by Rinker Buck
“Ah, ma’am, the captain and I agreed that we wouldn’t burden you by too long a stay,” he said. “And we think that we should get over to the funeral home, to start making arrangements.”
Joe Childers just loved this and started to laugh.
“Hey, cap’n,” Joe said. “The first noncom is kicking your butt here, hunh? He’s the boss and he doesn’t want you to stay for lunch.”
Morgan immediately felt bad about it, if Joe Childers was going to frame it that way. He hadn’t meant to undercut his chief of command.
“Ah, sir. Joe,” Morgan said, “I love Kevin. He’s my captain, and the best. I’m just saying…”
“No, no, sergeant,” Joe said. “It’s okay. I’m just remembering being the noncom myself, and having to kick that captain’s butt. Ship’s gotta run on time, you know? You go along. It’s all right.”
“Kevin,” Judy called from the kitchen. “Next time?”
“Judy, it’s a date,” Hutchison said. “Wednesday we’re coming back and we’re staying for lunch.”
Hutchison was still edgy about it when they got out to the car. They had turned down the Childerses’ offer of lunch, but his first sergeant was probably right about it being time for them to leave. How was it best to serve this family? Hutchison sighed as he pulled the Suburban around in reverse. Saber estar. Knowing how to be just wasn’t at all easy in the situation he was now in.
“Thanks, Barry,” Hutchison said. “It was probably time to get out of there. But I just feel so awful for the Childerses. I feel so sad for them.”
Morgan felt the same way, but it was his nature to stay focused on practical details, to keep the CACO running on time. The two marines, in fact, were nudging toward a sensible division of labor. While Morgan concentrated on mopping-up details and maintaining the order of the Billings command, Hutchison’s purview was emotions, and constantly attuning himself to the Childerses’ needs. He was becoming the commander in charge of bereavement.
Hutchison turned east on the farm road, toward Powell. The brisk Wyoming wind was up now, and he noticed in the rearview mirror that it was blowing their dust trail due south, ninety degrees to the bumper.
The Miratsky-Easton Funeral Home stands just off the main commercial district of Powell, two blocks west on Third Street. It’s a simple, unpretentious cinder-block structure, painted white on the sides with a tasteful tan stucco facade in the front. Graceful columns holding up a verandah roof, and three large cottonwood trees in the front yard, complete the look and seem to complement the quiet elegance of the residential neighborhood that stretches west to the prairie.
On Monday afternoon, when Hutchison and Morgan stepped up to the front door of the funeral home and rang the bell, Laura Richardson, the matronly, cheerful, brown-haired funeral director, looked through the curtains of her office window and saw the two marines standing under the verandah in their dress blue uniforms and white caps.
Oh my God, they’re here, she thought. They’re here and please God, or someone, start praying for me. This is going to be tough, honey, real tough.
Richardson stepped through the large reception vestibule of the funeral home and opened the front door for the marines, quickly ushering them in and locking the door behind them so they wouldn’t be disturbed, and then introduced herself.
“Laura,” Hutchison said, “We’re here because a young marine from Powell, Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers, has been killed.”
“Captain, I know that already,” Richardson said. “It’s such a terrible thing to say, but, well, I was hoping you wouldn’t be coming here. But now you’re here and Lord help us. We’ve got so much work to do.”
Richardson knew a lot about military funerals. A native of Wyoming, she had married and then moved to New Mexico, becoming a funeral director after she was divorced and needed a means of supporting her two young children. She had returned to Wyoming several years before to be closer to her family and her mother, who lived in Lander, and to take over the management of the funeral home in Powell for an owner who lived in Arizona. But while she was still in New Mexico, Richardson had handled the funerals of two active-duty servicemen, one of whom had been killed in a helicopter crash in Greece, the other during parachute training in the United States. She was familiar with the peculiar demands of military deaths—the long wait for a body, which made it almost impossible to finalize arrangements, the meticulous color guards, processions, and gun salutes, the outpouring of curiosity and support from local veterans groups and distant military commands. Burying even the most obscure, low-ranking private required an attention to detail and an ability to coordinate that far exceeded the demands of a civilian funeral.
