A moving story of courage and persistence
Friday, July 04, 2003
An Independence Day Contemplation
July 4th, 2003, and Edwin Mayhew was more than unusually happy. He whistled the Stars and Stripes Forever as he shuffled down the front steps to hoist Old Glory on his flagpole. This had been his invariable routine for as many years as he could remember, though if he thought about it he knew only roughly how many years it really was. Within two years maybe. And the occasion of today's additional exultation was the ragged piece of metal he found in his bed that morning touched with just a smudge of blood.
Edwin was old. Although some of his peers still played a mean round of golf or licked the hide of men 20 years younger at bridge he had not worn well. A genial face mounted on a head whose remaining hairs were still cropped army style, the leathery old skin was creased with lines more etched by pain than laughter. He was not habitually unhappy, but pain takes its toll. Ethel was still in bed and would remain there unmoving until such time as he took her a cup of green tea laced with a touch of lemon, no sugar. Ethel was not given to Edwin's early mornings. If the sun got up that early with her husband obediently following like some slave to the day she would take her time and only shuffle to the bathroom after she had listened to the nine o'clock news on NPR, not a minute earlier. It was a routine she had followed for as many years as she could remember, and if she thought about it she knew exactly how many years that was. There was no two year period of uncertainly or simply not knowing.
This difference was no longer a matter of strife between the old couple. At one time it drove her mad, but with the years she grew accustomed to the problem. Why could he not remember? Even after she filled in the blanks, why could he still not remember? Edwin insisted, she was not there, how could she know?
The flag was aloft in the fresh warm morning California air. Barely a breeze bothered to match his early morning enthusiasm to stir the limp material so that a passerby might see the stars and the stripes. Had the wind caught up they might also have noticed the flag was unusually worn, spattered with a number of ragged holes and the mysterious shadow of stains which occasional launderings had failed to remove. This flag was almost as old as Edwin and had lain with him in the mud, the cold ruthless sludge, of a field in France. For two years it was either a sheet for his bed or a curtain by his cot. His hand would reach out and clutch at the rough cotton and a tear might glisten in his unseeing eye. Even when he was transferred far from the incessant prattle of gunfire to the restless hammock of the great iron ship that bore him back through the watery steel of the Atlantic Ocean to the humid shores of Florida still his hand would grasp the flag with an obsession that would have cured Linus of his addiction to his comfort blanket for very shame.
Ethel was there, in Florida, railed there at the expense of Mr. Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, she was not the only one so favored. It was the very least the Government could do to enable wives to be re-united with their beloved warriors. These men had, after all, set the world free from a monstrous tyranny whose evils were only just beginning to be named. Some only came to meet coffins. Ethel met a cot, but its contents were little distinguishable from the bodies that inhabited the coffins. And as she sat in the hospital day after day, it seemed that the hand that gripped the flag was stronger than the hand she gripped.
The doctors were always hopeful. "How is the patient today, Ethel?" they would repeat. "He's a little stronger than yesterday" she would reply hoping to God that this was true but fearing in the deepest anxieties of her soul that this was not so. Fall turned to winter and the hurricanes died away. It was just chilly. The seas lashed the empty beaches. Ethel did not know that 5,000 miles away the other side of the same ocean had lashed bodies, fragmented, pathetic bodies with pink foam and mocked the firm resolution with which they had left this beach to liberate their ancient cousins. All she knew was that Edwin was not the same man who left, that he had multiple pieces of steel in his head and body which the doctors could not remove because it was too dangerous to operate. Maybe he would never see again, or speak. Maybe he would hover between life and death for years to come. Maybe he could hear the voices by his bed, maybe not. You could not tell. There were no wires and electronic monitors to gauge his condition for these were yet to be invented. But there were tubes; tubes that carried carefully measured amounts of liquidized food directly into his stomach, tubes which took away his urine, tubes which sucked out phlegm, tubes which delivered glucose into the veins, and other tubes which seemed to have no purpose that Ethel could divine, but she trusted the doctors to know what they were for. She was not there to get a medical degree by observation so she stopped paying close attention. She was just there, by his side, holding one hand while the other held Old Glory. And she watched the lumps. This was her only preoccupation. The lumps in his body seemed to move. One day she could feel them under his skin and another day they would be gone, receding deep into some muscle mass, the wasted muscle mass of a man she barely recognized but whom love told her was her husband.
