Next he found the medals. There was a nest of them, police marksmanship badges (his father was a natural, extraordinary shot), Pacific Battle Star and campaign ribbons, the Purple Heart with four clusters, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 2nd Marines, another one for the 3rd Marines, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and of course, the big one, the Medal of Honor, a chunk of metal in the configuration of a star that hung on a necklace of now faded but once sky-blue ribbon. He hefted the ornament: it had weight and density, gravity almost, dignity perhaps. Its gold plating was grimy from years of neglect and he realized that he’d never seen the thing itself before; his father never had it out or displayed it and his mother must have dumped it in this box sometime after the funeral, and sealed the box and herself off from the pain.
He held it in his hand for a few seconds, waiting to feel something. It was only a chunk of dirty metal, a trinket. He’d won medals himself and knew the odd distance a man feels from them, looking at them and thinking, so what? They explain so little, they have no connection with the reality of what they signify.
The citation was there too, on official Department of the Navy paper, a fancy-looking, thick piece of paper dated 10 December 1945, that had the look of formal ostentation that he despised. It could have hung in a dentist’s office.
He read it, wondering if he’d ever read it before or only heard it told by other men. His father never spoke a word about the war.
On 21 February 1945, on Charlie-Dog Ridge two miles inland from Beach Red 2, Platoon Sergeant Swagger’s unit from E. Co., Second Battalion, Ninth Regiment, Third Marine Division, came under intense fire from several enemy machine-gun positions. All his flamethrower operators dead or wounded, Platoon Sergeant Swagger led a squad off on a flanking maneuver, but only he reached the ridgeline in sufficient condition to continue the attack, the others having been killed or wounded. Wounded himself three times, Platoon Sergeant Swagger climbed into the first nest from the rear, killing the enemy soldiers with his submachine gun.
He continued to work his way along the line, silencing two other positions in the same fashion, by rolling over the parapet and spraying the enemy with gunfire. In the third nest, his gun jammed and he killed two enemy soldiers with the butt of the weapon. Advancing on the last position, a concrete bunker, he realized he was out of ammunition. He returned to the previous machine-gun nest and removed the enemy weapon and several grenades. He blew open the steel door of the emplacement and leaped inside with the light machine gun, killing thirteen more enemy soldiers.
In the seven-minute engagement, Platoon Sergeant Swagger killed over forty enemy soldiers while sustaining five wounds himself. His actions saved the lives of thirty men in his platoon. For conspicuous gallantry in action against the enemy above and beyond the call of duty, he is awarded the Medal of Honor.
Somewhere Bob had seen a picture, though it appeared not to be here. He remembered a yellowed scrap of newsprint, almost delicate to the finger in its crumbly dryness, and on it the image of his much younger father, flat-bellied and stoic of face, in dress blues, as the President of the United States, behind bifocals and a folksy Missouri face, laid the ribbon over his head. Again, it was nothing: the ceremony was for other people, not for his father, who kept his feelings to himself about what he’d done and why he’d done it.
At last Bob set the medal down. He knew enough of war to know that the description of his father’s action was antiseptic to say the least. In the nest with the Japs, working them over with a tommy gun, he must have watched them disintegrate under the heavy impact of the .45s. The air was sulfurous and full of lead and smoke; mortars exploded everywhere, sucking the oxygen from the surface of the planet. Exhaustion, stress, dirt and filth, grime, the gritty volcanic soil of Iwo, the hundreds of scrapes, cuts and abrasions from low-crawling, the utter terror, maybe some bloodlust, some pleasure in watching the enemy’s head torn off or limbs blown away, fear that the gun would jam: all that, and much more, was left unnoticed by the citation.
Hell of a fight you made, Daddy, he thought.
Next his eye caught on something unusually regular and a pull yielded a thick wad which turned out to be an old tablet of Arkansas traffic violation citations. An amazement! There were at least twenty unused citations with their triplicate carboned forms left flat on the pad, but curled back over the spine of it were five or six carbons on tickets already handed out. Bob saw in a second that they were the tickets his father must have issued that last week and was unable to file with the court before his death. He shuffled through them, seeing his father’s own handwriting recording a series of meaningless misdemeanors against the Arkansas Standard Traffic Code in the second and third weeks of July 1955. “Driving with left taillight disabled” was checked on one citation, and the driver’s name and address and license number and below that, under the rubric “Issuing Officer,” the scrawled semisignature “E. L. Swagger.” A couple of speeding violations on Routes 71 and 88, a DWI, the small beer of a rural highway patrolman’s life. He felt his father so powerfully he almost doubled over.
