Authors: Diane Munier
Darnay Road (39 page)
“No.” His eyes shoot to the ring and
he’s worried.
“You can’t stand up for us? What do you
think I’ve been doing every day at school, with those older boys, with Ricky,
yes I know all about it, how he feels, all about it, with my father and my
granma, what do you think I’ve been doing and the first time you get a taste of
it, you get mixed up? About me?”
I’m working the ring off. I know I’m
being dramatic and I’m too upset to think but I work it off anyway. “Here.”
“No,” he says.
“You weren’t ready to give this to me.”
“Yes I was.”
“No you weren’t. Take it before I throw
it into the weeds and you can’t find it anymore.”
“I won’t take it back.” He folds his
arms.
There’s no way I’m throwing it in the
weeds. I make a fist over it and turn and start walking.
“Georgia you’re taking this all wrong. I
just wanted to tell you.”
“You told me.”
“Stop it. Stop.” His hand on my arm
stops me. “She said it was partly pity. That’s what got me. That and you sitting
alone waiting.”
“Don’t…repeat it.”
“Is it pity?”
I turn to him. “You mean like feeling
sorry for you? I did feel sorry for you. I do now. You’re headed for war, Easy,
a war that makes the soldiers…they say don’t go. Uncle Sam never had soldiers
say that, but these are.”
“Not all of them.”
“And I feel sorry for you that you have
to make your own way and that no one loved you, sorry that I saw bruises on you
and I knew you were being hit and you weren’t fed enough or ever given a pat on
the back or clapped for or given anything to help you, or made to feel safe.”
“My mom loved me….”
“I was sorry for you. I’m still sorry
for you. I’ll always be sorry about that. And so sorry…that night. I’m so
sorry…that he died like that…and your mom….” I just can’t say anymore. I wipe
my eyes on my shoulder and I try to stop my emotions from growing so big I
can’t speak.
“You’re too good for me.”
“I’m not….”
“You are. I always wanted you. I
couldn’t help it.”
“You’re good. You told me you weren’t
but I always saw it, Easy. You’re good inside. You’re the best there is, the
only one I want. The only one I’ll ever want….”
He takes quick steps toward me and he’s
got me and we’re moving backwards, all the way to a tree, it’s rough against my
back and he’s pressing against me.
“I should let you go. I should let you
go,” he says, mad and miserable and serious and terrible.
I am crying now, but so is he. And I
hold onto him, I hold onto him so tightly.
Darnay Road 63
There is no fairy tale. We’ve stayed
with the tracks, the obvious for too long.
When we pass the trestle we do not
reminisce. We are too busy living the story, our story, too busy trying to
reach resolution without being able to move toward it. We are stuck with what
is.
We have established the truth. Granma’s
interference has dug all the way to the marrow. We have a love that’s
impossible to grow or fulfill in the regular fashion.
That doesn’t make it go away.
It’s alive like a new baby with a fatal
disease. It’s still sweet. You still want to hold it, cradle it, sing to it,
cry for it. But it could die before it even gets to live.
No, I think, no, and it’s like revelation
what I know. The only obstacle to us is us. Nothing can separate us if we don’t
let go. Maybe not even death. Now that’s dramatic, like Granma accused us of
being, but it doesn’t change how I feel and how I feel changes everything.
We’ve gone too far now. I just wanted to
keep walking but we’re behind Aunt May’s. I can see Easy’s old house over
there. It looks even more faded, like it’s going to disappear soon, fall into
the ground and turn to humus.
We stop. He does. I do. “It hasn’t
changed,” he says. “I think I dreamed that house. My dream house.” He laughs
but it’s bitter.
“What happened to your dog when you
left?”
“Disbro took him to the country and gave
him away. No one around here would want him. The old man mistreated…that dog.
Cap would cry. I’d try to get him to turn it on me.”
“The dog?”
“No. His…anger.”
He holds my hand so tight. I look at him
in profile as he stares at that house. I see it now. I see what he did in his
family.
“You’re brave,” I say. I mean it. He has
always been the brave one. Forged into a hero. It’s so deep in him he can’t be
anything else. He can’t be a coward. Like his dad.
It worries me and comforts me all at
once. He will be heroic when he goes to war. But it will be what he must do.
And he wonders why I love him…so fiercely.
I work my hand free of his and I still
have that ring in my other fist and I let him watch me put it on my finger.
“What’s it mean?” he says.
“I’ll never take it off,” I say, chin
up, not blinking just staring. At him.
He holds my hand and touches that ring.
He’s not looking at that old house anymore. “I get back…I’ll give you another.
