After the Flag Has Been Folded Read online

  I was in the kitchen one afternoon when Daddy told Mama about a little girl he’d seen get blown up by a bomb. That troubled him. It troubled me too, after I heard about it.

  Daddy said the girl would come to the camp, and he and the other soldiers gave her C rations, pennies, gum, or candy, whatever they had. Frankie and I liked to get into Daddy’s C rations, too. Not because the food tasted good. It was really awful. Most of it smelled and looked like cat food. We just liked the cans because they were painted army green. When we ate from them, we pretended to be soldiers in the jungles, just like Daddy.

  Daddy leaned his chair back on two legs as he took a draw from his cigarette. A little bit of the Pet milk he’d poured over his bowl of cobbler earlier had turned the color of peaches.

  “The Viet Cong strapped a bomb around her,” Daddy said, recalling the moment he’d seen the little girl explode. Mama stood by the kitchen sink, drying a plate, listening to Daddy. She didn’t say a word. “She was just a little girl, about Linda’s size,” Daddy said. “She was always asking me for pennies, for gum. They strap these kids with bombs and send them into our camps. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Daddy took another drag from his cigarette and mashed the end of it into his plate. Mama just kept drying dishes. I studied the sadness on my daddy’s face. He looked defeated. Tired. Plumb worn-out. I walked over and wrapped my arms around his neck from behind. He patted my hands. “Hey there, Sissy,” he said.

  “Hey, Daddy,” I replied.

  “Wanna go for a ride?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Run go get Linda,” he instructed. “She can come with us.”

  Daddy loved to take Linda and me riding on the moped in between the rows of pineapple fields near our house. He’d found the moped in a ditch one day and brought it home and fixed it up. If something had an engine, Daddy could get it to run. He’d spend hours lying on his back underneath a car, tinkering with its parts. I don’t ever remember any car we ever owned breaking down. But Daddy always found some sort of reason to spend his Saturday afternoons underneath the car’s hood. The only thing he seemed to love more than fixing car engines was driving cars. Fast. He and Mama shared that, too. Their lead-footed ways.

  One day, back in 1957, it had gotten him into a mess of trouble and practically killed Granny Ruth. He had her in the passenger seat beside him when he was broadsided on a highway outside Knoxville. Granny Ruth was hurt real bad. She spent weeks lying in the hospital bed. Mama says Granny Ruth never did fully recover from that wreck. She died from a stroke in 1962, shortly before we left for Hawaii.

  Mama didn’t like Daddy taking us girls out on the moped. She wouldn’t ride it with him except for a time or two, down to the end of the street. And she wouldn’t watch as we whizzed in and out of the red dirt roads of Wahiawa’s pineapple fields. But Linda and I loved it. We squealed with delight, especially when Daddy revved up the engine.

  “Faster, faster!” Linda would scream.

  “Yeah, faster, faster!” I’d chime in.

  Our hair, hers dark, mine blond, would whip every which way about our heads. Daddy would yell at us, “Hang on tight!”

  Linda sat in front between his legs and gripped the bike’s handles. Daddy kept one arm around her. I sat on the back, grasping his waist. Sometimes, when he wanted to go really fast, he’d have one of us wait in the fields while he took the other out. “Safer that way,” he said.

  He wouldn’t go far, but he’d go as fast as the bike would take him. It was probably only zero to thirty in five minutes, but Linda and I felt like we were going at the speed of light. It was better than a Scrambler ride at the fair. Plus, we got the extra kick of having Daddy all to ourselves.

  During that time he was home in May 1966, Daddy took Linda and me for several rides in the pineapple fields. He took Mama fishing along Oahu’s North Shore. And he tossed balls with Frankie in the driveway. He ate hot biscuits and milk gravy that Mama made.

  Daddy didn’t talk much of war or of Vietnam. Other than the story of the little girl, I never heard him mention it again. He cleaned his gear, shined his boots, and grew sadly quiet as it got closer to the time when he had to return. He didn’t make me any more promises. But this time I wasn’t worried about his leaving. He’d come home just like he’d said. I figured he’d be home again soon enough. So on May 20, 1966, I barely woke at all when Daddy came in to kiss me good-bye.

