor with Linda,” Mama recalled. “I didn't have anybody else I could call to help me out.”

She left Frankie and me with a girlfriend while she delivered our baby sister without anyone by her bedside. Nobody brought her flowers. Nobody threw her a baby shower. Mama just went about her business, tending to our family's newborn, Frankie, and me.

Mama liked being the soldier's wife. She would dress us up and parade us around base on Armed Forces Day or the Fourth of July. She enjoyed dancing at the NCO club, with Daddy's hands clasped about her waist. It was fine with Mama that other men referred to her as “Sergeant Spears's wife.” That's the only title she'd ever envisioned for herself.

All her friends were other military wives. They didn't care who had an uppity education and who didn't. They were focused on raising their kids the best way they could, making sure they didn't miss out on the deals at the commissary, and looking ahead to where their husbands' next assignments might be. They got together to sew school clothes, drink a pot of coffee, and arrange pool parties or the occasional dinner out.

Mama had never been a career woman. She didn't even know any women who were, other than our schoolteachers. She knew some women who worked at diners or Dairy Queens to make ends meet, but if their husbands had made better salaries, they wouldn't have done that. As capable as she was, the thought of providing for her family terrified Mama. She loved Daddy. She needed him. She couldn't imagine life without him. Such a life held no promises, only guaranteed sorrows.

“Nobody really knows how alone I really was then,” Mama told me years later.

Perhaps not. But Nita Thorne had some idea of how alone she might feel if she'd been in Mama's shoes. Nita was one of the wives Mama befriended while Daddy was stationed in Hawaii. Nita's husband, Hank, was a good friend of Daddy's. They served in the same unit at Schofield and in Vietnam—Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 9th Artillery, 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry.

Daddy and Thorne were cannon cockers. Daddy, a staff sergeant, was known as “chief of smoke” because he led the firing battery. Thorne was operating the cannon when Daddy died. Thorne, who was still on active duty in Vietnam, sorely wanted to accompany my father's body home, but his request was turned down. Nita and her two children were living in Alabama.

Mama sat on the edge of the bed, her head downcast, tears streaming down her face as she pressed the black-handled phone against her ear, grasping for the comfort Nita offered her. Nita told Mama she was coming to Tennessee. Mama said it wasn't necessary, but Nita and the kids came anyway, and stayed until after Daddy was buried.

Retreating to my room, I scrawled a note to Mrs. Eye, my former teacher at Helemano Elementary School. The writing helped. I had to quit crying so I could concentrate on my cursive. I think that letter was the first time I used writing as a tool to bring order to chaos. I don't know exactly what I wrote that day, but I know I told Mrs. Eye about my father's death and the bulldog puppy whimpering
outside the trailer door. I also told her how Mama's crying frightened me.

After placing the letter in my Bible, I curled up on my bed and wept until I fell asleep. As best as I could figure out, if Daddy was dead, that meant he wouldn't be coming home. Not for my birthday. Not for Christmas. Not ever.

The night before Granny Ruth died in July 1962, Mama opened a box of Toni home-permanent kit and rolled my hair up in scratchy pink curlers with itsy white tissue papers. Then she poured nasty-smelling stuff all over my head. It ran down my face. Thankfully, Mama had given me a washcloth to hold over my eyes. When she took the rollers out, my hair balled up all wiry—like a scouring pad that had been used to clean up the fried-chicken skillet. Daddy chided her: “Little white girls aren't supposed to have hair like that, Shelby.”

I hoped Daddy's death wouldn't cause Mama to get out the Toni box again.

 

T
HE TOWNSPEOPLE LEARNED
of Daddy's death when the local papers ran articles with bold headlines declaring he'd been killed by his own shell. One paper ran a picture of Daddy standing next to a 105 howitzer. He's wearing a white T-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots covered in mud. The cutline beneath the picture reads: “
Last Picture
–S/Sgt. David Spears, standing by his howitzer, was received by his wife in Rogersville Friday. Two days later she was notified of his death, apparently from one of his own shells.”

