HIGH MEADOW FARM, 24 June 1969—He rolled onto his back. Josh adjusted, snuggled against his leg. Bobby moved again. Again Josh adjusted. In his whiskey-induced fog-sleep, Bobby shuddered. His right arm fell over the edge of the mattress. Immediately he jerked it back up, laid his hand across his stomach. Dim light from the bathroom—Grandpa let a seven-watt night-light burn continuously—seeped in through the doorway. At Bobby’s motion, Josh raised his head and shook it, causing his ears to flap, then lay back down, sighed, went to sleep.
Wapinski’s face contorted. He did not move. For hours his mind had been snatching at images, yet the scotch had deadened it, made it lethargic, closed down each sprouting thought before it could take hold. Now the alcohol was mostly metabolized, the toxic remnants washed to the liver and kidneys for sorting, filtering, and evacuation.
He grimaced. Josh sensed his restlessness, snuggled in tighter, snorted. Wapinski’s mind filled with the image of a tree-lined dirt road surrounded by lush green vegetation. He stares up the road. On the right there is a stone wall, very clear, the stones covered with blue-green lichens. He can see the wall diminishing in the short distance to the forested hill at the end of the road.
He is behind the wall. They are in numerous positions along the wall and the road, dug in, expecting an attack. He has an incredible number of weapons—pistols, M-16s, captured AK-47s, all heaped and loaded—ready. There are boxes of ammunition beside him. Somehow he has moved across the road into a gully on the left side. He is facing up the road, uphill, expecting the attack to begin any moment. He lies in the gully, in fresh orange-brown dirt, focusing on the road. Others are in positions behind the stone wall. At the end of the road, perhaps a quarter mile, there is a crossing road and beyond there is a hill that rises sharply. The hill is alive with movement but he cannot detect anything specific, for the movement is under a thick canopy of oak, ash and maple. Local land. He does not know why he is there but has been told an attack will come from the hill, a human wave determined to sweep over the land.
Wapinski checks his rifles, aims one in on the road. Stacy is behind the stone wall. He can see her crouching silhouette. Slowly the attack begins, the wave rumbles forward, hidden beneath the vegetation. The earth trembles. Still there are no soldiers. The dirt is mud. The vegetation thins. One soldier breaks from beneath the trees, begins his sprint down the road toward Wapinski’s ambush. Wapinski recognizes him. The ambushers are withdrawing. He glances across. Stacy is gone. The sprinting soldier, the attacker, is running down the left edge of the road, a rifle in his hands. His legs churn. The road surface is thick mud. It slows him. He is trying hard but he is slowing. Wapinski is confused. It is Akins. Joe Akins. He aims in on Akins. Why is Akins attacking? Why must he be ambushed? Wapinski centers his bead at Akins’ stomach. If the rounds are high, low, left, or right, he will still have a decent chance of killing him. Wapinski breathes in deeply, begins a long, slow exhale, begins his smooth squeezing, of the trigger, begins—BAM! A round slams into Wapinski’s hip. Before the pain explodes upward into him, he knows it will come. He knows his pelvis is shattered, hears the bones crunch, feels the shards scraping against each other, waits for the pain. BAMTHUD! A round hits his ribs, his chest, rips deeply into him. BAM! Another round. Another impaction. Bam! God! Help! Medic! Stacy! His company, Stacy, completely gone. Medic!
He is cool. The vegetation is gone. He is in a small room, cramped, a hundred masked people pushing, shoving. “Next,” one shouts. “Next,” another answers. “Not him,” Akins says to the corpsman. “Put him—”
Wapinski opened his eyes, bolted up. “Don’t leave me,” he mumbled. He was in his own room, his old room at Grandpa’s. His own voice surprised him. He knew exactly where he was, when it was. “Why the fuck?” he muttered into the dark. Josh lifted his head from where he lay by Wapinski’s legs. “Akins,” Wapinski said. “Of all people, Akins.” Josh wrinkled his forehead, rose further, then again fell back onto the bed. Wapinski swung his feet to the floor, stood, fumbled for cigarettes, lit one, went to the bathroom. Outside it was dark. His head hurt. His hands were sore. The knuckles of his right hand had scabbed over, on his left forearm there was a long abrasion. He returned to bed, pushed Josh over, smoked another cigarette. He did not want to think about the party, the people, the fight. He didn’t understand how the flow of events led to the fight, or even to the debate that had preceded the fight. His head felt dull; his eyes itched. He got up again, put his pants on. He thought about going out for a walk but was afraid the squeaking door hinges and the creaky floor would disturb his grandfather.
It was impossible to sleep. The night was humid. More humid than Nam, he thought. Besides, he thought, Josh keeps hogging the bed. He stared into the darkness. Stacy’s image was there, everywhere, in every corner, on the dark windowpanes. He looked out the window, cupped his hands about his eyes, leaned against the glass. He could see her in the night sky. Behind her image was the bloody face of a foolish boy. Wapinski felt sick. He felt for the bottle in the dimness, drank. The whiskey burned in his throat.
For the second time in his life Robert Wapinski had moved into the farmhouse at High Meadow. And for the second time he fell under the spell of the land and of his grandfather.
He knew—not consciously, not yet, that would take more time—that High Meadow would be a place of healing, a place of new perspectives, new energies, new idealism. But first Robert Janos Wapinski, ex-Army infantry captain and combat company commander, age 23 that summer of 1969, would need to be held in the grip of the land, would need to feel he belonged to that once-scarred and once-rejuvenated land.
The farm at High Meadow wasn’t much of a farm anymore ... no cows, no pigs, only a few chickens, the lower pasture rented out and planted by the Lutz boys in feed corn, the sugarbush and orchard ignored. Perhaps it never had been much of a farm. The soils were thin and the humus scant. A million years earlier the land had been seabed. Sediment had built up year after year, compressing to become the underlying bedrock formation of Pocono sandstone. Then the land had elevated in the geological Appalachian Revolution, then folded and weathered, the impervious Pocono strata fracturing into immense mile-square blocks. When the land receded, successive glaciations scarred and gouged the surface.
