Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Mike hustled the men off to the showers and the mess hall, then went on to the helo pad with the corpsman and Ike Tibbetts to send Thomas’s body home. They put the stretcher on the Huey and stood together as the chopper lifted off, watching it go in silence.

  “See if you can find some beer for the men, Top,” Mike told Tibbetts. “Steal some from the Seabees or something. Get Bentano on it.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tibbetts said.

  Their eyes met. It seemed pretty sad that a can or two of warm Miller was all they could offer their company on a night like this. But they both knew it was the best they could do, and after a moment Tibbetts turned away and got on it.

  THE INTEGRATION OF Virginia Beach Bluebird Troop 232 proved surprisingly easy in practice. Liz and Linnell Williams accompanied their daughters to the first meeting on a Tuesday night and were greeted at the door by Brenda Hinton, the troop’s leader. Brenda was a statuesque woman, with frosted blond hair piled medium high. She wore an impeccably tailored uniform of bluebird blue with a sash laden with badges and insignia, two-inch heels, and soft cherry-colored lipstick. Her eyes were bluebird blue as well. They widened at the sight of Linnell and Temperance in her crisp new uniform.

  “Hello, I’m Liz O’Reilly,” Liz said firmly. “This is my daughter, Kathie. And this is Linnell Williams and her daughter, Temperance. We talked on the phone about the girls joining the troop.”

  “Of course,” Brenda said. She had not let them in the door yet. They all stood for a moment in silence. The Hinton home was old Virginia Beach, a two-story colonial painted soft yellow, with non-weight-bearing white pillars flanking the front door and massive azalea bushes surrounding the house. The yard was huge and lush and crowded with crepe myrtles still leaking pink flowers from their late summer bloom. Above the entrance, a hand-carved wooden sign read, AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD.

  “Is there a problem?” Liz asked. “This is the right night, isn’t it?”

  “You’re a little early,” Brenda said. She hesitated a moment longer, and Liz took a deep breath, ready to let her have it. But Brenda said, “But please, come in. You can help set up the refreshments.”

  And that was that. It turned out that Kathie and Temperance already knew a number of the girls in the troop from school; there was some excited girl chatter, and the meeting proceeded without incident. On the way home, as the two girls practiced the Bluebird Oath, the Bluebird Sign, the Bluebird Law, and the Bluebird Promise in the backseat, Liz and Linnell Williams exchanged a wry look of shared amusement. Liz realized that she was actually a little let down by the failure of fireworks. But Brenda Hinton’s indomitable Southern decorum had turned out to be the deciding factor. The woman would have died before allowing an awkward scene, Liz thought; Brenda wouldn’t say “shit” if she had a mouthful. It was too bad, in a way. Liz had really been ready to wreak some havoc.

  “BLESS ME, FATHER, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession, and these are my sins….”

  Germaine relaxed, recognizing Danny O’Reilly’s voice. Every time he slid open the window in the confessional, it was a fresh leap of faith, and a new opportunity to despise himself. The litany of a suburban parish’s sins was humbling, inevitably; he knew himself to be worse than even the most tormented of his parishioners could imagine, as they poured out their hearts to him. It was easier, with the children: not easier to forgive them—that was God’s job in any case—but easier to forgive himself.

  “I was mean to my brother,” Danny said. “Seven times.”

  “Seven times?” Germaine said, amused.

  “Maybe eight.”

  “How many times were you nice to him?”

  “Well, we play together a lot.”

  “An approximation.”

  Danny considered. “A hundred, maybe.”

  Germaine was silent a moment. “Do you love your brother?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you sorry you were mean to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is a hundred divided by eight?”

  There was a pause, but Germaine knew the kid could do it in his head; and after a moment Danny said, “Twelve, with four left over.”

  “That’s a niceness-to-meanness ratio of more than twelve to one. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You let me know if it dips below ten to one. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything else?”

  There was a pause, and then Danny said reluctantly, “I lied.”

  “Oh?”

  “I told my mom I was sick, but I wasn’t really sick.”

  “Because you wanted to stay home from school?”

  “Yeah. I needed time to think.”

  “Uh-huh,” Germaine said, and waited, sensing more to come.

  There was a silence. And then, “I shot a bird.”

  “With your BB gun?”

  “Yes.” Danny began to sob. “I killed it.”

  Germaine said nothing, resisting an urge to cross to the other booth and take the boy in his arms. He was thinking of the PFC in Charlie Company who used to come to him for confession after every firefight. At first the kid had cried, confessing to killing enemy soldiers. In the end, though, he had wept because he no longer felt remorse.

  Danny’s sobs had quieted. Germaine said, “Danny, some things you can make up for. If you tell a lie, you can find the courage to go back and tell the truth. If you are mean to your brother, you can find the strength and compassion and humility to apologize and try harder to be nice. But with this bird, there is nothing to do but feel the pain of what you have done. To be truly sorry. Which you are. God sees that. And God has already forgiven you. Now you have to begin to try to forgive yourself.”

  The boy was silent, and Germaine felt the inadequacy of his own words. He said, “Danny, I know what I’m talking about. I killed a man once, myself.”

