Being Dead (7 page)

And there the footprints stopped.

In the years that followed, come cold dark nights as autumn turned to winter, the townspeople often asked themselves what had become of Conrad. But no one dared dig up Marjorie's grave to learn the truth, for fear of what they might see.

My brother, Kevin, may or may not have come back from the dead for any one of several contradictory reasons, depending on which of my relatives you assume is most reasonable. Personally, I wouldn't consider any of us particularly reliable.

Since Kevin was a boy, and since he was born five years before I was, we had few common interests. That meant we didn't consider each other competition, and that, for the most part, kept us from finding it useful or especially gratifying to persecute each other.

The only time he was put in charge of me was when I was in first grade and my parents told him he had to walk me to and from school. This he did without trying to lose me. No running and cutting through people's backyards and climbing fences, which some of my friends' brothers (and sisters) did.

I submit that as Exhibit A in the case against Kevin becoming a malevolent ghost. (Though I'd be the first to admit that death changes everything.)

When I was in second grade, the people three houses down got a dog that would come to the very edge of their yard and growl whenever I passed. Though Kevin was no longer officially in charge of me, he put himself between me and that dog, and he growled back. The dog slunk away. From then on that dog knew I knew he was a coward, and he didn't bother me anymore, even when Kevin wasn't with me.

Exhibit B. For anyone who's keeping track.

For all of that, Kevin and I didn't think alike: I was a fen of the Beatles; he liked the Rolling Stones. My favorite TV show was Dr.
Kildare;
Kevin said Ben Casey was the better doctor and
The Defenders
was a better show. But different tastes in music and TV are not important One of the big ways we differed was our reactions when our father talked about being in France during World War II. Dad had been part of the OSS. His group would parachute behind enemy lines to help the French Resistance fighters, and one of his stories was about the time one of his men landed badly, breaking a leg. They couldn't bring the wounded man with them, because he would have slowed them down. And they couldn't leave him behind, because if he was captured the Germans would surely torture him until he revealed the men's hiding place. So Dad had to shoot him. His own man.

I hoped I would never find myself in a position where I had to kill one of my friends, but I also hoped that—if I had to—I could be as strong as my father.

But when I made the mistake of sharing this profound thought with Kevin, he called me a ninny. The women, he pointed out, stayed home and kept the factories going, except for the Wacs and Waves, who were mostly nurses, and nobody expected them to shoot anybody.

"In France," I pointed out, "the women fought."

"Oh, good heavens!" Kevin gasped, an expression he normally did
not
use. "I
thought
you might be turning French, Sarah, but I wasn't sure. We'll have to keep you away from French bread and frogs' legs until you get over it."

Kevin never seemed to be interested in hearing what he called "the old war stories"—our parents' or our aunts' and uncles'. Not even Aunt Lise's, who was born in Germany and had different stories from everybody else's. Like how by the end of the war she and her mother were eating grass from what had been their front yard, because all the supplies went to support the German military, not the civilians. She claimed Uncle Jack had saved her life by marrying her and bringing her to America after his tour of duty was up. And that was despite the fact that, when she first got here, Americans who recognized her accent sometimes spat at her, even though she was barely eighteen and too young to have had anything to do with the war.

I thought all this stuff was fascinating. While I would stay indoors after dinners with the aunts and uncles, lapping it all up, Kevin would go play basketball with his friends.

Would a disinterest in the past be a sign that Kevin was not likely to ever turn into a ghost? Exhibit C? Or at least Exhibit B and a half?

One time, when I was ten and Kevin was fifteen, Dad wouldn't let Kevin escape. Kevin made some comment criticizing the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and that made Dad mad. "Fascists, Nazis, Communists; they're all the same," Dad said, and the next Sunday he asked Uncle Jack to "Bring those pictures." "Those pictures" were ones Uncle Jack had taken when he had been with a group that had liberated one of the concentration camps where the Nazis used to keep Jews. Dad felt Kevin should see them.

Kevin, but not me. And not Uncle Jack and Aunt Lise's son, Dwight, who was one year younger than me. (Dwight was
exactly
the kind of boy who if he died would come back and haunt his family. He would be the sort of ghost who would rattle chains in the attic and who would sneak up behind you and breathe on your neck.)

"Go out and play," Dad told us.

Aunt Lise agreed with him. "These pictures are disturbing. They are not for you to see."

Well, all right. Be that way.

Dwight and I could wait.

We went up to Kevin's room and played Monopoly, but we listened until we heard Uncle Jack open the hall closet door to return the pictures to his coat pocket. Then I sent Dwight downstairs to fetch a glass of milk, and on his way back he stopped at the closet.

The pictures were worse than disturbing. I felt scummy, as though I was looking at dirty pictures, as though—by looking at those pictures—I was responsible for what was in them. I'd never seen such skinny people, not even in the pictures of starving African kids that the nuns would show us on Mission Sunday.

"They don't even look real," I said.

"Maybe they're actors," Dwight suggested. With Dwight it was sometimes hard to tell if he was joking or being stupid.

The men all had shaven heads; the women all had scarves to hide that their heads had been shaved, too. And there were kids, as bald and dull-eyed as the grown-ups. I'd seen pictures of other people—French and Belgian and Egyptian—welcoming the liberating troops. They were always waving, cheering, dancing in the streets. There was always some young woman climbing up on the tanks to kiss the soldiers. The people from
this
camp just stood there, though you'd figure they'd have been the most relieved to be rescued. But they just looked at the camera, or beyond it, with their hollow eyes, as though they'd given up hoping and weren't ready to believe they'd really been rescued.

I couldn't stop looking, even though I wanted to.

Kevin came in then, and he plucked the pictures out of our hands. "These are the ones who were rescued," he reassured me, even though I hadn't said a word. "These guys survived."

I hoped Kevin was right, and ignored the feet that his foot came down on Dwight's before Dwight could talk about the ones who weren't rescued.

Exhibit Whatever.

That was my vision of the war my parents had lived through: the valiant Americans who came in the nick of time to rescue the downtrodden people of the world. Bad was bad and good was good. Once in a while there were hard choices—wounded buddies, no-win situations—but generally if you thought about it long enough, you would know what you had to do if you were brave enough to do it.

Then came the war in Vietnam.

At fourteen I was more interested in trying to iron my hair straight and in reading J. R. R. Tolkien's "Ring" trilogy than in watching the news—especially news that was always depressing. And it wasn't just that American soldiers were getting killed. Buddhist monks were setting themselves on fire to protest the war; college students were burning flags and draft cards and ROTC buildings, yelling and screaming into the TV cameras. I was vaguely annoyed at the rude and messy ruckus, but mostly I was grateful—grateful to be a girl so I wasn't draftable, a Catholic so I could look down my nose at the suicidal Buddhists, and too young to go to college, which looked to be fast becoming a dangerous place to be.

Kevin, of course,
was
draftable.

He was also more sympathetic to the draft dodgers and the protesters—Buddhist and U.S.—than anybody else in the family. Is that another piece of evidence to support that he couldn't have turned into a vengeance-seeking ghost, that he was sympathetic by nature and didn't approve of killing?

Or is it a sign pointing at exactly the opposite?

"When I was your age," Dad told him at the dinner table, the day he got his draft card with a number so low we knew he would be drafted, "I was proud to serve my country."

"When you were my age," Kevin countered, "the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, and Hitler was an obvious psychotic who wanted to take over the world and re-create it in his own image."

"Yeah?" Dad wouldn't have been surprised that his patriotic pep talk was being sidetracked. This was not a new conversation.

"Now,
we're
the bad guys."

I thought,
Can't we talk about something else for a change?
Being stuck at the dinner table, with the conversation endlessly going round and round, the only thing I could think of was
Hey, how about those guys on
Ed Sullivan
last night who spun all those plates on those poles.
Probably not the most brilliant opening for diverting an argument.

"The bad guys," Dad said, "are the ones who keep undermining their own country—kids who have too much time on their hands and don't appreciate that their parents are going broke sending them to college."

