by Diane Munier
“He didn’t make it happen. He let it happen,” Cap said. “But he told me there’s no difference.”
I understand why he had to go—had to fight for a better father. I understand the pull of the confessional, the way he maneuvered us through. He tried to find a way to be worthy. He’d been the forgiver but not the forgiven. He would not forgive himself.
So I keep loving him. I just keep loving him. And love covers a multitude of sins.
Vietnam is a war whose success is measured in body counts. Not land. They count the dead. They say more Cains die than Abels. I do not know as the stars grow dim on this very fine trip of ours.
I can’t base hope on death.
I can’t.
I sleep. Some. Knock, knock on our window. It’s morning. It’s the owner of the station. Sorry. We are moving on. But we need gas and what you got there? Potato chips? Best breakfast I ever had. Can we use the restroom? Thanks for the key. We pee.
The air, it’s hotter here. I feel its bake and this is how it shines in a gas station parking lot side of the road. Oh the light is different here. I know.
“No it’s not,” Cap says.
But it is.
“How long did we sleep?” Cap says.
“As long as a crocodile,” Abigail says and we laugh.
She holds a cupcake toward me and I take it and wash it down with orange soda.
We pile in and take off and I look out the window and this Darnay is threading through hills. Mountains, Cap calls them.
Mountains. There is a blue, almost silver. Oh the light is definitely different here.
Darnay Road 66
I ride with my head out the window, the hot, hot wind in my face, some of my long, long hair escaping my braids, the thin band I wear like a squaw holding the errant strands back. I have waited to breathe here.
The light is not only silver, but gold. It’s farmland here.
“This is our pasture,” Cap says.
I’m not used to them having anything, not really, even though I’ve known about this place and how it took Easy from me most of the days before he went overseas.
But this valley is what they left when they showed up around Darnay like they’d ridden there on those bikes, those stripped down frames with the small tires.
Easy and Cap’s grandfather died right before they shipped Easy to Nam. Easy went home at the behest of a legal letter and he didn’t tell Cap until after.
When Cap found out he was mad and so was I but neither of us could hold a grudge on Easy.
“I’m tired of you deciding everything for me,” Cap said to Easy when he finally showed up at big white with two stinking days of leave left.
“He left us the farm,” Easy said. That’s all.
Farming is what Cap wanted to do.
But the grampa didn’t leave it out of love, there was no love, but revenge on two no-good sons that Easy chased off the land like a cowboy routing rustlers.
The sheriff wouldn’t help him evict two good-old-boys but there was a younger deputy whose brother was in Nam. He helped Easy get the uncles to move off the property and they did it at night and John Wayne style. That’s all Easy would say.
But when Easy deployed they came back like two sneaky low-lives and burned the old farm house to the ground.
“If you survived a spinal injury and shrapnel in your leg to come home and be shot by your two…hillbilly uncles…,” I said two days ago over the phone.
He laughed. He laughed at that.
There is a lightness in his laugh. In his voice. Almost getting killed has saved him, I think. I hope, now that he’s lived.
He bought a camper and parked it near the rubble and he started to clear the mess.
“Why ain’t you here?” he said.
“I have to graduate,” I said. That was the deal I made when I moved myself to public. Granma said I must graduate and I said if she’d let me move, I would. At the end of freshman year my religion teacher at Bloody Heart said how troubled I was and she sent me to guidance. Well I was troubled that people could be so cruel and so petty. I was troubled that they could file into Mass with such solemn attitudes and harass someone in their spare time. I outlived that, but when it died down I found I didn’t want to be there anymore. I outgrew Bloody Heart. I grew away.
“But your prom…,” Sister said in the last counseling session I had to endure, and this in response to my outpouring about losing faith not only in the leaders of my country, but in God Himself for allowing so much pain and suffering.
But your prom…as if some gaudy taffeta dress and banana curls in my hair could set it all right.
The gap between myself and my religious instructors was unbreachable.
