Ghosts of Tom Joad (23 page)

T
HE BUS STOPPED,
harder this time, the brakes metal on metal like that old trash disposal back at the shelter I'd messed up with that post card.

First on was my mom.

Right behind her, my old man climbed up, still wearing his work clothes. I think he just slept in them, even now that he was dead. I never knew a man who had so many pairs of pants all the same, so many work shirts, all the same, like some Rain Man who can't stop doing the same thing over and over. I didn't smell alcohol on him, and his eyes were clear. He looked at me, meeting my own eyes for the first time since, hell, I don't know, maybe when I was a lamb in the third grade Christmas pageant and my mom made him dress up with that stupid clip-on tie. Who my dad was wasn't my choice. Not loving him was. And so if his story now was gonna be a confession, so is mine.

It was getting late on the bus. Who the hell knows how or why he was on it. I was not interested in what I expected was
gonna be a “best days behind us, best days still in front of us” talk from a dead man, when all I wanted to do is get this day over with and get off this damn bus.

I was stronger than my dad when he passed, the weight almost magically transferred from him to me as he aged over the years. A part of me still wanted him to put his arms around me, hoping I could feel his strength, but I held back, knowing it was gone and not needing another reminder of that. I only saw that strength when I was younger, and then only in his anger and bitterness and the mean kind of sadness he got all over him when drinking. I remembered me and Mom would start playing a board game, and then Dad came home from work and we somehow had to stop. Or when he promised to help work on a school project, then ended up asleep on the couch instead. When your old man's dying, those are the things you want to talk about, but we was quiet.

Christ did time pass. I remember how near the end he got to climbing out of the car like it was a space capsule, the biggest part of the day was sorting out his pills for the week. Even after he died, frail, pathetic, comic, gimpy after a third stroke, I had no interest in the tears that didn't come anyway. Medicine kept him alive, but my old man died old in the strictest sense of that word.

Mom made me go through his clothes and things, saying maybe there was something I could use, and I followed her request out of habit more than respect. I wanted him to leave me something, give me stories to carry home—but there was nothing. I thought hard thoughts that day. I was alone in their bedroom, maybe for the first time in my life. I remembered being there with my friends when I was nine years old, delicately
handling grandpa's gold watch. With Dad passed, I handled his things with contempt, but worried at the same time that as much as I cursed the image in the old glossy photos, I could not deny the reflection.

My mom started talking first. Every time she said my name now it sounded like she was crying:

“Earl, sweetheart, you know your Dad and me tried for you. Life turned hard. We tried not to complain about it. We didn't know what to tell you, so we said what we'd been told, to study hard, work hard, try hard—we knew hard. Your daddy loved you Earl, he wanted to see you grow up right, he thought the world of you, but we thought you wouldn't understand, maybe until you was older, so—”

“Why didn't you tell me when I got older what was inside Dad?”

“Well, your dad and me, we thought what happened, was happening, was for us to deal with, that you was always our child. What happens to adults shouldn't happen to their children, children's lives ought to be better than their parents', that was the way of it, we felt.”

Mom never talked to me about her life with Dad before I was born, but it seemed now was the time to do so.

“We was married before he went to Korea. They didn't do all that with yellow ribbons back then, calling everyone heroes, and that was probably better. We had no cell phones or email, so we only knew about when he'd be back. Your grandma was the first outside when the car pulled up. Me and grandpa stayed in, him never stirring from the couch, like he knew what was coming
and did not care to see it. Your dad had on his uniform, tie, shined shoes. I thought he looked wonderful.”

“That night I helped him off with his undershirt, got the dog tags caught up in it. I stared at him, as it was almost shocking to see him bare-chested in front of me. Times were different then, and even though we'd been married I had not seen him in the light so naked, so close to me, much before. You're a man now, but it is still embarrassing to tell you these things, tell you I felt, well, scared and, I don't know, sexual. My night gown was like a puddle on the floor. I wanted him to put his arms around me so I could fall heavy into him, hoping I could feel his strength. How I felt like with your dad, I could never find good words for it, so I'll say it plain—I just felt. You know I never really studied much, but it was like those poems we had in Mrs. Garrity's English class, a bunch of pretty words that came one line then the next, so that at the end you didn't know why exactly, but you felt different.”