Fifty-eight years had passed since then, fifty-eight years that, before they unraveled, would have seemed an unthinkable eternity; but now they lay in the past, checked off in the calendar of Ethel's life. She was the one who had worked to make existence possible and at times quite enjoyable. At least she had a man about the house. He could attend to the daily chores and would drive to the store with the shopping list to get in the comestibles. The girls in the shop would help him locate the exact brands Ethel had so carefully scribed on the small yellow legal pad with her exact, if not spidery writing. Time with this chore was not of the essence but accuracy was. And in all those years Edwin had only ever failed to return with the right items if the store was out of stock, and the substitute items had been thoughtfully suggested by the staff in the store. The method of this shopping had also changed and the transition for Edwin was almost more than he could bear since the one thing a prematurely pensioned veteran likes is regularity. Back in the fifties he would park his 1954 Belair Chevrolet at the kerb, right outside the front door of the grocer, or if the space was taken, in a small parking lot around the corner, where it was not unusual to find some other less fortunate veteran lying in his piss after a night with the beer.
Edwin stood in line on the maple wood floor until at last he could lean on the scratched but beautifully polished mahogany counter and hand his list to the sales clerk. He would cruise around the shelves behind him picking cans and jars faster than you could figure out where everything was. He weighed out the sugar and flour, and sliced the bacon with a hand-operated machine. The smell of freshly ground coffee always blended so perfectly with the milder aroma of the tea kept in large foil-lined boxes under the counter, though this was lost on Edwin. He could smell very little. Edwin knew the store clerk well. They spent every Thursday night together down at the American Legion. So the clerk understood when Edwin could not always see his way back to the door as he carried the week's supplies in the cambric bags his wife supplied.
The doctors had a handle on the problem - well, as best they could. Edwin and Ethel sat in the stucco walled office where the ceiling fan fought a losing battle trying to drive the humid air into the even hotter street. Ethel, as always, sat forward on her chair clutching her purse in her lap, inclining her head ever so slightly so she would not miss a single word the doctor spoke. More hunched, but bright-eyed nonethess, Edwin's posture in the adjacent chair seemed a defiance of gravity. Why did he not slide right on to the floor? But with constant shifting of his weight somehow he remained in the chair.
"The lumps, as you call them, are pieces of shrapnel. His body (for the doctor only really spoke to Ethel) looks after the problem by wrapping them in a sort of capsule to prevent internal damage. And because they are not attached to anything in particular they can move around - slowly. If you come in here when you see them, or maybe just feel them near the surface, we can snick them out. It will only take a few minutes with a little anaesthetic."
So this had been the plan. Over the years the lumps were removed. X-rays initially showed over twenty of them scattered around his body. Twice the shrapnel came right up under the skin, just little pieces no bigger than a pinky nail, and Edwin frantically scratched at them until they just popped out. He kept them in a jar. He would swear that some came out "with everything else" but he was not into fishing around in the toilet to prove it. He knew there was one piece in his head buried deep in his brain. That was not expected to come out "with everything else". The point to record is that over the years the lumps all disappeared, and any left inside never surfaced. They became history, all except for the certain knowledge that the one small piece of shrapnel in Edwin's head was what caused his intermittent problem.
It could happen at any time. One moment Edwin was asking Charlie, for such was the name of the clerk, for a pound of chick peas and the next he would reel backwards with a searing pain in his head, and sneeze, violently. His eyesight would disintegrate into a jumbled mosaic of fragmented images swimming around in his head like a kaleidoscope. Mercifully two things were to Edwin's advantage otherwise this outing to the store would have been impossible. Firstly the sneezing always preceded the mind-numbing pain so he had some warning it was coming. This gave him time to stop the car if he just happened to be driving when the episode was about to break upon him. Secondly the state of the law had not yet reached the point where is was made illegal for people to drive if, by today's standards, driving would be judged a hazard to the driver and others on the road. Edwin knew he was a potential hazard. He did not need a law to tell him. But he and Ethel had it under control such that since he got the Belair his worst accident was to hit a chicken while he sneezing. Ethel was with him at the time and the chicken provided four good meals over the next two days.