For 13,000 years, first microscopic vegetation, then mosses and larger green plants grew, died, deposited their organic materials. Animal life migrated to the area. Then came man. Delaware Indian oral history dates back at least a millennium. Linguistically Algonquin, the Delaware called themselves Lenape, “true, original” people, and the Monsee tribe (Mountain People) called themselves Wolf. They were the fiercest of all the Delaware, though even they did not live on the land. The mountain ridge between Loyalsock and Little Loyalsock creeks, including the land of the future farm at High Meadow, was considered unsuitable.
Europeans first viewed this land in 1681, the year William Penn the Younger acquired all of Pennsylvania from King Charles II. At that time north central Pennsylvania was covered by a forest of eastern hemlocks that rose to 160 feet and stood four to six feet in diameter at the base. In 1743 mapmakers referred to the area as the Endless Mountains and noted the gloom of the forest, the three-inch thickness of the tree bark, the thick carpet of needles on the forest floor, and the wide alleys between the massive trunks.
Prior to the beginning of the American Revolution a band of survivors of the Pennamite War between Connecticut and Pennsylvania took refuge in the area along the Indian trail north of the gap at High Meadow. They lived there for three years until the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 when British troops and Iroquois warriors wiped out the settlement at Wilkes-Barre. Fearing reprisal, the Pennamite survivors moved on.
European settlers moved west and north from Philadelphia but circled the mountain regions. Only after most of America had been settled did farmers come to the Mill Creek delta. Mill Creek Falls was established in 1849 by Raymond Hartley, an Englishman who had fallen out of favor with his wealthy family. He designed the town center, laid out the roads, built the courthouse, hotel and first school. He also established the first industry, a tannery and leatherworks. By 1860 Mill Creek Falls had grown to 800, Heckley County to more than 4,000.
In the 1870s, Williamsport, to the south, became the world’s hardwood center. The demand for wood exploded the region’s population. Capital poured in. Land barons grabbed up huge tracts. Eagles Mere became a fashionable resort, and much of the lumber used for the mansions there was cut from the groves about Mill Creek Falls. After the lower tracts were cut the lumber men moved uphill. Railroads were constructed to transport logs and mill products—lath, barrel staves, wheel spokes, bulk lumber—to Williamsport. In 1888 a branch line reached to Mill Creek where the tannery processed nearly three million pelts each month.
The Endless Mountains region was just moving out of log cabins when in the rest of the country electricity was coming into common use, but business depended upon trees and once the hemlocks were cut they never returned. In the late years of the nineteenth century, with the easy land stripped bare, companies moved to new tracts and pulled most of the people with them.
Then, as the century turned, paved roads and the automobile replaced the railroad. New companies built timber slides to get the highest, the farthest, the last logs. By 1910 more than 95 percent of Heckley County had been deforested. Only on the ridge beyond the gap—a natural steep-sided trough that kept the lumbermen from being able to transport logs across the chasm, the gap that would become the north border of the High Meadow farm—were any virgin eastern hemlocks left standing.
Finally the companies left for good. The people vanished. Clustered shacks rotted, caved in upon themselves during mosquito-infested summers, disappeared beneath the cover of early cycle foliage, plants that would help the earth regenerate in a process that could take 10,000 years.
To this land came Pewel Wapinski. In 1909, at twenty years old, he left his mountain village south of the city of Lwów in Polish Austria, and migrated to the United States. For seven years he wandered the eastern third of America; for seven years he worked at menial tasks, educated himself, dreamed. In 1917 he enlisted in the Army of the United States; was sent to France; fought at Château-Thierry, the first major U.S. combat role of the Great War, where he was wounded. In 1919, after convalescence, he was discharged, still alone, still to wander. On his way from Wilkes-Barre to Williamsport he took a wrong road and found the Loyalsock and Mill Creek Falls. North of the falls he discovered barren, worthless land that could be purchased for next to nothing. In 1922 Pewel Wapinski became a U.S. citizen, met and married Brigita Clewlow. In December of that year, only months after he purchased 143 muddy acres—the top soil washed away in heavy rains, blown away by dry winds, cracked and heaved in freezing temperatures—in that horrible month of that horrible year of mud slides and frozen ruptured scars, Brigita Clewlow Wapinski gave birth to their only child. They named him Pewel for his father but used the English spelling, Paul, for the new country.
For Paul and for Brigita, Pewel first built a small cabin a hundred yards beyond the northeast shore of a muddy swamp. He then tended to the highest pasture spreading clover and alfalfa seed to stop the erosion, then cut drainage ditches across the hills. He dammed the basin’s outlet, built a spillway, planted an apple orchard, set to work on a windbreak along the ridge that in a few years led him to plant seven acres of sugar maple seedlings.
When Paul Wapinski returned from World War II, High Meadow was supporting a small herd of dairy cattle and enough pigs to keep a quarter of Mill Creek in pork chops and bacon. In 1946 Robert Wapinski was born to Paul and Miriam (nee) Cadwalder.
The house Bobby Wapinski moved back into in 1969 was run-down. Perhaps any home in which a man lives alone for fifteen years, alone after his wife’s death, would be run-down. But Pewel Wapinski lost not only his wife in 1954, he lost his grandson whom he and his wife had raised for more than six years as though he were their own son, as though they, late in life, had been given the chance to raise their only son again, a son whose vanishing they did not understand, whose abandonment of his family horrified them. A year later Pewel caught Miriam making the nine-year-old boy eat, without utensils, from an animal bowl on the floor, calling him dog and pig, telling him he would eat there forever until he learned to eat without making noise, eat like his brother and sister who sat respectfully afraid at the table not seeing Rob on his knees, his hands behind his back, licking at his food, trying so hard to be soundless. What else she had done, Pewel did not know, refused to imagine.
Pewel Wapinski had attempted to gain custody but Miriam fought him and the court sided without question with the mother who owned a Victorian in the Lutzburgh section over the old man from the hills, sided with her without even hearing the old man’s story much less what the boy might say. In Pewel’s loss there was despondency. When that passed he could no longer live in the house except to eat and sleep. He rose early each day, spent the day in the barn, in a loft office he built with such intricate precision the woodwork rivaled that in the best homes along River Front Drive or indeed even those in the mansions at Eagles Mere.
