After the Flag Has Been Folded (18 page)

I discovered two things that day—the sheer thrill of a log ride through shallow water and what it means to be immersed in the cleansing blood of the Lamb. The latter I learned when the youth pastor dropped me off at home.

I paused momentarily before jumping out of the van and rushing into the trailer house. “Pastor,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he replied. “What is it?”

“What makes Patsy so different?”

“What do you mean, Karen?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “It seems that Patsy has a light about her. Something from the inside that sets her apart. I mean, I don't know, she's just different, that's all. She seems happy. Not perfect, but sure of herself or something.”

I knew Patsy was as human as any girl when she sat in the back of the van on that ride home necking and snuggling with a blond, bronzed stud in the youth group. At first I was shocked, but then
I thought it was funny the way the two would pop upright and not even touch shoulders whenever the youth pastor glanced in the rearview mirror. I could tell Patsy was pleased that he never once caught them. Stolen kisses in the back of a church van were about as risqué as Patsy allowed herself to be—at least, as far as I ever knew.

“Patsy doesn't have anything you can't have yourself,” the pastor replied. He pulled a tiny black Bible out of his shirt pocket. Then, turning to John 3:16, he began reading: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall have eternal life.”

I had no idea what he was saying. He must've noticed the confusion in my eyes.

“Karen, there isn't a person alive who doesn't need God,” he said. “God created us to need him. He wants to have a relationship with us, but our sin gets in the way of that.”

I knew all about sin. It was an honored guest in our household. I recalled the lecture I'd gotten about sin from a drugstore owner after I'd been caught stealing a box of eye shadow. Linda watched in horror as the store manager whisked me to a back room and jerked the makeup out of my hands. “She was trying to get out the door without paying for this,” the woman informed the store owner.

A skinny man with puffy cheeks, the owner bent over, shook his finger in my face, and said sternly, “Don't you know that it's because of thieves like you that Jesus had to die on the cross? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I ought to call your mama.”

Frightful tears rolled down my cheeks. Linda was crying, too. She hadn't done a thing wrong, but the man's outrage scared her. She wasn't yet ten, but she already figured Frank and me to be the family idiots.

The fellow didn't call Mama. Instead, he shooed me out of his store with a warning and a threat: “Go home and seek God's forgiveness so you won't burn in hell. And don't you ever come back to my store again, young lady!”

Linda never told Mama about the incident. I went on to steal again. I didn't quit stealing stuff until after Mama confronted me. The most expensive item I stole was a fourteen-karat gold bracelet off a manikin at Kiralfy's Department Store.

Mama had admired a row of gold bracelets in the store's showcase while buying a dress one afternoon. While she was making her purchase, I slipped over to a manikin and picked a bracelet off its wrist. I had nothing to fear. The dummy couldn't push me away, and the sales clerk was too busy to notice.

But by that evening the guilt and shame I felt were heavier than ten blocks of gold. The chain links of the bracelet felt like shackles. So I did the proper thing and gave my shackles away—to Linda.

“Where did you get that bracelet you gave your sister?” Mama asked later. She was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, taking a slow drag from her cigarette as she waited for me to answer.

“I bought it at the drugstore,” I replied.

“Where did you get the money for that?” she asked. Mama returned my answer with a cool stare that let me know she didn't believe a word I was telling her.

“From baby-sitting,” I said. I had no qualms about expounding the lie.

“It's a really nice bracelet,” Mama said. “It doesn't look like a drugstore bracelet. It looks like the ones we saw downtown today.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. “I wanted to give Linda something nice for her birthday. I've been saving up for a long time.”

Mama didn't say another word. She blew a ring of smoke into my room and walked off. She took the bracelet from Linda and kept it herself. She wore it sometimes. I always knew that she knew I was lying. She knew I had swiped that bracelet from Kiralfy's. What she couldn't figure out is how I'd been able to do it without her or the sales clerk seeing me. That was the last of my five-finger discount days. Not because I was afraid of getting caught but because I didn't like the way I felt afterward.

