The Summer of '72

The padlock was nearly rusted shut. I worked the key back and forth a full minute letting out a series of exasperated grunts before it gave. Inside, the darkness smelled of cardboard and mustiness. I swatted around in the air at nothing before finding the pull-cord for the bulb on the fourth or fifth try.

Unit 114. The number was painted on the cinderblock next to the door. Three rows of boxes against the back wall, a folded cot beside a push broom worn down to a wedge. Silas Krane lived a long life, but had packed the better part of it into a concrete box, paying by the month to keep it dry. Then he had died, and a lawyer two states away had found my name in his will, located an address and put a key in the mail.

The lawyer had read me the bequest over the telephone, slowly, as though I might want a pen. He impressed upon me the address and unit number of the storage unit, and then four words of an unknown worth – and what is inside.

I had not heard my name spoken aloud by a stranger in a number of years, except when uttered incorrectly by the receptionists at my doctors’ offices. “Roy Vasconcelos.” Like them, the lawyer pronounced it wrong. I did not correct him.

I had driven two days with contractor bags and a marker, and the idea that this would go quickly. There could only be so many boxes, and it would only take minutes to go through each one. I made my piles on the gravel outside the door. Garbage to the left. Donate to the right. There would be nothing to keep.

At seventy-six years of age, I have never had much to my name. I hate clutter, and I don’t collect things. I have a truck that is upside-down on the loan, and a leg that warns me before the rain comes. I had come to cart off a dead man’s leftovers because a lawyer told me they were mine. But I had no intention of keeping anything. I didn’t need it.

The first boxes were easy. Kitchen utensils wrapped in old newspapers that had lost their crispness. A clock radio. A coffee can weighted with pennies. I could take that to the bank and deposit it. A dinner service for eight that had served, I would have guessed, no more than two people. Then there were his clothes. Pressed shirts, a good coat with the dry-cleaner’s tag still stapled on. In one box a woman’s things, folded with care, as you would do for someone gone. There was a hymnal, and a wedding photograph of Silas in a rented suit beside a bride who didn’t smile. He was not smiling either. I laid the photograph face-down on the give-away pile, and was sorry the moment I did it. But I didn’t pick it back up.

I tipped two half-empty boxes of his linens into one and broke the spare down flat. I found his medals in a cigar box. His Bronze Star with the V for valor, the Purple Heart I had last seen pinned to a hospital gown. I sold my own a long time ago. I set it in a third pile. I hadn’t let myself establish it yet, because I hadn’t decided I was keeping anything at all.

*****

In the last box of the back row, a liquor-store carton gone soft at the corners. Under a folded square of plastic he had kept the small museum of his life. A matchbook from a bar in Saigon. A church bulletin from a town I had never heard him name. A strip of photographs from a booth, with two soldiers too young to be the men I remembered. They sat shoulder to shoulder, laughing at something past the frame. And beneath all of it, wrapped in a handkerchief, a wooden boat the length of my hand.

I had carved it myself the summer the river ran the color of strong tea and the war we were in had no safe direction to face. I cut it from a block of teak the chaplain gave me after they took the shrapnel out of my leg. I had worked it down to a flat-bottomed skiff like the ones the fishermen poled through the paddies, and burned his initials into the transom with a heated bayonet. I gave it to him the day his orders came through ahead of mine. I had told him it was so he would have a boat to come back in.

I sat down without meaning to, and held the boat, and for a while I was of no use to anyone. What I thought would only take a few minutes to go through had suddenly turned into hours as a flood of memories came back to me. I rolled the boat around in my hand, remembering how I had carved it from that piece of teak, and how my heart had felt when I handed it to Silas.

*****

We met at a firebase in the Summer of ’72. Silas came in on a resupply bird, a rangy boy from a dry county who could strip a truck engine blindfolded, and who would not say more than two words at a stretch. I got him talking. That became the whole of my war – getting Silas Krane to talk, and then to laugh. By the end we would sit closer than two men needed to, on the nights when everything past the wire wanted us dead.

One night, the North came across the line in force and the war that was supposed to be ending instead arrived at our door. The rockets came after dark, darting across the base in a line no man could outguess. Silas and I were down behind the same berm when one landed close enough to throw grit into our teeth. Before I had hold of myself his hand was on my knee, gripping hard enough to bruise, pinning me to the earth as though he could keep me whole by the strength of his arm. But my nerve ran out. I had my hands over my head and a sound in my throat I am not proud of.

Silas did not let go of me. He moved his hand from my knee to the back of my neck and set his forehead against mine and talked to me, low and steady, until the words mattered less than the breath behind them. His breath. His warm breath hot on my neck.

