the fifties. Though it was sheathed in dust, he could make out handwriting, his mother’s ornate script:
He tugged on the old ribbon, which, easily enough, gave up the ghost and popped. Dust stirred like vapors of lost memory. He carefully lifted the lid off, and there, kneeling in the yellow light in a pair of sweats, he began his exploration.
This is what remained of Earl Lee Swagger, USMC, Arkansas State Police, killed in the line of duty, July 23, 1955. First, Bob saw old brown photographs on stiff, slightly wilted papers. He picked them up to enter an alien universe that seemed built around a little farm boy with a chubby face that showed but a trace of the bone structure that would eventually yield the face he would recognize as his father’s. In this brown world, there was a farmhouse, a trellis, a scrawny old goat in a straw hat, a three-piece suit even in summer’s full blaze, a bow tie and starched collar, a face chipped out of granite who must have been a father, that is, Bob’s grandfather; he also wore a circled star on his chest that was a sheriff’s badge and a wide belt festooned with cartridges and a holster that swallowed up all but the Colt Peacemaker’s curved grip. Next to him was the grandmother, a dour woman in a shapeless dress and a face that looked as if it never had worn a smile. He turned it over and in faded ink read the date: 1920, Blue Eye, Ark. There were others, various arrangements of the same three people, sometimes together, sometimes alone or in twos. None of them had ever gotten fat off the land, Bob saw. A final shot showed Earl in his twenties, in a marine olive-drab service uniform, with that tight tunic collar, a glistening Sam Browne belt diagonally transecting a manly chest and a sergeant’s three stripes on the shoulder, looking proud and ramrod-straight. He’d joined in 1930, at twenty, and had made his rank fast: turning the picture over, Bob saw in his grandmother’s flowery penmanship the inscription “Earl home on leave, 1934.” Earl’s hair was slicked back over white sidewalls and he looked dapper as possible.
Next he found the medals. There was a nest of them, police marksmanship badges (his father was a natural, extraordinary shot), Pacific Battle Star and campaign ribbons, the Purple Heart with four clusters, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 2nd Marines, another one for the 3rd Marines, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and of course, the big one, the Medal of Honor, a chunk of metal in the configuration of a star that hung on a necklace of now faded but once sky-blue ribbon. He hefted the ornament: it had weight and density, gravity almost, dignity perhaps. Its gold plating was grimy from years of neglect and he realized that he’d never seen the thing itself before; his father never had it out or displayed it and his mother must have dumped it in this box sometime after the funeral, and sealed the box and herself off from the pain.
He held it in his hand for a few seconds, waiting to feel something. It was only a chunk of dirty metal, a trinket. He’d won medals himself and knew the odd distance a man feels from them, looking at them and thinking, so what? They explain so little, they have no connection with the reality of what they signify.
The citation was there too, on official Department of the Navy paper, a fancy-looking, thick piece of paper dated 10 December 1945, that had the look of formal ostentation that he despised. It could have hung in a dentist’s office.
He read it, wondering if he’d ever read it before or only heard it told by other men. His father never spoke a word about the war.
On 21 February 1945, on Charlie-Dog Ridge two miles inland from Beach Red 2, Platoon Sergeant Swagger’s unit from E. Co., Second Battalion, Ninth Regiment, Third Marine Division, came under intense fire from several enemy machine-gun positions. All his flamethrower operators dead or wounded, Platoon Sergeant Swagger led a squad off on a flanking maneuver, but only he reached the ridgeline in sufficient condition to continue the attack, the others having been killed or wounded. Wounded himself three times, Platoon Sergeant Swagger climbed into the first nest from the rear, killing the enemy soldiers with his submachine gun.
He continued to work his way along the line, silencing two other positions in the same fashion, by rolling over the parapet and spraying the enemy with gunfire. In the third nest, his gun jammed and he killed two enemy soldiers with the butt of the weapon. Advancing on the last position, a concrete bunker, he realized he was out of ammunition. He returned to the previous machine-gun nest and removed the enemy weapon and several grenades. He blew open the steel door of the emplacement and leaped inside with the light machine gun, killing thirteen more enemy soldiers.
