By Jeff Hampton
Dan stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the eggs out of the frying pan while watching his two grandchildren play on the lawn that stretched from the house up the hill to the road. He’d tried to get them excited about a healthy breakfast for a change, but they were more interested in Pop Tarts. At least he was able to get them away from the television and out into the sunshine. It helped that he didn’t have cable or a dish and couldn’t offer the shows that passed for playtime at home. It also helped that their townhouse didn’t have a yard, and so the great expanse of lawn with all its trees and hiding places still held their interest during the first days of their annual visit.
As he watched them – Matthew’s brave knight attacking Melanie’s fierce pirate – he remembered all the times he played in that yard as a child, alone or with friends, while his mother Helen tended to things in the kitchen. Sometimes he would look back toward the house and catch her watching him through the window, which always brought a smile and a little wave. Other times he’d see her just staring out across the lawn toward the road. He knew she was remembering that day – that sunny morning when she was standing at the window and saw the dark sedan come down the gravel driveway. She was alone while her parents were at the market, and they came home to find her sitting on the porch steps with a piece of paper fluttering in her hand – a telegram delivered by the preacher and the man from Western Union that said her soon-to-be-born son would never look up from his play and see his father smiling from the window.
Dan shook his head as he rinsed the pan and dried it with a dish towel. He couldn’t make the math work: At 66 he had lived three times as long as the 22-year-old who had given him life. Sure, a son is expected to live past his father, but he isn’t supposed to grow old and gray while his father remains a boy forever. It was a momentary frustration, however, because the truth was that Cpl. Daniel Smith had never been more to his name-sake son than a character in a story he’d been told through the years.
Danny, as they called him, was born and raised on a cotton farm and would have stayed there but he made good grades in high school and was recruited to work at a bank downtown. He was just starting the training program to become a teller when he met pretty Helen at the diner during a lunch break. The two fell in love quickly and were married for just five months before the draft board called his number and he was shipped out to the war in Europe. Helen received a few letters from Danny in the months that followed, but then they stopped coming. She heard nothing else until the day the sedan came down the drive with the telegram from the Secretary of the Army explaining that Cpl. Smith was missing after an intense battle in the Rhine Valley.
With nothing of Danny to bury, Helen refused to put his name on a marker at the cemetery. She said the ground was too sacred and too scarce to be taken up by an empty tomb. After the war his name was added to the stone tablet at the courthouse listing the town’s war dead, but that was none of her doing. She preferred to remember her Danny with pictures – placed on the mantle at first and then moved into albums as the years went by and the memories faded. And once a year, on Memorial Day, she went to the cemetery to place flowers at the small stone marker for the unknown soldier who was brought home and buried after World War I. Her faith told her that grave was empty too, but at least there was a remnant of a life there that deserved some attention and respect.
Dan heard little else about his father through the years except for “he’d be proud of you” when he made good grades, won a ribbon at a track meet, or did something else that most kids do. He heard it again when he graduated from college – the first of his clan to get a degree – but he doubted his father would have been proud to know he had marched with the protestors on campus that year. It was a different time, a different kind of war. The lines on the map weren’t as clear, and the reasons and rewards for fighting seemed less certain. Still, Dan’s protest was more personal than political; he’d seen too many of his friends go away and not come back.
The children laughed and shrieked as they crossed swords made of pecan twigs, and Dan envied their innocence. The oldest of the two was born a few months after the twin towers fell, and the second one came during the early weeks of the war in Iraq. They’d heard about it by now, of course, but just like he’d heard snippets about Korea as a boy, they didn’t fully understand what it was about. By the time he reached college, Korea was history and Vietnam was in full boil. He wondered what trouble these two would encounter in a dozen more years – and who would be sent to deal with it.
But that was a worry for another day. In a little while it would be time to load them in the car and pick up Helen at the nursing home for the annual trip to the cemetery. He would hold the children close and show them the resting places of family members going back 100 years, including their grandmother who they’d barely known. Then, they’d stand quietly with him while their great-grandmother visited the unknown soldier, and in that moment he’d give thanks for the father he never knew.
THE END
Photo: Pioneer Cemetery, Cameron, Texas, April 9, 2010
Copyright © Jeff Hampton 2010