Grandpa Elliot made sergeant in the US Marine Corps for shooting a German sniper out of a tree in France in World War I. Same as shooting squirrels, he told me once. As for Dad, he spent his time in the Marines in Korea and saved a man’s life at a place called the Chosin Reservoir. He don’t ever talk about it—not ever—except when he and his friend Dickie Howell get together, and then only because Dickie was also a Marine. Dickie, who only has one leg.
For us Elliots, if the country calls, you answer. Simple as that. Maybe you lose a leg. Maybe you lose much more. But you go. Which is why I hate myself for feeling how I do. Because I don’t want Pete going to Vietnam. I don’t want my brother to die.
Rain’s stopped. Dad’s cigar burns hotly one last time in the blue dark, then fades. At almost that same moment, a tiny glow answers it from the grass beyond our porch. I wait and when it comes again, I spot two others floating near it. Tiny lights winking on and off, bobbing in the dark.
“What are those?” Frankie asks.
I’d almost forgotten my cousin, him sitting so quiet, so still beside me.
“Ain’t you ever seen fireflies before?”
He stares out into what’s now a sea of glowing lights and shakes his head.
“Does that mean you ain’t ever chased fireflies?”
Another head shake.
“Well, goodness gracious, what kind of place do you come from, anyhow? You wait right here and don’t go anywhere.” I run and fetch a jar from the kitchen.
“Come on, Frankie. You and me are going firefly hunting. You follow my lead and do just like I do. We’ll catch a bunch and put them in this jar. Don’t worry, they don’t bite or sting, and they got nothing to do with real fire at all.”
I kick off my shoes and lead my cousin out into our yard. Butch joins us, his tail swishing a mile a minute, and we chase fireflies over cool, wet grass, following the little lights deeper into a night that smells sweet and clean. When Frankie finally catches one, you’d think he caught a pop fly in the World Series. He crouches on his knees, peering into his hands.
“I’ve got one. I’ve got one!”
“So stick him in the jar and go find another one!”
By the end of it our little jelly jar is glowing like a dragon’s egg. And as we walk back to the house, our feet soaking wet, I’ve eased my worrying over Pete and the draft. And I’ve also decided that my cousin Frankie is all right for a city boy.
At first I think it must be Apple Creek I see rolling before me. The water is brown; the storm’s churned up the bottom. But the trees on the far bank are shorter than the white oaks along our creek. And darker. Their arms reach out over the water, so low that their vines, like fingers, trace lines in the current. Pieces of red sky blaze between the trunks, like a poker left too long in the fire.
I am in the jungle.
I suck in a breath of hot air, heavy with the stink of rotten leaves, because I know what I’m about to see. Already the shapes are coming, moving under the trees just across the water from me: dark, green shapes sliding so quiet you’d think they were the shadows of birds passing overhead. But they are not birds. They are boys.
Boys in uniform.
Pete is with them. I don’t see him. I feel him. But whether in the front of that line or still back in the deep shadows I do not know.
Stay in the trees.
The boys ignore me. One by one, they step out into a dangerous open space along the river, a tiny pocket of land that’s opened up in the tangled mesh of jungle.
I shout at them to go back. Run into the trees. Hide. My lips drag around silent words. Like every time before, the boys on the bank cannot hear me.
The shots start downriver this time. I want to look, but someone’s holding my head in a vise so the only place I can see is straight ahead. From the corner of my eye, I catch sight of yellow lights popping angrily in the green dark. On the far bank, the first boy pitches forward into the dirty river. He doesn’t crumple up. He stays straight. He falls like a tree. He slips headfirst below the surface and is gone.
The next boy steps up. The others behind him don’t run for cover, don’t throw themselves into the dirt like they’re supposed to. They simply stand in line. Boys like trees, standing, waiting to be cut down.
I squeeze hot jungle air from my lungs and my throat burns as I try again to shout. Not a whisper comes out.
The second boy slips under the water too, smiling as he goes.
A third boy steps out of the trees, a boy taller than the rest, with broad shoulders and a thatch of straw-colored hair. I don’t look at his face. I already know who it is. Instead, I jump. That dirty river water is warm and I fight it, punching and kicking to get myself to that far bank in time. Can’t shout, so I have to swim. And if I can just get to that bank, I can save him.
I have only a few seconds more. I kick harder, but now I’m sinking.
The air rushes out of me again, hissing past my lips into the river of death. I can’t hear the shots when they come. But I hear the splash. I feel it somewhere above me.
A shape slides down in front of me in the dark water, feet first, the body ramrod straight. Pete grins as he goes by, his hair waving on end around his cheerful face. He sinks out of my vision, down deep into the black mud.
The water floods my mouth and nose then as I scream, and suddenly everything is dark and warm and dead.
It’s a fat, cream-colored moon climbing over my windowsill as I lie listening to Pete’s snores and the crickets out in Knee-Deep Meadow. My oldest brother is fast asleep in his top bunk, his arm hanging over the edge. In the pale moonlight, it’s ghostly white. Will’s still as stone in his bed. On his mattress on the floor, Frankie is a shapeless lump, his chest rising and sinking with all the noise of a falling star.
It’s only me and my somersaulting mind awake now.
I sit up and the bedsheets come with me, sticking to my bare back and arms. I feel the night breeze through the open window, and I suck it in. A little while later, I cry.
My dream is the same every time. Those boys in the jungle line up and wait to get shot. Pete somewhere among them, and I can’t do a thing to save him. So many other boys’ brothers have gone to Vietnam. Signed up or drafted. It ain’t fair of me to want to keep mine here all safe and sound, but I don’t care.
I climb down from my bed and creep past my sleeping cousin to the windowsill. The moon spills its milky light over our yard and Dad’s truck in the drive. Valley beyond is all wrapped up in mist.
I kneel down and pray.
My knees are numb by the time the words come:
God, help me save my brother. Help me save my family.
I repeat it over and over and over. My own river of words to fight that dark, deadly river in my dream.
When I lift my head from the window, the moon is smaller, higher in the sky. My feet have fallen asleep under me. I climb back into bed on tiny, stabbing needles. I am on my way out of the world again when Frankie turns in his sleep. From his mattress, he gives a long, slow sigh.
I know it then. It’s the last thought through my mind before I switch off the burning hot bulb in my brain: Frankie is the answer to my prayer. After all my talking to him, God’s said something back.
Chapter 4
NEW SHILOH
Sunday morning our family piles into the Ford and Dad drives us into town for church.
New Shiloh Lutheran sits at the town’s edge, white wooden boards blazing in morning sun under a steeple that tilts like a scarecrow’s hat toward the ocean of corn that surrounds it. Wind moves among the stalks as we pull up, making waves that lap the walls of the church like water against the hull of a ship. And it reminds me how Pastor Fenton said one time the church was a ship: seas could swell and rise against it, but it could never sink, and neither would you so long as you kept inside it.