Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “If he wasn’t my son ...” John Sr. began, the zest gone from his voice. “What he’s done to Linda. You’ve met her. She’s a beautiful girl. And our granddaughters ...”

  Bobby interrupted. “He passed through the gates of hell, Mr. Pisano,” Bobby said. He did not know from where within him these words came. “He defeated death, but it—”

  “Then,” Jo said sadly, “he should rejoice in life.”

  “Him!” John Sr. scoffed. “He’s a death maker. Going to make the death of me.” He stood, turned away. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “I’m very fond of him,” Sara said simply.

  That startled John Sr.; and Jo answered, “So are we.”

  They had Christmas Eve dinner at High Meadow. Miriam and Doug were there; and Brian and Cheryl (who was pregnant again) with their son Anton, almost three and a half. Joanne came alone. And there was Linda, Gina and Michelle, and Linda’s sister Cindy, now 19, and Tony’s brother Mark, 20, and with them the youngest Balliett, Henry Jr., just shy of 13. And, of course, Grandpa.

  In the kitchen, before dinner was served, Linda and Sara were putting the final touches on the meal while Joanne puttered and Miriam sipped a glass of wine.

  Bobby entered. “What can I do?” he asked.

  “Are all the chairs in?” Linda asked.

  “Yep. And the table’s all set.”

  “Did you get the serving spoons and forks?” Sara asked.

  “Yes. Everything’s set.”

  “Then would you take the turkey out and carve it. You know how to do it where you open it up like petals?”

  “Yep,” Bobby said. “Okay. I’m off.”

  “Well,” Linda laughed. “Looks like you’ve got him pretty well trained.”

  Sara laughed too, but Joanne sneered, said, “You wait. Wait until after the baby comes.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Sara said. “With Bobby ... I mean, there’s never been a question about what we want from our marriage. We ... ah, we’re two of a kind.”

  “Yeah, right.” Joanne stirred the soup.

  Bobby reentered. He stood behind his sister, looked over her shoulder. “That’s ready for the tureen, isn’t it?”

  Joanne nudged him back. Bobby startled. Joanne quipped something about control and he wanting to keep Sara barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

  “Hey in there,” Brian called. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  The room was dark except for a single candle that Linda held in the hall to the kitchen. “Dear Lord,” Grandpa began, “please bless us and watch over us. On that first Christmas Eve the angels said, ‘Peace on earth to men of goodwill.’” At that Linda entered and with her candle, lit the three candles on the table and inserted the one she held into the fourth holder. Grandpa smiled. He and Linda had planned the meal and he’d so liked Sara and Bobby’s wedding rite that he asked Linda to get the candles. “Did you all hear that?” He said gruffly. “Peace to men of goodwill.”

  Joanne spoke up. “They probably said ‘to people of goodwill.’”

  Grandpa chuckled. “I’m certain they did. I’m certain they used a word that meant all people, and all creatures too, but the monsignors and prelates couldn’t translate it exactly and they skimped here and there.”

  “On purpose, Grandpa,” Joanne said. “They were all men. They translated it that way to preserve their power base.”

  “Oh, come on, Joanne,” Brian said. “This is grace. Let Grandpa finish so we can eat.”

  “It’s okay,” Pewel said. “She’s absolutely right. ‘Peace to beings of goodwill.’ I want to ask you, each of you, to say something nice, to everyone here. That peace will be your present to me.”

  “Now?!” Miriam said from the opposite end.

  “Yes.” Pewel smiled. “Even you, Miriam, who looks prettier every year.” She was speechless. “But I want to start with my darling, Gina.”

  Gina was prepared. Her eyes glittered impishly. “You make me happy,” she said.

  And Michelle squeaked, “Me too. For no reason any all.”

  Pewel leaned forward. “Why, thank you,” he said.

  Around the table the “grace” was said with Doug saying to Bobby, “You oughtta come over to the new KC plant. I’ll show er to ya. She’s a real beaut”; and Bobby saying to everyone (and holding Michelle’s small hand in his), “I feel happy for no reason any all, too. When I’m here, even in winter, I see the muskrats swimming across the pond and the moths with their intricate wing camouflage and the wildflowers of June and the bats of August nights catching insects up against the windows. I feel euphoric. I want you to feel that way too.”

