Grace: Holding On

43

Amparo

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
(Halfway between the jasmine and the
spikenard.) 

You hear the wonderful water
gushing in the garden,
and the feeble yellow trill
of the canary. 

You see the cypresses, in the afternoon,
trembling with the birds,
while slowly embroidering
letters upon the cloth. 

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
Amparo,
how difficult to say:
I love you!

Federico Garcia Lorca

1990

Late at night the fog drifted up from the bay shrouding the twisted cypress and stunted oaks. I let the dogs out for their evening piss and stood at the door as they disappeared into the mist. This night I didn’t really care if they dug up the flower beds, which, like all those I’d planted in so many places, weren’t very successful. I had never stayed any place long enough to get a sense of the soil and the seasons. I whistled and the dogs came back with their coats dampened from the fog. They followed me through the stacks of packing boxes and sprawled on the floor beside me as I sat at my desk and polished my boots. The fog muffled the night sounds and it was so quiet I could hear the faint ticking of my grandfather’s pocket watch. It was probably 80 or 90 years old and was hanging from a brass pin on the wall. It kept pretty good time as long as I remembered to wind it. Every ten years or so I found a watchmaker to clean it. From time to time I took it down off the wall and put it in the watch pocket of one of my few pairs of trousers that had a watch pocket, or sometimes just let it ride along with keys and change in a regular pocket. It seemed to add something to my day. Tomorrow morning I will take it down and carry it with me.

On my desk I had one hell of a letter opener. It was a Randall fighting knife and more than 20 years old. Owning the knife was the result of deep study of the Randall catalog with my fellow lieutenants in Germany. We all knew that we were liable to be sent to a war and we all wanted a good knife, perhaps one of the storied Randalls. I ordered one not long before my orders to Vietnam came through and I was told that it would be a six-month wait. I called Randall while I was in a school at the Special Warfare Center and they put my knife to the head of the list. I picked it up at the same time I was settling my wife in an apartment near Orlando, Florida. The knife had a seven inch blade of very hard, hand-forged steel. The steel was not stainless. Years later as I was swimming across a river in Panama I tasted the water and discovered it was salty. I spent much of the next couple of days using the oil I carried in the butt of my rifle to wipe the blade, but on this day almost 20 years later, the pits in the steel seem to give it character. The top of the blade was sharpened from the tip back about three inches. The knife had a brass double hilt that I polished once every four or five years and it shined back up very nicely. My name was engraved into the blade. The handle was made of a synthetic material called Micarta and had finger grooves for a right-handed person. The knife had never been used for anything more challenging than opening a beer can, whacking bush to make a comfortable place to sleep, or opening a letter. Since I don’t trust the movers, the knife would go in the car with me when I left California.

Above my desk I had a delicate ink drawing. It was maybe sixty years old and was created by a young Cambodian-Chinese boy studying calligraphy in the Cholon part of Saigon. It was essentially an illustrated poem. I had never been able to get a precise translation of the poem, but the calligrapher, by the time I met him an older man living in the Delta village of Lịch Hội Thượng, told me, in French, that the poem had to do with a rock, bamboo, and grass (or maybe orchid) and how a man had to have within himself the qualities of all three. When I first saw the painting in Lịch Hội Thượng I told the artist that the poem reminded me of the children’s game of paper-rock-scissors and I showed him and my interpreter the game. They already knew the game from their own childhoods and we played it a bit, the three of us. There were two of the paintings in the man’s home. Both with the same poem on the right-hand side of the sheet of rice paper, both with quickly drawn hints of rock, grass, and bamboo on the left. In the subtle way such things were done, later in the day I found one of the paintings wrapped in newspaper in the back of my jeep. I was never able to think of an appropriate gift to make in return. I could not think of one years later. There were open boxes for all of the paintings in the house that the packers would fill up the next day. The ink painting would come down and be packed in one of them.

