Excerpt from “Under the Beetle’s Cellar,” by Molly Cates, Lone Star Monthly, June 1995
… They don’t really hang out together much, they say. But sometimes they gather out on the playground and talk. They talk about the nightmares and the moments of panic when the school bus comes to a sudden stop or when the lights go out. They talk about how Bucky’s thumb-sucking has gotten out of hand, and about how Sandra’s persistent stomachaches are mostly in her head. They joke about going to therapy.
They talk about Josh and what it was like to watch him die.
And they talk about Walter Demming.
They say that in the beginning he didn’t seem to like them much, but, later on, when he walked the bus aisle at night checking on them, they would sense his presence and feel taken care of. They say he wasn’t someone you would think of as funny or entertaining, but the story he told became their all-time favorite; sometimes now they talk about Jacksonville and Lopez and argue about the ending, and they laugh. They say he didn’t like religion much, but he ended up praying anyway. They say he’s hard to describe, hard to pin down as this thing or that.
And that’s true. After all, he was a man who broke all his vows. When he came home from Vietnam, Walter Demming had planned, like Candide, to stay home and tend his own garden. He had vowed to avoid involvement, but he ended up intimately involved in the lives of eleven children. He had vowed to avoid violence, but he died in an explosion of apocalyptic violence. He had vowed to maintain his privacy, to attract no attention, but he became headline news around the world, and was awarded posthumously the Presidential Medal of Honor.
Fate, or whatever force it is that delivers people to that very place they have been avoiding, devised for Walter Demming a situation that compelled him to transcend his rules and act instead from his heart and his true nature.