The exterior of the house had been neglected. Where the grass around the barn was neatly cut, that around the house grew to its self-limiting height. Where the tree limbs at the barn were meticulously trimmed so that in the strongest storm winds the branches barely reached the roof with the tickle of a leaf, the trees around the house had grown first to brush the sides, then to jam against the roof and windows. And where the barn trim was repainted yearly, even in his eightieth year though he only did the lower sections now and hired various boys from other hill farms to do the second story and gable peaks, the house had not been painted since 1953.
The man Bobby Wapinski returned to was small, wiry, shrunken to five foot seven, only 135 pounds. Yet Grandpa Pewel was still strong, and except for when the arthritis in his shoulders, hips and especially his hands flared, he was spry. And he was happy. Perhaps that was the foundation of his spell.
For ten days Robert Wapinski and his grandfather spoke little, mostly just vague stammerings in the kitchen at the table where Robert had learned to talk.
“Bob,” his grandfather said. He did not call him Rob or Robbie. It was the first evening of July. The house was hot, humid, smelled of mildew even though the old man had cleaned harder than he had in fifteen years. “I imagine, if I’d just returned from a war, if I’d just come back here, I imagine I’d feel a bit of a stranger here. And I imagine I’d be mighty restless, too.”
Robert Wapinski leaned forward on his elbows, wrapped both hands around his coffee. He hadn’t verbalized those thoughts to himself but as Grandpa talked he realized that he did feel like a stranger, not at High Meadow, but in town and at Nittany Mountain. And he was restless. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for.
“Well,” Grandpa continued, “don’t expect to feel all right overnight. It takes time. Nothing grows overnight. It takes time to grow new skin.”
Robert said nothing. Conversations between grandfather and grandson were slow, unrushed. Earlier he had told his grandfather about Stacy, about the fight at the frat house, what he could remember about the ride and the crash. He had relayed these things as if he had been a briefing officer delivering an afteraction report. He had said little about Viet Nam except on the third night at High Meadow, half intoxicated, he had raged, “With all their talk, with all the words, it’s like nobody here has the vaguest idea what’s happening over there. They don’t know. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know about our soldiers. They don’t give a shit about the people. I was going to go back to school. I can’t go back to that place.”
Grandpa had answered, “Your father felt like that some when he came back from World War Two. Your grandma and me, we pushed him back to your ma’s cause we thought that was right. He sure as hell couldn’t live with your ma. Well, you know, you can stay up here. Do whatever you want. Alone or bring whoever you want. Door’s always open. The place is yours.”
Again the fourth night Robert had drunk too much. He’d talked, raged, spewed forth indignation, but he refused to hear. And Grandpa had not repeated Bobby’s comments, had not tried to reason with his grandson. He had simply sat there, listened, let the young man discharge his anger.
Grandpa finished his coffee. He rose and carried his plate to the sink. “I don’t know if you know this,” he said running hot water into the dishpan, “but I felt like a stranger, too, after the Great War. But, ha, I was a stranger. It was okay for me. Do you want to give Josh the bones?”
“Just one.” Robert brought his plate to the sink. He picked out a bone with some meat left on it. “I don’t think his digestive tract is mature enough for much more but it’ll be good for his teeth.” He made a chicking sound. “Come on, Boy.” He opened the back door, tossed the bone into the yard. Josh scampered out.
“Granpa.”
“Um-hmm.”
“What makes her so cold?”
“Who?”
“My mother. Why’s she like that?”
“She’s a hard woman to ... Her ma, she was a lot like that too. Them Cadwalders is like that.”
“God! I wish I knew what made her that way.”
“Well, she is cold,” Pewel Wapinski said. “I haven’t hardly talked to her since the day she—she chased ...”
“I know,” Robert said. “It’s okay with me.”
“It’s not with me,” the old man said simply. “That’s not the way families are supposed to be. She broke up more’n just her own family. She broke up my family, too.”
“What was my Pa like?” Robert asked. He had been told stories about his father when he was young, and he had read the letters, but he had a need to hear again, maybe to read again, in light of his own past few years.
“He was a good boy. A fine boy. When he came back from the Pacific, though, he needed time. I don’t know what he saw there. He was in a field artillery unit. Okinawa late in the war. He went late. Not with the first force. He was a replacement soldier pretty late in ’42. But then he went on to the Solomons and the Marianas. And he was with the first guns on Okinawa in ’45. I cut articles for him, just like I did for you. When he got back your brother was three years old and your dad couldn’t touch im. We didn’t give him time. And she sure as hell didn’t. She got pregnant. That’s when you were born.”
“She’s always saying I’m just like him.”
“You are like him. You are. You’re Wapinski through and through. That’s what she couldn’t stand. She wanted to turn him into a Cadwalder, like she done to the fella she’s got with her now.”
“Doug?”
“Sorriest excuse for a man I ever seen.”
“He’s okay, I guess.”
“He’s nothin compared to your Pa.”
“You know, every time she’d get worked up and start smacking me around she’d always yell, ‘Yer just like him. Just like yer f-ah-ther.’ I mean, I think I knew way back, even at nine or ten, she was a bitch. I think I knew that’s why he left.”
“That’s why he left. If she hadn’t been like that I’d of had a son and a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Your grandma and I gave your father five thousand dollars when they got married so he could buy her a house in town. That was a lot of money back then. But she turned everything she could against the Wapinski name. Only one she wasn’t able to get to is you. And that’s because you’ve got that Wapinski stubborn streak. Your father had it but she got to him at his low point. And we didn’t help because we didn’t know.”
“Do you think he’s still alive?”
“Nope. I think he died because if he was still alive he would have come back for you after he’d sorted hisself out. He loved you. He didn’t know Brian. She’d already turned him into a Cadwalder by the time he come back. And, of course, he left before Joanne was born.”
“Is she my full sister?”
“Maybe.”
“Like Ma might have been a whore, huh?”
“She was goin with a man when your father was away.”