  “In the war?”

  “Yes.” He could still see the figure looming over the foxhole, on a night the Vietcong had broken through the wire. The wounded Marine beside him had given Germaine his M-16 earlier, and when the moment came Germaine had fired it. He’d told himself he did it to save the wounded Marine, but he knew he would have fired anyway. The enemy soldier had crumpled from the burst across his chest and fallen backward, but he had taken almost twenty minutes to die, five feet away, and the whole time Germaine lay in the hole, listening to the man begging for his mother in Vietnamese and wishing he had the moment back.

  “It’s different in a war, though,” Danny said tentatively.

  “No, it’s not,” Germaine said.

  They were silent again. There was nothing left to say, Germaine felt; he suspected there had been nothing to say all along; and at last he began, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry—”

  Danny joined in to the Act of Contrition, “—for having offended thee. And I detest all of my sins, because of thy just punishment. But most of all because they offend thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.”

  Germaine raised his hand and made the sign of the cross. “Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi, merita Beatae Mariae Virginis et omnium sanctorum, quidquid boni vel mail sustinueris sint tibi in remissionem peccatorum, augmentum gratiae et praemium vitae aeternae. Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti.”

  “Amen,” Danny said, crossing himself.

  “Amen…Your sins are forgiven. Now go in peace.”

  The boy rose, with a scrape of the kneeler, then stopped. “But—what about my penance, Father?”

  “Danny, what you’re feeling is already the penance. Do you understand?”

  Danny said, after a pause, “Not really.”

  “You will,” Germaine said.

  BACK IN HIS bunker, Mike cleaned his rifle, in case the NVA decided tonight was the night to storm
the wire, then lay down on his cot. He could hear the rats rummaging along the walls and the sound of music somewhere nearby, someone playing Laura Nyro. He was thinking he should write the letter to Thomas’s mother, but he just didn’t have it in him yet.

  Instead, he took out one of the photographs he kept in a plastic bag in his map pocket, a picture Liz had sent of Kathie in Liz’s wedding dress. His daughter looked so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her. Liz always said that Kathie looked like him, but Mike saw Liz in all the kids. Kathie had his eyes, but she had Liz’s cheekbones and Liz’s determined jaw. And she would cry at the fall of a sparrow, just like Liz. He wanted to protect that little girl’s heart. On a night like this, it seemed like the only thing left worth doing, the only thing he had left of who he had been, back in the world. Someday he would be home, and this war would be nowhere but inside him, in a place that Kathie would never have to know, and everything he had seen would be wrapped in plastic like Thomas in his poncho, and Liz and Kathie would never have to see or know; none of them ever would.

  After a while, Doug Parker came in.

  “Plenty of good chow left, Skip,” the lieutenant said. “Tibbetts came up with some beer too. The man’s a genius.”

  “I’m not feeling much like eating,” Mike said.

  “Yeah. Me neither.” Parker sat down on his cot, took off his helmet, boots, and flak jacket, and lay back. The two men were silent for a time.

  “It’s a fucked-up war, Skip,” Parker said at last.

  “All wars are fucked up,” Mike said. “We’ve still got to fight them.”

  CHAPTER 14

  NOVEMBER 1967

  THE MARINE CORPS’ birthday on November 10, traditionally an O’Reilly family holiday, was exceptionally subdued this year. The year before, with Mike egging them on, the kids had actually come up with 191 candles for the hideous green cake that Liz always made, and the resultant conflagration had rendered the cake inedible. But this year no one seemed particularly inspired. The green food coloring in the milk, the cookies cut out into the eagle, globe, and anchor of the Marine Corps emblem and frosted in red, black, and gold, the traditional meal of creamed beef on toast, which Mike had taught the kids to call SOS—none of it aroused much enthusiasm. Danny, who had been unaccountably subdued for days, disappeared upstairs before the serving of the green cake inscribed with “Semper Fidelis.” Kathie had chosen to eat dinner at Temperance’s house, where the celebration of the Marine Corps birthday might have been expected to be at least a small occasion, given that Temperance’s uncle was also in the Marines. But when Liz mentioned the birthday to Linnell Williams, Linnell had merely said, “Only Marine Corps holiday I know about is the one when that boy gets his reckless ass home alive.”

  Deb-Deb’s otter loyalties precluded much in the way of gung ho, so in the end Liz and Angus lit the candles—a somewhat arbitrary seven of them this year, the last loose ones in an old box—and sang the “Marine Corps Hymn” alone.

  “Since it’s a holiday, do I have to do my homework?” Angus asked, as he dug into the cake.

  “Yes.”

  “Do Marines need to know subtraction?”

  “Yes, Angus.”

  Angus considered this, then said, “How come?”

  So that you’ll know how many men are left in your platoon if seven of them die, Liz thought, but she said, “Marines have to balance their checkbooks just like everyone else, sweetheart.”

  She took a piece of cake upstairs to Danny and found him in the top bunk in the boys’ bedroom. He looked unnervingly like one of Mike’s second lieutenants, fresh out of Basic School, in the preposterous black-framed glasses he had insisted on; and somehow he looked sadder too. It hurt Liz’s heart; she had a sudden sense of having lost track of her older son.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You seem awfully quiet lately.”

