Uncle Sean

by Ronald L Donaghe

  So I didn’t write in the tablet Uncle Sean gave me. I drew hotrods. Daddy and I fought almost daily, too. It was about Uncle Sean, but his name never came up, except at first, when Daddy demanded to know why I was so broken up over him. I wouldn’t tell him, except to scream back that Uncle Sean never did anything to me. “You make it sound like Uncle Sean is some kind of pervert!” I screamed.

  There were times I wanted to apologize to Daddy, but couldn’t, and when he landed in the hospital just after that harvest season and had a third of his stomach removed from bleeding ulcers, I wanted to be gentle on him and tried to say things that would smooth over his own kind of hurt. The best I could do, though, was work like hell when I got home in the afternoons to get everything done that Daddy wasn’t able to while he was laid up in the hospital. During those times I cursed Uncle Sean and, alone in the fields when May wasn’t there, or frustrated when I couldn’t get a part to fit right on the tractor, and Daddy wasn’t there to show me how to do things, I screamed at Uncle Sean’s ghost, hovering there all around me.

  When he called the first time and I knew it was him, I wouldn’t go to the phone when Mama called me, saying it was Uncle Sean and he really wanted to talk to me. I only listened to Mama’s side of the conversation, hearing her tell about Daddy being in the hospital, watching her hunched over at the counter gripping the phone and trying to keep the sound of her sobbing from getting through to Uncle Sean on the other end.

  So I had a tough first semester in high school. I never was very good in school, and my grades reflected it. I wasn’t allowed to join the football team that fall because of it. I was floundering around like a fish out of water, gulping the air, yet suffocating. Or it was more like a tender plant hanging on in a crevice between rocks up in the Hatchet Mountains, whipped by the spring winds, starved for life-giving water, and quickly wilting, and finally being burnt to a cinder by the blast-furnace that is the sun out here.

  But the second time Uncle Sean called, I did take it. I didn’t want Mama to see that my hands were trembling, but the harder I gripped the receiver, the more I shook, and when I met Mama’s eyes, just before I spoke into the phone, she frowned, then nodded, and left the room.

  Our conversation was really awkward but, by then, I was so starved to hear his voice I wouldn’t get off the phone, even though I was crying.

  “I miss you so bad!” I told him. Those were the first words out of my mouth. And I’m sure he said the same thing back, but I didn’t hear it.

  Then, maybe to gain a little time, he asked how everyone in my family was, one-by-one, and I told him, “Rita’s got a boyfriend, May’s on the girls’ baseball team, again, Trinket is the top in her class and she thinks she wants to become a veterinarian.” Then I told him that Daddy was all right, though he still seemed a lot weaker to me than he ever did, but that May was a great deal of help to me, as always, and that Mama was even working in the field sometimes but she was looking kind of ragged out, so both May and I tried to convince her we could handle the work.

  “And how are you, Will? Still angry with me?”

  I let this question hang between us for a long while as I thought about it, and I could hear Uncle Sean kind of gulping on the other end, so I knew I had to lie. “No, I’m not angry, anymore, Uncle Sean,” I said, though I was fighting back my tears.

  “Then you found my letter?” he asked, and I was stunned. I felt all the breath go out of me and asked, “What letter?”

  He was silent for a minute. “Look in your hiding place,” he said. “I hope it’s not lost.”

  My mind was racing, my heart pounding, and I was afraid his letter was lost. I couldn’t think of a hiding place at first, until I remembered the loft in the barn.

  “I know where to look, Uncle Sean!” I said. “I didn’t know it was there! I haven’t been there in quite awhile.”

  “Then look!” he said. “I hope it will help.”

  Too soon, he was saying good-bye all over again. So to keep him on the phone for just a little longer, I asked what I was dying to know: “Did you find a boyfriend?”

  His laughter sounded like old times to me, and I found myself laughing, too, for the first time in a while.

  “Not anyone as pretty as you,” he said. “But, yeah. I’m dating someone, though he’s nothing like Ted—or you. How about you?”

