Bob sat up in the bed. He was glad there was no whiskey in the house for if there were he knew he’d grasp it and drown himself in it, going down so far there’d never be an up. He could hardly breathe.
He rose, a tall, thin, strong man, graying, but still with a gift for silent movement and a face famous for the little that it showed. He had slept alone for so long: now he wasn’t alone in the bed anymore and he looked at her, dozing softly under the sheets, such a beautiful woman. Who’d have thought it?
He slipped down the hall and pushed open the dark door into the next room, hearing the child’s breath. He snapped on the light. YKN4 was curled up, her little nose fluttering ever so gently. She stirred, disturbed by the light. She looked as if she were made of candy, a moist, perfect little thing, her wide lids enveloping her wide eyes, her curled lashes as perfect as the tracing of a doily, her tiny little nose cusping her tiny perfect seal of lips. She rubbed a hand against an eye, shivered in some sort of animal delight, pushed some hair off her face, and pulled the blanket tighter, dreaming, no doubt, of horses. He wondered if he would ever be the mystery to her that his father was to him. He hoped not. Bob turned off the light, bent to her and kissed her smooth cheek gently, feeling a radiance much stronger than whiskey’s and much truer.
That’s worth getting through it all, he thought.
Suddenly, he felt a bit braver. Resigned almost, steady at least, and aware at last of what must be done.
He walked down the hall, pulled a lanyard so that a section of the ceiling pivoted downward with a groan, and a section of wooden ladder slid out. He climbed into the attic, pulled the light switch. It was any attic: jumbled trunks, racks of old clothes, sheaves of pictures, most of it Julie’s. But a small portion of it was his, loaded into the trailer for that drive out from Blue Eye years ago, after he’d buried his guns. He climbed and looked toward his small claim of the space. He saw an old seabag full of marine utilities, boots, the like, his dress blues hanging off a rack, a leather shooting jacket with its many buckles and straps, a few old pieces of luggage.
And at last, what he was looking for. It was an old shoe box, with a red ribbon tied prettily outside it. The label on the box said “Buster Brown, Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” the container for his Sunday shoes sometime in the fifties. Though it was sheathed in dust, he could make out handwriting, his mother’s ornate script: Daddy’s Things, it said.
He tugged on the old ribbon, which, easily enough, gave up the ghost and popped. Dust stirred like vapors of lost memory. He carefully lifted the lid off, and there, kneeling in the yellow light in a pair of sweats, he began his exploration.
This is what remained of Earl Lee Swagger, USMC, Arkansas State Police, killed in the line of duty, July 23, 1955. First, Bob saw old brown photographs on stiff, slightly wilted papers. He picked them up to enter an alien universe that seemed built around a little farm boy with a chubby face that showed but a trace of the bone structure that would eventually yield the face he would recognize as his father’s. In this brown world, there was a farmhouse, a trellis, a scrawny old goat in a straw hat, a three-piece suit even in summer’s full blaze, a bow tie and starched collar, a face chipped out of granite who must have been a father, that is, Bob’s grandfather; he also wore a circled star on his chest that was a sheriff’s badge and a wide belt festooned with cartridges and a holster that swallowed up all but the Colt Peacemaker’s curved grip. Next to him was the grandmother, a dour woman in a shapeless dress and a face that looked as if it never had worn a smile. He turned it over and in faded ink read the date: 1920, Blue Eye, Ark. There were others, various arrangements of the same three people, sometimes together, sometimes alone or in twos. None of them had ever gotten fat off the land, Bob saw. A final shot showed Earl in his twenties, in a marine olive-drab service uniform, with that tight tunic collar, a glistening Sam Browne belt diagonally transecting a manly chest and a sergeant’s three stripes on the shoulder, looking proud and ramrod-straight. He’d joined in 1930, at twenty, and had made his rank fast: turning the picture over, Bob saw in his grandmother’s flowery penmanship the inscription “Earl home on leave, 1934.” Earl’s hair was slicked back over white sidewalls and he looked dapper as possible.
Next he found the medals. There was a nest of them, police marksmanship badges (his father was a natural, extraordinary shot), Pacific Battle Star and campaign ribbons, the Purple Heart with four clusters, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 2nd Marines, another one for the 3rd Marines, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and of course, the big one, the Medal of Honor, a chunk of metal in the configuration of a star that hung on a necklace of now faded but once sky-blue ribbon. He hefted the ornament: it had weight and density, gravity almost, dignity perhaps. Its gold plating was grimy from years of neglect and he realized that he’d never seen the thing itself before; his father never had it out or displayed it and his mother must have dumped it in this box sometime after the funeral, and sealed the box and herself off from the pain.
He held it in his hand for a few seconds, waiting to feel something. It was only a chunk of dirty metal, a trinket. He’d won medals himself and knew the odd distance a man feels from them, looking at them and thinking, so what? They explain so little, they have no connection with the reality of what they signify.
The citation was there too, on official Department of the Navy paper, a fancy-looking, thick piece of paper dated 10 December 1945, that had the look of formal ostentation that he despised. It could have hung in a dentist’s office.
He read it, wondering if he’d ever read it before or only heard it told by other men. His father never spoke a word about the war.
On 21 February 1945, on Charlie-Dog Ridge two miles inland from Beach Red 2, Platoon Sergeant Swagger’s unit from E. Co., Second Battalion, Ninth Regiment, Third Marine Division, came under intense fire from several enemy machine-gun positions. All his flamethrower operators dead or wounded, Platoon Sergeant Swagger led a squad off on a flanking maneuver, but only he reached the ridgeline in sufficient condition to continue the attack, the others having been killed or wounded. Wounded himself three times, Platoon Sergeant Swagger climbed into the first nest from the rear, killing the enemy soldiers with his submachine gun.
He continued to work his way along the line, silencing two other positions in the same fashion, by rolling over the parapet and spraying the enemy with gunfire. In the third nest, his gun jammed and he killed two enemy soldiers with the butt of the weapon. Advancing on the last position, a concrete bunker, he realized he was out of ammunition. He returned to the previous machine-gun nest and removed the enemy weapon and several grenades. He blew open the steel door of the emplacement and leaped inside with the light machine gun, killing thirteen more enemy soldiers.
In the seven-minute engagement, Platoon Sergeant Swagger killed over forty enemy soldiers while sustaining five wounds himself. His actions saved the lives of thirty men in his platoon. For conspicuous gallantry in action against the enemy above and beyond the call of duty, he is awarded the Medal of Honor.
Somewhere Bob had seen a picture, though it appeared not to be here. He remembered a yellowed scrap of newsprint, almost delicate to the finger in its crumbly dryness, and on it the image of his much younger father, flat-bellied and stoic of face, in dress blues, as the President of the United States, behind bifocals and a folksy Missouri face, laid the ribbon over his head. Again, it was nothing: the ceremony was for other people, not for his father, who kept his feelings to himself about what he’d done and why he’d done it.