Booty (v)

I never told my father, not until last week, thirty years later, when the two of us sat together on a pair of hassocks at the very spot at the top of the stairs where I spent too many anguished nights. My father and I sat in front of the closet where the bayonet should have been, where the samurai still leaned against the wall studs, perfectly sheathed.

''I'd almost forgotten that thing," he said when I pulled it out from behind the aquarium. "We were in the Phillipines just a couple of weeks after the war, and they had this whole pile of junk there. The CO said we could take what we wanted."

He rubbed his fingers over the flowered handle, and I saw very clearly that the sword meant nothing to him. He handled it as if it were a museum piece, then put it down and unrolled his father's high school diploma, dated 1898. "Look at this," he said excitedly. "Your grand­pa had 36 weeks of Cicero in high school. It's listed here, right on the diploma. See that? --36 weeks of Cicero. My goodness, what an education."

I waited for him to mention the bayonet.

"You know that sword is probably worth something today," I said. "Didn't I read somewhere about samurais being collectors' items? Maybe we ought to sell it.” I picked it up and laid it across my lap, turning it once or twice and running my hands over the bronze sheath.

"If the price is right," he said, putting down the diploma. "I don't need money. You want it, Lane?" he said. "I don't think your sisters want it, do you?"

Of course, I wanted the sword. "Sure," I said, "I'll take it," because I knew right at that moment that he would have given me the bayonet too, had it been where it should have been; and I knew that even long ago that lost piece of war booty had been predestined for me too. What I'd lost years ago was always really mine.

"You better start a pile," he said, pointing. "We got a lot of odd things to go through here. What else we got in there?" he said, nodding back into the closet.

I had to tell him the story. I had to open it up, I guess, if not for him, then most certainly for me. "That's it?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Of the war --of what you took back?"

"It's been almost a half a century since I thought of that stuff," he said, thumbing through the photos. "Not the war, I mean. You think of it now and then. Maybe every day something comes back --the way the ship used to rock in the swells, nausea." He seemed distanced as he looked over what we'd pulled from the corner. "I used to have a duffle, remember that? I think you used it, didn't you? It seems I remember you hoisting it up over your back. White one. Maybe it's gone now."

The leggings lay in a dusty heap, and a pair of pants I had forgotten hung from a hanger against the wall.

“You don’t remember anything else?” I said.

"You get to be my age, Lane, and you won't remember things that happened two weeks ago." He flipped the leggings over. "Didn't I have the whole business at one time? Seems to me I had my dress uniform."

If I hadn’t told him, I knew then he wouldn’t have remembered.

“What about a bayonet?” I said. “You remember a bayonet —Japanese bayonet? You had a bayonet too, a little one, a black one with a wood handle?”

My father has a way of staring when he channels his mind. His eyes glaze, as if the volume of whatever is playing in his head shuts out the world around him. He reached up with his right hand and took a hold of his ear, shook it. "A bayonet?" he said. "Japanese, you say?"

"You had a bayonet, a little one," I said, stretching my hands.

"I don't remember a bayonet," he said. "Somewhere I got some pictures of the signing of the peace declaration. You ever see those? A whole bunch of them. I bought them in a set-all pictures of the Japs giving up. You could buy them on Guam. The brass, in their best dress uniforms, chests full of medals. Admiral Nimitz. I have those somewhere. Maybe Mike wants them."

Mike is my son.

"The bayonet, Dad?" I said. "You don't remember?"

He was lost in a world of ships and ports and tropics.

"You had one," I said, "and I lost it."

He looked at me as if all of it was silly, his eyes hesitant and skeptical. 

"Years ago, I took it out of this closet without asking you. I stole it really, and I used it when we used to go trapping. You remember?"

"You and Mugsie?" he said.

"Yeah. I snuck it out of here --out of this closet-and we used it trap­ping."

"Sure," he said. "I had this sword here and a little bayonet with a hook that goes over the barrel. Sure, a bayonet. I remember."

"I took it," I said again.

It seemed still something of a mystery. "What for?" he said.

"For trapping, Dad," I told him. "You remember how Mugsie and me---and John --we used to trap?"

"You took it?" he said. "You needed it?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I can't say I needed it --not really. I just took it, and I lost it. I threw it in the river --not on purpose, Dad. It wasn't on purpose. Mugsie asked for it, see? --and I threw it and it went in the river and I never found it back. It's not that we didn't try."

He shook his head. "Is that right?" he said. "You lost it way back then. How old were you? --grade school? You used to take your bikes. Sure, grade school." His eyes came in at me. "It seems like a strange time to tell me now," he said. "What is it? --thirty years?"

"Maybe it's the right time," I said, trying to laugh.

"You lost it?" He shaped his mustache with his fingers and leaned back off his elbows. "You and your buddies heisted it right out of this closet and you lost it in the river --that's what you're saying?" It somehow struck him as funny. "I guess you got away with one, didn't you?" He giggled to himself. "I suppose it's too late to do any punishing now, isn't it? --what are you, forty years old?"

“It’s history,” I told him.

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Tomorrow: But for him, the lost bayonet is more than history.