“And then she started tellin’ me how it was . . . And then, I did understand. She managed to get the story out, spittin’ out a few words here and there between sobs.”
I saw him shake his head out of the corner of my eye.
“Man, she was tore up! Real tore up!” He took a sip of coffee.
“So I listened to her as she told her story. She just poured her heart out like I was the only shoulder she had to cry on.” He paused thoughtfully. “I guess maybe I was. Well, I listened to her talk for a while about how sorry she was and how she missed her husband and so on, and by the end, I was almost cryin’ myself. I consoled her the best I could, and by the time I’d left, she’d even managed to smile a little.” He peeled his eyes off the ceiling, leaned on the table, and fixed his gaze on me.
“I got in my car, and I drove off, thinkin’ about that poor little girl and how sorry I felt for her.” His look was so intense now I felt my head turn toward him, almost involuntarily. His eyes locked on mine and I couldn’t look away.
“I drove for an hour or two, just thinkin’ about it, and suddenly, wham! Another thought hit me like a Mack truck,” he said, tapping his fingertips on the table.
“Suddenly,” he paused, his mouth quivering, “suddenly, I remembered I had a boy out there somewhere. My boy! My boy was out there, and he was hurtin’!” He tapped his fingers harder and faster as he fought to subdue his emotions.
“I looked at the darkness all around the car, and imagined that somewhere out in the darkness, God knows where, was my boy, hurtin’, and—and bleedin’, from a big ole hole in his chest where he’d had his heart ripped right out.” He moved his head in a motion that was neither a nod nor a shake.
“And then . . . and then I got angry!” he rapped his knuckles forcefully on the table. Flashes of that anger he recalled lit up his eyes.
“And I said to myself—” he stopped, his face trembling with feeling. He composed himself to continue. “I said to myself, ‘It ain’t right!’” He shook his head and clenched his teeth. “It ain’t right! Nobody—nobody!—has the right to hurt my boy like that! Nobody!”
He took a ragged breath and kept talking, unashamed of the tears that coursed down his face.
“And I started prayin’, and cryin’, and prayin’, and cryin’. I prayed and I cried all the way home. I was beggin’ God, ‘Please help me find my boy! My boy needs me! Please help me find him!’ I prayed every morning, every night, and every time in between, for close to a year.”
Tears ran down my cheeks in salty waves as he paused and took a deep breath.
“And then last night, someone called me up. Said there was a wild man with a gun at the saloon, pokin’ holes in Vern’s jukebox.” He smiled through his tears and shook his head. “It was my boy.”
We both laughed and wiped the tears from our faces. It felt like it had all happened a lifetime ago. He pulled out a hanky and blew his nose, and I did the same with my napkin. Then I sat there wondering what he was thinking, and wondering if he was wondering what I was thinking.
“So, Pa,” I began, “when—” I halted, realizing I’d called him “Pa” for the first time I could remember. I hadn’t meant to, it had just slipped out. For the first time, it had just felt right to say it. I glanced at him to see if he’d caught it, and he just smiled at me as if to say, “Yeah, son, you can call me Pa,” so I picked up my sentence from where I’d dropped it.
“When I pulled the gun on you last night, why did you holster your pistol?” I asked. He leaned back and looked reflectively down at his hands which he had folded over his stomach.
“Well,” he began, before taking a moment to think. “When I realized it was you, I knew there was no way I was gonna shoot you, so it didn’t make much sense to have it out.”
“Did you think I wasn’t going to shoot?” I probed. He thought a moment and looked at me.
“I didn’t know,” he admitted, “but the way I figured it, if you did shoot . . . maybe I had it comin’.”
My throat knotted up as I thought about my pa living with a guilt that had him believe he’d wronged me so badly he thought perhaps it would be the fulfillment of justice if I would shoot him. I shifted nervously in my chair as words flowed unbidden to the tip of my tongue. They were words I’d thought I’d never be able to say to my father. They danced on my tongue and demanded that I open my mouth. I thought surely Pa would hear my nervous heart pounding in the silence that became only more uncomfortable as it grew. The words would not be denied.
