The Old Oak

The older I get, the harder it becomes to climb this damned hill. I feel as though each passing year has progressively increased the seeping thievery of time’s demands on my body, and in no place in the world am I reminded more of this fact than when I come here to see you. It’s not simply because of this hill, mind you. It’s this entire place, with its immortal chorus of fluttering leaves, as green and alive as they were in those days when we were young, and these rolling, grassy hills where we used to chase each other, sticks in hand and whipping them back and forth through the air in front of us like those daring, cavalier swashbucklers we used to read about. It’s the ancient roots and aging bark of the tree -- our tree -- at the top of the hill. It's all of it together, whispering old memories into me that have begun to lose the vibrancy of specificity, those small details that, no matter how much I puzzle myself over them, simply can't seem to manifest with the surety that they once did.

I’m wheezing a little, and I’ve stumbled along the path. Perhaps I’ll rest a bit before I continue.

“You alright, Grandpa?”

That's Devon, my grandson. That’s right, I haven’t come alone this year. You can hardly blame me, considering the fall I took the last time I came to visit. As much as I hate admitting it, I need help getting around these days. Devon is a good boy, I’m sure you’d like him. He’s still young, not yet twenty, but strong and ever attentive -- perhaps overly so; I’m afraid he fusses far too much over me, and not enough over himself. He reminds me very much of you, actually. His dark brown eyes are always alert and worried about something or another, with their gaze constantly flicking this way and that. Even his posture, whenever he’s faced with a challenge, is the same as yours, squaring up with a thin veil of courage akin to the one you always wore when you thought courage was needed. When I see him in moments like that, it reminds me of you, like when Mother and Father passed away, and the court ruled that we be turned over to the state. I remember how you gripped onto my shoulder protectively and stared defiantly up at the judge and lawyers who had all, within the matter of minutes, decided our fate. I looked up at you then, and I could tell that you were just as afraid as I was in that courtroom, but you refused to show it. I’ll never forget it. You were as brave a big brother as any that I could ever have asked for, and I always thought, even back then with the extreme limitations of my adolescent mind, that life was unjust for bestowing you with the burden of looking after the both of us at such a young age. But justice ran away from us in those days, just as it did for everyone else.

Well, that’s enough of that, and enough of this resting. I’ll continue the trek, despite the increasingly painful wobble in my step. I can see you now, the creaseless fullness of youth billowing your face as you press me up the hill. Come on, Billy-boy! We ain’t got all day!

My whining complaints -- But I’m tired, Johnny! Why can’t we take a lil’ break, huh? -- would only spur you on, your enthusiastic encouragement now tinged lightly with ridicule: ‘Cos I said so! Come on, gramps! See that ol’ Oak tree up there? That’s where we’re goin’, I gotta’ show ya’ somethin’!

Neither of us knew it then, but that reasoning of yours, “Because I said so”, would become a mantra for you, and something of a painful blister in my shoe. 

My face is all twisted up with a determination that I know you’d get a laugh at. Each slow step of mine is dragging like a corpse against the hardened dirt soil beneath the grass, I know. But don’t laugh too hard, Johnny -- I may not be able to make this climb next year, but I’ll be Goddamned if I don’t make it up there today.

Devon’s running toward me, now. He walked a little ways down the hill to check on the car. He’s a worrywart; has to have all his ducks lined up in a row, that one.

“Grandpa, why don’t you rest a little longer? We have plenty of time to get to the top, I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“Listen boy, why don’t you relax? Just give me your arm. It’ll all be fine, you’ll see.”

“Okay… Well, watch your step, please.”

“Oh, stop with all this ‘please’ nonsense! You need to grow a pair, son. Did your dick fall off since the last time I saw ya’? Come on, let’s hustle on up there. Somethin’ I want ya' to see.”

“Alright, Grandpa. Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

“Now, that’s more like it, son.”

I’m sure he understands the wry smirk I’m giving him now. We don’t spend a whole lot of time together since his mother moved halfway across the damned country a few years back, but he knows me well enough to understand that I love him and that I’m only hard on him sometimes to prepare him for the world. It’s a hard, cold world out there, you and I both know. It hasn’t changed much, for all I can see, despite the remarkable social and cultural shifts that have swept across our nation over the decades. It’s still hard, and it’s still cold. Wars are fought over global influence and control over oil, these days. It’s not like when you and I shipped off to Europe and the Pacific in the ‘40s; there’s no naked aggression from fascist dictators and their allies, set on world domination. We're all just little pawns on the chess board being stomped out upon the whims of the kings and queens of the world.

