The Lost Uncle

The Lost Uncle

By Gregory Van Tassell

Copyright: 2012, Greg Van Tassell

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The Lost Uncle

Chapter One

The late autumn breeze of Richmond glides across the James River and brushes Michael's cheeks as it scatters with the leaves among the angels and statues and sarcophaguses of the previous century. He stands on the riverfront heights of Hollywood Cemetery and looks across the algae choked canal and its tow path and the still rumbling rail line along the bank. He watches the half mile width of water below flow around boulders long as flatbeds, pockmarked and buffed by meandering glaciers eons past, left like stepping stones for a breed of giants. More rock than water fills Michael's view due to a summer long drought that has grown tedious and turned the normally robust James into an enormous creek. A line of boulders a hundred yards from the far riverbank form one side of a normally submerged channel where a few intrepid citizens of Richmond stand watching rapids flow on toward the lower Chesapeake bay.

Michael turns toward a spot a short distance away on the riverbank where his uncle had been found dead from a heart attack a few days ago. He takes in a deep breath of late afternoon air and welcomes its coolness. He turns and walks downhill past President Monroe's wrought iron tomb shaped like an enormous aviary, past President Tyler's ten foot tall obelisk, eyes Jefferson Davis amid the collective moans of an entombed confederacy, and tries to remember what the various grave symbols mean. Masonic, Jewish, is there one for agnostic? Back to the family plot where he and his mother and a respectable assembly of friends and relatives have buried Oscar Turner.

Michael had grown up with Oscar in the family home and in a way he was Michael's best friend. Yet he knew little about Oscar. Oscar never let him in, or for that matter anyone else. Silent like the tombstones Michael saw in the mirror as he drove himself and his mother home, Oscar was a man of few words and his thoughts shut tight as the grave he had been lowered into an hour ago.

Michael and his mother weaved their way through the repository of spent dreams and promises, past the rebel pyramid erected so high its capstone could not be placed from the scaffold, the man rewarded who finally climbed its fissures and placed the crown, and approached the cemetery exit opening onto the back streets of Oregon Hill. The old redneck haven of clapboard row houses was being gentrified, but gnarled pickups and unchained mongrels still roamed streets where Richmond’s yoemantry were in grudging retreat.

A turn to the right and another would lead to the river where Michael could never convince Oscar to accompany him to fish, or traverse the walkway suspended like a tinkertoy vision under Robert E. Lee Bridge to Belle Isle, graveyard of Powhatan ghosts and Union prisoners, or visit Brown Island and the Kanawha canal locks where his eighty four year old body had been discovered still warm in a slight chill October drizzle. The police said he looked peaceful, almost happy.

-Mom, it's been three days. You said you thought you knew what he was doing by the river.-

-Please, Michael, I just want to go home now. Later. I'm so tired.-

He steered toward Carytown and worked his way westward across the bottom border of Richmond. The air in the old Baptist church where the service was held had seemed stale and the reception in the banquet basement stifling. His dislike of crowds, the jostling, feigned familiarity, forced eye contact, and lately his attitude toward people in general was ambivalent at best, or maybe, he feared, he just didn't care. He winced and tightened on the steering wheel. Not that. If he couldn't care, couldn't greet each stranger like a potential pub mate, clasp hands with a genuine smile, pass time amiably in line to buy socks or sardines, he would rather hate, hate with the bile of a gutter snipe watching revelers on New Years Eve, anything but not caring like poor Uncle Oscar. But lately he couldn't love his fellow man. His heart felt like a forgotten container, lost in a meat bin's recesses, bubbling mysteriously, best left unopened.

But he loved his mother. Beside him. Driving past the statues along Monument Avenue. Not small in her mid-eighties, but still tall, unshriveled by age, weight controlled like her emotions. The high cheek boned, sculpted face of the past now almost perfectly round from the years' weight, but smooth and unlined, and her hair white and short and permed like all proper aging white Richmond ladies, walking among mourners, attentive unlike him, thanking each friend and cousin for helping say farewell to her brother and commending his spirit, the pastor and Luke had said with conviction.

