Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I got older what was inside Dad?”

  “Well, your dad and me, we thought what happened, was happening, was for us to deal with, that you was always our child. What happens to adults shouldn’t happen to their children, children’s lives ought to be better than their parents’, that was the way of it, we felt.”

  Mom never talked to me about her life with Dad before I was born, but it seemed now was the time to do so.

  “We was married before he went to Korea. They didn’t do all that with yellow ribbons back then, calling everyone heroes, and that was probably better. We had no cell phones or email, so we only knew about when he’d be back. Your grandma was the first outside when the car pulled up. Me and grandpa stayed in, him never stirring from the couch, like he knew what was coming and did not care to see it. Your dad had on his uniform, tie, shined shoes. I thought he looked wonderful.”

  “That night I helped him off with his undershirt, got the dog tags caught up in it. I stared at him, as it was almost shocking to see him bare-chested in front of me. Times were different then, and even though we’d been married I had not seen him in the light so naked, so close to me, much before. You’re a man now, but it is still embarrassing to tell you these things, tell you I felt, well, scared and, I don’t know, sexual. My night gown was like a puddle on the floor. I wanted him to put his arms around me so I could fall heavy into him, hoping I could feel his strength. How I felt like with your dad, I could never find good words for it, so I’ll say it plain—I just felt. You know I never really studied much, but it was like those poems we had in Mrs. Garrity’s English class, a bunch of pretty words that came one line then the next, so that at the end you didn’t know why exactly, but you felt different.”

  “I don’t know what your dad was thinking then, but his face was looking at the wall through me. He said he was just tired. I told him to come and look at the stars with me on the porch, but he said he’d already seen them. I never knew people could be tired that long that much. It felt like most of the inside of him had been left over there, leaving just the outside still with me.”

  “I touched him, on his chest, but he just stood there until I didn’t. Put the light off and went to sleep, unrelieved from what it was. But he had that factory job waiting, it was gonna be okay, he said, soon as he could get back to work, have a schedule, have a reason for getting up early. Back then they’d save your job for you when you joined the service. Most nights he’d sleep like I had to check if he was even still breathing, then other times he’d say whispers in his sleep and toss and turn so that he’d have to untangle the sheets to get out of bed. You don’t have to go over there, he said, just look into my eyes and you’ll be there. I’d cry alone too many times nights. It frightened me, and so I got the courage to ask grandma about it, since grandpa had come home from his war, and she sat me down in a way that I hadn’t seen since I was fourteen and learned what my period was. She said your dad just needed sleep and a drink, like grandpa had, but watch that it don’t turn into too much sleep and too much drink.”

  ON THE BUS, I felt Dad start to talk even before he formed the words.

  “Dammit, enough Sissy. I’ll talk to the boy. Time’s short. Jesus, there was always supposed to be more time. You, Driver, don’t stop this goddamn bus ’til I’m done talking.”

  I hadn’t heard his voice for a long time. Dad said:

  They loaded us all, maybe twenty boys the Sergeant kept on calling men, on an old bus at Inchon so as to get more ass into the fight fast. We didn’t know if Inchon was a town, the name of the water we saw, or some kind of Korean word for the coldest place we had ever been. We were so scared. It wasn’t like we was scared of something, a roller coaster or running into an old house, just scared all the way through. People was yelling to hurry up and get into the bus, which we was doing as fast as we could on the thought that the inside of anything had to be warmer.

  Inside wasn’t warmer, but no one was yelling there, and we all squeezed together on the wooden seats. That wood was just like the bench on the Reeve football field sideline that had gone gray from sun. The bus pulled away and became all the world for us. They had covered the windows to make us less of a target, just slivers of sharp cold light cutting in around that edge. As the bus turned, the light would catch in the clouds of our breath in the air. Might’ve been pretty.

  I didn’t know much but I knew I was in Korea, a country that had mattered very little to Reeve, Ohio until a war started that we was told did matter. We was told that somehow North Korea the country threatened our country, as if a North Korean mountain was going to take over an Ohio field.

