Part 3 — Neil Wrote Home
I took the paper from the hand of the Major, and my fingers shook so badly that I could not unfold it. Starla lunged across the boards and caught the corner of the page, and for a moment my daughter and I were holding the same sheet of paper from opposite ends, with sixty people watching. Then she let go. She put her hands over her face. “Read it, Daddy,” she said. “Please just read it.”
I read it out loud, standing on the dock in the sun, in the dry crackly voice of an old shrimper. The handwriting belonged to my boy. It slanted forward as though he were leaning into a wind. “Dad, if you are reading this, then I did not make it home, and I am sorry. I want you to hear three things, and then I want you to go fishing.”
“One. The Miss Ellen needs a new engine. There is nine thousand dollars of my pay in the coffee can at the back of my closet. Use it. Two. Tell Starla I am not mad. She borrowed six thousand from my account for nursing school, and then she quit, and she has been too ashamed to tell either one of us. I would rather have her happy than have my six thousand back. Tell her to go back. She will be the best nurse in Alabama. Three. Be good to yourself, Dad. You never are.”
The dock was silent. The grandmother of somebody blew her nose into a napkin. Starla sank to her knees on the boards and wept in a way I had not heard since her mother died. “I took it from him,” she said. “He sent me his pay for the semester, and then I could not do it, I could not stand the blood, and I never told anybody. He died before I could say I was sorry. I thought he died hating me.” She looked up at the sky. “Fifteen years, Daddy.”
I knelt on those old boards beside her, as well as my knees allowed, and I held the face of my daughter in both hands the way I did when she was small. “He did not hate you, baby,” I said. “He wrote it down two days before he died. He forgave you before you ever asked him.” A boy of twenty-three had settled the debt of his sister in a letter that waited fifteen years for the right moment to arrive.
Ricky had been quiet through all of it. He tried to climb back up on the picnic table and nearly fell off. “Hollis, listen—” The Major said, “Sir, I would sit down.” A deputy from Mobile County had been standing at the end of the dock since she arrived, and he came forward now with his hat in his hand. Ricky was arrested for the theft of the medal and for the false message he sent to the dealer, which claimed I was in a nursing home and the family wanted the medal gone.
Ricky pleaded guilty in the winter to theft and fraud. The judge gave him three years of probation and ordered him to repay the $2,400 the Major spent to buy the medal back. The Major would not keep a cent of it. She gave every dollar to a fund for the families of fallen soldiers on the Gulf Coast, and she sent me the receipt with a note that said only, Neil would have liked this. Ricky moved out of my house the week after the party and found work on a barge.
The Major sat with me on the dock after the crowd went home and told me what the citation said. In the fall of 2011, an armored truck had rolled into a canal outside Kandahar. Neil pulled two wounded men out of the water, and then he went back for the third. She told me Neil talked about the Miss Ellen every night in the barracks, and about me, and about the way the shrimp came up silver in the net at dawn. I had known my son was brave. I had not known he was homesick.
Starla took the ring off her finger on the dock that evening and put it in the hand of Ricky without saying a word. She enrolled in the nursing program at Bishop State in January. I found the coffee can exactly where Neil said, at the back of the closet behind the winter boots, wrapped in a rubber band. Nine thousand dollars, in twenties and tens, still smelling of cedar. The money had waited fifteen years too. I used the first of it for her tuition.
The Miss Ellen got her new engine in March, from a yard in Bayou La Batre where a man named Dewey rebuilt it in his shop for half the price, because he had known Neil in grade school. I painted her name again on the bow with a fine brush. At the christening, Starla broke a bottle of root beer across the rail, and the whole dock cheered.
I hung the frame back on the wall by the front door with new glass. Both medals sit side by side now, the Bronze Star and the Silver, next to the boot camp picture and the letter, folded in a small plastic sleeve. Every morning I stop in front of them on my way out. I put two fingers on the glass, the way a man touches the shoulder of someone he loves.
On Sundays Starla and I take the Miss Ellen out into the Sound, just the two of us, and I let her take the wheel. She is passing her classes. Last week she called me from the parking lot of the school to say she had earned the highest grade on an anatomy exam, and she was laughing and crying at once. I told her to hold the line steady. Neil would have laughed at that, and then he would have asked what was for supper.
