“It’s just –” my father explained to Helen as she turned, “you looked a little unhappy there, my little Honey.” As though unhappiness was in fact a foreign and an unaccountable thing, unfamiliar to our family – whose presence, within the limits of our lives, he could neither explain nor understand.
“Oh, no,” Helen said. “No, no.” And then she did go.
Because, in the end, my mother and father had done exactly what they’d hoped that they might, it was not exactly unhappiness that I felt then, either. Instead, I felt only very strange and small. Like I was sitting inside myself in little pieces. As though I could, if I wished, take myself apart like a Russian doll and find myself in layers there, each one smaller, and more hollowed than the last. Until, at the very bottom, and for want only of tools precise enough with which to do so, I could go no further.
We sat out on the porch for some time after Helen had gone, not speaking. Then my father went back to his puzzle.
Every now and then he would look up and ask, “Honey – you’d know this. What’s the capital of …?” Or, “You’d know this. Who wrote …?”
But I never did know.
Then, in the last days of August, while rummaging for a lost prescription in a kitchen drawer, where, for a generation and a half, receipts, old letters, photographs and paperwork had been indiscriminately piled, my father stumbled across a poem that I had written for Henry in the tenth grade.
When I came back from the lake that evening he was waiting for me, poem in hand, evidently pleased with his find, and before I was even properly in the door, he was already reading it out loud in the deep contralto he reserved for recitations.
In the poem, Henry is a simple, happy man; just the way that I had imagined him as a child, when he had existed as though for me alone; a side character even to his own story. I had summarized him as though in a single gesticulation; in one of the eloquent, but cursory waves of my father’s hand, say, which – though always used to some effect – never really indicated anything at all.
It seemed remarkable to me, then, as I listened to my father, that I had at any time imagined it all so simply; that Henry could have been for me, just, a man who fished. Who fixed the engines on boats. Who solved math problems with beatific patience in the evenings. As though in the calculation of things – the requisite addition and subtraction; the anticipated and final division – there had been, and would be, no remainder. That it could turn out to be, after all (as he perhaps had hoped all along, no less than I), a perfectly balanced equation, the answer to which he had already known.
It seemed, after all, that I’d expected, instead of too much, too little from life. But my father, his eyes shining, was untroubled, and lingered – ignorant to my derisive shouts of laughter – on the poem’s last note.
“I think,” my father said when he was done – a little defensively – “that it’s a nice little poem.”
I gave another loud shout of what I’d intended to be a laugh, but by a strange alchemy it was converted to a sob inside my throat, so that I had to pause and swallow several times, quite hard.
“I don’t want,” I explained to my father, finally, biting each word, “to have written a ‘nice little poem.’”
My father, who had not noticed the change in my voice, only shrugged his one movable shoulder, and, with his working hand, gave a characteristic wave. “So,” he said. “Write another. But don’t be too sad. Be like Whitman. I like it when you’re like Whitman. He always made the most of everything.”
Having returned the poem to its place on top of the still unsorted paper files, my father moved out to the porch. He walked slowly, very straight and tall, as though there were pieces inside of him that were made out of glass. Then, having arrived finally at his destination, he cleared his throat loudly, leaned heavily on the porch rail, and lit a cigarette.
I remained where I was. In the kitchen. I drew my knees to my chest, and put my head in my hands, but I did not cry. I kept my eyes wide open so I would not, and because of that I could see precisely the lines my hands made against the floor, where they didn’t join. The triangle of light that formed. A brown half-moon, a yellow square. I stared for so long there, at those irreconcilable shapes on the floor, and did not listen so intently to the noises of that house: to my father’s deliberate inhales, his stuttered coughs, the deep throat-clearings of the porch, outside, that I didn’t even notice when Henry arrived.
Henry himself. How would I have known him?
It was as though – gliding swiftly and unseen – he had become a ghost in his own house, and so was only just suddenly there beside me saying, “Look!” And when I did look, taking my hands away from my eyes, which I had not closed, I saw that his hands were cupped in front of me where my own had been.
Then he opened them and a bird flew out.
Henry, with a small laugh of alarm, looked down at his hands in bleak surprise, as though he had not guessed what they’d contained. Then my father was there at the door, leaning in from the porch with just his cigarette outside – choosing, for the first time, to remember that he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house.
“What the –” my father started to say.
Henry pointed to the corner behind the open door. He seemed embarrassed. “I found it over there,” he said. “I didn’t mean to let it go just then. I just wanted,” he turned to look at me with a shrug, “to show you –” But then the bird made a sudden dive toward our feet and he left off, giving another loud whoop and a holler as it rose again, to the ceiling.
My father took charge. “Stand by the windows!” he shouted at us. But Henry and I remained where we were, motionless.
“What –” this time Henry began.