Charlie closed his store in the mid sixties and he and Edwin ruminated about the way the world was changing as they played cribbage in the Legion. Edwin did not care for rock and roll; nor did Charlie - though Ethel had bought some mighty strange clothes lately and took to going out dancing with others of the 'girls' as they liked to call themselves. At forty they would call themselves girls if they wanted to and they would carry on doing so "for ever" said Ethel with some insouciance in her voice. The bigger matter was this new-fangled supermarket where you had to find your own food spread around the store on cheap chrome shelves where the boxes were simply cut open and turned on their sides so you could fish out whatever cans you needed. The bacon was pre-packaged, sugar came in standard sized bags and the coffee was not fresh. The rich, intangible collision of a thousands perfumes was replaced by the smell of Lysol-mopped floors. But Edwin knew nothing about this. He only knew that Ethel told him about it. Shopping took three times as long now and although the girls in the store were pretty and friendly they did not have the character and dignity of Charlie the store clerk.
It was the year the supermarket came that Edwin and Charlie decided they would keep the old ways alive and make a stand for the days when school actually taught kids how to read and add up by the time they were six, when you addressed all older men as Sir and you tipped your hat to a woman if you passed her in the street. They would march, march proud and march tall. They would press their uniforms, shine their medals and join the town parade on the Fourth of July. They would get a new banner made and Ethel would supervise its construction because being the manager of the haberdashery store at the end of Main Street she new about these things. They would drive together in the Chevy and park it at the assembly point ready for the marching bands to lead the way.
The American Legion was not as well represented in the parade as we might have supposed because most of the men of Edwin and Charlie's age did not care to remember the war, did not care to dress up in their old uniforms and could more usefully spend the time with their growing teenage families or in their back yards where it was still economically worthwhile to grow a few vegetables to supplement the general well-being of the family. They would certainly come and watch the parade, drink cold lemonade, eat ice cream and eat hot dogs.
There, amongst the fire engines, the steam traction engines, prancing horses and shiny new cars in which hitherto unknown mayors, marshals and House Representatives rode were three ranks of soldiers. Somewhat bent and awkward in his gait was a man who looked so much older than the rest. Rising from the leather holster at his waist was a large flag, large enough for a man to wrap himself in were he out in the cold at night. It was a little ragged and seemed to be somewhat stained, but no matter. Perhaps the Legion could not afford a new flag this year. Then it was gone and a troupe of little girls marched pertly past twirling batons. There was no holding anyone in town back when the fireworks were over and the line dancing began in the street and young and old mixed without a care and the dogs licked up the remains of the hot dogs thrown in the alleyway where the drunken veteran would lie in his piss until morning. The 15 soldiers saluted their drill sergeant at the end of the parade and stood to attention as Edwin carefully lowered the flag and with Charlie folded it away. Edwin did not remember the rest of the day. He sneezed, his head seemed to disintegrate and he awoke in bed the next morning none the worse for wear. Charlie had driven him home as Ethel cradled him in her arms on the back seat. The red leather was hard and shiny, thought Ethel. She had never sat in the back seat before.
Three years later the Legion did afford a new flag and Edwin found his emotions somewhat confused as he marched in the second rank and another man played flag-bearer for the day. That was the first year Edwin had decided to hang his old flag outside his home on the Forth of July. And he had done it ever since.
It hung there, limp. Memories swirled around in his head like tantalizing fragrances, which are there for a moment and are gone. When was it that he last smelled kerosene and fresh cooked oats as he ate his breakfast? where the old tarred shed hung heavy with the smell of drying onions? where the delicious tangy stench of anthracite smoke pushed up from the railroad? where drying horse droppings mingled with roses at a Sunday market? When Ethel was finally dressed he would take his breakfast then take his time to put on his uniform, hang his medals and practice his salute. A neighbor would drive them to the parade and Edwin was not expected to march the whole distance. Their son would call by from the local motel where he stayed the night before, having driven 200 miles to be there for the event. He had spent the whole day before shining the old Belair - which Edwin never could part with. The engine ran smoothly though the smoke emissions were barely legal. The red leather responded eagerly to the lotion he applied with the chamois. It was his pride and joy and although he did not know this yet, it would win first place in the 50's vintage car section of the parade.
