I didn’t. I left the unopened binder on the table in front of me.
“Of course, you know you’ll be receiving the death gratuity,” he said. The payout from the military if a soldier is killed overseas. Miles had mentioned it once in passing.
“Don’t let them try to give you the twelve thousand,” he said. “If I die over there, make sure they give you the full hundred thousand.”
To the casualty assistance officer I said, “Don’t let them give me the twelve thousand.”
He laughed.
“No,” he said. “You’ll get the full one hundred thousand.”
I learned that I’d have health insurance for another three years. Dental too. I’d also receive half of the Servicemembers Group Life Insurance policy every soldier buys into. Miles had called it winning the SGLI lottery. His parents and sister would receive the other half. Later I discovered that many widows call the SGLI payout “blood money.” They tuck the cash into low-yield savings accounts and pride themselves on never tapping into it.
“I haven’t touched that money,” these widows will tell me.
They smile as they say this and their cheeks flush, their meaning clear: they will not be bought off. But I felt none of their resentment. I saw the survivor’s benefits as continued marks of Miles’s generosity. I was strangely grateful to the military and I saw what people meant when they said the Army takes care of its own.
The casualty assistance officer slid a sheet of paper across the dining table. He removed his glasses and polished them with a cloth he pulled from his pocket.
“I’ll need you to sign this for me,” he said.
I looked at the form without touching the paper. “What is it?”
“It asks if you’d like to receive partial remains.”
“Partial remains?”
“If they find anything after the funeral.”
He put his glasses back on.
“Body parts. That sort of thing.”
I imagined a tooth, a sliver of bone, bits of Miles trickling in over time. I wondered if it would be worse to lose him that way, in pieces.
I declined.
The casualty assistance officer filed the form in his binder, stood, and shook my hand.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said.
More people arrived the next day. The mother of a soldier in the unit who lived in Tampa. A soldier from the unit’s rear detachment. Friends. Neighbors. I thought often of the second pilot. Who had been with Miles at the end? When Amy McNish finally called, I crept away to the back room.
“I have the name of the other pilot,” she said.
“Is he alive?”
Amy was quiet. “No.”
I thought of all the soldiers in the unit. I wondered who would hurt the most.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“Tell me.”
“It’s John Priestner.”
I was standing when she called but then I was on my knees. The rough fibers of the carpet rubbed my skin raw and a wail escaped from me. How was this possible? John was one of the most experienced pilots in the unit. He had fifteen hundred flight hours and two deployments behind him. John should have kept Miles safe.
“Do you want me to tell Teresa?” Amy said.
“Yes,” I said. “Please tell her. Tell her to call me.”
Teresa called the night we drove to the airport to pick up another close friend.
“How are you doing?” Teresa said when I answered.
“I’m okay.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Did you hear anything about the crash?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I heard maybe weather.”
“Did you hear they were trapped inside?”
I shook my head but could not speak. Please stop talking, I thought. Please stop telling me this.
“The helicopter caught on fire,” Teresa said. “They were burned. Our boys were burned.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did. It was unimaginable. So I didn’t imagine it. I tried to let it go, let the information pour through me, no filtration, nothing to stop it. I was a sieve, wide-wired. If I could prevent myself from knowing, from letting that knowledge lodge in my brain, then I could keep myself sane. But if I listened to Teresa, if I took in what she was saying, then the magnitude of what had happened would destroy me.
At the airport my friend folded his tall frame into the backseat while Teresa talked on the phone about what came next. I wasn’t listening. Or I was listening but it was flowing through me so that I held on to none of it. Nothing but the image of Miles burned to dust.
10
The week after the notification I flew to Washington, D.C., for John’s funeral at Arlington.
“You don’t have to come,” Teresa said on the phone.
I stopped her before she could finish.
“Of course I’m coming.”
I drove straight to the wake from the airport and stopped on the steps of the funeral home when a girl looked up at me with John’s face.
“Megan,” I said.
She smiled. “My mom’s inside.”
I pushed open the glass doors to a dark entryway that was mostly empty and waded through the pools of light cast by lamps until I reached the chapel where everyone had gathered. I stepped in and the low murmur stopped. A man whispered to the woman next to him.
“That’s the other pilot’s wife,” he said.
The silence stretched out while I tried to settle my eyes on someone I knew and then there came a sudden rush. Soldiers stepped forward, pushed past one another, and scooped me into their arms. These were men from the unit, men who had known Miles. I pressed my face against the green cloth of their uniforms and everything about them reminded me of him—the shape of their frames, the low pitch of their voices. It was impossible to be next to those men and not think of Miles. Impossible that they should be there and he should be dead. The soldiers passed me from embrace to embrace until Teresa had her arms around me and there was nothing to do but stand together in our great sadness. When we stepped apart I saw the coffin at the front of the room. Closed. Of course. Teresa took me by the hand and led me to it. She knelt in front of the casket and I knelt beside her. When she raised her hand to lay her palm against the flag draped over the coffin, I held my hand at my side as long as I could. I hated to touch the metal, hated to imagine what lay inside. When I managed to reach out and touch the coffin with the tips of my fingers, I shook with the horror of it. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath and when I raised my head, Teresa looked at me.