"Have you looked at a map lately?" Kevin asked. "North Vietnam is ... what—the size of Florida? Talk about the bully that can't pick on someone his own size."

Mom, spooning out mashed potatoes, murmured, "Kevin, you don't need to be sarcastic to make your point And, Tom, we're all right here—you don't need to shout to be heard."

"He isn't making a point at all," Dad said, "and I am not shouting." But he did lower his
voice: "Obviously
this isn't an issue between the United States and North Vietnam. Because
if
it were just North Vietnam"—Mom handed me the bowl of potatoes, since Dad was too engrossed in making his own point to take it—"the war would have been over about two and a half minutes after it started. This is an issue of fighting Communism, of keeping the people of the world free."

"What's right for us isn't necessarily right for the world," Kevin said. "Especially when the only leaders they have to choose from are corrupt."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Dad snapped.

Mom cut in. Very sweetly she said, "Well, none of us has actually been to Vietnam to see and judge for ourselves."

Dad gave her a look of surprised betrayal.

Mom?
Mom
coming in with what sounded suspiciously like an opinion? I knew where everybody else stood on the Vietnam issue: Dad for military intervention, Kevin against, me for not talking about it anymore. But I realized for the first time that maybe Mom wasn't with me. Maybe, even though she never said anything, she had views of her own. Or maybe not Maybe she was just trying to make peace in the family.

Still, the heat of the discussion went down several notches. To Kevin, Dad said, "Do you think I wasn't afraid to fight in a war, too?"

"That isn't...," Kevin started in a huff. But then he sighed. "That isn't all of it."

"I know," Dad said. He patted Kevin's hand, awkwardly, self-consciously. "I also know you'll do the right thing."

The old I-know-you'll-do-the-right-thing ploy.

And Dad was right. Despite his dinnertime complaints, Kevin didn't try for conscientious-objector status, nor did he burn his card or take off for Canada, which a couple of the boys in his class did. He reported for service, which Dad took as a victory for his persuasive ability, so Dad forgave Kevin his lack of enthusiasm.

What he couldn't forgive was that Kevin got killed.

The telegram came on a bright summer Saturday. My mother was in the side yard, hanging clothes out to dry. My father was trying to teach tricks to the brain-damaged puppy he had rescued from the animal shelter three weeks earlier and had named—for some reason clear only to my father—Spartacus. I was just sitting around being hot, wondering out loud why if the Fitzhughs next door could afford an air conditioner, we couldn't; and why if Mary Beth Hinkle's family took their vacation in a cottage at Myrtle Beach every year, we only ever went camping at Stony Brook Park.

Then this car pulled up in front of our house. Out came these two army guys in spiffy new uniforms. I think that was when all three of us knew—then, as soon as we saw them, before the army guys said a word, before they started their slow, deliberate walk up the driveway.

Mom came around front, still holding a clothespin in one hand and a pillowcase in the other. Dad pushed Spartacus away, and when Spartacus kept on trying to pull the stick from Dad's hand, Dad broke it in two and let the pieces drop. I stood up from the stoop, thinking,
This is so like Mary Beth, to be off at the beach when I need her here.

Kevin—the army men and the telegram explained—had been killed when his unit had been ambushed by the Vietcong. There weren't very many more details available, other than that five other men had been killed at the same time.

"
Men"?
I thought, surprised to hear the term applied to Kevin. Kevin wasn't a man: He was my brother.
Fathers are
men.
Uncles
are men. Kids are ... well, they're kids. Had Kevin, at his eighteenth birthday, started to think of himself as a man?

I wondered if the other five dead men were really five more dead kids. I wondered if these same two army men had to deliver the news to five other families. Then I wondered how old
they
were. Their practically shaved heads, and those stupid dress-uniform hats worn so low on their brows, and their I-am-a-rock expressions probably made them look older than they were. Were they eighteen, too? Were they brand-new army guys, just out of boot camp, and was that why they were still here in the United States? Would they be leaving for Vietnam soon themselves, and were they—all the while they were speaking so politely but emotionlessly with us—mentally repeating to themselves:
Not me, not my family; please, God, don't let this happen to me?