Memorial, a story (iv)

When Wiley got home, the smell of coffee made the air rich inside the house. The kids stayed outside in the sun. 

"Anybody else out there?" Carolynne said with her back to him.

"Couple dozen people at least," he said.

"Talk to anyone?"

He remembered so clearly how he'd tried to tell her everything in those letters, how what he'd written seemed even then like holy scripture, how he'd put everything in.

"Boys behave?" she asked.

"Lewie Van Dam was out there," Wiley said, swinging his jacket up over the back of a chair. "I ran into him again.”

She turned to him and grabbed the towel off her shoulder, then started drying her hands. "What'd he say?"

He waited before sitting, stood there at the table with his hands on the two points of the chair. "He said he wanted me to march tomorrow,” he told her, “for the holiday, for the Legion. You know.”

“Again?”

“He doesn’t understand. He’s so way back. He doesn’t know anything.”

“Know anything?” she asked.

“It’s all behind me,” he said. “I tell myself I got you and the kids and I got this farm and all of that’s history and there’s no sense celebrating anything that couldn’t be celebrated then.”

“All of what?”

“All of that time over there.”

She kept at him with her eyes. “What’d you tell him?” she said.

He pulled out the chair just as she pushed coffee over the table toward him. “I told him no. I told him I wasn’t going to walk in his stupid parade.” He looked down at his hands and saw his fingers shake.

“You’re jealous of him, Wiley,” she said. “Down deep, you’re really jealous of him and Henry, aren’t you?”

He crossed his legs and slapped at the dirt on his knees from when he’d knelt out there at his parents’ grave.

“He gets you upset somehow because it wasn’t the same,” she said. “Is that what’s bothering you, Wiley?”

“I was out there with a hundred thousand guys and none of them cared like they did—none of them.” He looked around out the windows, away from her. “There was this one time,” he said. “We were coming back from Phu Tai on the log bird when we came up on this SPC that just got hit.” He took a long sip from the coffee. “The chopper got called down for the wounded. They told us to get out the bodies. The thing was incinerated. The guys inside were burned to the seat frames. We had to scrape them out and put what we had there into body bags.”

Carolynne sat with her cup up to her lips.

“Three days later I saw the names on a casualty sheet. I mean, it surprised me that all had names—you hear what I’m saying? They had names and places they were born, and I was almost surprised.” He stopped for a moment, forcing her to look at him. “I never had a Hank Minnard, Carolynne, if that’s what you want to know.”

“Nobody?” she said.

“Some lived and some died, but we were all short-timers. You put your monts in and got back to the world. That’s all. None of his holding hands shit.”

“What did you have?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “We didn’t have nothingat all like that. All I had was a sense of getting myself out—and you. Maybe all I had was letters—your letters and what’s back home. Nothing else.”

“You had me?”

He looked at her hair, lighter now, less kept, cut shorter, and at her eyes, the way lines from the corners spread into the edges of her temple—at the spots in her skin where he once imagined her so perfect, his wife now, a mother. She was part of him now, part of a whole different story, nothing close to what she was back then, the dream he had over there, the image of Carolynne.

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Tomorrow: More important talk, more stories.