If I know you’re waiting…if you want to…you have to promise you’ll go ahead and
do things. I won’t hold it against you. Just…when I get back…if there’s someone
else….”
I start to pull away and he holds more
tightly to my hands, “Hear me out Georgia. If something happens while I’m
gone…you’ll have to tell me and I won’t blame you. I’ll do whatever you say.
Just…don’t sit around. And miss things.”
He looks at me so sincerely and my hand
with the ring works free and I touch his face. I know he likes this, when I
touch him this way. He closes his eyes.
“The only thing I’ll miss is you,” I
say.
Part 3: 1970
Long white rows of headstones fill the
landscape, each marker representing a life…someone’s hope…someone’s heart.
The ground is spongy from so much rain
and this day is gray. Like Good Fridays usually are. This is a place where men
who have performed military service are laid to rest.
Our small party has broken up. Granma is
already in the car with Aunt May. Well she took it so hard.
I am determined to see a crack in the
sky so the sun can wink at me, but I can’t find that seam of light even though
I know it’s there.
I don’t feel numb. I feel peace. The
difference is vast.
The sun does wink then. I’m no different
than any of these others laid here in silence like seeds planted in the earth
while their lives continue to bear fruit through those who like me, in distant
groups peppering this landscape, sow them in reverence and hope for the day.
Did his life touch me?
I’m here, aren’t I?
1971
In the morning, we practice graduation
and Cap smokes a cigarette while we walk two by two. He hides the smoke when we
walk past the teacher.
Then later it’s the last day, last day
and exams.
If I could laugh, I’d be laughing right
now. Cap is looking out the window and I know he’s not finished. The history
final hasn’t been hard but it required preparation. He knows some history. He
reads. But the way they teach it here, in public school, you have to memorize
dates. I think that’s so you can sound like you know something so they can feel
good about themselves. But history is one big understatement. You read that a
battle took place—the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War One, Two,
Korea, Vietnam, and all that will come after. But you don’t read the millions
of stories, of children barely grown….
The ocean is just grief, all the tears,
noise that swells beneath the canon, the strafing, the M16, the ocean is the
hum that builds and builds and calls on God and rails on Him and quiets down
and swells again…it’s an endless psalm.
I look out the window too. Like Cap. My
test is finished. I think it’s an A because I studied. But here is history. My
history. Long rows of letters dotting my landscape like tombstones, each
marking a life, my life on Darnay and Easy’s life on a firebase in Vietnam.
Here is my history loving, fiercely loving, holding him alive in that love.
Holding him in my love and begging God with the devotion of a nun, novenas and
supplication and rosaries and fasting. Oh God. I am over the altar now, I am
laying my face on the white linen there.
We wear the flat caps and the flowing
gowns. We move our tassels. Cap moves mine and I move his.
We did it. Whatever we’ll be in this
life, it won’t be high school dropouts. But there were times he nearly dropped
out. Or I did.
I wouldn’t let him. Granma wouldn’t let
me. And Abigail May wouldn’t let either one of us. Something about carrying on.
It was what he would have wanted.
Really? I never knew him that way. Let’s
not change him because he can’t defend himself. He was just a kid, figuring it
out. He was hard on us sometimes. But he wasn’t bad. He didn’t know, didn’t
have a dad to show him what to do. But wanting us to carry on? He never had to
think about it.
We stand for pictures, Granma and Aunt
May. Aunt May’s develop in our hands. Oh look at you. Oh look at me. I’m so serious.
We are serious. Even our humor is a weighty attempt…to be here.
We leave in the morning. Bare morning.
Alice May barely awake and grumbling. You never went to sleep and you pack
light. You live light. Just barely. I have made decisions and what I need is more
than what I want.
Aunt May’s old car will make it. We’ll
ride it away from the solid things--Aunt May saying good-bye and Granma sound
asleep. My note lies on the kitchen table. “I know you said to be sure and wake
you up….”
And the extra ten dollars sitting on top
of my purse--if I had tears, they would fall about now. They would splash on my
hands and hold me to this fleeting moment.
But I carry Little Bit across the street
and kiss her one more time and hand her to Aunt May. “Be good,” I tell her, not
Aunt May but my little trembling dog that has slowly become more hers than mine.
We get in, me in the back with my stuff.
Cap and Abigail in front and one glance at Aunt May, big gray behind her, big
white calling to me for a kiss at least and Darnay Road carries us a few
hundred feet…and lets us go.
Darnay Road 65
Abigail is already saying, “We there
yet?” then she laughs but not the old laugh, the new laugh that is loud and
quick and…over.
