Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

Sometimes the staff would come by my cell and see a new collection of marks. They were never able to distinguish new marks from old ones, but a few of the guards had a sense of what the volume was before they’d gotten their forty-eight hours off, or gone on vacation, and they recognized, if nothing else, when the randomness expanded. Now, I understand why they would have seen this as a pattern, and perhaps there was a pattern there after all, for I confess myself that had I been confined for another year or two the walls would have been full, there would have been no marks at all, just a wash, a new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned, and that seemed just to me, that would have been a worthy pattern to have made. But it was not to be. Everything disrupts. The guards seemed to understand that my marks had meaning, so surely they can be forgiven if their error was one of interpretation.

They’d ask, “Getting near to your earliest possible release date, right?”

“Sure,” I’d say. “Seems like I must be.”

“Ah. You’re a shoo-in for early release, a model prisoner.”

“We’ll see, I guess, but thanks.”

“How many days you got down?” they’d ask, pointing to the marks on the walls, what I then would realize could appear to be an accounting of the passing days.

“Must be nine eighty-three, nine ninety, right? Almost a thousand?” they’d say and smile.

“Must be,” I’d say, thinking of Murph, who was not counted for a while, wondering what his number would have been if I hadn’t lied about it all.

His mother came to see me once, that spring before I was released. I could see that she’d been crying as she waited for me to come into the visiting area.

“Y’all can’t touch, but I can get you coffee if you want,” the guard said.

I didn’t know what to say to her at first, but it seemed unfair that she had to bear it like this, to be responsible to start, so far away from any comfort or understanding. And if she should accuse, then I should be accused. His absence from the family plot was my fault. I had left him in the river. I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her. But this was not her way. Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

I didn’t know how to respond.

“Just needed to see, you know?”

I looked down at the linoleum.

“No. Course you don’t.”

She began by telling me that back in that December, a black sedan had driven slowly through town. One of her friends had called her to tell her it was coming. The woman had seen the dress uniform of the man in the passenger seat and she told Mrs. Murphy that the men in the car seemed lost, but that they’d be there soon.

I tried to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Murphy watching from the kitchen window. Snow surely fell as it had fallen all through the evening, over the eaves of the porch and over the hills and lining the branches of the trees. The world clean and obtuse. No angles, nothing hard. The car coming around the last bend in the road, unacknowledged, as if it had not been seen.

Mrs. Murphy and her husband saw the car, to be sure, but some part of it did not register. They stood by the window as if struck by some strange palsy. They were mute and nothing changed in the scene but the snow falling a little harder and the black stain of the car becoming larger as it moved through that blank canvas. And yet they stared. Even when the car stopped in the small turnaround of their driveway — the idle of the engine soft but undeniable — they did not move. Nor did they move from the window when the captain and chaplain removed their covers and knocked on the door. And despite the fact that the gentle rap of their knuckles asserted the fact that they were truly, wholly real, Mrs. and Mr. Murphy remained looking out the window at the car as if it were one of God’s unknowable mysteries.

When the two men gently forced the door open, Mr. Murphy had kissed his wife and put on his hat and coat and left the house out of the back door. When they said to her, “We regret to inform you that your son, Daniel, was killed,” she only looked at them with her arms crossed as if waiting for some unseen third party to elaborate. None did. The men, fulfilling their obligation with all the grace and deference that men could be asked to, finally left a card in Mrs. Murphy’s hand that gave the address of the rooms they’d rented while they waited for a break in the weather. It had a number to call if she had any questions.

As she spoke, I thought of where I had been at that exact moment, but I could not calculate the time difference, nor could I distinguish between all the cold predawn patrols that marked my tour after Murph had died. She said that she’d stood in that same spot for hours. So long in fact that the heat of her body had affected the way the snow collected on the window, leaving the small outline of her figure cleared in the iced-over glass. When she did finally move, it had almost been evening. She walked outside through the still-open back door and found Mr. Murphy there, cross-legged in the snow, which swirled in drifts sometimes up to his waist and collected on his hat and shoulders like a shroud. They sat there together like that in silence. Night began. More fell.

By the time she finished telling me about that day, the coffee had gotten cold, the steam spread out and dissipated above the passing hours. Mrs. Murphy took our mugs and absentmindedly dumped the dregs into a third cup and handed it to me.

“I didn’t mean for it all to happen like that,” I said.

“Well, what you meant can’t do anything now.”

“No. You’re right.”

The army had given up on her eventually, her fight for truth and justice, to know how it was he’d gone from MIA to dead so quickly, why the explanations never fit. But they knew that if they waited long enough people would forget about her pain, and finally a cost-benefit analysis was done and it reached the conclusion that she could now be done away with cheaply. The story of her fight had long since passed from the TV news to tabloid rags, the headlines gaudy and absurd, with pictures of her sitting on a rocking chair, a cigarette dangling from the thin line of her lips. She’d settled for an increase in her SGLI payout and my imprisonment when everyone stopped listening to her, when America forgot her little story, moving as it does so quickly on to other agonies, when even her friends began to smile at her with condescension, saying, “LaDonna, you just gotta find your truth in all of this.”

That’s what she told me anyway. “As if mine’s supposed to be different from yours, like you got one and I got another. What the hell’s that mean, your truth?” she said.

I didn’t know. Neither of us said anything for a while and it seemed OK.

“I just wish he hadn’t left home,” Mrs. Murphy said. She looked at me for a moment. “What about you? You got big plans for getting out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had never really paid attention to where I might end up, which is what I could control, and what mattered. I’d like to think I could choose well if given half a chance. But I had always done something else, always looking back instead on the nothing that remained in memory. I never got it right. All I knew was that I wanted to return to ordinary. If I could not forget, then I’d hope to be forgotten.

I was glad she came. Not because there was any unexpected reconciliation, but because she was tolerant and seemed to want to understand what happened to her son, why I’d made her read a letter that wasn’t real, standing in the snow, as I had. I was the last witness to her son’s irrevocably human end. He was now just material, but I hardly knew what to make of that. I guess all the words I used to try to explain it to her were like so much straw compared to what I’d seen. But I appreciated the way she reacted to my explanation, as roughly as I told it to her, the connections failing as they did daily on the walls of my cell. I can’t quite say what her reaction was exactly; her face still had the dull glow of loss, faded from a feeling always felt toward something else that she would now be forced to measure. Even after talking for six hours straight I couldn’t swear to any visible relief. She hadn’t offered forgiveness and I hadn’t asked for it. But after she left, I felt like my resignation was now justified, perhaps hers too, which is a big step nowadays, when even an apt resignation is readily dismissed as sentimental.