he placed the letter aside. “You passed your physical?”
“Last May.”
He regarded me a moment, but said nothing about my deception. Probably he had already guessed it. Then: “What are you going to do?”
I had imagined this moment so many times my answer was ready. “I’m going to do my duty,” I said.
“Is that a fact. Tell me what that is, you’re so sure of yourself.”
“To fight. Like you did.”
“I see.” He nodded. “Let me ask you this. What if we were Germans, and it was 1939. Your boss Hitler has just invaded Poland and told you to come along and join the fun. Would you fight then?”
“We’re not Germans. It’s not the same.”
“That’s where you may be wrong. You better hope you’re not.”
“I’m not wrong.”
“Tanner have anything to do with this?”
I wanted to laugh. “Tanner’s an asshole.”
“What are you fighting for?”
I thought a moment. There was only one answer. “Myself.”
I expected him to argue: all these strangers, shuttling through the camp, riding the rails of some underground of which my father was a part. Tanner’s warning was no joke. By this time everyone in town knew what my father was doing, or else suspected. There were people who wouldn’t have pushed my father out of the way of a logging truck, who would have watched him choke or drown. He’d given everything away, or nearly: his reputation, his name, most of his friends. And yet, when I told him what I intended to do, to fight the war he loathed, the war that seemed to undo the very meaning of his own sacrifice, he had no words. For a moment we sat without speaking, the only sound in the room the rhythm of our own synchronized breathing. I had never been more aware of his presence, the sheer, unassailable fact of him, his mysterious existence. We had lived alone, just the two of us, for thirteen years. Rarely did I speak of my mother, and never to him. Once a year, each June on her birthday, we would put on our suits and take the pickup to the cemetery; but even on those mornings, the silence was like a cold blade between us. We did not say we missed her, or that we loved her; he did not tell me, your mother would be proud of you, I’m sorry she’s not still here, to watch you grow up. We always brought flowers—irises, her favorite. After we had placed them on the ground by her headstone, we would stand a moment longer, and then my father would place his hand on my shoulder and, in his smoke-coarsened voice, say, “Well. It’s nice here. A pretty spot. I’m glad to see they take good care of it. We’d better get going.” I understand now that what I wanted most was simply to know him, and to do that, I had to be like him. But not back then; I might have said I hated him.
Finally, he pushed back from the table and rose.
“If you’ll forgive me, I’ve lost my appetite.” He carried his dish to the sink and turned to face me. “When the time comes, I’ll take you,” he said. “At least let me do that. You won’t have to go alone.”
A strange energy surged through me in those weeks, like a current in the blood. Until that time, everything in my life had been handed to me: the camp, the small world I lived in. Even Lucy, in a way, whom it seemed I had always known. And the bad things too, like my mother’s dying, the hole it scooped in my father’s plans of happiness and the kind of man he had become because of it; the stark loneliness of my need for him, so fierce and unrequited, like standing on a treeless plain, wind-blasted and without a scrap of shade, and the feeling always that I was somehow unworthy, not up to the task of being his son. I would go to Vietnam and do what was required of me: stand up straight, say “yes, sir,” clean my weapon, and sleep bareheaded in the rain, all things I knew well how to do, and also things I didn’t. Shoot and be shot at. Stake my fate on something larger than myself, on the urgent brotherhood of war. Become somebody else: a man who had earned his life.
I don’t remember telling Lucy I was going, only that I did it. Sometimes I think I told her on the porch;