And then, next, a notebook. Evidently, Earl’s pen had broken or some such, for it was spattered with brownish fluid on the cover, and a discoloration had worked under the cardboard and bled through the pages. Bob peeled them, one at a time, trying to make sense of it. He saw a list of meaningless names inside the cover, like Jed Posey, Lum Posey and Pop Dwyer. He saw a stick figure crudely inscribed and lines radiating off toward landmarks that indicated distances; and a variety of other unrelated facts or observations: “Was she moved?” it said at one place. “Little Georgia,” it said at another. “Cause of death,” it wondered, “blunt force or strangulation?” “Meeting at church? Find out what?” He could make no—
A sudden sense of profound unease hit Bob. He turned back to the cover of the notebook and felt the thing burn in his fingertips. It occurred to him that the brownish stain that had seeped through to discolor the pages must be blood. It was his father’s blood. His father had been holding this or had it in his pocket when Jimmy Pye fired the fatal bullet and the wound had emptied on this document.
It had the sense of something religious to it, something from an ancient saint’s reliquary, like a blessed chard of bone or a fragment of hair or cloth. Its power overwhelmed him, and he put it down, feeling somehow as if he’d blasphemed. It was almost too much.
He suddenly had a need to put the lid on the box, stuff the box back into the slot where it had rested beribboned and sheathed in dust, and flee back to the good life he’d finally built for himself. He had horses to care for, a daughter to raise, a wife to support. In the box was only pain and black memories.
No, go on, he told himself. Go on, do it, see every last thing.
Next came some news clippings of the event itself, the various rags’ account of the events of July 23, 1955. He slipped through them, uninterested in details. Only one caught his attention: HERO TROOPER BURIED, it said, July 26, 1955, the Fort Smith Southwest Times Record front page, also brown and crackly with age. He saw himself as a small dour boy standing next to his poor mother, surrounded by a sea of uniforms and suits under a spreading elm tree. A minister seemed to commandeer the most artention; the casket was aligned next to the hole in the ground under the tree where it would go. At least Daddy had some shade. A marine honor guard stood on the right, ramrod boys with no hair and severely raked white dress hats, bills low over their eyes, their gloves white, the high-necked dress coats severe as any Puritan’s frock. Bob glanced at what the picture showed of himself, and saw only pudge and softness, as if he were out of focus, which he was. He could barely even remember the event itself, though the photo brought something back: his mother would not stop crying, though by this time he himself had been fully cried out. It was hot, the speeches seemed to go on forever. Someone called Miss Connie was like the dowager empress of the event, the Mother Courage who took over and got everything organized and done. He remembered her smell and beauty and
how strong she’d seemed. But she was not in the picture.
Bob put the clipping down, passed through what little was left. Letters of condolence, official and otherwise, testifying to his father’s greatness, from, among others, the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, two men in the platoon who could write that day only because his actions had saved their lives, one on Iwo, one Tarawa, testimonials in inflated language from the commanding officer of the Arkansas State Police and the governor of Arkansas and a final crude letter from someone called Lucille Parker, telling his mother what a wonderful white man Earl Swagger had been, the only white man who’d listened to her pain over her daughter, Shirelle, and pledged to help. What on earth could that mean?
So many mysteries, so many unconnected elements, unfinished bits of business, the stuff of his father’s life. Not much to show for forty-five years on a planet where you’d done so much good work, and only a shoe box was left to testify to your existence.
That was it? Would the boy find such material interesting? Possibly. Bob made his mind up that in the morning he’d call the boy and arrange to let him borrow the stuff. Possibly some good would come out of it, after all.
There was a last scrap of paper. Bob picked it up, curious. It took some effort to get it figured out. It was the last page of what may have been an autopsy or a hearing report. In fact, lodged under the staple at the left top was the mulch of other pages that had been torn away. Bob understood that it had been the necessary, clinical, appallingly unemotional and excessively professional description of the wounds his father had suffered. A copy had been sent to his mother and when she discovered its meanings—Bob guessed it would have read something like “translateral passageway from under left nipple at 43-degree angle to sternum led to severe and catastrophic destruction of left ventricle” or some such—she’d just been unable to face it and had ripped it up and destroyed it. Why had this page survived? He couldn’t guess; it couldn’t be explained. Maybe she’d gone back and pulled it out of the garbage can and remorsefully tucked it away in the box. Her own sad decline had just been initiated; she would not live much longer herself, bent under grief and regret and finally alcoholism.
So this alone remained. Bob glanced at it and saw that it was a partial list of exhibits pertaining to the ballistics evidence of the hearing or autopsy or whatever. Because he knew a great deal of such matters, he read onward and saw what state police detectives had recovered at the scene.
“1) Colt .38 Super Government model, serial number 2645, with staghorn grips, four cartridges left in the magazine in the pistol.” That was Jimmy’s gun, slick, flashy Colt automatic shooting high-velocity bullets, vest-penetrating, shock-inducing, meant only to kill. Very professional choice.
“2) Fourteen cartridge cases bearing headstamp COLT .38 SUPER—WW,” the spent casings that Jimmy had ejected in the fight, meaning he’d fired fourteen times, he’d reloaded once and was halfway through the reloaded mag when his father took him out. He was a shooter, that boy. Bob wondered which of the fourteen rounds had been the fatal one, whether his father took it early or late. He shook his head. A fleeting wish came to him that he could reach back through time and deflect that bullet or maybe improve Earl’s aim just a bit on an earlier round; who knew how differently it might have turned out? But no: Jimmy fired the last round; he killed Earl even as Earl was killing him.