  Some of the good cheer would last forever. Some was transient. And amid the chatter of Christmas Eve dinner, 1974, the first formal wording of The Code was begun. “And now,” Pewel said, “I want to give you my gift. Before I am human,” he said, “I am an element of the earth, a particle of the universe, and to this I owe integrity. I am a living being and to all life, next, goes my allegiance. I am a human before I am an American. To the brotherhood of man I owe my energy and my spirit.”

  “You’re getting sexist again, Grandpa.”

  “Thank you, Joanne. If I didn’t have you here to guide me, I’d err.”

  “How about,” Sara said, “I am a human before I am a man or a woman, before I am an American. To humanity, as part of the earth and universe, I next devote my energy and spirit.”

  “Boys”—Pewel chuckled—“the girls are refining me. Aren’t you going to help?”

  Sara, leaning back, around Pewel, said happily to Bobby, “I see where you get it from.”

  Around and around. Pewel went on, “When your self needs minimum maintenance, you can expand beyond your self and take care of others. Expanding beyond the self is also less wearing on the self and thus requires less maintenance of the self. In this way one is opened to teach or to cure; to create, to explore, to investigate; to love, to rear children, and to defend those who cannot defend themselves.”

  On December 26 Pewel Wapinski, suffering pleuritic chest pain, tachycardia, tachypnea, and dyspnea, was readmitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Rock Ridge. By dark, after hours of tests and hours of waiting-room pacing, doctors told Bobby and Brian, Sara and Linda, that Pewel had a pulmonary embolism. For the time being he was confined to bed, attached to an oxygen mask, and injected (IV continuous) with an anticoagulant.

  “I don’t believe it.” Bobby was angry. “How could it happen? Just like that? Like that!” All morning and into the afternoon Sara had paced the waiting room with him but she was now sitting with her legs up, letting Bobby pace alone. At times Brian popped up, paced too. At times Linda joined them.

  “It can,” Linda said softly. “It can happen just like that. He’s still very strong. They’ll get it under control.”

  “Yesterday he’s great,” Bobby said. “He brought Sara and me out to the barn to give us another present. Do you know what he’d done? He made a crib. He made the most beautiful crib from the maples up at the sugarbush. He’s eighty-five years old and when we called and told him Sara was pregnant, he took the tractor and the saws up to the sugarbush and chose a number of branches. He said he could see the crib in the branches before he cut. He said he wanted his grandchildren to grow up in a little bit of High Meadow even if they lived three thousand miles away.” Bobby fidgeted, shuffled, scuffed a heel into the floor tiles. “Damn it. Damn it!”

  Then with the sky winter black, the doctor came again and said, “He’s stable. He’s resting. There’s nothing you can do here. Go home.”

  “I think I should stay,” Bobby said.

  “Take your wife home. Come back in the morning. We’ll call if anything happens.”

  Friday, 27 December 1974, nine A.M.—“Helloohh!”

  “Ah, hello. Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Robert Wapinski.”

  “Oh. Won’t you come in? He’s upstairs. Who should I say ...”

  “Ah .
.. my wife and the kids are in the car.... I, ah ... I’m Phil Simpson. Tyrone Blackwell’s brother ... half-brother.”

  “Ah ... oh ... ah ...” Sara recognized, then doubted, then felt confused. “Ty Mohammed, you mean?”

  “Huh?” Phillip was equally confused. His tie to his brother had been reduced from a broken thread to a feeling.

  “Why don’t you all come in. They’ll freeze out there. I’ll get Bob.”

  A few minutes later, after Bobby repressed the frustration of being interrupted in the paramount task of going back to St. Luke’s—he’d called at five and eight and both times had been told Pewel was stable and resting—“This is Jessica?”

  Phillip nodded. The little girl, almost six, sat on his lap. Phillip’s wife, Carol, held their son, twenty-five months, on her lap. And pregnant Sara held Phillip and Carol’s youngest, the baby Cecilia.

  “And you named this guy Tyrone?” Bobby said.

  “Yes.” Phillip nodded sheepishly. “The little stinker ... you know, I mean my brother.... Look, Mr. Wapinski ...”

  “Please. Just Bob.”

  “Look, it takes a man and a woman to make a baby,” Phillip said. “Two parents is jus natural. Maybe not necessary, but it’s a primary and a back-up system for raisin kids.”