He watched her at the long covered table strewn with floral condolences and photographs he had helped her choose from albums, drawers, and Buster Brown shoe boxes to display the stages of Oscar's life. Oscar at eight with a trophy for what she could no longer remember, hair cropped unevenly by their frugal mother, June's head shaking fondly. Oscar and Father with a string of bug-eyed brim taller than son..... image, pause, image, smile, and then a long moment before one that brought tears to those eyes that rarely cried and sent her quickly toward the ladies room. Michael walked over to the picture and bent down. A picture he did not know. A tall, gorgeous blond in a spiffy uniform, eyes wide and sparkling as her deeply tinted mouth, and his mother beside her over sixty years ago, shoulders touching, heads almost together. The laughing smiles of the two Navy nurses charmed Michael out of his apathy. Smiles and eyes so tastefully framed by lipstick and mascara, above bodies that surely drove healing sailors and marines to whistles and antics amid half-hearted reprimands in hospital wards, the boys they loved she had told him. Oh nurse, oh nurse, he imagined, I think I have a fever, feel my forehead, is it time for a shot in my bum? Michael laughed, the first time in days. It seemed their smiles should have vanquished the Axis single-handedly, Tojo and Hitler in retreat, Mussolini their lap dog. And yet he had no idea who his mother's companion was and why her image had been included and why she had shaken his mother so. He looked at his mother and placed his hand on her shoulder as they pulled up before the red brick house on the corner of Strawberry Street and Monument Avenue.

Michael followed the crown molding above him while lying on the twin bed he had slept on growing up. The stained trim wavered perceptively with the one hundred year old plaster warping beneath it, lath, lime, and sand aging along with its inhabitants. Its corners still met true, though. He focused on each ninety degree angle as he had at night before his mother turned off his light after kissing him before sleep. Corners unchanged. Mother, light, bed, assurances of childhood, balm for the day as well as the last faint whiff of his mother's perfume that always accompanied her. Balm for days since then as well, in his mind, when things had not gone well.

He had smelled it when he leaned down and kissed her in the adjoining bedroom. Lying down to nap after the funeral, her duty done at last after sixty years of caring for Oscar after the war, her second child, a much older brother to Michael, younger though, wandering through each day vaguely interested, a bird who rarely left the garden, picking the seasons fruits and seeds, returning to his roost in unerring faithfulness and acceptance. But not peace, Michael thought, trying to nap like his mother. Oscar had never seemed to know that. Placid always and seemingly untroubled, yet somehow never at peace. For there was a sadness to Oscar, not in his face or actions or words, few as they were, but inside him that Michael had always felt. Like the emptiness of a vacated house seen from outside, known without going in. Felt. Michael did not think peace possible alongside such sadness. Had Oscar sought that by the river, by the old canal? Perhaps it had called him like the canals of Venice called Yeats. This world is no place for old men, after all. Did Oscar intuit this truth of wrinkled men? Was it true for young men as well?

He closed his eyes and then opened them halfway until they were an easy squint and looked at the space under the door, at the slit of hallway showing as he had as a child. Back then he would look for some sign of life, Grandfather's brisk footsteps, Grandmother's slow passage, Mom's pause by the door to listen for his post bedtime shenanigans. But now there would be nothing but him, his mother, and the old two story Edwardian house settling peacefully in its place among the constants of the world.

He falls into sleep as peacefully. An interlude of calm breathing before descending into sleep's lower realms that he so effortlessly attains even in naps, an inner sanctum like morning coffee and steaming winter baths. That he never tries to control. And then he awakes within his sleep and stands beneath a sun hung luminescent above him. He stares directly at the glow without harm, at the gray rimmed burnished sky above it, at oaks, maples, and pines surrounding, their lattice transfixing his gaze. He knows he is ten years old and walks beside a middle age Uncle Oscar like he had so many afternoons on the wide shaded meridian between the brick paved one-way streets of Monument Avenue.

He hears the snapping turtles stir in their mud pond behind the family Blue Ridge cabin where, six years old, he stands holding Oscar's hand and the dripping bag of melon rinds they have brought to feed the turtles. Three waddle pugnaciously from the mire and demand with a glare the morsels they have come to expect during summer visits. Oscar urges him to toss them quickly, and with perfect prehistoric ease they clamp down on their half moon prey and drag them back below to be mangled down their throats and shuttle along their turtle paths to God knows where. Michael smiles up at Oscar and Oscar nods down his approval. Michael shifts his head on the pillow and smiles.