I considered myself a pretty good kid once we'd left Lake Forest. I'd quit running the streets with Frank. I hadn't kissed a single boy during my entire eighth-grade year. I knew Frank was still going to make-out parties around the neighborhood, but I refused to go along. I didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't cuss. And I didn't let boys with stubby fingers touch my breasts anymore. I was trying oh so very hard, to be a good girl. Like Linda, I, too, wanted to be a help, not a burden, to Mama. I was proud when Mama made the dean's list at Columbus College, a feat she accomplished several times. I told all my friends about how smart my mama was. Sometimes I would help her study for her spelling tests. I marveled over the medical terminology that seemed to take up forty-eight letters of the alphabet.

But despite all my good behavior, I knew I lacked something. That something was what Patsy Ward possessed. I wanted it. My breathing grew shallow as the youth pastor flipped through his little pocket Bible, showing me the words of Jesus highlighted in red. Then he turned and placed the book into my hands. “Here, take this,” he said. “I've marked some things for you to read. What you need, Karen, is God. He loves you and wants the best for you. But he won't force his way into your life. You have to ask him in.”

“I can't take your Bible,” I said. I tried to hand the book back.

“No, you keep it tonight,” he replied. “You can give it back to me later.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I had a great time today. It was really fun.”

“Thanks for going!” Pastor called out his window as I rushed into the house.

Frank was curled up in front of the television, watching a black-and-white late-night show. Mama was sitting at the dinette table, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. Linda was in bed. “How was your trip?” Mama asked, looking up from the book she was studying.

“Really fun, ma'am,” I said. “The log ride was my favorite. I got soaking wet. We gotta go, Mama. You'd love it.”

“Yeah, maybe one day when I'm out of school,” she said. She turned back to her book.

I rushed to my bedroom, flipped on the light. I had to blink a couple times to adjust my eyesight. That tangerine-colored bedspread caused blind spots. I plopped down across the bed and began flipping through the Bible. I hunted for the red words—the ones Jesus spoke.

I read John 3:16. Then Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” I wept as the words washed over me. Those bright red words scoured my heart's tarnish better than a team of Merry Maids.

I slipped off the bed, onto my knees.
Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.
My heart pounded harder than a woodpecker on a chimney chute. Blood coursed through my body until my cheeks were hotter than an oven coil. Gasping, convulsing sobs racked my body, leaving me as exhausted as an epileptic after a bad seizure.

“God,” I cried. “I don't even know if you're there or not. I don't even know how to pray. But if you can hear me, I need you. Everything is so messed up. Frank's leaving. Mama's never around. I miss Daddy so much. Why did he have to die, God? How come you didn't save him?”

I kept on going. “Everything has been so messed up since Daddy left. I know I've done some bad things, God. I'm so sorry. I hope you'll forgive me. Will you, God? Will you forgive me?”

I took a deep breath and held it for a long moment. Waiting expectantly. But God didn't bust through the trailer roof with a dozen angels flanking his side. So I kept talking.

“These words say that you're standing at the door of my heart knocking, ready to enter.” I could hear the pounding of my heart but I couldn't tell if it was God or not. “I want you to come in. I want you to be Lord of my life.”

My body heaved with relief, the kind that comes at the end of the first day of a really long hike when the heavy pack can finally be slipped off and the trekkers can kick back. Immediately the faucet of
tears shut off. I blew my nose on the edge of the bedspread. I looked around the room, but I didn't see any incandescent figures hovering. That was a relief in itself.

I'd had a visitation once in the first year after Daddy died. The spirit who came into my room that night was not my father's. It was not a woman or a man. No wings or halos adorned this presence. I remember the luminous figure perched on the edge of my bed. I wasn't afraid, but I was a bit startled, just as I might be if I woke up and found Linda sitting on my bed studying me.

“Karen, don't be afraid,” the voice said. It was neither a male nor female voice. Just a voice of calm assurance.

“I'm not,” I replied.

“Your daddy is okay,” the voice said. “He wants you to know that. He wants you to quit worrying so much.”

“I'm trying,” I said. “But I miss him. I want him to come home.”