“You okay, honey?” she said.
I nodded.
We stood and I circulated through the room to speak to the soldiers I knew. One squeezed me close before stepping back to hold me at arm’s length.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said.
I could feel the heat that radiated from him and I wanted to step away, but I did not know how. Instead I let him hold my hands and stroke my hair, conscious that I had become porous and malleable, easily breached.
The morning of John’s funeral was already soaked with rain by the time I arrived at the chapel. The space inside the cathedral was viscous with humidity as I found a seat in a pew near the back. I took shallow breaths of air that smelled of damp cloth and incense while I half-listened to the service. Mostly I was bracing myself. I knew the Mass was only a prelude to the real event, the interment, the part where the earth would open up and swallow John whole. My body stiffened with the weight of my anxiety, and when the service ended I moved with the current that flowed out of the chapel, pulling in mourners like branches beside a swollen river. We swept behind John’s coffin and spilled into the parking lot, then drove through the rain to a plot of fresh earth in Section 60 where the combatants of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. There are female soldiers there, though the majority are men, husbands and fathers and brothers and sons, each laid to rest in that crowded f
ield, their lives come down to a plot not much bigger than a man. I realized that somewhere—elsewhere—there were lovers and wives and children whose minds were thick with those men as Teresa’s mind was thick with John and as my mind was thick with Miles. The memories of those men existed even though their bodies lay beneath the autumn fog, and it occurred to me that one day when the details have faded, when I can no longer recall if it rained the day we buried John or what shoes I wore or the color of my coat, Miles’s memory will still be in me, fresh and alive and fully formed. I thought of my mother, to whom I had imagined my father was forgotten, and I knew in a way I had never known that she must still carry his memory tucked inside her, just beneath the skin, beating with the rhythms of her own heart.
They buried John with full military honors. The sound of rain pinged off the white tent stretched over our heads, and I shook as the guns fired the final salute. Teresa stood by the coffin, her arms around her daughters, and I watched closely so that I might know how to behave when my turn came.
* * *
The first time I flew into the Amarillo airport, the smell of manure hit me at the gate. I followed Miles to the baggage claim, trying to breathe through my mouth.
“What is that smell?” I asked his aunt on the way to the car.
“That,” she said, “is the smell of money.”
It was there again when I arrived for the funeral—the smell of money: fresh and green and processed through the gut of a cow. I met my mother, Heather, and Annabelle in Dallas, and when we reached Amarillo Miles’s mother hugged all of us. She hugged me last and longest, as if we were two unlikely members of the same team. I was silent on the drive away from the airport and up the Texas Panhandle, too stunned by my sorrow to speak. In the distance I saw the lights from oil rigs that pump all night. They flashed on and off, signaling in the dark, as we followed the route Miles’s casket had taken earlier in the week, carried in the back of the Hendersons’ pickup. People had lined the highway along the route, waiting in the cold autumn night for the coffin to pass so that they might welcome their Texas son home.
The day before the funeral a neighbor who rode in the rodeo circuit brought horses to the Hendersons’ ranch to take us riding. He hoisted Heather into the saddle first.
“I hope I don’t fall off this thing,” she said.
He gave Annabelle a boost and then heaved me up. When we all sat squarely in our saddles, he led us through the pasture and across the far hills. I surprised myself at the easy way I sat in the saddle. I had always been a nervous rider; I clung tightly to the saddle horn and jerked the reins. I kept my legs stiff and my back too straight.
“Just relax,” Miles told me the first time we rode together. “Show the horse where you want to go. Here”—he kicked back with his heels—“and here.” He gently tugged the reins.
But that day before the funeral I was fearless. I worked the reins deftly. When the horse beneath me wanted to gallop, I let him open up. The ground pounded under his feet and I tipped my head back and tilted my face to the sky. I felt Miles everywhere, in the wind that streamed past, in the grass that bent below the hooves. He was there in the alfalfa smell of the horses and the smooth leather of the reins. He was in the open land and the wide expanse of the sky. I turned and faced into him like a wildflower following the sun.
“There were times that week when you weren’t there,” Annabelle said later. “Like that day we went riding. I looked over at you and thought, ‘She’s not even here.’ ”
I was nowhere. And everywhere. I was disappearing, becoming part of the landscape, blowing into the yucca and mesquite and sage. If I rode hard enough, I thought, if I just kept moving, I might vanish into the air.
But I never managed it. I was never fast enough. Because the day ended and the night passed and the next day dawned, and I was still there. I rose early, showered, and brushed my hair. I dressed in front of the mirror, watching myself, and tried to memorize every moment of the day. Years later I would attend an art exhibit in New York where an entire room was dedicated to paintings of the artist’s lover on her deathbed. I would immediately recognize the impulse—not to chronicle the grimness of the lover’s death, as the exhibit implied, but to hold tight to her, not to let her go.