And the taste of butter, real butter, calls from the back kitchen of the friendly old house, eleven now, down the hallway while grownups sit in the parlor chattering, his finger sliding beneath the butter dish cover and into his mouth, so warm, so sweet, so delicious by itself, and what if Grandmother catches me.....aha, gotcha, you rascal, and her hand into his, out into the backyard where azaleas, roses and their kin flank the slate walk and bob his head with scents as she plants her lips on his head, his plant sense reaching its zenith as a youngster in Grandmother's garden.

It is still a gray early November day when Michael wakes and looks out the window to see that the afternoon is winding down. In a few weeks standard time will return and it will be almost dark. He considers the flashes of his dream. If those childhood moments crowd the years, bind the brain's pathways like lightening in the distance, than what of all the striving since? To gain, to retain, to lose and regain, like the hours of the day, what? How to explain and untangle the crossed fibers of his twenty year marriage that have been on his mind since Oscar's death, since he helped lower him into the earth. Another of the dead. Shattered for him, against his will. You can't have children? We'll adopt. You don't want children? We have each other, Grace. I married you, not an if. You're unhappy? We'll get help. And then gone for no other man he knows of, carrying the simple unhealing nature of her pain and their union like a carpetbag of sorrow. Leaving him a share as his portion that he has come to believe is his due. Why can his dreams not cover that landscape with a snow scene from a Currier and Ives world, replay the good times he knows were there and assuage the crack in his heart. Questions he has no answers for. He cannot control his dreams. He should wake his mother now. He does feel refreshed from his sleep, though, and his visit with Oscar and Grandmother. He had been in a funk earlier today. It was a funeral after all. I don't have it that bad really. There's Mom, this house, my business, I'm healthy, and so many people really do have it bad.

June sat in the parlor's old armchair with her head back against a white doily, one of various sizes her mother had crocheted by the dozens for dozens of purposes. An obsession of his Grandmother's that Michael loved remembering. Arm rest covers, coasters, pot holders. He remembered snitching one to cover a coffee can he used for a covert worm farm in his bedroom closet. He had caught hell when his grandmother followed her nose after the worms died and discovered his use of her handiwork. They looked comfortably at each other as she sipped the tea her son had brought her, wondering what to tell and how to tell it.

How to describe that brief two years of Oscars life that no one, not her, her father, her mother, and certainly not Oscar, had ever spoken of to him except in vague inconclusive statements that never went beyond the obvious: Oscar had sustained a head injury in the concluding days of the unspeakable campaign on Okinawa during the last few months of the war. And when he had recovered, he hadn't recovered, little left of the vibrant probe that had been her brother's mind, the poetic sensibilities and charm and warmth that would arrest strangers and bond friends, staggered and extinguished forever. Not uncomprehending or simple like the Down Syndrome son of one her friends, smiling and hugging with unallayed affection. None of the spasmodic jerks, screams, unbelievably creative obscenities and plasma stares enclosed by wire in the psycho-neurotic back wards of Bremerton Naval Hospital where she had served during the last year and a half of the war. No, Oscar's was an emotionless voyage of indifference from the age of twenty three onward, going through the motions, aware of all around him, even the unmemorable minutia escaping others, but unconcerned, content to receive it all like a neutral jury. As content to watch soap operas with their mother, nodding at her evolving views on each doctor's and nurse's love lives, adding an I don't know or we'll see, as he was to go outside and throw a football with Michael as long as it did not involve too much effort.

The last psychologist she had spoken with twenty years ago at McGuire Veterans Hospital described it as a mixed platter of neurological pathology. Brain damage from the mortar blast, synaptic tearing, quite possibly with white matter disruption, along with the cumulative effect of seven months of almost continual combat, all presenting the attributes of classic schizoid personality disorder, a condition usually evolving in genetically predisposed individuals from simply being alive: emotionally constricted, little anger, little joy, solitary, diminished feelings for friends or family, a soul shrunken as an unshelled pea in winter. Oscar could thank a war for this transformation, the devastated doppelganger of the man who enlisted rather than sit out the war with the ironclad deferment he was entitled to. The only person who could occasionally brighten him was Michael, like a misanthrope's favorite wolfhound in a Bronte tale, and for this reason she was unsure of how to unburden herself, or if she should.

-Michael, when I came out of the ladies room in the church basement I saw you looking at a picture on the table, one with me and another nurse. Do you remember?-

-Yes. I was going to ask you about it. It wasn't with the ones we looked at.-

-No, it wasn't. Her name was Bess. I never mentioned her to you. She was one my roommates at Bremerton in that huge attic we all lived in because of the housing shortage. She was also my best friend.-

He watched dust moats float in the window framed daylight between June and himself, a ballet of particles in step with his mother's voice.