  Danny shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  Liz stood for a moment more in the doorway, feeling helpless. Danny had gotten more and more like his father lately; she could feel a kind of inarticulate darkness moving in him, something fiercely inward and guarded. Her son was drawing something, but the pad was shadowed and she couldn’t see what the picture was. Six months ago she would have walked right in and assumed the right to look. Now she felt that would be wrong somehow.

  “I brought you some cake,” she said at last. “Marine Corps birthday cake.”

  “I’m not really hungry, thanks.” It was almost an outright dismissal, but Liz lingered, unhappily, and after a moment Danny lifted his head and gave her a melancholy smile, touched with rueful acknowledgment, also eerily Mike-like. “I’m fine, Mom. Really.”

  “I’m sure you miss your dad. Especially tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said.

  Liz waited, but it looked like that was it. She was about to go, when her son said, “Mom?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Do you think Dad would mind if I became a priest?”

  “A priest?”

  “Like Father Zeke. A Marine priest.”

  “Father Zeke was in the Navy.”

  “But he was with the Marines. That kind of priest.”

  Liz took a couple of steps into the bedroom, still holding the cake. “I’m sure your father would be very supportive if you felt called to the priesthood,” she said carefully.

  “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Uh-huh.” Liz hesitated, then asked, “What made you start thinking about being a priest?”

  Danny shrugged, already in retreat, and turned back to his sketch pad. He was drawing a bird, Liz saw now from her better vantage point.

  “That’s beautiful,” she offered.

  “It’s a blue jay.”

  “I can tell.”

  “I can see the birds clearly now, with the glasses.”

  “That must be wonderful.”

  Danny shrugged. He actually looked a little pained, but there was nothing more forthcoming. Her oldest child ran frustratingly deep sometimes. Liz lingered a moment, watching him etch delicate feathers and fill in the jay’s crest. She was always amazed by how well Danny could draw; he’d shown an obvious gift since he first picked up a crayon. Neither she nor Mike had any graphic talent at all; they were both word people.

  LATER, AFTER THE KIDS were all asleep, Liz cleaned up the kitchen, took out the trash, and began to ready herself for bed. Mike’s toothbrush was still in the rack, a black, stiff-bristled, minimalist thing, a Marine’s ascetic toothbrush, dry now and a bit withered. Her own toothbrush was as soft as toothbrushes came, and colored light pink. The tube of Crest on the counter was set for a left-handed pickup and squeeze, her habitual mode. Mike was a right-handed squeezer, but after their honeymoon, and every night of their married life since, he had put the toothpaste down prepositioned for a left-handed pickup, making that little effort every time. That was love, Liz thought. When he got home this time, she planned to surprise him by having the toothpaste set up for right-handed squeezing.

  She was restless, for some reason. Had Mike been home, they would have been at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball tonight. The year before she’d gotten a little drunk and insulted a general’s wife somehow. But they usually had fun.

  She opened the closet and found her husband’s uniform in its plastic bag. Mike in his dress blues was a gorgeous stranger, severe and noble; usually so satirical, he was almost embarrassingly earnest about all the corny tradition surrounding the uniform. Mike’s ceremonial sword was on the top shelf, a replica of the North African Mameluke scimitar presented to Marine Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon by an Arab desert chieftain in gratitude for whatever the Marines had done on the shores of Tripoli almost two centuries ago.

  Happy birthday, you wretched institution, Liz thought. Here’s health to you and to our Corps, which we are proud to serve. A hundred and ninety-two years of going overseas to fight for right and freedom, and to die for things that e
arned the gratitude of desert chieftains and left the families at home to grieve. She closed the closet door and went to find some paper to write her nightly letter. She wished it wasn’t going to take anywhere from three weeks to a month to get Mike’s take on the fact that their older son suddenly and inscrutably wanted to be a priest.

  She was just starting to undress when the doorbell rang. Liz froze, feeling instantly ill, then glanced at the clock. 9:07. Did the Marines doing casualty calls work nine to five, or did they just come as soon as they got the news themselves, at any time of the day or night? All the wives she knew who had received the two grim messengers in uniform had gotten their visits midday. What time was it in Vietnam, anyway? Danny’s watch was still set to Vietnam time. She had an insane urge to run into his room and check.

  She finally made herself go to the window and peek out. A Volkswagen bug was parked out front. No Marine Corps green sedan. Liz relaxed and hurried downstairs, opening the front door just as Zeke Germaine started to walk away down the steps, apparently having given up after his single ring.

  “Hello, Father,” Liz said.

  Germaine stopped. “Oh,” he said, as if he were surprised to see her. “Hello, Mrs. O’Reilly.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  The priest mulled this for much longer than seemed necessary, then said, “I suppose that depends on what you mean by all right.”

  It was such a Germaine-like answer that she laughed. “I have very low standards for ‘all right,’ at this point. You’re not here to tell me my husband’s dead, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then everything is all right.”