You remember how excited you were as you held that newspaper that you’d found in front of my face? How you tapped furiously at the headline that read, in big, bold letters: “US AT WAR”? True, our little trinket stand filled with pilfered or lost goods wasn’t enough to keep us going; I knew this just as well as you did, but suggesting that we enlist in the army to go fight across the sea in order to circumvent that problem seemed like too much, to me. But despite my reservations, you always thought you knew best.  

Come on, Billy-boy. We’re starvin’ out here in these streets. No way the orphanage’ll take us back, and we gotta fill our bellies. They pro’lly pay pretty good, too. Don’t you worry, if we tell ‘em we’re brothers, they’ll pro’lly put us in the same unit and we’ll watch each other’s backs just like we always do. It’ll be a grand adventure, you’ll see.

I was only sixteen at the time. I had heard that the youngest acceptable age to enlist was eighteen, and tried to use that argument to fight back, you remember.

Johnny, the youngest they’re takin’ is eighteen. I’m sixteen, so I can’t!

Trust me, Billy-boy, they don’t care. We’ll just lie about it. You’re eighteen, as far as I see it.

You’re twenty, at least you won’t be caught in no lie. I don’t wanna’ go to jail.

Hey, you get three squares in jail. Least you won’t be starvin’ anymore.

Fine, you go then. I don’t wanna’. I’m stayin’ right here.

Boy, don’t you see them Nazis are takin’ over everything out there? And the Japs already bombed us over there at Pearl Harbor. The war’s gonna’ come whether you like it or not. Might as well stick together when it does, right?

Well, can’t we stick together here?

No, Goddamnit! We’ve got no food! No money! We’re gonna’ starve to death in a gutter somewhere, you want that?

You were right, of course. I just wished that you weren’t, that’s all.

Well, maybe we can shine shoes or somethin’. Those Jones boys might let us in on their racket. They like you, don’t they?

We’ll be dead in the dirt mixin’ with them lot! Fine, Billy, you go shine shoes and get your little throat slit by them filthy crooks. They don’t respect nothin’. And don’t you even try to deny it, you know I’m right. You got so much as a stick'a gum they want, and they’ll cut you right in your own bed. Anyway, fine. You stay. I’m joinin’ up to fight.

Aw, Johnny! Even without me? Why ya’ gotta’ go?

I told ya’ why. I’m goin’, and you’re comin’ with me. I ain’t gonna’ let you starve out here in these streets with the likes of them Jones boys. We ain’t got nowhere else to go, can’t ya’ see that?

But why do I gotta’ go, Johnny?

‘Cos I said so, Goddamnit!

That was the end of that discussion. We abandoned our rickety street cart and together went to the recruiting office the next day. What you said ended up being halfway right. Our lie that I was eighteen was accepted with very little inquiry, so the expectation that the recruiters would not care turned out to be true. However, you were wrong about one thing, probably the most important thing of them all.

You hear me? You were wrong, Johnny. 

They split us up. The army couldn’t have cared less that we were kin; they placed us according to our strengths, wherever the army needed us to be. After all was said and done, you were headed to the 101st Airborne Division, while I was assigned to the Quartermaster’s Corps. We had very little chance to talk during in-processing, but I was able to catch a reassuring wink and a thumbs-up from you before we were separated. It was as if you weren’t even worried. I knew you were, though. I could tell you were afraid, just like all those years ago before our time at the orphanage, when we stood in that courtroom in front of that towering judge and those unfeeling lawyers. You were afraid, just like I was, of what might happen to us, especially since we were no longer going to be together.  

I've wondered every day for the last sixty-some-odd years how far you made it out there in Europe with the 101st while I went west with the Quartermasters to hop islands with the Marines in the Pacific. I’ve never stopped wondering. There’s simply no way for me to know how far you made it, and whether you fought and died valiantly against the Nazis, side by side with your brothers-in-arms -- or if you even died at all. Perhaps you survived, and were discharged from the army in some far away state, clear across the country. Maybe you got married and started a family, and just never bothered to come back home. Would you have done that to your kid brother, just leave him to navigate the world alone? I don’t know, and maybe I never will. I’ve been waiting for an answer, hoping one day I might find it waiting for me at the old oak tree.

The strength of Devon’s arm aids enormously in my quest to make what looks to be -- let’s face it -- my final trip to the top of the hill. We’ll make it up there together. The incline is progressively leveling out, the closer we get to the top. As we make the final crest, I hear Devon let out a soft gasp.

“Wow, this view! Grandpa, look!”