“I don't know what your dad was thinking then, but his face was looking at the wall through me. He said he was just tired. I told him to come and look at the stars with me on the porch, but he said he'd already seen them. I never knew people could be tired that long that much. It felt like most of the inside of him had been left over there, leaving just the outside still with me.”

“I touched him, on his chest, but he just stood there until I didn't. Put the light off and went to sleep, unrelieved from what it was. But he had that factory job waiting, it was gonna be okay, he said, soon as he could get back to work, have a schedule, have a reason for getting up early. Back then they'd save your job for you when you joined the service. Most nights he'd sleep like I
had to check if he was even still breathing, then other times he'd say whispers in his sleep and toss and turn so that he'd have to untangle the sheets to get out of bed. You don't have to go over there, he said, just look into my eyes and you'll be there. I'd cry alone too many times nights. It frightened me, and so I got the courage to ask grandma about it, since grandpa had come home from his war, and she sat me down in a way that I hadn't seen since I was fourteen and learned what my period was. She said your dad just needed sleep and a drink, like grandpa had, but watch that it don't turn into too much sleep and too much drink.”

O
N THE BUS,
I felt Dad start to talk even before he formed the words.

“Dammit, enough Sissy. I'll talk to the boy. Time's short. Jesus, there was always supposed to be more time. You, Driver, don't stop this goddamn bus 'til I'm done talking.”

I hadn't heard his voice for a long time. Dad said:

They loaded us all, maybe twenty boys the Sergeant kept on calling men, on an old bus at Inchon so as to get more ass into the fight fast. We didn't know if Inchon was a town, the name of the water we saw, or some kind of Korean word for the coldest place we had ever been. We were so scared. It wasn't like we was scared of something, a roller coaster or running into an old house, just scared all the way through. People was yelling to hurry up and get into the bus, which we was doing as fast as we could on the thought that the inside of anything had to be warmer.

Inside wasn't warmer, but no one was yelling there, and we all squeezed together on the wooden seats. That wood was just like the bench on the Reeve football field sideline that had gone gray from sun. The bus pulled away and became all the world for us. They had covered the windows to make us less of a target, just slivers of sharp cold light cutting in around that edge. As the bus turned, the light would catch in the clouds of our breath in the air. Might've been pretty.

I didn't know much but I knew I was in Korea, a country that had mattered very little to Reeve, Ohio until a war started that we was told did matter. We was told that somehow North Korea the country threatened our country, as if a North Korean mountain was going to take over an Ohio field.

We had the draft then, so whether you volunteered and went this year or got drafted next year didn't matter much, and we gave the decision about as much thought as that. Being in the service was something kids from Reeve did, maybe still now like your dumb ass friend Muley. You either left high school and volunteered, or you left high school, worked a year or two in the factory, and then got drafted. Either door, you ended up in the same place as the meat cutter's kid and the school teacher's kid and the car dealer's kid and the preacher's kid. Somebody else was always rolling the dice for us.

We knew nothing about being in a war, though every one of us had played soldier for days and days in the woods and had had their turn with a rifle while chugging whiskey with our dads in a drinking contest they called ‘hunting deer.' It had been poor preparation, because here there were no woods we could run through and there damn sure was no whiskey.

My dad—your grandpa—had been in the Army but he never told me much except that he walked from France to Germany in the spring of 1945 and never would care again to sleep outside or visit Europe because of it. He said he did killin' and saw killin', he said no one comes back even if their body comes back—something stays out of it. Grandpa said the best thing and worst thing was that he was ignored when he came home. He told me people would not care about what happened, they'd be on with their own lives, and if they did ask to hear, it'd only be as a cheap thrill for them. So, fuck 'em, he'd say. He said that he'd seen things he wouldn't think of but remembered anyway, remembered them like a smell or an odd sound, couldn't place it, but there it was in yer head, and the more time that passed the more he remembered. It was supposed to be the Good War, but Grandpa said it wasn't. He was supposed to be part of the Greatest Generation, but Grandpa said he wasn't. He said people who stayed home always said things like that for every war.

