by Chris Lynch
“How are you, Morris?” The Captain says, shaking my hand and patting my other shoulder at the same time.
“Um, thank you, sir,” I say. “Fine, I mean. I mean, as fine as … I suppose … Well, you know … I suppose.”
“I know,” he says with an understanding nod.
I didn’t give much thought to who was going to meet the train. I guess I assumed Rudi’s mom, and mine. Somebody from the Marines, certainly, but …
Is my head ever going to stop spinning?
The honor guard mounts the carriage and gets to the business of dignified transport.
“You do look lost, Morris, I must say,” says The Captain.
Ivan’s dad, The Captain.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
The two of us stand at attention, saluting, as Rudi’s flag-draped coffin comes down and passes by on the way to the hearse that has been brought right up into the station, twenty yards from the train. Once he is loaded inside and the back is shut on him, we relax. So to speak.
I watch as the hearse pulls very slowly away from us, and I feel my voice cracking without my having to attempt a word.
The Captain takes a firm grip of my upper arm and leads me in the opposite direction. But I still keep looking back at the hearse.
We are separated now. There he goes, no longer mine.
I am watching my old world passing by my window as The Captain talks to me from the driver’s seat.
“I took the liberty of liaising with the military authorities and the funeral home to get things together as simply and smoothly as possible,” he says. “I know this is hard enough already for everyone.”
“Thank you, sir,” I say without looking at him.
“That’s why you were stuck with me to greet you.”
“I didn’t feel stuck at all, sir.”
“His mom couldn’t do it. She was intending to, but …”
“I understand.”
I am aware of this getting more and more awkward despite the fact that this is a good man making every effort to do right by everyone. That could even be making the situation worse, but still, it’s not his fault and he deserves better.
He deserves a whole lot better.
“So, naturally, your mom thought she should stay with her.”
“Of course.”
“It’s been an unbearably hard time for everyone here. As, of course, it has been for you boys over there. Possibly even more so.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say, “that anything could be harder than it is for the parents.”
“You are a thoughtful boy, Morris. I have been trying to talk to Ivan since we heard, but have not been able to contact him yet. Have you seen him, since? Do you know how he’s doing? I worry very much, since he and Rudi were so —”
“No, sir. I did see him not long before. But … I’m sure you understand things got completely out of control after that.”
“Of course,” he says. “Of course I understand….” He is a great man, The Captain. He is juggling everything for everybody right now. He is military and he is friend, he is liaison and he is driver. He is mourner and he is stand-in, for a couple of women who don’t have husbands to lean on. For sons who don’t have fathers.
He is all that, and he is heroic.
And he is still more.
“I just,” he says with a gaping pause right there, “would like to know that he’s all right. If I could just hear him or see him, or touch his big blocky head with my own hands and know that he is all right … that would be good. That would be good.”
“That would be good,” I say.
I don’t pretend I can give him the reassurance I cannot give him. We drive on through the streets and neighborhoods in silence until we come to the streets that join us all together, that join our houses with our school and our history and with the funeral home.
“Are you ready?” he says as we pull up in front of his house and all of our people.
Now I look at him.
“No,” I say.
The Captain nods at me, pulls away from the curb, and in a few minutes he is depositing me at another curb, in front of my own house.
“No,” he insists as I step out of the car. “Now, Morris, we all appreciate how grueling this journey has been for you. You have done as much as you can for now. You simply must go to your bed before you collapse from exhaustion, which nobody wants to see. And that is a direct order, which I will explain to everyone. Is that clear?”
This is an awfully good man. Which makes it hurt all the worse.
“Thank you, sir.”
“No,” he says softly, “thank you.”
DelValle. DelValle the grenadier didn’t make it.
Evelyn DelValle. That was it, what rang the bells, what gave me the one moment of unidentifiable nice in the middle of all that brutality.
Boy, did we love her. Boy, was she worth fighting for. Maybe together we could have added up to one guy worthy. One guy good enough for Evelyn DelValle could surely fight the world in a war and win.
Worth fighting for, for sure.
But we wouldn’t fight each other. Not for anything.
I barely remember going to bed.
“Morris?” I hear from somewhere in the clouds. “Morris? I’m sorry.”
I know. Everybody is sorry. Everybody knows everybody is sorry so we don’t have to say it anymore.
“I’m sorry, son, but you have to wake up now. It’s time. I’ve left it as long as I dare.”
I roll over, blink a hundred times, and take in the vision of my beautiful, sad ma standing, hands folded, dressed in black.
“Hiya, Ma,” I say, extending both my hands to her.
“Hiya,” she says, taking them. She nods her get-along-now nod of gentle persuasion.
“Already?” I ask.
“I’m afraid so.”
“It’s all going so fast now. After it went so slow for so long.”
“I know,” she says. “She wanted it done this way. Mr. Bucyk has organized with the Marines people every step of the way. There’s a brief service at the church this morning. Then the cemetery with the military thing….”