“He can't do that,” the voice answered. “But he misses you, too. He loves you. Never forget how much he loves you, Karen.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried hard to stop crying the way I had the night when Daddy came to my room before leaving for Vietnam. But, like before, I wasn't able to.

I quit believing in fairy-tale endings the day the man in the jeep showed up. I knew Daddy was in no position to make empty promises to me anymore. I believe the visitation was simply my father's way of letting me know he was sorry for breaking his promise and for breaking my heart.

Death took Daddy away, but his love for his family remains unrestrained. A short round didn't kill it off, and a casket didn't seal it away. It was the love of my earthly father that first convinced me there was such a thing as eternity and a heavenly Father who cares for me.

I
WAS SITTING IN THE LIBRARY IN THE BASEMENT OF
C
OLUMBUS
H
IGH THAT FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL IN
A
UGUST
1970 when a group of very big upperclassmen pulled out wooden chairs and sat down beside me. “Whaddya' reading?” one fellow asked.

“Victoria Holt,” I replied.

Another boy reached over and took the book out of my hands. I kept my head down.

“You a freshman?” the third fellow asked.

“Yes,” I replied. I looked up at them.

“What's your name?” the biggest of the three boys asked.

“Karen Spears,” I said.

“You have a brother who goes here?” he asked. “Is your brother Frankie?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. Frank's name is John Franklin. Lots of folks called him Frankie.

Then the three boys looked at one another, grinned, and stood up. They pushed in their chairs, and without saying another word they walked away from the table and never bothered me again. They didn't even give me time to tell them that my brother was no longer at Columbus High but at a military school some seventy miles away in Alabama.

My brother laughs whenever I recount that story. But what he never understood is how much I depended on him for my security. When he went away, my fears soon overshadowed me. I grew convinced that someone was going to do me or Linda or Mama some great harm, and I had no idea how to protect any of us.

For safety's sake, I devised an escape route from the trailer. With Mama often gone at night, I slept on the floor of my room, with my head sticking out into the hallway. The front door was to my left and the back door to my right. I figured if anybody came through the front, I'd be able to see them, grab Linda, and run out the back door. And vice versa if they came through the back door.

Needless to say, I got very little sleep. Every time the wind blew a pine branch up against the trailer, I jumped up and stared out the windows into darkness with my heart pounding, my stomach cramping. If I heard Mama coming in, I hopped up into my bed so she wouldn't know what a fraidy cat I was.

I hated the nights when she went barhopping with her girlfriend Betty. Or over to Lewis's to spend the night. I continued to feign sickness, hoping she'd postpone her plans and stay home for the night. That never worked, since Mama was a nurse. She would tell me to take two aspirin and go to bed. What she didn't understand was that I was feverish with fear. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't think clearly and I cried constantly.

I had quit going to church, since I had no way of getting there. Mama wasn't about to run me to town three times a week for Sunday school, evening service, and Wednesday-night prayer meeting. The only book of the Bible I'd studied so far was Revelation. The sight of locusts made me tremble. God's promises in Revelation did not offer me any assurances—they terrorized me: “I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which
searcheth the reins and hearts; and I will give unto everyone of you according to your works.” Rev. 2:21–23.

I was sure Mama's sinful ways were displeasing to God, so I was constantly worried that He was going to take her from me. My own salvation did not comfort me because my image of God was terribly distorted. I knew nothing of mercy and grace. I felt completely abandoned by my father, my mother, and now my brother. My world grew so dark that not even daybreak offered me a sense of relief.

I didn't want Mama out of my sight. On the nights when she was home, I pleaded with her to let me sleep next to her. But because she didn't understand my gnawing fears, Mama told me I was acting childish. “You're too old to be sleeping with me,” she said. She banished me from her room. “Go to bed in your own room!”

Often I lay on my bed until I was sure Mama was asleep, and then I snuck back into her room and curled up on the rug by her bed. The floor was hard and usually too cold because of the window air conditioner. But I slept better there than anywhere else during that first year after Frank went away.