  “Umm.” Bobby wanted to speed Phillip’s plea. “You’re saying ...”

  “Look now at this.” Phillip hoped his thoughts would be passed on. “See how vulnerable is a person if you remove the back-up? See? You wouldn’t go out an cut off everahbody’s left arm. But that just what we doin with quickie divorce and lettin men run out on their families. See? I know there are circumstances. But we approachin one-third single-parent households in this country. One third! Higher then that in the black community. We allowin ... like we approve of it ... we allowin the removal of the back-up system. That’s dangerous, Mr. Wapin—”

  “Bob.”

  “Bob. That makes the children and the country vulnerable. Half a all divorced women with children under five end up on welfare. Luwan been on welfare. That’s why Carol and me got Jess. But he her father.”

  “You want him to come back, huh?”

  “A course.”

  “All I can do is tell im.”

  “Give im this picture a Jess. Tell im I’ll pay his bus fare.”

  Later that morning at St. Luke’s Hospital Bobby talked with his grandfather. Pewel was still propped in bed with oxygen and IV therapy but he was awake, alert, impatient with his condition yet physically tired. “They say you’re going to be okay,” Bobby said.

  “One, two, three, four. Potatoes on your head.”

  Bobby chuckled. “What?”

  “That used to be one of your jokes.”

  “One of my jokes ...”

  “When you were little. Brigita’d be spoonin potatoes in your mouth and you’d make up those jokes.”

  “Oh. I don’t rememb—”

  Pewel cut in. “Or you’d ask, ‘Does being truthful mean not telling a lie even when Pinocchio would tell a lie?’”

  “Um.” Bobby paused. “They did say you’re going to be okay.”

  “I know. The doctor came in earlier. Diuretics. Digitalis. Now they’re sayin somethin, cow manure.”

  “Coumarin,” Bobby corrected. “It’s an anticoagulant.”

  “Six months.” Pewel sighed. “Take it for six months.”

  That evening Pewel’s spirits were a little better, and that night he slept well. On Saturday he was up twice, walking. Linda brought Gina and Michelle. His spirits soared. Jo, Isabella and Helen visited, as did Brian, Cheryl and Anton. Father Tom Niederkau from St. Ignatius came, followed by three women volunteers from St. Theresa’s Guild. Adolph Lutz brought a fruit cake his wife had made, and Stacy Carter, how she heard no one knew, sent a bouquet of flowers. Through it all Bobby and Sara sat, left briefly to eat, read Pewel the newspaper. There was a six-line note on fighting in the Mekong Delta, and separately, three paragraphs on the Khmer Rouge having launched an offensive in Cambodia. A page 1 story about Kinnard/Chassion closing one of its Yankee Rollers, a massive heated drum on which toilet paper is made, and laying off most of its third shift was positioned next to a large photograph showing the factory with its four-foot-high rooftop SEASON’S GREETINGS sign.

  On Sunday Pewel was stronger. He held one of Sara’s hands, one of Bobby’s. “What do you want to do with your lives?” Pewel squeezed their hands. “Don’t tell me. Tell each other. Tell yourselves.”

  “But I’d like to tell you,” Bobby said. For an hour he explained his massive design scheme for revolutionizing transportation in the North Bay area. He told Pewel of the lightweight car design, of the windmills. And he told him of Henry Alan Harrison’s reaction and of his “subsequent decision to start my own company.”

  Pewel was excited by Bobby’s bold approach and Bobby’s decision to go out on his own. Between naps they talked about energy—sources, consumption, alternatives. “Oh, just think of the possibilities!” Pewel lay back. He was very happy, very tired. “They won’t let you do it out there, eh?”

  “No. Not a chance.”

  “So. How is Environmental Energy Systems going to make enough money to stay in business? Who’s going to buy your crop?”

  “That’s the problem right now,” Bobby said. “It’s either huge foundations or one-man shops. There’s not much in between.”

  “Bob, you can grow the best crop in the world, but, if nobody buys it, it sits and rots.”

  On Monday, 30 December, Pewel was champing at the bit. “You stay with us until after the holiday, Mr. Wapinski,” his doctor had said. “Then we’ll see.”

  “Sara’s school starts on the second,” Bobby said apologetically.

