The ticket to the museum was really expensive—80 Euros, like, $125, the student rate!—more than I’d budgeted for the entire week. At least it included a minibus tour of the beaches. And the museum was worth it, way impressive. They showed these films about D-day—nothing you didn’t already know from school and all the movies, but it was something else to see for real. And there were tons of photos and memorabilia, the uniforms of all the units and stuff, their weapons—straight-up relics.
I bought some postcards from the gift shop. Mama and I had taken to writing each other, paper and pencil, after that first letter. I’d been sending three, sometimes four, a week. I wrote at night, before going to bed, and I would tell her about what I’d done that day, places Matt and me had visited, things I’d learned about Paris or France or the world. Hers were scribbles on scrap paper mostly, sometimes hardly more than I’m fine and Have fun. I mean, she’s got so much to do, and Tookie and Tina to worry after too. Tookie would usually write a few words at the bottom in those big block letters you first learn, and Tina sent crayon drawings she’d made for me.
I would carry Mama’s letters with me, unopened, in my jacket pocket until the next one arrived, sometimes days and days on end. Because once I’d read it, it was like the letter was suddenly just ink on a page, you know, and I would lose sight of them, of Mama and Tookie and Tina. The weight of it in my pocket, the anticipation of the still-unseen words, made Mama and them seem real and right here with me. Like the next line in a conversation that never ended.
The minibus that carried us out to the beaches was packed with tourists, most of them older couples with cameras hanging around their necks, most not American. Me and Matt squeezed onto a narrow bench near the back. The bus went to Sword Beach first. We got out and looked down over the bluff. The wind was crisp, and I put my letter jacket back on. The brochure talked about all the troops that had landed there, Canadians and Brits at Sword, Juno and Gold, Americans farther on.
It shook me, the spare stretches of sand and the rocky bluffs, and the conical black roofs on the white stone houses in the distant villages. It was picture-postcard pretty, but the emptiness was loud. You didn’t need movie special effects, the Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers pillbox bunkers and tracer bullets and bursting spits of dirt. The quiet and space said it all.
We wandered around Omaha Beach, into the bunkers and machine-gun nests. As a kid, I would have been imagining myself a soldier, maybe even playing war. Dodging behind walls and charging through doorways, tossing grenades into machine-gun nests. But me and Matt just drifted from spot to spot, kind of reverential.
Up the way, past the giant Battle Monument, was the American Cemetery. It was just rows and columns, rows and columns, of white crosses, sometimes a Star of David. I’d seen it a hundred times before in pictures, but you just don’t know. You just don’t know what it’s like. All those crosses and stars.
James W. Smiley, Pvt 116 Inf 29 Div, Omaha, Nebraska, b. March 17, 1926–d. June 6, 1944.
Draper A. Conway, Pvt 16 Inf 1 Div, Lynn, Massachusetts, b. October 27, 1922–d. June 6, 1944.
Arthur L. Rose, Sgt 505 Inf 32 Abn Div, Fairfield, Connecticut, b. January 4, 1925–d. June 6, 1944.
The brochure read: They died defending freedom and democracy.
Matt said, “Coaches always talk about blitzes and lobbing bombs and taking no prisoners.” He moved from one grave to the next. “But this…what your father does… now that’s for real.”
I broke away from him then, wandered off by myself. Because…well…I just did. And a few rows on, there was a crucifix and the guy’s birthdate was the same as my pops. No lie. September 7. And no lie, his first name was the same. John.
Jack, my Mama called him.
No lie.
Suddenly Matt was there beside me, and he was like, “Hey, you all right? Free?”
“My old man, he’s dead, you know.” My voice, the words spilling out of me, was like a confession. “In Iraq. They blew him up. An IED. He was riding in a Humvee, him and his team, going to train some new guys or some such. And he wasn’t even a combat soldier, just a jet-engine mechanic. I mean, he was a mechanic, man.”
There was an old couple a few rows over, necklace cameras and all, and they were just staring.
“We had a game the Friday after the casualty-notification officer came to tell us. A big game, to make the playoffs. Ain’t none bigger.”
I tried to look at Matt as I said it, but I couldn’t.
“I played the fucking game, man.”
I got my hands free of my pockets and wiped my face, the snot that was at my nose.
“Mama ain’t been to church in I don’t know how long, Pops sure as shit didn’t go, but she’s steady going now, with my Grandma Jessie and Auntie Constance in New Orleans. Like that makes one bit of difference, you know? And…”
I didn’t know what more to say.
We’d buried a casket, just a metal box with an American flag draped over it, whatever remained inside too far gone for viewing. Taps and a twenty-one-gun salute. Mama behind a black veil, Tookie’s face in her shoulder and Tina on her lap. Tookie couldn’t stop crying. A colonel in dress blues gave me the triangle of folded flag.
Remembering the funeral now, on that beach in France, I wiped the water off my face, then twisted my class ring free. I laid it at the base of John Wilson Smith’s white crucifix, and I took a knee. I crossed my heart with a finger like you see people do in Notre Dame. I didn’t really say a prayer, because I didn’t know what more there was to say. I just knelt there.
When I opened my eyes, Matt was kneeling beside me. He rose when I rose, then followed me to the minibus. We sat at the rear and waited for the tour guide to lead all the old couples back and for the bus to return us to Caen.
On the ride there, the bus twisting along the beach-side roads, Matt said, “You did good, leaving your ring there.” He hunched his neck into his collar. “It’s just so tacky and gaudy…”
And I busted up. He was laughing too.