Darnay Road

by Diane Munier

  We stop. He does. I do. “It hasn’t changed,” he says. “I think I dreamed that house. My dream house.” He laughs but it’s bitter.

  “What happened to your dog when you left?”

  “Disbro took him to the country and gave him away. No one around here would want him. The old man mistreated…that dog. Cap would cry. I’d try to get him to turn it on me.”

  “The dog?”

  “No. His…anger.”

  He holds my hand so tight. I look at him in profile as he stares at that house. I see it now. I see what he did in his family.

  “You’re brave,” I say. I mean it. He has always been the brave one. Forged into a hero. It’s so deep in him he can’t be anything else. He can’t be a coward. Like his dad.

  It worries me and comforts me all at once. He will be heroic when he goes to war. But it will be what he must do.

  And he wonders why I love him…so fiercely.

  I work my hand free of his and I still have that ring in my other fist and I let him watch me put it on my finger.

  “What’s it mean?” he says.

  “I’ll never take it off,” I say, chin up, not blinking just staring. At him.

  He holds my hand and touches that ring. He’s not looking at that old house anymore. “I get back…I’ll give you another. If I know you’re waiting…if you want to…you have to promise you’ll go ahead and do things. I won’t hold it against you. Just…when I get back…if there’s someone else….”

  I start to pull away and he holds more tightly to my hands, “Hear me out Georgia. If something happens while I’m gone…you’ll have to tell me and I won’t blame you. I’ll do whatever you say. Just…don’t sit around. And miss things.”

  He looks at me so sincerely and my hand with the ring works free and I touch his face. I know he likes this, when I touch him this way. He closes his eyes.

  “The only thing I’ll miss is you,” I say.

  Part 3: 1970

  Darnay Road 64

  Long white rows of headstones fill the landscape, each marker representing a life…someone’s hope…someone’s heart.

  The ground is spongy from so much rain and this day is gray. Like Good Fridays usually are. This is a place where men who have performed military service are laid to rest.

  Our small party has broken up. Granma is already in the car with Aunt May. Well she took it so hard.

  I am determined to see a crack in the sky so the sun can wink at me, but I can’t find that seam of light even though I know it’s there.

  I don’t feel numb. I feel peace. The difference is vast.

  The sun does wink then. I’m no different than any of these others laid here in silence like seeds planted in the earth while their lives continue to bear fruit through those who like me, in distant groups peppering this landscape, sow them in reverence and hope for the day.

  Did his life touch me?

  I’m here, aren’t I?

  1971

  In the morning, we practice graduation and Cap smokes a cigarette while we walk two by two. He hides the smoke when we walk past the teacher.

  Then later it’s the last day, last day and exams.

  If I could laugh, I’d be laughing right now. Cap is looking out the window and I know he’s not finished. The history final hasn’t been hard but it required preparation. He knows some history. He reads. But the way they teach it here, in public school, you have to memorize dates. I think that’s so you can sound like you know something so they can feel good about themselves. But history is one big understatement. You read that a battle took place—the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War One, Two, Korea, Vietnam, and all that will come after. But you don’t read the millions of stories, of children barely grown….

  The ocean is just grief, all the tears, noise that swells beneath the canon, the strafing, the M16, the ocean is the hum that builds and builds and calls on God and rails on Him and quiets down and swells again…it’s an endless psalm.

  I look out the window too. Like Cap. My test is finished. I think it’s an A because I studied. But here is history. My history. Long rows of letters dotting my landscape like tombstones, each marking a life, my life on Darnay and Easy’s life on a firebase in Vietnam. Here is my history loving, fiercely loving, holding him alive in that love. Holding him in my love and begging God with the devotion of a nun, novenas and supplication and rosaries and fasting. Oh God. I am over the altar now, I am laying my face on the white linen there.

  We wear the flat caps and the flowing gowns. We move our tassels. Cap moves mine and I move his.

  We did it. Whatever we’ll be in this life, it won’t be high school dropouts. But there were times he nearly dropped out. Or I did.

