5. Here is one of my father wearing a green uniform, high black lace-up boots, a helmet. He is standing next to a briar patch covered in purple-pink blooms that look like wild roses. He has snatched one of the flowers off and put it between his ear and helmet. On the back: I had Caudill take this picture of me because I thought you’d like the flowers. A little bit of beauty here in hell.
6. Six big helicopters sitting in a field. Their blades are a blur of motion, cutting the picture in two. The sky is low and gray, the color of an old spoon. No inscription on the back.
7. My father cutting a boy’s hair. A towel is spread out over the boy’s shoulders and covers him to the waist, where green soldier pants show. My father’s hand is spread out completely flat on the top of the soldier’s head and he is looking very intently at the small scissors in his hands as he snips away hair. The boy’s head is bent down but he has brought his eyes up to meet the camera, one brow arched. Behind them there is a thickness of woods. This is the only picture that is in black-and-white, and on the back my father wrote: Cutting Caudill’s hair. He’s my best friend over here.
I didn’t want to take too much time to think about what I had seen and read, so I put the pictures back into their envelope and arranged them all neatly in the sandwich bag and placed them in the canvas satchel. I had been sitting there so long that my hair had dried and my shorts were only damp. The sun burned through the trees with such a white fierceness that I could almost hear the leaves crisping on the limbs. The heat bugs clicked in the grass. It was now the middle of July and it hadn’t rained since I had stood out in that thunderstorm and nearly scared Daddy to death. I didn’t want to think about how I might have caused him to start having his flashbacks, which is what Josie called them. She had gone to the library and looked up a bunch of books about veterans. She had lain down on the bed beside me and run her long finger down the page, trying to explain things to me.
“The vets from Vietnam have it worse because they were flown straight home,” she had said. I had watched her as she looked at the words on the page. I had no idea what she was talking about, but then she explained. “In the Second World War, the men had to take this real long boat ride back home, but soldiers like Daddy were in Vietnam one day and back home the next. They didn’t have time to think it all through before they got back to their people, so it’s worse for them.”
I meandered through the woods and found my bicycle lying at the end of the path, beside the road. I pumped my legs hard down the dusty road, thinking of nothing, focused completely on driving the bicycle as fast as I could. I was suddenly panicked and felt that if I didn’t get the letters back home and properly hidden in the cedar box, I would surely be found out. Besides, I didn’t want them in my possession anymore.
Josie was a storm that moved through the house. She stomped away from our mother, who was right at her heels, her face stretched tight with anger. Josie slammed her bedroom door, slid past where Loretta was yelling in the hallway, and whirled around on one heel to face her. As she did so, she jerked at the back of a kitchen chair too hard and sent it straight to the floor, its back making a high crack on the still, hot air of the house.
Josie had on her flag pants, and this time Mom wasn’t going to back down. I stood in the back door, watching them, although I don’t think they had even noticed my entrance. I had my satchel strapped over my shoulder and was torn on what I should do. This fight was occupying Mom in such a way that I had the perfect opportunity to return the letters to the cedar box without her noticing. But I hated to miss this fight, because it was going to be a big one. A part of me was thrilled by their arguing, so I wanted to see it for the entertainment value. Another part of me hated to see them so mad at each other, so I wanted to stay and intervene if the need arose.
“Take them off right now!” My mother thrust a finger into the air, toward the pants. “Right this minute.”
Josie looked completely taken aback, as if someone had just told her to put a gun to her temple and pull the trigger. “I won’t!” she screamed. “After what you did, you don’t have no right to make me do anything!”
Mom took one step forward, a giant step, like someone bobbing over a narrow creek, and wrapped her hand around Josie’s wrist. She brought her face down close to Josie’s, their eyes burning into each other’s. “This is one time that you’re going to mind me, Josie Michelle. You are going to take those pants off and I’m going to throw them away and then you’re going to your room for the rest of the night.”
“Charles Asher is coming to get me,” she yelled, appalled. She tried to peel Mom’s fingers away from her arm, but it did no good. Our mother was not going to back down this time.
“You’re not going anywhere with Charles Asher,” Mom said. “I know what you’ve been doing with him, and this is going to stop now. You’re going to take off those pants right this minute. And you’re going to stop running wild.”
“What am I doing with him, Mom?”
Quieter now: “You know what I mean, Josie. Don’t make me say it in front of Eli.”
So they did know I was there.
“We’re not doing anything you didn’t do,” Josie said. She was enjoying this. The words spewed from her like someone caught up in a fire-and-brimstone campaign speech. “But I’m smarter than you.”
Mom ripped her hand away from Josie’s wrist, and Josie stepped back, touching her arm as if she were hurt. Then Mom unleashed her anger on me instead of Josie. She whirled around and faced me, her sharp finger pointing toward the door, her words urgent and high. “Go back outside, Eli!” she hollered. “I’m tired of your spying! Right now!”
Although my mother had never screamed at me this way before, I only scrambled out onto the screen porch and cowered near the back door, where I could still hear them. Mom was so caught up in all the words that she didn’t even notice when I peeked around the door frame.
“How dare you speak to me that way, Josie,” she said, calmer now. She seemed to measure out each word.