  “I love you, Karen.”

  “I love you, too, Daddy,” I said. I sat up and gave him a hug. He flipped off the overhead light, and I fell back to sleep, confident that there would be plenty of time for more hugs from Daddy.

  In June our family returned to Rogersville in anticipation of that promise. Daddy said he’d be home in time for my tenth birthday on November 12. Perhaps even on Veterans Day.

  Daddy kept his promise, in a way. He did come back. Via airmail, in a cargo plane full of caskets.

  THE TEARS STREAMING DOWN Mama’s face frightened me.

  Grandpa Harve didn’t rise from his lawn chair until the man in the jeep pulled away. And if he ever hugged or comforted his daughter in any way, I never witnessed it. But tears trickled from beneath his dark glasses throughout the rest of the day. Grandpa Harve loved Daddy as much as any of us.

  As I tried to sleep that first night, fear blanketed me. Never warm, it at least wrapped me up real tight. I took refuge in fear’s cocoon. Sometimes I still do.

  I could hear Mama’s cries through the thin panel boards that separated our bedrooms. She had cried all day long. Loud, wailing cries. Bitter water. That day I’d seen Mama raise her head and plead with God Almighty Himself. She kept asking Him the same question over and over. “Why me, God? Why me?”

  If God gave her an answer, I never heard it.

  I wasn’t bold enough to ask God why myself. I figured you had to know Him well enough to ask such a personal question. Still, I prayed each night. Clasping my throat, I prayed the only prayer I knew: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallow’d be thy name.”

  Sometimes I fell asleep before I got to the part about “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But not usually. Getting to sleep is hard when you’re worried about having your head cut off. It was a notion I obsessed over after I overheard some kinfolk discuss whether somebody had tried to cut off Daddy’s head. From that moment on, for years to come, decapitation haunted my slumber. Avoiding dismemberment became my focus early in life.

  Prior to Daddy’s death, I had never even thought much about my neck before. The only times I ever noticed I had a neck were when Mama told me there was enough dirt in its creases to grow cotton. But nearly every night hence, I fell into a fitful sleep with my hands resting on my throat. I figured being asleep was too much like being dead. No telling what people do to you when you’re dead or asleep.

  Once, years later, I slept with a man who didn’t understand my fallow fears. While I lay sleeping, he took a pair of scissors and cut off my panties. When I awoke the next morning and found myself nude from the waist down, I was frantic. I couldn’t figure out where my favorite pair of underwear had disappeared to. Nor could I recall any particular dream that would have enticed me to discard them. My panic came out in a scream.

  I know that poor man never understood the violation of cutting a pair of panties off a woman while she slept. And I tried hard to believe that was the only way I was violated. But when one is asleep, one is never sure what is going on.

  I fret that being dead renders the same effect. Perhaps it’s different for the dead. Perhaps the dead know what’s going on in a way the sleeping don’t. But can they really offer any help? Or is it just like those dreams where an intruder climbs into your bedroom window and he’s stealthily coming toward you, and you begin to scream for help? Then you wake up and your mouth is open, but there is no sound at all. Just the clock ticking, the refrigerator humming, and dark silence.

  I suspect if Daddy really saw
how hurt we all were, he would have done something to help us. But he didn’t. I hope it’s because he couldn’t—not because he was so busy rejoicing up in heaven that he didn’t care about the hell he’d left us in.

  It’s hard to explain what losing a father does to a family. Daddy’s death is the road marker we kids use to measure our life’s journey. Before his death, ours was a home filled with intimacy and devotion. After his death, it was filled with chaos and destruction.

  I thought about our family’s loss decades later while reading an article published in The Oregonian. It was the police account of a young man whose body had surfaced in the Columbia River. Hoping that somebody could help identify the boy, the newspaper ran a photo of the shirt he was wearing. It was a custom-made T-shirt with the picture of a skull on it. Law enforcement officials couldn’t identify the boy because his head was missing.

  That shirt was his only legacy. And unless someone recognized it, his headless body would be buried in a grave marked “John Doe.” Whatever thoughts or memories his soul would carry into the afterlife would literally be cut off forever.