  I wouldn’t let him. Granma wouldn’t let me. And Abigail May wouldn’t let either one of us. Something about carrying on. It was what he would have wanted.

  Really? I never knew him that way. Let’s not change him because he can’t defend himself. He was just a kid, figuring it out. He was hard on us sometimes. But he wasn’t bad. He didn’t know, didn’t have a dad to show him what to do. But wanting us to carry on? He never had to think about it.

  We stand for pictures, Granma and Aunt May. Aunt May’s develop in our hands. Oh look at you. Oh look at me. I’m so serious. We are serious. Even our humor is a weighty attempt…to be here.

  We leave in the morning. Bare morning. Alice May barely awake and grumbling. You never went to sleep and you pack light. You live light. Just barely. I have made decisions and what I need is more than what I want.

  Aunt May’s old car will make it. We’ll ride it away from the solid things--Aunt May saying good-bye and Granma sound asleep. My note lies on the kitchen table. “I know you said to be sure and wake you up….”

  And the extra ten dollars sitting on top of my purse--if I had tears, they would fall about now. They would splash on my hands and hold me to this fleeting moment.

  But I carry Little Bit across the street and kiss her one more time and hand her to Aunt May. “Be good,” I tell her, not Aunt May but my little trembling dog that has slowly become more hers than mine.

  We get in, me in the back with my stuff. Cap and Abigail in front and one glance at Aunt May, big gray behind her, big white calling to me for a kiss at least and Darnay Road carries us a few hundred feet…and lets us go.

  Darnay Road 65

  Abigail is already saying, “We there yet?” then she laughs but not the old laugh, the new laugh that is loud and quick and…over.

  No one seems happier to be out of school than Abigail May. Our last year was particularly brutal. At least I had Cap at George Washington. Abigail was pretty much alone. She hadn’t really gotten close to anyone once I left. Well the friends she had just fell away.

  They tried. She says they tried. They attended Mass for Ricky and they came to the funeral, walking in and past.

  Solemn. Death had touched them. Ricky—he was them, even if older, it didn’t matter. His picture was in the glass case. Ricky excelled.

  Abigail didn’t cheer and she barely passed her classes. She didn’t go to sock-hops, she didn’t try out for the play. She didn’t twirl. She was letting her hair grow out, she tied it back. She did go to prom. Cap on one side of her, me on the other. We tied ribbons on our feet and in our hair and pretended it was fun.

  Then she got a new cut right before our trip, a long shag.

  “Like Jane Fonda?” I said.

  “Like myself,” she had answered.

  She made it through. What is it called, that loss of innocence…turning into an adult. That’s it. It was always the goal. No one can tell you, no one knows. They hope it will happen naturally, but when it’s quick—the turning--you’re dazed for a while—you’re unpredictable. No one has known you this way before. Including you. You’re not sure you can do it—be grown up. You don’t know if you’ll shout or scream or get in line or break the line, the rules. You don’t know.

  “We fight,” former
President Johnson had said. “We will not be defeated.”

  By the time our Darnay boys went to Vietnam thirty-eight thousand were already dead. By 1970 almost no one here wanted their war—two-thirds of Americans didn’t.

  But since sixty-nine President Nixon had a plan, an initiative. Our soldiers were training the South Vietnamese—primitive farmers—to take over the war. We were going to have Nixon’s ‘peace with honor.’ Nixon was slowly bringing American soldiers home.

  Half a million troops were in-country by sixty-nine. Nixon reduced that to over three hundred thousand by seventy. But the handwriting was on the wall. There wouldn’t be a victory. An exit strategy was designed by well-manicured hands. Peace talks were taking place in Paris. It would be a hand-off between a gigantic green machine and a herd of water buffalo.

  The anti-war movement had reached Vietnam loud and clear. Largely, the soldiers just wanted to end it. They just wanted to go home and marry their girls and see their babies and not be the one to take a bullet while they turned over…a lost cause.

