I Drove A Hearse To Mississippi

I drove a hearse to Mississippi, a year ago when I was just 16. I really did. Well, make that in the company of my Dad, who enlisted my help. I had just gotten my license two months before that and barely even knew how to drive. But Dad, he must have trusted me, or had something else in mind.

My Dad’s brother, who ran the funeral parlor in our small town, was on a bender and couldn’t make the drive down to Mississippi to pick up the corpse of some old-timer who was to be buried in the county cemetery. It wasn’t the first time my uncle had been incapacitated, because, like my Dad used to be, he was an alcoholic, so now the call of duty fell in Dad’s lap. And mine, it appeared.

Before we left, Dad pulled me aside and said, “Son, we’ve got a lot to talk about on this trip. Now, I want to know: can you keep a secret?”

“Sure, Dad,” I said, “What’s the secret?”

Dad grinned. “Well, son, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret now, would it? Just be patient.”

     And so began my first road trip, an adventure that provided a conciliatory setting for Dad and me to bond and finally get to know each other. I didn’t know Dad very well at all, really, not because of a generation gap but because of a love gap. After all, let’s face it, Dad was absent during my formative years. It was the alcoholism and war - traumatic experiences he never purged from his heart or hardly talked about. But they were surely awful, because Dad had taken to the bottle right after the war and it was no secret of his fondess for Dark Eyes that helped him drown out the sorrowful memories.

Cruising down Highway 41, I felt at first like a shy hitchhiker picked up by a laconic stranger. But as time wore on, we got to know one another and I felt like he and I started to connect. We were winding our way along spooky swamps and moss-draped oak trees when Dad pulled over for gas at a Sinclair station and handed me the big ol’ clanky to the Hearsemobile.I put it in Drive and off we went.

Dad immediately dozed off, now slightly twitching and emitting melancholy little cries. What foreign tongue was possessing him? What dreams were tormenting him? Though only 52, he seemed old and worn out. I guess alcoholism and the war will do that to a person.

     I fiddled with the radio, tuning to a country station out of Lubbock, Texas. It was one lonesome song after another of heartrending fiddles, nostalgic train whistles and unrequited broken hearts. I looked out to admire the bucolic landscape passing by in a blur of old graveyards, weather-beaten churches with crooked crosses, vacant billboards, cotton fields, dirt poor farmsteads, and broken down buildings in boarded up little towns. Welcome to Mississippi a sign announced.

In the spacious cab of the Hearsemobile, I felt insular from the strange world out there. I was suddenly struck with an inexplicable urge to exit the highway down a side road and follow it straight into the mysterious heart of the Delta, where the secrets of the South would reveal themselves, come alive with meaning. But what did I know? Nothing, nothing at all, about Mississippi, or the South, other than it was the losing side of the Civil War and home of the blues and the birthplace of Elvis Presley. I never did turn down the side road, but still enjoyed a boundless sense of freedom and awakening in this strange place that might as well have been Mali as Mississippi.

Dad was snoozing and barely stirred and the Hearsemobile didn’t miss a beat with its big powerful V-8 engine clicking on all cylinders. That’s when Dad began acting a little weird in his sleep, shifting his slight frame and reposing his knobby head on the side window, using a rolled up jacket as a pillow. He was murmuring almost inaudibly. I could barely make out the word,“Goddamn . . .” Then“G” something. Then “Goddamn” something again – this time I heard him say it: “Gooks”.

“Goddamn gooks,” he mumbled, anger and fear clouding his voice. I could tell he was having another one of his hallucinatory nightmares of his war days fighting the Japanese.

I recalled when I was 11 watching Dad crawl on the back porch on his belly, shooting a fake tommy gun at spectral enemies - “the goddamn gooks” - he was forced to kill as a young man in his early twenties. And not just shoot and kill Japanese men soldiers, but boy soldiers as young as 14 that he knew in his mind he had killed because “the goddamn gooks” ordered them in to battle, and worse, used women and children as human shields when crossing enemy lines. Orders were “shoot to kill.” 

Dad had been a mama’s boy, I’d been told, but by the time he was in college, with war raging and patriotism at an all-time high, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps: Company One, Third Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Division. The Old Breed. Semper Fi. This much I did know: Dad’s unit was one of several waves that stormed ashore in World War II’s most horrific battles of Peleliu and Okinawa.

Dad finally sputtered to consciousness. “Dad! Dad!” My voice was rising and cracking, “Are you okay?”

“Holy crap! Dad moaned. “How long have I been out?”

I thought, too long, Dad, too long . . . and now I know why.

Dad said, “Son, lemme tell you a story. I started to yesterday, but got derailed. You need to hear some things, and it’s about time I get them off my chest.”

    And so for the next hour, after we pulled over to get Dad a cup of coffee and some smokes and me a Coke and a 3 Musketeers candy bar, we rolled down the road in the heart of Mississippi with Dad telling me all about the war, things so horrific I gasped every so often and said, “Dad, no way!”