No one seems happier to be out of school
than Abigail May. Our last year was particularly brutal. At least I had Cap at
George Washington. Abigail was pretty much alone. She hadn’t really gotten
close to anyone once I left. Well the friends she had just fell away.
They tried. She says they tried. They
attended Mass for Ricky and they came to the funeral, walking in and past.
Solemn. Death had touched them. Ricky—he
was them, even if older, it didn’t matter. His picture was in the glass case.
Ricky excelled.
Abigail didn’t cheer and she barely
passed her classes. She didn’t go to sock-hops, she didn’t try out for the
play. She didn’t twirl. She was letting her hair grow out, she tied it back.
She did go to prom. Cap on one side of her, me on the other. We tied ribbons on
our feet and in our hair and pretended it was fun.
Then she got a new cut right before our
trip, a long shag.
“Like Jane Fonda?” I said.
“Like myself,” she had answered.
She made it through. What is it called,
that loss of innocence…turning into an adult. That’s it. It was always the
goal. No one can tell you, no one knows. They hope it will happen naturally,
but when it’s quick—the turning--you’re dazed for a while—you’re unpredictable.
No one has known you this way before. Including you. You’re not sure you can do
it—be grown up. You don’t know if you’ll shout or scream or get in line or
break the line, the rules. You don’t know.
“We fight,” former President Johnson had
said. “We will not be defeated.”
By the time our Darnay boys went to
Vietnam thirty-eight thousand were already dead. By 1970 almost no one here
wanted their war—two-thirds of Americans didn’t.
But since sixty-nine President Nixon had
a plan, an initiative. Our soldiers were training the South Vietnamese—primitive
farmers—to take over the war. We were going to have Nixon’s ‘peace with honor.’
Nixon was slowly bringing American soldiers home.
Half a million troops were in-country by
sixty-nine. Nixon reduced that to over three hundred thousand by seventy. But
the handwriting was on the wall. There wouldn’t be a victory. An exit strategy
was designed by well-manicured hands. Peace talks were taking place in Paris.
It would be a hand-off between a gigantic green machine and a herd of water
buffalo.
In those same years Abigail’s mother got
sick and came home to big gray. Then Ricky got in trouble with the law, with
Disbro and they could go to jail or he of the unwithered good hands well able
to hold a weapon could go in the army. Next thing we knew Ricky was in basic
then on his way to Vietnam.
Who gets killed day one in-country? Not
Ricky. Not this boy that most things came naturally to. Not this angry son of a
father who had died in Korea.
But yes, our boy. And several hundred
others over time. Casualties of day one in a war of many a thousand days. Ricky
Brody, meant to marry some girl who graduated Sacred Heart and lived close to
Darnay Road. He was meant to have a big Catholic family and get a pot-belly and
a bald head and join the Knights of Columbus and run a booth in the school
picnic every summer. And work for the phone company. He was meant to have sons
who would ride their bikes up and down Darnay and play ball in the field all
summer. He was meant to have daughters who snuck out at night to solve mysteries…to
be mysteries. He was meant to outlive his anger.
If Ricky could die, anyone could.
But you can’t kill a soul. I couldn’t
love Ricky, not in the way he thought he wanted. But I wanted him to live, no,
I expected it.
Granma said it wasn’t me. She said it
wasn’t me. I didn’t send him out to break the law to get so drunk and ride
through the shopping center and have marijuana in the truck and pee on that
cop’s leg. All I did was say no, all I did was tell him I could never feel that
way about him. I told him I was in love with Easy. It would only ever be Easy.
Some days, after Abigail’s mom was in
remission, after she was done being stoic and strong, and Ricky was buried
under the earth away from the sun, after all of that there were days when Aunt
May couldn’t get out of bed. She read “I’m Okay, You’re Okay,” and she read her
bible. I sat on her bed, one side of her, Abigail on the other, Little Bit
curled under Aunt May’s arm like she’d found a higher calling than just amusing
me.
“Cain will kill Abel,” May said. “Both
sons. Both born to the same mother. Both needing milk. Who do you hate? Who do
you blame?”
It was mostly about Ricky. She
worshipped him, Granma said. When she talked like this, she made Abigail cry.
“Well I blame Cain, plain and simple,” I
said.
But I thought Aunt May was pretty
brilliant anyway. She wasn’t talking jibberish. She had a theory, that’s all.
She had to find her way. But I knew, for sure, she’d never let him go.
But now I’m traveling and it’s this new
world. New to me.
“Nothing is longer than traveling to
Florida,” Abigail May says blowing through her lips. “Thank God we’re not going
there.”
