Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

Shortly following his passing, Hollis and Debra assumed the chores Ida didn't have the will to perform, entering the guest bedroom where T.J. had slept alone (an untidy sanctuary near the living room, down the hallway and, seemingly, a long distance from the much larger bedroom he ‘d previously shared with his wife). On a brisk spring afternoon, they packed his belongings, dusted the furniture, polished the floor, washed and folded the linen. Then they tackled his mothball-steeped closet, sorting through clothing — what to keep or throw away, what to donate — climbing atop a stool in order to retrieve cardboard boxes stored well beyond their reach. One box held homemade fishing tackles, one was stuffed with issues of Life . Another box contained hundreds of photographs and negatives, most bound by rubber bands yet given a rough chronology; there were various shots of T.J. as a ranch kid, as a high-school quarterback, as a farmer, as a smirking entrepreneur in a community not yet made anxious by combat reports (sharply dressed outside his Ford dealership, his gas station, his Bobcat Bite diner — the businesses he divested himself of at the end of the war); portraits of him wearing his navy attire, the spotless uniform appearing as white and smooth as his skin; images of him at a port tavern, hoisting a beer bottle, laughing.

And there, finally, there: her father huddled with tougher-looking men — marines — on a beach somewhere, crouching together, posing like a football team above the opposing dead. What breathless shock seized Debra then, as if she'd stumbled into frigid water but was unable to cry out, when contemplating a Japanese soldier's severed head clutched by her own father's hand, a hand which had held her hands and had stroked her hair; the boyish soldier's face was savaged on the left side, a rent eyelid hanging over a hollow Asian socket, the black hair coiled around the same fingers which had gently patted her shoulders. “This didn't happen,” she said, abruptly tearing the picture in half. “We didn't see this.” How could Hollis have told her such human desecration was commonplace for the victors of battle — that he, too, had also stood above the fallen, his rifle aimed toward the lifeless? Instead, he kept quiet as the picture was torn again and again — the bits fluttering, sprinkling about the floor. Better, then, for her to collect the pieces without hesitation, depositing them in the trash — better returning that particular box to the highest closet shelf, shutting the door, and not dwelling anymore on what she couldn't fathom. “We didn't see that,” she repeated, and, as her father had also done, never spoke of it further.

But while Debra refrained from disagreeing with her mother's or younger sister's postmortem resentment concerning T.J.'s alcoholism, in time she concluded that it was her father's right to have anesthetized those assaulting memories; he earned the privilege, and none of them should have expressed reproof for his indolent excursions out of the living room — bare feet shuffling along the floorboards, taking slow, deliberate steps toward the kitchen, going to where another cold Lone Star could be fetched. In hindsight, she wished she had shown deference as he had ambled past her like a purposeful sleepwalker, understanding him as one in need of forgetting so thoroughly he'd rather drink himself to death than remember. Even so, she ‘d always loved him very much — she whispered this to herself at his funeral and knew it was true. She had grown into an adult alongside his calm intemperance, had gone from his little girl to Hollis's wife while he inhabited the sagging couch; she had accepted his vague presence since childhood, had maybe sensed his days melding into the manifold of dreams — where his decades of casual dying, to her now, somehow felt like a cloud's broad shadow winding across an unbearable terrain, dissipating by degrees until at long last it was nothing more.

Debra was next to him, propped up in bed, as Hollis lay there with his hands folded behind his neck. Her eyes were blankly staring forward, the bottle of cherry oil held below her nostrils. He was looking at the yellow ceiling, squinting, while discerning something else altogether: that big hilltop house on the West Texas plains — an ominous, creaking silhouette rising high beneath moonlight, a black hole shaken by itinerant winds, doors and windows boarded, panes shattered — abandoned and, at last, truly haunted since Ida had died, his mother-in-law succumbing to pneumonia some ten years ago.

“Come to think of it,” he said, turning his head to her, “I'm not so sure your dad would've liked Nine Springs. I mean, I suspect he wasn't meant to leave Texas, don't you?”

Debra glanced at him with an expression of such melancholy on her tired face that Hollis thought tears were imminent, but she was only readying herself for a yawn. “Who can really say,” she said, her mouth gaping. “You could be right, I guess.”

“Oh, what do I know anyway. It isn't like I think about him all that often these days.”

Hollis had never imagined he would find himself off in an exclusive desert community recalling the life of his late father-in-law, or remembering the solitary Victorian house which had remained standing after the majority of its former residents were deceased. Yet whenever pondering his own life, however briefly, he had assumed his demise would come well ahead of Debra's end — although he hadn't given much thought to how she would survive without him. There were, of course, stock investments, his life insurance, and their considerable savings. The vague supposition lurking somewhere deep in his mind was that she would be able to take care of herself, just like her widowed mother did following T.J.'s passing. In any case, it seemed, for him, the natural order of things: wives rarely preceded their husbands to the cemetery. His mother, too, had buried two husbands by her seventy-third birthday, spending her final years in a Critchfield retirement home while keeping herself busy with bingo and origami. And where Debra had grown up, the men were always inclined to go before-hand — from drinking, heart failure, mental decline, hard living — and, existing beyond their spouses, the widows banded together, becoming attentive to their friendships and Jesus. Rugged cowboys and stoic farmers aside, West Texas was, in truth, a land governed by strong, independent women. But then again, he ‘d reminded himself, ovarian cancer wasn't part of Debra's gene pool; her disease was a fluke, the sole exception to the rule, and he couldn't have foreseen or ever conceded the possibility that he might now outlive her.

She tightened the cherry oil's lid, setting the bottle on the bedside table, and, without hesitation, picked a different aromatherapy bottle, shaking it for a few seconds before unscrewing the top. Then, as she began inhaling from the bottle, it was sleep-improving lavender replacing the lingering scent of cherry. “What about Bill?” she suddenly asked, between sniffs.

Hollis rested his right hand against his forehead. “Who?” he said, glancing furtively at her.

“Bill McCreedy. Do you think about him at all anymore?”

For a time nothing was said. Debra kept inhaling and exhaling, and he stared at her, taken aback by the question. His expression was so unlike his usual attempts to force a smile that he seemed like a separate person. “I don't know,” he said, his voice almost a gasp. “I don't.”

“You don't know? Really?”

He nodded, a look of utter consternation on his face: “I suppose I think of him. What about you?”

“Not so often,” she answered, frankly. “Only sometimes.”

“Me, too,” he lied. “Not so often.”

And that was that. Debra put her hand to her mouth and yawned once more. Presently the room would fall dark — the pillows adjusted, the lavender scent then diminishing with the increasing tenor of Debra's snoring, the sheets bunched around her shoulders. But sleep would elude Hollis for a while. Instead, he tried to picture what it was Debra saw whenever her memory invoked McCreedy — but, despite his best efforts, little was revealed to him. How many years had it been — he found himself wondering — since they had last spoke of Creed? Ten, fifteen years? And why were the long dead recurring to her now? Gripped with anxiety, Hollis gazed into the pitch of the room until the darkness surrounding him made his body shudder and eyes close. A distant scent came to him there, a pleasant mingling of odors which weren't within reach or distilled in bedside bottles of oil — apples and pears and muddy earth and tall, fragrant reeds, transporting him elsewhere, sending him far from where he lay with his wife; and, too, while aware of her sonorous breathing, he was observing a broad river coursing near groves of apple and pear trees. He was, in those tugging moments just prior to sleep, somewhere else — somewhere he had never wanted to visit again, a valley where the rushing, shifting water now symbolized only loss and the transience of living.