Eli the Good (9 page)
Authors: Silas House
I worked the first letter out of the stack, afraid that if I undid the knot on the black ribbon my mother would somehow detect my intrusion. It seemed that she had arranged them from the earliest to the latest date after he had finally shipped out, since the first one was postmarked October 28, 1966. I brought the crisp envelope up to my nose and drew in its scent. The paper smelled of ink, tangy and metallic.
My mother had ripped the end off each envelope. I could see her doing this, careful and hesitant so as not to accidentally cut into the letter that stood inside. I tapped the corner against my palm, and the letter slid out. For just a moment I let the three pieces of small, folded stationery rest on my palm, testing their weight.
“Be careful,” Edie whispered, making me feel as if I were handling a pack of firecrackers.
I unfolded the pages in slow, measured motions, and then laid them on the floor in front of me, smoothing my hand over the creases. The paper was thin and rough, like the paper I imagined the Constitution might have been written upon. I leaned forward on my knees and read aloud.
Hey Baby,
Well, I’m here. Six days on that ship. The first two days I was so sick I thought I was going to die. All these men who had gone through rough-as-hell basic training leaned over the rail, puking their guts up.
But I’m here. And I’m alive. So far. We are close to the Michelin and Firestone plants, which is a strange thing to know, being so far away from home and seeing the signs of something so familiar. I am missing you like crazy and somehow seeing those rubber factories makes me miss you all the worse.
My sergeant says that homesickness is what kills you over here, and also what gets you through it. As I write this I have been here two days and already I know that the main reason I want to live is so I can get back to you, back to home. I miss that soft place behind your knee and the way your mouth always tastes like strawberries.
“Eli,” Edie said at this point. “Maybe you ought to stop.”
But I kept reading:
I miss Josie getting my hand just before bedtime and asking me to take her out onto our little porch to see the stars. How quiet she was when I pointed out the Big Dipper to her, the way she sat up real straight and said, “I see it, Daddy,” after a long time of looking, and the way it felt when I thought that maybe she did see it. God, you’ve never known homesickness until you’re on the other side of the world. Add to this that you know you’ll eventually see some action, that people are dying over here every day. If a man thought too much about it he’d get himself killed, as he’d crack up.
“That’s enough, Eli,” Edie said. I saw then that she had unfolded herself during my reading and was lying on the floor, one arm propping up the side of her face. “Come on, now.”
“No,” I said, and I didn’t sound like myself at all. I never spoke with so much force to Edie. “Just a couple more.”
But then I read three more, aloud, and after that she didn’t stop me. With each one we went deeper and deeper into Vietnam. There was one about how they had to go into the jungle for two weeks, another about the way the B-52s would zoom in over them and bomb the Viet Cong. After that my father had to go on what he called search-and-destroy missions, although he never explained exactly what that meant. It seemed to be an understanding between him and my mother that he wouldn’t spell out every single thing. He mentioned being dropped from helicopters into bamboo grass that was eight feet tall.
He talked about stringing Constantino wire around the camp, about building a bunker out of rubber trees and sandbags. In one letter a small newspaper article from
Stars and Stripes
fell out. The entire first sentence was underlined in fat blue ink:
A Viet Cong forward aid station was discovered while on a search-and-destroy mission 15 miles south of Phuoc Vinh by Company A, 1st Batallion, 2nd Infantry, 1st Infantry Division.
A shaky arrow snaked out to the margin where my father had written in matching blue ink:
Our brigade.
One letter detailed the prisoner of war my father had to guard. The POW was tied up with rope in the center of a big field, with a soldier on each corner. There were long declarations of homesickness and admissions of fright and descriptions of the land and the people. My father wrote that in Saigon there was an old Vietnamese man who spoke perfect English and cooked a wonderful meal of rice and shrimp for my father and his buddies. The old man’s teeth were solid black from opium, and he ate three fish heads while they feasted on their supper. “He could squat down for hours on his haunches,” Daddy wrote. He told of children who stood beside the roads as the troops passed, all dressed in long sleeves no matter how hot it was. My father and the other soldiers broke Hershey bars into five pieces and handed them out. He told of riding for miles up and down Highway 1 in the back of army trucks while the land sped by.