  I think that’s what losing Daddy did to us. With him gone, we were headless. It was as if somebody came into our home with a machete and in one swift slice decapitated our entire family.

  CHAPTER 2

  bloodstained souls

  BY NIGHTFALL MAMA HAD STOPPED WAILING AND WAS TALKING ON THE PHONE. SHE WAS LISTENING AS HER girlfriend Nita Thorne listed all the reasons why Mama shouldn’t just lie down and die herself. “Shelby, think of the children,” Nita said, talking Mama through the first of many anguished nights. “What would they do without you? They need you, honey.”

  Mama wasn’t thinking of killing herself or anything like that, but she was frantic. She’d never felt so frayed and torn up in her entire life. Not even when her own mama had died. Back then she’d had Daddy to cry out to. Now she didn’t have anyone to hold her and tell her that everything would be okay. The worst kind of stomach flu couldn’t have made her gut hurt more than it already did. She could not comprehend that Dave, her beloved, was gone for good.

  SHELBY JEAN MAYES and David Paul Spears had fallen in love on a blind date at a county fair in the late summer of 1953. She was sixteen. He was twenty-two.

  Daddy was already a seasoned soldier when he met Mama. He’d dropped out of school after the eighth grade and worked as a laborer at Townsend Electrical Company in Greeneville, Tennessee, before enlisting in the Army in August 1951. He did a tour of duty in Korea and was back in Tennessee, working at the steam mill in Persia. Mama was a schoolgirl, getting ready to start her sophomore year at Rogersville High.

  They fell in love from the get-go. Daddy was smitten with Mama’s lean, tanned legs, boyish hips, and dark-as-coffee-bean eyes. He liked the way her naturally curly hair cascaded around her neck, and that she didn’t have a prissy bone in her shapely body. Mama had grown up with five older brothers. She didn’t giggle, gossip, or give a shit what other people thought of her. She was as independent and stubborn as the day is long, and Daddy liked that. It gave him something to laugh about. Shelby Jean Mayes also liked the things he liked most—fishing a riverbank on a sunny day and making love under a tin roof on a rainy night.

  In one of the letters he sent Mama from ’Nam, Daddy referred to their first date: “I remember when I took some good-looking girl to the carnival in Kingsport. Do you remember?” The letter arrived shortly after Daddy died. In that same letter, he teased Mama with the following note: “It sounds like Frankie is learning to get around there the same as he does everywhere. Tell him to watch out for those city girls around there for that is where one of them caught me. Ha!”

  Mama dropped out of the tenth grade after the first two weeks of school. Five months later, on February 13, 1954, the eve of Valentine’s Day, my parents married. Mama was five months pregnant with Frankie.

  Daddy had been talking about reenlisting in the Army for months. On January 8, 1954, he signed up for a three-year stint. Daddy was due to report to his station at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Valentine’s Day. Mama stayed in Rogersville with her parents until Frankie was born on June 16, 1954. Daddy wasn’t there for Frankie’s birth, but he arrived in Rogersville later that evening. Mama moved to Fort Campbell with Daddy when Frankie was a couple of weeks old.

  From that moment on, Mama was a military wife. Her independent streak came in handy whenever she was required to pack up and move kids and caboodle on short notice. She made sure we had up-to-date shots for overseas travel, kept our school records in order, and learned the quickest route for finding new dentists, new friends, and new churches. She mowed the lawn, starched Daddy’s uniforms, and made sure Grandpa Harve had an ample supply of cigarettes nearby.

  After Granny Ruth died, Grandpa Harve moved in with us. Mama’s daddy was disabled. A stroke had rendered his left side useless. He could walk with the aid of a cane, but it was a slow step-shuffle. His speech was equally lopsided. But Daddy always took the time to converse with Grandpa. They were good buddies. They would sit on the porch or under a mimosa tree, drinking cups of black coffee, passing cigarettes and matches and stories between them.

  When Daddy got called up for a second tour of duty in Korea, Mama birthed and raised Linda alone for the first fifteen months.

