June 20, 2010

Daddy was a veteran of WWII, served in the Pacific, and came home damaged I think, by what he had seen and experienced. His job was to follow US forces who wrested islands in the Pacific like Kwajalein, from the Japs, as he called them, and dig trenches and shovel in dead bodies of the Japs and bury them to keep disease from spreading.

Day after day of shoveling heaps of bodies of rotting Japanese soldiers into trenches caused him, for the rest of his life to have a "nervous stomach" as he called it. The VA gave him some Librium that he took off and on. He never spoke of the war--he tried to bury those memories in the trenches of his brain--it didn't help much.

So, the US Army taught him how to run a bulldozer and he used that learning off and on the rest of his life; he dug ponds and leveled plots for house sites, etc. to make a little money.
Daddy and Mama had six stairstep children, only nine years difference between the eldest--me--and the youngest. Mama was high strung and neurotic and had tried suicide before they were married--they were ill suited for each other.
I grew up listening to them fight--in the middle of the night; her crying and him with his voiced raised. Daddy sometimes drank to relieve stress I think--but I never saw him drunk. Mama was always deeply depressed and was a terrible house keeper--as I write this I realize they were both overwhelmed by the life they found themselves in. Burdens of too many children and no money for starters, living in a shack in the middle of a cornfield.

In middle age, Mama and Daddy opened a little cafe in town and Mama started working for the post office part time; she later became postmaster at a small town post office. I thought she and Daddy were finally living the good life--they went on convention trips etc. and enjoyed it. But after over 40 years of marriage, she divorced him after another suicide attempt. It was a big ugly bitter horrible mess, with the children taking sides. Our family has been torn and ripped and forever unreconciled.

But I remember Daddy, wearing his usual blue coveralls and a cowboy hat, moving a piano for my sister from upstairs of her house into a van; of him coming to Texas and helping me load up my belongings into a van so I could move back to Mississippi, and taking time to flirt with the woman across the road at the same time. Oh he grumped when he was called on to help move the chillun--he grumped a little, but he did it anyway. I hope I thanked him enough. I have his cowboy hat hanging in my office. I used to sniff the old sweat stains on the sweatband of the hat, to get some sense of him, but there's nothing there. He died many years ago, and is buried next to his mother in a tiny Mississippi graveyard, with an American flag on the tombstone.

susil