  In those same years Abigail’s mother got sick and came home to big gray. Then Ricky got in trouble with the law, with Disbro and they could go to jail or he of the unwithered good hands well able to hold a weapon could go in the army. Next thing we knew Ricky was in basic then on his way to Vietnam.

  Who gets killed day one in-country? Not Ricky. Not this boy that most things came naturally to. Not this angry son of a father who had died in Korea.

  But yes, our boy. And several hundred others over time. Casualties of day one in a war of many a thousand days. Ricky Brody, meant to marry some girl who graduated Sacred Heart and lived close to Darnay Road. He was meant to have a big Catholic family and get a pot-belly and a bald head and join the Knights of Columbus and run a booth in the school picnic every summer. And work for the phone company. He was meant to have sons who would ride their bikes up and down Darnay and play ball in the field all summer. He was meant to have daughters who snuck out at night to solve mysteries…to be mysteries. He was meant to outlive his anger.

  If Ricky could die, anyone could.

  But you can’t kill a soul. I couldn’t love Ricky, not in the way he thought he wanted. But I wanted him to live, no, I expected it.

  Granma said it wasn’t me. She said it wasn’t me. I didn’t send him out to break the law to get so drunk and ride through the shopping center and have marijuana in the truck and pee on that cop’s leg. All I did was say no, all I did was tell him I could never feel that way about him. I told him I was in love with Easy. It would only ever be Easy.

  Some days, after Abigail’s mom was in remission, after she was done being stoic and strong, and Ricky was buried under the earth away from the sun, after all of that there were days when Aunt May couldn’t get out of bed. She read “I’m Okay, You’re Okay,” and she read her bible. I sat on her bed, one side of her, Abigail on the other, Little Bit curled under Aunt May’s arm like she’d found a higher calling than just amusing me.

  “Cain will kill Abel,” May said. “Both sons. Both born to the same mother. Both needing milk. Who do you hate? Who do you blame?”

  It was mostly about Ricky. She worshipped him, Granma said. When she talked like this, she made Abigail cry.

  “Well I blame Cain, plain and simple,” I said.

  But I thought Aunt May was pretty brilliant anyway. She wasn’t talking jibberish. She had a theory, that’s all. She had to find her way. But I knew, for sure, she’d never let him go.

  I don’t know anything beyond Darnay and tracks and Scutter and the trestle and the avenue with the show, and Wellman’s. I don’t know anything beyond Bloody Heart and Mac’s and Moe’s and a whistle and a boy, and a boy, and a boy who made me see into a place thousands of miles away even when he lived on Scutter Road, even then.

  But now I’m traveling and it’s this new world. New to me.

  “Nothing is longer than traveling to Florida,” Abigail May says blowing through her lips. “Thank God we’re not going there.”

  No, we’re not going there. She’s trying to smoke now. The window is down and her hair whips around. I watch her and I smile a little. She takes a puff then gives the smoke to Cap and I think of how Easy taught me to smoke once, in this very back seat and my hand rubs over the worn threads.

  A hundred years ago.

  Well three. Many letters and boxes mailed, cookies packed in popcorn. Cookies and popcorn and stubborn love.

  I think of him that last night, the very last between his six months at Fort Ord and before he went over to Nam. He came all the way to big white, to Darnay Road to be with me for two precious stinking days of bliss and sorrow and hoo-ray and boo-hoo.

  He had this sense of mission then, and I was first on the list.

  He loved me, in my formerly pink room, the Barbie Game buried deep in my closet, the pink radio on my shelf, the ring on my finger--a small diamond now, the opal on a chain around my neck.

  Yes, I’ll marry you. When you get home I will.

  I gave him my heart as he moved past, like a train rushing through. I slipped that beating red into his hand, madly and passionately, it couldn’t be stopped as we barely started…big white had a heartbeat, the telltale heart, in my room, in my arms, in my bed creaking and hitting the wall. It was us now, not asking permission, beyond them, love had carried us there, there. “Georgia,” he said, “Georgia.” He gasped, he cried. I had walked into his heart, into the deepest chamber I knelt there and took root there, half stubborn, half weak, but sure and certain, I gave him everything. All I had.

