Eli the Good Read online

  Daddy went off to basic training and came back home for a week, and then, somehow, my mother found herself in Fort Hood, Texas. She was excited that this was where Elvis had done his training when he served in the army only six years before. She took up housekeeping, all the while knowing that she would someday be able to take the college classes that would make her into a science teacher. This is all she had ever wanted to be her whole life.

  Six months later, Josie was born in Texas. On that day my father was the first one to hold her. Mom told Stella that when the nurse laid her in his arms, she saw a jolt run all through him. “She’s ours,” Daddy whispered, not taking his eyes off Josie.

  Those four years were a time of change for everyone. Nell kept on working at the House of Wax and was working there the day Kennedy was shot. She closed the store and rushed home to Yvonne, who was devastated, inconsolable.

  On one of those long summer evenings when I was ten, Nell told me that on her way to work in March of 1965, she heard something on the radio news that changed her life. She heard the report that an eighty-two-year-old Quaker woman named Alice Herz had set herself afire on a Detroit street corner in protest of the impending war in Vietnam. Once Nell got to the record shop, she clicked off the radio, then the engine, and sat there a long while, listening to the cooling click of the motor and picturing this old woman dying in such a way. And she knew what she would have to do.

  Right around that same time, Daddy came home one day with an important announcement. My mother was washing dishes while Josie played at her feet. Her hands became still in the warm dishwater. “No,” she said, a single word she thought would do the trick, but he didn’t budge. Then: “They won’t make married men go overseas.”

  “I volunteered,” Daddy said, and put his hand on her damp wrist.

  She jerked away from him and took a step back, holding on to one of the wheat-patterned plates that Yvonne had bought for their wedding. She turned the plate in her hands as if sliding her fingers over a steering wheel. “Why would you want to do that, Stanton? It don’t make no sense.”

  He told her that it felt like the right thing to do. He believed in fighting for his country. He had always longed for an adventure, and now one loomed before him. Plus they needed the money. A particular kind of patriotism, promises of adventure, finances. This is how boys end up soldiers.

  “But it’s getting bad,” Mom said. “Real bad. Men are getting killed every day. It’s all over the news.” Her voice grew jagged and loud and she kept backing away from him, holding on to the plate. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “They’ll end up sending me anyway, Loretta,” he said, his hands still out in front of him. “Come on now, baby. This way I’ll only be over there a year. If I wait for them to send me, I’ll have to go for two years.”

  “No!” she screamed, and slammed the plate onto the floor for emphasis. The plate broke into six neat pieces, one of them scattering across the floor to rest very near Josie’s bare foot. Josie started crying and my mother gulped, “Oh, my God,” realizing what she had done. She bent and gathered up Josie and stormed away.

  (The thing that neither of them realized was that she was carrying me, too. She had become pregnant only the week before.)

  When Mom remembered that day, she always recalled that President Johnson was on the television later that evening. She was so struck by part of what he said that she wrote it down and put it under a piece of sticky cellophane in her photo album. President Johnson said: “I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth . . . into battle . . . I have seen them in a thousand streets of a hundred towns in every state in this union — working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow.”

  After Daddy left for Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he received special training before being flown to San Francisco (where he would board a boat that would carry him across the Pacific), my mother drove their green Corvair — loaded with Josie and everything they owned — for twenty hours straight. She staggered into Yvonne’s house at three in the morning and collapsed on the kitchen floor.

  Three months later she was certain that I was growing in her belly. About this same time, the first major antiwar rallies were being held in forty American cities. My mother and Nell and Yvonne watched the news coverage of the battles and the marches while the evening mists seeped in over the river. Often they prayed together, too.

  Yvonne and Mom became very good at praying, but Nell’s requests to God were often interrupted by the nagging fire of revolution that had been recently lit in her stomach. She couldn’t stand just sitting there watching Walter Cronkite while the world went up in flames. She had to do something.

  Nell had another clear memory of listening to the radio in November 1965, when she heard that four hundred soldiers had been killed in one ambush, at Ia Drang. “I drove straight on over to the college,” I heard Nell tell Josie once, “and found the student group that was organizing protests.” Ten days later, thirty-five thousand people marched against the war in Washington. Nell was one among them.

  I had never heard Nell talk about her times on the road, roaming around the country fighting for peace or falling in love or the many other things she did. And my father never ever talked about the war. No amount of eavesdropping ever gave me that. All I knew about those two things were that Nell floated around and came back home occasionally and that Daddy served his time, got out of the army as soon as his tour of duty was over, and came back home for good.

  So, in many ways, the most important parts of the stories were blank pages for me. And although I was good at making up my own tales to fill in the holes, I was never really able to do that with either Nell or my father. I knew that my imagination was not nearly good enough to envision what either of them had gone through, even when I tried many years later. Ultimately reality is far worse and far better than anything that either adult or child can ever dream.