  We had the draft then, so whether you volunteered and went this year or got drafted next year didn’t matter much, and we gave the decision about as much thought as that. Being in the service was something kids from Reeve did, maybe still now like your dumb ass friend Muley. You either left high school and volunteered, or you left high school, worked a year or two in the factory, and then got drafted. Either door, you ended up in the same place as the meat cutter’s kid and the school teacher’s kid and the car dealer’s kid and the preacher’s kid. Somebody else was always rolling the dice for us.

  We knew nothing about being in a war, though every one of us had played soldier for days and days in the woods and had had their turn with a rifle while chugging whiskey with our dads in a drinking contest they called ‘hunting deer.’ It had been poor preparation, because here there were no woods we could run through and there damn sure was no whiskey.

  My dad—your grandpa—had been in the Army but he never told me much except that he walked from France to Germany in the spring of 1945 and never would care again to sleep outside or visit Europe because of it. He said he did killin’ and saw killin’, he said no one comes back even if their body comes back—something stays out of it. Grandpa said the best thing and worst thing was that he was ignored when he came home. He told me people would not care about what happened, they’d be on with their own lives, and if they did ask to hear, it’d only be as a cheap thrill for them. So, fuck ’em, he’d say. He said that he’d seen things he wouldn’t think of but remembered anyway, remembered them like a smell or an odd sound, couldn’t place it, but there it was in yer head, and the more time that passed the more he remembered. It was supposed to be the Good War, but Grandpa said it wasn’t. He was supposed to be part of the Greatest Generation, but Grandpa said he wasn’t. He said people who stayed home always said things like that for every war.

  That was about as much detail as we’d get and even that was only after a lot of guinea red wine on Sundays, and then he’d get all quiet or yell at your grandma about something she didn’t do. Grandma understood she needed to just take it, sometimes even a black eye, though he never meant no real harm, because her job was to keep Grandpa from breaking, as he was never gonna drink what bothered him off his mind. She couldn’t work back then and so he had to. He walked with some limp, but we never knew why, and it never stopped him from working twelve hour shifts when he needed to. He did one time have a bit more than usual even for him at Cousin Mike’s wedding and started in about piss and brains and pink shit on the snow until me and your uncle eased him outside. After that he just sat with the wine, and you kids would always laugh and say how Grandpa’s sleeping at the table again.

  You joined up back then and then you came home and went back to work without bellyaching. If you wanted to talk, you went to the VFW hall out on Harrisburg Road, or AmVets, though they favored the Catholics, and sat at the bar in the afternoon hiding from the sun and kicking back shots until you didn’t want to talk. Some days all the wars would be there, some old bastard from the World War, another from my war, a longhair handlestache from Vietnam, but inside we was all the same. Half the days the oldest bastard would dribble-piss himself right at the bar, until somebody saw the leak and told him, “Old man, go to the fucking toilet ’cause you forgot again.”

  IN KOREA ALL them years
ago, the bus stopped. We all got thrown against each other, no warning, nothing we could have done.

  We had not spoken. We did not know each other. We were pushed onto the buses in groups based on the order we came off the ship. Not one of these boys had struggled like me with crazy old Mrs. Reardon in 12th grade English, or done what their daddy had done in the same factory as had made me. I was certain every one of them was from somewhere else.

  The Sergeant screamed at us to get off the bus. We did; there was nothing else we could have done. Outside, it was so bright, it was like comin’ out of a matinée. The Sergeant pushed and cursed us into lines, his foul language a force to cause boys to shift places. He was an ugly man, the kind you look at, then look away, and then want to look back at, even knowing it’s wrong to do so. It was cold and no amount of cursing was doing anything about that as we formed lines. The snow was deep enough, but we managed to pound it to hell forming up, making a little oval of flat space that was for now our home in Korea.