 

DEFECTIVE SHELL KILLS ROGERSVILLE GUN CHIEF

That newspaper story always troubled me. I couldn't help but wonder if Daddy had been careless. He was a veteran soldier. I thought he should have been more aware, taken better precautions to keep himself out of harm's way, for our sake. I was distraught by the idea that his own shell killed him.

My own ill-formed concept of good and evil, coupled with the newspaper accounts of Daddy's death, left me wondering if my father was in some way responsible for his own death. Had he done something wrong that caused the cannon to misfire? Was he goofing off, not paying attention? Had he cursed God? Used God's name in vain? For what, in all of heaven and earth, could have caused Daddy to abandon his family this way?

As a child, I considered God to be akin to a senior accountant, with a stash of sharpened number-two pencils and a thick ledger book. His watchful eye never missed a wrongdoing. In my effort to avoid the problem of pain, I searched for suffering's common denominator. I knew being a good girl was mandatory for blessings. And just as surely, I knew that doing something wrong would always result in trouble. I was struggling to figure out what wrongdoing had caused this tragedy to befall our family.

 

G
RANNY
L
EONA
, D
ADDY'S
mama, was a crippled woman. She suffered from bad arthritis and poor circulation. Before we went to Hawaii, she shuffled around the wood floors in her home leaning on crutches or a walker. But during our absence she'd weakened more, so she relied on a makeshift chair attached to four training-type
wheels to get around. Her chair would not maneuver through our dirt front yard. And even if she could've managed that, how was she supposed to get into our little trailer house? The steps to the door were too steep for Granny and her walking tools. So she did not come see us when we moved back from the island or on the day we learned that Daddy was dead.

Granny lived in a tin-roofed, clapboard house near the corner of Virginia and Elm Springs Roads in the Lyons Park section of Church Hill, a nearby town. Lyons Park was a community of good-hearted people who feared their fiery preacher. Granny's rental house had a wooden stoop, window screens, and a coal stove in the middle of the living room. Bloody Highway 11-W ran directly behind her house. From the kitchen window at the back of the house, Granny could watch the traffic buzz by or keep count of how many trips the black kids from up the road made to Hurd's or Polson's, the two neighborhood markets along the highway. Sometimes Pap would take Frankie and me to Hurd's to get a Coca-Cola, or as Pap called it, “a dope.” Pap was Daddy's father.

His real name was Howard Spears, but nobody called him that. Everybody in the family just called him Pap. People in town called him Red because of his burnished freckles and red mop of hair. Pap was a quiet man, who liked to tease us kids with pinches to our inner thighs or by rubbing his unshaven face up against our tender cheeks. He rolled his own cigarettes with Prince Albert tobacco and filled a lighter with fuel from a blue-and-yellow tin can with a pointy tip. Pap could not write or read anything except his name, and he never drove a car. None of my grandparents did. No reason to learn, since they were all too poor to buy one anyway.

Frankie was old enough to go the store alone. I wasn't. But I was big enough to carry coal in from the heap that sat in the corner of the yard, and I was big enough to go next-door and sit on the porch swing and visit with Mr. and Mrs. Parker and their daughter, Priscilla. Going to Granny's house was usually a lot of fun.

But after the man in the jeep showed up, I felt nervous about going to see Granny Leona. I'd never seen her upset before. The newspaper accounts of my father's death had elevated our family from being part of the town's overlooked and unimportant to people of honor and sacrifice. The war hero's family.

Mama was quiet on the drive out to Granny's. Frankie and I were in the backseat. Linda sat up front. Sister Linda had been at Mama's side, or on her lap, ever since the man in the jeep showed up. She even slept with Mama. I'd heard more than one person remark: “Look at that baby. She won't remember her daddy. I feel so bad for her.” Whenever I heard that, I would study Linda. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. How should grief look on a seven-year-old? I couldn't tell how much she understood. Mostly she'd play quietly with her dollies, or she'd sit and stare at Mama. From time to time she'd reach over and grasp Mama's hand.