But there was something more mysterious for Edwin as his watched Old Glory hang in the early morning sun. He could see more clearly. He could make out the broken threads round the edges of the holes where German bullets whipped through. And this too was not an illusion, nor a fleeting memory of scent which was gone so fast he could not hold it much less name it, for the star jasmine was in its final bloom for the year and he could, yes he really could, smell it. He knew what it was as surely as he knew the back of his own hands; a gentle, thick perfume he had not known in fifty eight years. And then another miracle. He knew he had to go make the lemon flavored green tea for Ethel, but it might have been sewage flavored for all he could smell. Then she would get up and breakfast would begin. But he sensed Ethel was already there behind him. He did not need to turn. The sweet savor of lemon, and tea like it came from a foiled-lined box under Charlie's counter assailed his nostrils, and it seemed like a dream except he knew he was awake. Pinching himself would make no difference.
"You're up early", he said. His heart was beating hard.
"How did you know I was here?"
"I could smell the tea. I was going to make it for you."
"You sneezed, you woke me up", Ethel persisted. She had her own agenda.
"I know."
"No headache? You sure you're okay?"
"Oh, yes. I'm good, real good," drawled Edwin, a slow smile beginning to spread across his face. A smile of unfathomable incomprehension.
"It was a big sneeze. One of your huge snorters."
Edwin now turned to look at Ethel. He could see, really see, the color of her hair wrapped around the blue plastic curlers and he reached out to touch it. At eighty years old she looked more beautiful than he could remember in recent years.
In her left hand she clutched her tea. In her right hand she held a piece of metal. "What's this? I found it in the bed."
Now Edwin could not see properly because his eyes were awash with salt water and it began to course down the furrows of his tanned leather face. "It's the final piece. I sneezed it out this morning. And all the pressure in my head has gone and I seem to remember a time when I lay in bed for many months and you held my hand while I held Old Glory. And I don't know if it's a dream or not."
Ethel sipped her tea then placed it carefully on the low wall by the front door. She slipped her arm round Edwin's skinny old arm and pulled him close. "It took a long time," she whispered, "but I finally got you back. Happy Fourth!"
Michael Buss
Independence Day, 2003.
See also www.5weeks.blogspot.com
July 4th, 2003, and Edwin Mayhew was more than unusually happy. He whistled the Stars and Stripes Forever as he shuffled down the front steps to hoist Old Glory on his flagpole. This had been his invariable routine for as many years as he could remember, though if he thought about it he knew only roughly how many years it really was. Within two years maybe. And the occasion of today's additional exultation was the ragged piece of metal he found in his bed that morning touched with just a smudge of blood.
Edwin was old. Although some of his peers still played a mean round of golf or licked the hide of men 20 years younger at bridge he had not worn well. A genial face mounted on a head whose remaining hairs were still cropped army style, the leathery old skin was creased with lines more etched by pain than laughter. He was not habitually unhappy, but pain takes its toll. Ethel was still in bed and would remain there unmoving until such time as he took her a cup of green tea laced with a touch of lemon, no sugar. Ethel was not given to Edwin's early mornings. If the sun got up that early with her husband obediently following like some slave to the day she would take her time and only shuffle to the bathroom after she had listened to the nine o'clock news on NPR, not a minute earlier. It was a routine she had followed for as many years as she could remember, and if she thought about it she knew exactly how many years that was. There was no two year period of uncertainly or simply not knowing.
This difference was no longer a matter of strife between the old couple. At one time it drove her mad, but with the years she grew accustomed to the problem. Why could he not remember? Even after she filled in the blanks, why could he still not remember? Edwin insisted, she was not there, how could she know?
The flag was aloft in the fresh warm morning California air. Barely a breeze bothered to match his early morning enthusiasm to stir the limp material so that a passerby might see the stars and the stripes. Had the wind caught up they might also have noticed the flag was unusually worn, spattered with a number of ragged holes and the mysterious shadow of stains which occasional launderings had failed to remove. This flag was almost as old as Edwin and had lain with him in the mud, the cold ruthless sludge, of a field in France. For two years it was either a sheet for his bed or a curtain by his cot. His hand would reach out and clutch at the rough cotton and a tear might glisten in his unseeing eye. Even when he was transferred far from the incessant prattle of gunfire to the restless hammock of the great iron ship that bore him back through the watery steel of the Atlantic Ocean to the humid shores of Florida still his hand would grasp the flag with an obsession that would have cured Linus of his addiction to his comfort blanket for very shame.