Stanley was angry—and powerless. It was the last thing he did for me, making that sacrifice to pay the Sacred Heart tuition. He didn’t have the nerve to come back to Darnay Road and try, just try to force me to stay there.
So I got out and followed Cap over to George Washington. It was easier there. So easy. Not nearly the workload I was used to, barely any homework. No religious instruction. I flew through classes, got involved in some anti-war protests, especially after Kent State, and worked on the school-paper with less censorship, but not more room for important articles that might make someone think about more than the next game.
But I had Cap to sound off to. He wasn’t afraid to read or to think. He believed in non-violence, marijuana, communal living, which is what we had since he’d moved in with me and Granma after Easy left that first time, then he moved into Aunt May’s after Ricky died. Moved into Aunt May’s and pretty much into Abigail May’s room though he headquartered in the small bedroom-slash-sewing room next to Ricky’s old digs for all intents and purposes.
After Ricky died the rules didn’t matter. Not the useless ones.
Kindness prevailed. Helping each other won out. We weren’t worried about a million petty things. We ate together every night. At Granma’s. Cap taught May and Granma about rock and roll music. He gushed over their food. He moved their furniture and helped with anything, anytime. He became the man of two houses.
He made bread.
At the end of my senior year as a publicker, I went to Bloody Heart’s prom with Cap and Abigail. We dressed like hippies and we danced like crazies and none of it mattered.
I pull back into the car and we take a gravel road that winds back to a cove and a burned out shell of a modest house.
Cap whistles and we stop there and I see the camper sitting to the side under the big trees and I take off running, and knock and pull the door and the bed there is made neatly and Wonder bread and peanut butter sit on the table. And in the window, tied to the pull on the shade by its pink hair, that troll doll I gave him a million years ago and around its neck, my bracelet.
He’s not here.
I turn to Cap and he and Abigail are already getting back in the car and I say, “Wait for me,” and I lift my long skirt and run and get in and Cap drives back to the highway.
“He’ll be along here,” Cap says as we drive on the road, the last panting tongue of Darnay rolling me there, right to him.
We don’t go far, there’s a pasture and deeper in, I see him, small so far and he’s riding on a tractor dragging a claw through the green shoots. It’s him, his bare shoulders, his back. It’s Easy.
Cap pulls off the side of the road and honks and I think Abigail is screaming and laughing, but it’s me, it’s all me.
“Go get him Georgia,” Abigail says.
I get the door open and I don’t even close it. I take a few steps and reach the long rows and he’s seen me.
I have my arms out to balance myself and my skirt rubs against the green leaves of the plants on either side and he’s jumping off the machine.
He’s brown, well from Hawaii and a straw hat and jeans. He gets something off the tractor, a shirt he’s pulling on, and he pulls off the hat and puts it on the seat and he runs his hands over his hair a few times and heads
for me.
I’m leaping over the rows to get closer to him, then we’re nearly in the same aisle and I’m nearly running and so is he.
His smile. His arms wide. The sounds of coming together, my feet lifted off the ground, his arms so strong around me, him so strong, not weak, not in any way ruined.
His hand on the back of my head guiding me to his lips. His dry kiss. His wet kiss. His salty skin. His breath and voice and words. My name.
His face under my hands. His eyes. His eyes. His forehead against mine. His heart under my hand.
“Georgia.”
They call from behind us and he looks up, big grin and a wave, but his hand is quickly back on me. He was wounded and put on a ship, then flown to Hawaii. I couldn’t see him, touch him.
He was a hero, just like I knew, in the Cambodian invasion, a deserted camp seven miles over the border and some file boxes booby-trapped. He threw himself on a buddy when someone disturbed those boxes in the hopes they held important files.
Easy took shrapnel. Two others died. The soldier he protected was fine.
I know that’s why he put on the shirt. The force was to his back. Shrapnel near his spine. He was lucky, so lucky, and God does hear prayer.
“Georgia,” he says. “Ballerina.”
And I lift my face and kiss him. Easy.
