What I remember most though was the silence.
The silence that followed the third round was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced. It boomed louder than a hundred guns could have and hung heavy in the air with an ominous tone that seemed to resonate with sadness.
Several long minutes passed before finally the pastor said, “May God be with you,” bowed his head and walked away.
I feel like there was more he wanted to say that day, but didn’t. Those three rounds and that heavy silence said everything for him.
Sometimes there just aren’t the words.
The crowd paused and watched him depart before following suit, everyone trying to ignore the enormous sadness of the moment. Some people formed into loose clumps and whispered back and forth, others got into their cars and drove away.
Lost in the shuffle, nobody noticed as I slipped off and watched the solitary man alone by the grave. He sat with his gaze aimed forward before reaching into the small green knapsack by his feet. From it he pulled a tattered rag of red, white and blue, twisting the material in his hands.
On wobbly legs he stood and spread it across the top of the casket.
I knew the man was my uncle Cat and that he couldn’t walk without his cane. I heard he was injured in the war years before and that his body was never the same. Despite that, I watched as he tossed the implement aside and stood over the casket of his brother. In one swift movement he snapped his heels together, drew himself up arrow straight and saluted.
His body quivered as he held that salute as long he could before collapsing to the ground.
Chills ran the entire length of my body as I watched. Never had I felt so alive, so emotional, so vulnerable, all at once.
I stood rooted to the spot with every fiber of my being on fire until my father came and gently pulled me back to the car. The mere touch of his hand set my skin crawling as goose bumps dotted my body.
On numb legs I walked back to the car, certain that I could never feel that way again.
A few hours later I found out just how wrong I was.
Chapter Four
Growing up in a small town, there wasn't a lot of variance in the people that lived there. I didn’t meet a black person until I was ten years old and didn’t befriend one until a family moved in during junior high.
Most folks were white skinned, blue collared, and kind to a fault. They were God fearing, upstanding, and lived their lives the way we’re taught to as children.
The only major difference between most people in town and my father was that he was the hardest worker around. Famous for his strength and stamina, he worked far beyond the hours any normal human should be expected to and did it without ever a word of discontent.
Every day he rose before the sun, put on his bib overalls and flannel shirt, and headed to the wood yard that was his second home. Each night he would return home and peel off the same sweat soaked clothes.
To this day I can only remember my father wearing a suit a handful of times. Growing up he referred to it as his “marry-bury suit,” which pretty succinctly summed it up. If the suit came out, somebody was getting hitched or had just been read their final rights.
It was much the same way with Roberts family gatherings. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other or get along well; it was just that everybody had their own lives to lead. It was very rare that I saw most of my relatives outside of holidays and the only time we ever saw extended family was when a major occasion brought us together.
I guess you could say we were a marry-bury family.
I was still reeling from the scene at the graveside as my father piled us into the car and drove away. The gold buttons on my jacket had a hawk emblazoned on them and I spent the ride studying it as we wound our way through town and out into the country.
The incident scrawled through my mind time after time. With each replaying my uncle held his salute a little longer, fell a little more dramatically. It wasn’t until the car stopped that I even realized we weren’t going home.
We were going to visit my Aunt Millie.
Aunt Millie was my mother’s sister and lived not far from town. Mama used to say she always thought she was better than Birch Grove and everybody always assumed she would leave town and never look back. Instead, she married a doctor and spent her every waking minute touting her newfound affluence for anybody that would listen.
I guess it never dawned on her that she had latched herself to the ugliest man in Ohio in earning this wealth.
That, or in her mind, it was worth the sacrifice.
If not for my aunt’s demeanor, visiting her would have been a kid’s dream come true. She lived in a big two story farm house that sat fifty yards off of Lake Mendelman. A dock ran from their front yard out over a hundred feet into the water with a motor boat and paddle boat they kept tied to it nine months out of the year. Giant sycamore trees dotted the front yard with plenty of low branches for climbing. One of them even had an old tire swing that swung out over the water.
“What are we doing here?” I asked from the backseat without thinking.
“We’re having a visit,” my Mama said and together we climbed from the car.
We were one of the first to arrive and within minutes a dozen cars pulled in behind us. I recognized a few of my aunts, uncles and older cousins streaming from the cars, but for the most part I was again a child among strangers.
“What’s going on?” I asked my father as we climbed the steps to the enormous front porch and walked towards the door.
“It’s been awhile since we've seen each other,” he replied. “We’re going to have a nice lunch and talk for awhile.”
Reading between the lines, this meant I was in for an afternoon of boredom.
Still, I knew better than to say anything.
The house smelled of honey and fresh baked bread as we entered and Aunt Millie swung out from the kitchen with an apron wrapped around her neck. She was drying her hands on a dishtowel as she grabbed my mother in a hug. “Oh, how was it?” she asked, feigned concern in her voice.
