Memorial--a story (conclusion)

On Memorial Day, on the holiday, Wiley was out in the field, rotary-hoeing in the sixty north of the house, roaring along in fourth gear, kicking up dust behind him, smashing the hard edge of soil into pieces around the straight lines edge where his father had always of corn, when he said years came to ar ago an immigrant church stood, long before his time or his father's, on a flat spot at the very corner of his land. Every year he'd kick up something in the dirt, maybe a brick, hard and square in the soft ground, maybe a square chunk of wood, blackened by rot. 

And that's where Carolynne saw him late that morning, standing beside the tractor in his coveralls, the cab door swung open. He was looking down at something he held in his hand. Cheryl, all decked out in her band uniform sat beside her in the front seat. She was driving the kids back from the holiday parade, the boys in the back seat in their scout uniforms. 

That's when she saw him out there by himself.

"What's Dad doing, Mom?" Danny asked.

She couldn't see exactly what he was holding, but if she could have, she would have seen him scraping the dirt off a jagged piece of porcelain from some old church plate, a scrap of white he'd unearthed from the ground, some remnant of a church that once upon a time stood out there full of huddled immigrants, a people with hope years and years ago.

From the rounded shape of his shoulders, from the way he held that something in his hands, and from the way his head was bowed over it, she could see that her husband was dreaming about something again, out there in the field, alone, the tractor's noise almost lost beneath what it was he was hearing in his soul. 

She knew he was thinking about something she might never fully get from him--or give him either, something he'd felt once long ago on a Saigon sidewalk, and maybe now, here again, on broken field, something he needed to find for himself, forgiveness and then comfort, in the words of an old Psalm that long ago would never leave his soul behind.

That was her prayer as she turned in the driveway.

________________________ 

Even though a heart condition kept me from being drafted in 1970, I am a child of the Vietnam era. I knew vets, some of whom had trouble speaking to their fathers, who were also vets--but of an earlier war. A good friend told me that he'd once gone to the funeral of a neighbor, a WWII-era vet, where he'd spoken to a neighbor who told him he and the deceased had been close while the two of them spent some significant time in Europe during the war. The two of them had remained friends even though they weren't that close when they'd returned. That man told him that vets never lost those friendships. My friend told me how angry he grew at that moment because their experiences were so painfully different. 

What prompted me to write "Memorial" was the source of that conflict--how Vietnam was a whole different thing than WWII. That idea brought me into what we now call PTSD--Wiley's. 

But the story reached out for another protagonist. With the revelation she feels as she sees her husband out in the field, Carolynne heart is beginning to process the stories Wiley had finally told her, no matter how horrible. She's gained this sense at least--that she may somehow be a comfort to her husband the veteran because now some knows some of it. Now, maybe, she can begin to understand.
"Memorial" must be 30 years old or so. It appeared in a magazine and in the collection of stories I titled Still Life.