“The windows!” my father said. And so we moved. Henry to the near window, and I to the one on the opposite wall.
My father, having now illegally entered the room, began to wave the burning end of his cigarette at the bird. He danced awkwardly, going first one way, and then the other, but the bird seemed to anticipate his every step, mirroring each swoop, each lunge, each one-handed wave that my father’s cigarette made in the air.
Finally, though – as if it had always known where the open door had been and had, with every loop, every seemingly mistaken angle of his flight, tended toward it all along – the bird simply flew away.
We followed him out onto the porch. Watched him as he disappeared around the side of the hedge. Then Henry leaned back in his chair and laughed, and my father laughed too.
Finally, so did I.
But then, when we were quiet again, my father said: “You know what that means, don’t you? A bird?” He paused. “It means,” he said, and his eyes twinkled, “a death in the house.” I suppose he had meant it as a bit of a joke but Henry ignored him, and declared only, in admonishment to both my father and I, “We’ll do better to keep the door closed now.”
“Anyway,” I said, addressing my father’s remark instead of Henry’s, and rolling my eyes. “I know you don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
My father winked at me. “I don’t believe in a lot of true things,” he said. “A lot of stuff just happens, you know, my little Honey, whether I personally believe in it or not.”
That night, just before he fell into his trance, my father again read aloud my tenth-grade poem, this time to Henry. I tried not to listen. And then, because that was impossible, I tried not to mind. Then, because that too proved impossible, I thought instead of that fragment of the poem my father had recited to us once, not long before: “Simplify me when I am dead.”
For some reason I always remembered it after my father had said it. It just stuck in my head.
8
On my last afternoon at the government house I took my father for a long drive out on the back roads between Long Sault and Ingleside. My father kept his beer goosenecked at his feet, snapping them as we drove, one after another, from their hold, and emptying them all afternoon – so that, by the time we had dr
iven an hour, he’d relaxed into comfortable, semi-conscious repose. He reclined in his seat, his head tilted back to the late afternoon sun, closing his eyes sometimes, but not because he seemed tired.
No. On the contrary. All afternoon he remained attentive, vigilant as a hawk, even with his eyes closed; anticipating the stop signs, as always, while they were still miles away.
Hours later, still not ready to return, I drove the car right past the government house, stopping at the end of the lake road, and we sat out there for some time, looking back to where the lake stretched behind us in three directions. The thin wedge of Henry’s dock just barely visible to us there.
Then we drove back the way that we came. But, just before we slid again into the government house drive, completing the return, my father turned to me and said: “I’m writing a poem too, you know. I’m basing it on that photograph that I like so much. Of you and of Sophia.”
It was the photograph that Helen had sent to my father two years before; the one he had kept on the windowsill of his old Fargo place, and had spent such a long time looking at when in the dead of winter his pipes had frozen and he’d stood at the sink to melt his snow.
He still kept it with him at the government house. Not pasted up on the wall, or framed, or even on the refrigerator door where he might more frequently see it, but in amongst the clutter of his bedside table instead: his beer caps, used handkerchiefs, pill bottles, and twists of chewing tobacco that he spat out like an owl.
“When it’s done,” my father said, “I’ll send it to you to proof. It’s my very first poem.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. We had by then pulled up in front of the government house but neither of us moved to get out of the car.
“I can be like Whitman too, you know,” my father said. “I can see beauty in things.” He looked at me. “When it has to do with my sweethearts, I sure can.” He gave my shoulder an almost authentic-seeming squeeze. All the while his eyes shining, in that way that they did sometimes. Like underwater lights, searching for something.
Also, though, he was just goofing around.
But then a few days later, he called my mother’s house in Orono where finally I’d returned, and read me what he’d written over the phone. For the first time in a long time, then, it felt uncomplicated. It was just love, after all, that I felt for my father, and that wasn’t so hard.
“It’s not Whitman yet,” my father informed me. “But it’s something.”
Later that same day, he called again and read the poem out loud a second time.
“What did you change?” I asked.
My father sighed.
The end-stop in the middle, he told me, was a comma now so that the two sections of the poem were joined in a single sentence.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Okay. I like it.”
“I think it makes a difference,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You couldn’t tell.” He was disappointed.
“Not at first,” I said. “But I can now. I think it’s good.”
“Whitman would have noticed,” my father said.
Then, in the early part of November, as though in speaking of the war my father had opened a seam through which the rest of the world now burst, he received a telephone call from a historian at Indiana State. His name was George Parada. For almost three years, he had been researching the incident at Quang Tri – which my father had described to me for the first time during that summer.
“I had a hard time tracking you down,” Parada told my father when he called. “The records indicate that you live in Fargo, North Dakota.”
“Tell me about it,” my father replied.
