After the Flag Has Been Folded (7 page)

I watched as the soldiers picked up the flag off Daddy's coffin and meticulously snapped it into a taut triangle; then, with a salute, they handed it over to Mama. She clutched it to her breast like a newborn baby. I half expected her to fall over into the pit, screaming for Daddy. But she didn't. She just stood there, head bowed, weeping so softly only the angels could hear her.

As the bugler played the mournful taps, a desperate urge to bolt surged up from somewhere deep in my belly. Perhaps if I were somewhere else, running through sewer holes with Bernadette or racing across pineapple fields in Hawaii, then none of this would be happening. Without me there, they couldn't bury Daddy. If I had the powers to transport myself back in time, I could save Daddy and put an end to all this hurt.

But I didn't have any powers. I didn't even have any prayers. I felt empty inside. That achy, hot burn that had been in my gut since the day the man in the jeep arrived was fading. I was plumb worn out. I wanted to curl up in that coffin right beside the cold, blue man that everyone said was my daddy and just fall asleep, forever.

I don't remember the ride back to Rogersville, or much of anything else that day, except the dream I had that afternoon.

Mama said we should all lie down. Frankie protested. He was too old for naps. He wanted to go biking with a buddy.

“Awright then,” Mama said. “Go on. But change your clothes first.”

Linda crawled into bed with Mama, who didn't even take her dress clothes off. I curled up on the twin bed in the adjoining room. As Frankie headed out the door, I fell asleep crying softly, so as not to upset Mama.

I was awakened by a dream in which I saw Frankie at the front door, covered head to toe with blood. I wasn't sure it was Frankie, so I just closed my eyes again, a reverse blink. It was.

As I sat up in bed, wide awake, the phone in Mama's bedroom rang. I ran to grab it, but Mama had already picked up the black-handled receiver. She motioned for me to hand her her glasses. I did.

It was Daddy's cousin Mary Ellen.

“Frankie's been in an accident,” Mary Ellen said. “He's banged up pretty bad.”

“Where is he?” Mama asked, sitting up on the edge of her bed, fumbling with a cigarette and lighter.

“I think somebody's taken him to the hospital,” Mary Ellen said. “You'd better get on down there.”

“Okay,” Mama said, hanging up the phone. She took a drag from the cigarette she'd managed to light. “Shit fire, save matches.”

Linda and I just looked at her. We had no idea what “Shit fire, save matches” meant, but Mama said it a lot.

I didn't have time to tell Mama about my dream. Somebody was pounding at the trailer's front door. Linda and I followed Mama down the narrow hallway into the kitchen. Mama opened the door and there stood Frankie, covered from head to toe with blood, just like he'd been in my dream. Mary Ellen's information was wrong. They'd brought Frankie to the house instead of the hospital.

Frankie had taken a spill on his bike and gone head over tail over the handlebars. With a neighbor's help, Mama rushed him to the hospital. He had a busted nose and a broken arm.

The gift of knowing things unseen is defined as faith in the Scriptures. I didn't know it that day, but God had anointed me with the spirit of Mamaw Molly, Daddy's paternal grandmother. Folks around town said that Mamaw Molly was a certified witch, a fortune-teller. She had wispy hair the color of talc powder, which she kept pulled back in a net at the nape of her long neck. She wore cable-knit sweaters, even in August. And her limbs were long, like a weeping willow. They draped or swayed depending on whether she was sitting still or moving about. She died long before Daddy got his papers for Hawaii.

I never bought into all those stories about her being a witch, but I couldn't dismiss Mamaw Molly's prophetic gift altogether because I'd heard the stories about how she had warned Aunt Mary Sue about the dangerous man she'd marry. And I'd heard how Grandma Molly wouldn't reveal Mama and Daddy's future.

I'm sure Mama had pretty much forgotten about Mamaw's mute prophecy until the man in the jeep pulled up. But by then it was too late. Others in the family would eventually mention it.

Unlike Mamaw, however, I have never been able to read palms, but I can sense things, troubling things, before they happen. They are most often revealed to me in dreams. These visitations always leave a fire in my belly. I know that if I don't do whatever the spirit is urging, I will regret it. Sometimes I'm led to pray, sometimes to caution others. And sometimes the spirit tells me to sit still and pay close attention. Many a family member and friend have wished that spirit had simply rendered me mute.

I never told Frankie, but that day the spirit told me the road ahead of him was going to be more hazardous than a mountain pass slathered in black ice. For many years I wasn't sure if he would be able to maneuver his way clear of the hazards that awaited him. Of all my loved ones, I've prayed for him the most.

I clung to the gift of faith that told me what I could not see. That someday, somehow, we'd all be okay. By God's grace, we'd figure something out. And maybe Daddy's death would eventually make sense.

