THEO
WE ALL TOOK TURNS watching Tula and her growing menagerie. While I mended Mrs. B’s fence, sleeves rolled up, Tula and Solly watched.
“What does that cartoon on your arm mean?” Tula asked.
“Well, it’s not a cartoon, honey,” I said. “It’s called a tattoo.”
“Bud has one of those.”
“Sometimes men get them when they go to faraway places.”
“What are faraway places?” she asked. “And why do they mark you like that?”
“These are good questions. Can you hand me the box of nails?”
She sat with her bucket on one side and Solly on the other, on the ground two feet away from me. She handed me the box and asked, “Why is your angel sad?”
“Well, when I first arrived in Japan, one of those faraway places, and before heading for Korea, another faraway place, some of us, my buddies, we got tattoos.”
Mine was originally the image of an angel: strong, muscular, a Michelangelo’s David-looking sort, with white untainted wings the full length of his body, his robust arms in prayer in front of him, eyes closed. Solemn, well intended, naïve.
“But why is yours a sad angel?” she asked. “Aren’t angels happy?”
“Some,” I said, trying to find an explanation for something I barely understood myself. “The angels here are happy, but sometimes angels in faraway places are sad.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, faraway places can be hard to understand, but what matters most is you only have to concern yourself with happy angels.”
Solly’s head snapped up, then he jumped and ran after a squirrel, taking Tula’s attention and rescuing me from the next, inevitable why?. As Tula chased Solly, who chased the squirrel around Mrs. B’s oak tree, I thought about my tattoo’s alterations.
A year after Korea, after the children were killed, and after I had been shot and left for dead, I was shipped to a military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany. I had one of the other soldiers take me in a wheelchair to a tattoo place in a seedy part of town. There, the German tattoo man exacted the truth from the image on my arm. He added a chipped, bloodied sword to David’s praying hands and drops of blood, like tears falling from his white wings, and he opened the eyes of the sleeping angel and burned Sister’s words into my skin beneath it: May Our Cause Be Just.
That altered image was closer to the truth. And having the truth was worth everything.