Parada had been a member of the same division as my father. He’d worked as the battalion mail clerk from early 1967 until the end of the war – and so, though he had no first-hand experience of the incident in question, the rumours of its consequences had not escaped him.
He lived in Terre Haute now, a professor at the university there, and had begun to compile accounts of the incident, Operation Liberty II, as it had been known, in response to the erroneous account published some time after the war by ex-marine Frank Higgins. Higgins had, according to Parada, so exaggerated the scale of the operation, that he numbered the dead at three hundred, making the incident appear to be a miniature My-Lai. He hoped that his own book would uncover the truth of the incident, and lay to rest, finally, Higgins’ false testimony – which threatened, he said, to turn the whole thing into noise.
It was tough going, though, because there was not much to either prove or disprove Higgins’ account, and for months – though he sorted endlessly through military records, and transcribed interviews – Parada was left with no obvious results. Speaking to two of the government counsel lawyers, when finally he located them, had yielded next to nothing. Michael Baird and Peter Francie had refused to speak at all. “Oh that old thing again,” Francie had said before he’d hung up the phone. “That thing with Haskell. The guy was a nut. Nothing happened that night. SOP the whole way.” Robert Pike didn’t “remember shit about anything.”
Among Parada’s personal acquaintances he had had even less notable success. They, too, either declined to speak of the event, or were unlocatable. Two of them – and Teddy (Edward Fairly) turned out to be one – had committed suicide; Teddy having hanged himself off a second-floor balcony in Hood River, Washington, sometime in the early eighties.
All that was left for Parada to work with was contained in the forty-year-old transcript of the trial: a five-hundred-page document, which he had managed to get hold of in its entirety. The existence of this document was also a revelation for my father when he spoke to Parada of it in the weeks before his death. He had always assumed that his hearing had been a small – an embarrassingly personal – affair and was unaware that anyone, besides himself, had testified.
It turned out that my father’s apparently futile visit to the chaplain had in fact sparked an investigation that had lasted two and a half years. In the end, though, for lack of real evidence, and due to the subjective nature of the witness’s testimonies, the case against Bean and the other commanding officers of the implicated patrols was eventually thrown out.
Unfortunately for Parada, when he was finally able to get in touch with my father, he too was of little help. By that time he had already shifted into noticeable confusion. In fact, Parada’s telephone call was one of the earliest indicators that this was the case. Although less than three months before my father had spoken unfalteringly to me about the incident in question, never hesitating in point of fact (as though the words that he would use had already been written, and had sat for years, spooled on his tongue), by the time of his conversations with Parada he was no longer able to clearly recall the events of the twenty-second of October at all, or of the trial that ensued.
A short time later it became evident that not only the remote past had disappeared for my father: My own recent visit to the government house had as well. Stumbling slightly in humble accusation over the phone, my father insisted that I hardly visited him at all. It made me sad then, and it still does, to think of it. And also not a little afraid. To think that despite our best intentions we may, in the end – and necessarily – leave the people that we love quite extraordinarily alone.
After his initial conversation with Parada, my father’s confusion grew rapidly, and a second telephone call, which followed only six days after the first, left him, long afterwards, repeating fragments of the conversation to himself in utter bewilderment. Sometimes just a single word, for hours.
Later, it would be objects instead of words that confounded him: he would throw up his hands in frustration and rage when observing, for example, within arm’s reach, a scrap of tissue on the bedside table, a disc of chewing tobacco, or the cordless telephone. “What the fuck does this have to do with anything?” he would shout at each object in turn. As though it were the items themselves, and not the circumstance
s which had arranged them there, that had become for him unidentifiable.
When Parada phoned for a third and final time, and, later that same afternoon I asked my father about it, he said only: “You know, I had a dream last night where I met everyone at once, in strange circumstances, and then I woke up.”
It was during this last conversation, though, of which Parada told me more later on, that my father seemed able to recollect again, and quite plainly, the events at Quang Tri. But instead of answering any of Parada’s questions himself, he threw them back at Parada – only then to interrupt any attempted reply with an objection or a shout: “No!” he would say. “That wasn’t the way that it happened at all!”
But – uselessly for Parada – this was a response evoked equally by Higgins’ version of the events as by Parada’s own. Though he was pressed to continue with his own version of things, my father, by that time, would or could not. And so Parada – having reached the end of what had at one time been a long list of possible purveyors – at last admitted to having failed in his pursuit.
Ten days later, my father died. Henry telephoned the ambulance and they telephoned the police. For six hours – while my father remained on his bed in the opposite room, stretched in a final convex image of himself, and of repose – Henry was interrogated by two RCMP officers who drank bucketfuls of coffee in the government house kitchen and examined my father’s collection of photographs, prescriptions and disorderly files, curious to know why he had come to die so far away from home.
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