“It was...it was bad,” my mother answered, the hurt in her voice very much real.
“I wish I could have been there, I just had to stay and get everything ready,” Aunt Millie replied, her eyes already moving to the next people streaming through the door. “Food’s in the kitchen, go ahead and help yourself.”
I looked uncertainly up at my father, who said, “Come on, you must be hungry.”
I wasn't, but went along for his benefit as much mine.
Neither one of us much cared for Aunt Millie.
Following my father, we made our way to the kitchen and grabbed matching plates. We filled them high with mashed potatoes, noodles, turkey, and green bean casserole. Together we found a small table in the corner and settled down to eat alone.
My father wasn’t from Ohio and sometimes I got the impression that he felt even more out of place at family gatherings than I did. It was easy for a kid to disappear in a crowd, but a man his size stood out no matter how hard he tried not to.
With our heads down we fell to our meals, both taking in heaping spoonfuls. By the time we were done the crowd had swelled, people standing in pairs and trios all over the house, deep in conversation. Many of them held plates of steaming food in front of them, doing their best to talk and eat.
“Come on, let’s get up and let somebody else sit down,” my father said and we both rose and took our plates to the sink. He placed his in and ran some water over it, then took mine and did the same.
Together we turned and wound our way from the kitchen towards the front of the house where we bumped into my mother talking with an elderly couple in the main hall. “You remember my husband William,” she said as my father shook hands with the man and nodded at the woman. “And this is our son Austin.”
I gave a half smile as they did the same, both sides dismissing each other within seconds. For several minutes I stood and dutifully tried to listen, followed
by several more of watching the people mingling about me. Eventually, I gave up on the situation and made one of the most important decisions of my young life.
I wandered out onto the front porch.
Chapter Five
The thin wooden screen door was light and swung free at my touch. Outside, the autumn air was deliciously cool after standing in the artificial heat of the house.
My shoes clicked against the floorboards of the porch as I walked to the edge and peered down at the flowerbeds a few feet below. A handful of red maple leaves were pressed against the lattice encircling the porch. A few more were wrapped around the bases of bright yellow mums spaced every couple of feet.
The screen door swung open behind me and I turned to see my father stick his head out from the house. “Stay on the porch Austin, alright?”
“Yes, daddy.”
The door swung back closed and for a few moments I was again alone. I turned and walked in the opposite direction, measuring my steps against the even planks of the floor.
I made it over halfway across the floor before I noticed there was someone else with me.
My great uncle Cat sat stone still in a rocker, staring out over the lake. His left hand gripped the top of his cane and his right was draped across his lap. He was still dressed in his military uniform and his gray eyes stared unblinking across the water.
Pulling up short, I stopped and stared at him. The scene from the graveside played again in my mind and all I could think of was him saluting the casket before tumbling to his knees. A thin chill crept through me as I retreated a few steps and perched myself on the top step, my body angled towards him.
If he saw me, he gave no indication.
Instead, he sat with a steeled façade and stared at a spot on the horizon. For several minutes I followed his gaze in an attempt to figure out what he was staring at.
Nothing jumped out at me.
Eventually the curiosity got to me and I did something that only someone as brash or naïve as a six year old could do.
I asked him what he was looking at.
His features remained fixated, his hand remained on the cane as he watched the water. I waited for him to answer, but no words came. I began to wonder if he'd even heard a word I said.
Several minutes passed before I worked up the courage to try again.
“Uncle Cat, sure is some good food in there. Can I get you something?”
I had hoped the less obtrusive topic might get him talking, but it didn't. He remained motionless, as wooden as the rocking chair he sat on.
Finally I resigned myself to being ignored and said, “I sure am sorry about Uncle Jack.”
I pressed my back flat against the post and turned my head to the lake, watching the sun dance patterns across the water.
“He was my brother you know,” my great uncle said, his voice deep and graveled.
The response took me by surprise and I jumped several inches up off the porch. My heart pounded in my chest as I turned to look at him, his body frozen in place, his eyes locked towards the distance. “No, I didn’t know that.”
They were my great uncles. Their being any more than that had never occurred to me.
Something moved behind my uncle’s eyes as he shifted his head towards me. The stiff exterior of his face softened and sagged a bit. His right hand released the cane and he leaned forward and rested it against the porch railing. Not once did his eyes leave mine and when he spoke, I knew I was the only person in the world he saw.
“Have you ever heard the story of my brother Jack?”
Chapter Six
My great uncle was born Richard Roberts, but for the last fifty years, everyone just called him Cat. At the time I didn’t think much of the name, and not until long after the fact did I learn it stemmed from a cat fishing accident near their home when he was a boy.
Only twice before had I been in his presence and neither time did he say anything to me. My mother often spoke about him in hushed tones and said that things had happened that made him the way he was.
I had no idea what that meant.