The military thing. The military thing.
“Then, all done and dusted,” I say, sneering like I would have just two or three years ago when she’d be right where she is now, trying to roust me for school.
She looks down at the floor, giving me a second for composure while never letting go of my hands. Then she looks up.
“Sorry, Ma,” I say.
She gives the hands a squeeze before letting go.
“No need for that,” she says. “Just get ready now. We’re almost late.”
Banana, orange juice, English muffin with grape jelly constitute the fuel that powers me out of the house.
Ma and I walk the few blocks to the church, me in my Navy uniform, her in her mourning one. I am happy to think about other things than where we are going as we stroll through the old neighborhood on a cool sunny morning. What I think immediately is that the place seems smaller again, smaller even than when I came back last time. And the people we pass, some distantly familiar and some not at all, look likewise smaller than the people I knew when I knew this place.
The uniform draws attention. It draws no comment, however, probably due to the dignified woman in black on my arm. I am aware how the war is playing out at home, and that almost nobody is neutral on it. I feel like everybody would like to shout something if they could, and I wish they could so I could know better where I stand.
But as I scan the faces I don’t know if I do want to know.
There are so many memories attached to these granite steps attached to this redbrick church. They bombard me as the two of us walk gently up to the entrance: first Communion, first confession, small parts in earnest Christmas plays, confirmation … and boredom, the feeling of being trapped Sunday after Sunday made bearable by having three or two or even just one other guy to laugh with hysterically for no other rea
son than we must not, must not laugh.
Even just the one guy.
Rudi never missed Mass. He liked gatherings of people.
“It’s open,” I say to Ma as the two of us walk up the aisle, nearly late and certainly last, like a deeply strange wedding couple.
“Yes,” she says calmly, knowingly.
Cripes, I hadn’t even thought about this. I have been with Rudi’s dead body all along, and I got used to a task that most people will never have to get used to, but I am freaking now over the open casket and the task we in this church have been used to forever.
Aw, cripes.
We split the aisle and the small gathering of family members and fancy-dressed Marines, and we stop a few feet short of the coffin, then Ma goes up to kneel before it and say the good good-bye she has practiced in this old building all those other times, and I am sure it is comforting to Rudi but now she is done, neat and tidy, and I don’t know if I can do any of that: neat, tidy, or comforting.
She brushes me lightly on her way past, and I am officially up.
Last time I saw him?
Good Lord, no.
I’m bawling like a fool before I hit my knees and I haven’t even seen his face yet. I was wailing out of control last time, too, that last time, that last time I saw Rudi’s sweet, stupid face, and I was pushing and pushing on his chest. When I look up now I’m sort of doing it again because I have both my hands out and resting on the double breast of his sharp Marine jacket with the polished buttons, but there is exactly the same absence underneath my sweaty palms now as there was then.
I am trying my guts out not to do the slobbering blubbering I did on that trail that time, but I do hear the cavernous old church echoing all around with my sniffles and snuffles as I try to hold things together like the hardened soldier I am supposed to be after all.
I see his face, though, and Lord, look at it. It is small and it is innocent and simple as the day I met him, and while I am as happy as I could be to think that we will give back to the earth today the good and fine Rudi boy that we found in the first place and not that hard and demented one we had messed up so bad there at the end, I have to fight the howl I feel rising when I see that we are sending the good boy off with the big hole right there in his puttied and powdered temple.
The hardest thing, easily. The hardest thing I have ever done is this thing I am doing, and it is mostly not-doing that I am doing. I want to bellow and roar to the point where my voice will roll around these stone walls repeating Rudi for the rest of time.
They did what they could. But the spot with the sniper’s mark looks like a hole in a tire tube blown out and patched in desperation.
The bells ring. The great bells of the church tower ring and resonate, singing out that the appointed hour is here. It’s twelve o’clock. The time has come, and my hope of walking back down that aisle without a scene is no hope at all.
I cannot stop.
Sorry, man.
I give Rudi one last two-handed chest thump, then use the bells like close air support as I make my way, head down, back to the pew.
Embarrass me, why dontcha.
I could always do that pretty good myself, though, right?
We are supposed to be done with all that sorry stuff, remember? So, no more, okay? Okay? Okay.
Remember Peters Hill? Wetting my pants over the induction notice? Something to cry about? Ha. Now that’s something to cry about. You all hugged me anyway, wet pants and all.
Remember? Remember that?
We were one. We really were one.
Remember?
Do. Remember.
I have to sleep. I need sleep.
It’s past eleven, and I have to sleep.
I can’t go back to my bunk until this stops. I will stay in this toilet until it stops because otherwise they will think I am losing it and I won’t have that. I will hold it together because I can. Because I won’t be one of them. I have the tools; I will not break.
I cannot stop the crying. I don’t know why. I have to, though, or I’ll just be another one of them, another broken, pathetic casualty, and I will not be that.