“3) Smith & Wesson 1926 Model .44 Special, SN 130465, with six unfired WW .44 Special rounds in the cylinder.” Bub’s gun, Bob guessed. Unfired. Hadn’t got a shot off.
“4) Colt Trooper .357 Magnum, SN 6351, with three loaded cartridges and three empty in the cylinder.” His father’s gun. Bob had seen his father clean that big piece of machinery once a week and after every firing session. Most of his memories of his father, in fact, were connected with firearms and his father teaching him how to shoot, how to hunt, how to clean, care for and respect the firearm. They were the lessons he’d never forgotten.
“5) Six cartridge casings bearing headstamp REMINGTON .357.” His father had reloaded himself, a speed reload under heavy fire from a guy with a semiauto and plenty of ammo. Good work, he thought, the best kind there is.
Only one label remained on the sheet. It bore the depressing title “Bullets Recovered” and he knew it meant recovered from bodies. The coroner’s last connection to the physical mechanism of death.
Did he have the courage to read on? With a sigh, he discovered he did. There were three “exhibits,” that is, bodies, and under each of them was listed the items recovered. Nothing in it surprised him, except that he learned that Bub had a bullet in him from Jimmy’s gun, probably delivered in the excitement of the action, a friendly-fire accident of the kind that was distressingly common in battle.
At last he read of the bullets taken from his father.
There were three.
“Two (2) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullets, copper clad, weighing 130.2 grains and 130.1 grains.”
Then “One (1) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullet, metal clad, weight 109.8 grains.”
Bob looked at it, not quite sure what he was reading, then he read it again and a third time. It did not go away. 109.8 grains.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Julie said.
He turned, startled.
“Yeah, here I am. Going back through it.”
“Bob, you ought to help that boy. It would help you more than anything. You’ve been angry ever since 1955. You should face it.”
“I’m going to do more than face it,” he said.
8
In the gloom of twlight, Earl drove swiftly down Route 88 until he passed beyond Board Camp and came to his own mailbox, turned in and followed the dirt road to his own house. He picked up the microphone and called in.
The news was not good at all. The state detectives had not been able to get to the Shirelle Parker site yet and wouldn’t make it until the morning. Only a one-man shift from the Polk County Sheriff’s Department could be assigned to secure the crime area overnight, though a coroner’s assistant had come out to make a preliminary investigation.
“How long was he there?” Earl asked over the radio.
“Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes!” Earl exploded to the sheriff’s dispatcher. “How the hell could he learn anything in ten minutes?”
“Come on, Earl, you know we goin’ to go to Niggertown tomorrow when all this about Jimmy is settled, and sooner or later someone goin’ to talk to us. That’s how it works down there. Them people can’t keep no secrets.”
Earl thought: Suppose it was a white person who killed Shirelle?
“Okay. Tell them I’ll be out there first thing in the morning, and to keep the site as clean as possible. I hate to think of that little girl lying out there all alone another night.”
“It don’t matter to her none, Earl.”
Earl signed off.
All sorts of things weighed on his mind; he tried to will them away.
You got to stay sharp, he told himself. You got lots to do.
But he wanted more than anything to sleep, to end the day and hope that tomorrow would be a better one.
He reached the house, which had once been his father’s, low but surprisingly gracious, a white place with a porch and green shingles in a grove of elms. Out back there was a rope swing and a creek. The barn held four good riding horses and the fields were Earl’s for two hundred acres all around. His son came running off the front porch.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
“Well, howdy there, Davy Crockett, how’s Daddy’s best boy?” he said, his heart swelling at the sight of the kid running toward him, the ever-present coonskin cap clutching his head, its tail bobbing on his back. Damnedest thing Earl ever did see, but all the kids wore them.
Bob Lee was nine and had never given anybody a lick of trouble. He was all the son a dad could wish for; all boy, but a hard worker too, and he had something of his father’s
natural ways with a firearm. For a nine-year-old, he could fire a .30-30 lever gun with amazing accuracy and last year had bagged a deer, though he’d shot it too far back and Earl had to track it all the way into the mountains of Scott County to finish it. Earl picked his son up and gave him a swirl up to the sky as if he were a bag of feed, swinging him till his little feet swept upward.
“Whoooooooooo!” screamed the boy.
“Best hope I hang on to you, Bob Lee, I let you go, you’ll end up on the moon!”
The boy laughed as Earl set him down.
“Mama’s up the road a piece,” he announced. “Mrs. Fenson felt poorly and Mama said she’d take over some dinner.”
“Umh,” said Earl, recognizing his wife’s behavior in the gesture. “I’m just gonna git me a sandwich and an iced tea and be on my way.”