No, we’re not going there. She’s trying
to smoke now. The window is down and her hair whips around. I watch her and I
smile a little. She takes a puff then gives the smoke to Cap and I think of how
Easy taught me to smoke once, in this very back seat and my hand rubs over the
worn threads.
A hundred years ago.
Well three. Many letters and boxes
mailed, cookies packed in popcorn. Cookies and popcorn and stubborn love.
I think of him that last night, the very
last between his six months at Fort Ord and before he went over to Nam. He came
all the way to big white, to Darnay Road to be with me for two precious
stinking days of bliss and sorrow and hoo-ray and boo-hoo.
He had this sense of mission then, and I
was first on the list.
He loved me, in my formerly pink room,
the Barbie Game buried deep in my closet, the pink radio on my shelf, the ring
on my finger--a small diamond now, the opal on a chain around my neck.
Yes, I’ll marry you. When you get home I
will.
I gave him my heart as he moved past,
like a train rushing through. I slipped that beating red into his hand, madly
and passionately, it couldn’t be stopped as we barely started…big white had a
heartbeat, the telltale heart, in my room, in my arms, in my bed creaking and
hitting the wall. It was us now, not asking permission, beyond them, love had
carried us there, there. “Georgia,” he said, “Georgia.” He gasped, he cried. I
had walked into his heart, into the deepest chamber I knelt there and took root
there, half stubborn, half weak, but sure and certain, I gave him everything.
All I had.
I groan when I think of it and I think
of it all the time, even in the middle of class, even in the seconds before
they gave me my diploma. At a grave. During sermons or meals or movies or
riding in this car.
Now, especially now, I think of it. I
think of him standing there, in my room, his body grown and hardened and
scarred and beautiful. I think of him. I think of him.
The tires hum beneath us, and a road
whose name I do not know, carries us along. It’s all Darnay, all of it, one
running into another and another and a country…and a dream.
These United States of America. My love.
My home.
“Should we stop?” Cap asks me in the
mirror and it’s hills and dark skies and stars that break apart…over a
valley…and make me hope.
“Up to you,” I say. Don’t stop. Don’t
stop.
He shakes his head. “It’s not so far.
You say.”
I lean forward. My face near him. “It’s
different here,” I say. “It’s already different.”
He smiles. “I don’t know…if anything’s
that different.”
“If we pull over I can close my eyes
and…,” he says. He didn’t sleep the night before.
“All right,” I say, and I pull his long
hair just a little before I sit back.
Patience. It means surrender. It means I
take my hands away. And I wait.
And we pull off and the tires crunch
gravel and pop those old tar bubbles we used to work with a stick. He finds a
haunted gas station in the middle of this no-where and pulls in.
Abigail May drops onto Cap’s lap and he
tips back his head and I know his hand is on her. I slump a little and turn my
head so I can see the stars. “Remember those old hook man stories?” I say.
He laughs quiet. He is a quiet guy.
I feel him so suddenly, so quick—Easy.
Easy. I send him love, like I always do. I pray love…to him. For him. I look at
the stars and there are no more tears. No more now. He understands.
That time he held me against the tree.
Right after I put on that ring and I was a bride making a vow, behind Aunt
May’s with the frozen brown ground and the desolate chill.
He gave me himself that boy. That wild
boy.
It’s Cap who told me one night. Easy’s
mother was right. It was always Cap who would eventually tell.
His father visited Miss Little…all the
time. He used that poor woman, he hurt her sometimes and Easy would fight him
and try to make him come home. His father would get so drunk Miss Little would
call. And they’d go for him—Easy and Cap would--and drag him home.
Fourth of July families celebrated, all
along, and happy birthday to me and I carried that cake.
Explosions and sparkles and red, white,
and blue. They got him out of her house into the yard. He would black out and
come to and fight them. When he wasn’t kicking and punching he’d turn into dead
weight.
They got him as far as the yard and he
struck Easy in the side and Easy kicked him. For a while he had his hands
around the old man’s throat and Cap didn’t think he’d stop.
Cap pleaded and he beat on Easy and
finally Easy saw me and he jumped to his feet. His dad was coughing. Cap was
crying.
Easy ran me off and they worked to get
their dad behind her house, half carried, half dragged him almost to the tracks
and he came to again and started to swing and curse and he fell on the tracks.
He fell right there. Train coming. Like
providence. Like a period at the end of a long, sad story. Right there.
“Get him up,” Cap said. “Get him up.”
And Easy fought his father Carl, to get
him up.
But a terrible voice at the back fence
over the barking dog. A terrible, “No.”
They looked at her. She didn’t come
outside often. She hadn’t been up much since she lost the baby.