Richardson had first heard about Shane Childers’ death on Saturday morning and all weekend she was worried about something else, a concern shared by several other Wyoming funeral directors who had already called to offer their help with the funeral. In the fall of 1998, Wyoming had been both repulsed and riven with divisions after the death of a young homosexual student at the University of Wyoming, Matthew Sheperd, who had been robbed, pistol-whipped, and then roped to a fence all night on the outskirts of Laramie. During the memorial services for Sheperd, thousands of gay activists and fundamentalist Christian antigay activists descended on Wyoming and there were several ugly confrontations between these groups. This offended the natural decency and the live-and-let-live sensibility of many Wyoming residents, but they didn’t blame the activists. They blamed the national media and especially the television camera crews that roamed freely through Laramie for several days, filming the confrontations between the gay and antigay activists and interviewing ordinary Wyoming folks in a way that made them look like hicks. Many Wyoming residents were still resentful about that. Big events, the arrival of the national media, they concluded, were bad for Wyoming. It was as simple as that, and now the funeral drama for the first soldier killed in Iraq would draw too many outsiders—antiwar protestors, veterans groups, the marauding media—into a replay of the Sheperd mess.
Richardson considered these fears to be exaggerated, mostly an expression of how uncomfortable Wyoming felt under the glare of publicity, but they added to the mounting pressure she felt all weekend. The Shane Childers funeral had to be perfect, flawlessly executed, and she knew how much was involved.
Hutchison and Morgan sat down with Richardson in the carpeted, tastefully furnished conference room where she met with families to discuss funeral arrangements. They were immediately impressed with her reassuring mix of brisk efficiency and personal warmth.
“Okay, captain, sergeant, we all have to start making up lists,” Laura told them. “We need lists on yellow legal sheets, okay? You guys will be going back to Billings tonight and making up lists of everything you need, everything you expect from me, all your needs. And I’ll be spending tonight making up my lists. Then on Wednesday we’ll merge and purge our lists and get started.”
They were amazed by her, how much went into a big military funeral, which they could see was not going to be at all like the relatively small, private affair they had arranged last summer in Montana. Had Hutchison thought yet about contacting local car dealers, so that vans could be provided to drive the family back and forth from the funeral and burial? What about blocking out motel reservations in Cody and Powell for visiting relatives? There wasn’t a church large enough in town to accommodate a funeral of this size, so they would probably have to arrange to use the community college gym. She advised Hutchison and Morgan to start mentally and emotionally preparing themselves to view the body, once Shane Childers arrived, to help ease the family through the difficult decision about whether the casket should be open or shut during the wake. If they decided on a full military procession through Powell, which many people in town were already asking about, arrangements about routing and security had to be made with the police and county sheriff. And they would have to protect themselves against snafus, especially paperwork snafus, always a problem when dealing with the
military. To legally bury Childers she would need a death certificate and an assignment of the remains to the family, and they would have to be in touch with uniform suppliers as well, just in case Childers arrived without a proper medals rack. Everything had to be considered.
While she was running through her mental checklists, Laura would occasionally reach over and squeeze their arms. When she stood up to refill their coffee cups, or check a file, she patted them on their shoulders, bolstering them up, as if to take the edge off her litany of instructions.
Hutchison made a strong, early impression on Laura as well. While he seemed very professional and intent on getting the details right, he was also disarmingly humble. He didn’t affect the aura of unquestioned command that she found so common in other military officers. When she asked him whether he had a firm delivery date for Childers’ body, or if he’d discussed a burial plot with the family, he wasn’t embarrassed to tell her that he didn’t know or hadn’t checked that yet.