-Bess and Oscar were very much in love. They were going to be married after the war.-

The dust moats halted as he heard the words and listened for their echo in the silent cushioned curtained parlor. He hoped his stare was not as strange as it felt.

-I think that may have something to do with what Oscar was doing by the river.-

Michael shook his head as if flicking gnats at dusk and smiled at the mottled throw rug at his feet.

-Oscar in love? With that beautiful young woman?-

-I know. But it's true. You never knew the real Oscar. I was their confessor, go-between, girlfriend, sister, they told me what they told each other and more.-

Her eyes closed and her head sank deeper into the doily, hands holding the upholstered armchair firmly as she smiled at the air, a glimmer of joy surfacing, crossing her pale tired flesh, and he watched her mine seasons and lifetimes of love compressed into moments and days that she had shared vicariously when the whole world was in its death knoll. To him it was a revelation. A mother he had never seen, an uncle he had never known, a love he could never imagine had he an eternity to consider every possibility the universe might hold.

-And her name was Bess. Where did she come from?-

-A small farm in southern California outside a town called Mountain View. Just a farm girl during the depression gone to nursing school in Oakland. She wanted to get away from the farm and help with the war.-

Her eyes were open now, glistening at him, under control and warm, yet frail. He could see time open behind them. Moments he had no hint of. Knowing no more, he was charmed. The idea of Oscar in love. And deeply moved. That the neutral figure he remembered shuffling through life had loved deeply. As deeply as he had himself, perhaps more. June smiled at him more with her eyes than her lips shut tight as if afraid of the words they might release.

-We were given a two week leave after orientation in Norfolk before we were to report for duty in Washington State. There were strained feelings between Bess and her parents at home. They hadn't wanted her to leave the farm. I invited her to stay with us and she accepted. Oscar was recovering from his automobile accident. That's how they met.-

-And when Oscar was wounded they didn't.....-

Her head and body nodded like she was trying to adjust the armchair. Her eyes narrowed as she looked straight ahead and said nothing.

-Mom, its all right. You don't have to open that all up for me. It was war. Lives and loves were shattered. I'm glad you told me.-

Looking at him again, calm in an instant, wistful once more.

-I need to open it up for me, son, and for Bess and Oscar. I couldn't while Oscar was alive, I never knew if I could afterward, and I know now I can't. I think I put that picture there so you would see it and maybe you could.-

-But why, Mom?-

Her eyes closed again and she was as still as the chair. He walked behind her and reached over the chair back. Placing his hands on her shoulder, he bent and kissed her head.

-It's all right.-

She raised her hands backwards and patted the assuring flesh. Then she assumed with a startling facility the playful manner he loved.

-Help me up.-

Michael felt himself trailing out of the parlor, holding his mother's hand like a toddler on faith, up the old familiar stairs to the landing, up the second flight, down the corridor, to a spare room unused for many years. His mother opened the door and again he saw how tall and straight she was, how the accumulated barnacles of eighty five years had seemed to slough off, her being an annealed surface. He was concerned knowing that beneath she was troubled, and perplexed that somehow he could help. She walked to a closet, turned the tarnished brass knob, and struggled with the door held tight by a century's coats of heavy binding enamel.

-Let me try.-

He used both hands and heard a satisfying scrunch as the door flew back.

-Haul down that box in the middle up there - she said pointing into the dark interior.

He reached up for a Chiquita Banana waxed cardboard box that he knew his mother collected from the produce man at the grocery store. Sturdy, with a heavy removable overlapping top, it had carried green fruit up a continent to end up another treasure chest for his pack rat mother, holding what? He held it out like a stevedore, waiting for instructions. June turned smartly, flipped her wrist forward like a traffic cop, and lead silently out of the room back down the stairs into the parlor. She walked to an antique trophy roll top desk that had fascinated Michael growing up and even now he guiltily coveted as a legacy. It stood in the middle of the wall opposite the parlor fireplace. He remembered his grandparents and mother letter writing and checkbook balancing and doing what enchanted him, the tucking of pens, pins, paper clips and papers into the myriad compartments, drawers and shelves and mystical holes, to vanish as the fluid articulated mahogany roll top slid down to hide it all. What wonders and secrets he had been sure lurked there. On Easter mornings the highlight was an egg in the right upper drawer that he always had to ask the key for. The computer resting on the old green desk blotter looked absurdly out of place. An anachronism of the future.