“How dare you lie to me,” Josie said, her hands balled into fists. “And how dare you act so high and mighty. Do you realize what a terrible mother you’ve been to both of us? Lying to me, never there for Eli.”
“Never there?”
“Always caught up in some la-la land with Daddy, worshipping him —”
“You ought to be glad your parents love each other. What if you had parents like Edie?”
“But you always loved him more than us,” Josie said. Even though I had felt this way many times, I knew that Josie didn’t really believe anything she was saying. She was just throwing gas on a raging fire. “You always chose him over us. I despise you.”
My mother said nothing. I looked around the door frame and saw her there with her back to me, her shoulders slumped, yet rising with each deep breath she took. She was shaking her head no, slowly back and forth.
“And it’s because Daddy saved you, you think,” Josie said, mocking. Her eyes were wild, huge. “Because I wouldn’t have had a father otherwise, right? If you hadn’t been running wild, maybe you wouldn’t have got knocked up with me,” Josie said, a smile creeping out over her lips. “I’m not a slut like you were.”
My mother sliced her hand through the air and slapped Josie’s face. The sound was sharp and piercing, like someone bringing a book down hard on a table. Worse than the sound was the way Josie looked, though. Her face was taken over by a scowl of disbelief and complete belief, all tangled up in one openmouthed gasp. She put her trembling fingertips against the place where Mom had hit her and brought her hand out to look at them, as if blood might be there.
Josie drew her face tight, and just as her gathered mouth and fretted brow let me know what she was about to do, she threw her hand up and slapped our mother.
Her impact was less openhanded and produced a dull thud against Mom’s cheek, but she had hit her own mother in the face, and this was too much. This had gone too far. I stepped forward, wanting to do so
mething, to say something, but there was nothing to say. I couldn’t understand where Nell had run off to. She could have stepped in and said the right thing and stopped all of this. Peacemakers were never around when they were needed, I decided. They showed up only after the war was already in progress.
And then I realized that my father was standing in the back doorway, stopped in his tracks between the kitchen and the screen porch. He had walked up just as Josie’s blow had landed on Mom’s face. He had been holding his metal lunchbox in one hand and his Thermos in the other, but he dropped both of them at the same time and they hit the floor — the lunchbox a muted clatter, the Thermos a dark thud.
He bolted across the room and grabbed Josie by the wrist. She struggled around, her hair thrashing about. Her voice was small and clipped: “Please” and “Daddy” and “Don’t.” But he paid no attention to her. He pulled her out onto the porch, threw open the screen door, and then they tumbled off the steps and into the yard. He was a ghost of himself, his eyes gone dead again, his face drawn up into that war look.
My mother and I were close behind. Once, when Josie was thrashing about, she came around to face me and two little breaths pumped out of her mouth: “Eli.” As if there was anything I could do to save her. But her eyes were looking at me as if to warn me, as if to say, “Run!” Maybe if I said “Daddy” in a small voice, the way I had that night when he was strangling my mother, he would snap out of it. But I didn’t think so. It didn’t even seem like I should try. Besides, Josie had slapped Mom. She deserved punishment. Still, though, Daddy had never spanked either of us that I could remember. Mom always did that. And wasn’t Josie too old to spank, anyway? I didn’t know what he was going to do. He stood there on the yard with Josie twisting around at the end of his arm like a huge, disobeying fish that didn’t want to be taken off the hook. She was a little girl now, terrified, begging him to let her go. And what was terrifying was that our father’s face had been overtaken by the war again. He wasn’t even there anymore, so we couldn’t predict his movements.
Mom put her hands out to Daddy, her eyes full of kindness and heartbreak. “Stanton,” she said, a coo. “Let her go. I’ll take care of it.”
At last Josie wrestled free. In her fright, off balance, she fell onto the yard, flat on her rump. She was too scared or shocked to move. She sat there with both hands on the ground on either side of her. Her hair hung down in her face, and long lines of it puffed in and out when she breathed. Only one of her eyes showed through the wild black mane.
“You slapped your mother,” Daddy said, amazingly calm, as if he had collected himself in the struggle to get outside. He stood over her with his hands on his hips.
“She slapped me first,” Josie said.
“Why?” Daddy said.
Josie put one hand up to her face and pushed her hair aside, hooking it behind her right ear. Her lower lip was trembling. Her face showed everything that was going through her mind: terror, defiance, sadness, anger. All these things played across her forehead and her eyes, in the way she held her mouth and managed to stop the trembling.
“Answer me!” he boomed. I saw then that he was breathing hard, too. Josie had given him a run for his money. Maybe her wild spirit had impressed him, had made him realize what he was about to do. Because it had looked as if he was going to get her out onto the yard and take his belt to her, but now he was listening. I didn’t want Josie to be in trouble, but I also wanted her to be set straight, once and for all. I was tired of her drama.
Josie pressed her hands against the ground and sprang up. She looked very tall and beautiful and grown. She wasn’t scared of anything anymore. “Why didn’t you tell me that I wasn’t your child sooner?”
I sat down on the steps. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to eavesdrop on all this or not.
