Joshua asked for clarification. “Sand Sailor? I’m afraid that I haven’t heard the term before.”
“It’s navy slang for a ‘fish out of water’ or a sailor who is deployed in the desert. It’s almost always used as a pejorative term.”
“I see.” Joshua thought it best not to interrupt her.
“So he was on orders for a whole year; our oldest son was two and starting to toddle around. We thought that he would go over, get his ticket punched, and be in a good spot for his next promotion—such a simple plan. All the while I would be home saving the extra money and paying down our mortgage. Eric said that he liked the job okay, and the long days made the time go by so that he didn’t have to think about missing Leo and me as much. But as the time went on, he was not staying grounded in true godly things. He stopped going to chapel services and there was a noticeable decline in substantive letters from him. I guess that the targeting mission really got to him. It’s one thing to process signals impersonally as strictly empirical data; it’s another to track someone’s life and be responsible for steel on target when the boys in black show up to shoot people in the face.
“Somewhere between the ones and zeros of Johnny Jihad’s life and the ‘actionable intelligence’ derived from the analysis—we lost Eric. To deal with that stress, the office would generally play television shows in the office on those huge flat-screen monitors that they used for shift-change briefings. They showed everything from Seinfeld to Friends to Desperate Housewives. You can’t take in that level of pop culture and not be affected by it.
“Eric eventually started to notice a female Air Force senior airman attached to his section. She would bring him up on chat more often than necessary and comment on certain scenes in the television shows. Seems like histrionic crass girls with ‘daddy issues’ are beacons for extracurricular activities. Toward the end of the deployment he called and said that he wanted to discuss the ‘dissolution of our marriage,’ which could not have come at a more inopportune time because I was pregnant again, but had been reluctant to tell him because things were deteriorating so quickly.”
“Wow, so you went from deployment widow to single mom and pregnant?”
“It was illogical. Yes, he wanted to chase his sweet young complicated thing and I was holding down the fort with all the responsibility. You can say that we had a ‘mismatch in our commitment level’ to the relationship. He initiated the paperwork on his end with the JAG office, and I signed it, and that was that. I was here, pregnant, alone, and a single mom. I called Malorie, and she dropped everything to move down to West Virginia. I could hardly afford the live-in nanny anyhow. I took the option to separate from the Marine Corps and I became another green-badge contractor. I ended up with the house and the leased car, while he took his porn collection, his truck (with the payments), and all of the guns. I changed my name back to my maiden name of LaCroix, and the rest is history. That was three years ago now.”
Joshua squeezed her hand and said, “I’m sorry you had to go through such a terrible ordeal, Megan, but I want you to know that you haven’t scared me away. Knowing what you’ve overcome, I’m even more amazed by you.”
9
TOLERANCE
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
Malorie LaCroix went on to trade school after she finished high school early and worked as a first-year apprentice machinist at Millinocket Fabrication and Machine, Inc., in Millinocket, Maine. She was more conversant in French than her elder sister, Megan, and after translating some French machinery manuals for Millinocket, Malorie eventually developed a side business doing French-to-English technical translation. She was an avid 4WD enthusiast, preferring older Ford eight-lug pickup trucks to all other modes of transportation. She was nineteen years old and already had a local reputation for building trucks for several people around the state.
Malorie was single and, like her older sister, grew up in a stable family home where her parents loved each other. Their father, Cedric LaCroix, was a lumberman in the northern woods who might be away at camp for weeks at a time, but while he was home he doted on his girls. After an accident late one winter that would have broken most men, he was left injured, with a permanent limp, and no longer able to have children. Since then, he had always joked that he would have to raise his girls like boys, so both Megan and Malorie would learn to sharpen axes with a stone, rebuild chain saws, and drive a skid steer during the summers, and in the autumn they would rack, hunt, pack out, and process deer. No matter how hard he worked them, both Megan and Malorie knew that they were the object of their father’s love.
With that level of confidence, the sisters never needed to be reaffirmed by other boys. So why should they care if they never were asked to go out by the football players for pizza after a game or to an unsupervised party out by the lake, which usually meant underage binge drinking and propositions for sex. Malorie had consoled way too many women who had given away what they could never get back.
Megan and Malorie were both homeschooled up through their eighth-grade year in the classical tradition of education. Their mother, Beatrice, had them memorize huge portions of the Bible as well as read nearly all of the classics, the writings from the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Founding Fathers. Beatrice would tell them, “You never know when these books will be outlawed, so read them now. The Founding Fathers were not clairvoyant; they just read their history and decided what kind of government they did not want.” Cedric did not have an education beyond the eighth grade, so he was insistent that he would work as hard as he could so that Beatrice would be able to stay home to educate the children properly. He would drill them on their memory work every night after dinner that he was home to ensure that they were getting their money’s worth from homeschooling.
After Malorie completed the eighth grade, she had attended the local high school as her sister had for ninth through twelfth grades and, like her elder sister, pursued intellectual interests after her other schoolwork was complete. Since Beatrice worked part-time at the local library in Sherman, Malorie would catch a ride there from Katahdin High School and hang out in a quiet corner consuming volumes of da Vinci, amazed at his mechanical acuity, his use of physics, and his contributions to mathematics.
Megan had joined the USMC a year after high school and was away at Parris “Paradise” Island for boot camp when their mother was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver on her way back from a prayer meeting at church. Malorie was only fourteen years old and although no one can ever be prepared for that, she had a lot of growing up to do in a big hurry. Her father, who was always as tough as nails and the quintessential north woods logger, wept bitterly over Beatrice’s death. The other loggers said that when he got the news that she was killed, he set down his saw and was never the same again. Cedric and Beatrice had been junior high school sweethearts and he had never known any other woman. When she died, he transferred his love to the bottle and drank heavily. Megan came home on emergency leave to mourn her mother’s death.