 

T
HE DAY AFTER
Frankie's arm was put into a cast and Daddy was laid to rest, the Kingsport newspaper ran a story that would confuse and upset me for years to come:

 

SGT. SPEARS KILLED BY HIS OWN SHELL IN VIETNAM

I hated the headline on that story, and even worse I hated the possibility that my father, a career soldier, was somehow at fault for his own death. Something told me that there was more to the story than what was reported in the newspaper. A letter Mama received from Daddy's commanding officer (CO) in September 1966 seemed to support the idea that what was being reported in the newspaper wasn't the truth. I wouldn't read that letter for many years, but when I did I knew there was more to my misgivings than just a child's nagging hunch.

It was the second of two letters Captain John Osborne mailed to Mama from Vietnam. He'd initially sent her a form letter, typed and
dated August 19, 1966. It was the standard stuff: Sorry about the death of your husband; he made the supreme sacrifice; he served his country well; please accept the sympathies of the Battery.

Upset by the dismissive letter, Mama immediately sat down and fired off a letter to the captain, demanding to know exactly how Daddy died. The next letter Captain Osborne sent Mama was written in his own script. It was dated August 30, 1966. According to Osborne, my father was nowhere near his howitzer when he was killed:

Osborne admitted in the letter there had been some confusion about the exact source of the explosion.

And he even made an attempt to answer the question that Mama had cried out the moment she heard word of Daddy's death—“Why me, God? Why me?”

Now, I can't speak for Mama, or Captain Osborne, but it has never made any sense to me that God needed my daddy more than I did. The suggestion of an omnipotent power willy-nilly orchestrating who died and who didn't in wars festered an ache in my soul. However, Osborne did make one comment that I appreciated wholeheartedly:
“I don't think he ever knew what hit him.”
If that was true, Daddy was lucky—all the rest of us were reeling from the impact.

 

T
HE
A
RMY'S OFFICIAL ESCORT
dropped by the trailer that day to see if there was anything more he could do for Mama. Mama said she didn't think so. It was time for her to sort through things on her own, to figure out how best to care for her invalid father and her three fatherless children. There was plenty of paperwork to finish, so she could collect Daddy's death benefits and begin receiving his Social Security. Meanwhile, she needed to find us a home. School was starting in just a couple of weeks.

B
Y THE TIME SCHOOL OPENED,
M
AMA HAD MOVED US FROM THE TRAILER AT
S
LAUGHTERS TO A HOUSE ON
Rogersville's Clay Street. Our furniture had arrived from Hawaii, and we needed someplace to put it. The trailer was too cramped.

The white rental house was smack-dab at the end of the street, banked up next to the railway tracks. Waxy hardwood covered all the floors except in the kitchen, which had a sheet of beige linoleum over it. French doors led to the bedroom where Linda and I both lay sick with a bad case of mumps while Mama, Frankie, and Uncle Woody set up house.

Mama and Aunt Gertie both ordered me to not get out of bed for any reason other than to go pee. They warned me that if my “mumps fell,” it would render me sterile, and walking around the house or motion of any sort just might do the deed. I had no idea what being sterile meant, so I asked my cousin Linda, Woody's youngest daughter. She told me that meant I wouldn't be able to have any kids when I grew up. Having kids when I got older wasn't even on my agenda as a nine-year-old, so I was put out by the rigid constraints. After all, my sister had the mumps and she was allowed to roam about as she pleased. But when I pointed out this discrepancy to Mama, she had a perfectly good explanation for it. “Linda isn't as old as you are,” she said. “If her mumps fall, it won't hurt her.”

Nobody dared broach the word
puberty
, so Mama's reasoning still made no sense to me. Tired of hearing my whining, Mama finally mollified me with bowls of ice cream. Lying around eating ice cream greatly improved my disposition and slowly helped restore my body. But Linda didn't seem to be recovering as quickly as Mama expected. She had never really regained her strength from the day of Daddy's funeral when she'd thrown up so much. She wouldn't eat ice cream or anything else. The first day of school came and went with the two of us still at home on the mend.

One afternoon, shortly after we moved into the house, Linda and I watched as a door-to-door salesman offered the Widow Spears his condolences. Then he asked Mama if he could have a moment of her time. Mama opened the screen door and let the fellow in. Without any further prompting from Mama, the man began to show her how a made-of-stainless-steel Kirby vacuum cleaner could be her knight in shining armor.

Like a magician at center stage, he flipped nozzles and switches, sucking up dust balls and marbles. I couldn't tell if Mama was mesmerized by his antics or just wanted him to get the hell out of her house. Either way, she didn't dare argue that a good Kirby would be more reliable than a man. So she plunked down money she could ill afford and bought a machine that weighed more than a wheelbarrow full of coal. Always a clumsy contraption, it became a constant source of anger and frustration for me, like the grief I could never quite get a handle on.