“And me? Am I maybe a bastard too?”
“No. Your Ma wasn’t playing around just when your Pa came home. You were conceived probably that week he come back. And there was a good year there. Least that’s what we always believed. But then she started playin around. As I heard it.”
“So my mother was a whore.”
“No. Not a whore. Just she weren’t your father’s exclusively. She liked a few other men and that drove him crazy. But—but I think he would of put up with even that if she weren’t like she was to him. And he couldn’t tell me or his ma because we didn’t want to know. You didn’t talk about those things then.”
“Great family.”
“Bob, Wapinski is a great family. It’s a shame you don’t know more. A shame I don’t remember more. But Wapinskis have always been strong. Back in our village, my father was looked up to by everyone. And my brothers were strong. And Wapinskis have always been brave and truthful. When I first come to this country I worked in every kind of job. I am always the best. But I never found in a city what I found here and that’s why I stayed. Wapinskis are better than most. We serve others. But we know, you can lead others by your service. When you have children, Bob, that’s something you teach. You always teach your children that Wapinski is special. That it’s a thing to be honored. That way, they carry that with them and they’ll always be good.”
Bobby squinted. The Wapinski stuff was hard to take. “What about Pa?”
“Your pa, he ... between your ma and what he saw on Okinawa ...”
“What’d he see on Okinawa? I thought he never talked about it.”
“He told me ... well ... there was terrible mayhem there. People, farmers, gettin between the armies and bein slaughtered. Maybe somewhere near 60,000 natives. Seems I read that. Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand noncombatants in just a few months. Then after ... after the fighting was finished, he was there, then too, part of the occupation force but just a short time. He couldn’t stand it. They carried so much anger, American soldiers, anger from having seen so many of their friends die. When they’d be on guard, at night, if they saw a native, they’d shoot im.”
“Shoot ...”
“Shoot em. After the war ended there.”
“Um. I’m not surprised.”
“Well, your father was! He didn’t like it. He wanted to have some men tried. It affected him a long time.”
“Yeah. I guess it could. We were very strict about that kind of thing.”
“I’m glad to know that.”
“Some stuff like that happened. I know some units where guys went crazy and maybe killed people they didn’t have to during a fight. It never happened with my unit.”
“Good. Then you don’t need that.”
“What? The scotch?”
“Yep.”
“It ... ah, it just helps me sleep.”
“Bob, I’m only going to say this once. You don’t need me harpin at you. But you’re not goina find the answer in that bottle. Be careful of that. It won’t do you much good and you haven’t finished what you begun.”
“Finished what?”
“You’re here for a reason, Bob. Here, on earth. I don’t know the reason but there’s not a soul born without reason. You ask yourself this like you were somebody else, like He was askin you. You say, ‘What have you done that you want to show me? What have you done you’re proud of?’ Maybe your reason is to right them folks you think are wrong.”
“Folks?”
“Them newspeople you cuss at.”
“About Viet Nam! Uhn-uh, Granpa, I did my part. And those people ... they don’t want to hear.”
“Then you might just as well give it up.”
“Give it up? Give what up?”
“Your anger. If you’re not going to set them straight, you just might as well agree with them. Let them have your mind.”
“My mind. My—” Bobby put his head into his hands, closed his eyes, mumbled, “Never let em get to your ...”
“Eh?” Grandpa said.
“Oh. Nothin.” Bobby looked up. “I was just thinking of something else.”
“Your part, eh? Well Bob, to me, I think your part’s not finished until you’re finished. Unfinished business, Bob, unfinished business has a way of haunting you. Take care of business, first. You’ve got to plant before you play.”
“Yeah. You’re right Granpa. But not—”
“I know. Not yet. It’s okay. You’ll work it out. I know you will. I know you’ll do it right. You’re Wapinski.”
“Yeah. Thanks Granpa.”
Robert Wapinski began his third week at High Meadow by drawing up a plan for refurbishing the house, and by taking Josh on his first hike into the deep woods. His perspective changed dramatically. He gave up his morning shots of whiskey. He rose at five, made coffee, watched the sunrise. Then he skimmed the newspaper or the newsweekly for Viet Nam–related articles, which he cut and saved but barely read more than the headlines, telling himself he’d study them later. And he made a phone call.
“Bea Hollands, please.”
“This is Bea.”
“Oh.” She had a pleasant telephone voice. He tried to picture her. “I’m Bob Wapinski. I’m a friend of Stacy—”
“Oh yes, Bob. Hi.”
“Hi. I was—”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Uh ...” Blew this one, he thought.
“Bob, we met about three years ago. At a party. I’m the short girl with the red hair. You and Stacy were going pretty hot and heavy then. I guess you didn’t notice much else.”
“Oh, I’m ... yeah. I think I do remember you,” he lied. “Bright red hair?”
“That’s right. That’s why most of my friends call me Red. You can call me Red.”
“Okay. Red.” The phone conversation was easier than he’d expected and he knew it was not because of himself. He already enjoyed talking to her. “Hey, can we get together?”
“Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and we can talk.”
“Stay close, Josh,” he said. They headed out the back door of the house toward the pond. Josh jumped, leaped, nearly did flips in the air. Bob caught him on one of the jumps and hugged him. “Yer a good dog, Josh.” He nuzzled his face behind the dog’s ear. “You really are.” They made a short detour to look at the car they had crashed. Pewel Wapinski had had it towed to High Meadow and pushed into the garage bay on the barn’s downhill side below the main floor. “You know, little brother,” Bob said to Josh, “I coulda gotten you killed. Damn. What a mess. We’ll work on the yard this afternoon and tonight we’ll start strippin her so we can find just how bad she is. Maybe we can pull the engine and seats and stuff and find one that’s been junked with a blown engine and combine the two.”
They walked down the path to the pond’s edge. The morning was already becoming warm. There was a high thin cloud cover. Josh walked into the low water, lapped up some, came out shaking himself next to Bob. “Geez,” Bob laughed. “You dummy. Come on. I’ll take you around.”