All I knew was the earnest sincerity in his face when he asked me that question. I could sense the gravity in his tone and I bit back my eagerness to hear anything he might tell me.
“No.”
The corners of his lips turned up a bit, giving just the slightest indication of a smile. Without comment he lifted a gnarled hand from his thigh and reached for the floor beside him. He pulled the same faded green knapsack I saw at the cemetery up onto his lap and pointed at another rocking chair off to the right. “Drag that chair over here."
I did as he said without pause.
The chair was homemade from thick wood and it took a great deal of effort for me to drag it the ten feet to his side. I left a gap the better part of a foot between us as climbed up and stared across at him.
“What I am about to show you, only one other person has ever seen," Cat said. "The time has now come to pass it on to somebody else.”
He lifted his eyes towards the water again.
“I’ve been sitting here for the last hour trying to think who I should give it to. It was so simple, I should have seen it sooner. Only a child can properly appreciate this story. Someone that hasn’t yet been corrupted by society or embittered by the false promises of a government that cares nothing for them.
“Most importantly, only somebody that has a brother themselves will properly appreciate this story.”
“A brother themselves?” I asked, furrowing my brow and staring up at him.
His gaze never left the water as he raised a hand for silence. After several moments he lowered his focus and peeled back the flap of the green canvas bag. He reached in with one hand and pulled from it a dark leather album.
Scratches and blemishes crossed the front of it. A few water stains stretched from the corners. He placed it with care, almost reverence, atop the sack and looked down at me.
“You might have photo albums at your house, but I promise you they’re nothing like this. Yours might be filled with pictures and papers and awards, but you won’t find much of that here.
“This album isn’t really an album, but a record. A record of the life your uncle Jack and I lived together. Everything in it has been put there with great care and everything in it has a story to tell. Each item was placed in specific order and even if something doesn’t make sense as we come to it, it will by the end.
“Do you understand?”
I stared from my uncle’s face to the album and back again.
I did not understand in the slightest, but I nodded my head up and down anyway.
His eyes bore into my own for several moments before he too nodded and turned his attention back to the album on his lap. The cover swung open beneath his aged hand to reveal not a cover page, not even a title.
Just a single object pressed against a solid white background.
The birthday napkin.
Chapter Seven
Uncle Cat stared at the napkin, his face impassive. I watched for any sign of movement, but for a long time none came.
At last, the crease along the right corner of his mouth played a little deeper into his face and his hand ran its fingers over the page.
I waited until I could resist the urge no longer.
“What is that Uncle Cat?”
He raised his face from the page and turned it to me, then back towards the water. His eyes took on a far away quality and when he spoke it was the rich voice of a man many years the junior of the one before me.
My Uncle Cat wasn’t just going to tell me a story.
He was going to relive it.
“My Pappy hung himself in the spring of 1937," he began. No preamble, no back story, just a flat statement that would set the tone for the rest of the day.
"After he did, my Mama had no option but to move us. She didn’t want to take us from Birch Grove any more than we wanted to go, but we didn’t have a choice.
“S
he found work in a laundry outside of Burbank, about twenty-five miles north of here. The job was posted in the weekly newspaper that we got whenever somebody left one lying around at church. She wrote to the address to ask if it was still available and a few weeks later a man replied. Said she was welcome to it if she was still interested.
“We packed up everything we could in a couple of peach baskets and the rest we bundled up using our bed sheets as hobo sacks. One bright Saturday afternoon the man drove down in his flatbed pickup and got us, took us up to Burbank.”
Uncle Cat paused a moment to collect his thoughts.
“We got us a little apartment above a general store and for three years we went about life the best we could. Mama worked torturous hours at the laundry and many days she would be gone before sunrise and home after sunset. When she did return she was often pale and her dress was soaked in sweat, though she never said a word.”
His voice caught a tiny quiver at the last line, but his gaze remained focused on the lake.
Mine remained focused on him.
“Up to that point Jack and I were brothers only insomuch as we were born from the same parents. We weren't enemies mind you; we just didn’t cross paths that often.
“See, Jack was a loner by nature. He was two years older than me and he knew Pappy better than I did. He was the one that found him hanging in the mill that day and I think it left a deeper impression on him than he would ever care to admit.
“Not only that, but from that moment on he felt an innate need to assume the leadership role for the family. It ate at him that Mama had to work so hard and it absolutely killed him that he couldn’t do more to help her.”
He cocked his head a bit to the side and turned his right hand upward. “Of course, this is all hindsight from an old man looking back at the situation. At the time I was just a five year old boy, oblivious to the world around me.
“Every day Mama would go to work, Jack would go to school, and I was free to roam as I pleased. I spent many spring and fall days bouncing through the creeks behind Main Street, looking under rocks for crawdads and salamanders. In the winter I’d sit at the window and watch the people come and go from the general store.
Scars and Stars Page 2