Posted 31/8/00
"I lost my brother in the war" she says, matter-of-factly.
I start at this, but don't say anything. The stiff but raw emotionality of the funeral has already vastly exceeded my ability to make small talk; I have no chance responding to something like this.
She turns and smiles at me kindly, as if I'm the mourner here. "It's OK. I haven't gone crazy or anything. I know - I know what's happening"
She turns back to the window. The sun is baking down with typical spring menace, threatening of the summer to come. The cars seem to shimmer in the car-park beneath us; the green grass glows.
"But we lost him long ago, you know. In the war"
I nod. It seems the only thing to do. For a moment, I think I should reach out and touch her shoulder, but I can't. So I stay there, watching her at the window, silhouetted against the sun.
"He wanted to serve, you know" she beings again. "Wanted it so badly, so much But they wouldn't let him. And that's when it all started." She turns back to me again and shrugs. "Or maybe it didn't. I don't know." I share her shrug and her weak smile to show I understand.
Unspoken, we start walking to the doors of the church. For a moment, we break back into small talk. In a way, it's more painful than the mourning.
Kelly and I went to school together. It's funny. I never understood that phrase before. School was more than ten years gone now, and we were so young then, it never seemed likely that the people from then would ever mean anything to me again. It's only when people start dying that you realise how important the old ties are.
We talk about what we're doing now, but in our minds, both of us are only seeing the past. Those crazy years at the edge of puberty, when everything is confusing but still alive, when you really can and do take risks, have adventures, fall in love, when the summer friendships are so much sweeter for the knowledge that they'll soon be gone.
I remember her brother then; older and stronger, but cruel and stupid so we could look down on him with impunity. We'd make polite hellos and then run off to play without him. But when you're kids, all partisanship disappears among adults, so at larger family gatherings, we inevitably ended up together. So I knew him, at least as much as you can know anyone at that age. So I knew him.
I remember when I saw him all those years later on the bus; crazed, dirty and angry. Knowing right away our worlds were forever separate, and part of me feeling triumphant to see the bully ending up just where my mother said they did. I tried to hide, staring furiously out the window, but as I got up at my stop, our eyes met and I saw in him the same assured recognition, and the same complete understanding that this recognition should go no further, that the boundary of time should never be broken.
Kelly and I slip through the crowds and down around the back of the church. We didn't belong with the others anyway. We stand out far too much. Somehow, there's a patch of blessed shade on the side steps. We huddle into it.
"I can't hate him" she says. Then she pauses, like she realises she shouldn't have just said that out of nowhere, that I might be embarrassed if she got too emotional. She bites her lip and stares down at the wood steps. "I can't" she says again. "But I can't love him either. I don't know if I ever did"
She leans her face in her hands. I look away so she doesn't need to hide her tears, but she isn't crying. "I - by the time I was old enough, he was already�" she breaks off. "I never even really knew him."
Slowly, carefully, I put my hand on her shoulder. Stupidly, all I can think of is that it mustn't be misconstrued, that my intentions of only comfort are clear. I take special care to make sure my hand is mostly on her back, as if there is a line along her clavicle that only family or lovers can cross.
She may be right. About the war, I mean. He always had a fire in him, a crazed desire to do something, anything. When there wasn't anything to do, he inevitably chose destruction: knocking down our cubbies, slashing the grass with his dull knife, smashing an old cricket bat over and over again into an old kerosene can. He was more sombre, more quiet as a teenager, but when they told him he couldn't join up, that he couldn't do what he most wanted, it probably all came boiling out again. All that emptiness, all that anger.
And of course the war gave him something else too. It gave him an enemy. A focus for all his rage. And that was it, that was enough. From then on, you could say it was inevitable. It was only going to end like this.
My hand rises and falls as she sighs deeply. "All I keep thinking is that I'm glad it's over now. Glad he's stopped." She gulps in air with the fractured beginnings of a sob. "Is that wrong?"
I shake my head, but it wasn't a real question.
She looks at me, the sob fading. "You know what else I keep thinking? I keep thinking about the war. About the army. It sounds - it sounds stupid, but if this was in the war, if he was over there, if they'd been...the enemy�" she inflects the last word with bitter inverted commas. She knows all too well how false that word rings today. "If...He knew what he was doing, you know? If he'd been a soldier, fighting - if they'd let him join up - he would have been a hero."
"He'd be a hero" she says, and gulps in air again.
Through the gardens, I see the first hearse slow down on the road and pull into the driveway. That's when I have to go. I know if I stay there, I'm going to have to count them all, and I can't bear that. I give her a quick hug and she says she'll be all right. I skip over the garden, and I'm back in the street. It feels far too good to be out of there.
The sun makes my black suit roast my back as I walk home, but somehow it feels right: the stifling heat matches my choked emotions. The streets are empty and silent - the whole town is in mourning - and the bright noon sun gives everything a still shine, like it's a model, a sculpture under glass. In such a world, the pit in my stomach feels right at home.
All I can think about on the way back is him, when the time comes, and they strap him into that chair; his strangely childish dimensions contorted with fear, his face harrowed with exhaustion, pissing himself and crying in agony long before the electricity hits him. It strikes me that nobody at the church today will think of him like that. To them, he'll always be a hulking, mighty monster, sneering with pride and anger, laughing at them even as the switch is thrown. Cut down like a warrior in battle. Killed like a king.
Or like a hero.
And I realise just how right Kelly is. Heroes and villains - it's all just the same. Both of them end up with the same result. They live the same lives. And the man is still dead in the end.
I remember the shot on the news from the security camera: the proud stride, the calm hands. Now, I picture that same powerful stance in the jungle, the screaming M-16 above the explosions, the enemy all around, but he fights hard, taking them down, winning victory, saving lives - until his luck runs out, and a line of bullets roars from out of nowhere, tearing him in half and he sinks to the jungle floor, gun still gripped tight in his hands, brave smile still on his lips, the Star Spangled Banner still humming in his heart�
I think of him in that chair again, the man I knew already fading into something better, and I salute him in my mind.
Mate, I think, they would have given you the Medal of bloody Honor