Out in a storage shed next to the carport was a workbench made out of inch and a half thick ash planks. The wood came from a lumber yard in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I and my new wife needed a table for our little student apartment and I thought I could make one. I misjudged the hardness of ash and, instead of hours, it was days of sanding and finishing before I could fit the table together. I attached short legs to the planks and we bought pillows to sit on. I was very proud of that table. 

The Army moved us to Fort Benning, Georgia and we took the table with us. Then we were sent to Worms, Germany, and Aschaffenburg, Germany and on to Wurzburg, Germany. We came back to the U.S. and I moved my wife to Maitland, Florida while I went to Vietnam. Then it was Fort Carson, Colorado where our daughter was born. From there we went to Fort Knox, Kentucky and El Paso, Texas. I drove my family back to Maitland, Florida and went to Vietnam again. Then it was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We put the table into storage while we went to Quetta, Pakistan and took it back out when we arrived in Detroit, Michigan. We went back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and then to McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida before we ended up in Monterey, California. Along the way my daughter went to schools in all those places, except for the year in Pakistan where her mother home schooled her. She finished high school in Florida and went off to college in Kansas. Her parents ripped her idea of home away from her and moved to California (and lived in two different houses there). Along the way the table stopped being used as a dining table. First I put it up on taller, much sturdier legs and it was used in various kitchens as a work table. But eventually, after being refinished a couple of times it became a workshop bench. It was now out in the storage shed, from where it will be carried to the moving van.

I once heard a story of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail who proudly showed off a toothbrush he was carrying in his pack. The hiker had drilled holes in it to save weight. Some infantrymen treated their lives like that, doing anything to save weight, keeping their personal belongings to the bare minimum needed to survive the next mission. I wasn’t able, and did not want, to do that. I had, instead, drawn into my life someone who would roam the world with me and by so doing keep me connected with the world. I had the pleasure of raising a daughter who, by her circumstances, did not see the differences in the color of a person’s skin until it was pointed out to her in her late teens. By then it simply could not make a difference. I always had a place to which I could return, not escaping from the infantry, but a place that was almost a part of the infantry, a place that had the whole world between me and the outside.

Very few of our possessions survived all those travels. On that fog-bound night we had set our table with the stainless steel flatware we were given as a wedding present. There was a book or two from the beginning (translations of Spanish poets given for a Valentine’s Day, a ragged copy of The Joy of Cooking) among the hundreds we had accumulated since. In a cedar chest that I made along the way was a wedding dress and a black suit that was hopelessly out of style, but I still thought I could wear. All the rest of our possessions were going into those boxes scattered around the house. Much more had been left behind, put on the street to be picked up, given to our daughter after her marriage, or otherwise simply disappeared. 

We sat at a dining room table bought in Kansas, on German and Danish chairs, ate from German china and drank from Austrian wineglasses. There was a Chitrali rug on the floor and an old Pathan sword hanging on the wall. Also on a wall were pieces of Champa cloth woven in Vietnam and a batik piece from Indonesia. The furnishings of the house were very like those of the other houses in our neighborhood.

The dogs stirred as I finished my boots and got up to wash the polish from my hands. My wedding ring tapped the side of the sink. It had an unusual design and was matched by the one on the left hand of the woman asleep in the room just down the hall. I undressed and slipped into the bed beside her. The dogs took their places at the foot of the bed and settled down with loud, snuffling sighs.

She had shared the pain of my departures and the joy of my returns. I cannot entirely know, except through her letters, what it had been like for her all this time. I knew that throughout we had been together and she was a part of it. And because she was with me she also became separated from the rest of the world around her. In the time that we lived in the high desert of Pakistan, when I was a student at their staff college, we found that we had more to share with the German, British, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Australian, Canadian, and Pakistani military families than we did with those back in a more conventional life. She and my daughter were more at home at a Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall than a family gathering in North Carolina. I could only guess at the ripples of fear and dread that spread through housing areas as men packed up rucksacks and disappeared into the early morning or the different perspective of one who is on the ground watching instead of being in an airborne drop.

Here in the night, in the warmth of our bed, what mattered was that we were together, had been together, will be together. I reached out to put my arms around her to hold her and she, in turn, reached out and held me.