“I forgive you, Pa,” they flew out quickly, but quietly. He smiled, glossy-eyed. I looked down.
“Thanks. That means more to me than you’ll ever know,” he said, his voice unsteady.
My heart slowed, and I felt more relieved than if I’d just stepped down from a podium from which I’d delivered an address to the whole world. We settled back into a silence which I found much more comfortable, until the clock chimed, startling us both.
“Oh, my, it’s time an old goat like me got to bed!” Pa joked, looking at the time.
“Yeah, I reckon I could use some sleep myself,” I said as I stood up and stretched.
“Say, tomorrow’s my day off. Would you like to do some fishin’ or somethin’?” Pa asked.
“Shouldn’t I be looking for work tomorrow?” I responded.
“There’s always Tuesday,” he replied with a smile. I thought about it a minute. I’d never gone fishing with my pa.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Yeah, fishing should be just fine.”
~~~
It took me some time to fall asleep that night. Part of it was that I really wanted to have a drink. But that wasn’t the half of it. The last 24 hours of my life had been such an unbelievable whirlwind of events, my mind was still spinning around, trying to comprehend all that had happened. It sorted through the things that had happened, and the conversations we’d had, processing them one by one and putting them to rest, until I came to one thought that I just couldn’t tuck in and put to bed. It was a thought that I wouldn’t have been capable of contemplating even a day earlier, and that thought was this: If a man as hard as my father could be brought to repentance for his sins, and that repentance could cause him such great sorrow, could it be that Ellen might also be feeling the same anguish of spirit that my pa displayed for his transgressions? Could it be that I wasn’t the only victim of her sin? Could it be she endured sadness and guilt for a regret of her own making? For the first time, I allowed myself to think about someone other than myself. And though I still wouldn’t think of entertaining thoughts of forgiveness, I felt myself pity her, ever so slightly.
“Man, she was tore up. Real tore up!” I remembered the words my pa had spoken mere hours before.
She deserves to be, I thought to myself, trying to excite the anger I was used to feeling in order to rid myself of feelings of empathy that made me uneasy. But those feelings would not leave. Their strength would only grow.
~~~
The next morning Pa had me out of bed, finished with breakfast, and sitting with my line in the water before the sun had a chance to rise. It took me some time to brush the cobwebs out of my brain, since I wasn’t used to being up that early. But Pa said the fishing was best early in the morning, so we went early. And he was right. The fish were biting hard for the better part of an hour before things settled down.
As the sky began to lighten, I almost had my pole yanked out of my hands. It was a big old catfish, about as long as my arm, and he made it clear he had no intentions of being hauled out of the water. I told him I had other plans. He was pretty stubborn about it, but after I played with him for close to a half hour, he started coming around to my point of view.
Pa whooped and hollered and slapped my back when I pulled the monster out of the water. I had a grin on my face that was about as wide as my fish was long. He wasn’t exactly a pan fish, so we unhooked him and set him back in the water, holding him to face the current so the water would flow through his gi
lls. He rested for a minute, and was off with a swish of his tail.
We wiped the fish slime onto our pants, sat back down, and told each other pieces of the story that had just happened as though recounting something that had happened years ago. For the first time in forever, I was almost happy.
The sun bounced over the horizon like a big orange ball. It tried on different shades of orange and yellow, like a woman tries on clothes in the morning, before finding a bright, egg yolk yellow that suited its taste.
The fishing slowed down, so we pushed the butts of our poles into the muddy bank and lay back, squinting into the sun as we lazily watched the tips of our poles for any sign that something was tugging on the line. I lit a cigarette and felt myself become drowsy. I could feel my eyelids droop. My sleep had been much too short.
“So, what do you plan on doin’?” Pa asked quietly. I opened my eyes and stared up at the blue sky.
