And then Pops turned his head all of a sudden like he knew I was watching him, and there’s no way he couldn’t have seen what was in my eyes, and we had this moment, you know? This moment when he knew that I knew, and vice versa.
Fortunately the salads came then and kind of broke up what we were all feeling, and then we had our dinner and talked and laughed a little but there was always something hanging in the air that made us want to keep our voices low and filled us with a sad kind of tenderness for each other.
It was about a week after that Sunday, six days to be exact, when Pops called me in the morning and asked if I could get away for a few hours in the afternoon. All he would tell me was that he wanted me to drive him somewhere. “You can tell Cindy I’ll have you back in time for supper,” he said.
So I pick him up and he still won’t tell me where we’re going. “Head north,” he told me.
“Anywhere in particular?”
“Straight up 62 North. It will take us a while to get there.”
I noticed right away that Pops wasn’t his usual self. A lot quieter, for one thing. But there was a stillness to him too that he didn’t usually have. I think I told you before about how fidgety and restless he always used to be, always having to do something with his hands, whether it was cleaning his nails or tinkering with an old toaster or fixing some crack in the plaster that only he had ever noticed.
So we’re riding along, and I’m giving him his quiet time and enjoying the fall leaves and all, when he comes out and asks if I ever hear from my Army buddies anymore.
And so that’s when I told him what I hadn’t even told Cindy, I guess because I’d never wanted to hear the words out loud. Now seemed the time to do it though.
I told him about how you went back for another tour, this time in Afghanistan, and how you and your boys got pinned down on that hill for most of two days, taking mortar fire and sniper fire the whole time, and how you all must have been huddling there listening nonstop for the sound of a drone or a jet or a missile or anything, but that when it finally came, everybody had already stopped listening.
I bet it took me fifteen minutes to tell him that story, what with me running out of breath right at the start, and having to stop talking again and again to keep from just losing it. The more I talked, the more the sunlight coming through the windshield stung my eyes. By the time I finished, my throat was thick and hoarse and my chest felt like it’d taken a direct hit from an RPG.
Afterward Pops was quiet for a while, and of course I was too. And then he started talking.
“When I came home from the A Shau, you know, I was so full of hate. Hated everybody, never trusted a thing I was told. Seeing your own gunships blowing your buddies to pieces all around you, and for what? For a useless chunk of land. That’ll do something to a man. Plus the way the country was back then, that didn’t help. Nobody ever said ‘Thank you for your service’ to us. Baby killer, that’s what we got called. It was tough living with that every day. Tough living with what we did over there.
“Your grandmother, though, she waited it out with me. She kept right on loving me, you know, and waiting for things to heal. Then your mother came along, and it all kept getting better. Then you. My grandson. And I finally came to realize that nothing else really mattered. There wasn’t nothing could touch the way I loved the three of you, and the way I knew you all loved me.”
I felt like there wasn’t anything I could say to that. Like he didn’t want me to say anything. He only wanted me to listen.
“People don’t have to be perfect for you to love them,” he said. “You understand what I’m saying? Sometimes you love them because they aren’t perfect. You love them for their imperfections . . .
“One thing you probably don’t know is that I never entirely agreed with your grandmother’s view of things. Church things primarily. I went to church with her, every Sunday, regular as clockwork. But I went because of her. What I mean is I went for her, not for myself or for any other reason.”
I could see him struggling with it a little, not knowing exactly how to get to what he wanted.
“What is it you want to tell me, Pops?”
“Your grandmother would have told you, in fact she always did, that good can only come from good. You have to do good to be good.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Well . . . she never went to war, did she?”
“Sir?”
“Good don’t always beget good. And evil don’t always beget evil. In fact sometimes it’s the opposite that’s true.”
I kept driving, staring straight ahead, trying to keep my eyes clear.
“You did things over there you’re not proud of,” he said. “I know you did. I knew it the moment you came home and I looked into your eyes. It was like looking at myself in the mirror, that’s how I knew. You don’t have to tell me what it was, because that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you did what you had to do to get back home again. To get back from a place and a situation not one of us should ever have been sent to in the first place.”
And I wanted to tell him, Spence. All the horrible things I saw and did and failed to do over there. I just couldn’t get it out. All these years it’s been stuck in my throat, half choking me. I guess maybe it always will be.
Pops didn’t say anything for a long time after that. And all I could do was to keep driving with the road all blurry in front of me. After a while he put his arm up on the back of the seat, and he let his hand rest there on my shoulder. And that’s where it stayed until we got to where we were going.
He had me pull off the side of a road out in the country. Off to the right was a cornfield, must have been a couple hundred acres or more. All the corn had been harvested and the stalks were mostly stubble now, short brown spears looking almost white in the sun.
“This is it,” he said.
“We came out here for a cornfield?”
“Out there beyond it. See that hill with the one tree on top?”
“I do.”
“Back when I was even younger than you, that hill out there was a dream of me and your grandmother’s. I don’t know how many picnics we had up there, but it was a lot. I’m pretty sure we made your mother up there one night.”
He opened up the truck door and climbed out. I shut off the engine, then popped open my own door.
“I don’t want you coming with me,” he said. “In fact I don’t even want you sitting down here watching me.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I want to be alone with your grandmother a little while. And that’s the best place I can think to do it. I’ve been cooped up in that little apartment too long. The place is always noisy and filled with a bunch of busybodies won’t give a man a moment’s peace. And I miss her. I miss her every night. Are you going to begrudge me a little privacy while I spend a half hour or so with your grandmother?”
“No, sir. I’m not.”
He stepped up closer and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Tell you what. About twenty miles back, on the far end of Main Street—the town’s called Jamestown. You remember it?”