  We had been told on the boat coming over by a chaplain that we was coming to Korea to bring the word of God to the South Koreans, kill the North Koreans, and to avoid fornication and sin. This now changed. We were luckier than a dog with two dicks, Sergeant said, because we had now a mission. The hill ahead of us, he explained while spitting into the white snow, was what we had come to Korea for. We were near a place he called Goddamn Myungdong, and we were to climb that hill, dig holes in the frozen ground and stay there until someone defeated the North Koreans. Was that clear? It was. The hill did not have a name but the Sergeant told us it was to be known as Hill 124, based on its height above sea level and thus designation on the army maps that only the Sergeant had seen or would see. Years later, as I learned more about things, it occurred to me that it was possible for other hills to be this height above sea level, and indeed several I could see around me did not look so different. It was possible that other boys would be sitting on a Hill 124 of their own, but this one was ours.

  Sergeant told us we’d have time to kill when we got home after the war, now we had to work hard. We really didn’t need the encouragement. The chance to do something—cut trees, slam small shovels against frozen ground—was good movement, which made us warmer and allowed us to talk to each other about this very significant hill we suddenly had in common. My small frozen hole would be near to another one with a boy whose name was Miles, a name not common in Reeve and so of some interest. We had our holes, we made our fires and, using the stomped snow as a guide, looked the other way hoping to see the North Koreans or whoever the hell might also be interested in Hill 124.

  Each night felt like four weeks at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where I was basically trained, being made to eat and sleep and shit close to other men. It was there for the very first time I spoke with both a Southerner and a Negro, and on the same day ate a thing called grits. You know we’re not necessarily racist in Reeve—we have Negroes living there and possibly Southerners, I don’t know, but we did not readily mix. It was not something we were proud of, or not proud of, or offended by, or even gave much thought to, as we were born that way. We never had enough of the Coloreds in Reeve to become too prejudiced. Fact is, before we later all got told we was white, a lot of people in town hated men named Stephanowski, Battaglini or Abramowitz.

  After many nights of absolute terror over absolutely nothing happening, we all experienced one of the most intense emotions of war—boredom. After the first night when nobody came to kill us, followed by a second, third and eighth night where nobody came to kill us, we all began to believe that on subsequent days and nights it was likely no one would come to kill us. This feeling was hastened by the reality that it appeared no one existed outside of Hill 124. We had no contact with any Koreans, except to occasionally see old women, sometimes with kids in tow, wander around in the woods, pushing aside the snow to dig around for something we came to learn was a kind of mushroom they ate. Food was scarce in Korea for the natives, but we had quite a bit of it, even though it was in the form of C-rat cans of Spam and some goop we called in a sing-song fashion, “Fruit, Peach, Canned, Syrup-Type.” The Korean women and their kids would wear tin cans salvaged from us around their necks, clanging and clinking to warn us they was coming. They wanted those damn mushrooms and did not want us to shoot them, which seemed reasonable. We all waved at ’em at first, and Miles one time shouted something that meant “hello,” to him at least, in Korean talk, but they’d never look at us or call back. Clang clang, dig up some mushrooms from under the damn snow, and clink clink away. Except for “hello” in Korean, which Miles claimed as his own, none of us spoke nothing but English anyway.

  Even the Sergeant seemed to lighten up a bit after boredom became our general state of affairs. He may have had a name, in fact had one stenciled on his clothes like all of us, but no one here was his mother and no one would call him anything but Sergeant. Sergeant had been an occupier of Japan before bringing his skills at yelling at people to the fight in Korea. He would tell us long tales of that time in Japan, most of which revolved around having sex in exchange for food, sex for money, sex for safe passage, and then more sex. It was kind of shocking to hear it said like that. Even though we all talked about screwin’, it was always kind of like we was talking about someone else, like describing a movie we’d seen, keeping a certain distance.

