After the Flag Has Been Folded (28 page)

R
UFE,
M
AC, AND
B
ETH HELPED ME PACK UP MY DORM ROOM AT
B
ERRY AND PREPARE MY STUFF TO BE SHIPPED
to Oregon. The night before I flew out, I got so sick, Mac worried that I might not be able to make my flight. “You aren't going to have to worry about dying if your plane crashes,” he said. “You're going to shit yourself to death.” Beth and Rufe laughed while I groaned and made another dash for the bathroom.

The previous week Donna and Karen Mendenhall had hosted a going-away party for me. Mac made me my favorite chocolate pound cake. Donna set the table with linen and silver. My many friends from Rose Hill Baptist turned out to bid me farewell. The Burke boys, Jimmy and Jerry, were there. Jimmy was dating Lynn at the time. I had learned from Mrs. Burke that her son had a crush on me while I was a freshman at Columbus High. She had found a stash of love letters he'd written to me but never given me. I couldn't help but wonder, if he had, how would my life have been different? Would I have ever returned to the trailer court to strike up a doomed relationship? Jimmy and Lynn were great friends. I wanted things to work out between them, so there was no jealousy, no remorse, just a lot of what-ifs in my mind.

Also at the farewell party were Ed Hendrix, Patsy Ward, Andy Kelley, David Toney, Debbie and Dee Jo Baker, Buddy and Lynn
Wilkes, and a host of others who dropped in. Many who showed up for the party also came by the Columbus airport to wave me off. I didn't know it then, but I wouldn't see some of them until decades later. Wesley Skibbey was not among the crowd. We hadn't spoken since graduation night. I didn't bother telling him that I was moving across the country.

Of course, I didn't really realize how far across the country Oregon was. Mama had tried to talk me into staying at Berry for the full year. “It's the rainy season in Portland,” she said. “Why don't you stay until summer?”

I wish I'd listened to her. But as usual, I was led by my heart, not reason. It was almost Christmas. I wanted to be with my family.

Mama forgot to mention that the rainy season in Portland could last until mid-June. There were a lot of other things she forgot to tell me, too. Important things about how when a girl falls in love, it can alter her destination in life.

Within four years of moving to Oregon, I had earned a B.S. degree in communication and education from Oregon State University (Mama always said the B.S. part came natural, I didn't really need to earn it), and I'd met and married a native Oregonian.

During the summer of 1978, I'd called Granny Leona in Tennessee to tell her I was getting married.

“What's the boy's name?” Granny asked.

“Timothy Zacharias,” I said. “He's from Joseph, Oregon.”

“Well, you couldn't get any more biblical than that,” she replied. I laughed.

Tim was everything Wesley had not been. He was intelligent and kind and patient. And best of all, he was one of the most godly men I'd ever met. His parents, Gene and Gwen, had raised him in the jungles of Ecuador, where they were serving as missionaries with Wickliffe Bible Translators. Tim had spent much of his formative years reading books, over and over again, by flashlight, eating alligator for dinner, and playing with his pet, a monkey named Judy. By the time
we met, Tim was a graduate of Judson Baptist College, where he'd been a member of the basketball and soccer teams. He was at OSU working on his degree in history when a mutual friend introduced us.

We didn't take to each other right way. He thought I was a flirt. I thought he was a nerd. At the time I was dating a member of OSU's crew team. Tim didn't attract me. But over the course of the next four months, we grew to be friends, and from that friendship a romance sprouted. We had our first date in February 1978. I called Karen Mendenhall when I got home that night. It was about 1
A.M.
Georgia time. “I've met the man I'm going to marry,” I said.

“How do you know?” Karen asked, trying to sound awake.

“I don't know,” I said. “I just know it.”