That was about as much detail as we'd get and even that was only after a lot of guinea red wine on Sundays, and then he'd get all quiet or yell at your grandma about something she didn't do. Grandma understood she needed to just take it, sometimes even a black eye, though he never meant no real harm, because her job was to keep Grandpa from breaking, as he was never gonna drink what bothered him off his mind. She couldn't work back then and so he had to. He walked with some limp, but we never knew why, and it never stopped him from working twelve hour shifts when he needed to. He did one time have a bit more than usual even for him at Cousin Mike's wedding and started in
about piss and brains and pink shit on the snow until me and your uncle eased him outside. After that he just sat with the wine, and you kids would always laugh and say how Grandpa's sleeping at the table again.

You joined up back then and then you came home and went back to work without bellyaching. If you wanted to talk, you went to the VFW hall out on Harrisburg Road, or AmVets, though they favored the Catholics, and sat at the bar in the afternoon hiding from the sun and kicking back shots until you didn't want to talk. Some days all the wars would be there, some old bastard from the World War, another from my war, a longhair handlestache from Vietnam, but inside we was all the same. Half the days the oldest bastard would dribble-piss himself right at the bar, until somebody saw the leak and told him, “Old man, go to the fucking toilet 'cause you forgot again.”

I
N
K
OREA ALL
them years ago, the bus stopped. We all got thrown against each other, no warning, nothing we could have done.

We had not spoken. We did not know each other. We were pushed onto the buses in groups based on the order we came off the ship. Not one of these boys had struggled like me with crazy old Mrs. Reardon in 12th grade English, or done what their daddy had done in the same factory as had made me. I was certain every one of them was from somewhere else.

The Sergeant screamed at us to get off the bus. We did; there was nothing else we could have done. Outside, it was so bright, it was like comin' out of a matinée. The Sergeant pushed and
cursed us into lines, his foul language a force to cause boys to shift places. He was an ugly man, the kind you look at, then look away, and then want to look back at, even knowing it's wrong to do so. It was cold and no amount of cursing was doing anything about that as we formed lines. The snow was deep enough, but we managed to pound it to hell forming up, making a little oval of flat space that was for now our home in Korea.

We had been told on the boat coming over by a chaplain that we was coming to Korea to bring the word of God to the South Koreans, kill the North Koreans, and to avoid fornication and sin. This now changed. We were luckier than a dog with two dicks, Sergeant said, because we had now a mission. The hill ahead of us, he explained while spitting into the white snow, was what we had come to Korea for. We were near a place he called Goddamn Myungdong, and we were to climb that hill, dig holes in the frozen ground and stay there until someone defeated the North Koreans. Was that clear? It was. The hill did not have a name but the Sergeant told us it was to be known as Hill 124, based on its height above sea level and thus designation on the army maps that only the Sergeant had seen or would see. Years later, as I learned more about things, it occurred to me that it was possible for other hills to be this height above sea level, and indeed several I could see around me did not look so different. It was possible that other boys would be sitting on a Hill 124 of their own, but this one was ours.

Sergeant told us we'd have time to kill when we got home after the war, now we had to work hard. We really didn't need the encouragement. The chance to do something—cut trees, slam small shovels against frozen ground—was good movement,
which made us warmer and allowed us to talk to each other about this very significant hill we suddenly had in common. My small frozen hole would be near to another one with a boy whose name was Miles, a name not common in Reeve and so of some interest. We had our holes, we made our fires and, using the stomped snow as a guide, looked the other way hoping to see the North Koreans or whoever the hell might also be interested in Hill 124.