The Brave

       Indian summer always turns my thoughts to my father. All men have a season; his was late summer; the days often blistering hot but the nights turning cool and promising the relief of autumn. I remember the hay bales and corn husks starting to tower in the green fields. I remember cookout smoke, pop-tops sssshing open, and the deep laughter of men.

             Most of all, though, I remember my father, quietly brooding amidst a cloud of bluish white cigar smoke, his deep-set eyes searching the horizon for he alone knew what. I remember his hair, once jet black but now tinged with white, standing straight on his scalp like a centurion’s crest. I remember the gentle stoop of his neck and shoulders, the product of a life of heavy labor before his strength had begun to fail him. I can’t remember his voice, though---that’s gone forever now. I miss it like amputees miss their limbs.

             The older we get, the more a prisoner of our unspooling pasts we become. We take refuge in them in our dreams. For me, it’s always Indian summer---THAT Indian summer---and it’s always the same, like a Titian painting.

             I was fifteen. 

             I’d grown tall and stout, like the old man. Wisps about my upper lip and chin foretold of the ZZ Top chinderwear I’d sport later. My baby face was mostly in my mother’s imagination now. My face was pockmarked but the acne I’d found so horrifying then would fade by the time I’d reached adulthood. 

             I spent as much time as I could get away with traipsing through the woods, creeks, and hills around our home. There weren’t many children then, although more than there are now, and I didn’t mind exploring on my own. It was good practice. 

             My old man had by this point begun taking me with him when he went hunting with The Fellas. I only saw them bag a buck once; the rest of the time seemed to be spent talking, drinking, and building bonfires. They brought rifles with them, of course, but aside from shooting clays and bottles it seemed like a waste of time and effort. They made me wear a bright orange vest just in case and I spent most of my time out there as I did at home----wandering alone.

             When I was in camp, I helped cook or carry things and kept my mouth shut as I’d been instructed. Every now and then they’d ask me Civics questions and reward me with a pat on the head if I got them right. One time they gave me a flag with a big snake on it. I buried him with it, less because he wanted it than because I didn’t.

             The best thing about those trips was sleeping under the stars, bundled up with just my nose sticking out of the sleeping back, listening to the men snoring and the crackling flames. There must have been a hundred men there, but I was the only boy. Even though I wasn’t one of them, I felt like I was part of something---like I belonged. 

             Maybe that’s why I return to that place and that time in my dreams. That aching to belong is a hard one to shake, even when you’ve been along so long as I have now. Maybe it was simply being among the guys doing Guy Stuff. Maybe it was seeing other men defer to my father, increasing his worth in my eyes thereby. Or maybe it was simply that there was good food and plenty of it. An army marches on its stomach, they used to say, and 15-year-old boys surely did.

             It’s hard to explain what life was like without digital minders. Most of you would never dream of going out into the wilderness, beyond the blinking towers, amidst the wild animals and other natural terrors that Man has done so much to banish from society. But the things that creep and bite and sting did not bother me at all then, much less frighten me. I was not yet accustomed to constant interconnectivity nor to the notion that help would be on the way in seconds once my vital signs dipped below acceptable levels. I just wanted to be out there---walking where no man had in a thousand years, seeing sights no human eyes had seen, completely oblivious to the rest of the world. I didn’t care for the bulk of humanity and they didn’t care for me, so why I should prefer differently eluded me at the time.

             Not that I spent the whole time communing with nature, mind you. I did my fair share of chores, schlepping heavy green metal cases hither and yon, peeling endless amounts of potatoes, even stringing barbed wire along a maze of metal posts, being ever so careful to keep it at just the right height and to follow the contour of the ground. I always did my part. 

             We weren’t home but a couple of weeks that last summer when they came for him.

             I was fast asleep in my little orange tent in the backyard when I heard the whup-whup-whup and the lights blasted our yard. I was confused at first as some of the glare came from overhead and others from ground level all around; it wasn’t until some time later that I realized that the latter were the news trucks coming to life at some signal I couldn’t hear. 

             I was supposed to head for the woods but instead found myself running toward the house as fast as my long, skinny legs could carry me. I burst in through the shattered door and saw my father, arms raised high above his head as he sat up in bed, eerily white in the tactical flashlight’s glare as his skull and blood and brains painted the wall behind him. I never heard the shot, only the ringing in my ears as my mother screamed silently beside him. 

             By the time the baton crashed down between my shoulder blades I’d become a man.

             It’s a better world, now, of course, and I’m not such a narcissist that I believe that night is what made it so. My kids won’t be out to hell and back where anything can happen to them and nobody’d be the wiser. I’ll be there for them and for my grandchildren, should there be any of either. I have a purpose now and a duty to fulfill it. 

             Not that I’m going---not that WE’RE going soft, mind you. This is still The Home of the Brave.

             May it always will be.