Tim and I were engaged by the end of March. We married in August. Karen and Lynn flew out to Oregon to be my attendants. We had not seen one another in three and a half years, but our friendship didn't skip a beat. We spent the week traveling to the Oregon coast and Willamette valley, laughing and telling stories about our mamas and the Rose Hill gang, just like we always did. Lynn and Jimmy had broken up, and Karen had called off her relationship with Andy Kelley and was dating a fellow I didn't know—Philip Clark, a Hardaway boy.

Mama spared no expense at my wedding. She paid for everything—the dress, the flowers, the cake, the reception—without complaint. She did it for me and for Daddy. It was the sort of wedding he would've wanted to give me himself, had he lived.

Uncle James, who was living in Colorado at the time, flew out for the event. I think it was his way of trying to fulfill his promise to Daddy. James had turned his life around and was working a respectable job as a maintenance supervisor for several buildings in downtown Denver. He was very sweet to me. James would have probably escorted me down the aisle if I'd asked, but I had asked Frank do it.

Moments before he walked me down the aisle, Frank lifted my veil, bent over, and kissed me on the cheek.

“I wish Daddy were here,” I said, wiping away a tear.

“Me, too,” he said.

After a brief honeymoon to the Oregon coast, Tim and I returned to OSU to complete our senior year. Three months later I was pregnant with the first of our four children. Our son, Stephan, was born in August 1979. He was followed in close succession by identical twin sisters, Ashley and Shelby, and then Konnie.

When the nurse at the college infirmary confirmed that I was pregnant, I was distraught. Tim had planned on going to seminary. I wanted to teach high school. This put a definite kink in our plans. But when the nurse suggested an abortion would fix everything, I knew better. “No, thanks,” I said. “It's really not an option for me.”

That was the same answer I gave another nurse at the Wallowa County Health Department in December 1983, when I discovered I was pregnant for the fourth time. Ashley and Shelby were only seventeen months old. I'd just barely got them weaned.

We were living in the very remote town of Enterprise, where Tim was working as a history teacher. His family lived nearby, but mine had moved far off. Linda and her husband, Greg, were living in Washington. Mama and Frank and his family were in Alaska. Not long after moving to Oregon, Frank had joined the Army and was making a career of it. He was stationed in Anchorage with his wife, Janet, when my son was born.

Despite his religious conversion, Frank's drug habit continued to plague him. In 1981 his drug dealing earned him an all-expenses-paid trip to one of the best drug-treatment programs in the nation, the Army's disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Janet was pregnant with their second child. His daughter Amy was a preschooler.

Mama moved to Alaska to support Janet and the kids while Frank served out his prison term. David Paul Spears II, my brother's son, was nearly a year old before his daddy laid eyes on him for the first time. Frank walked out of that Kansas prison and into a degree program at the University of Alaska, where he earned his engineering degree and
his self-respect. Mama stayed in Alaska because she liked her job and the rivers.

She kept trying to get me up there, but I refused. “I've gone as far north as I'm going,” I said.

Mama had come back to Oregon for a brief stint while I was pregnant with the twins. But when they were a week old, she sat with me on the front steps and told me once more why she needed to move another three thousand miles away. She had her reasons: better job, better opportunities. She felt guilty about leaving me again. “It seems I'm always taking off during the times when you need me most,” Mama said.

“You do seem to have that habit,” I replied.

I tried hard to mask my hurt over Mama's leaving. Being a mother myself had helped me see Mama in a new way. I understood how easy it was for a girl to forget who she used to be in an effort to be the mother her children need her to be. I was beginning to recognize, in very small ways, how my father's death had affected Mama.

When
People
magazine came out with its 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon issue in March 1985, I sat in my home in Enterprise and wept. I had lost touch with all things military. I felt cut off from Daddy and Mama and from all things familiar. My days were consumed with laundry, naps, coloring books, and Cheerios.

I scrounged around the house for a pen and paper. The only writing utensil I could find was a broken crayon and the nub of a number-two pencil. Taking the paring knife from the kitchen drawer, I sharpened what was left of the pencil and wrote a letter to
People.
The unlined paper was stained with bitter tears when I put it in the mail.
People
published the letter in its April 1, 1985, issue.