  I groan when I think of it and I think of it all the time, even in the middle of class, even in the seconds before they gave me my diploma. At a grave. During sermons or meals or movies or riding in this car.

  Now, especially now, I think of it. I think of him standing there, in my room, his body grown and hardened and scarred and beautiful. I think of him. I think of him.

  The tires hum beneath us, and a road whose name I do not know, carries us along. It’s all Darnay, all of it, one running into another and another and a country…and a dream.

  These United States of America. My love. My home.

  “Should we stop?” Cap asks me in the mirror and it’s hills and dark skies and stars that break apart…over a valley…and make me hope.

  “Up to you,” I say. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

  He shakes his head. “It’s not so far. You say.”

  I lean forward. My face near him. “It’s different here,” I say. “It’s already different.”

  He smiles. “I don’t know…if anything’s that different.”

  Abigail is asleep, her small head right there on Cap’s shoulder. I touch her hair, still soft, like silk. I feel for the little bump at the top and it makes me smile.

  “If we pull over I can close my eyes and…,” he says. He didn’t sleep the night before.

  “All right,” I say, and I pull his long hair just a little before I sit back.

  Patience. It means surrender. It means I take my hands away. And I wait.

  And we pull off and the tires crunch gravel and pop those old tar bubbles we used to work with a stick. He finds a haunted gas station in the middle of this no-where and pulls in.

  Abigail May drops onto Cap’s lap and he tips back his head and I know his hand is on her. I slump a little and turn my head so I can see the stars. “Remember those old hook man stories?” I say.

  He laughs quiet. He is a quiet guy.

  I feel him so suddenly, so quick—Easy. Easy. I send him love, like I always do. I pray love…to him. For him. I look at the stars and there are no more tears. No more now. He understands.

  That time he held me against the tree. Right after I put on that ring and I was a bride making a vow, behind Aunt May’s with the frozen brown ground and the desolate chill.

  He gave me himself that boy. That wild boy.

  It’s Cap who told me one night. Easy’s mother was right. It was always Cap who w
ould eventually tell.

  His father visited Miss Little…all the time. He used that poor woman, he hurt her sometimes and Easy would fight him and try to make him come home. His father would get so drunk Miss Little would call. And they’d go for him—Easy and Cap would--and drag him home.

  Fourth of July families celebrated, all along, and happy birthday to me and I carried that cake.

  Explosions and sparkles and red, white, and blue. They got him out of her house into the yard. He would black out and come to and fight them. When he wasn’t kicking and punching he’d turn into dead weight.

  They got him as far as the yard and he struck Easy in the side and Easy kicked him. For a while he had his hands around the old man’s throat and Cap didn’t think he’d stop.

  Cap pleaded and he beat on Easy and finally Easy saw me and he jumped to his feet. His dad was coughing. Cap was crying.

  Easy ran me off and they worked to get their dad behind her house, half carried, half dragged him almost to the tracks and he came to again and started to swing and curse and he fell on the tracks.

  He fell right there. Train coming. Like providence. Like a period at the end of a long, sad story. Right there.

  “Get him up,” Cap said. “Get him up.”

  And Easy fought his father Carl, to get him up.

  But a terrible voice at the back fence over the barking dog. A terrible, “No.”

  They looked at her. She didn’t come outside often. She hadn’t been up much since she lost the baby.

  “Leave him,” she said.

  She was strong. She was certain.

  Leave him.

  Their father didn’t move and he didn’t try.

  And Easy stepped back. He held onto Cap who struggled and cried. But Easy was strong and he wouldn’t let Cap go. And the train came through…their lives.

  I remember Easy then. His hands, almost too big for his sinewy arms, everything figuring how to grow into everything, and this light in his serious eyes. I remember the bruises and how he could speak to me, bark at me almost, and I knew he didn’t mean it, I knew he was good.