  “Go.” Pewel waved him off.

  “We’ll be back after the baby’s born, okay?”

  “Yep.” Pewel pointed to the closet. “Go in there. In my jacket pocket in there.” Bobby fished into Pewel’s jacket. “My knife in there?”

  “Yep.” Bobby pulled out a well-worn pocket knife.

  “Take it with you,” Pewel said.

  “Granpa, this is yours.”

  “I know. But I want you to give it for me.”

  “Give it?”

  “To Tony. My present to him. Tell him I hope he gets a great deal of pleasure from it. Tell him a good knife is like a good woman. And vice versa.”

  23

  LITTLE BY LITTLE, SHIT everywhere hit the fan.

  “Ohhah!” Sara entered, kicked the door shut behind her, dropped her book bag with sets of papers to be corrected.

  “What’s the matter, Sar?” Bobby had rarely seen her agitated.

  “I can hardly believe it!” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “Two of my students ...” Her arms shot out, palms up, beseeching. “Second graders! With marijuana joints! In my classroom!”

  “You’re kid—”

  Bobby began to make light of what Sara had just said. She cut him off. “If you ever design a town’s school layout, separate the levels. That’s the problem. With the middle school next door, all their problems become ours. Joints in second grade!”

  “Were they going to, you know, I mean, second graders ... They wouldn’t know how to smoke them, would they?”

  “That’s not the point. Oh! This entire town is out of control.”

  It was only their third full day back. Problems had begun immediately upon their returning to the Old Russia Road cottage.

  “Where’s Ty?” Sara had asked Tony.

  “Ah ...” Tony had stalled.

  “We’ve got something very special for him,” Bobby had added. “And something for you from Granpa.”

  “But Ty has to sit down for this,” Sara had said.

  “He split,” Tony had said. “He freaked out. Some people from your old office, Al and Jane, dropped by and they recognized him. He freaked out and split.”

  “Aw ...” Bobby had opened his suitcase, taken out the letter from
Phillip, the picture of Ty’s little girl. “I need to get these to him.”

  And the next evening, the call from Linda, after Tony had left with the photo of Jessica: “He’s developed another pulmonary embolism.” There was frustration and sympathy in her voice.

  “I thought that couldn’t happen with the heparin. And coumarin.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t but it can,” Linda said. “His doctor thinks they can control it. He said it may not even be a new one but the first one breaking apart. It’s very small on the X-ray.”

  Bobby put his hand to his head. “I—I can’t come back right now. I mean, I will if ...”

  “I don’t think it’s that serious, Bob. But they’re going to keep him in the hospital until it clears up.”

  Bobby stayed within earshot of the phone on the fourth and fifth. He read, watched TV, tried to think of a way to sell his crop, tried to define to himself what was indeed his crop, dozed on and off. On the fourth CBS News told of the failure of the U.S. government’s clemency program for draft resisters, and of a Khmer Rouge massacre at Ang Snoul, Cambodia. Little else was mentioned about fighting in Southeast Asia. On the fifth NBC showed aerial views of Phuoc Long Province and Phuoc Binh and warned of the impending collapse of that besieged city only sixty miles northeast of Saigon. Then on the sixth came the announcement of the fall of the entire province including the provincial capital. To Bobby this was startling. Until the day before he had seen no mention of a major offensive, or even a major build up. Phuoc Binh was a provincial capital, a regional center. Not since the Nguyen Hue Offensive in the spring of 1972 had a major city been lost—and that one, Quang Tri, was 400 miles from Saigon.

  Public and media debate erupted. Bobby talked to his grandfather. The old man was again doing well. Still Bobby stayed by the phone, by the TV. From the seventh to the tenth all the major networks carried stories about President Ford’s Viet Nam “concern,” then his “consideration” of emergency aid to South Viet Nam, then congressional opposition to that aid and State Department doomsday scenarios if the aid wasn’t forthcoming. Amid the electronic reportage there was little mention of the fate of the civilian or military human beings of Phuoc Long—province and city—who’d been pounded by tens of thousands of rounds of communist artillery, crushed by a hundred Soviet T-54 tanks. And there was little mention of the three weeks of intensive fighting in which the out-manned and outgunned South lost 4,550 soldiers and were finally overrun by the NVA’s 4th Corps infantry.