  I felt immediately hurt and flattered at the same time. “I haven’t looked,” I said. “You know there’s just a bunch of ugly farm and ranch boys that go to that school.”

  “Well, you will find one someday,” he said. Then, after telling me he loved me, he did say good-bye and I told him back that I loved him, too.

  When I hung up the phone, I felt better than I had in a long time and even though Mama saw that I had been crying, I smiled at her as I raced out of the house, past the girls, who were out working on the flowerbeds, and kicking up dust all the way out to the barn.

  I flew up the rickety ladder and once I was up in the loft, I just kind of stopped, my heart beating as I smelled the musty, moldy hay and saw the dust I’d stirred up hanging in the light coming in through the open loft doors.

  At first when I reached up into the rafters, I couldn’t find anything, and I was afraid mice or something had got up in there and chewed up my tablet, but more importantly that Uncle Sean hadn’t left the letter in a safe place and the mice had ruined it. Then I found the Webster’s dictionary and brought it out, smiling to myself at its dirty and spotted condition. I set it on the bale of hay I usually sat on, then rummaged around amid the spider webs and stuff until my hand touched the familiar sack. I pulled it out and blew the dust off of it, wondering if I’d ever read my childish writing, again. When I pulled the sack out, something funny rattled and when I pulled the tablet out and laid it aside, I looked into the sack and immediately got choked up, because Uncle Sean had dropped his dog tags in there. I knew they weren’t Theodore Seabrook’s tags, because these were flat and in good condition.

  I remembered something that Uncle Sean had said, when he stole his boyfriend’s tags when he was killed—he had to have something solid to bring him back, and Uncle Sean had done that for me.

  But I didn’t find Uncle Sean’s letter and I was becoming upset all over again. So I sat down and started reading my own words, nodding when I read some things, kind of choking up as I read others, laughing at my childish way of putting things, and finally deciding that I needed to start writing, again. It had been too long, though I didn’t think I would be writing about Uncle Sean.

  I was so disappointed that Uncle Sean’s letter was just not there! But at least I had his dog tags, and I put them around my neck and tucked them under my t-shirt.

  I didn’t want to leave. The pen that I’d used wasn’t there, though, so I couldn’t write, so I picked up the dictionary and thought about taking it back to the house, when I realized that something thick and white was tucked inside.

  Two

  ———————▼———————

  “Clarity.” I like this word. It’s what I began to feel after I read Uncle Sean’s letter. I was almost through with the first semester of my freshman year and, up until then, had made a mess of my grades and such. With Daddy being sick and me working harder than ever, I was about to flunk out, and Uncle Sean’s letter jerked me back to myself, the kid I’d been just a few months earlier. I knew I couldn’t salvage that semester, but the first thing I did was take seriously his advice for me to get a good education.

  I still wasn’t ready to touch writing about him, again, or myself, but I surprised the hell out of Mrs. Blackmon, my freshman English teacher, when I told her I wanted to save my grades, if there was any way if I wrote a theme about my father, and how his illness had brought a lot of things home to me. She was skeptical, because a lot of kids in trouble with their grades pull that “is-there-anything-I-can-do,” crap.

  But she agreed, kind of wearily, and said if I could get the theme in by the end of the week, she’d co
nsider weighting it heavily to bring up my abysmal average.

  So I sat in study hall each morning with a new Bic pen, the Webster’s dictionary from home and wearing Uncle Sean’s dog tags around my neck, lying close to my heart, as he said. I sweated (and even cried) that theme out. I filled up five of those theme books the school likes to use. When I handed them to her over lunchtime, she about dropped her teeth (which was a real possibility, since they’re so obviously false) at the length of my theme.

  I hung around as she began to read, red pencil poised above the opening line; and then she began marking here and there, glancing up at me sitting in the front row in her empty classroom, her face stern, then smiling, then frowning. Then she put the first book aside and opened up the next one. I was itching to take that first book and see what horrors she had bled onto my work, but I held back.