“Yes way, son,” Dad nodded, eyes closed, gathering up the emotional wherewithall to continue. “They shipped my unit off to the Pacific Islands to join in an all-out assault to defeat the Japs. Mine was part of the first wave that landed in Okinawa on April 1, 1945.”

Dad went on to relate how enemy forces hiding out in hilltop fortified bunkers had let Dad’s first wave land ashore, then, “the tricky bastards,” Dad said, “they mowed down the next couple of waves, like shooting fish in a barrel.” 

“No, way, Dad! So what happened next?”

Dad explained how they had to seek cover in makeshift foxholes for three days until reinforcements could come to the rescue. “It wasn’t pretty, son. We were low on water and rations. I ate grubs and insects, I was living in my own shit and piss, and those nips . . .”

I stopped Dad for an explanation of this new word he was using for gook. Dad’s use of terms I considered offensive highly disturbed me, but after listening to his experiences, I could halfway understand him using those derogatory terms.

“Yes, nips, from Nippon, what the Japs called their homeland. So we called ‘em nips and gooks. I know it’s not right or proper to refer to them as such nowadays, but we’re not talking about nowadays, son. We’re talking about those days. They came down out of their bunkers looking to kill us. I had to bayonet more than one of those sonsabitches.”

Dad explained how killing a man from a distance, with a gun, was awful enough, but having to do it up close and personal, with one’s bare hands, eye to eye, was infinitely more horrific.

“Son, we were never safe. By the time reinforcements arrived, the battle got ugly, we were in a hell of flames, death and gore, yet by God's good grace, I survived.”

I was amazed and saddened. “I had no idea you went through all this, Dad, such suffering.”

Dad said, “Well, you gotta know, because you won’t read about this in any history book, but it turns men into savages. War is a barbaric thing, and don’t you ever forget it. I hope you don’t have to ever experience the things I went through.” I wondered if Dad was thinking what I was: Thank God I was too young to fight in the current war raging today in a different Asian country.

Dad bared his soul like confessing to a priest: gruesome, endless battles, deadly skirmishes, dangerous scouting missions, atrocities, never-ending horrors. Dad said that the constant stress, fatigue and fear of being in a combat zone for weeks on end was too much to bear, that it turned a man’s brain to mush and hardened his soul. “Son,” he confided, “War makes a man do things he wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

“Like what, Dad?” 

Dad was thinking better about sharing this part, I could tell.

“Well, son, I’ve never told anybody this, nobody. We were out on patrol the night after a brutal skirmish where we killed maybe 150 nips and they got 50 of our men. I was leading a search party looking for some MIAs, two of my good buddies who we thought were still alive out there and we wanted to get them before the nips did. But we didn’t make it in time.” 

Dad broke off, finally, he said with tears formulating and his voice cracking, “We found their mutilated bodies, naked, lying in feces and blood-spattered mud.” What he said next was too much to bear, that the marauding soldiers had severed their penises and shoved them in their mouths.

Dad hung his head, “Son, I broke down. I was so angry and disgusted. I was full of vengeance, but what was I gonna do? What could I do?”

I barely managed to squeak out a trembling sentence, “Oh, that is the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard. So, what did you do, Dad?”

Dad paused to collect his thoughts. The words he used to describe his vile, unimaginable act shook me to my core. Dad confessed he went into a rage and found a still half-alive Japanese soldier lying in the mud with his guts hanging out. He took out his knife and severed his testicles and gouged out his eyeballs, finshing the job. The unspeakable atrocity turned my stomach in knots and wrenched my soul. I couldn’t believe that my own Father had done something so awful in the war. And, that he was telling me about it! But it certainly went a long way to explaining a lot about Dad’s condition and mentality.

“Son, war changes a man, makes him do irrational things, just to get even, or have some sense of victory or superiority over the enemy, I don’t know, but I wasn’t done. I busted out two of his gold teeth and crammed all four of his balls down his throat. I stripped him of all his identification and took his pistol, too. So, there you have it”

I winced. “Geez, Dad, it’s awful. I had no idea. I guess you were pretty lucky to have emerged unscathed.”

Dad laughed. “Unscathed! Hah! Son, I witnessed death and destruction beyond what any man should have to endure.”

Dad went on to lecture how war exacted more than physical loss. The psychiatric casualties were so awful that men committed suicide or went insane. Dad said, “Or became . . . like me, alcoholics or drug dependents. They called it ‘shell-shocked’ or ‘battle fatigue’ . . .”

“I’ve heard of that before, Dad. Were you shell-shocked?”

Dad affirmed that it was natural to experience battle fatigue. “But let me clue you in on something. It goes beyond shell-shocked. It sticks with you for life, the trauma and stress of hardened combat. That’s why I am the way I am, son. You live through hell, it’s hard to escape. I’m trying to get well, but the VA considers it an untreatable disease, not the alcoholism but the shell-shocked condition that is a traumatic psychiatric disorder. Someday maybe they’ll figure it out, son.”

