The Time Keepers

Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31 Vietnam, 1969

J ACK WAS AT BASE CAMP WHEN THE TELEGRAM FROM THE R ED Cross arrived. It had been a difficult few days since Stanley’s death and most of the men couldn’t believe he wasn’t still with them, hiding out somewhere clasping his Bible or begrudgingly putting on his helmet with the offensive words scrawled on front.

But that morning Jack was resting for a few minutes outside the exterior of his hooch, his utility shirt drying on the clothesline, a dark green towel wrapped around his neck. He welcomed the beating sun, after that fateful patrol where the rain had been relentless and the leeches had been even worse than usual. The men had long since discovered that the thirsty bloodsuckers would crawl up their pant legs and attach themselves to their chest and limbs, any place they could reach. Jack’s entire body was now a constellation of painful, open, slow-healing, red sores, the only way to get the bastards off their skin was to burn them with the end of a lit cigarette, cover them with salt, or douse them with insect repellant. The men almost always opted for the torch of a cigarette.

He still considered himself more fortunate than some of the others. Chief, who had carried Stanley’s body the whole way without any help, looked exhausted. His eyes saddled with bags, his shoulders slumped.

He had not expected to suddenly see Lieutenant Bates standing in front of him.

“Lance Corporal Grady …” His voice, which had always been clipped and devoid of emotion, sounded strangely different in Jack’s ears. He held a thin envelope in his hand.

Years later, when Jack would think back on how he had first heard the news, he would recognize the unfamiliar tenor in Bates’s voice to actually have been kindness.

Jack stood up. Half-naked, his pants low on his hips, his dog tags flat against his bare chest.

“This just came for you.” Bates handed over the telegram to Jack. Printed on featherlight paper, the envelope fell out of his hand like a stone.

Jack took the telegram and pulled out the message.

We regret to inform you of the death of your mother, Eleanor Grady.… The death was reported this morning at 0700 hours. Transportation back home will be arranged by the Red Cross.… Two weeks’ bereavement leave has been approved.…

It took Jack several seconds to make sense of the words. He kept thinking he had misread them.

“My condolences, Lance Corporal Grady.” Bates reached to squeeze Jack’s shoulder.

For months, Jack had been living in a world that was full of discomfort and danger. He’d experienced the white-knuckle terror of rockets and grenades exploding just feet away from him and witnessed the senselessness of young men in body bags, their lives cut tragically short. But the one thing that Jack counted on was the knowledge that the two people he loved most were safe back at home.

After all, that was the natural order of things.

How many times had he imagined his mother receiving word of his own death? As soon as he learned he was drafted, Jack had envisioned two officers dressed in their military uniforms walking up the porch steps, solemnly saluting his mother, before offering her a neatly folded flag just as they did in the movies. It was a scene he had memorized because it was plausible under the circumstances.

But Jack had never imagined that he would be the one reading the telegram of his mother’s passing. It was supposed to happen the other way around.

“The chopper will come in at thirteen hundred hours to pick you up and take you to the Da Nang airfield,” Bates informed him.

Jack nodded blankly. He had been sweltering all day, but now he no longer felt the oppressive heat. His body felt cold, as if his veins were filled with ice.

News of Jack’s mother’s death spread quickly through the base camp. No one wanted to say they were envious that he was getting to go home on two weeks’ leave. But still, the prospect of sleeping in a warm bed, eating food other than C-rations, and finding comfort in the arms of a girlfriend seemed to them an upside to the otherwise-heartbreaking news.

“Man, don’t beat yourself up. I’m sure she was very proud of you.” Doc was the first to go over to him and offer comforting words.

Flannery, too, tried to be positive. “At least you’ll get to see your girl again, Hollywood.”

Jack would be lying if he didn’t admit Becky had flashed through his mind within seconds of learning the news about his mother.