The panic in me had nowhere left to go. I wanted to live. When the all-clear came, we did not pull apart. I brought my hand up and held his face in my palm, his jaw rough with two days of beard growth, and wet with sweat. There in the dark I could just make out his eyes looking back at me, and there was no fear left in them. He never said the word, not then and not after. He did not need to. He had put his body between me and the end of the world and pulled me back from the edge. That was the whole of his heart given over to me in a way they had never managed to train out of him.

We were careful after that, as careful as two men in uniform deployed to a combat zone had to be, which is to say we were not careful enough. We were never caught though. I have wondered since then whether being caught might have been a mercy, because it would have forced us into the daylight before we learned to be ashamed.

They discharged us both with honor and a handshake and told us nothing about how to go on living. His orders had come first and mine three weeks later. We said we would find each other stateside, and we had meant it. But the war did not end when the plane lifted off. It came home in both of us and set up house. A man with that much noise in his head is no good at finding anyone, least of all the one person who knows exactly what he is trying not to remember. I drank. He, I learned later, did much worse. The letters we sent each other got shorter, because every honest word led straight back to the firebase. Neither of us could afford to remember it. One of us stopped writing. For years I told myself it was him. But it was me.

We did what was expected. We married women. Good women. Women who deserved better than half a husband. Mine left in time, and I do not blame her; she had married a door that would not open. His stayed, and that was its own long sentence served by two people. The proof of it lay face-down on the give-away pile six feet from where I sat. We were married, but we were terribly alone. A thousand miles between us, and hiding behind a glass neither of us could dare to break.

*****

I took the boat for the whole of the inheritance. I had it buttoned in my coat and a hand on the bulb-cord ready to leave. But then, from the corner of my eye, I saw something behind the last row, where the boxes had kept it hidden from the door. It was a safe the size of a footlocker standing on its end, gray, fireproof – the kind a man buys to keep a deed or a pistol. It wasn’t locked by a key. Rather, it was guarded by a dial.

I did not know the number. At least not at first. I spun the month, the day, and the year I was carried down a hill on his back with my leg in pieces and the world coming apart over both of us – 7-13-72. The dial gave on the last turn like a held breath let go.

Inside, in the dark no fire could reach, he had kept the rest of his secrets. Not a deed. Not a pistol. Savings bonds, banded in fifties, the issue dates running back to the year we came home and forward almost to the month he died. He had bought one in every season of every year that we did not speak. Series upon series, the small denominations of a frugal man, and clipped to the top a single sheet from a bank with a figure typed on it. I counted the zeroes. I counted them again. It came to a little under five-hundred thousand dollars. The man who I thought had forgotten my name had set them all aside over fifty-four years.

There they were, waiting for me, protected by a combination dial, and the day a lawyer would say my name aloud. He had spent a lifetime making certain that I, who had nothing, would not die with nothing. And now, he was providing for me. It is the plainest love letter ever written, and it is addressed to a man too old to spend it on the life it was meant to buy.

*****

I pressed my hand against the wooden boat in my pocket, making sure it was still there, as tears began to stream down my face. I looked back at the savings bonds in my hand. My old, wrinkled hand. A hand that had once held a gun in the jungle. A hand that had once held Silas’ face in its palm. I closed my eyes to remember it, even if only for a moment, and for the first time, the memories did not trigger a panic attack. Instead, there was just calmness as I imagined Silas’ touch, and loved him all over again.

I folded the bonds into my coat where the boat already rode. I reached up and pulled the cord that controlled the light, then pulled the door down and set the padlock back on its hasp.

I loaded the piles of “donate” and “garbage” into the trunk, and as I did the wedding photograph came loose and dropped to the asphalt at my feet. I picked it up. Silas in his rented suit, the corners of his mouth held down, and beside him an inch of empty air where I might have stood. I wondered whether he would have smiled if I had been standing there next to him. I could not put their photograph back on the pile. It was the last of his likeness available to me, and it went into my coat with the rest of him.

I drove to the coast that afternoon. I had intended to wade past the breakwater and set the skiff on the ebb and let it finish its purpose. I stood at the tideline with my trousers soaked to the thigh and the little, dry boat held tightly in my fist, unwilling to let go. I could not open my hand. Fifty-four years he had kept it, and now it had come back to me. I could not give it to the sea.

So I carried it home, to the life Silas bought me. Some days I grieve that we were given not one hour of a normal life together. Most days I am only grateful that, of all the frightened men all over Viet Nam, it was Silas Krane I was given to love, and Silas Krane who, when plain words had failed us both for fifty-four years, at last found the language to tell me how he felt.

The boat found a place in my home. It hung, mounted in a shadow box over the mantel of the fireplace. Beneath it, I hung the wedding photo. A photo I nearly threw away.And every day I could now gaze upon the boat and the photo, and remember that man who saved me all those years ago, and who saved me again after his life was over.

When I take the photo down from the wall, I can hold his face all over again. I love you, Silas Krane, and I always will.