The path climbed south, away from the pond, through the edge of the orchards. Bobby was stiff. He hadn’t walked much since the accident. Now climbing the small hill to the orchard his knees ached. He walked slowly. He was not in a hurry. He did not want to think about anything in particular. He felt happy. For the first time since the day he returned, he actually felt happy. They walked into the orchard. It had not been tended in years. In one tree he found the remnant of an old treehouse he and his grandfather had built. Along with feeling happy, he felt melancholy. He didn’t explore the feelings.
He grabbed a branch with his left hand to help himself up a short, steep section. His thumb was still weak. The mild pressure of his grip caused some pain. He paused, examined his knuckles. They had healed from where they’d connected with the boy’s jawbone. His stomach felt better after having eaten with his grandfather for two weeks and having reduced his whiskey consumption. And he was gaining back some weight.
The trail meandered over the wooded knoll at the south end of the pond. They paused. Bob led Josh to the edge of the cliff and sat and looked at the pond. The pond lay at the base of a large, hundred-acre, natural bowl with the highest rim of the ridge at the north, the bowl opening south, the east and west ridges very gradually descending, extending like two arms holding and protecting the pond and the inner farm and even the knoll upon which Wap and Josh sat. Halfway down each arm from the north crest was a sheer six-foot step, a major fracture in the underlying bedrock that ran from one ridge, under the pond, to the other. There were two springs in the floor of the pond that seeped from the fracture, oozing water that created cold spots to swim through in the summer and warm spots where the ice was always thin in winter. The pond was shaped like a Christmas stocking, or fat, squat boot. At the bottom of the toe to his left was the spillway. The dam ran up the entire toe.
The hill in front of the boot was covered with woods. Above the top of the boot there was a steep grassy area before the slope evened out into the forty-acre upper meadow. On the right side, at the back of the boot was the house, the barn, several outbuildings, the stone ruins of the old barn, and three fenced enclosures. The fences had long since deteriorated. Along the east ridge was a cluster of pines, and beneath was the family cemetery. He’d visited his grandmother’s grave numerous times with his grandfather. His great aunt Krystyna, who had come to America after her brother established the farm, also lay there, and two workers had been buried up there in the 1930s, men without families, who’d died one winter in the old barn when the structure had caught fire.
“Pretty, isn’t it, Boy,” Bob said to his dog. “You want to keep moving, don’t you? Okay.” They walked back to the trail and followed it down the west side of the knoll, over the spillway and across the dam. Several trees with arm-thick trunks were growing from the earth of the dam. He made a mental note to bring the chainsaw down and remove them before their roots caused leaks.
The trail followed the edge of the pond for several hundred feet, crossed a small stream, then headed uphill. Josh scampered back and forth, racing wildly, glancing back at Bob every few seconds for approval. Wapinski laughed at his antics. A red-winged blackbird flitted across their path, then glided toward the tall reeds at the pond’s edge. In the trees above, two crows screamed their intruder alarm to the forest.
Wap and Josh continued the climb, up over a set of crags, cresting then descending through a rock crevasse. “Come on, Josh,” Wapinski said. “You can do it.” He stepped carefully from foothold to foothold, dropping quickly into the narrow chasm. Josh barked and whined. He crouched, his paws at the edge of the gorge, hesitated, peered down, shirked back, unsure. Then he stood straight up. “Come on, Josh,” Wapinski called again. But Josh was now still, staring over the chasm, not listening, sniffing. Then Wapinski smelled it. A slight whiff. Entrails and fresh blood. Then full force, repulsive. It threw him back, pushed him to the other side of the world. He snapped his head around. Searched. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood. He knew where he was, but his body reacted over his knowledge. He stepped down. The scent closed upon him in the warm humid air. He looked for the dead. He mumbled to Josh, “There’s got to be a cat or a raccoon here. Maybe a dog. Maybe a dog got a deer. Come on,” he ordered. “Get down here. This is the path we’re takin.” Josh barked, whined. He came to the edge of the steep descent. Wapinski stretched up, grabbed him by the collar. The dog reared back. Wap pulled him down, caught him as he fell, tucked him under his left arm. Josh squirmed, his strong body objecting to being held. Bob descended. The odor closed in on him. The back of his throat tightened. He swallowed. He cleared his throat, spit. He descended to the bottom, put the dog down, looked into the crevices and holes but saw nothing. He searched the area beyond the path, first to one side, then the other. He climbed over a fallen tree and foraged beneath several bushes. With his head up he could smell the death but the moment he tried to home in on the origin, the smell decreased.
There was a slight breeze, so slight Wapinski could not ascertain its direction. He looked uphill at the trees. The wind should lift the leaves, he thought. If I can see the bottoms, the wind will be coming from that direction. The leaves hung listless. He moved farther down toward the pond. Again the smell came strong. He searched and the smell dissipated. He backed up and the smell was gone. He descended and the rancid, piercing smell nearly knocked him down. He felt his stomach tighten. Then he knew he would not stay, would not find the source.
He continued on the path. It rose over a small hummock then fell again toward the pond. He paused and covered his face. “Josh,” he yelled. Wap knelt. The dog came over and pushed his face between Wap’s arm and chest. “Josh,” Wap said softly, almost pleadingly, “you smelled it too, didn’t you?”
When Bob Wapinski and Josh returned to the farmhouse Grandpa was waiting for them with news. Joanne had called. Montgomery McShane was pressing charges.
Bea Hollands was dissatisfied with her life. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Pellegrino, was in Viet Nam, had been there for most of the past two years. Her last close friend, Stacy Carter, was planning a September wedding and a move to New York City with her new husband. And in nine days she would be twenty-one years old and no one seemed to know or care. Bea was stuck in Mill Creek Falls, Pennsylvania, without adventure, without future, stuck, she felt, in a backwater, back-hills town where even yesterday’s Fourth of July celebration, which supposedly brought out the best of small-town America, had been a total drag.
Bea was small, barely five one and not ninety pounds dripping wet, smaller than petite, so small she purchased her clothing in the girls’ departments of the local clothing stores. As if to make up for this diminutive size, she had a wild mane of bright red-orange curls that covered both shoulders and fell to below her waist. Her hair added two inches to her height and framed not just her face but her neck, shoulders and her slight upper body. In the center of that frame, two hazy green eyes tried to look languid, despite their natural vim.