-Put that on the floor next to the desk and lets sit down.-

Composed back where they had begun their trek, June began.

-The first fifteen years after the war, I guess like everyone involved in it, I didn't give what's in that box much thought, if any. When your father died and we moved back home, I just took back up where I was before your father and I set up our own home, but it was different somehow. I'd only been gone two years, but there was you now, and a sense that with your father gone, sad as that was, I was at least in the one place where I could contribute the most, caring for you, Mother and Father and Oscar, but somehow, maybe just time passing, or a break in life's routine, I don't know, I got to thinking of the war and what went on during that time.....-

Michael watched her drift off momentarily and drifted off himself toward his father, who he rarely thought of, not even a smudge in his memory, dead of a heart attack before he was two years old, when he and June moved back to the family manse, Oscar his strange uncle cum brother, Grandfather filling two roles, and his mother fulfilling her destined role once more.

-There are letters in that box, Michael. War letters. Those are popular now, aren't they? Letters written during the war. Memoirs. Oral histories. I've looked at some of it on the Internet.-

He looked at her with the feigned, smiling surprise he liked to rib her with.

-That's right, young man. I don't just email gossip and send pictures.-

-Of course you don't. You're multifaceted. I sprung from your loins after all.-

-Don't be obscene.-

-You're a nurse.-

-Anyway. Greatest Generation and all that. It's true to a certain point. We did all right. Some of us more than others. I know I tried. So did Bess and Oscar. There are several batches there. Letters from Oscar to me, from his basic training at Fort Picket, from Oahu, the Philippines and from Okinawa. In transit in between. I kept them all. And those from him to Mother and Father and a few he sent just to Father. And I guess every letter Bess ever wrote him.-

He opened his mouth.

-Wait a minute, son, let me finish. None of the letters Mother or Father wrote to him came back to roost, or maybe a few from Father did, I think. The other things in there are pages Oscar wrote to himself during the war. Like a journal. Quite a few. He kept one when he was recuperating from his accident after his junior year at University of Virginia and was real serious about it. He got rid of it before he went into the army. He said he wanted to start fresh. He resented the army wouldn't let soldiers keep diaries and censored the mail, so he wrote his thoughts on letter paper the Red Cross passed out, and V-mail forms and kept them together. You'll see.-

Michael gave her the look again. He saw her intent. June ignored it.

-The only ones I've read are those to me. The ones from Bess to Oscar he sent to Father during the war for safe keeping, as well as his personal papers. Those I never looked at.-

-Did he after the war?-

-No. He never asked when he came back. I don't know if he even remembered. I asked him after maybe a year and he looked perplexed and shook his head.-

-So you'd like me to read it all?-

-Yes. About seventeen years after the war, right after I moved back home with you, Father said he wanted to gather all the letters from Oscar to him and Mother and me, with Oscar's personal pages, I guess journal, along with what he had written during basic training, and Bess's letters, and the few of ours to Oscar, special to him, I guess, that he sent back as well with Bess's letters. It bothered Father that it was just scattered here and there in the house. He felt someone in the future might want to read it. Like I said, I had been thinking about it as well, so I was game and separated my letters from Oscar from my pen pal letters and from friends and gave it to him. He added it to all the rest and put it in order. I remember going though all of my stuff, reading several of the pen pals, but I didn't get far in Oscar's. Frankly, it was too painful. So that's what's in there.-

-Why. What do you expect?-

-I don't know. Maybe something that would explain.-

-Explain what?-

-I don't know. Maybe nothing, but I feel it needs to be read and I can't do it. Maybe you'll understand how I feel as you read it. You're smart, you like history and reading about the war, and you loved Oscar. He lost himself in the war, Michael. There was the head injury. It was bad. He could have remained a vegetable, but he recovered some and.....but I.....I just don't know sometimes. He went through awful times in Leyte and Okinawa. Many came back changed and twisted from those experiences without being wounded. Maybe you can piece it together.-

She smiled and leaned forward, remembering over the top of decades to the young lady she once was along with her younger brother and Bess, her best friend, and the woman Oscar had loved.

