After the Flag Has Been Folded (3 page)

I wanted to be next to Mama like that. But I knew that such affection would not be welcome from me or Frankie. We were too old. I'd heard Aunt Gertie make several remarks about Mary Ellen's inappropriate affection for her son. Mary Ellen was Daddy's cousin. She had red hair that I thought made her look just like a movie star. And soft eyes that crinkled like wax paper when she smiled. Mary Ellen was always smiling and always touching folks, especially kids. But I could see Aunt Gertie's point. Mary Ellen's boy was a lean, lanky thing. When he sat in his mama's lap, his legs hung halfway down to her shins and his arms were near about as long as hers. He wasn't as old as Frankie yet, but he looked too old to be hanging on to his mama all the time. I couldn't remember Frankie ever even hugging our mama, much less sitting on her lap. He was far too mature for that.

I tried to be. But in truth, I longed for such comfort. I wished Mary Ellen would pull me onto her lap and hold me, like she did her boy, or Mama did Linda. Most of the time, though, I just pretended my hurt wasn't as big as Linda's because, after all, I was the older sister.

Granny Leona knew better, of course. She didn't tolerate such
nonsense. When I walked into her house that day, she stretched out her arms at me, and I ran right for them. I didn't care who saw me. Burying myself in her fragile embrace, I cried and cried like a big ole bawl baby. With nary a word, she comforted me. In her arms, I was able to turn loose all the chaos of the past few days. I didn't have to pretend my hurt wasn't real. I didn't have to hide a thing from Granny Leona. And unlike other folks throughout my life, Granny never ever told me I needed to get over my father's death. I think it's because she knew she never would.

 

A
FTER THE MAN
in the jeep came, it seemed our little trailer became the town's social center. Relatives I didn't even know I had turned out. I always suspected some of them came for the fried chicken and pound cake. And I suppose some came to gawk at the widow and her children. I imagined that when they returned to their mountain hovels they said prayers for us and thanked the Lord God Almighty that they didn't have to deal with all of our problems.

I've heard it said that Buddhists believe it's wrong to let a person die hungry. Well, Southern Baptists think it's a sin to let the grieving starve. Aluminum-foil-covered platters and bowls filled our fridge, covered the counters and the dinette table. Even the four chairs held plates of cornbread, pound cake, and banana pudding, pepper-fried pork chops and golden fried chicken. There were glass casserole dishes filled with cheese grits, macaroni and cheese, jelled salads, and piles of baking soda biscuits, yeast rolls, and black walnut bread. There was so much food that when folks came to pay their respects, they didn't have a place to sit. They just stood by the front door, fiddling with the slide in the screen. Mama didn't like us kids playing with the screen door slide, but she never said anything when grown-ups messed with it. I figured it was because Mama would just as soon they not stay too long. The trailer was crowded enough with just us and Grandpa Harve.

Folks usually didn't linger, but they all said the same thing. “I'm so sorry.”

Sometimes tears would well up in their eyes and dribble down their chins. I don't believe there is anything more troubling to a kid than to see a roomful of grown-ups cry. I don't think Mama liked it either. She did less crying than some of the women who dropped by.

But worse than the crying to me were those apologies everybody kept making. I didn't know what to say to the kindly folks who'd give me a sideways hug and say how sorry they were about my daddy. It was confusing. When we were little kids, before Linda was born, Mama had forced me to say “sorry” to Frankie after I'd bloodied his nose with a swift kick intended to keep him from knuckle-punching me again. I said it even though I wasn't the least bit sorry. I was proud I'd outdone him for once. Frankie would likely say I was way too smug about it.

Mama had also made me say I was sorry for hoarding three kittens in my bedroom closet in Oahu. But I didn't have to be prodded to say “sorry” when she and Daddy drove by Matsumoto's store in Whitmore Village and saw me shimmy up out of a sewer hole.

New sewer lines were being constructed in the neighborhood. My buddy Bernadette and I would pry open the iron lid and climb down into those dank holes. Then we would wander the shadowy underworld. The cement rounds were spacious, clean, dry, and cool, and in some places, where the sun shone through the sewer lids, full of eerie contours. But what I liked most was the secrecy of what we did. Until, of course, that day my parents drove by.

“Get home now!” Mama shouted at me.