“Laura, how do we make this happen?” Hutchison asked her. “We’ve never done anything this big before. I need your help.”
After they were done in the conference room and had moved toward the front door, Morgan scooted out to the verandah while Hutchison and Laura lingered to talk for a few more minutes. Before Hutchison left Laura squeezed his hand once more and tried to be reassuring.
“Captain,” she said. “I know it all seems like a lot to do. But let’s work together, okay? I won’t let you down.”
On the ride back to Billings, Hutchison and Morgan reviewed all their paperwork, started making their lists, and discussed a sensible division of labor for the rest of the week. While the captain would work intensively with the Childerses and Laura Richardson on all the funeral details, the sergeant would have to concentrate on assembling and drilling a color guard and gun-salute team for the funeral. They were in “marine mode” now. It would all get done.
After they got north of the Montana line and were passing through Bridger, it got dark outside, and they had to abandon their paperwork. They rode in silence for a while, but then Morgan just couldn’t resist.
“Say, sir, mind if I mention one other detail?”
“Barry, please,” Hutchison said. “Go ahead.”
“I’ll keep your secret about Laura Richardson, okay? Sir.”
“Barry, shut up.”
“Ah, c’mon, sir. I’ll keep your secret. I mean, she kept touching your arm. She held your hand. She likes you, sir. I found it very moving and…”
“Now look, Barry,” Hutchison said.
“Sir! I will keep your secret. None of the girlfriends in Billings have to know. Promise.”
“Sergeant,” Hutchison said. “Shut your pie hole. Now. And that’s an order.”
But it was good they were laughing now. To the right of the car the Pryors were black and featureless and to the west the high rim of the Beartooths glowed incandescent purple and orange as the sun fell. They were exhausted from the emotions of the day, overwhelmed by the funeral chores they still faced. But at least they could rib each other in the old way, pretending they were on some other mission.
“I’m just saying, sir, you know? I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve really got a way with these older women.”
When he got back to Billings that night, Hutchison worked for two hours at the armory faxing all his completed paperwork out to Quantico, checking his e-mail, and generally feeling overloaded about all the details of his command that were being neglected because of his CACO responsibilities with the Childerses. At home, he made dinner, worked for another hour on lists for Laura Richardson, and then decided that he was too ramped up, too overtired, to go to sleep. He was jittery about the war in Iraq and felt disorganized because of the piles of tools and reconstruction rubble littered around his house. But it was still early enough for him to call home to California and talk with his mother and older sister.
Hutchison’s parents had divorced when he was a year old. After that, his father had remarried, and his parents lived fifteen minutes away from each other in Palos Verdes. Hutchison spent every other weekend with his father. The demands of adjusting to what would eventually become a very extended Hutchison clan had made him very sensitive, but also very flexible. By the time he was fifteen, when his father remarried for a second time, Hutchison had already gone through the “evil stepmother” experience and suffered the envy of watching his father lavish attention and money on his stepbrothers and stepsisters. Hutchison felt disappointed and lonely after his two older sisters left for college but soon learned to stay in touch with them by phone.
Counting both his father’s remarriages and his mother’s, he eventually had a total of eleven siblings and stepsiblings, and they were all close. His father established an admirable model by putting all his children and stepchildren through college without complaint, and every Thanksgiving he took the whole madass jumble of the blended Hutchison clan—wives, ex-wives, new husbands, boyfriends and all—down to the Balboa Club at Mazatlan in Mexico for a long holiday. They all had a crazy time together down there and, as a result, Hutchison’s sense of family was bumptious but very committed. “I probably have just about the healthiest family in America,” Hutchison liked to say. “We put the fun back in dysfunction.”
Hutchison was particularly close to his mother, Nancy, and his older sister, Heidi, and frequently spoke with them by phone late into the night. It was a habit that he revealed to only a few close friends, but he retained a confident, self-mocking humor about it. Yes, he was undeniably a tough, successful marine, particularly respected among his peer group of officers for the variety of his “expert” rankings—everything from parachute school to winter warfare. But when something bothered him, or the shit hit the fan in the Corps, he called home and debriefed with Mom. It was a system of personal support and evaluation that worked well for him.