  After much thought, Nell had decided she needed a toothbrush, but it was important that she go to the Rexall and pick it out herself. Josie wanted a new bathing suit, and although she said it would be much cooler if Charles Asher would come and take her to town, my mother insisted that she had to help her choose the suit, since Josie would come home with a bikini otherwise. After the big gas shortages of a couple years before, smart people like my mother only went into town once a week, so after enough planning to take a trip overseas, she and Stella and Nell and Josie all loaded into my mother’s amber-colored Cougar and drove into Refuge for groceries, swimwear, and a toothbrush.

  I was lectured to stay close to the house. Even though I was no baby, Mom had never completely gotten over seeing The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case on television a few months ago and stayed in fear of my being snatched away. I acted as if I was put out by her concern, but secretly I relished these moments of motherly action on her behalf.

  I stood in the front yard and waved to them as if they’d be gone a very long time, and as soon as they were out of sight, I sprinted to Edie’s and found her sitting by her willow tree.

  Edie wasn’t crazy about the idea of going into my parents’ bedroom, but her curiosity outweighed her trepidation, so she followed along when I told her what I wanted to do.

  When we made our way into my parents’ bedroom, my stomach flipped up at the corners. I knew what an invasion of privacy I was committing. I didn’t fear being caught; instead I dreaded lying awake and feeling guilty about this for nights to come. We were not a family who went to church much — both my parents believed that God could be best served by being the best people they could and treating everyone right and being thankful for all they had — so my guilt was not the kind that is created or fostered. I was simply made that way: a boy who cared too deeply for everything and therefore felt that any wrong in the world was partly my fault. In retrospect I see that this is a good way to be, but it also makes for a miserable existence.

 
The shades were drawn so that their room was as dark and cool as a cave. Everything was immaculate. My mother couldn’t stand to go anywhere without first making her bed. On the dresser, one side was devoted to Daddy’s cologne and a leaf-shaped dish that held tie tacks (which were never worn, since he never wore ties). The other was reserved for Mom’s Charlie perfume, a bowl for hair barrettes, and last year’s picture of Josie and me, which had been taken at the fire department. In the middle sat the big cedar box that my mother had bought in Texas. I had seen her carry important things into her bedroom, bound for the box, enough to know that this was her hiding place for letters and souvenirs.

  I put my hands on either side of the box and sat in the floor, Edie nearby. When I lifted the lid, the scent of cedar washed up over our faces, musky and cold, like the inside of an ancient tree.

  In the box were my parents’ marriage certificate, both my and Josie’s birth certificates, a collection of movie-ticket stubs, a dried-up flower that looked like a shrunken, darkened version of the rose my mother had worn on her wedding dress. There was a ring with a small, brownish pearl; three of my or Josie’s baby teeth in a baby-food jar; and a yellow Juicy Fruit wrapper that had I am yours written on its white side in slanting, cramped pencil. This was my father’s handwriting, which I liked to study on the little receipts he wrote out for his customers at the gas station garage. There were deeds and insurance papers and many saved Hallmark cards (mostly from my father) and a postcard from the Mississippi University for Women with I am here if you need me scrawled across the back. And below all of this was the stack of letters, bound together by a black ribbon. The letters were housed in small white envelopes that had red-and-blue borders around the edges. Each was addressed to my mother, and in the upper left corner was a San Francisco Army Post Office Box number. In the space where the stamp should have been, my father had written Free. The packet felt as heavy as a big rock in my hands.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” Edie said. She had slid down to the floor and sat leaning against the bed, her arms wrapped around her knees. “It feels wrong to me.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it was like, though?”

  She looked troubled, her normally blue eyes turned into dots of thundercloud gray. Her face was flat and square. “Yes, but not like this. You ought to just talk to him, Eli.”

  “He won’t tell me anything.”

  “Maybe if you asked him the right way.”

  “I’ve asked every way I know how.”

  She sighed, her shoulders coming down with the long breath. “Well, maybe just a couple, all right?”

  I worked the first letter out of the stack, afraid that if I undid the knot on the black ribbon my mother would somehow detect my intrusion. It seemed that she had arranged them from the earliest to the latest date after he had finally shipped out, since the first one was postmarked October 28, 1966. I brought the crisp envelope up to my nose and drew in its scent. The paper smelled of ink, tangy and metallic.

  My mother had ripped the end off each envelope. I could see her doing this, careful and hesitant so as not to accidentally cut into the letter that stood inside. I tapped the corner against my palm, and the letter slid out. For just a moment I let the three pieces of small, folded stationery rest on my palm, testing their weight.

  “Be careful,” Edie whispered, making me feel as if I were handling a pack of firecrackers.

  I unfolded the pages in slow, measured motions, and then laid them on the floor in front of me, smoothing my hand over the creases. The paper was thin and rough, like the paper I imagined the Constitution might have been written upon. I leaned forward on my knees and read aloud.

  Hey Baby,

  Well, I’m here. Six days on that ship. The first two days I was so sick I thought I was going to die. All these men who had gone through rough-as-hell basic training leaned over the rail, puking their guts up.

  But I’m here. And I’m alive. So far. We are close to the Michelin and Firestone plants, which is a strange thing to know, being so far away from home and seeing the signs of something so familiar. I am missing you like crazy and somehow seeing those rubber factories makes me miss you all the worse.