But he was perplexed. Why was he only learning now that his mother had been ill? Why hadn’t Becky mentioned to him that his mother’s health was deteriorating in any of her letters?

Or had she, but he just hadn’t taken notice of it? After all, she had written to him about his mother’s cough, but he thought it was nothing more than a cold.

He opened his duffel and reached for the plastic bag where he stored all her letters and pulled out a handful of the most recent ones.

Your mother’s cough is still quite bad. I brought her lemon lozenges from the drug store the other day. She told me the doctors said it’s nothing, but it does seem to take a lot out of her. I don’t get to visit as much as I’d like to with school making things so busy for me. But when I do, we talk almost all about you. She saves all of your letters, just like I do.…

And there was the last one, which had arrived at base camp only a couple of days ago.

Your mother looks weak to me. I made her Campbell’s soup. She was funny. I made the chicken and stars one. It was the only can she had left in the cupboard. And your mom said something so sweet. She said she was going to wish on one of the stars that you’d come back home safe and sound. I only want to eat chicken and stars soup now, Jack. I want to make the same wish on every one until you get back home.

He knew the cigarettes she’d smoked since she was sixteen had made her voice permanently raspy and that she had a cough when he left for boot camp, but that was months ago. One thing he knew for certain was that his mother never once mentioned doctors or being sick. Rather, her letters read more like TV Guide manuals with detailed descriptions of the shows she was watching and the occasional reference to the lottery scratch-offs she was buying with her tips from the diner. I’m going to win a million dollars and get an RV to take you across the country , she wrote in her last letter to him, as if she were willing her dreams to life as she put pen to paper. Make sure you’re eating, Jack , she’d remind him. But most of all, don’t do anything stupid , she’d chide him, as if he were standing there in the living room and about to go out with friends. She had absolutely no idea of what his daily life in Vietnam was like, the weight of carrying that Prick-25 on his back, the sheer terror of not knowing if he’d be shot by enemy fire or blown to bits by stepping on a land mine. He would never write that to his mother because he wanted to spare her from the pain or the incessant worrying about things that were outside her, and his, control.

Perhaps he was guilty, just like her. He wanted her to think he was just fine when the truth was just the opposite.

He went into his hooch and packed his duffel quickly. He pulled down the clothes that were drying on the line, and then he threw in his kit, his journal, and the letters he kept from Becky, a thick stack tied with utility string.

He had imagined going home from the moment he first landed in Vietnam. When he packed sandbags or dug the latrines, he thought of home like it was an idealized place of perpetual Christmases. And although his home was never like a perfect Jimmy Stewart one on television, he began to reimagine it with softer edges and a lantern-like warmth. He edited his memory of the living room, erasing the threadbare sofa or the chipped, mismatched dishes on which they ate their meals. He focused only on the good. He envisioned his mother making pancakes and link sausages in the frying pan. He saw her coming home from her job as a waitress at O’Hara’s, pulling the crumpled bills from her purse and smoothing them on the countertop with a few quick sweeps of her hand.

How he loved it when he was just a little boy and she’d count out her tips and tell him they had enough extra for ice cream. Even now, the thought of the two of them walking down to the Dairy Queen to get soft serve cones, licking the ribbons of custard that dripped down the side, pulled him back to a place where he didn’t have a care in the world.

So much had changed since then.

He recalled the photograph of the two of them his mother kept by her bedside. Her hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, and he was no older than four. He is nestled in her arms, his cheek pressed against hers, his head a crown of brown curls. In the photograph she is electric. Her hair is golden, her eyes Windex blue. But by the time he was in high school, her Kodak-color beauty had faded. Her eyes became cloudy. Her hair looked like straw. Her former luster had been lost to years of raising him on her own.

His mother was only twenty-two years old on the sunny afternoon that photograph was taken, the same age he is now as he packs his bag to bury her. Jack hoists his duffel over his shoulder and goes to wait for the chopper that will take him back to a motherless home.

