The Last Swing

There are two kinds of news in the Army, or so I believed for most of the time I wore the uniform. Good news waits on a bulletin board where you might walk past it. The other kind knows your name and comes looking for you. That was the rule as I understood it, and it held right up until the one time it didn’t — but that is a later part of the story, and I will get to it when I get to it. One thing I learned in the Army is that bad news doesn’t get better with age, and the Army kept that like gospel — news was given straight away and with a straight face, and there was a mercy in it that took me years to name.

It was Thanksgiving morning in Korea, which meant it was still Wednesday night back home, and I have thought about that ever since — how the news reached me before the day it belonged to. The Army had put turkey on the schedule. The cooks at Camp Garry Owen had been thawing birds for a week, and there was a rumor of real pie, and the whole camp had that loose feeling a holiday gives a place that runs on not being loose. We were cavalry up there — Fourth Squadron, Seventh Cavalry, scouts, close enough to the DMZ that nobody had to say so — and three months earlier the towers had come down and the world had tightened like a fist, and we had all learned to sleep with one ear open, and now here came the Army trying to hand us cranberry sauce like it was any other November.

I was twenty-two years old and certain I had the shape of the world about figured out, which is the one thing being twenty-two guarantees you are wrong about — and I had a bowl of peas in my hands.

That’s not right. I need to tell this the way it happened, and the way it happened is that I was on guard duty at the front gate. Thanksgiving morning, cold coming down off the hills the way it does up there, dry and mean, and me standing my post watching the road while the rest of the camp got ready to be thankful. Then the sergeant on duty called down and told me to report to the CP. He didn’t say why. There is a way a man doesn’t say why that tells you everything, and that sergeant had it down like he’d practiced.

The peas come into it later. The peas come into everything, if you give them time.

The first sergeant had the Red Cross message on his desk, face down, the way you’d rest a hand over something to keep it still. He was a big man from Alabama who had been in the Army since before I could ride a bicycle, and up to that morning I had figured him for my personal cross to bear.

That was the man who turned the paper over and read it to me in a voice I had never heard him use, careful as a man carrying a full bucket. Emergency leave. Grandmother — the Army’s word, the Red Cross’s word; they didn’t have a blank on the form for what she actually was. Stroke. Serious condition.

He said, son, get your bag. He said the Army would have me on a plane by noon. And the Army, which cannot get a private a working pen in under three weeks, had me on a plane by noon, because the Army understands exactly one kind of emergency and this was it, and I have loved it a little ever since for that.

Here is what I knew on the flight line, waiting in the cold with my duffel: Dessie Faye Wilkins was eighty-two years old. She had been born in Cotton Switch, Texas, in 1919, the first of six, in a house within hollering distance of her daddy’s forge. She had raised her brothers and sisters, and then her daughters, and then one of her daughters’ daughters, and then, in the summers and after school and any other time the world got too loud, she had raised me.