Nine by Sydney Chaney Thomas (summer reads .TXT) 📕

I lie in bed with him for hours and he talks to me. He tells me stories about when he was a pilot in the war, he teaches me how to predict the weather by the shape of the clouds. He teaches me their names, cumulus, stratus, cirrus, he tells me these are their Latin names as he lay slowly dying. I pronounce them as best I can and commit his words to memory.

Transported to and from the hospital in a military helicopter, the police in our small farming community are concerned. They think he is trafficking drugs. My mother laughs at this, but is livid, maybe even beyond livid. She loses much of her good humor in the years my father spends dying.

We pray for him, kneeling in the pews of the Catholic Church, never has there been more futile an activity than this. Nevertheless, we continue this practice every Sunday, the three of us, my mother dressed impeccably, my sister and I with our shiny hair pulled back, matching dresses and black patent leather shoes. Together we kneel, stand and kneel. We cross ourselves with holy water as we leave. My mother holds my hand white knuckled through the parking lot.

On our way home, I watch the orchards disappear as we pass, pear, apple and walnut. As the car speeds up they pass in patterns that make me dizzy to watch. We stop in town and my mother buys us each a black berry milk shake. This is our treat for being quiet in church. We sit outside on metal benches in the weak sunshine watching the cars go by. My mother stares at us while she smokes a cigarette. We look back at her and say nothing. There’s not much to say at this point.

My mother begins drinking all of the wine my father has been making from the small vineyard on our property. The barrels sit aging by the back door in our kitchen and my mother siphons the liquid out with a turkey baster, but who can blame her? My sister and I are vacuuming and ironing clothes. The ironing board hits me at the clavicle. I am ironing polyester. I am ironing her polyester muumuu. I am ironing her polyester bedspread. It is slippery and I try to keep it on the board. My mother walks by me without comment. She is losing not only her good humor now, but her judgment as well.

The summer days are cool on the farm, the rains have continued into June and now we await the arrival of my grandmother. My mother spends days cleaning and baking for her arrival, she tells us she is selfish, but you can tell my mother loves her and seeks her approval. When my grandmother does arrive, she walks around in a purple satin negligee and ignores us. She buys our younger cousins candy, but not my sister and I, she says she just got a little something for the little ones. And my mother, well, she simply goes berserk.

They think it is Agent Orange, a pesticide used in Vietnam to clear the vegetation from the jungle, which is causing my fathers lungs to disintegrate, but they can’t be sure, they just don’t know. There is no cure, no treatment. We can only wait and see what will happen.

Men die on battlefields all the time, soldiers slaughtered, bombs explode, guns are fired - it happens all the time. For thousands of years, more even, men are lost to war.

It took a thousand days for his body to disintegrate, literally. Agent Orange, Vietnam – not everyone survives Vietnam, least of all the front line of De Nang. If they can kill an entire jungle, how should one man survive? Then again, other men were there who did survive, what of those that didn’t die? It was just one of those things. No ones fault, everyone’s fault, war.

He left Vietnam with the chemicals in his lungs – lodged deep inside, the chemicals that kill jungles can kill men too it appears, sometimes, but only slowly.

He had volunteered to go there. Volunteered. It seems so hard to understand why someone would do that, but he did.

For a thousand days I watch him die, later when asked where my father was, I would say, “My father died when I was nine”.

And sometimes people would say, “Oh, you didn’t know him then,” but the opposite is true, my brain is infused with him because of it.

But I would just stand there and say nothing. How could I explain?

It was clear he was dying; it wasn’t something someone would need to tell you or something that could be withheld. I understood easily by observation, that our days together were numbered and I took note of them as they passed.

Even now, I can close my eyes and remember what it was like to lay beside his skeletal body at night watching the horses graze in the moonlight. The white moon in the sky, the dark blue shadows of the horses bodies as they grazed, his fragile thin frame next to mine, still warm. Just thinking this, I can hear my mother’s voice, scolding me, “Don’t be so dramatic,” she would say, a warning not to indulge my sorrow, not to name it or speak of it. I was not allowed that extravagance, it was too big of a luxury then and the same is true now.

One man. One soldier. He is just one casualty of war.

But, I never stop thinking of him as if my growth was stunted, at the age of nine, by loving him. A part of me remains forever nine – living in that house – on that land – in that valley.

Later, I waited patiently for my own daughter to turn nine so I could watch her. I wanted to see what a girl of nine was, both intellectually and emotionally. I wanted to gauge that age through her. See how sophisticated she was, how child like, understand what I had been when I had lost everything that was dear to me.

My mother left us at a pig farm the day they put him in the ground. We missed his 21 gun salute - the hogs neatly penned in their long open barns, the white house standing alone at the end of the road. I sat watching the gravel drive, waiting for her, the sky turns lavender, and then, the sun goes down. It is January. She pulls up and takes us back to the farm.

Publication Date: 12-23-2009

All Rights Reserved