And always the trees; he was obsessed with them. Especially their leaves. Their bigness, slickness, the way some of the leaves would hold rain like cups and leaves that were slender as green beans and smelled musky and sweet at the same time. Each letter was different in some way except that he always talked about the trees and he always said how much he missed my mother and Josie. He longed to touch my mother’s pregnant belly.
The thing that struck me the most about all these letters was his love for the trees.
I knew that he could name any tree he saw. He was apt to be walking along somewhere and nod in the direction of a beech and speak its name, or run his hand down a scaly bark and say, “Hickory” or peer far up into the branches and say, “Look, a persimmon tree.” But he did this same thing with cars, too. Often when I was at a station with him, he would stand outside beside the Pepsi machine and watch as people sped by on the highway and sometimes by only the sound of the approaching engine he’d say, “’66 Mustang,” or “Ford LTD,” or “1971 Plymouth Duster.” So I never knew that he loved the trees as much as I did.
This undisclosed connection that bound us now, the secret trees that neither of us spoke of to each other; it seemed like something that would be easy for a son and father to talk about. I lingered on this a long while after the fourth letter, thinking it over while the room grew smaller and darker and Edie relaxed into the silence of the house so much that she all but disappeared to me.
“One more, then,” she said, at long last. Still quiet, still a whisper. I loved her for her quiet, for her lack of interference. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her for it, but I thought this would be a crazy thing to do and she would only punch my arm and laugh in that jaunty, menacing way of hers.
So I opened the one that would change me forever.
Dearest Loretta,
I usually start your letters with Hey Baby but I need to use your name now. I’ve been whispering it to myself all day long. Loretta Loretta. That’s all that’s gotten me through this day, saying your name, a name that I love because it’s yours, because when I say it I see you in front of me.
I need to tell you something that I shouldn’t. But I have to, because you’re the only one who really knows me. Besides my mother and Nell, I know that you’re the only person in this world who truly loves me. Some of these boys over here love me. I know that, too. We are like a family now. But if they live and go back to their families they’ll probably only remember me every once in a while, for some strange reason they can’t explain. I love them, too. They’re the best friends I ever had because we’re here, together, and you can’t help but get close in times like these. But you know what I mean. When it comes right down to it all I have in this world is you and Josie and the baby and my mother and sister.
You can tell that I’m beating around the bush, so I’ll just say it. I killed a man today. I have had to do some terrible things on those search-and-destroy missions, Loretta. Things I’ll never get over. But today, I saw his eyes.
We were on a march up Highway 1. And I stepped aside just for a second to pee, although we’re not supposed to do this, and just as I unzipped, there he was. Looking right at me and I could see in the way he clenched his jaw that he was about to pull his trigger and so I pulled mine first and he fell not five feet from me. Like his knees had been shot out from under him, but the round hit him square in the chest and he was dead just like that. He was about my age, probably a couple years younger, but I bet he had a wife and family and a mother and sister, too. We’re not supposed to think about that, but who can help it? I keep seeing his eyes. They were so tired. And so then I say your name so you’ll come up and overtake his face.
So everything is changed for me, see. I won’t go on about it, but I had to put it on paper. A confession, I guess. Don’t ever speak of it again, all right? Let this be the time I tell you and let it go.
This is a war, though. And until you’re over here you can’t know what that’s like. Nobody can. We keep hearing on the news about the people marching against the war and all that and even though some of them say they’re marching for us I just don’t get it. I don’t know about all this either, all this war. But I do know that I’m a soldier and I was asked to come here and fight for reasons that my country said were right and so that’s my job now. That’s what we’re here to do and I’m here now so I’m going to do it and just pray your name until it’s over. I don’t have much light left, so I’ll close, although I could go on just writing and writing until it was nothing more than nonsense. If I could do that maybe it would all start to make sense. But I don’t think so.
Burn this, Loretta. Loretta Loretta Loretta.