“Hi,” Wapinski said. “You’ve got to be ...”
“Red.” She gave him a big smile. She was dressed in matching pistachio-colored short shorts and T-shirt. “You’re taller than I remembered.”
“Yeah. Ah ...” Two sentences, he thought. Already I’m awkward. Does she mean I’m too tall for her? “I can slouch,” he said. Red laughed. She had an easy laugh.
“It’s probably because I’ve only seen you with Stacy and she’s tall too,” Red said. “Why don’t we go for a drive. I don’t want to stay here.”
“Sure,” he said. “Any place you want to go.”
“There’s a new ice-cream shop downtown that has the creamiest, yummiest ice cream you’ve ever tasted.”
Wapinski didn’t know what to say. She’d moved into high energy. He felt overwhelmed.
“Stacy told me that you just came back from Viet Nam,” Red said as they got into Grandpa’s ’53 Chevy. “This is really a neat car. You could put wood trim on the sides and it’d be a real woody.”
“Ah, it’s my grandfather’s. I, ah, crashed mine a few weeks ago and haven’t been able to fix it yet.”
“Why don’t you just have the insurance company fix it? Look how wide the seats are. I feel like I’m on my living room couch. This is so much better than my car.” Wapinski was about to ask her which car was hers, but she rattled out before he had a chance. “That’s mine. The Vee Doub. It’s cute, don’t you think? My father helped me put the racing stripes on it.”
“Very nice,” he said. He started the Chevy, backed out, and in silence followed her directions toward the ice cream parlor. She continued chatting. Bob Wapinski liked her voice, but the chatter drove him to lean against the door. Very gradually she slowed down as he stopped even his occasional um-hmms. He liked the way she looked, too. She wasn’t Stacy, but in a very different way she was pretty. Even her legs were nice, not model legs like Stacy’s, he thought, but she had smooth skin and firm-looking thighs and calves. He decided that he didn’t like her but that he’d like to fuck her. Then her entire countenance changed. She shut up, became serious.
“You probably’d like to get a word in here, huh?” Red dropped her head. “Jimmy told me I talk too much, and I know he’s right. Sometimes it just bubbles out of me.” She looked up at Bob, tilted her head just so, smiled sheepishly, said, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said. “I was enjoying listening to you.”
“Yeah, but I think you wanted to talk, didn’t you?”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“He’s my boyfriend. Stacy said she told you.”
“Oh. I must of forgot. Who is he?”
“He’s in Viet Nam, too. He’s a Marine.”
“Man.” Bob sighed. “He’s got no idea what he’s comin back to.”
“He’s been back. He’s on his second tour.”
“And he’s still your boyfriend!?”
“Uh-huh. We’re engaged. I wrote him and told him I was going to see you and just talk. He knows what Stacy did to you.”
“What?”
“Well, Stacy and I doubled once with Jimmy and his cousin and once with Jimmy and Jerry.”
“She was playing around the whole time I was over there, wasn’t she?” Bob didn’t ask it with bitterness. Somehow, he could not blame Stacy. It wasn’t that he thought the fault or reason for their splitting up lay with him or with his service: it was simply a matter that he could not think badly about Stacy. To him she was perfect.
“She dated,” Red said. “She wrote to you and told you.”
“No she didn’t.”
“She told me ... that’s what she told me. She said she wrote and told you.”
“She wrote and told me she loved me,” he said. “What happened to her? You know we’d been going for almost four years? I sent her a long-stem red rose on the first of every month, FTD. A dozen roses, one for each month I was away.”
“I know. I remember when she first went to Nittany Mountain and she met you. She was crazy about you. Really. She was always crazy about you.”
“Damn! See. I don’t know what happened. Did she just get tired of waiting? Did this guy Jerry sweep her off her feet? Who is this Jerry sucker?” Again Red just looked up at Bobby with her great big green eyes and shrugged. There was a short silence. Then he said, “Can I ask you ... about your boyfriend?”
“You mean ...”
“Yeah. Do you cheat on him?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never. I wouldn’t do that. He’s, he’s like—like the love of my life. He’s been my only love. We’ve been going ever since we were sophomores in high school. I’ve never even dated anybody else.”
They talked about Stacy and Tony and Jerry and Jimmy for an hour. They sat in the car in the small parking lot of the ice-cream parlor, ate their cones, talked more. Red sat sideways on the seat, her knees folded, her feet by her butt. Bob lay against the driver’s door. Talking about Stacy, finding out that she’d been dating, dating more he was sure than what Red let on, and from almost the time he left for overseas, bummed him out, dropped him into gloom. If Red looked lovely in the amber light that came through the windshield, he didn’t notice. He drove her home, in silence, until they reached her curb.
“All women aren’t rotten, Bob,” Red said. “I know you’re feeling that way, but it’s not true.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you’re right. It’s just depressing talking about this.”
“Bob ...”
“Um.”
“If you’d like to talk again, I’d like to talk too.”
“Okay.”
“Call me.”
Their first dates, if they could be so called, set up the next four years of their lives. Later, much later, Robert Wapinski would look back on this time with Red and think, I must have needed someone terribly then. That’s why I fell in love. But at the time he did not realize it, simply went with the flow. He had had good friends in the army, friends that knew his intimate fears and hopes, that had shared his joy and his sorrow. Close friends. Better friends, he felt, than any man had a right to. Now, except for Grandpa and Josh, he was alone. Cut off. Cut off from his family by an invisible wall and from friends by seemingly infinite distance. He wondered if they were still in the A Shau, or back in the A Shau on another operation, on new hills, new or reopened firebases. Was Thompson the company commander? Had Colonel Cordman rotated? Great battalion commander. Was Quay still interpreting with S-2? And Doc Edwards and Billy Smith, his medic and RTO on Dong Ap Bia, were they okay? He hoped they’d DEROSed, unscathed. He had Faulks’ address, and a few others who’d left country before him. Faulks was in Nebraska—too far, it seemed, even to call. He didn’t know why. And Eton, and Bowers. Missing. Left behind when they withdrew—when the rain turned the mountain to mud and they less withdrew than slid away, involuntarily, slid down the side of Hamburger leaving Eton and Bowers wounded, getting Carino killed trying to go back and recover them. And Ty Blackwell too. Not KIA, WIA and pissed. Moaning, bitching, vengeful at the evac hospital at Camp Evans. Son of a bitch, Wapinski had thought. Son of a bitch, still a better man than anyone has a right to know: better men than anyone has the right to be befriended by, much less the privilege to serve with, under or command.