  “I called a taxi to take me to the hospital when I went into labor with Linda,” Mama recalled. “I didn’t have anybody else I could call to help me out.”

  She left Frankie and me with a girlfriend while she delivered our baby sister without anyone by her bedside. Nobody brought her flowers. Nobody threw her a baby shower. Mama just went about her business, tending to our family’s newborn, Frankie, and me.

  Mama liked being the soldier’s wife. She would dress us up and parade us around base on Armed Forces Day or the Fourth of July. She enjoyed dancing at the NCO club, with Daddy’s hands clasped about her waist. It was fine with Mama that other men referred to her as “Sergeant Spears’s wife.” That’s the only title she’d ever envisioned for herself.

  All her friends were other military wives. They didn’t care who had an uppity education and who didn’t. They were focused on raising their kids the best way they could, making sure they didn’t miss out on the deals at the commissary, and looking ahead to where their husbands’ next assignments might be. They got together to sew school clothes, drink a pot of coffee, and arrange pool parties or the occasional dinner out.

  Mama had never been a career woman. She didn’t even know any women who were, other than our schoolteachers. She knew some women who worked at diners or Dairy Queens to make ends meet, but if their husbands had made better salaries, they wouldn’t have done that. As capable as she was, the thought of providing for her family terrified Mama. She loved Daddy. She needed him. She couldn’t imagine life without him. Such a life held no promises, only guaranteed sorrows.

  “Nobody really knows how alone I really was then,” Mama told me years later.

  Perhaps not. But Nita Thorne had some idea of how alone she might feel if she’d been in Mama’s shoes. Nita was one of the wives Mama befriended while Daddy was stationed in Hawaii. Nita’s husband, Hank, was a good friend of Daddy’s. They served in the same unit at Schofield and in Vietnam—Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 9th Artillery, 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry.

  Daddy and Thorne were cannon cockers. Daddy, a staff sergeant, was known as “chief of smoke” because he led the firing battery. Thorne was operating the cannon when Daddy died. Thorne, who was still on active duty in Vietnam, sorely wanted to accompany my father’s body home, but his request was turned down. Nita and her two children were living in Alabama.

  Mama sat on the edge of the bed, her head downcast, tears streaming down her face as she pressed the black-handled phone against her ear, grasping for the comfort Nita offered her. Nita told Mama she was coming to Tennessee. Mama said it wasn’t necessary, but Nita and the kids came anyway, and stayed until after Daddy was buried.

  Retreating to
my room, I scrawled a note to Mrs. Eye, my former teacher at Helemano Elementary School. The writing helped. I had to quit crying so I could concentrate on my cursive. I think that letter was the first time I used writing as a tool to bring order to chaos. I don’t know exactly what I wrote that day, but I know I told Mrs. Eye about my father’s death and the bulldog puppy whimpering outside the trailer door. I also told her how Mama’s crying frightened me.

  After placing the letter in my Bible, I curled up on my bed and wept until I fell asleep. As best as I could figure out, if Daddy was dead, that meant he wouldn’t be coming home. Not for my birthday. Not for Christmas. Not ever.

  The night before Granny Ruth died in July 1962, Mama opened a box of Toni home-permanent kit and rolled my hair up in scratchy pink curlers with itsy white tissue papers. Then she poured nasty-smelling stuff all over my head. It ran down my face. Thankfully, Mama had given me a washcloth to hold over my eyes. When she took the rollers out, my hair balled up all wiry—like a scouring pad that had been used to clean up the fried-chicken skillet. Daddy chided her: “Little white girls aren’t supposed to have hair like that, Shelby.”

  I hoped Daddy’s death wouldn’t cause Mama to get out the Toni box again.

  THE TOWNSPEOPLE LEARNED of Daddy’s death when the local papers ran articles with bold headlines declaring he’d been killed by his own shell. One paper ran a picture of Daddy standing next to a 105 howitzer. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots covered in mud. The cutline beneath the picture reads: “Last Picture–S/Sgt. David Spears, standing by his howitzer, was received by his wife in Rogersville Friday. Two days later she was notified of his death, apparently from one of his own shells.”