Eli the Good (9 page)

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.

“Eli,” Edie said at this point. “Maybe you ought to stop.”

But I kept reading:

“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.

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.