So Bobby transferred his need for intimacy to Red. Through July they just talked. Their “dates” alternated, it seemed, between fun talk and serious talk, between times when Red couldn’t control her chattering and Bob was in no mind to listen, to times when Red drew the most painful thoughts out of him and if not understood, at least listened without judging.
“Sometimes it’s like I don’t know what I think anymore,” he told Red. “I read these god damned papers. We’re fighting honorably there. Damn it, I know this. I was on Dong Ap Bia. I know who was up there. I know where they came from and what they had. Then I read this shit about Nixon thinking about throwing in the towel. Or these senators. I can’t believe Kennedy! I can understand the protestors. I just can’t understand our own government. And I can’t understand the press. Those people are way off base. They see one side of things. They’ve got no idea what war is and yet they think they’ve got the right to report it. Well, damn it, they do, but they’ve got a responsibility, too, to report all the different sides. God, sometimes, inside, I get so worked up.
“Red, sometimes I feel like I’ve been shaved all over my body. Especially inside my ears. Like I’ve been shaved by a razor that was set too high. You understand? It’s like it’s taken off my outer skin. It’s like my nerves are exposed. Like everything rubs the raw ends.” Bob held out his left arm, exposed the underside, and drew his right thumb up from wrist to elbow three times as he said, “Imagine it like this. Like somebody’s slicing away my skin. As they lift the razor it looks clean and pink but in a second you can see tiny droplets of blood oozing from each pore and in ten seconds my whole arm’s dripping blood. Real watery blood cause it drips off and doesn’t scab over and the skin stays so sensitive even breathing on it hurts.”
Bob continued rising at five each morning, making coffee, skimming the papers, often walking around the pond with Josh. As the mornings lightened he worked around the house at High Meadow, clearing the yard, patching the roof, replacing boards in the porches, painting. In the afternoons he worked on his car, ran errands, or set about the business of exploring options. In the evenings he read or wrote or went to talk to Red and shared with her what had happened during the day.
“Happy birthday,” Bob said. “Here, they’re for you.” He held out a cluster of Queen Anne’s lace surrounded by maidenhair fern all wrapped in white freezer paper.
“Where’d you get these?” Red giggled. “They’re really pretty.”
“Up at High Meadow. You should come up with me sometime. It’s my favorite place. I like to walk around the pond. There’s a lot of wild-flowers at this time of year and the woods are full of birds and animals. I saw a fox this morning.”
“A fox! I’ve never seen a fox in the woods.”
“You’ve got to be quiet. You just sit still and all sorts of things appear.”
“How can you be quiet with that crazy dog of yours?”
“He’ll lay still if I sit with him and scratch his ears.”
“Well then, so will I.”
“Oooh! Scratch your ears!” He laughed.
“Come and walk with you,” she giggled.
“Would you let me take you to that inn up in Towanda tonight? For a real ah, you know, birthday dinner.”
“I’d like that. Did you get a job or something?”
“No. If I want one I can. My sister-in-law can get me one with Mr. Hartley if I want to get my real estate license, and Mr. Lloyd offered me a spot selling cars at his Autoland. I can also get on at the old slat factory but ... I wouldn’t work for any of em. I keep thinking I should go back, get my degree but I ... well, you know, with this thing with McShane.”
“Are they going to arrest you?”
“I don’t think so. A few people told the police he threw the first punch. But I think he might try to have me pay the medical bills. I shouldn’t have hit him. I don’t know why I did. He was pathetic. What about you? What’d your father say?”
“He called his friend in California to see if he could get me a job with him.”
“What’d he say?”
“Just, ‘Maybe.’”
“That’d be neat. You’d get out of here.”
“I wrote to Jimmy and told him and asked him if he’d like to live in California when he came home. I also told him that we were seeing each other. That it was strictly platonic.” Again she giggled. “I said you were my buddy.”
That night he again dreamed of a ground attack on his position, of lying in ambush across the mud road from Stacy, of sensing movement under the canopy, of soldiers breaking out from the vegetation, of Joe Akins and now Montgomery McShane and Wap’s sister, Joanne, charging, sprinting, he aiming in, now on his own sister, squeezing the trigger and BAM! ROUNDS SLAMMING INTO HIS LEG, HIP, CHEST. His force withdrawing, leaving him. “DON’T ...” Then triage.
He tossed, bolted upright. The skin of his head felt tight, his nostrils pulled shut by the tension. He got up, pissed, smoked, drank half a pint of whiskey, watched the moon, the night, angrily, sadly, till dawn.
In early August Wapinski thought of telling Red his dream. He’d had it in one form or another half a dozen times in the past two weeks. And he and Red were becoming, he thought, more than just buddies. But he couldn’t tell her. So he related other stories.
“There was one incident, up on Highway One,” he said. “Up at Quang Tri.”
“I know where that is,” Red said. “Jimmy was in Quang Tri.”
“Yeah. Same place. I was up there for a short time as kind of a liaison to a Marine unit. It was incredible. Damn NVA kept blowing up the bridges over the Cua Viet River. The Marines had opened up a base up there. Small base. I don’t even think it had a name.
“I was there waiting for a bird back to Evans. I think I was going back to Evans. Maybe Eagle. I don’t remember now. At that time I was up there a lot. Sometimes Quay, my interpreter, would be with me but this time I was alone. There was a platoon of Marines on the section of the perimeter where the gate was and where the pad was. Helicopter pad. Red! Do you understand?”
“I think so. When you just said pad I didn’t.”