  What appetites we had we generally kept hidden away. Sergeant was crude, saying Oriental don’t matter because they all looked the same upside-down. They’re little dolls over there, he’d say, can’t tell the boys from the girls even turned sideways, but they’d take you away for not much money or even in exchange for a C-rat can. Had a mom, then her daughter, sayin’ anyone would do anything if they was hungry enough. Paid money to some local kid who pimped out his sister in return. For an extra dollar the kid’d make her say, “I love you” in slurred English. Kissed her one time and tasted soured milk, Sergeant said with a smile. That was his element, and he fit like a fish at a swimming lesson. He said they even had fun trapped on base. One time they shoved this female dog in heat inside a cage, let her moan until every stray mutt in Japan was clawing to get in, then they opened the cage and drank beer and laughed while them dogs just about tore her apart. Said them males were so crazy they even started humping each other until someone just hit the bitch with a shovel and ended it. Can’t have fun like that back home, Sergeant said.

  The snow tended to absorb the sound, especially the sounds that weren’t made by metal clanking against metal, so loud noises were kind of unusual, even, Miles said once, unheard of, and everybody laughed, includin’ me, though I didn’t quite understand everything Miles said that made people laugh. At first I thought maybe some of what he said was aimed wrong at me, but eventually we became something of friends. Anyway, one day started with a SPLAT, then another until I ended up at the bottom of my frozen hole, face pressed as hard against the frozen mud at the bottom as I could, hoping if I pushed harder then I could get deeper away from whatever this new thing was. It wasn’t until I looked up finally, saw Miles standing over me and then felt the SPLAT of a well-thrown snowball hit me square in the mouth.

  I climbed out of the hole to see almost every one of them soldier boys running in circles, throwing snowballs at each other and shouting, laughing and throwing more snowballs. Boredom and young boys don’t mix well, and after what seemed like forever sitting on Hill 124 doing nothing, we had found something. I packed a tight one, pulling off my gloves so as to let my hands melt the snow enough to form an ice ball. With some element of a practiced eye, I hurled that snowball as hard as I could at some boy about twenty yards away, smacking him straight on his nose. He looked over at me more surprised than anything and when I saw him laugh, I laughed too and went over to make sure there were no hard feelings. His nose was bloodied all right, as I had something of an arm back then from playing football, with the red blood dripping on that white snow. As he laughed, his head moved, flinging drops of blood in a wider circle around u
s both. It was kinda pretty, the red and the white, the drops giving off a bit of steam and melting just a tiny bit into the crust of the snow. We shook hands and laughed, him saying he was from Indiana, which was next to Ohio and enough to form a bond of sorts that day on Hill 124.

  “How old are you anyway?” I asked him. “Eighteen. Next month,” he said.

  I never felt old before. I had just myself turned nineteen.

  I looked over and Miles had a bunch of boys making snow angels in formation, flopping down in the snow and waving their arms around, swinging their legs open and shut, then hopping up just as quick to make another, until most of us were lying in the snow making designs, laughing at the fun of it, happy for the first time to be on Hill 124. We saw some Koreans clinking their way toward their mushrooms and waved, some of us even getting up long enough to throw a snowball at the kids towed along behind their mamas.

  It will be no surprise that the Sergeant’s voice cut through it all. Sergeant began running up the hill, kicking boys still half buried in snow, grabbing their arms and pulling them back to their holes, yelling at us for being idiots out in the open and that we had a job to goddamn do.

  There is nothing in the world that sounds like a mortar. No time to be brave or scared at first. Later, when you have time to sort it out, you recall a distant, hollow thunk, then a whistle, then an explosion. Them three sounds come one-by-one but feel when they happen like one big thing, but they are distinct. The thunk comes as the shell ignites in the mortar tube somewhere far away, the whistle as that shell moves from there to you, and then the explosion. You feel that thunk in your chest as much as you hear it, and it stays with you so as to make you jump twenty years later when something hollow hits the floor behind you, or when your goddamn son stomps up the stairs, Earl. We had learned at Fort Polk that mortar shells are well-designed, simple enough to have been around for many wars, but improved in World War II to include specially cut grooves and ridges so that the explosion inside the shell turns the casing holding it all together into white-hot pieces of scientifically designed metal fragments, each blown into a razor-sharp edge. The large pink-faced Southerner who explained this to us in basic training likened it to a Tootsie Pop, as the hard candy shell was good to eat as well as the casing holding the whole Pop together.