Eli the Good (23 page)

And then two letters where he asked for more paper, where he talked about missing home, the trees, Josie’s laughter. In all the letters he was holding back, not saying all he wanted to. Even a ten-year-old could see that. Maybe he couldn’t bear to write it all down. But in each one, there is something else that is left unsaid. The lines of the letters are like waves on the middle of the ocean, each of them covering a whole world beneath.

In one he said that I was eight months and two days old and he had never laid eyes on me.
I will make it up to him
someday, not being there. When I can I’ll be with him every minute of the day,
he had written. That hadn’t worked out like he had wanted, because when he got home he worked most all the time, fixing something on his truck or mowing the yard or breaking up the garden. I suppose he had tried his best to be one of those fathers who is always there, tossing a baseball and all that, but he wasn’t, and I was okay with that. I knew that he had to work, and that was all right. The problem was how quiet he was with me most of the time, the way he hardly ever noticed me. The last time I had felt like he was truly mine was when he had left me drive to the gas station, more than a month ago. I remembered the way he had kissed the back of my head.

And then, this letter, which was the last one of his I ever read:

There was something about this particular letter that got to me in a way no other had. Maybe it was everything that he wasn’t saying. Or maybe he was too much like a real person to me, something we don’t think of our parents being until we are much older. When I finished reading it, I found that my breath was heavy, as if I had been running a long time. I should never have read those letters at my age. It was too much for a child to properly digest.

The next envelope was blank and much heavier than the others, and I could tell right away that it contained a few pictures. Seven of them, all in color except for one:

1. A little boy in a long-sleeved, pin-striped shirt, smoking a cigarette with a small smile. A younger boy stands beside him, thumbs and forefingers together at his belly, looking into the camera. A hut and palm trees behind them. The inscription on the back reads:
Ton and Tin, Phuoc Vinh.

2. My father, shirtless, holding what looks like a machine gun with a wooden stock. He doesn’t look as old as Charles Asher, except in the eyes. He and another man (who wears black plastic glasses and has a wet rag around his neck) are looking up into what resembles a persimmon tree. There is a monkey sitting within the crook of two branches, and he looks like he’s laughing. The man with glasses is laughing, too, but my father is not. On the back my father has printed:
Me, Robinson, and our monkey, Woody.

3. A dirt road, palm trees on either side. A white sky. I have to squint to see, but it is undeniable: there are twelve dead bodies lying in the road. One of them is almost completely red with blood. One tire of a jeep is visible in the lower left corner. At the far end of the road there is a green tank with a large white star on its side. I don’t notice for a long time that there are several American soldiers standing near the bodies, looking down at them, as frozen as the corpses. I studied this one a long time. There is no writing on the back.

4. A dark-skinned man sits on the ground with a cloth bag over his face. The picture is full of movement — I can imagine his head darting about, trying to figure out the sounds around him — except for my father, who is standing very still in this photo, too. He is looking away from the hostage, far out over the fields, which are brown and yellow and dead. There is no writing on the back.

5. Here is one of my father wearing a green uniform, high black lace-up boots, a helmet. He is standing next to a briar patch covered in purple-pink blooms that look like wild roses. He has snatched one of the flowers off and put it between his ear and helmet. On the back:
I had Caudill take this picture of me because I thought you’d like the flowers. A little bit of beauty here in hell.

6. Six big helicopters sitting in a field. Their blades are a blur of motion, cutting the picture in two. The sky is low and gray, the color of an old spoon. No inscription on the back.

7. My father cutting a boy’s hair. A towel is spread out over the boy’s shoulders and covers him to the waist, where green soldier pants show. My father’s hand is spread out completely flat on the top of the soldier’s head and he is looking very intently at the small scissors in his hands as he snips away hair. The boy’s head is bent down but he has brought his eyes up to meet the camera, one brow arched. Behind them there is a thickness of woods. This is the only picture that is in black-and-white, and on the back my father wrote:
Cutting Caudill’s hair. He’s my best friend over here.

I didn’t want to take too much time to think about what I had seen and read, so I put the pictures back into their envelope and arranged them all neatly in the sandwich bag and placed them in the canvas satchel. I had been sitting there so long that my hair had dried and my shorts were only damp. The sun burned through the trees with such a white fierceness that I could almost hear the leaves crisping on the limbs. The heat bugs clicked in the grass. It was now the middle of July and it hadn’t rained since I had stood out in that thunderstorm and nearly scared Daddy to death. I didn’t want to think about how I might have caused him to start having his flashbacks, which is what Josie called them. She had gone to the library and looked up a bunch of books about veterans. She had lain down on the bed beside me and run her long finger down the page, trying to explain things to me.

“The vets from Vietnam have it worse because they were flown straight home,” she had said. I had watched her as she looked at the words on the page. I had no idea what she was talking about, but then she explained. “In the Second World War, the men had to take this real long boat ride back home, but soldiers like Daddy were in Vietnam one day and back home the next. They didn’t have time to think it all through before they got back to their people, so it’s worse for them.”