Over the weekend, Hutchison had already told his mother and sister about his CACO assignment. They were solicitous and promised to do whatever they could to help but he really didn’t know very much at that point. Now the concerns he shared with them were quite specific. He’d forgotten just how many details had to be mastered during a CACO case, and he was afraid that he’d obsess on one or two and then become overwhelmed. Also, he worried about losing his professional detachment. He felt so sorry for the Childerses, so committed to them already, that he was afraid that he might burst into tears and not perform his job. As the week progressed and he became increasingly preoccupied and wasn’t able to sleep, Hutchison’s entire family—his father, his mother, his sisters—were concerned, and they called frequently to buoy him up.
“Kevin, I don’t really have a very good picture of this family yet,” his mother said to him that night. “Tell me more. Then I can help you.”
So Hutchison told her about the Childerses and Joe’s storytelling, his West Virginia rearing and two hitches in Vietnam, then blacksmithing school and his long romantic career in the Seabees. When he got to the part about Joe taking Shane off every weekend on his horseshoeing junkets, his mother began to cry.
“Oh, but, Kevin, can’t you see?” she said. “You’re perfect for this. You care about people, and they sense it right away. I know you don’t want to be doing this, but just remember that you were chosen for a reason.”
“But, Mom, I’m so upset I might cry.”
“It’s okay to cry, Kevin! When you feel like that, just call us. Call home.”
Later, when his sister Heidi called—she’d been briefed through the family phone tree—she made Hutchison repeat after her: It’s okay to cry, Kev, it’s okay, you’re supposed to be sensitive. When you feel like that, call us. Call home.
After the phone calls, Hutchison tried to get some sleep, but his mind was still swirling from Judy to Heidi to his mother, their repeat-after-me doting. One thing that both Judy and his mother said affected him. He and Shane were very similar and he knew that they would have instantly liked each other. They were
only a year apart in age, both bookish and obsessed with marine discipline, devoted to rifle platoon leadership. And like himself, Hutchison thought, it sounded as if Shane had rejected the American creed of comfort and prosperity to pursue a life of meaning, which so often became expressed by excitement over people, especially the intense, nascent, unalloyed pleasure of making new friends. And both of them, too, had achieved exceptionally, despite the very real obstacles in their past.
As thoughts like this caromed around in his head, Hutchison had trouble sleeping. There were so many angles to work here, so many associations aroused by this marine named Shane Childers, and then dealing with his family. He couldn’t resolve all of them and bring his mind to a place where he could get some sleep.
But it was quite late now and, through the top panes of his bay window, Hutchison could see the points of stars in the black sky. The mountains outside that he couldn’t see in the blackness seemed to nuzzle and protect him, and in the morning just the sight of the peaks again would lift his spirits.
GOOD TO GO
Joe Childers’ reputation as a colorful blacksmith continued to define him as he traveled around the world for the navy Seabees, and it also marked him as a parent for Shane. In 1974, when Joe’s tour at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico was completed, the Childerses were reassigned to the big Oceana Naval Air Station at Virginia Beach, and Joe quickly reverted to his weekend disappearance act, junketing off to shoe horses. He was also away a lot for the navy, for six to eight weeks at a time, serving with a small unit attached to the State Department that maintained American embassies in places like the Central African Republic or Jamaica. But the Childerses were infinitely happy and busy at Oceana, and Judy had everything nearby that she needed for the children—beaches, amusement parks, the playgrounds and gyms of a cheerful, peacetime naval base. In the summer they made the long drive west over the Appalachians to the Childers family seat in Salt Rock. The family lacked only one thing, the dream farm that Joe could never stop talking about, but now at least they were consistently saving money toward that.