John sensed it was time to leave the electricity wizards to their celebration; it had already been an exhausting day after a sleepless night. Returning home, he slipped off to be by himself while the rest of the family went to bed.
A half hour later, he sensed a presence behind him and turned to see Makala standing in the moonlight. He didn’t say anything other than to slip over on the bench by Jennifer’s grave so that she could join him.
Makala offered him a glass of blackberry wine, the last of half a dozen bottles that had been a Christmas gift from one of his old students. Makala took a sip from her glass and remained silent.
“You know, there are times I still crave a damn good cigarette.” He sighed, finally opening up. “And this is one of them.”
“One of the few benefits of what happened, it made you kick that loathsome habit,” Makala offered, leaning in against his shoulder.
He struggled not to let her know that he had been crying, but he could not hide it. It still hit him at times when he came out at night to sit by his daughter’s grave for a few minutes for silent thought and a prayer before going to bed.
“I should be at least somewhat over it all.” He nodded to the grave. Nightmares still haunted him, her last words coming back to him, whispering that she wanted to be buried in the yard so she could remain close to him and for him to take good care of her beloved stuffed animal Rabs, whom he now held whenever he visited with her.
He finally sat back, coughing, embarrassed, wiping his face with a soiled handkerchief, Makala kissing him on the cheek again.
He nodded an embarrassed thanks even though she had witnessed moments like this scores of times, but he was glad to feel her close by his side. “And now they want to take Elizabeth away from me,” he gasped, struggling for control. “If she goes off, she’ll never come back.”
Makala remained silent as she always did at such moments to give him room to finally let his feelings out, a luxury he could not indulge in when in front of others who expected his stoic leadership.
“There are times I am so sick to death of the role I have to play,” he said. “The rock-solid leader, the one that everyone else comes to for strength. I can’t bear the thought of her going, but I have to stand by silent and let her go if that is the way this plays out. To do otherwise is pure hypocrisy. I have to tell her to go if others are forced to go.” He sighed, looking off. “When we went in on the attack against Iraq, I wanted to be on the front line, not stuck a couple of miles back in a well-armored command vehicle. When several of my men were killed, I had to take it in calmly, reassure the other troopers, tell them to push on, even though I wanted to scream with frustration and pain, since I knew those kids well. When we came back to the States, I went to see their families; one was married with two kids. The whole rest of the country was celebrating what they thought was an easy win, but it still cost hundreds of lives. What could I tell those who had lost a son or husband? They died in a good cause? They were heroes?
“The three in my unit who died? Their Humvee took a rocket-propelled grenade, and there was no heroism about it. One second, they were alive—the next second, dead. And they left behind families that will never really heal no matter what the platitudes and honors.”
He looked up, gazing at the moon. “And so now I will be the parent that stands by and waits, with my gut instincts telling me she’ll not come back. Part of me wants to race back to Fredericks tomorrow and take the deal I know he’d give me to exempt Elizabeth. Then what? Frankly, it’s not how the town will react that bothers me, though I know I’d be a pariah. You and Jen would understand, but I think the respect of both of you would be gone if I did.”
He fell silent, and she did not reply.
He continued, “It’s that I know Elizabeth will tell me to go to hell and enlist anyhow, because she believes it is her duty, even though it means being torn away from her child.” His gaze returned to Jennifer’s grave. “Damn this world. Damn what we allowed it to become.”
“We had nothing to do with what happened,” Makala began, but he cut her off with a glare.
“We did have a lot to do with it. We had all grown so fat, so complacent, and we always let someone else worry about such things, even though we knew that those we allowed to be in charge were far too often incompetent—or worse, self-serving and blind in their arrogance.”
There was no reprimand in his words, only a deep sadness. “I feel like a balled-up knot, becoming the archetype of the way it is in all wars, of old men pointing to the front lines and telling the young to go out and die. But this time, it is now my daughter, her friends, the ones who fought and saved this town a year ago.”
He sighed again, absently petting the well-worn fabric of Jennifer’s stuffed animal.
“When Dale made that first offer, of course I refused; it was so damn insulting. But now, after hours of thinking about it, it does tear at me even as I know I have to resist it.”
“I don’t trust that son of a bitch as far as I can spit,” Makala snapped back in reply. “He tried to bribe you right up front with offering a deferment to Elizabeth and not the others. He knew what he was doing.”
A bit taken aback, John said nothing, just looking at her for a moment.
“What do you think of him?” she finally asked. “You’re the ex-military type, not me.”
“My first reaction today was not good. I mean, the guards out front… you could see it in his eyes; he’s a thug. That type has always been a plague since pharaoh first organized an army. They get in a uniform, and God save anyone who crosses them. A good unit commander weeds that type out quick or at least keeps them on a really short leash. So that was a bad first impression. But I’m not going to judge Fredericks solely on that. He explained why he made what you call a bribe. He just thought I was there only for Elizabeth. The guy most likely is swamped with hundreds of families, each asking for special treatment. At least my war in the Gulf and the ones after it were fought by an all-volunteer force. No one likes a draft, but there is some logic to it here and now if we are to resecure our borders and start rebuilding the entire United States as it once was.”
He wearily shook his head. “So now I am hoisted up on the spike of my own ethics and convictions.”
“Look at it cynically and him far more cynically, John. You want to believe that the motivation of this leader is good, along with those behind him all the way up to those in Bluemont.”
John was silent for a long time.
He gazed at Jennifer’s grave, moonlight casting a shadow from the ceramic golden retriever placed at the head of the grave in memory of Ginger, whom Jennifer had loved with all her heart and whom John had actually killed the day after Jennifer died in order to feed Elizabeth, struggling with her pregnancy. That memory nearly choked him up again.
It was all too much. He stood up, stepping back into the sunroom to place Rabs on his perch where he kept watch over Jennifer. Makala followed him.
“I just don’t know,” John whispered. He looked appealingly at Makala. “Give me a couple of days to sort this one out. See what Fredericks comes back with. Okay?”
His tone indicated he was worn down with the conversation and needed some what he called “introvert time,” to just think things through. She kissed him on the cheek, whispered a good night, and left his side.
He returned to the sitting room and sat down at the old rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father-in-law. Mounted to one side was a true luxury.
One of the ham operators had shown up at his doorstep several weeks earlier with a small multiband shortwave from the 1960s dug out of an abandoned antique store. He also gave John a solar-powered battery charger, and though the batteries were wearing down after hundreds of recharges, they did allow him to tune in for a half hour or so before having to charge them back up again. He settled down by the radio and clicked it on, the old-fashioned analog dial glowing and fine-tuned into a familiar voice… the BBC. The timing was good—late in the evening here, three in the morning over there. There was the familiar, comforting chime of Big Ben marking three and the always-so-well-modulated voice of the news broadcaster.