Gunning For Ho: Vietnam Stories

A Return

A Return Marvin Prosette stretches his arms high overhead and yells through the door screen, "Ma!" When no answer comes, he drops his arms to his side and shakes his head. He looks toward Mount Rainier, where the glacier is ringed with clouds. Signs that autumn is arriving are everywhere. The sky is a patchwork of vagrant clouds easing their way east. The fat old squirrel that lives in the oak tree has been bustling about, gathering food. Dew covers the lawn and the garden. The signs. This is the time of life when Marvin had planned on slowing down, time set aside to shape wood on the lathe in the basement, to make chairs and stools and tables. And he would be doing that, if Casey had lived. Marvin glances at the open grave, shuts his eyes briefly, and shakes off a thought. Things to do, he reminds himself. Pears ready for harvest and no picking crew con46 tracted as yet. It's been hard to get one in with so few pickers working. Again he calls out for his wife. She doesn't answer. He frowns as he walks to the edge of the orchard, where he pauses to flex his arms and stretches again. Though his back is still healthy and his hands are strong, his body has stiffened. It doesn't slow him much. He still rises with the sun and at night goes down in the basement to work with wood tools. Work consoles a man. He opens the door to his toolshed, leaving it ajar for light. He comes out with a toolbox, from which he selects a pipe wrench. He rummages about for a washer, then walks to the edge of the orchard to a spigot that he's been meaning to fix. He turns the valve stem counterclockwise. In mere seconds, he replaces the washer and tightens down the valve. He scans the orchard, looking from tree to tree - for what, he can't be certain. Then he knows. In the center of a row of lush green is the charred skeleton of a tree hit with lightning in 1969, the year Marvin nearly lost his farm and his mind, the year he began writing letters. Though he should have done so long before , he has never had the will to cut the tree out. He returns the toolbox, then looks beyond the shed, past the edge of the house at the rough lines and divots dug to hold footers - the grass-covered trench that outlines what remains of the plumbing to the cottage that never was. He'd wanted to clean out the area many times, but there was a conflict between his wanting to and having the will to do it. Twice he had started to but simply couldn't finish. An old floor joist, sun-bleached and gray, lies on a diagonal. Beside it is a berry bush, mostly twig, that looks more like a spool of rusted barbed wire. It was in 1970 or '71, he recalls, that the bush picked that spot to grow. He was frantic then, writing letters, some of them angry demands, some pleas for mercy. He wrote to the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris, to the State Department, to the president. He was called a traitor in the Seattle paper, accused of A Return 47 giving aid to the enemy. His name was linked with Jane Fonda's. A paper in Portland called him an activist. But he was just a father with a son who was missing in action. He wanted to know why his son was over there, wanted a straight answer to that, and he wanted to find out where his son was being held if he was a prisoner of war. He wanted America out of Vietnam because he wanted his son to come home. Yes, he'd marched. His neighbors whispered, he knew, but he lived a good distance from any of them, and they could say what they wanted. It was his boy, not theirs. Marvin looks at the house and wonders what is taking her so long. He needs something to occupy his mind, some quick piece of work. He doesn't want to reflect, but the more he resists memories, the more they intrude. He looks at the bush. Near it, the freshly excavated grave, the most difficult hole he has ever dug...