Most of the time I could shove both the Kirby and Daddy's ghost into a dark closet and walk away. But once I opened that door, I had to face an unwieldy monster. Taking care to unwrap the stiff electric cord, I tried my best to steer the Kirby clear of sharp corners. But inevitably, I wound up dinging the corner of the sofa or coffee table or ran the darn thing over my bare toes on a backward pull. Then, yanking the cord from its plug, I'd wind it, noose-fashion, around the Kirby's neck and kick it back into the closet.

Over and over, again and again, day after day, I would vacuum the floors of our homes. Sometimes I would pull out a nozzle and suck up the goobers and lint between the sofa cushions. And a couple times a year I'd lift the grates on the heating vents and stick the nozzles down those holes to clean up gunk-encrusted pennies and dust balls. But each time, I cursed that Kirby salesman because I came to realize he was the first of a long string of men to take advantage of the Widow Spears. And I hated most of them. Not because they were awful, but simply because they weren't Daddy. I began to feel like one of those discarded pennies that had fallen between the vent grate. I felt like my core was becoming encrusted with all sorts of gunk.

 

A
FTER MY SWOLLEN JAWS
shrank down to a suitable size, Mama enrolled me at Rogersville Elementary School, the same school she'd attended as a young girl. Everybody was real nice to me, but I felt out of place all the same. Some of it was because I was late getting enrolled, but mostly I was troubled by the look in my teacher's eyes when she greeted me that first day with a comment about being so sorry about my father's death. I didn't want to be the object of other people's sympathy. I didn't like being singled out as the only girl in fifth grade whose father was killed in war. I didn't want to be fatherless at all, but if I had to be, I didn't want other kids to know about it.

I don't remember talking to any other kid in the entire school other than Frankie. He was always watching out for me, and during those first few weeks at Rogersville Elementary he was extra attentive. He no longer complained about having to walk with me to and from school, the way he had back when we lived in Columbus, Georgia. It was as if he'd taken to heart Daddy's last instructions to him: “Frankie, you're the man of the house now. Take care of your mama and sisters.”

We'd been close pals before Daddy's death, but now Frankie and I were inseparable. We did our homework at the kitchen table without complaint and played on the train tracks beside the house until
suppertime. We answered “Yes, ma'am” to everything our mama asked us to do, which wasn't very much. We even both got baptized during the same late-summer evening at the First Baptist Church in Rogersville. I can't speak for Frankie, but the reason I answered salvation's call was pure-tee-white-knuckle paranoia. I was afraid of dying and spending eternity without Daddy. If water baptism could assure me eternity with Daddy, then praise the Lord and dunk me quick!

Mama accepted her assignment as the war hero's widow with unwavering reserve. It was her duty, her obligation, and one she fulfilled with headstrong determination and very little emotion. There was never a moment in the days, weeks, or months following Daddy's death when Mama sat us kids down and tried to explain anything to us, and it never occurred to us to ask. From the get-go, we did not discuss Daddy—not with Mama, not among ourselves. It was almost as if our entire history as a family of five had been erased from the chalkboard of our memory. But of course, it hadn't. Daddy's absence was emblazoned across our hearts, like that telling letter
A
the adulteress Hester Prynne was forced to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter
. It felt as though each one of us had been marked and marred for life.

I recoiled from the recognition that accompanies a brave soldier's death. I suspected Mama did, too. On September 11, 1966, in front of a crowd of aging World War I and II veterans at the VFW Post 9543 in Rogersville, Army officials awarded Daddy the Purple Heart.

Mama laid out the funeral clothes across our beds. It was the last time Linda and I put on the itchy navy dresses with the red ties and look-alike jackets. I'd never been to a VFW hall. I thought it was some sort of uppity joint for members only, like the country club. I had no idea what a Purple Heart was or why Daddy needed a heart at all, now that he was dead. Frankie told me it was a medal of great distinction—the sort only really good soldiers received.

“Oh, one of those,” I said. I was saddened that Daddy wasn't
around to enjoy this honor himself, since he was, after all, the one who'd earned it. I was learning rapidly that there are a lot more reasons to be sad than proud when a daddy dies a war hero.

The VFW hall was just outside of town, high on a hill. Woody and Gertie were the only other family members that I remember being there that day. I don't think Granny Leona or Pap were there, or any of Daddy's siblings. Maybe Mama hadn't told them about it. Or maybe because back then, with that troublesome two-lane stretch of road connecting the mountain towns, Church Hill and Rogersville seemed too far apart for them to make the trip.

Mama was greeted by a group of men wearing blue hats that looked like envelopes made of felt. They were decorated with all sorts of gold and silver doodads—pins and monograms—and the men wore them cocked to the right, so that the VFW 3543 insignia was just above their bushy white eyebrows. In addition to the VFW members, a couple of soldiers dressed in their best khaki suits greeted us.