“What do you mean?” I asked, suspecting I knew what he meant, but wanting clarification in case I was mistaken.
“With your life. Where do you go from here?” he questioned. I laughed cynically.
“I’ll be damned if I know,” I replied. “Most days the debate isn’t about what to do with life, it’s about whether it’s worth hanging onto at all.” He took my comment in stride.
“Yeah,” he nodded, “I been there.”
His acknowledgement surprised me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. It piqued my curiosity. I tried to let it drop, but the itch to know more increased until I couldn’t help but inquire.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, trying to sound interested enough that he’d elaborate, but not too snoopy or eager.
“Oh, yeah,” he affirmed. “There’ve been many times I wanted to end it all. Even tried a time or two. I know if it wasn’t for the grace of God, I wouldn’t be alive today.” I thought about what he said, my curiosity only partly satisfied.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why did I want to end it all?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. He pursed his lips and sighed.
“Well,” he said slowly, “my problem was I let old wounds outlive the people that made ’em. I just had trouble . . . lettin’ go.” I was curious what wounds or people he was talking about, but I didn’t have the forwardness to probe any deeper.
“Well, a fellow can’t help if he gets wounded. Maybe you had the right to not let some things go,” I defended myself by defending him.
He shook his head.
“No, that was my problem. I felt like it was my right to be bogged down in the past. It took me a long time to figure out there’s no use being alive today if you’re livin’ in yesterday. There’s no purpose. That’s what makes a man feel like killin’ himself.”
I thought about what he said, but didn’t comment. He wasn’t done.
“You know, son, someone hurtin’ me ain’t what made me miserable most of my life. It was me. It was my own self-pity. It was me thinkin’ I deserved to be angry and bitter and down in the mulligrubs for what’d happened to me. It was me pickin’ and pokin’ at sores that would have healed long ago if I’d just left ’em alone, let ’em heal up.” He paused to pull in his line. He’d been so preoccupied with talking, he’d let the fish nibble his hooks bare.
After he put on more bait and threw his line back in the water, he picked up from where he left off, just now, he was getting preachy.
“Self-pity is a leech. It’ll suck the life right out of you. It nearly killed me, and it nearly killed you. If you keep on feelin’ like a victim, and that the world done you wrong, and that you didn’t deserve what someone did to you, you’ll never move on. Because you’ll never forgive. Forgivin’ someone ain’t sayin’ what they did was right, it’s just sayin’ you’ll give ’em grace and you’ll both try to move on.”
My hackles rose as I took umbrage with what he was saying. It all sounded trite to me, as if he had no understanding of how gravely I’d been wronged. Words sat in my mouth like popcorn kernels, waiting for the heat of my wrath to explode them into action.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice, “yeah, it’s easy to tell someone to forgive when you ain’t walked a mile in his shoes.” The words popped out of my mouth slowly at first, and then, faster and faster.
“Let me tell you something,” I looked at him and shook my finger. He looked me in the eye without flinching. “I fought for 10 months in Europe, and I lived through hell! I saw my friends get killed in ways that you wouldn’t believe if I could find words gruesome and gad awful enough to tell you! I got hit, twice. I fought the whole damn war with a wounded leg that never got proper medical attention. But I wrote Ellen letters. I lied to her, because I didn’t want her to worry. Told her everything was a fucking bowl of cherries! Told her I loved her and how much I missed her. But that didn’t mean shit! My love didn’t mean shit! My loyalty didn’t mean shit!”
I felt my face twitch in anger as I continued. “Everyone else I served with, single, engaged, or married, chased every skirt from Maryland to Germany. But me, oh, no, I had my honor! I was an honorable man! A woman, a married woman, tried to seduce me in England. She wanted me bad! Do you think I didn’t want her? Hell yes I did! But I didn’t give in! Because I had my honor! I had my fucking honor! But what did it mean? What the fuck did my honor get me?”
I was nearly in tears now. If my pa had felt half as sorry for me then as I felt for myself, he would have been won over to my side, but he didn’t seem the least bit dissuaded. He didn’t say anything, but pulled a sandwich out of a burlap bag and offered me one.
