Three days after they dropped that horrible bomb on Hiroshima, someone come on the radio and said they dropped a worse one on a place called Nagasaki. When Daddy heard that, he dropped his head into his hands. Sometimes I still wonder how he knew to grieve about those bombs.
At first, no one realized how many people they killed. Or how many thousands would die in the weeks afterwards. But my daddy seemed to know. It was like there was a voice inside him saying, This is much worse than anything you saw while you were fighting in Europe.
And for some reason my daddy cared about that. He was supposed to hate the Japs, but it was like he just couldn’t do it. Like he had already done all the hating he could—which wasn’t much to begin with.
When he heard that news about the second bomb, Daddy stared at the worn pattern in the green and white kitchen linoleum and listened for a minute or two more. Or maybe he didn’t listen. Maybe he just sat there with his heart in some other part of the world.
The rest of us was hanging on to each other and wondering what to say. Daddy stood up and we stepped back to make room for him. He went onto the back porch and closed the screen door real soft and careful—as if letting it slam would set off something bad in the world. Then he went into the johnny house and stayed for a long time.
Later that night, President Truman come on the radio. He said the reason they started dropping that new, awful kind of bomb was on account of the Japs bombing us at Pearl Harbor and how atrocious they treated our prisoners of war. He said our bomb would save thousands and thousands of American lives.
I looked at my daddy when the president said that. I was thinking it might cheer him up. But I could see that it didn’t.
The president went right on talking. He said the bomb had tragic significance but America should gladly bear that burden. “We thank God it has come to us,” he said, “instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He will guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
You should have heard my daddy then. “God!” he shouted. I couldn’t tell if he was swearing or praying except he don’t usually cuss, so I figured it was a prayer. And he was looking up when he said it—like he wanted God to come down there and do something with our president.
But God stayed right where He was and my daddy sure didn’t know what to do. So he yanked the cord out of the wall and picked up the radio and threw it at the kitchen window. The radio hit the screen so hard it popped out of place. I heard a clanking sound. And then a rustling noise when the radio landed—smack-dab in the middle of Momma’s blue hydrangeas.