Ethel was there, in Florida, railed there at the expense of Mr. Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, she was not the only one so favored. It was the very least the Government could do to enable wives to be re-united with their beloved warriors. These men had, after all, set the world free from a monstrous tyranny whose evils were only just beginning to be named. Some only came to meet coffins. Ethel met a cot, but its contents were little distinguishable from the bodies that inhabited the coffins. And as she sat in the hospital day after day, it seemed that the hand that gripped the flag was stronger than the hand she gripped.
The doctors were always hopeful. "How is the patient today, Ethel?" they would repeat. "He's a little stronger than yesterday" she would reply hoping to God that this was true but fearing in the deepest anxieties of her soul that this was not so. Fall turned to winter and the hurricanes died away. It was just chilly. The seas lashed the empty beaches. Ethel did not know that 5,000 miles away the other side of the same ocean had lashed bodies, fragmented, pathetic bodies with pink foam and mocked the firm resolution with which they had left this beach to liberate their ancient cousins. All she knew was that Edwin was not the same man who left, that he had multiple pieces of steel in his head and body which the doctors could not remove because it was too dangerous to operate. Maybe he would never see again, or speak. Maybe he would hover between life and death for years to come. Maybe he could hear the voices by his bed, maybe not. You could not tell. There were no wires and electronic monitors to gauge his condition for these were yet to be invented. But there were tubes; tubes that carried carefully measured amounts of liquidized food directly into his stomach, tubes which took away his urine, tubes which sucked out phlegm, tubes which delivered glucose into the veins, and other tubes which seemed to have no purpose that Ethel could divine, but she trusted the doctors to know what they were for. She was not there to get a medical degree by observation so she stopped paying close attention. She was just there, by his side, holding one hand while the other held Old Glory. And she watched the lumps. This was her only preoccupation. The lumps in his body seemed to move. One day she could feel them under his skin and another day they would be gone, receding deep into some muscle mass, the wasted muscle mass of a man she barely recognized but whom love told her was her husband.
Fifty-eight years had passed since then, fifty-eight years that, before they unraveled, would have seemed an unthinkable eternity; but now they lay in the past, checked off in the calendar of Ethel's life. She was the one who had worked to make existence possible and at times quite enjoyable. At least she had a man about the house. He could attend to the daily chores and would drive to the store with the shopping list to get in the comestibles. The girls in the shop would help him locate the exact brands Ethel had so carefully scribed on the small yellow legal pad with her exact, if not spidery writing. Time with this chore was not of the essence but accuracy was. And in all those years Edwin had only ever failed to return with the right items if the store was out of stock, and the substitute items had been thoughtfully suggested by the staff in the store. The method of this shopping had also changed and the transition for Edwin was almost more than he could bear since the one thing a prematurely pensioned veteran likes is regularity. Back in the fifties he would park his 1954 Belair Chevrolet at the kerb, right outside the front door of the grocer, or if the space was taken, in a small parking lot around the corner, where it was not unusual to find some other less fortunate veteran lying in his piss after a night with the beer.
Edwin stood in line on the maple wood floor until at last he could lean on the scratched but beautifully polished mahogany counter and hand his list to the sales clerk. He would cruise around the shelves behind him picking cans and jars faster than you could figure out where everything was. He weighed out the sugar and flour, and sliced the bacon with a hand-operated machine. The smell of freshly ground coffee always blended so perfectly with the milder aroma of the tea kept in large foil-lined boxes under the counter, though this was lost on Edwin. He could smell very little. Edwin knew the store clerk well. They spent every Thursday night together down at the American Legion. So the clerk understood when Edwin could not always see his way back to the door as he carried the week's supplies in the cambric bags his wife supplied.
The doctors had a handle on the problem - well, as best they could. Edwin and Ethel sat in the stucco walled office where the ceiling fan fought a losing battle trying to drive the humid air into the even hotter street. Ethel, as always, sat forward on her chair clutching her purse in her lap, inclining her head ever so slightly so she would not miss a single word the doctor spoke. More hunched, but bright-eyed nonethess, Edwin's posture in the adjacent chair seemed a defiance of gravity. Why did he not slide right on to the floor? But with constant shifting of his weight somehow he remained in the chair.