I meandered through the woods and found my bicycle lying at the end of the path, beside the road. I pumped my legs hard down the dusty road, thinking of nothing, focused completely on driving the bicycle as fast as I could. I was suddenly panicked and felt that if I didn’t get the letters back home and properly hidden in the cedar box, I would surely be found out. Besides, I didn’t want them in my possession anymore.

J
osie was a storm that moved through the house. She stomped away from our mother, who was right at her heels, her face stretched tight with anger. Josie slammed her bedroom door, slid past where Loretta was yelling in the hallway, and whirled around on one heel to face her. As she did so, she jerked at the back of a kitchen chair too hard and sent it straight to the floor, its back making a high crack on the still, hot air of the house.

Josie had on her flag pants, and this time Mom wasn’t going to back down. I stood in the back door, watching them, although I don’t think they had even noticed my entrance. I had my satchel strapped over my shoulder and was torn on what I should do. This fight was occupying Mom in such a way that I had the perfect opportunity to return the letters to the cedar box without her noticing. But I hated to miss this fight, because it was going to be a big one. A part of me was thrilled by their arguing, so I wanted to see it for the entertainment value. Another part of me hated to see them so mad at each other, so I wanted to stay and intervene if the need arose.

“Take them off right now!” My mother thrust a finger into the air, toward the pants. “Right this minute.”

Josie looked completely taken aback, as if someone had just told her to put a gun to her temple and pull the trigger. “I
won’t
!” she screamed. “After what you did, you don’t have no right to make me do anything!”

Mom took one step forward, a giant step, like someone bobbing over a narrow creek, and wrapped her hand around Josie’s wrist. She brought her face down close to Josie’s, their eyes burning into each other’s. “This is one time that you’re going to mind me, Josie Michelle. You are going to take those pants off and I’m going to throw them away and then you’re going to your room for the rest of the night.”

“Charles Asher is coming to get me,” she yelled, appalled. She tried to peel Mom’s fingers away from her arm, but it did no good. Our mother was not going to back down this time.

“You’re not going anywhere with Charles Asher,” Mom said. “I know what you’ve been doing with him, and this is going to stop now. You’re going to take off those pants right this minute. And you’re going to stop running wild.”

“What am I doing with him, Mom?”

Quieter now: “You know what I mean, Josie. Don’t make me say it in front of Eli.”

So they did know I was there.

“We’re not doing anything you didn’t do,” Josie said. She was enjoying this. The words spewed from her like someone caught up in a fire-and-brimstone campaign speech. “But I’m smarter than you.”

Mom ripped her hand away from Josie’s wrist, and Josie stepped back, touching her arm as if she were hurt. Then Mom unleashed her anger on me instead of Josie. She whirled around and faced me, her sharp finger pointing toward the door, her words urgent and high. “Go back outside, Eli!” she hollered. “I’m tired of your spying!
Right now!
”

Although my mother had never screamed at me this way before, I only scrambled out onto the screen porch and cowered near the back door, where I could still hear them. Mom was so caught up in all the words that she didn’t even notice when I peeked around the door frame.

“How dare you speak to me that way, Josie,” she said, calmer now. She seemed to measure out each word.

“How dare
you
lie to me,” Josie said, her hands balled into fists. “And how dare
you
act so high and mighty. Do you realize what a terrible mother you’ve been to both of us? Lying to me,
never
there for Eli.”

“Never there?”

“Always caught up in some la-la land with Daddy, worshipping him —”

“You ought to be glad your parents love each other. What if you had parents like Edie?”

“But you always loved him more than us,” Josie said. Even though I had felt this way many times, I knew that Josie didn’t really believe anything she was saying. She was just throwing gas on a raging fire. “You always chose him over us. I
despise
you.”

My mother said nothing. I looked around the door frame and saw her there with her back to me, her shoulders slumped, yet rising with each deep breath she took. She was shaking her head no, slowly back and forth.

“And it’s because Daddy
saved
you, you think,” Josie said, mocking. Her eyes were wild, huge. “Because I wouldn’t have had a father otherwise, right? If you hadn’t been running wild, maybe you wouldn’t have got knocked up with me,” Josie said, a smile creeping out over her lips. “I’m not a slut like you were.”

My mother sliced her hand through the air and slapped Josie’s face. The sound was sharp and piercing, like someone bringing a book down hard on a table. Worse than the sound was the way Josie looked, though. Her face was taken over by a scowl of disbelief and complete belief, all tangled up in one openmouthed gasp. She put her trembling fingertips against the place where Mom had hit her and brought her hand out to look at them, as if blood might be there.

Josie drew her face tight, and just as her gathered mouth and fretted brow let me know what she was about to do, she threw her hand up and slapped our mother.

Her impact was less openhanded and produced a dull thud against Mom’s cheek, but she had hit her own mother in the face, and this was too much. This had gone too far. I stepped forward, wanting to do something, to say something, but there was nothing to say. I couldn’t understand where Nell had run off to. She could have stepped in and said the right thing and stopped all of this. Peacemakers were never around when they were needed, I decided. They showed up only after the war was already in progress.