-I'd like you to know them. Yes, Michael, more than anything I'd like you to know them. I think you will like them very much.-

She trailed off looking around the parlor almost dark from the setting sun. Michael switched on the light next to him. She looked at the light and at him and gave him a determined appreciative motherly smile.

-I'm going in and heat some of that food folks have brought by. You're hungry, I guess. I just ate a couple cookies.-

He nodded and looked over at the large yellow crescents next to the Chichita brand name.

-Is Bess still alive?-

-No. She died in a car accident not long after the war. She stayed in the navy after I came home to care for Mother and Oscar. She visited here about a month after I came back, maybe three months after Oscar was wounded. To see if she could.....well, she died a few weeks after she returned to Bremerton.-

-Really? How sad.-

-Yes. It was terrible.-

-How did he take her death?-

-I don't know.-

Chapter Two

Michael sits on a dining room chair before the brown folding card table that he has brought up from the basement. An old brass standing lamp illuminates the surface where he has begun to spread out the contents of the cardboard box of correspondence and Oscar's personal private thoughts, still an amazing concept to him, and perhaps his own. He feels alert, like an angler at dawn, his line extending below.

September 20,1944

Somewhere in the Pacific

Dear June:

Well, here I am after four months on Oahu on my way to where? Don't know and can't express my opinion. Keep your eyes on the headlines. We are not exactly going first class. Suffice it to say I bunk rather high up on the wall (bulkhead, pardon me, sailor sister). Which is just as well since it provides some distance from the smell of vomit wafting up from the floor. Is there a naval term for floor? Not deck. That's topside. Anyway, I am a true sailor, who happily accompanied Father on fishing trips unlike a certain sister who does not like the mess of fishing. As you know, I am immune to seasickness. Seriously, most of these poor guys are miserable and would probably prefer facing the Japanese tomorrow than go through another day bobbing like a cork.

I spend most of my time on deck, where the weather is beautiful and the air sweet and salty, untinged by the smell of regurgitated meals, or what pass for same. Both nights I've slept on deck in nooks out of sight. One under some 15 inch guns. Some of the GIs think the sailors are pompous; but they seem all right. What are they supposed to do? Hold our hands? We did have a bit of a problem yesterday. We had been told UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were we to touch any navy foodstuffs. Unfortunately, a crate of oranges marked NAVY broke on deck among a large group of lounging GIs. Only a navy officer (not sure what. I don't have naval insignia straight yet. What do your ensign pins look like next to your pretty face?) kept a melee from breaking out and seemed to write it off as 'lost in transit'. When he and his swabbies left there was the pungent aroma of citrus wafting about for some time. Of course, I know nothing about it. I hear they were delicious, sweet, with just a hint of tartness, not too pulpy and very juicy. Like the Valencias that Mother always gets. But then again, this is just what I heard.

The sea is endless and all that Conrad and Melville tried to convey. My trip from the west coast to Oahu was different somehow from this. This is the South Seas after all! I'm sure it becomes routine for the navy, but it's wonderful to sit and watch the whitecaps, occasional schools of flying fish. Perhaps I'll see a porpoise. If I did not know that our destination is unlikely to be so peaceful, I could lose myself in it. So I spend my time. I will write again before we arrive wherever we arrive. Bess should receive a letter about the time you receive this. Give her my love as she gives you mine. I love you both. It helps me greatly that you two are together. Take care of yourselves and one another as you take care of your sailors and marines. I will do my utmost (believe me) to take care of myself.

Love always,

Oscar

Michael looks at the red cross at the top of the twice folded sheet of stationary, American Red Cross right below it, both centered, and then at the bottom, the official wording of the 1905 Act of Congress, To furnish volunteer aid to the sick and wounded.....as a medium of correspondence between the people of the United States of America and their Army and Navy..... So much to wonder at in the first random sample picked blindly, this brilliant burst of personality in the uncle he had never known. He is almost stunned.

He had to start somewhere among the neat groups of letters and papers, bound lovingly with rubber bands, not too tightly, by his fastidious grandfather, and he had chosen one by reading the first his thumb and finger picked, like sampling a fruit from a bin, like gently squeezing an orange. He smiles. A metaphor already, sprung from his original source. Oscar's signature held a small flourished circle inside the top of the O, and an inch long tail at R's end rising up to the top of the O. Michael could not remember ever seeing his Uncle Oscar's signature. Or imagine any reason Oscar would have to sign anything in their forty four years of shared existence. Or that the benumbed, complacently blunted personality he had known had anything in common with this individual who so effortlessly leapt forth from the brief epistle he held, let alone, unfathomably, was the same person.