When my sleeping pattern didn't improve, Mama decided something was horribly wrong. So she took me to see a counselor at Martin Army Hospital. She told him how I slept on the floor in my room or beside her bed. She told him there was really no reason for me to be acting out like this. She suggested maybe I was just trying to get attention. I'd always been her most hysterical child.

Then the kindly man sent Mama out of the room.

“Karen, what do you think is wrong?” he asked me.

“I don't know,” I said. “I just get scared when Mama's away.”

“What are you most afraid of?”

“That she'll die, too,” I replied.

He paused for a moment, and a heavy silence fell between us. I studied the stacks of papers piled across his oak desk and looked out the window at the twisted oaks. He studied me. Then he asked, “What should your mama do to help you?”

“She ought to take me to church,” I said.

“Why's that?” he asked.

“I like going to church,” I said. “But I can't drive. I don't have any way of getting there.”

We visited some more, and then he called Mama back into the room. “Your daughter wants to go to church,” he said. “Perhaps you ought to consider getting involved in one.”

Mama thanked the man and left. We drove home in silence and never returned to that counselor. Mama didn't take his advice. She wasn't speaking to God, and she didn't care if I cracked like a hardboiled egg; there was no way in hell she was taking me to church. As far as she was concerned, I was just overreacting.

But to be sure, she did take me to see another counselor. A woman therapist in downtown Columbus who specialized in troubled teens like me. But I was on to her scheme.

On occasion, Mama and Aunt Mary Sue visited palm readers. They'd pay twenty dollars or whatever the going rate was for a glimpse of their futures. What they wanted to hear was that very soon a well-to-do, handsome pirate would come steal them away to some exotic island. When, instead, the readings cautioned Mama or Mary Sue about a short lifeline or a troubling intersection ahead, they would dismiss the gypsy's reading as pure foolishness. That particular palm reader would be stricken from their list of wise advisors. Then, after a sufficient time lapse, they would seek out another fortune-teller, hoping for a better outcome. I knew Mama was applying the same approach to therapy that she did to palm reading. The trick was to find someone who would tell you what you wanted to hear.

The counselor, a juvenile specialist, didn't tell Mama to take me to church like the man at Fort Benning did, but she didn't dismiss my fears as easily as Mama had hoped. After our second visit, as we drove home down Macon Road, Mama and I got into a shouting match about who was at fault for what. When we pulled up to the red light near Shoney's Big Boy, Mama turned to me and said, “Shit fire, save
matches, Karen! I can't do anything right by you. I'm not wasting any more time or money going to see more therapists! As far as I can tell they just make aggravating matters worse.”

“Fine with me!” I yelled back. After all, no teen in her right mind wants to be identified as mental and hauled into therapy. I was furious with Mama. She was troubled enough by my insomnia to try and get me help, but only as long as it didn't require any effort or change on her behalf. That was just further evidence to me that Mama was unfit.

In an almost prophetic twist of literary irony, the first book to enrapture me as a youngster was Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel
A Wrinkle in Time.
I had read and reread it while attending Helemano Elementary School in Oahu, long before Daddy died. The mystery is about a brother and sister's quest to find their father, a scientist who is missing due to a time-warp experiment gone awry. Her father's absence makes the temperamental Meg explosive and emotionally unstable: “But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears.”

Only Meg's brother, Charles, whom the townspeople generally consider to be slow-witted, seems to understand her. The brother and sister duo travel through time and space and spiritual boundaries in order to restore their family. They are aided in their search by Mrs. Whoo, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit.

“If you want to help your father you must learn patience,” Mrs. Whoo warns Meg. “To stake one's life for the truth. That is what we must do.”

By the story's end, Meg's greatest weaknesses prove to be the source of her inner strength. What are her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was her faults that she turns to to save herself.

Unlike the fictional Meg, I did not recognize that weaknesses, either Mama's or mine, could be useful. For the next year or better, I struggled to iron out wrinkles in my own blurred reality. I traveled
along dark borders and traipsed through warped places that Mama couldn't see or comprehend. I had absolutely no coping skills to handle the fright that seized me each night or the guilt and anger that I harbored toward Mama by day. I never understood why she couldn't just hold me and tell me everything would be okay. What difference did it make if I was eight or eighteen? I was scared. I missed Daddy, and Frank, and I was haunted by the thought of losing Mama.