Even though it was afternoon outside, it was dark as the dickens inside. Red, blue, and purple spots flashed as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The place smelled like a tray of half-smoked cigarettes. The walls were paneled, like the walls of the trailer we'd just moved out of, only with a darker veneer. Multicolored linoleum squares covered the floor. Folding chairs, the kind the music teacher used for choir lessons, were uniformly lined up across the room. There were enough seats for a hundred people, but they could've managed just fine with about two dozen. An air conditioner hummed in the background.

Somebody brought over plastic boxes with enormous white-carnation corsages for Mama, Linda, and me. Linda and I had never had corsages before. We made funny faces at each other while Aunt Gertie pinned them on us. We felt ridiculous. The corner of the linen jackets kept folding beneath the weight of the puffy flowers. Frankie was grinning at us. I could tell he was glad he didn't have to wear one.

One of the soldiers led us to seats in the front row. Woody and Gertie sat in the row beside us. As the flags were presented, we all
stood up, with our hands over our hearts, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. This was something we did every single day at school, so I knew the words without thinking about them, but the whole recitation seemed different to me now that I was the daughter of a soldier killed in action. I couldn't say “with liberty and justice for all” without considering the price of such a pledge.

After that, one of the soldiers asked us to join him and some of the VFW men at the front of the room. They were standing next to a cafeteria-like table where a black Bible and gold-embossed certificate were placed, along with a box holding Daddy's Purple Heart. We did as we were asked and stood next to Mama at the table as Captain John Ammon spoke to the crowd. Mama gnawed on her lower lip and fought back tears. Her right hand rested protectively on Linda's shoulder. We stared at the gold-and-purple medal on the table before us, as Captain Ammon told the smattering of people gathered there: “Sergeant Spears gave all he could possibly give—his life.”

The next day the newspaper reported the event and noted that it was the first Purple Heart to be presented in Rogersville since World War II. But, as we were busy discovering, such medals of distinction are of little comfort to widows and children in the middle of the long nights that always follow a soldier's death.

 

I
N ONE OF HER
last letters to Daddy, dated Sunday, July 17, Mama made it clear that she had no intentions of staying in Rogersville for any extended period of time. “I'll tell you one thing,” she wrote, “you'll never get me to live back here and you can be looking for another lake or river to do your fishing in. If we get away from here I don't think I will ever come back here.”

Mama noted in the same letter that Frankie and I talked about Columbus, Georgia, where we had lived before Daddy was transferred to Hawaii, all the time. We had good memories of Columbus. Our home had bordered a park with an active recreation center. When we weren't in school we were at that park playing baseball,
tetherball, or dodgeball, or, on rainy days, playing board games in the rec center. It was the one place stateside that Frankie and I considered home.

For much of my life, I couldn't understand why my mother wanted to leave the town where she had grown up. This was the place where she and Daddy fell in love. The place where she'd birthed Frankie and Linda. (She'd been in Germany when I was born.) It was home to some of her family and Daddy's. Wouldn't she need their help to look after us? But according to Mama, none of them were ever much help. Her brothers didn't offer Mama any help caring for their daddy. Before Daddy's death and afterward, they left that chore to their wives. “I'm not impressed with anyone's grief,” Mama recalled. “Not a one of them came to me and asked me, ‘What can we do to be of help to you?'”

 

I
N THAT SAME LETTER
, Mama mentioned that she had nearly run herself ragged: “I had an infection in my side and have been to the doctor twice. He said I was pushing myself a little too far and was headed for trouble if I didn't slow down and rest. He was talking about the worry and upset of moving here, worrying about finding a place here and trying to get settled, plus trying to work and take care of the family, also worrying about you over there.”

Mama had found a job in the weeks just prior to Daddy's death. She wanted to save money to buy a house, which wasn't easy to do on Daddy's pay of three hundred dollars a month. She started working at a plastics plant, while we kids stayed home with Grandpa Harve. Formal child care was out of the question. Nobody had heard of day care centers in that part of Tennessee. Besides, Frankie was twelve and I was almost ten, plenty old enough to fend for ourselves and see to our sister by the standards of hardscrabble mountain people. And Aunt Gertie was just two trailers up if any emergencies arose. That whole situation never really developed into a routine; Daddy's death threw a wrench into everything.

The plant was holding Mama's job for her. She could go back to it if she wanted, and she might have done that if Linda hadn't fallen sick. First at the funeral, then with the mumps, and then with some illness that kept her running a low-grade fever and feeling punk. During the month of September Linda spent as much time home sick as she did in school.

Mama took Linda to the doctor in Rogersville, who then sent her on to a doctor in Kingsport. They took all sorts of X-rays and blood tests. Finally, the doctor in Kingsport told Mama that Linda was likely suffering from a blood disease called leukemia.