  My sergeant says that homesickness is what kills you over here, and also what gets you through it. As I write this I have been here two days and already I know that the main reason I want to live is so I can get back to you, back to home. I miss that soft place behind your knee and the way your mouth always tastes like strawberries.

  “Eli,” Edie said at this point. “Maybe you ought to stop.”

  But I kept reading:

  I miss Josie getting my hand just before bedtime and asking me to take her out onto our little porch to see the stars. How quiet she was when I pointed out the Big Dipper to her, the way she sat up real straight and said, “I see it, Daddy,” after a long time of looking, and the way it felt when I thought that maybe she did see it. God, you’ve never known homesickness until you’re on the other side of the world. Add to this that you know you’ll eventually see some action, that people are dying over here every day. If a man thought too much about it he’d get himself killed, as he’d crack up.

  “That’s enough, Eli,” Edie said. I saw then that she had unfolded herself during my reading and was lying on the floor, one arm propping up the side of her face. “Come on, now.”

  “No,” I said, and I didn’t sound like myself at all. I never spoke with so much force to Edie. “Just a couple more.”

  But then I read three more, aloud, and after that she didn’t stop me. With each one we went deeper and deeper into Vietnam. There was one about how they had to go into the jungle for two weeks, another about the way the B-52s would zoom in over them and bomb the Viet Cong. After that my father had to go on what he called search-and-destroy missions, although he never explained exactly what that meant. It seemed to be an understanding between him and my mother that he wouldn’t spell out every single thing. He mentioned being dropped from helicopters into bamboo grass that was eight feet tall.

  He talked about stringing Constantino wire around the camp, about building a bunker out of rubber trees and sandbags. In one letter a small newspaper article from Stars and Stripes fell out. The entire first sentence was underlined in fat blue ink: A Viet Cong forward aid station was discovered while on a search-and-destroy mission 15 miles south of Phuoc Vinh by Company A, 1st Batallion, 2nd Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. A shaky arrow snaked out to the margin where my father had written in matching blue ink: Our brigade.

  One letter detailed the prisoner of war my father had to guard. The POW was tied up with rope in the center of a big field, with a soldier on each corner. There were long declarations of homesickness and admissions of fright and descriptions of the land and the people. My father wrote that in Saigon there was an old Vietnamese man who spoke perfect English and cooked a wonderful meal of rice and shrimp for my father and his buddies. The old man’s teeth were solid black from opium, and he ate three fish heads while they feasted on their supper. “He could squat down for hours on his haunches,” Daddy wrote. He told of children who stood beside the roads as the troops passed, all dressed in long sleeves no matter how hot it was. My father and the other soldiers broke Hershey bars into five pieces and handed them out. He told of riding for miles up and down Highway 1 in the back of army trucks while the land sped by.

  And always the trees; he was obsessed with them. Especially their leaves. Their bigness, slickness, the way some of the leaves would hold rain like cups and leaves that were slender as green beans and smelled musky and sweet at the same time. Each letter was different in some way except that he always talked about the trees and he always said how much he missed my mother and Josie. He longed to touch my mother’s pregnant belly.

  The thing that struck me the most about all these letters was his love for the trees.

  I knew that he could name any tree he saw. He was apt to be walking along somewhere and nod in the direction of a beech and sp
eak its name, or run his hand down a scaly bark and say, “Hickory” or peer far up into the branches and say, “Look, a persimmon tree.” But he did this same thing with cars, too. Often when I was at a station with him, he would stand outside beside the Pepsi machine and watch as people sped by on the highway and sometimes by only the sound of the approaching engine he’d say, “’66 Mustang,” or “Ford LTD,” or “1971 Plymouth Duster.” So I never knew that he loved the trees as much as I did.

  This undisclosed connection that bound us now, the secret trees that neither of us spoke of to each other; it seemed like something that would be easy for a son and father to talk about. I lingered on this a long while after the fourth letter, thinking it over while the room grew smaller and darker and Edie relaxed into the silence of the house so much that she all but disappeared to me.

  “One more, then,” she said, at long last. Still quiet, still a whisper. I loved her for her quiet, for her lack of interference. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her for it, but I thought this would be a crazy thing to do and she would only punch my arm and laugh in that jaunty, menacing way of hers.

  So I opened the one that would change me forever.

  Dearest Loretta,

  I usually start your letters with Hey Baby but I need to use your name now. I’ve been whispering it to myself all day long. Loretta Loretta. That’s all that’s gotten me through this day, saying your name, a name that I love because it’s yours, because when I say it I see you in front of me.

  I need to tell you something that I shouldn’t. But I have to, because you’re the only one who really knows me. Besides my mother and Nell, I know that you’re the only person in this world who truly loves me. Some of these boys over here love me. I know that, too. We are like a family now. But if they live and go back to their families they’ll probably only remember me every once in a while, for some strange reason they can’t explain. I love them, too. They’re the best friends I ever had because we’re here, together, and you can’t help but get close in times like these. But you know what I mean. When it comes right down to it all I have in this world is you and Josie and the baby and my mother and sister.