Uncle Joe Uncle JoeELLIE’S UNCLE JOE WAS A TALL YOUNG MAN WITH blond hair and blue eyes. He was the one who told Ellie her parents found her under a big rock in the hog lot.
Ellie thought the world of her Uncle Joe.
When he graduated from Monroe County High School the spring before, Joe had joined the Air Force. He left home, promising Ellie and her sisters he would send them things from far-off countries. After he had been gone a while, he sent them a picture of himself wearing a jacket with a little fur collar and a cap with funny fur earflaps. Ellie got permission to borrow it for a day and she took it to school with her to brag.
Ellie sometimes liked to call Joe her big brother. But never aloud.
It was when she was walking home from the grocery with her sisters one afternoon in July that Ellie had seen both Okey and her mother sitting on the front steps together. And talking. With each other. Okey wasn’t drinking and her mother wasn’t crying. They were just talking together like normal people and it had made Ellie positive something was really wrong.
“What’s wrong?” she yelled at them before she even came in the yard. They just looked back at her and the other girls and waited for them to get to the house.
“Well?” Ellie asked when they’d reached it.
Okey had looked at her with his head cocked to one side. “Well, Miss Smarty, what makes you figure there’s something wrong?”
“You just look it, that’s all,” she had answered.
“Well, fact is,” said Okey, gazing directly at her as the other girls climbed on up the steps, “they’re shipping your Uncle Joe into a pretty bad place.”
“Where there’s a war going on.”
“War?”
“Girl, would you stop repeating me? You heard me.”
Martha asked if Joe would likely get killed.
“Killed?” Ellie had nearly shouted. Everyone looked at her in disgust. She just couldn’t talk in sentences.
“You mean, they’re shooting at our soldiers there? Like a real war?” There. That had made sense.
Okey looked out past Ellie and all of them.
“Hell, I don’t know what a real war is,” he had answered.
They had to wait a long time for letters from Joe after he went to the war. Sometimes he’d send them a picture. He had grown a beard. And in one picture, he was holding a board on which sat a live (so he said) scorpion.
Ellie would lie awake at night and be afraid for him. She’d beg God not to let him be shot. Or if he had to get shot, then to let the bullet hit his arm or his foot.
At school in the fall she had told her friends about her uncle who’d gone to war.
One boy told her what his father said about the war. He told her his father said it was stupid. That soldiers were dying for nothing. That it wasn’t even a real war. The boy told Ellie that it must mean her uncle was not a real soldier.
Ellie shoved him hard into the wall. And she called him one of Okey’s best cuss words. The boy was so surprised he didn’t even fight back—just stared at her with his mouth hanging open.
It seemed, after that, the time would never pass quickly enough until Joe came home. Ellie missed him, but more than that, she wanted him to tell her that he had been a real soldier.
And finally, one afternoon in December when they were nearly snowed in, Joe walked in on them all. He had on his blue uniform and his beard was gone. He seemed a foot taller. And to Ellie, he seemed as old as Okey.
In the night he made fudge in the skillet the way he used to and poured it into a buttered plate to cool. They all sat around the kitchen table, talking. Okey would not talk of the war. Joe would not talk of the war. So no one did.
But before she could sleep, Ellie had to ask him. He was sitting alone in the living room, watching the late news after everyone had gone to bed. All the lamps were off and only the television lit the room, making it blink black and white like the set.
Ellie tiptoed to the doorway. Joe sat on the couch, his long legs sprawled in front of him, and listened to the latest report of soldiers dead. The walls blinked and his face, too, went black, white, black, white, as the pictures crossed the television screen.
Ellie watched him. He looked older than Okey. Old as her grandfather. And when news of the war had finished, he wiped a hand across his eyes.
Ellie silently called the boy at school the strongest cuss word she knew, turned back to her room and fell asleep, tears in her eyes for her Uncle Joe and all the real soldiers.