At last Bob set the medal down. He knew enough of war to know that the description of his father’s action was antiseptic to say the least. In the nest with the Japs, working them over with a tommy gun, he must have watched them disintegrate under the heavy impact of the .45s. The air was sulfurous and full of lead and smoke; mortars exploded everywhere, sucking the oxygen from the surface of the planet. Exhaustion, stress, dirt and filth, grime, the gritty volcanic soil of Iwo, the hundreds of scrapes, cuts and abrasions from low-crawling, the utter terror, maybe some bloodlust, some pleasure in watching the enemy’s head torn off or limbs blown away, fear that the gun would jam: all that, and much more, was left unnoticed by the citation.
Hell of a fight you made, Daddy, he thought.
Next his eye caught on something unusually regular and a pull yielded a thick wad which turned out to be an old tablet of Arkansas traffic violation citations. An amazement! There were at least twenty unused citations with their triplicate carboned forms left flat on the pad, but curled back over the spine of it were five or six carbons on tickets already handed out. Bob saw in a second that they were the tickets his father must have issued that last week and was unable to file with the court before his death. He shuffled through them, seeing his father’s own handwriting recording a series of meaningless misdemeanors against the Arkansas Standard Traffic Code in the second and third weeks of July 1955. “Driving with left taillight disabled” was checked on one citation, and the driver’s name and address and license number and below that, under the rubric “Issuing Officer,” the scrawled semisignature “E. L. Swagger.” A couple of speeding violations on Routes 71 and 88, a DWI, the small beer of a rural highway patrolman’s life. He felt his father so powerfully he almost doubled over.
And then, next, a notebook. Evidently, Earl’s pen had broken or some such, for it was spattered with brownish fluid on the cover, and a discoloration had worked under the cardboard and bled through the pages. Bob peeled them, one at a time, trying to make sense of it. He saw a list of meaningless names inside the cover, like Jed Posey, Lum Posey and Pop Dwyer. He saw a stick figure crudely inscribed and lines radiating off toward landmarks that indicated distances; and a variety of other unrelated facts or observations: “Was she moved?” it said at one place. “Little Georgia,” it said at another. “Cause of death,” it wondered, “blunt force or strangulation?” “Meeting at church? Find out what?” He could make no—
A sudden sense of profound unease hit Bob. He turned back to the cover of the notebook and felt the thing burn in his fingertips. It occurred to him that the brownish stain that had seeped through to discolor the pages must be blood. It was his father’s blood. His father had been holding this or had it in his pocket when Jimmy Pye fired the fatal bullet and the wound had emptied on this document.
It had the sense of something religious to it, something from an ancient saint’s reliquary, like a blessed chard of bone or a fragment of hair or cloth. Its power overwhelmed him, and he put it down, feeling somehow as if he’d blasphemed. It was almost too much.
He suddenly had a need to put the lid on the box, stuff the box back into the slot where it had rested beribboned and sheathed in dust, and flee back to the good life he’d finally built for himself. He had horses to care for, a daughter to raise, a wife to support. In the box was only pain and black memories.
No, go on, he told himself. Go on, do it, see every last thing.
Next came some news clippings of the event itself, the various rags’ account of the events of July 23, 1955. He slipped through them, uninterested in details. Only one caught his attention: HERO TROOPER BURIED, it said, July 26, 1955, the Fort Smith Southwest Times Record front page, also brown and crackly with age. He saw himself as a small dour boy standing next to his poor mother, surrounded by a sea of uniforms and suits under a spreading elm tree. A minister seemed to commandeer the most artention; the casket was aligned next to the hole in the ground under the tree where it would go. At least Daddy had some shade. A marine honor guard stood on the right, ramrod boys with no hair and severely raked white dress hats, bills low over their eyes, their gloves white, the high-necked dress coats severe as any Puritan’s frock. Bob glanced at what the picture showed of himself, and saw only pudge and softness, as if he were out of focus, which he was. He could barely even remember the event itself, though the photo brought something back: his mother would not stop crying, though by this time he himself had been fully cried out. It was hot, the speeches seemed to go on forever. Someone called Miss Connie was like the dowager empress of the event, the Mother Courage who took over and got everything organized and done. He remembered her smell and beauty and how strong she’d seemed. But she was not in the picture.
Bob put the clipping down, passed through what little was left. Letters of condolence, official and otherwise, testifying to his father’s greatness, from, among others, the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, two men in the platoon who could write that day only because his actions had saved their lives, one on Iwo, one Tarawa, testimonials in inflated language from the commanding officer of the Arkansas State Police and the governor of Arkansas and a final crude letter from someone called Lucille Parker, telling his mother what a wonderful white man Earl Swagger had been, the only white man who’d listened to her pain over her daughter, Shirelle, and pledged to help. What on earth could that mean?
So many mysteries, so many unconnected elements, unfinished bits of business, the stuff of his father’s life. Not much to show for forty-five years on a planet where you’d done so much good work, and only a shoe box was left to testify to your existence.
That was it? Would the boy find such material interesting? Possibly. Bob made his mind up that in the morning he’d call the boy and arrange to let him borrow the stuff. Possibly some good would come out of it, after all.
There was a last scrap of paper. Bob picked it up, curious. It took some effort to get it figured out. It was the last page of what may have been an autopsy or a hearing report. In fact, lodged under the staple at the left top was the mulch of other pages that had been torn away. Bob understood that it had been the necessary, clinical, appallingly unemotional and excessively professional description of the wounds his father had suffered. A copy had been sent to his mother and when she discovered its meanings—Bob guessed it would have read something like “translateral passageway from under left nipple at 43-degree angle to sternum led to severe and catastrophic destruction of left ventricle” or some such—she’d just been unable to face it and had ripped it up and destroyed it. Why had this page survived? He couldn’t guess; it couldn’t be explained. Maybe she’d gone back and pulled it out of the garbage can and remorsefully tucked it away in the box. Her own sad decline had just been initiated; she would not live much longer herself, bent under grief and regret and finally alcoholism.
So this alone remained. Bob glanced at it and saw that it was a partial list of exhibits pertaining to the ballistics evidence of the hearing or autopsy or whatever. Because he knew a great deal of such matters, he read onward and saw what state police detectives had recovered at the scene.
“1) Colt .38 Super Government model, serial number 2645, with staghorn grips, four cartridges left in the magazine in the pistol.” That was Jimmy’s gun, slick, flashy Colt automatic shooting high-velocity bullets, vest-penetrating, shock-inducing, meant only to kill. Very professional choice.