“Because it didn’t matter,” Daddy said, becoming himself again, his face easing out. Quiet, but forceful, too. Each word a firmness. “Because you’ve always been my child, no matter what. I’ve never thought of you as anything less than my own child.”
“But I’m not,” Josie said, her hands cupped out in front of her, as if waiting to receive something solid and real instead of words. “I have a father out there somewhere, and you shouldn’t have hid that from me. I’m sixteen years old.”
Our mother took a step forward. “And when you turned sixteen, I told you.”
“You should’ve told me earlier,” Josie said, and looked away. She closed her eyes for a short time, breathing in the summer air, letting it fill her. “It’s my life, my history.”
“For the last couple of years you’ve been angry just for the sake of being angry, anyway,” Mom said.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Josie said, looking up as if startled.
“Even before all this, though,” Mom said. “Your generation doesn’t have anything to be mad about, so y’all are mad about everything.” Her words became quick little blocks now. “So I want you to go in the house and pull those pants off and end this foolishness.”
“Is that what this is all about?” Daddy said, as if he hadn’t even noticed the flag pants before.
My mother nodded. “It’s not right, her wearing them after you fought for this country —”
“That don’t matter,” Daddy said, cutting her off.
Josie stood before him, her elbows cupped in her hands. She massaged her elbows as if they had been harmed in their skirmish, looking at the ground.
“Josie,” he said. Her name sounded so tender coming from him, as if all his pain and sorrow were wrapped up in those two syllables. “Haven’t I been a good daddy to you? Haven’t I done everything for you?”
Josie paused, then nodded, two short bobs of her head.
“Are you mad at me about Vietnam?” he said, his voice full of expectation. “About me fighting in the war? Is that what you’re mad about?”
Josie seemed taken aback. When she answered — “No” — the word was nothing more than a curled exhalation of breath.
Daddy stepped forward and put his hand on Josie’s arm. She looked up at him as if she had no idea what he was about to do. I didn’t, either.
“The way you talk about everything — always saying all war is wrong, talking about all that history none of us can help. It’s like you’re saying it all to me. Don’t you know that I fought for this country?”
Each word rose in urgency, and I was convinced that he was out of his mind now. He never said so much all at once.
I had been mistaken; the war hadn’t left him. He hadn’t calmed at all. He had been like a kettle of water that boils before you realize it, and now he was at full boil again. The war slid right back down his body as if he were stepping into a new set of clothes. His hand was tightening on her arm; she began to twist under the grasp.
“You stand there and cry about not belonging to me. Don’t you realize that when I was over there — killing for my country — I was really killing for you, for Eli?”
Josie tried to pull away. She kept twisting, but she couldn’t get out of his grip. “Daddy, please,” she said.
“You think you have it all figured out and you don’t know shit,” he said, little specks of spit spraying from his mouth. Angry now, his whole body changing, becoming larger and more solid. “I’m always listening to you, Josie. When you say you hate this country, you’re saying that you hate me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Josie said each word separately, searching for the next word without knowing what she actually wanted to say. “I don’t hate it. That’s not what I mean.” Screwing her face up into a mask of confusion. It seemed that our father had melted down inside this man talking here on the yard, that he had been overtaken by someone else. He had lost his mind.
“Stanton,” Mom said, “what are you talking about?”
He held on to Josie’s arms, staring into her face as if he wanted to memorize her, then his whole face contorted and he started yelling. “You. Don’t. Know!” he screamed, shaking her s
o hard that her hair snapped out behind her and slapped her back.
Then Mom was pulling at him, saying his name over and over, the way he had repeated her name while in Vietnam, but this time it wasn’t a prayer. It was a pleading.
I thought he was going to shake the life out of Josie. I thought he’d break her neck. And then he released her only long enough to grab her face within both of his big hands. He cupped her cheeks, bringing himself closer to her, looking her right in the eye, his own eyes gone, dead, black.
“You shouldn’t,” he said, a ghost.
My mother was at his back, hollering his name over and over, as if it were the only word she knew how to say.
All I could see was her face, scrunched up into that look of complete terror and disbelief. I knew how she felt; I had been there before. So I had to do something.
I raced up behind Daddy and hit him as hard as I could in the small of his back. This didn’t faze him, so I ran around and scurried up his leg just enough to sink my fingernails into his face. I tugged my hand down. I could feel his skin peeling away, glanced at the two little lines of thin blood that were appearing on his cheek. His hand came out, nothing more than a reaction, really, and slapped me away. His knuckles caught me across the bridge of my nose, so that I actually saw stars for one smarting second. Then I fell to the ground, face-first, although I didn’t feel anything.
I thought I heard my mother cry out “No!” but I couldn’t be sure.
I wasn’t even aware of scrambling up and standing again, but by the time I had, everyone had grown completely still.
Daddy stood before me, taking in great breaths of air. Mom stood near him, but her eyes touched mine. He was still hanging on to Josie, but after what seemed a long time of us all looking at one another — everyone’s breathing filling the quiet — he pushed her away and she dropped onto the grass near me. She fell into a heap there, her legs out beside her, leaning on one arm, crying into her other hand.