  She stopped after the second one, glaring at me, and my heart (what was left of it, anyway) began heart-attack tapping. I knew she hated it. And she said, “Will, I cannot concentrate with you sitting there boring a hole in the top of my head. I’ll have this back to you by the end of the day.”

  So, anyway, I saw many things with more clarity as I wrote that theme about Daddy. There were many times while writing it that I ached to talk about Uncle Sean; but his words in the letter kept coming back to me, telling me how gracious and wonderful Mama and Daddy are. And I kind of saw that. Only I doubted that Mrs. Blackmon did, the way she glared at me there when she sent me out of the room.

  By the end of the day, I was shaking like a jackrabbit that knows it’s about to get its brains blown out when you have it in the headlights. And when I went back into Mrs. Blackmon’s classroom, she was there along with Mrs. Hendricks, the guidance counselor, and I just about got sick to my stomach with dread. Because the guidance counselor’s job is to stick it to bad kids if they’ve been missing too much school. I hadn’t been, but I wasn’t really “there” that first semester, anyway.

  “Have a seat, Will,” Mrs. Blackmon said. She had a very odd look on her old face, but it wasn’t nearly as scary as it had been. Mrs. Hendricks hadn’t said anything, yet, but she kind of smiled and nodded, as I took my seat.

  Then Mrs. Blackmon returned my 5-book theme, but there wasn’t a grade on it, and she said, “go ahead, Will, take a look at some of my comments.” I kind of cringed opening up that first book, seeing how she’d bled on it so much, I thought sure she would need a transfusion just to be able to get to her car.

  She hated it. She marked things in the margins like “agreement in number,” “change of tense,” “Cap, Cap, Cap,” and “delete comma, add period”—all kind of things. But then I saw “excellent,” “nice, fresh expression,” “surprisingly complex thoughts.”

  I was confused, and when I looked up she was smiling. Well, maybe grinning is more like it, and I almost burst out laughing because her false teeth looked huge in her mouth and I wondered what it would look like to feed her an ear of corn.

  “Do you want to know what I gave you as a grade?” she asked.

  I wiped the secret grin off my inside face, even though she still looked funny. “A ‘C’?” I ventured, hoping that it might pull me out of flunking.

  “No, Will,” she said. “I have never seen such raw talent in one of our freshmen before. An ‘A’ isn’t enough for this.”

  “Then what about my grade for the class?” I asked, hoping I’d average out at a “D.”

  “To be fair?” Mrs. Blackmon said, kind of ending in a question I knew wasn’t meant for me. “I don’t think your other work is indicative of what you’re capable of. But the other students have to be considered, since most of them have been putting out real effort all year. I’ll give you a ‘B minus’ for this semester.”

  I couldn’t believe it, but stayed quiet in case I had misunderstood. Then I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Hendricks and I wondered, again, what she was doing there.

  It wasn’t but a minute before I found out. She told me that Mrs. Blackmon had let her read my theme, and I felt kind of embarrassed at that, because I said a lot of things about Daddy, and how we fought all the time, lately. And then when he was in the hospital how I couldn’t apologize, though I worked as hard as I could in the fields and stuff to keep the farm going.

  So I waited for her to lower the boom. But just like Mrs. Blackmon, she gushed over my writing and she asked me if I thought I was going to be able to perform like I had with my theme from now on. She mentioned the farm work. And I told her I could handle it, because Daddy was getting better.

  Then I found myself talking about Uncle Sean and the letter he’d written telling me I needed to think about getting away from here when I graduated high school and going on to college and stuff, and how I might move out to California where he was now living and go to school, and both women nodded their approval.

  It was getting kind of late, and I knew if I missed the bus, Mama would have to drive the near sixty miles to come pick me up, and I said so. But I asked if I could think about playing football next year if I could bring up the rest of my grades.