I went straight to the house and pulled out the biggest Bible in the house. The gold-leaf one with the colored picture of a pale, frail Jesus on the front. It took both hands to carry that Bible. Placing it on my bed, I shut my door. Then, kneeling bedside and crying all over that picture, I asked Jesus to protect me from Daddy's belt.

As far back as I could recall, Daddy had never whipped me, but the belt's thickly woven threads and brass buckle left an impression on me nonetheless. I was hoping to never give him cause to use it. “Oh,
Jesus,” I cried. “I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I promise to never go in the sewer hole again. Don't let Daddy whip me.”

When they got home that afternoon, my parents never even said a word to me about my underworld adventures. I figured God had answered my prayers. There was simply no other explanation for it: Salvation belonged to the truly repentant.

Mama didn't know it yet, but there were other things I was truly sorry for. Terrible secrets far darker than those creepy sewers I'd crawled through.

So right after Daddy's death, whenever some kindly adult would lean over and say to me, “I am so sorry about your daddy,” I just wanted to run screaming from the room, yelling, “It's not your fault! It's not your fault!”

Because I sensed all along that it was mine.

I knew it from the moment Frankie slammed his best knuckle punch up against the trailer wall and hollered: “Those Charlies killed my daddy!” I didn't say anything to anybody, but I knew better. Whoever Charlie was, he hadn't killed Daddy—I had.

It seemed reasonable to me that if salvation resulted from repentance, then certainly the reverse was true. The unrepentant would not go unpunished. As Mama went wailing through the house, asking “Why? Why me?” I wanted to cry out, “Because of me, Mama! God took Daddy because I was bad!”

But I couldn't risk losing her. So I didn't.

And although I have told others about my wrongdoing, I have never told Mama that it was all my fault Daddy died. I've only told that secret to people whose love I can afford to live without.

The night before Daddy shipped out to Vietnam, I had been to a Christmas party at church. Our Sunday-school teachers gave Frankie and me each a sack filled with peppermints, peanuts, an apple, an orange, malted milk balls, and, at the very bottom of the brown bag, two chocolate footballs wrapped in gold foil.

Running into the house, I found my father lying on the couch
with his head in Mama's lap. “Looky what I got!” I squealed, shoving the bag under his nose.

Taking the sack from me, Daddy began to pluck through the treasures. He took out the apple and placed it on his chest. Then, digging deeper, he found one of the foil-wrapped footballs. “Mmmm, this is the one I want,” he said, pinching the tiny football between his thumb and forefinger.

I studied the candy's shiny foil and then looked into Daddy's sky blue eyes. “Oh, no, sir!” I cried. “You can't have that. That's my favorite!”

Then, pulling the bag from him, I fished for a malted milk ball and offered that to him. “But you can have this one, sir.”

Shaking his head sideways, Daddy again clutched the bag and held up the shiny football. “Nope. This is my favorite. This is the one I want.”

Frankie cozied up beside me. “You can have mine, sir,” he said, elbowing me aside.

Then, looking into my face, Daddy reached up and stroked the side of my head and said, “No, it's okay. I was only teasing. I didn't really want any candy. I would like the apple, though.”

Reaching into his pants pocket and whisking out his pocketknife, Daddy began whittling away the apple's skin. He always peeled his apples before eating them. He was pretty good at taking off all the skin in one long, red curl.

Placing the chocolate football in my open palm, Daddy grinned. I tore off the candy's foil and popped it into my mouth. Mama smiled at the two of us.

If my father had come home from Vietnam alive, I probably never would have remembered any of this. But as a child I believed the reason he died was because God was teaching me a lesson. A lesson so painful I couldn't tell anyone, not even Granny Leona.

The funny thing was that Granny believed it was her fault Daddy died. She told me this one morning, in the weeks after his death,
while she stirred a pan of oatmeal over the stove's gas flame. “I know why God took Dave,” she said.

I held my breath. I didn't think there was any way she could have known about the football. I hoped Daddy hadn't told her how selfish I'd been.

“It's all my fault,” she continued. I put two bowls on the table and fetched the can of Pet milk out of the fridge. “I was worried about how we was going to put Doug through high school. We didn't have money for school clothes or books. I prayed and asked God for the money. Your mama has signed over part of Dave's Social Security check to me.”

Doug was the youngest of Granny's eight kids. He was only a couple years older than Frankie, so he seemed more like a cousin than an uncle to us.