"The lumps, as you call them, are pieces of shrapnel. His body (for the doctor only really spoke to Ethel) looks after the problem by wrapping them in a sort of capsule to prevent internal damage. And because they are not attached to anything in particular they can move around - slowly. If you come in here when you see them, or maybe just feel them near the surface, we can snick them out. It will only take a few minutes with a little anaesthetic."
So this had been the plan. Over the years the lumps were removed. X-rays initially showed over twenty of them scattered around his body. Twice the shrapnel came right up under the skin, just little pieces no bigger than a pinky nail, and Edwin frantically scratched at them until they just popped out. He kept them in a jar. He would swear that some came out "with everything else" but he was not into fishing around in the toilet to prove it. He knew there was one piece in his head buried deep in his brain. That was not expected to come out "with everything else". The point to record is that over the years the lumps all disappeared, and any left inside never surfaced. They became history, all except for the certain knowledge that the one small piece of shrapnel in Edwin's head was what caused his intermittent problem.
It could happen at any time. One moment Edwin was asking Charlie, for such was the name of the clerk, for a pound of chick peas and the next he would reel backwards with a searing pain in his head, and sneeze, violently. His eyesight would disintegrate into a jumbled mosaic of fragmented images swimming around in his head like a kaleidoscope. Mercifully two things were to Edwin's advantage otherwise this outing to the store would have been impossible. Firstly the sneezing always preceded the mind-numbing pain so he had some warning it was coming. This gave him time to stop the car if he just happened to be driving when the episode was about to break upon him. Secondly the state of the law had not yet reached the point where is was made illegal for people to drive if, by today's standards, driving would be judged a hazard to the driver and others on the road. Edwin knew he was a potential hazard. He did not need a law to tell him. But he and Ethel had it under control such that since he got the Belair his worst accident was to hit a chicken while he sneezing. Ethel was with him at the time and the chicken provided four good meals over the next two days.
Charlie closed his store in the mid sixties and he and Edwin ruminated about the way the world was changing as they played cribbage in the Legion. Edwin did not care for rock and roll; nor did Charlie - though Ethel had bought some mighty strange clothes lately and took to going out dancing with others of the 'girls' as they liked to call themselves. At forty they would call themselves girls if they wanted to and they would carry on doing so "for ever" said Ethel with some insouciance in her voice. The bigger matter was this new-fangled supermarket where you had to find your own food spread around the store on cheap chrome shelves where the boxes were simply cut open and turned on their sides so you could fish out whatever cans you needed. The bacon was pre-packaged, sugar came in standard sized bags and the coffee was not fresh. The rich, intangible collision of a thousands perfumes was replaced by the smell of Lysol-mopped floors. But Edwin knew nothing about this. He only knew that Ethel told him about it. Shopping took three times as long now and although the girls in the store were pretty and friendly they did not have the character and dignity of Charlie the store clerk.
It was the year the supermarket came that Edwin and Charlie decided they would keep the old ways alive and make a stand for the days when school actually taught kids how to read and add up by the time they were six, when you addressed all older men as Sir and you tipped your hat to a woman if you passed her in the street. They would march, march proud and march tall. They would press their uniforms, shine their medals and join the town parade on the Fourth of July. They would get a new banner made and Ethel would supervise its construction because being the manager of the haberdashery store at the end of Main Street she new about these things. They would drive together in the Chevy and park it at the assembly point ready for the marching bands to lead the way.
The American Legion was not as well represented in the parade as we might have supposed because most of the men of Edwin and Charlie's age did not care to remember the war, did not care to dress up in their old uniforms and could more usefully spend the time with their growing teenage families or in their back yards where it was still economically worthwhile to grow a few vegetables to supplement the general well-being of the family. They would certainly come and watch the parade, drink cold lemonade, eat ice cream and eat hot dogs.