“No,” I said tersely. I was too agitated to eat.
The sun siphoned my body’s moisture out through my pores and I became thirsty. I took a few long gulps from a canteen of water and wished it was whiskey.
Pa ate his sandwich, leisurely, but with the look of a chess player plotting his next move. I waited for him to offer some sort of rebuttal, ready to explode at whatever came out of his mouth. He finished his sandwich, cleaned his teeth with his tongue, and plucked a thick stalk of grass to use as a toothpick.
“Robert, did you win any medals?” he asked. His question confounded me. I supposed perhaps he had decided to drop more volatile topics.
“Um, well, yeah, a couple, well, three,” I counted them up, feeling a little bit of pride in telling my pa I’d been decorated.
“Hmmm,” he nodded approvingly.
“And so of those three medals, which ones did you get for the appearance of your uniform, performin’ drills, or other basic requirements?” he asked. I couldn’t figure out what he was driving at.
“None,” I said, thinking even he should know that. If my answer surprised him, it didn’t show.
“Does that bother you?” he asked. I looked at him like he was an imbecile.
“No,” I said shortly, irritated by the silliness of the conversation.
“No,” he said, “it shouldn’t. Because there’s nothin’ special about a soldier doin’ his duty. And there’s nothin’ special about a husband doin’ his duty. You bein’ faithful mighta been hard, but it wasn’t above and beyond the call of duty.” His words stung like sand in the face. I bristled.
“You talked about your honor,” he continued, allowing ample spaces between questions to allow them to sink in, “but what kind of honor did you have? Was it a pure honor, or did you have an honor that even thieves have among themselves? Did you keep your honor when you found out about her sin?” He paused and looked at me as if he knew the answer without me replying. I averted my gaze.
His last sentences were hard and pointed, as if they were the final nails that held together his argument, and he drove them in straight, word by word.
“True honor will follow through on a promise. True honor will make you hold up your end of a deal . . . even when someone else drops theirs.”
He had a knack for knowing just how far to push me. He was stomping all over my toes, and I think he knew I was about to holler, s
o he shut up, pulled in his line, and put more worms on his neglected hooks.
I was smarting from his little speech. I’d told him what I’d told him so he’d see my point of view and realize that I deserved to be feeling a little sorry for myself. But instead of sympathy, all I’d gotten was a lecture about duty, and honor, and being faithful. By the time he got through, he had me feeling lower than a snake’s belly. I was the good guy, for Pete’s sake! Why was he trying to make me feel guilty for throwing a slightly extended pity-party that I was clearly entitled to?
Thinking about it just burned me up. The perturbation that churned inside me only made my craving for a drink more acute. Drinking had become the only way I knew how to deal with stress, depression, anger, sorrow—heck, it had become the panacea for all my emotional ailments!
I sat in silence until I knew I couldn’t stand another minute fishing beside someone as cold and judgmental as my pa.
“I think I’m done fishing,” I said abruptly, pulling in my own hooks that the fish had spit-polished. “It’s too hot. I’m not used to the sun,” I made an excuse, not even wanting to look over at Pa. He didn’t say anything, he just started packing stuff up.
As we walked up the bank, he looked over at me and said, with a gentleness he’d held back until then, “Robert, I just want you to know I didn’t say what I said ’cause I don’t love you or I don’t care or I don’t understand. I think you might be surprised how much I do understand. I spent most of my life in a front row desk at the school of hard knocks. I guess you could say I’m pretty much professor of the place!” He smiled a little, as if to show he was trying to lighten things up. I didn’t feel like smiling back.
“The point is, I don’t want to see you waste the next 20, or 30, or 40 years of your life, learnin’ the same lessons I had to learn. It’s a—it’s a terrible way to live, and I don’t wish it on nobody—’specially not my son.” I kept walking in silence.
Love is a Wounded Soldier Page 28