WHY have I not been writing?!?!?!?!
I don’t know! Because of some misguided sense of life not being exciting, or worth a few words…
I’m a fool! This is slower, in some ways easier than jumping up on a horse’s back 7 days a week… but in some ways it’s harder, and in some ways, many ways– it’s truer. Far truer.
I am watching, and listening– most of all listening– and I am learning. Images course and crash through my head kicking up dust like… like horses themselves. Horses of memory, of time, of war. The three horses of my own personal apocolypse. Why haven’t I written?
I feel like I should write it all tonight, but I can’t.
It’s a montage, a cataclysmic dance of a montage, that seems like it doesn’t make sense, and then suddenly comes together in a flash of inspiration. It’s crazy, and it’s damn good editing.
I’m talking about… everything I see, the world around me that I am so desperate to push away. The people. The people. Falling down, tumbling down the hill, looking into their graves. The stories they tell me!
The stories.
Why haven’t I been writing?
Because. Because it wasn’t about me, and so it wasn’t important.
Yes, a great fool.
I can’t tell it all tonight.
But I will start.
Tonight, dinner. Chicken.
The woman who hosts us graciously (we all tuck our napkins politely into our laps, all thinking, a little, how foolish that is) says, “The reason I clomp around so much–” (There is a laughing, confiding twinkle in her eye.) “–Is that I had Polio when I was little girl, and it’s come back to haunt me now.” So easy. I want to say, I don’t have the words, but I think: “That disease was eradicated! You’re part of history.”
But how rude that would be. How rude.
Her husband talks of England, and his service there.
I’m going to get this wrong. I remember only the thick, beautiful images his laughing tale provided. But I’m going to tell it anyway. Because somehow, some part of it is true.
Ralph commissioned into the military in 54. He was fresh out of dentistry school– and they needed men of medicine. He had avoided being drafted early because they wanted him to go to school, and to commission with them when he got out. It was a good gig, to commission. In the Air Force, you only stayed in for two years, and they would take care of your school payment. He ended up staying for three, but that’s another story.
Grr! I am stopping myself for lack of facts. But I can see the images, corroborated or not. I see the man, almost a boy– standing alone on the step of a British train depot in a little village, looking across the empty tracks at a field, in deep dark. The depot is closed. The village is asleep. He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go or even if he’s in the right spot. He’s thousands of miles away from Kansas and Nebraska, but the trees sort of look the same. It’s a different smell out here, and older smell. And the buildings seem somehow more firmly rooted to the ground. He stands there, proud and neat in his dress uniform, a beat up bag on the platform beside him. He doesn’t know what to do.
I see other stories. All their tales heaping up on one another, tales about money and hope and war and love.
I see a woman pulling apples from trees, giggling and laughing with her friends, but always with an eye east, east to the hot deserts where her husband is looking west, looking back. Making a joke, doing his work. Keeping half an eye to the west. This is earlier than the boy who will go to England– that boy really is just a boy now, just starting secondary school, heading off to his Catholic boarding school, wondering about the glory of the war.
The woman in hot, swealtering Canon City pulls apples and picks strawberries and cleans houses. Her name is Gloria. She hoards the coins she earns to herself, even though her big family and rapidly dying mother probably could use the money. Gloria has been giving everything of herself to them since she was a child, since they pulled her out of school in the fourth grade, because Mother was sick, and someone had to tend the children. She cleaned and cooked and toiled, and did all of the nasty work that is not encompassed with those neat words– held her mother’s head as she threw up again and again, or defecated all over the just washed bedsheets; took her brother out back and gave him a yelling, a beating, for breaking the one good china plate; killed the chicken for supper that night; watched her sister grow up and have her romances, and then her child. The child who was taken quietly away and never mentioned again, and the uncle who they never let come into the house after that. She put up with all of that, all for them. This time it was for her. So despite her father’s crying protests against marrying John, Gloria did just that. And then he went off to war.
Three years he’s been gone, fighting God knows what. Gloria does her housework, looks after the kids, tries in vain to understand the disease that God has granted her mother and her family; and on the side, she works in gardens, in houses, wherever she can find work. And she saves, and she saves.
Four years after that long kiss goodbye, John steps back into her life, proud and grinning from ear to ear. And tired, too. Very tired.
She greets him and can’t help crying on his shoulder. Four years is a long time. (She doesn’t know that later, 60 years later, she will cry again, missing him hard, because, yes, four years is a long time, and even if it is a mortal sin, she doesn’t want to live without him anymore.)
But when she walks him to the small, beautiful white house she has bought– all of 1500 dollars, a fortune to a girl who has been picking apples– it is he who cries. He looks at her, and tears course down his face, as he stands proud above her in his smart uniform. Now she holds him, thinking she might burst. It is a tiny house. It is theirs.
When he can speak, he tells her hoarsely, “Four of my buddies, they came back and they didn’t even have their wives. I must be the luckiest man in the world. I come back, and I don’t only have a wife, I have a house.”
He kisses her there in front of the white house. They are a perfect picture against the changing autumn leaves. She knows she will never forget his face when he sees this house. She never does.
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