In late May the sun stays up all day long and air warms up the ground so you can smell life stirring. In the shadow of three old pines out front of the cemetery, Wiley sat on his knees setting out Memorial Day geraniums at his parents' grave, a job that fell to him in '83, when they buried his mother out there beside his father.
He dug out the holes and dropped in the geraniums, threw a little water over them, and looked around for the kids, who he shouldn't have brought along but he did anyway because his father had always taken him out there too, the day before the holiday. Half a cemetery away, they were riding graves as if they were ponies, playing leap-frog, row to row, even Danny, the eighth grader, who looked up every once in a while to check his father, make sure that he could get away with what he somehow already understood was a kind of sacrilege.
He jammed the empty pots into the box, along with the watering jug, and stuck it under his arm, then stalked the kids, It was purely by accident that he ran into Lew Van Dam, who, like half the town, was out there putting in flowers.
"I don't suppose I could twist your arm into marching on Monday?" Lew asked from all fours. It wasn't the first time that he'd tried to recruit Wiley into marching with the Legion.
"I don't even have a uniform," Wiley told him.
"I can get you a cap is all you need," he said.
Wiley tried to call the kids.
"Look at this here," Lew said, pointing with his trowel.
And it wasn't until that moment that Wiley realized he was standing at the grave of Henry Minnard, no stone yet, only an engraved brass marker stabbed into young grass growing on the mound like fine hair. "I told his wife I'd take care of this for her," Lew said, pointing to the marker and the new flowers. "She still don't have her feet on the ground yet. They only had each other.”
"I'd think you had enough work out here just with your own family," Wiley said.
"Hank is family," Lewie said, sitting. "Listen, you don't have to join the Legion to march along. It's just the numbers, you know--we keep getting smaller."
Wiley looked back at his parents' grave. "It's your parade, Lew," he said. "I told you that before. You and Henry. It belongs to you guys. It's your war."
Lewie packed dirt around the plant. “That’s crap,” he said. "It's for all of them out here," he said, pointing around at the stones with flags. "Look at 'em all." Then he stared up at Wiley, like his own father might have. "The trouble with you Vietnam guys is it's all you can think about is how bad you had it. You think you're the only ones who had it bad." He jammed the trowel back in the dirt and wiped the sweat from his temples with his jacket cuff.
“I got to get my kids,” Wiley said.
"Whole cemetery is named after your relative--Henry Lammers, the Great War. You knew that, didn't you? 1918--killed in France in a trench, in the mud."
His grandma’s only brother, he remembered. Somewhere his father had a picture of a doughboy surrounded by his mother father, a yellowed picture full of pride. Somewhere thtat picture was buried in his parents’ things, somewhere.
Lie squirmed around until he got too his knees. “Look,” he said, “Hank never had no ides—you know that.” He pointed down at the marker. “My son Fred was born when we were somewhere way the hell out in France. I remember the letter. There was this lull,”he said. “The Krauts were already pulling back, and all they left behind was some stragglers to slow us down. Not a whole lot to do. That’s when I got the letter.” He leaned back and sat, one hand behind him.
“We got the most beautiful boy you’ve ever seen,’” he said, raising his hand as if he were reading the letter. “She wrote me right from the hospital, and I swear I smelled it.” He held his fingers to his nose. “So Hank here says that it’d be wonderful to see them together, Tillie nursing little Freddy. ‘Imagine that,’ Hank says, ‘Tillie in all that white bedding, sitting up and nursing that new child.’ He knew what I was feeling, just like that boy was his—like we had one mind. You know what I’m saying, dammit, you know. You been to war,” He pointed at the flag beside the gravesite. “It’s part of me in there,” he said. “You wait till you lose buddies.”
Couldn’t stop talking, Wiley thought. Just couldn’t shuttup, had to go on and on.
“I was with him when he died, you know,” Lewie said. “Tillie come right out to the field to pick me up. She told me that Marge had called from the hospital. Those women knew what it was between us." He cupped a match in his fingers and lit a cigarette.
"He went fast, you know. I tried to talk about times in France, but when he went it was so quiet in that room, you could hear dust settle." He looked around the graveyard. "I sat there holding his hand," he said, "and just like that it was over. Nothing said. Just silence."
Wiley watched the kids climb the steel fence by the pines.
"But that's the way it should have been, " Lew said. "Back there in France, all around us there was war, and we used to hear it all night long, the bombs. But always there was this silence between us--the big-mouth wops from New Jersey and all them city guys in the motor pool, and us two hick farm boys, with monkey wrenches, and we never had to say a thing. Both of us just knew just what it was we were dreaming, see? You know vJhat I'm saying. He put a hand down to his knee and pulled himself to his feet. "I don't have to explain to you.”
Wiley felt his hands shiver as the words tipped out. “I don’t understand a wword you’re saying,” he told him. “You go on and on and on like I know, but I don’t.
Lewie slapped off the grass clippings. “You’re lying,” he said.
“You don’t have a clue, Lewis,” Wiley told him. “We’re talking about a whole different world.”
Lewie dropped his cigarette a yard or so off the soft dirt of Hank’s grave, then stepped it out. “Maybe it was,” he said. “You should know—you were there.” He kept his foot down. “But you still know what it’s what it's like--better than somebody who never went--"
"I don't know," Wiley said. "I never had all that good buddy stuff. It wasn't the same."
Lewie let it sit there for a minute, and then he pulled himself up to his feet and brushed off his knees. "Maybe that's true, but you know what it is to have dreams," he said, pointing his finger like an old preacher. "You know what it is to be in the middle of all that and still dream about the smell of good land. Dammit, you know--just like he did." And he pointed to the grave.
________________________
Tomorrow: A difficult conversation with Carolynne.
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