All my love,
Stanton
Less than halfway through the letter I had stopped reading aloud, but Edie was sitting close to me by then — we had both sat upright with our legs crossed, leaning over the letter on the floor in front of us — and she read a paragraph but then couldn’t go on so we both read it silently, together. When we had read the last word, his name, we both sat there for a time without saying anything. The first thing I felt was sorry for him. I felt awful for him, to know that he carried that around with him every day of his life. That and more. Then I felt wrong and stupid. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel and why I felt the way I did. And then I was mad because he had never told me this, although I don’t know what would possess a man to tell such a thing to his ten-year-old son.
Finally, Edie broke the silence.
“Oh, God, Eli,” she said, and bolted away from me, realizing that we had gotten so close that our shoulders and the soles of our shoes were touching. “We shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have read these letters.”
I didn’t say anything. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, then returned it to its proper place in the stack, planted it back in the sweet-smelling box, dropped all the other things atop it, and eased the box closed, as if lowering the lid on a living thing that is to be hidden away. I held the box with the flats of my palms on either side and sat it back down, caught a glimpse of myself and Edie in the dresser mirror, and left the room without a word.
I went to my beech tree on the ridge overlooking our house. Nobody knew I had this secret place of my own, not even Edie. I don’t know why I didn’t want to tell her that I had a tree, too, just like she had her willow. When she showed me that morning how to listen to the willow, I had already known. I had done the same thing many times with this tree.
I had read all about beech trees in one of the botany books my mother had kept from teacher’s college. Their bark is not like bark at all, but skin. It doesn’t ever get cracked and rough because the outside grows when the tree grows. So the trunks of beech trees sometimes feel alive, like an elephant’s wide, gray legs. I appreciated beeches in particular because their leaves don’t fall off in the autumn but cling to the branches until new, bright green leaves come back in the spring. All through the winter the brown, shriveled autumn leaves hang there, staying with the tree. The beech is never alone. This, too, made me feel as if the beeches were more alive than other trees, the way they long to have company, just like people.
When I had left our house, I had grabbed my composition book and walked in a determined, fast stride across the backyard, right through the garden. Edie had run down the steps of the screen porch, calling my name, but when I didn’t turn to her, she had let the door slam behind her and sat down on the steps, watching as I walked away. I had known that she wouldn’t follow me if I didn’t invite her. And she had known that I needed time alone. From up there I could peer through the leaves and see our back porch, and I saw that she had finally tired of waiting for me to come back and had gone home. I hated to leave her like that, but I knew she’d understand. That was the best and most unexplainable thing about our friendship. Sometimes it was like we could read each other’s minds. We never spoke about this, but both of us knew that we were constantly sending each other messages.
I knelt at the base of the tree and put both my hands against it. Its skin was cool, just as it always was, no matter how hot the weather. If I stayed very still, I could feel juices flowing within. I ran my hands down the trunk, the way the doctor had the time everyone thought I had broken my leg jumping off the toolshed roof. With my hands on the tree, I could feel what seemed like tendons, slight rises where the trunk felt as if it was flexing long, broad muscles. After a while I leaned my head against the beech and let its coolness sink into my forehead. When I did this, I didn’t have to think about anything at all. I just let the calm that the tree always possessed spread through me, and for a brief time I had no thoughts of my father killing a man, or of a war I didn’t understand, or anything else. I thought only of the tree and the cool peace against my own skin.
After a time I turned and sat down, my back resting against the beech, my knees drawn up to my chest. I sat as still as I could and looked around me. Sitting down this way, I couldn’t see any of the houses below me or anything except for a forest of leaves. Above me there was only birdcall. Redbirds that perched on a dogwood limb and peered down at me before fluttering away. A swallow that sang high in the branches of the beech. The forest was filled with birdsong and the cry of lone cicadas, mourning the oncoming heat of another June day. The world smelled different here. Clean and musky, like damp sand. I closed my eyes and saw my father bringing his gun up, saw the color drain from his face after the shot was fired. Heard the silence filling the jungle after the blast. I imagined colorful birds flapping away with much noise. I saw it all in my mind — every detail enlarged, exaggerated — so I opened my eyes and flipped through the pages of my composition book until I found the clean page where I had left my ink pen. I put the tip of the pen to the paper, but nothing came to me. There were no words.