The guilt I felt over my sprawling fears was as heavy as an iron maul. I lugged it around all day long. I'd tell myself how stupid it was to be so afraid. I'd resolve each day at noon never to let darkness frighten me again. But every night at suppertime, as the sun set and the sky's light dimmed, a big swell of dread filled my belly until it ached fiercely. I'd try to fight off the anxiety with prayer, but that was never as comforting as having a grown-up nearby. I suspect Mama could see the fear clouding my eyes, but she turned away from it.

Years later Mama told me: “The more hysterical I saw you becoming, the more I tried to push you away. And that just made you more hysterical. I should have just let you get into the bed with me. I should have just comforted you. But I didn't know that then.”

 

D
ADDY'S LAST INSTRUCTION
to me was to stop crying because it upset Mama. I tried as best I could to do as Daddy had asked. But what he didn't know then is that Vietnam would upset a lot of people. I learned at an early age to handle the burning things of life with mitts of silence. So for many years I didn't talk about losing Daddy, about death, or Vietnam. I especially didn't talk about such things with Mama. Yet, neither one of us could escape Vietnam's far-reaching shadow. It was featured prominently in the nightly newscasts and in the daily papers. Political debates reached a feverish pitch once Fort Benning was selected as the site of the court-martial of Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley, Jr., for his role in the My Lai massacre.

Whenever Mama watched the newscasts or read the newspaper reports about the Calley trial, she'd gnaw on that worry gristle inside
her cheek, over and over again. It was as if she had a mouthful of words she was chewing on but couldn't quite spit out. I could tell she was troubled by what she was hearing and reading, but she wasn't one to divulge her worries.

November 1970 was a month chock-full of news. A lot of it was election stuff. Jimmy Carter, a plainspoken peanut farmer who promised to be a “working governor,” handily earned Georgia's top spot. It was the biggest Democratic victory Georgians had ever seen.

But not everybody in the city or state was rejoicing. Family members of the sixty-seven Georgia servicemen listed as missing in action or prisoners of war gathered in Atlanta and drafted a letter to the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. They also urged their fellow Georgians to join in a “Write Hanoi” campaign, asking the Communists to release names of those being held captive, and they pleaded for the release of any prisoners who were sick or wounded. At Columbus High School several of my classmates wore engraved bracelets bearing the names of those men. I didn't need a bracelet to remind me that our family was held hostage by what had already happened in Southeast Asia.

Some of the jury-selection proceedings in the Calley trial occurred on my fourteenth birthday—November 12—the day after Veterans Day.

Calley, then twenty-seven, was charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, in Quang Ngai Province of South Vietnam. Several other soldiers were also facing murder charges because the troops, under Calley's command, reportedly killed as many as five hundred unarmed civilians during that same rout.

The highly publicized trial was never discussed in my classes at Columbus High. Most of the kids there were the children of civilians, yet many had fathers or grandfathers who'd once served in the military. Columbus has always been very patriotic and deeply loyal to the military community at Fort Benning. Churches and civic organizations
make it a point to “adopt” young servicemen and to give them a family away from home. Sometimes literally. But soldiers are warned not to marry local girls. A fellow fishing off the banks of the Chattahoochee once told me, “They taught us at Fort Benning, ‘Don't marry a Columbus girl unless you intend to stay here because Columbus girls don't leave home for long.'”

Lieutenant Calley, a Florida native, was one of the many soldiers who married a local girl and made Columbus his home. He married Mrs. Tilly Vick's daughter. The Vicks were a prominent Columbus family. Well loved and highly regarded, they own the popular V. V. Vick Jewelers at Cross Country Plaza. Calley still runs the family business.

Teachers weren't given any edict about avoiding discussion of the trial; it was just part of the constrained society in which we all lived. It was considered uncouth to discuss unpleasant topics. The trial that made daily headlines nationwide was largely ignored at dinner tables and in civics classes. But occasionally I would overhear discussions among the students as we waited between classes for the bell to ring: