PART II
The land mourns. Joy is withered away. Sun and moon darken, and when the stars withdraw their shining, the menace shall run up your walls and through your windows like a thief. Your old will dream dreams and your young will see visions, wonder in heavens and earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. This day is near in the valley of decisions.
—PROPHETS: JOEL REDUX
SO MANY HAVE COME BACK. THE DEAD, THE WOUNDED, THE incarcerated. The insane. People remark how the blacks are acting odd—and wonder privately whether the riots in the big cities could possibly spread out here, infecting our peace—because the women too are not the same, their quiet natures flavored now with a rare new anger. Then too there are the strangers streaming into town, trying to take all our jobs at the new paper plant. People are fractious.
A man took a walk on the moon the other day, “a giant leap for mankind,” he called it. But we walk around our own town like we don’t know the place, as if body snatchers might have snuck in overnight and replaced all of us with replicas. There are black wreaths on too many doors, broad ribbons of yellow plastic around oaks in almost every yard. Come home, come home, the yellow ones say. Go back, say the black ones, go back to where you came from and send my real baby home to me.
Mothers do not take their eyes off their children now. No use in arguing. Jimmy Smith’s war bride is dead. A killer is on the loose and people look in the eyes of neighbors they’ve known all their lives, and they wonder. Everybody on the street is a stranger.
People talk. When did that one get here? I wouldn’t let my sister or daughter out of the house with him. Heard they beat a fellow after the graveyard shift the other morning, dragged him off into a field and left him there. Argument over a lunchbox or something. Warning words scribbled across his forehead, words you wouldn’t want your mother to see. Poolroom squabbles turn into blood matches.
The Bible’s Lamentations have got nothing on us: The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel and hath increased in us mourning and lamentation. Our gates are sunk into the ground. The children and the sucklings swoon and their souls are poured out onto their mothers’ bosoms.
Our covenant is with a two-faced god of forgiveness and vengeance. Yes, He has led us and brought us into darkness all right. His hand against us is turned all the day. It is hard in times like these to remember that the Lord is good to them that seeketh him.
EIGHT
Billy Juell leaves his father’s house, passes through the broad meadow, and crosses over the wooden stile into Lemuel O’Brien’s pasture. The ancient stone wall separating the two farms has long since crumbled into a low, serpentine heap, rambling over the land like the ruined tunnel of an enormous drunken mole. Billy is overdressed in a green camo vest and long sleeves so that perspiration soon pricks the skin of his neck. The sky stretches over the valley white and even like a taut sheet, its bland cloud cover doing nothing to break the summer heat. Three boxes of number seven and a half shot protest with soft rattling against his chest. It is a half hour after dawn, and by the time he reaches the edge of the woods, a rivulet of sweat makes its way down his spine, clear to the waistband of his jeans.
The path through the woods is much the way he remembers it, but narrower, dark and littered now with shards of yellow light that make the trail seem to slither along like some living thing in pain. The quiet swells in his skull, broken by the occasional despondent hoo-ooh-who-who-who of a mourning dove calling from the glade ahead. Reaching the clearing, he stands still in trained reconnoiter, barest movement of eyes and head, the gun hanging stiffly from his shoulder, a Remington 870 that marked his fourteenth birthday. Beneath the cedars at the clearing’s edge is a battered paint bucket, a crude bench for watching. Billy situates himself there with a good view of the stand of wild sunflowers and elk thistle where he’s seen the doves feeding.
He has been home for a while now and still he and his family circle around one another like strangers thrown together randomly into a boarding house. Early on after he came home, he tried to take most meals with them, but his sister always watches him across the table. He catches her staring as if he is somebody she might recognize but isn’t so sure. His mother hovers over him and he is pretty sure his father hates his guts. Willis has all but quit talking to Billy. And once Uncle Carl arrived on the scene Billy can’t tolerate being in the house at all.
He’s been sleeping late most mornings, and when he wakes he lies upstairs in his bed and waits until all sound fades in the house below and everyone has gone about their day. He makes toast or a bowl of cereal and gets out of there fast. He was glad when old lady Slidell hired him on to keep the grounds at the mansion, but now she’s near-dead and he’s afraid he won’t know what to do with himself in the afternoons, once she croaks. This whole place seems festering with death. Cutting across the hillside a few minutes ago, he could see the cemetery below where the graveyard crew’s backhoe still sat beside a new-dug grave. They must be going to plant Jimmy Smith’s dead gook wife this morning.
When he rose before the sun today his hope had been that he could steal out before the family stirred, get in a little hunting, try to see if he couldn’t find his old self out here. God, what was wrong with him? Talking about finding himself and such—it was that counselor his mother dragged him to at the VA in Louisville. He’d agreed to one visit to get her off his back. Hopefully none of the guys at Pekkar’s would find out. Last thing he needs is them thinking he’s spending time with a shrink. Not that he’ll ever darken that fucking doctor’s or any other’s goddamn door again. Anyway, he thought he’d be safe getting out of the house early, and he tiptoed downstairs and filled a Mason jar with water. He slapped a slice of baloney between some bread and put it in a baggy and left the house, closing the door behind him without even a click. He almost screamed when he turned around and there stood Mo, right in his face. Sorry! said Mo. Sheesh! And the way she looked at him, as if she knew everything about him, all he’s done and seen—Billy tried to shake it off, but right there, just like that, the tremor took over his hands and now the day is probably fucked in terms of hitting anything. Don’t be sneaking up on people, he hissed at her. But then she grabbed his hand and held it in front of her face and when she saw the way it was shaking, she pressed it hard against her chest, staring at him the whole time, as if she was trying to grab something inside his head. He jerked his hand away from her and laughed and said, You little freak! And then he rubbed her stupid pixie haircut to cover for how bad he was shaking.
You want to help me with my memoirs? Mo had said then. She had dragged him over to the picnic table where her papers were spread out, little rock cairns holding them in place. I’m interviewing people, she said. You can be my first one. Billy shrugged and sat down. Most people in town have been taking one look at him and turning right around and heading in the other direction. He wished somebody would explain to them the difference between an honorable and dishonorable discharge. He hadn’t done anything almost every other grunt did at some point over there. Nobody had sure as shit asked to interview him. So, Shoot, he said to his sister, Ask me anything. And she took the cap off her cartridge pen, all serious, her mouth so bunched in a tight little o it nearly broke his heart.
To save his life he cannot remember the questions she asked. Fragments of the things he said rattle around in his head now as he sits in the glade watching the doves feeding on thistle and wild sunflower heads. First, he told her, people need to get it straight: I was separated with honor. The other day Alden Wilder saw me a half a block away and he crossed the street. And him Uncle judge’s best friend.
He told her about flying out on a medevac, the way the nurses made him lay on a stretcher. He yelled at them, he remembers the yelling, telling them he wasn’t some Section 8 nut job, and the way they looked at him with their wet, tired eyes. They told him they didn’t think he was crazy, that everybody on the plane had to be on a stretcher. So Billy had lain in the back of that hospital. Ye
ah, he told Mo, those C-141s are like a big-box hospital with wings—all the way across the ocean. He was back there with some bad cases. One guy had both legs gone, both arms. Another one’s eyeballs fried straight out of his head, stone blind. Burns all over his face, breathing through a plastic tube. Rows and rows of them. Then there was me. Mo didn’t get the joke when he told her that if they’d had Dr. Frankenstein on board he could have assembled one good whole body out of all the parts that were somewhat intact. Nobody talked. All the way to Los Angeles.
His sister must have asked him what he remembered most about the place, because now he is thinking of the flies. Flies over there big enough to carry off a chicken leg. Imagine what three or four hundred of them working together might do, he told her. That’s what he said to a thirteen-year-old girl. Her face got all blurry and not like the face he knew, but he couldn’t stop himself, and he said, Oh, yeah, and I guess you don’t forget the smell of the bodies. Billy and his friends called it hamburger meat. Hey, somebody would say, sure was a lot of hamburger meat out on the road today. Because that’s what it reminded you of, when they’d been laying out there in the sun and the heat for six, eight days.
He hadn’t meant to tell her about the dream, how over and over again when he closed his eyes, he found himself captured during a night patrol. The gooks always took him to what everybody called the Hanoi Hilton. And in the dream, when he got to the prison, his little sister was already there. They had you there in the room next to mine, and whenever they came in to question me, they would start working on you. Trying to make me talk through your screaming.
She must have asked him about the black guy. The one with the bad heart. Oh, DeAngelo, Billy said. DeAngelo Blessing was his name. He was Billy’s friend. DeAngelo wasn’t afraid of gooks, and Billy was. Billy wasn’t afraid of snakes, and DeAngelo was. They had worked out a system to save each other’s ass. He had no recollection what the fight between them had been about.
And maybe Mo said something then like, Was it worth it? Or was he glad he went? Glad. After that about the road meat and the torture and the flies? Glad to be part of defending his country? she had said. Who feeds these kids that kind of bullshit? Billy wonders, watching the doves peck devotedly at the seeds. They’re not going to be able to recall this one with pride, the way they’ve talked themselves into for every other war, he told her, as if she would know what he meant. They’re not going to know what to do with this one. Not for a long time.
That was when he looked up and saw his father standing in the kitchen doorway. How long had he been listening with that disappointed, unmoving face? Billy had stood up from the picnic table and flung the rifle over his shoulder and walked toward the ridge.
A GRASSHOPPER CLICKS AN ARC in front of him, and Billy thinks of Paco snapping his teeth at empty air, the dog forgetful that already and always he would never catch the voracious things, but never failing to try anyway. Maybe Billy should check with Levon Ferguson, see about that bloodhound bitch that was about to whelp. Maybe one in the litter has Billy’s name on it. A little girl this time, maybe. Say what you want about Levon—and Billy wouldn’t trust him any further than he can throw him—but the man knows hunting dogs.
The doves are joined at the stand of thistles by three crows, darkly comical in their shiny black suits, compared to the doves’ soft colors and gentle demeanor. One of the crows scratches at a low hillock on the ground, and Billy remembers suddenly that this is the site of the O’Briens’ sawmill. Lem’s father operated the mill in these woods in the thirties, forties, on into the fifties. It was said that the wood for framing the new church came from this forest. The skeleton uprights and roof trusses of the old mill’s open-air pavilion stand guard over the clearing. Billy spots the long, low tracks of the power train that carried cedar logs to the saw blade. He remembers watching men shove logs toward the blade, and how he cringed with fear that one of the workers would lose a hand or an arm, that the spinning wheel of the blade would jump the track and take on a will of its own, and fly off to carry out its mayhem all over the county. If you weren’t careful, even now you could stumble on the half-buried wheels and rusting gears of the steam tractor that powered the operation; you could find in the weeds the rotting piles of hickory slag, shaggy bark riddled with curving trails of beetles. The crow was pecking and digging in the conical heap of sawdust Billy had kicked and wallowed in as a boy; it’s now a low, breast-shaped mound, hairy with dry wild grass. When Billy was younger, he and Willis and Lem O’Brien would crank up the tractor now and then. Cut a few boards, maybe build a playhouse for some neighbor kids, or repair a decrepit outbuilding. Nostalgia, mostly. Lumber is a thing gotten cheaper these days from some far off, manmade forest, single species of trees planted in sterile rows. Birds dare not live, much less sing, amidst such bald fakery.
A rustling at the east corner of the clearing cuts through the quilted silence, and the doves take wing, chirring softly toward a grove of locusts. Billy creeps around the perimeter of the glade, just inside the darkling edge of the woods. It is a man, crouching over the spring that bubbles from the roots of a sycamore. Billy watches the man lie down on the leafy ground and drink, his mouth directly kissing the water like an animal.
