The Road Home

"Uncle" Jack was Dad's shipmate in Hawaii from the before the war and they'd remained life-long friends after it ended.  I'd grown up around him, in fact, and heard all of his back-in-the-day adventures, from his naval service to a post-war stint as a uranium prospector in the Utah badlands, and as an engineer in South America.  Dad and Jack raised families in parallel, and we kids were close for a while.

I saw less of him after I grew up and life grew everyone apart, but I renewed our acquaintance at Dad's funeral. I hadn't seen him in years but he was still the same hale man in his mid-60s that I remembered as a kid.  He was a widower by then.  Before he said goodbye he asked a favor.  "You'll know what and when," he wouldn't say more.

For a few years after that we exchanged holiday cards, and I'd hear about him through his daughter (my almost-but-never-quite-fiance): he'd retired (again) to Montana, he was doing well, he wasn't doing well, his grandkid won a school award, a funeral, a wedding, a fishing trip to Cabo, he sends his best.  Then after a few more years, the news slowed down then stopped.  

     My job as lawyer / lobbyist for a gaming consortium kept me busy in Washington and Havana about this time so it was by chance (or not) that early one morning in early August I was at home in Larch Barrens, a small town two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City.  A letter from his daughter arrived the day before, circuitously forwarded from D.C. to Florida to Cuba back to New York and thence to Salt Lake.  I read it over coffee.  Her father was dying.

Ahhh, too late, I thought, the letter was weeks old.  

Then the doorbell rang.

It was a young sailor, in old-style working dungarees, but wearing a Hawaiian shirt with buttons out of order, like he'd dressed in a hurry in the dark.

"Harry, come on, we've got to get back to the ship."  He was agitated and kept looking up, down, everywhere.  After a heartbeat or three I recognized him.  But he called me Harry, my name is Phillip.  Harry was my late father.

"Ok Jack, let me pull the car around and we'll get going."

"Get your a*s in gear, and I mean now, haven't you heard the news?"

"I've heard, I've heard", I said, as he bundled into the passenger seat and I put the car in drive, and headed out.  What else could I do?  I'd scribbled a quick note to my wife -- back when I can --  found the keys to the Lincoln Continental and drove around to the front, where Jack waited anxiously.

"Hurry, damn you, they need us there now."

"I can't drive this old jalopy any faster."  I could imagine what his mind's eye was seeing off in the distance: blossoming fireballs and oily black smoke, anti-aircraft puffs in the sky, planes circling then stooping like hawks, muted explosions.  He made me pull the Connie off the road in a spray of gravel as imaginary Japanese Zeros raced overhead, machine gunning the highway but, by a miracle, missing us.

"That was close!"  Chest heaving, eyes wild, he was hysterical with anxiety, but determined to reach our -- his -- ship.

I didn't know what to do, much less say.  His world was breaking down, yet still held together by willpower alone, he was wound up tight as an iron hoop around a barrel.  I eased the big sedan back on the road and continued west.

Then I knew.  

"It's OK, Sailor, things will be alright.  We'll get you there."  I put my hand on his arm, he startled, drew himself up, a little surprised, almost as if sitting at attention and his eyes stopped their roving.  He was still tense and nervous with his eyes fixed on the horizon and wherever he thought he was, or actually was, these moments (his last moments, a small voice said) weren't going well for him.  

"Jack, listen to me: you're not going to make it back in time, but in a way that's going to work out OK because you'll survive today and a lot of our shipmates won't."  

"The next week is going to be pretty awful, there's a lot of bad -- things -- to get sorted out, a lot of uncertainty but your family will know you're safe before they have a chance to worry.  And you'll see all this through to the end and long after.  Next year you'll go for an unwanted swim at a place called Guadalcanal, but you'll get through that too.  You'll get nicked with some Japanese steel along the way at another place you've never heard of and still can't pronounce but that won't nearly hurt as much as you'll tell us it did."  

"After all that you'll come home.  You won't marry that nurse from New Zealand, it will be -- but why spoil it.  You'll have a son and a beautiful daughter who'll have enough sense to turn down a marriage offer from your best friend's son, and you'll have places to go and things to do and much to live for and ... well, one day you'll go home, I believe I can promise that too."

I talked on, and he listened in silence, breathing steadily but eyes no longer scanning for marauding aircraft.  I could have stopped and turned around but we didn't.  Instead we drove a long way, almost as far as the Arizona Strip just north of the Colorado River.  He was calm and composed and when I stopped for gas I wasn't sure if he was still with me but for a vein in his neck still fluttering erratically.  At the end his eyes focused, he recognized me, back in the Utah desert, an old man at the end of life.  His lips moved, a silent, Thank you.

 

I knew he was gone.  When I could bear it, I looked over.  The passenger seat empty, as I knew it would be.  I drove home alone.

A month later I was in Hawaii.  HIs daughter asked me to help with the special arrangements and I was greatly honored by the request.  We gathered at a private ceremony the Navy holds for families and friends of sailors assigned to the battleship U.S.S. Arizona who survived her sinking on that December morning.  After the bugle call Taps faded away, a team of Navy divers entered her hull through the barbette of turret three and placed the remains of Retired Chief Petty Officer and Beloved Uncle Jack alongside his shipmates who, as Navy tradition holds, welcomed him home. 

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

Great story. We don't always take the chance to get our parents life story until too late and perhaps we don't tell our own children enough. I've written a similar story about something I discovered about my own father who was in the royal navy during the wall. It is called walking to zero if you would like a look - I think page 5or6.
Well done again. I think perhaps these veterans did not want us to know how awful their experience was at times.
Regards,
Alan

[The Last Dragoon]

Thanks. Dad was USN, but joined in early '42. The uncle is a blend of several friends who are veterans from the Iraq/Afghanistan war with PTSD. You get to a certain age and you know what the dying process is like. The ceremony in Hawaii is real, I thought to blend it with a kind of "Vanishing Hitchhiker" tale. "Beatty" is a name well known to the RN.