In the two days that it took him to return to the States, Jack’s thoughts bounced between the pain of losing his mother and the joy of being able to see Becky again.

His tour in Vietnam had made his body lean and taut; the hot sun turned his fair German Irish skin a deep chestnut brown. Dressed in his Class A uniform, he felt far more distinguished than he had when he left for boot camp only nine months earlier. His muscles filled out the chest and sleeves of his shirt. His belt accentuated his narrow waist. He could see his own reflection in the well-polished shine of his boots.

He was eager for Becky to see how much he had changed. He hoped she’d be impressed with how strong his body had become, and he couldn’t wait to feel the weight of her in his arms. And yet, when he closed his eyes on the plane, the woman who appeared was not Becky at all. It was his mother. Her face young again and smooth. Her hands outstretched as if beckoning him to come closer to her with his first steps. Her laugh filling the air.

Changing planes in California, he had been surprised by the airline clerk who asked him if he was going to travel back to Pittsburgh in his uniform.

“There’s a bathroom down the corridor. You can change out of your uniform in there if you’d like.… I’ve given you the military fare.”

“No, ma’am,” he answered. “That won’t be necessary.”

Jack took his ticket and hoisted his duffel over his shoulder and began to walk toward the gate. He had forty-five minutes until his plane boarded, and he was looking forward to getting a good old American burger at one of the restaurants before he took off.

But only minutes later, as he walked in the direction of one of the airport restaurants, he sensed footsteps behind him that seemed unnaturally close to his own. Jack instinctively slowed his pace, then turned around.

“May I help you?” He stood face-to-face with a young woman wearing overly large sunglasses on her pale, moon-shaped face. Long brown braids dangled from behind her ears.

“Back from Vietnam?” she sneered.

Jack had seen her type before. The long peasant skirt, the baggy T-shirt with no bra. He didn’t hate the people in the peace movement before he left. Hell, he didn’t want to go to Vietnam in the first place. But he didn’t expect to be antagonized once he got back home either.

A freckled arm holding a tall drink extended out from her bright knit poncho. Stacks of dime-store bangles jangled on her wrist.

“I’m talking to you,” she started again. Jack turned around to her, and that’s when she pounced.

“Baby killer! Baby killer!” she shouted in his face, spit flying in the air.

He was just about to push her out of the way when she hurled her drink in his face.

Jack stood there, frozen as the girl’s ice-cold lemonade dripped down his cheeks and chest.

“What the hell?” he yelled back at her, his face pumping with blood. But she was already running down the hall, the back portion of her poncho fluttering behind her like a ridiculous cape.

Jack looked down at his soaked uniform. The sticky liquid had saturated his shirt and traveled down part of his pant leg.

Jet-lagged, exhausted, and in shock, he stood for several seconds, stunned.

“We’ll be boarding flight 509 to Pittsburgh in ten minutes,” a perfunctory voice announced over the PA system.

Had the woman really just called him a baby killer?

He had just spent five months with a radio strapped to his back, making him a bull’s-eye for the enemy to kill him. He was scared for his life every second of the day. He had not killed a single Vietcong, and the idea of killing a baby was ludicrous. Yet he had come home to the country he was supposedly fighting for only to be unfairly accused of such abominable acts.

“There’s a bathroom over there, son,” an older gentleman said as he tapped Jack on the shoulder. He pulled out some paper napkins from his pocket and offered them to Jack. “She’s just an ignorant hippie. Ignore her.”

Jack took it and began to blot his wet chest. “Not the welcome I thought I’d get when I got back home.”

“I imagine not.” The man shook his head. “Do you have some clean clothes in that duffel?”

Jack nodded.

“Go change and clean yourself up. I’ll make sure the plane doesn’t leave without you.”

Emotions swirled inside him, for the man was the only person to show him a gesture of kindness. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”

“Petty officer third class, United States Navy,” the man said as he reached to shake Jack’s still-wet hand.