After a quick sandwich June had left him before going out shopping, Michael returns to the card table, folds the letter, and places it back in the square blue envelope. He looks at the censor stamp at the left hand bottom corner, an illegibly scrawled Lieutenant Somebody within the stamp's tiny borders, the low man on the totem assigned the task of monitoring enlisted men's thoughts, opinions, and inadvertent slips of information. He looks at the dull five cent image of a bridge on the stamp, so unlike the bright crisp colors and contrast of modern mail tokens, and replaces it in its appointed spot he has marked with a Q-tip in the bundle of letters from Oscar to June. There is only one way to proceed, it is clear, and that is chronologically, from beginning to end, and then perhaps to the present for his mother's sake. For her peace of mind, it appears.

Grandfather had made the process easy decades ago by ensuring each batch, Bess to Oscar, Oscar to June, Oscar to Mother and Father, Oscar to Father at work, as well as each separate page of Oscar's personal papers, his sporadic opportunistic journal, the forbidden war diary, was in strict order from first date to last. Oscar's pages are contained in four clasped manila envelopes marked Oscar, he guesses in separate batches. Next is an old black and blue Prince Albert's Pipe Tobacco can, with June '45 written on a piece of masking tape hiding the prince's sword. Lastly, hidden beneath it all, lay a small ringed binder of twenty eight numbered type written pages. The front page reads My Time With The 7th by Chris O’hara. A name he does not recognize and June had not mentioned.

He searches among them all for the earliest date he can find. He glances at the first date in each letter batch, resisting the urge to take in a word or sentence, then at the envelopes containing Oscar's writings, and unwinds the red strings fastening the envelope flaps around brown discs, so pleasingly arcane, and looks at the dates. The first batch's pages are from October through December1944, the page numbers in the right top corner of the thirty or so tightly scrawled pages. He's relieved and pleased at how Oscar had managed to conserve space by writing small, yet very legible cursive strokes. The Leyte campaign he knows from the dates. MacArthur's redemption, remembered from his history studies at VCU, his own interest in the war, and his small attempts years ago to find out where Oscar had served. Grandfather dead before he was twenty two, before he cared enough to ask him of Oscar's contribution to the allied effort. To have asked Oscar would have been ludicrous and his mother had been evasive and uninterested, until now. He still does not know why and doubts she does.

The next envelope is from May 1944 to October 1944, a thicker stack, but from where he's not sure, perhaps Oahu? The third has twenty five separate Red Cross stationary sheets from April through June 1945. Okinawa, he knows, and puts them back with an involuntary shutter and refuses to pursue them, his mind on the task at hand. He knows himself too well to start wandering. The front page from the bulky load in the last envelope is dated 1/10/44, the earliest yet and he places it directly to the side. Lastly, the tobacco can, fondling it, wondering at such a container of memories. He doubts such items any longer exist. Probably cardboard like the banana box. He pries open the tight oval lid and looks in at the roll of paper. He carefully takes it out, wondering whether other items are within, fragile like Oscar, unsettled as his mother's thoughts, but nothing else exits when he turns it upside down. He straightens out the curled vaguely filmy papers and sees they are six small V-mail forms, four by three inch pages that he knows all correspondents were encouraged to use. Single-sided, one page, microfilmed, sent as small rolls containing thousands of short missives and reprinted at the receiving location to be restored to their original size before finishing the final leg. They saved enormous space in transport, he knows, for the more essential implements and components of warfare. Gas masks, cartridges, Spam and fruit cocktail, bandages and bodies.....Michael shakes his head to stop the flow, resists again reading them, and places the forms back into the can. To read all this material out of order, this archive of the outflow of news and thoughts and hopes, fears and feelings to sister and parents, and from the woman Oscar loved, and to his own internalized, journalized self, would be unfair and unkind. A period so compressed that one day's words without knowledge of words spoken the day, the week, the month before, of deaths Oscar shared in foxholes, of the hospital ships' disgorged mangled cargo reassembled by Bess and June, the.....here he is uncertain of the word. He will read it as it unfolds and ask June when she returns from shopping about the quaint Prince Albert can he suspects contains horrors.

1/10/1944

On my way from Richmond to Camp Pickett fifty miles SE from home. Strange