This was my very first published piece. Vietnam made me a writer. I had to find some way to structure the chaos; writing gave me the ability to do that.

 

W
HEN
I
LEFT
G
EORGIA
, it never occurred to me it would be a permanent move. I'd been so busy getting grown up, finishing school, and having kids that I was simply too worn out to consider anything except the immediate, which was usually a toddler crying. I'd given birth to four kids in five years.

Granny Leona died when Stephan was a toddler. I didn't have the money to attend her funeral. I hadn't been back to see my kin in Tennessee in years. In 1985 I grew terribly homesick. We didn't have any money, but Tim promised to take me south as soon as possible. That summer we loaded the kids, all preschoolers, into a Volkswagen van and drove south.

Mama thought the trip would disappoint me. She expected me to feel disconnected from the land of my youth, and she was hoping I would no longer feel like an immigrant to the Great Northwest. “You can never go home, you know,” she warned me. “It won't ever be the same again.”

Mama was wrong. Columbus, Georgia, always feels like home to me. I'm tied to its landscape and its people in a way that Mama can't understand. I suspect it's because it's where I best remember us as a family.

 

I
T HAD BEEN
ten years since I'd left Georgia. I vowed to never let that much time elapse between visits again. I might not be able to raise my children as Georgians, but I was determined to make sure that they knew the South of my childhood. So I took them to the park on Morris Road and showed them the house where I tumbled willy-nilly off the bunk bed and Daddy rushed me to Martin Army Hospital. I took them to the park where Daddy, Frank, and I played catch. And I bought them Krystal hamburgers and told them Mama used to buy a bagful for five dollars. I took them to visit Kadie the Kinnett cow. They giggled at one another as they stood under Kadie's giant udder.

Then Tim and I took the kids to Nashville and Rogersville to meet Papaw David's people and to visit his gravesite in Greeneville. We stayed with Uncle Hugh Lee and Aunt Nina. When we left, Hugh Lee was sad for days. “I've never missed so many people at once in my entire life before,” he said.

We visited Uncle Woody and Aunt Gertie and Uncle Carl and Aunt Blanche. We ate snap beans and fresh tomatoes from Carl's garden and drank the sweet tea Blanche fixed earlier that day. And at each stop, I hugged my kinfolk and told them how much I loved and missed them. I returned to Oregon feeling more disconnected and distraught than ever. I was weary of chasing after Mama. I'd moved to Oregon to be near my family, and all my family had moved elsewhere. I didn't know who I was or where I belonged.

That following spring our daughter Ashley was diagnosed with syringomyelia, a rare spinal disorder whose origins are still undetermined. The disorder can be crippling, as sacs within the spine fill with fluid and put pressure on the nerves. In Ashley's case, it resulted in a spinal curvature of thirty degrees and nerve damage to her right leg.

In March 1986 Ashley underwent hours of surgery at the University of Southern California San Francisco Medical Center. She was three years old and had never been away from her twin sister for even a night. Mama did not come down for the surgery. Tim and I were in San Francisco alone with Ashley. Tim's parents were caring for the other three children. Ashley spent ten grueling days in the hospital, mostly doped up on morphine.

It was a full week before we knew if she could walk. Earlier attempts to get her on her feet had failed. She would either throw up or cry out in pain. Doctors had skillfully inserted a shunt that drained the fluid from the sacs in her spine into her abdomen. But that had left her with two major wounds, one in the spine, one in the stomach. We finally coaxed her to walk across the room by telling her that if she would walk over to the phone, she could talk to Shelby. Their friendship was sealed in cement even then. Her gray eyes were lit with desire and determination. Ashley gingerly slid her slippered feet across the linoleum floor. It took her nearly twenty minutes, but she finally reached the phone and cried as she spoke to her sister for the first time in nearly two weeks. Tim and I wept with them.