Granny switched off the knob, and the flame died down. “God answered my prayer,” she said. “The money from Dave will get Doug through high school. But I'm sure sorry I prayed that prayer.”

I wanted to run over and hug Granny. To tell her it wasn't her fault. To tell her how I'd been the one responsible for Daddy's death. Instead, I sat down and topped my oatmeal with a splash of Pet milk, a dab of butter, and two spoonfuls of sugar.

Thereafter, whenever folks stopped by the house to pay their respects and told me how sorry they were about Daddy dying, I wanted to shout out at 'em. I wanted them to know nobody was sorrier Daddy had died than me. And maybe Granny Leona.

His blood stained our souls.

T
HE MAN IN THE JEEP HAD TOLD
M
AMA HE DIDN'T KNOW WHEN
D
ADDY'S BODY MIGHT BE ARRIVING.
H
E SAID
she'd hear something soon. Over the next few days she received all sorts of Western Union telegrams. By then I had come to realize that telegrams were a way of rushing bad news to folks.

This was the telegram the trembling soldier delivered. It was dated July 25, 1966, at 7:45
P.M.

Another one arrived the next day. It was dated July 26, 1966, 12:09
P.M.

Mama did not discuss these telegrams with us kids. She didn't even read them to us, but we knew by the phone calls she made to Daddy's brothers James and Hugh Lee and her own brothers Carl and Woody that she was upset. She didn't know when Daddy's remains would get to town or what condition they might be in. And she didn't know where to bury him. She could bury him at the town cemetery in McCloud where Daddy grew up, or at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Or, given the amount of money she was left with, maybe she
ought to dig a hole in the backyard and stick him there. Mama was crying lots now. Seems like every time a telegram came, she got mad and cried some more, but she had quit yelling at God. Instead she just started cussing out the Army.

“What the hell do they mean by ‘returning his remains'?” Mama asked. “How much is left of Dave?”

Hugh Lee didn't have an answer. No one did.

The next telegram was sent on July 27, 1966, at 12:28
P.M.

That was followed by one dated July 29.

Daddy's escort, Willie Huff, wasn't a close friend or anything like that. Mama didn't know him or any of the escorts the Army sent to assist with the funeral. Not even the pallbearers. They were just soldiers, too, like Daddy, who did their best to carry out their orders. I've often wondered if Willie Huff thought of us over the years. Did he worry about what became of the Widow Spears and her grieving
children? Or did he get shipped to Vietnam and come home in a casket, too?

Mama saved the telegrams along with the last few letters that Daddy wrote and the last ones she'd penned that Daddy didn't live long enough to receive. She kept them wrapped with a red ribbon and stuffed into a clear plastic pouch for decades, until December 2001 when she mailed them all to me. I hadn't asked for them, but I suspect she knew how much I would cherish them. Words can breathe life into a dead man and make a daughter remember her father's voice. Words can resurrect time forgotten and love lost. Perhaps it's only for a moment, but for a daughter who has spent a lifetime without her daddy, sometimes that's enough.

Along with the daily telegrams were copies of the local news reports of Daddy's death. The newspapers also told stories on a larger scale, such as the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in an antitrust case proposing a move of the Atlanta Braves to Milwaukee. The court threw out the case and ruled that the Braves would remain in Atlanta. Other headline news included that the Holston Army Ammunition plant in Kingsport would add an additional four hundred employees, bringing its total full-time staff to twenty-five hundred. The plant produced RDX, the basic ingredient in mortar rounds like the one that killed my father. And the
Kingsport Times
ran headlines welcoming home the town's newest celebrity, Vicki Hurd, the newly elected Miss Tennessee.

One of the first reports of Daddy's death was stuck in a corner section of the
Rogersville Review.
The headline read: “Rogersville Man Is Killed in Viet Action.”

Uncle James drove Uncle Woody and Mama in his car to Knoxville to meet Daddy's casket. We stayed with Granny Leona. Mama had a car, an old Corvair we had shipped from Hawaii. Frankie and Mama had gone to Virginia to pick it up the week before Daddy died.

Mama wrote this account of that trip on July 24, the same day Daddy was struck by a mortar round that would leave him bleeding to death in a country half a world away:

Mama's tears still stain the pages of this letter that my father never received. I can't help but wonder: If she was scared to drive a car through the mountains of Virginia all by herself, how did she ever muster up the courage to face a lifelong journey all alone?