After hearing Dad’s horrific recollections of brutality and desecration, I should not be here driving this Hearsemobile to Mississippi, since half of Dad’s infantry unit perished in firefights and kamikaze attacks of Peleliu and Okinawa. Surviving that was enough to drive anyone to drink, I figured. 

After a lengthy stretch of silence, Dad cleared his throat and announced he had one final thing to tell me. I was all ears and couldn’t imagine what could top his stories up to now.

“Son, I’m going to clue you in on that secret I mentioned before we left.”

I thought, Secret?! I had just been privvy to his deepest, darkest secrets, I was pretty certain. But apparently not, for Dad had one more startling admission.

“At the end of the war they stationed me in China before shipping me back to ‘Frisco, and during the time I was there . . .” Dad broke off leaving me hanging on his words.

“Yeah, what, Dad?

“Well, no one but you and I know this now. This was before I met your mother. I had an affair with a young officer from Peking, and . . .”

“And what, Dad?”

“Well, dammit all, I got her pregnant,” Dad confessed wistfully, but with a slight smile forming on his thin purplish lips.

The words “stunned” and “shocked” might begin to describe my sensation of wonder and confusion that ripped through me as Dad’s revelation came to light. Was it a shameful secret or a taboo incident? I wasn’t sure. 

“So, now you know, cat’s out of the bag. I got a war baby myself! I left China before she had the baby. She really wanted to come back to America with me, but she was caught between two worlds, two very different cultures and value systems, and though she claimed to love me, for whatever reason she chose to remain in China.”

“So you’re saying, Dad, that I have a 26 year old half- . . .”

“Half-sister, yes, son. After I got back, we corresponded for a year, now this is still before I met your mother, and I learned that the girl’s name is Li-Na.”

“Li-Na,” I repeated. “Dad, I can’t, uh, this is too mind-blowing! So I, we, my sisters and I, we have an older half-sister named Li-Na?”

Dad grinned. “Yep, her name means “Pretty Elegant”. How about that.”

“But, Dad, why haven’t you ever told us about this?”

“Because I couldn’t. How was I supposed to? What would your mother think? Well, anyway, when I sobered up, I started thinking, maybe it’s my only one true good memory from the war that I can recover and hang on to. How it just wasn’t right to have abandoned Li Xiu, her mom, so I tracked her down with the help of your mother’s Private Eye brother, Gizzepp - swore the bastard to secrecy - and found out that Li-Na lives in Wuhan and is married with two kids. Li Xiu mailed me a picture of her.”

“You mean you have the picture with you, Dad?”

Dad got out his wallet and rooted around in one of the compartments and pulled out a crumpled color photograph and held it up for me to see pinched between his elongated thumb and crooked forefinger. “Isn’t she - pretty elegant!” Dad said proudly.

Truly, she was, with her exotic Asian aspect and Dad’s All-American good looks. I asked excitedly, “Dad, do you think you will ever see Li-Na and her mom again?”

All Dad said was, “Mind you, keep this under wraps. This is our secret for now, got that.”

Dad then checked his watch and said. “We’re losing track of the time son! We better pick up the pace. We’re due at Grimsby’s funeral home to pick up old man Waldrip’s body in two hours.” 

We made it to Hattiesburg, located the funeral home, loaded old man Waldrip’s casket into the Hearsemobile, bid Mr. Grimsby adieu, and off we went on the return journey home, an estimated thirty hours of driving. 

By this time, our talk was exhausted, but I sensed that something had clicked in our relationship. It was all for the better, too, now that we shared in so much together. All the stories unleashed from their cages, all the secrets released from Dad’s heart, had bonded us, finally, as Father and Son. A relationship restored, made whole, born from the confessions and sharing of the most buried of stories and secrets in a man’s soul.

    Crossing the border into Indiana, Dad said, “This was a mighty fine adventure, don’t you think, son. It will be something to remember. I know you fancy yourself a writer, and you’re pretty good at it. Maybe you can write up this story someday.”

“I hope so, Dad, because there’s a lot to tell, and who’s gonna believe it anyway, unless I tell it.”

“Sure thing, son,” Dad said, then one of his trademark tension-filled pauses that I had come to expect from him. “And just you wait until our next trip together I’ve got planned for us!”

    My eyebrows raised. “Next trip? What are you talking about, Dad? This one’s not even over yet!”

    “Well, son, take a guess.”

I drew a blank. “I dunno, Dad. What do you have in mind? I can’t imagine. Maybe visiting Uncle Gizzepp in Chicago to see a Cubs game?”

Dad reached for his wallet, and pulled out that little picture he’d shown me earlier and held it up for me to see. “Son, when you turn 17 next year, for your high school graduation present I’m taking you to China to meet Li-Na.”

THE END