Epilogue: 1973
The hum of the car, the heat from the summer day and my husband. I sit next to him, so close like he requires…we require and the wind moves our hair and my belly pulls this way and that as the baby moves. My eyes are closed, and Easy’s hand moves over my stomach. How many times my heart has knocked against his, and now this new one beating in me.
He’s laughing a little. This is the moving-est baby to ever knit itself together inside of its mother. I am eight months along and it was hard to leave my mid-wife but we plan to be back on the farm in time for the birth. Like I could miss it.
In the winter of seventy-one Granma and May came to Tennessee on a bus to see me and Easy married off. My granma said, “Lord have mercy, Easy,” when she saw the camper we were living in. That was a sore point, us living together before marriage. They came out quick to set things right. They had a long talk with Easy and I argued that we were getting married so what did it matter. Well I thought Granma was going to have a heart attack. But once we went to the church, even though it wasn’t Catholic, or Lutheran, but just a plain old church with a preacher who was married and had children like a regular person, well it was fine then. Granma softened right up and told Easy she had always loved him like a son and just wanted the best for her two children. Then we took her to the motel so she could lie down. I worried she’d think her work here was done. I knew it wasn’t. “I still need you,” I told her, not caring if I had to keep her on earth with my selfishness. Not caring what I had to use.
“Oh for goodness sakes you always did give me such a headache,” she said, and she smiled and I knew she wouldn’t go.
Once they were rested, Easy showed them where our new house would be. He had it staked off just for them so they could envision it. They were worried, Granma was, as the silver bullet, what we called our camper, was all she could really see. She said she’d feel better when there were four actual walls around us and a roof over our heads.
But May said she could see it. She said she knew Easy could do it.
And a year and a half later we have those walls and that roof. We are living in our new home built by Easy and before I got like this, by me working right beside him, and a little bit by Cap even though he and Abigail live together in Chicago as Abigail prefers the city where she auditions to do her twirl.
We have also been helped by a man Easy does carpentry with, and by various neighbors. Occasionally one of Easy’s army buddies will show and he’ll help for a couple of weeks then take off for a while.
It’s an underground house, fairly large, with three sides tucked into a bank of earth, only the front is open for viewing. It’s easy to heat from the woodstove in winter and stays cool in summer. It’s not much more than an open shell at present, but the plumbing is in, the lighting, so we make due and we’re so happy.
But I have to say, I’m a little hungry to see big white and big gray.
Once we get there, and I think I’ve hit about every disgusting bathroom between here and home, but once we see that first sign for Darnay Road, the tears well up and spill from me. Oh I know there are some dark things to remember. I know. But that’s home, right? It’s not all sunshine. If I keep it up I’ll have to write this down. I’m already freelancing for the Tennessee Regular.
We roll past Miss Little’s and I am looking out Easy’s window and holding his arm so tightly. I see big gray and I look across and there is my big white. Granma is standing on the porch, and May is just rising from one of the big soft chairs.
The light here is old time, the light from my whole life. It’s different here, threaded through the big trees and shaped by the tall houses. And the air, cut through with close life, and the tracks behind and the secrets brewing on Scutter. All that mixes with the wind from the river. This recipe that anchors me somehow.
The sounds, I did not know there was so much noise until Tennessee and the country and how still it is there, how I can hear nature shuffle. But here, it’s no big city but there are children playing on the street and a car going by…and the two-fifteen will breeze on through.
Aunt May holds Little Bit. Oh, that porch is not as big as I remember, is it? And big white, it’s tall, but not like a skyscraper. I’ve seen those now when we visited Abigail and Cap. There are bigger things.
And my granma. All the love in me. I am laughing and crying at once. Granma and May have their arms around me and I hold my dog, and Granma touches my stomach and we laugh. I am soon in a chair and Easy has his army bag and both of our things are in there. “Get the honey,” I remind him. I’m keeping bees and I’ve brought them some comb and two jars of honey each.
Easy is tall and strong and they are chattering at him and yes he’d take some tea and well he’s been building a house and yes he’s had plenty of work between carpentering and our farm.