I will sleep right where I am if need be. I am better than this, I am stronger than this. I am smarter than this. I should be able to figure it out, and I should be able to stop it.
I cannot stop.
I am so sorry.
Peters Hill. Still can’t believe he peed his pants. Doofus.
Magnificent doofus.
I jam my fist right into my mouth when one final great howl of horror comes up to get it all out of me, finally.
It will stop. It will, it is, it will. And I will sleep.
He peed his pants. Ha. Remember.
You have one eye, moron.
You only have one left.
You cannot rub it like that and expect it to survive. Like you are grinding flour.
Go to sleep. That’s an order. Eleven p.m. Lights out. You want to get better? Huh? Do you? Do you want to get better?
I’m so sorry.
This has to stop. There are other patients. There are personnel about. Don’t want this on your chart. Do not want this on your chart. Stop it. Shut up, grow up, toughen up.
I am so sorry.
Get it out, then. Get it out. Be done, be gone, be away, now.
What else? Huh? Wet the bed yet?
Ha.
Peters Hill. Should we smile? Would that be terrible? Is any smile now terrible?
Crazy chicken, wetting his pants. Ha.
Ah.
We were one, we were.
Bunch of Rudi-Judies, one and all.
That’s what I say.
Rudi-Judy, Rudi-Judy, Rudi-Judy.
Now I’ll never get any rest, watching out for you guys.
The turnout is sickeningly small.
What is wrong with the people here?
I am standing on the side of the open grave, where friends and family are all lined up, and you could hardly call it a crowd. I don’t see anybody from school. I am positioned at the corner of the grave closest to the street, where I can see every person here, and if we wanted to follow up the service with a memorial softball game we wouldn’t be able to field two full teams. All of our parents are here, as if they were part of the deal when the four of us pledged to stay together and they are the ones who are actually seeing it through.
What if they knew, though?
Holy cow, what if they knew? Where would we be?
There are a few other mourners I can’t quite place as Rudi’s relatives or as neighbors or just those freaks who go to funerals, but that is it.
His mother wanted it quick, though, for her own reasons, so that didn’t help bring a crowd.
Or didn’t help expose the lack of one.
Short and sweet was what she wanted. She got one of them.
As the priest says his few more words and the end is very, very nigh, I focus on who is here, who does care.
The Marines. There is a Marine honor guard at the far side of the grave, and they look, I have to say, magnificent. They are sharp and solemn and attentive, and there are eight of them, and they look like they could field a whole team by themselves.
Rudi would be ecstatic. And he earned it.
I am not listening to the priest, I confess. I am listening to the breeze and to myself and looking and looking and looking at faces, and so I only know what is happening when it happens and the priest stops talking and the commander of the guard barks in hushed barks and the six Rudi-bearers go to the coffin and line up for the end. Four of them take the flag by its corners and step sideways with it. With precise, practiced movements they fold the stars and stripes, fold again and again until it is a beautiful puffed triangular pillow. The commander takes the flag and walks up to Rudi’s mom.
He goes down on one knee in the grass.
The commander makes a speech from his kneeling position as he hands Rudi’s mom the flag.
“I offer my apologies to you, ma’
am, on behalf of the United States Marine Corps, for the supreme sacrifice you have had to make for your country …”
It gets very hard to hear words now.
“… and the nation’s gratitude for the courage and heroism of your son in giving up his life for a duty …”
The words are water now. Water and wind until they are nothing and the commander stands, marches back to his spot, and barks a bark that sets the bearers in motion. They collect their ends of the three satin ropes running under Rudi’s coffin and they lift him up. As they walk toward the fresh grave, three on each side, the final member of the honor guard raises his bugle as the others lower the fallen soldier into the ground.
Taps plays clearly through the air, through the people, through the trees that surround the pretty cemetery that lies here in the shadow of Peters Hill.
I listen as it plays out, lovely, perfect. I look up to that spot on the hill as it does, not at the hole in the ground, because now we are done with crying, and this is a lot better. It is.
I still can’t believe you peed your pants, man. Right there.
I am pointing right at the spot, and I hope nobody is upset at the pointing and the smile I cannot do anything about.
I have decided to walk by myself to the reception after the burial and everyone has decided to allow me that. I enjoy solitude more and more these days, partly as a result of military life, where you are almost never alone. It’s also, at least right now it is, a result of my being in this town, walking these streets, without the team I had always walked them with before.
It was a very isolated feeling there at Rudi’s funeral. Even he had his team there, the Marines.
My team is blown up, and I don’t know what parts of it can ever be reunited.
And to top it all off, the reception is being hosted by Ivan’s parents.
I mean, nobody would have thought Rudi’s mom would be capable of hosting anything, but this feels like the final joke on Rudi, in a life that was full of jokes on him.
As I walk up the stairs to Ivan’s front porch, I am already trying to figure out my exit strategy before conversations get too uncomfortable.