In the seven-minute engagement, Platoon Sergeant Swagger killed over forty enemy soldiers while sustaining five wounds himself. His actions saved the lives of thirty men in his platoon. For conspicuous gallantry in action against the enemy above and beyond the call of duty, he is awarded the Medal of Honor.
Somewhere Bob had seen a picture, though it appeared not to be here. He remembered a yellowed scrap of newsprint, almost delicate to the finger in its crumbly dryness, and on it the image of his much younger father, flat-bellied and stoic of face, in dress blues, as the President of the United States, behind bifocals and a folksy Missouri face, laid the ribbon over his head. Again, it was nothing: the ceremony was for other people, not for his father, who kept his feelings to himself about what he’d done and why he’d done it.
At last Bob set the medal down. He knew enough of war to know that the description of his father’s action was antiseptic to say the least. In the nest with the Japs, working them over with a tommy gun, he must have watched them disintegrate under the heavy impact of the .45s. The air was sulfurous and full of lead and smoke; mortars exploded everywhere, sucking the oxygen from the surface of the planet. Exhaustion, stress, dirt and filth, grime, the gritty volcanic soil of Iwo, the hundreds of scrapes, cuts and abrasions from low-crawling, the utter terror, maybe some bloodlust, some pleasure in watching the enemy’s head torn off or limbs blown away, fear that the gun would jam: all that, and much more, was left unnoticed by the citation.
Hell of a fight you made, Daddy, he thought.
Next his eye caught on something unusually regular and a pull yielded a thick wad which turned out to be an old tablet of Arkansas traffic violation citations. An amazement! There were at least twenty unused citations with their triplicate carboned forms left flat on the pad, but curled back over the spine of it were five or six carbons on tickets already handed out. Bob saw in a second that they were the tickets his father must have issued that last week and was unable to file with the court before his death. He shuffled through them, seeing his father’s own handwriting recording a series of meaningless misdemeanors against the Arkansas Standard Traffic Code in the second and third weeks of July 1955. “Driving with left taillight disabled” was checked on one citation, and the driver’s name and address and license number and below that, under the rubric “Issuing Officer,” the scrawled semisignature “E. L. Swagger.” A couple of speeding violations on Routes 71 and 88, a DWI, the small beer of a rural highway patrolman’s life. He felt his father so powerfully he almost doubled over.
And then, next, a notebook. Evidently, Earl’s pen had broken or some such, for it was spattered with brownish fluid on the cover, and a discoloration had worked under the cardboard and bled through the pages. Bob peeled them, one at a time, trying to make sense of it. He saw a list of meaningless names inside the cover, like Jed Posey, Lum Posey and Pop Dwyer. He saw a stick figure crudely inscribed and lines radiating off toward landmarks that indicated distances; and a variety of other unrelated facts or observations: “Was she moved?” it said at one place. “Little Georgia,” it said at another. “Cause of death,” it wondered, “blunt force or strangulation?” “Meeting at church? Find out what?” He could make no—
A sudden sense of profound unease hit Bob. He turned back to the cover of the notebook and felt the thing burn in his fingertips. It occurred to him that the brownish stain that had seeped through to discolor the pages must be blood. It was his father’s blood. His father had been holding this or had it in his pocket when Jimmy Pye fired the fatal bullet and the wound had emptied on this document.
It had the sense of something religious to it, something from an ancient saint’s reliquary, like a blessed chard of bone or a fragment of hair or cloth. Its power overwhelmed him, and he put it down, feeling somehow as if he’d blasphemed. It was almost too much.
He suddenly had a need to put the lid on the box, stuff the box back into the slot where it had rested beribboned and sheathed in dust, and flee back to the good life he’d finally built for himself. He had horses to care for, a daughter to raise, a wife to support. In the box was only pain and black memories.
No, go on, he told himself. Go on, do it, see every last thing.
Next came some news clippings of the event itself, the various rags’ account of the events of July 23, 1955. He slipped through them, uninterested in details. Only one caught his attention: HERO TROOPER BURIED, it said, July 26, 1955, the Fort