There, amongst the fire engines, the steam traction engines, prancing horses and shiny new cars in which hitherto unknown mayors, marshals and House Representatives rode were three ranks of soldiers. Somewhat bent and awkward in his gait was a man who looked so much older than the rest. Rising from the leather holster at his waist was a large flag, large enough for a man to wrap himself in were he out in the cold at night. It was a little ragged and seemed to be somewhat stained, but no matter. Perhaps the Legion could not afford a new flag this year. Then it was gone and a troupe of little girls marched pertly past twirling batons. There was no holding anyone in town back when the fireworks were over and the line dancing began in the street and young and old mixed without a care and the dogs licked up the remains of the hot dogs thrown in the alleyway where the drunken veteran would lie in his piss until morning. The 15 soldiers saluted their drill sergeant at the end of the parade and stood to attention as Edwin carefully lowered the flag and with Charlie folded it away. Edwin did not remember the rest of the day. He sneezed, his head seemed to disintegrate and he awoke in bed the next morning none the worse for wear. Charlie had driven him home as Ethel cradled him in her arms on the back seat. The red leather was hard and shiny, thought Ethel. She had never sat in the back seat before.
Three years later the Legion did afford a new flag and Edwin found his emotions somewhat confused as he marched in the second rank and another man played flag-bearer for the day. That was the first year Edwin had decided to hang his old flag outside his home on the Forth of July. And he had done it ever since.
It hung there, limp. Memories swirled around in his head like tantalizing fragrances, which are there for a moment and are gone. When was it that he last smelled kerosene and fresh cooked oats as he ate his breakfast? where the old tarred shed hung heavy with the smell of drying onions? where the delicious tangy stench of anthracite smoke pushed up from the railroad? where drying horse droppings mingled with roses at a Sunday market? When Ethel was finally dressed he would take his breakfast then take his time to put on his uniform, hang his medals and practice his salute. A neighbor would drive them to the parade and Edwin was not expected to march the whole distance. Their son would call by from the local motel where he stayed the night before, having driven 200 miles to be there for the event. He had spent the whole day before shining the old Belair - which Edwin never could part with. The engine ran smoothly though the smoke emissions were barely legal. The red leather responded eagerly to the lotion he applied with the chamois. It was his pride and joy and although he did not know this yet, it would win first place in the 50's vintage car section of the parade.
But there was something more mysterious for Edwin as his watched Old Glory hang in the early morning sun. He could see more clearly. He could make out the broken threads round the edges of the holes where German bullets whipped through. And this too was not an illusion, nor a fleeting memory of scent which was gone so fast he could not hold it much less name it, for the star jasmine was in its final bloom for the year and he could, yes he really could, smell it. He knew what it was as surely as he knew the back of his own hands; a gentle, thick perfume he had not known in fifty eight years. And then another miracle. He knew he had to go make the lemon flavored green tea for Ethel, but it might have been sewage flavored for all he could smell. Then she would get up and breakfast would begin. But he sensed Ethel was already there behind him. He did not need to turn. The sweet savor of lemon, and tea like it came from a foiled-lined box under Charlie's counter assailed his nostrils, and it seemed like a dream except he knew he was awake. Pinching himself would make no difference.
"You're up early", he said. His heart was beating hard.
"How did you know I was here?"
"I could smell the tea. I was going to make it for you."
"You sneezed, you woke me up", Ethel persisted. She had her own agenda.
"I know."
"No headache? You sure you're okay?"
"Oh, yes. I'm good, real good," drawled Edwin, a slow smile beginning to spread across his face. A smile of unfathomable incomprehension.
"It was a big sneeze. One of your huge snorters."
Edwin now turned to look at Ethel. He could see, really see, the color of her hair wrapped around the blue plastic curlers and he reached out to touch it. At eighty years old she looked more beautiful than he could remember in recent years.
In her left hand she clutched her tea. In her right hand she held a piece of metal. "What's this? I found it in the bed."
Now Edwin could not see properly because his eyes were awash with salt water and it began to course down the furrows of his tanned leather face. "It's the final piece. I sneezed it out this morning. And all the pressure in my head has gone and I seem to remember a time when I lay in bed for many months and you held my hand while I held Old Glory. And I don't know if it's a dream or not."
Ethel sipped her tea then placed it carefully on the low wall by the front door. She slipped her arm round Edwin's skinny old arm and pulled him close. "It took a long time," she whispered, "but I finally got you back. Happy Fourth!"
Michael Buss
Independence Day, 2003.
See also www.5weeks.blogspot.com