While they go on about the honey and Easy brags on me, my hand reaches for Granma’s magazines stacked on the little metal table next to her chair. They are well-read as ever. I look over at big gray and just then a group of boys whizz past and one or two have their gloves hanging from their handlebars and one a bat tucked under his arm. And I am taken back, back.
I feel what it was like and I think of them then, all of them, their skinny legs pumping and beat up tennis shoes strong on the pedals, or dragging on the ground. I think of them--the ones who have come home—Easy—and the ones who have gone home—Riley. Oh it wasn’t long ago. It’s still here, in the air, in this sun.
Easy says something about Granma’s grass needing cut and they laugh and he pulls a chair close to me and takes my hand while he talks to them. He is always aware of me and I of him. It is like that. And my little dog licks my face and trembles against my arm, especially when the baby kicks and we laugh.
“Is it good to be home?” Granma says and I smile and nod. I see that year and a half on her like someone took an eraser and faded her out just a little more. But my eyes trace her face and it’s enough cause I see love.
“I love you,” I say, and it’s embarrassing to blurt that, but it’s the truth. I love them. This.
This Darnay Road where I bloomed like a flower. Where I came awake and aware. Where I was loved and I fell in love. This is my endpoint, no matter where I go, how far, this is where I’ll pull from, these two women who’ve shown me the way, big white and big gray.
Easy leans over and kisses my cheek. “Would you like a cherry Bomb-Pop?”
I realize then, the Mr. Softie truck is right on cue.
Other Titles By Diane Munier
Me and Mom Fall for Spencer Available now as Kindle e-book:
The house next door to Sarah and her mother Mar
ie has been vacant since the murder that happened there when Sarah was ten. Their neighbor, Frieda, was like a second mother to Sarah and she died brutally and that event sends a paralysis over this sleepy neighborhood that hasn't lifted for seventeen years. Imagine Sarah’s surprise when the old place finally sells to an on-line buyer. She looks through the thick growth separating her house from the other and a wild man looks back. He’s thirty-seven year old Spencer Gundry. Once he shaves the beard and gets a haircut, he’s not hard to look at. Well Sarah’s mom doesn’t think so. And maybe she doesn't either. Problem is, Sarah has evolved into the neighborhood watchdog and she knows this tumbleweed Gundry has as many secrets as the house he owns.
Finding My Thunder Available now as Kindle e-book
The story takes place in the late sixties. Hilly Grunier has been in love with Danny Boyd since she was a kid telling scary stories on summer nights at the fire hydrant while Danny pulled close on his bike. But when Danny is thirteen, their friendship ends when he and his brother Sukey have a vicious fight over Hilly. Years pass, and Hilly carries a secret and growing love as she watches Danny rise athletically to the top of their school’s food chain. He even dates the prom queen and rumor says they are engaged. Now Danny has graduated and shows up in her dad’s shop looking for some temporary employment until the army picks him off for Vietnam. He’s thrown aside his college scholarship and the golden girl. He seems to be searching for something new before he leaves town. He seems to be searching for her. Hilly can’t let him go overseas without showing him how she feels. But once he’s gone, her own battle intensifies. It’s a long road to finding her thunder.
My Wounded Soldier Book One: Fight for Glory Coming Soon
1866
All across the country men are drifting home from the war. But when Tom Tanner musters out, he doesn’t plan to go home. He has been working in the brickyard in Springfield trying to save enough money to buy a rig and head west. He’s not expecting his father to show up and plead with him to return to the farm. After the horrible loss of his older brother, Tom doesn’t feel worthy of the family’s company. But his guilt won’t allow him to cause them more pain and so he goes home for one last visit. It’s hard to find normal around the folks. The work of harvest provides the perfect distraction. Once the crops as in he’ll go so far away they’ll never have to look at him again. But his plans are challenged one day. Tom is working in the field when the neighbor boy, Johnny, comes running for help. What Tom finds at the neighbor’s home is a scene right out of the war. But it’s not just about killing. The Missus Addie Varn, is ready to birth. Tom wants to run, and he will come fall, but now he must roll up his sleeves and play midwife.