Though, in a way, I had already let Miles go. I had given the funeral home permission to cremate his remains before I arrived, and by the time I made it to Texas he was gone. I told myself it was better that way, not to have to touch his coffin as I had touched John’s, knowing what was inside.
On the morning of the funeral, we followed the procession to a low spot beneath the trees on the Hendersons’ property. I walked to my seat numbly and watched the sky blown clear of clouds as a pastor stood on a platform made of cypress wood and talked about God. I wanted none of it—none of his smooth words, his easy eulogies, the facile balm of his faith. When he finished, we stood and moved to an assembly of chairs facing a flagpole. The honor guard—young soldiers mostly, their faces like boys’—lowered the flag and folded it at right angles. They handed it to a colonel in white gloves who knelt at my feet. He presented the flag that had draped Miles’s coffin all the way from Iraq and I took the folded fabric in my hands. My hurt welled in me and threatened to stain the cloth. I cradled the flag in my lap as a bugler played taps, the notes rising high and clear in the morning air. Someone behind me pressed steadying fingers into my shoulders; I didn’t know who but I reached up and held on. From over the ridge a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” and Miles’s old horse rode down to the trees, his master’s boots backward in the stirrups.
“That’s how we do a cowboy burial,” Miles’s mother said when it was all over.
Afterward we gathered at the Hendersons’ home to eat brisket and drink lemonade, these strange rituals of death, and a woman with white hair and liver-spotted hands stopped me in the kitchen. She patted my arm as she spoke.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get married again.”
I smiled at her the way I smiled at everyone then and I turned politely away so she would not see how her words had sliced me open, a fish knife to the belly. The woman’s husband doddered in the kitchen, a paper plate clutched in his hand, and I knew she could not understand.
The Hendersons’ casualty assistance officer took me aside.
“These are for you,” he said.
He pulled a black velvet pouch out of his pocket and placed it in my hand.
“What is it?”
“They’re Miles’s dog tags.”
When he had stepped away, I unknotted the black cord and poured them into my hand, rolling the disks over to feel the lightness of the thin metal. They were not burned. They were smooth, clean, polished. In a part of my mind I was not yet ready to acknowledge, I knew that the dog tags came by way of Miles’s body. For me to hold them in my palm, they must have been lifted from around his neck. Someone would have had to clean them up before sending them home.
The day wore down and peopled trickled out. Someone fixed me a plate of barbecue and beans. Miles’s young cousin pointed to me and asked his mother why my face was so red.
“Sometimes when people are very sad,” she said, “they cry for a long time.”
In a quiet moment I escaped with Annabelle and Heather to Miles’s old bedroom. A soldier who had known Miles at Fort Rucker followed us and we spread out across the room. We talked about Miles and flight school, and after a time the soldier told us the story of his own helicopter crash. He’d been in the back of a Black Hawk, he said, and there had been fog. The pilot had pulled too far back on the cyclic and the nose of the helicopter rose. The Black Hawk dipped forward and rocked back, and the soldier knew they were going down. Often in Black Hawk crashes the transom, the middle part of the aircraft that supports the rotors, will fall and crush the crew in the back. The soldier knew this; he was sure he was going to die.
“And you know what I thought of in those last seconds?” he said. “I thought of my wife.”
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br /> The fields had gone brown with drought and the dry grass crunched under our feet as our small group made our way across the pasture the next morning. The wind turned our cheeks red and carried the whinny of horses from across the corral. We headed for a low space of land where cottonwoods grew, and when we reached the trees we stopped.
“Here, do you think?” Terry asked.
I had ridden there with Miles the first time I visited the ranch; the last time he rode with his family he brought them to the same place. Miles had snapped a few photos. They would come home with his things from Iraq.
“This is right,” I said.
The dry edges of the cottonwood leaves rubbed together in the breeze and sunlight filtered through the branches. Miles’s father took a few steps away from the group with the bag containing the ashes and placed himself downwind. He opened the bag and I closed my eyes. The ashes made a whooshing sound of sand being poured from a bucket and I looked back in time to see the lighter bits catch in a current of air. They blew like dust across the high grass and it was easy to imagine Miles had simply disappeared into the wind.
11
The military has a term for everything that comes after a traumatic incident: right of the boom, the boom being the moment of the incident itself—an IED blast, a sniper shot, a helicopter crash. This is how I began to think of my life—right of the boom—as all the parts of military protocol fell into place.
My casualty assistance officer called in early December.
“I got the shipment in,” he said. “Your husband’s things from Iraq. I’m going to need to bring these over to you.”
He pulled into my garage on a windy afternoon with the two tough bins loaded into his car. He lifted the smaller of the two bins from his trunk and set it on the concrete floor. He needed my help with the second, and together we maneuvered the plastic container out of the backseat.
“Where do you want these?” he said.
Unremarried Widow Page 10