It is Harlan O’Brien. There is nearly ten years between them. When Billy wasn’t yet eight, Harlan had gone away to West Point. Billy’s parents are longtime friends of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and have allowed no gossip or innuendos of murder in their home. Such nonsense is the bailiwick of ignorant folk in whom his mother has never put much stock. Katherine Juell is still the outsider, a citified stranger to the natives.
But there is talk aplenty in town. At Pekkar’s Alley, Billy has heard them wondering why an arrest hasn’t been made. He does not remember people being so restless and, well, mean. Are they bored, he wonders, so many laid off from the cement plant? Resentful of the unfulfilled promise of more jobs at the new paper products factory? Some of the guys, when they get liquored up, say outright that they are tired of pretending they don’t know there was something going on between the dead Vietnamese woman and this big-deal hero.
When Harlan’s head makes a slow swivel, the younger man flinches. The eyes too are those of an animal. Billy pushes the Remington further behind him and clears the phlegm gathering in his throat.
“Dove hunting,” Billy says, and pauses. “My dad talked to your dad. It’s all right.” He remembers the lieutenant riding through town at the Memorial Day parade, mounted on Uncle Judge’s black mare, Harlan peering out through narrowed slits of eyes at all the confetti floating down around him. Billy hadn’t had difficulty imagining what it reminded Harlan O’Brien of: ashes. The way, over there, the air filled with gray flecks of burning buildings and flesh.
“I was so thirsty.” Harlan struggles to his feet now, or his foot, and Billy salutes. But Harlan swats a hand through the air and stares at the ground. The two men begin to walk in the listless and aimless way people will when time has appeared to stop. They don’t converse about being back here, about how they’d both rolled into town that day with the seven dead. Seven—a mere handful when you thought about it, compared to the mounds and mounds of bodies they both had seen. Billy and Harlan do not discuss these things as they cross the same land they tramped separately as boys. There is no clapping of shoulders, no hail fellow well met, no nostalgic sighs. Periodic need for statement, rendition, interpretation arises and is dispensed with by utterance of a few small words that drift to the ground like brittle, stubborn leaves from a water oak, always the last to let go. For a long while, neither speaks. Then Harlan.
“Mother said you’d gotten back. When was that?”
“May. Same day as you,” Billy says. “I was with the guys on the bus. Behind all the funeral cars.” He tries for a mordant chuckle but lets it peter out when it becomes obvious that the lieutenant doesn’t share his sense of—well, he could hardly call it humor anymore. Irony, is that what you called it? Not that Billy saw it as ironic that Harlan
had come home alive. Harlan O’Brien was the mythical quarterback of the Holy Ghost Shamrocks, who led the football team to the triple A championship in ’57, the handsome and aloof heartthrob stared after by every girl in town.
But Billy himself? Any god who’d seen fit to spare him was a fucking sphinx.
“I heard Carl’s home,” the lieutenant says.
It strikes Billy that Uncle Carl and Harlan would have grown up together, about the same age, here on their fathers’ neighboring farms. He cannot imagine the two having anything in common, Harlan O’Brien being a war hero, and Uncle Carl being a certified loony with papers to prove it.
“Sure enough,” Billy says and laughs nervously again. He needs to get control of himself. They walk.
“Back before, a lot of folks would pile their kids in the car after Mass on Sundays, go out visiting,” the lieutenant says suddenly. “Go see their old people who lived deep in the hollers. I remember my Aunt Fern—she was my grandmother’s sister—hobbling out onto the porch, shading her eyes with both hands. Uncle Bud right behind her, both of them wobbly stacks of bones. You got the feeling they were waiting for you. The way they gathered you in their arms.”
Harlan falls silent again, and Billy is too stunned by this long string of words to speak. The few times Harlan has come into Pekkar’s, he sits at the bar nursing a bourbon straight up for an hour or more without speaking to a soul. People tried to get friendly with him when he first got home. Lately they steer clear.
The two of them continue to footslog across one stream after another, and Billy becomes aware that he has taken on Harlan’s halting gait, his back straight and stiff. Limp arms swing at their sides, counterweights to the ponderous ballast of some unspeakable apprehension, stones rattling in both their heads.
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