“Okay, anyway. There was the gate, and a guardhouse.” Wapinski leaned back and shut his eyes. He could see the base. “There’s the bunkers. I’m sitting by the pad by the gate. Comin up the road there’s a six-by. A big truck. And it’s full in back with ARVN troops. All wounded. All wounded, Red. All bad wounds. God, I can see em. I can see these two ARVN soldiers. One’s cradling the other in his arms. The one being held is a mess. A MESS! All blown to pieces. They’re all wounded. There’s got to be forty of em in the truck. I found out later that they were on a bridge that got blown up while they were on it. I think they were in another truck and it rolled over on some of em cause these guys weren’t just hit, you know, not just shrapnel. That would of been bad enough. But half of em were crushed. There was a Marine sergeant at the gate and he saw em and he brought em in. And this fucking colonel, I’m sorry but that’s the only word....”
“It’s okay.”
“This son of a bitch comes out and tells this sergeant to get that gook truck off his base. Tells this kid to send these guys back out. And the sergeant, he just stood there. I think he was in shock. But his men made the truck turn around and go back out the gate. These guys are dying. I remember now. There were two colonels on the base. One with a Marine Air Wing Group and one was battalion commander of Second of the Fourth Marines. Two-Four was the outfit on the perimeter.
“I think it was the Air Wing colonel who made them turn the ARVNs away. But he left on a bird for someplace. This sergeant, God bless him, as soon as that SOB left he brought the ARVNs back in and he must have got the other colonel’s permission, or somehow, anyway, he got two medevac birds. And they took the ARVNs out to Quang Tri hospital.
“That took guts, Red. That kid had guts. I’d of had im in my unit any day. But those ARVNs. After they got them off the truck, the truck pulled out of there. And I watched it. I was looking at it. The tailgate was down. I don’t know why I was looking at it. It lurched forward and a wave of blood just came out the back and splatted in the dirt.”
By mid-August both Red’s and Bob’s attitudes changed. Bob lightened up again. Red was hurt. She had gotten a letter from Jimmy Pellegrino answering hers where she had told him that she’d been talking to Bob. That they’d become buddies.
“He doesn’t believe me,” she said indignantly.
“I don’t blame him,” Bob said.
“Why?”
“Look what happened to me. A lot of guys over there get Dear Johns. I think if Stacy had sent me one, maybe the first month, or, I don’t know. But I think it would have been easier than walking into what I walked into.”
“But we’re not doing anything.”
“No, we’re not,” Bob agreed. He felt a tinge of guilt that he was causing this man that he didn’t know anguish over his fiancée. But he also felt, felt for the first time since the very first time Red had gotten into the car with him, that he really did want to do something. He liked Red. They got along well. He was not in love with her. He was still in love with Stacy and he knew that. But he also felt that he needed a woman and Red, engaged or not, was available. “But he doesn’t know that.”
“Would you write to him and tell him? He’d believe you.”
“I ... I’d like ... Hmm. Yeah, if you want me to. Of course....” He backed up and gave her a silly, leering grin, then arched and lowered his eyebrows.
“Bob!” She punched him in the arm, feigning offense.
They drove to Mill Creek Falls, through town and up to High Meadow. It was Red’s first time to the farm and it was Grandpa Wapinski’s birthday. The early evening was overcast, humid, the wind was sporadic as if either a thunderhead was building or a front was approaching. Josh met the car as they drove in, tail wagging most of his body.
“Hi ya, Josh,” Bob said. He hugged the dog. Josh tried to escape, pulled back, the loose skin of his neck rippling in thick folds behind his head. “Go ahead. Go get Granpa.”
“So you’re the little lady,” Pewel Wapinski began, “that’s got Bob’s eye. Well, I can see why.”
Red laughed coyly, flashed her green eyes at the old man. “Happy Birthday, Mr. Wapinski,” she said. “It’s an honor to be invited to have dinner with you.”
“You call me Pa. That mister stuff makes me feel old. I’m only eighty.”
“I told her,” Bob said, “that she could only stay for dinner if she agreed to wash the dishes.”
“I don’t know,” Pewel said. “Maybe she and I could talk some after dinner and you’ll do the dishes. Anyway, dinner will be ready in a bit. You two can stay out here till I’m finished if you’d like.”
“I think I should come in and help,” Red said. “A man shouldn’t have to cook his own meals.”
“Red is it. You sure do have some hair there, Red. I’ve cooked for myself for fifteen years. I’m pretty good at it.”
When Grandpa left, Red said to Bob, “Oh, he’s just the sweetest old man.”
“He is,” Bob said. “He really is. But he’s really not what you think of when you think of eighty. He’s more like sixty. He’s so damn strong. I think if my grandmother were still alive he’d be even younger-looking. She was a great lady. I think of them more as my mother and father than I do my mom. I didn’t know my dad.”
They meandered to the back porch, sat on the step. The wind was a little stronger. Josh jumped up, began chasing a tiny whirlwind full of leaves. He barked at it, then jumped on it but it disappeared. Bob and Red started to laugh, and Josh rolled over, yipped, sprang up and began stalking a second dust devil. He approached it more slowly this time, then snapped his teeth into it but it just kept whirling. He stood on three legs, tried to pat it with a paw but it vanished. A third whirlwind swished up in the yard. Josh sat down, cocked his head, whined. His whole nose wrinkled in puzzlement.
Red and Bob laughed, then Bob excused himself and went in to check on dinner.
“There’s a card for you there,” his grandfather said. “Looks a little official.”
Bob picked the envelope from the desk in the living room. He sighed. He had a fair idea what it contained. Carefully he peeled the flap back, found the invitation to Stacy’s wedding and a short note in her meticulous hand.
Dear Rob,
The enclosed invitation is for you, for your information, not to invite you to the wedding. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. Jerry is a nice man. I know you’d like him if circumstances were different. You didn’t fight very hard.
Love Always,
Stacy
That night, after they made love on the back seat of Grandpa’s Chevy, Red cried. She couldn’t stop. All she would say was, “I love you” and “Please hold me.” Again and again. She could not tell him that she was crying for Jimmy. But Bob knew.