  “Football!” both women said, like they were Siamese twins joined at the throat. “I was thinking more of getting you to work on an academic scholarship,” Mrs. Hendricks said. “If you can show the same aptitude in the rest of your studies, I’d like to see you move up in your classes, Will. There’s still plenty of time. We pride ourselves in the preparation we give our students…”

  I tuned her out for a while and nodded and “yes-ma’am’d” and couldn’t wait to get out of there and see if I couldn’t get my hands on a new fat spiral notebook, because I had a lot of stuff I wanted to write about before it faded from my mind like smoke into the night sky. I touched Uncle Sean’s dog tags and thought how I’d like to write to him to tell him how excited I had made these two old ladies.

  Then Mrs. Blackmon said she’d like to drive me home, because she wanted to have a talk with my parents, and I was suddenly afraid. What if she was going to get mad at Daddy for being against “book learnin’,” because I had put that in there to explain part of why he was like he was.

  So I was in agony all over again, though I did kind of begin to like my English teacher as we drove home. She talked about putting me on an accelerated reading program. “Books that everyone should read,” she said, “to get a strong foundation in critical thought.”

  I rolled my eyes at that, pretending I was looking out the window as the dust boiled behind her Chevy Suburban. I was kind of surprised that she had such a big vehicle, since she was a scrawny little thing and was probably really old, at least sixty or something. But she also had a couple of bales of hay in the back, and a saddle, and she told me that she and her husband ran a small ranch just off the Gray ranch, southwest of here. That surprised me, too.

  So when we got to my house, she took control of both my parents, as they seemed to be awed that a teacher would come out special to talk to them. And my daddy was downright nice to her. By the time she left, Daddy was nodding like a jack-in-the-box at what she said, and when she was just a memory still ringing with laughter in the living room and her cup of coffee was still sitting on the coaster on the coffee table, Daddy turned to me and said how he was proud I’d gotten the teacher to give me a good grade for her class.

  “If you can handle your chores, Will,” he said, “and still make the football team, you can take the extra courses Mrs. Blackmon and Mrs. Hendricks want you to.” I noticed the order of the things Daddy said were important, and so that’s how I treated them. Farm work first, football next (because every man’s son for fifty miles around played football), and school third.

  So that’s what I did. And that’s how I began growing up a little, from what I now see is the sobbing child I was. It was Uncle Sean’s letter and me finally talking to him over the phone that kind of got me back on track.

  It’s funny how English was suddenly enjoyable to me. Mrs. Blackmon and Mrs. Hendricks did put me on an accelerated reading progr
am. And I’m not talking simple books, like the novels English teachers try to get us students to read for the fun we can find in them. They started me on Thoreau and Dickens and Joseph Conrad. They said Conrad didn’t even learn English until he was in his twenties, but he became one of the great writers of the English language.

  Not that I was going to take things that far. But I had been writing almost every day since I was fourteen, and once I was introduced to some of the basics of grammar and such, I snapped. Things fell into place, and I wrote a lot more than what I had been doing in private. But I’ll get to that. I’ve got to back track and tell how things went before now.

  Three

  ———————▼———————

  The next semester of my freshman year, football season was over, and maybe I should’ve gone out for basketball, like most of the other boys did, but I didn’t. I took P.E., though, and got a laugh at all the pimply butts in the shower. What I told Uncle Sean was right. We were just a bunch of ugly farm and ranch boys, and it seemed like everybody broke out in pimples, just like in grade school when everybody lost their teeth.

  But Uncle Sean was right, the guys thought my wearing his dog tags was neat, though to them it was neat since it brought the war home. We all had relatives or knew somebody over there in Vietnam, and we all knew the guys who were sent home dead. Sometimes kids broke down when they heard the news—especially the time that Richard Johnson was killed. He was the all-time, most well-known football quarterback in school up to that time and, just like Uncle Sean, he was drafted straight out of high school. Nobody even thought those war protests covered in the news were a good thing. Not in this part of the country, anyway, where you played football, did your duty for the country and, if you were lucky enough, took over the family businesses, or moved away.