I don’t look. The view is not the reason for this trip. What I do look at is the old E-Tool -- you remember those old folding shovels we were issued in the army -- lying neatly at the base of the Oak, exactly where I had left it last year, and the message I had first carved decades ago -- the same message that I've been refreshing each year with my pocket knife -- into the tree’s gnarled trunk.

“Ohnny Jay Ig Day?” Devon's squinting as he reads.

“Pig-latin. You kids don’t speak Pig-latin these days? It says: Johnny dig”

“Johnny... Your brother, Johnny? The one you lost in the war?”

I’m nodding and motioning toward the E-Tool, now.  As Devon unfolds the E-tool, not without a bit of trouble at first, and gets to work, I retrieve my letter to you from my pocket and ease myself onto the flickering leaves of grass that blanket the hilltop.

Clunk.

“Grandpa, I’ve hit something.” He’s tossed the shovel, now on his knees, and begins to dig with his hands. “A box? Grandpa!”

“That’s right, pull it out and bring it here.”

About a minute later, after he's fully unearthed the box, he settles in the grass beside me, holding the dirt-encrusted metal tin with one hand as he dusts his knees off with the other. I hand your letter off to Devon as I take the box. The lid pops off after quite a fight. Setting the box down, I slowly lift the lid of the box to reveal the mess of papers within. Time has curled and browned the edges of the paper, but overall the letters are surprisingly well preserved. My face does not betray the distinct disappointment that I feel as I examine the papers. These letters are all mine. I press down on them to make room for the next letter.

“Go on, son. On top.”

Devon places the folded letter atop its predecessors, gently, as if handling something sacred.

“Are those..?”

He trails off as I replace the lid. I’m turning to look out over the view now, and I know my face is no longer able to hide it. What first began as disappointment has now become a deep well of quiet sorrow. I know I’m crying in front of the boy, Johnny. I don’t care anymore. Why should I care what you think when you’re no longer here to tell me what you think? Why should I bother trying to go along with you when there’s nothing left to go along with? And why did I goddamned along with you when we could have just stayed in Columbus that day with our trinket cart, with those backstabbing Joneses, and our growling bellies? I know if I refused to go and enlist with you, then you wouldn’t have gone. You wouldn’t have left me by myself, I know it. Goddamnit, I should have refused. I should have Goddamned refused.

“Grandpa, are you alright?”

“Everything’s fine, son.”

Gazing out at the skyline of Columbus in the distance, I'm lost in memories. The sun's reaching its zenith in the sky, and I can see its glint off the shining whites of your eyes as you point out toward the city, its borders much further away then than it is now.

Look, Billy, see that? That’s Columbus. You won’t remember, ‘cos we went there when you were just a baby, but Mom and Dad took us there before. See all the trees and stuff everywhere? Mom and Dad said soon all of it’s gonna’ be gone, and there won’t be nothin’ left but big ol’ roads, and sidewalks, and streetlights, and buildings as tall as these hills -- and the buildings are gonna’ be everywhere. Imagine that! I think we’re gonna’ be alive when it all happens. That’ll be the day, huh? We’ll come back here to this hill, under this Oak, in twenty years and you watch, Billy-boy, we’ll be city boys then. Yessir, we’ll be big shots, you’ll see. I told ya’ comin’ up here was worth it. Just look at that view!

I wasn’t so interested in the city back then as I followed with my gaze the point of your finger as it swept across the old Columbus skyline, but I couldn’t help but latch onto your energy and excitement. It wasn’t the city or the prospect of it growing that stretched that wide smile across my face; it was you. Hearing you talk was like being transported somewhere else entirely, where everything became an adventure, where courage and bravery ruled, and fear became a lost, diminishing stranger. You were the one who had all the answers and all the big ideas. You were my big brother. You still are.

Devon’s being quiet and respectful, the dear boy, after having seen my old face streaked with those ridiculous tears. He won’t see them anymore, if he looks. They’ve dried up, now. I feel his hand light upon my shoulder, resting there with a gentle sort of humility that matches his reverent demeanor.

“Here, take this pocket knife, son. Before we go, I want you to trace over the message in the tree. No, not yet. For now, let’s just sit here and enjoy the view.”

“Oh. Sure, Grandpa. Aren’t you hungry or thirsty? If you wanna’ stay up here for a bit, I can run down to the car and bring some stuff. It’s not that far.”

“No, no. I am hungry and thirsty, a bit, but just sit with me for a while, okay?”

“But if you want, I can run down and get some snacks and a bottle of water.”

“I said no.”

“But why not?”

“‘Cos I said so, Goddamnit. Now, relax and sit down.”

That’s right, big brother.

I stole your line. 

Send me a letter if you’ve got anything to say about it. I’ll be waiting.