Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

Now fully permeating the consuming shadows of the Nine Springs kitchen, their past swirled about in the darkness around them, the blades of the ceiling fan stirring it like windblown leaves. “It's tough faulting old Florence,” Hollis told Debra, “because she needed someone tangible to blame, otherwise she'd have been sunk. Her grief was just too great for her to recognize your own level of grief, that you were too heartsick and distraught to see them bury the boy you loved, or that facing her and Bill Sr. and Edgar simply underscored Bill being gone. She couldn't understand it. How could she? Plus, I think anger is a lot easier to live with than sadness — I'm sure of it. I mean, she couldn't attach any meaning to the loss of her son, so you became a bit of a scapegoat for that pain, I suppose. I'm not saying it's right, but sometimes that's what people do. We do it more than we probably realize.”

Sitting at the table, with Hollis by her side, the rest of the story was as clear to Debra as it was to him. But the perspective she had always wanted was his perspective, his version of how they met — that timely encounter when, as dusk concluded, she had wandered from What Rocks to the McCreedy farm and sought him out because she had learned he was staying there: the soldier who had been shot with Creed, the one who had survived and could, hopefully, make her understand why her boyfriend had died. And so he obliged her now as he had done back then; he spoke of that other night long ago, after the chores were done and supper was finished and the McCreedys were all shut inside their bedrooms, and he sat by himself on the porch steps, in the cool winter night, gazing upward at a sky which glimmered brilliantly with more stars — blue, red, white, yellow — than he had recalled seeing before or since.

As Debra had approached the farmhouse — trudging up the dirt drive, unclasping the gate of the front yard — Hollis didn't notice her until sensing something below his line of vision, something or someone emerging toward him in the night. Lowering his head, bringing his stare from the heavens to the earth, he saw a fluttering of white up ahead, a slight billowing of fabric, and then on the concrete walkway he recognized her — for she was the same as in Creed's photograph, indistinct and impossible to define, a girlish representation made alluring by lingering just beyond his perception. But with every step she took, the aperture of his mind brought her into clearer focus, honing her shape and features and outward manner. She wore a heavy beige-colored wool coat, blue jeans, and sneakers, with a white chiffon scarf which was knotted at her neck but rippled out across a shoulder like a wind sock. As she drew closer, he spotted a cheap paperback clutched in one of her hands, the kind found on the revolving racks of dime stores, and he imagined she had cradled the book in her palms, thumbs holding the pages open while she navigated around scrub brush and prickly pears, reading during those last fading minutes of the day.

He raised an arm off his knee, casually waving to her once. “Hi,” was what he then heard himself say, when she had stopped in front of him, standing some three feet from where he sat on the steps. With her face as colorless as the scarf she had on and the dark glossy locks of her hair bathed in the glow of the yellow porch light, she seemed to be frowning at him, her brown eyes assessing him suspiciously. Behind her, in the pitch surrounding the yard, the night loomed as her ally and gave bearing to her diminutive figure.

“You Hollis?” she said in a flat, direct way, asked with a gruff tone which sounded older than her years — one her body would, gradually, see fit to match over time.

“That's right,” he replied.

“You was in that mess over there with Billy?”

“I was. Yes.”

His answers seemed to lessen the frown, although her expression remained determined and willful, unflinching while she loitered on the walkway, staring down at him with the frays of her black hair made iridescent by the casting of soft yellow light. Her stare narrowed as the breeze howled swiftly through the yard for a moment — lifting the scarf, and, like unseen fingers, sweeping her hair from her forehead. Once the breeze had passed, that curious frown was there again, that reserve and somberness, staying put when she introduced herself. “I'm Billy's girl,” she continued, as if Creed were still among the living and waiting for her inside the house. But she didn't intend to bother him long. She merely wanted a few minutes of his evening, just whatever it would take for him to accurately make plain the circumstances of her boyfriend's death; the specifics of which had been mostly hearsay, elaborated about town in hushed, piecemeal fashion and exaggerated like gossip — forming an incomplete picture in her head and heart, puzzling her more than any of the mystery novels she read every week.

“Of course,” Hollis said, a solemn note creeping into his voice. “I understand.” And there and then, he was struck by the girl, captivated for reasons he couldn't quite sort out. It wasn't as though she was a perfect beauty — her cheekbones were too high and broad for the small, round shape of her head, her eyes were too far apart — not nearly as beautiful as what the photograph had repeatedly allowed him to conjure. Yet the force of something inevitable seemed to pound at his gut, prodding him with a need for her while, too, filling him with apprehension as she stood above him. He hadn't, until that evening, bought into the idea of a definitive love which could blossom between two people in an instant. However, if such a love were real, he regarded it as an awful thing, a destructive thing, because with it also came the possibility of real loss, of complete and utter desolation in its absence — a bitter outcome he had no wish to experience.

As his voice initially wavered with his thoughts, Hollis began imparting the only full account of Creed's final minutes Debra would ever hear, a version of the event which, from that point on, she accepted as being true. But during the telling, his voice grew steadily more confident, more vivid; and what was then described about that morning at the Naktong wasn't so different from the tale he had given Bill Sr., save for one dramatic shift: it became Hollis, not Creed, who had seen something reflected by sunlight as they shielded themselves behind the dying pine tree, something glinting among the reeds and hidden several yards away; in a split second, Hollis had jumped toward Creed, attempting to push him down at the very instant a loud crack erupted within the reeds — except, of course, he couldn't have moved fast enough. The resulting moments, he went on to explain, brought no appeasing resolution; no degree of satisfaction was had by single-handedly avenging Creed's murder — pursuing and killing the sniper, also getting badly wounded before it was finished — because he would be forever haunted by the knowledge of having failed to protect his friend.

“Everyone called me a hero,” Hollis said miserably, “though it isn't anything I'm proud of. I mean, a real hero would've reacted a second earlier, he ‘d have caught that first bullet and kept his pal from being shot — that's why I'm hardly a hero. And now I can't stand that I'm here and he isn't, doesn't seem right somehow. So I remind myself I've got a duty to keep my head above water and let my life from here on out serve as an honor to his memory — and that's what I'm intending to do, and that's pretty much it.”

Once Hollis was done talking, Debra appeared poised to speak, but then seemed to prevent herself. Instead, she looked at him, withholding a single trace of emotion, and for a while neither of them spoke. Yet he was completely drawn to the impassiveness of her expression, warmed thoroughly in her strong presence — as though she was absorbing the chilly air between them, heating it inside her delicate body, releasing some of it for him to feel.