Memorial, a story (v)

“I remember this one Sunday morning in Saigon,” he told her. "I sat on a park bench in the middle of town and all I wanted to think about was you back here right then in church. I thought about your arm," he said, amazed that it came back so effortlessly out of nowhere, as if it had suddenly been unearthed. "Can you imagine that, Lynnie?--your husband sitting there thinking about your arm, just your arm?"

She held her cup of coffee in both hands.

“I could feel it, really. I could feel your arm in my fingers. I swear it.” He held his hands out in front of him, rubbing his own fingers. “Crazy, isn’t it? Can you imagine your husband somewhere a thousand miles away getting off on your arm—how soft it was?”

She pressed her lips together tightly in a smile.

“I sat there feeling your arm in my fingers and at the same time I was repeating the words of the 23rd Psalm—‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ like church. ‘I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.’ All of that. I kept going over it, trying to force it into my soul almost.” He looked up at her. “That’s really dumb, isn’t it?”

“Like meditation,” she said.

“I suppose—Carolynne Folkert’s arm—”

“My arm?—”

“Yeah,” he said, “your arm and the 23rd Psalm in the middle of Saigon on a Sunday.” He brought his hands up to his eyes and laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why?”

“I remember I could feel things top in me, all the nerves just quit, everything shut down when I’d think about you. My nerves went soft as fur, and all the time I was trying to repeat the words of the Psalm. It made things quiet.”

“He restoreth my soul,” she said.

She was something of yours from another world you knew existed only because you had this vision memory, he thought. He didn’t have anyone else, only her. “God, I loved you a lot,” he said.

“More?” she said, smiling.

"I said things in those letters that I guess I don't say anymore," he told her. "I remember how I could pour it into that pen--you know, writing. I couldn't do that anymore." She held one hand up beneath her chin as he talked, and her eyes suddenly seemed dream-like, almost the way he would have imagined her back then, twenty years ago. "Listen," he said, "it wasn't just your arm I thought about over there, I'll tell you that much. I thought about the rest of you too--every sweet inch, baby."

“It was all so different, wasn’t it?” she asked. "I mean, from what we are today--better, almost." She brought down her arm and stretched it out toward him across the table. "Here," she said, "hold me now, like then."

He put one hand on her wrist and the other over her elbow, pinched softly, then spread his fingers and ran them lightly over her skin, stopping intermittently to squeeze. Dime blue veins ran up from her wrist and disappeared into her flesh. The bones on the back of her hands rose from her skin like tight wires, but all around him the streets filled with little people begging him to buy, bicycles pedaled all over through the constant Sunday morning chatter of an almost language he'd almost learned to hate.

“Like this?” Carolynne said. “Is that what you mean?”

If he pressed her flesh just soft enough he could really feel her there in his hand. "'The Lord is my Shepherd," he said again, "I sha 11 not want. ' "

He heard her breathing thicken. "I used to cry," she said, "because I worried so. I never told you how much."

"We got hit on patrol somewhere once," he told her, "and the radio guy went down just on the other side of the hill, the box was squawking--I could hear it, the buzz, the garbled noise." He kept his left hand on her arm, raised his right hand to his eyes. "When I tried to get up, they kept shooting, and I was scared. I knew the radio guy was down, but I couldn't move, Lynnie. I couldn't move. I was the damn medic."

She put her hands over his.

"Four hours I listened to that squawking. He was dead."

"You never told me," she said.

"It was the crying that made me sick last winter," he told her. “It was Lewie Van Dam’s crying out there in the cemetery that did it.

“You never cried?” she said.

I cried so hard I don’t have a drop in me,” he said. “All night I cried. You see me cry now, Lynnie?” he asked. “You ever see me wet with tears?”

“You’re too strong—”

"Strength, hell," he said. “I'm too scared. " She pinched his fingers. "I buried my parents, Lynnie, both of them. Don't you dare say I didn't have occasion.

She reached up and took his arms in both her hands. "You couldn't tell me that?" she said. "In all those letters, in all these years?"

"Some people can go on and on," he told her. He pulled himself back and stood. "I got chores to do.” He nodded as if to assent to something, then walked out and down the stairs.

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Tomorrow: the conclusion