Tell Me of the Night

Watchman, Tell Me of the Night' part 1
BOB COMENOLE
SPECIAL TO THE RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
Posted: 12/9/2007
Related Article'Watchman, Tell Me of the Night' part 2: Two for Chicago
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Author Bob Comenole

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Author Bob Comenole


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Editor's note: Today begins a serial Christmas story set in 1969, following a 19-year-old soldier returning from overseas. His father has disowned him because he recently put in for conscientious objector status. On a train from San Francisco to New York, he meets four mysterious and intriguing characters, each of whom has suffered a significant loss in life. This serial will run on Sundays and Mondays through Christmas Eve. If you miss a day, you can catch up at
http://www.RGJ.com/living.


Part I: Letters From Home

I walked against a biting wind from the Embarcadero up Market Street. All around me the lights of San Francisco began to poke into the falling night, red and yellow, shimmering off into the bay. I raised my collar, more against memory than cold. Behind me was an 11-month, 11-day tour of duty. I didn't know if it would ever feel like home again. After a year overseas I avoided catching my reflection in the storefront windows.

A small brass ensemble played "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" as children hurtled down the streets, filled with the helium of joy. Their trailing scarves left long brushes of color suspended in the air, red, green, yellow, and each hung there, like a colorful ledge upon which anyone might rest a dream or a want. At 19, I thought how much closer in age I was to them than to their parents who were madly dashing behind. I overheard a man say that there'd been only 10 instances of measurable snow in San Francisco in the past century. Apparently, this was going to be another one of them.

Snowflakes gathered upon my shoulder. My heart lightened, for I knew if flurries had come to California then by the time I arrived back east my hometown would be buried. And in five days I would be there, shoveling out the long drive at my folks' home on Pine Ridge Road, a little gravel comma half-way between Auburn and Skaneateles, two small towns at the frontier of the Finger Lakes.

At the Fleet Post Office an older vet was stepping to the double glass doors, keys in hand. Before addressing the locks he pulled up his shirt sleeves, one by one, in that quick, peculiar ritual of those giving meaning to small tasks. On his left arm was the tattoo of a woman in profile, on his right an intricate monogram encircled by the name it must have represented: Billi Callico.

"Don't dawdle, soldier," he said without looking up, pausing for the five bells which began to sound overhead. I hurried in. Waiting for me were three forwarded letters. One contained a check from the Treasury Department for half a year of pay errors. Each of the other two was addressed in my mother's handwriting. The vet held the door for me and I asked, nodding toward his tattoo, "Yer wife?"

"I wish!" he grunted. In the midst of his laugh there was a perplexed crinkle, as if to say 'You the only one who doesn't recognize her?'

I fashioned a loose salute and headed out. He stopped me, nodding at the Treasury check, "The Wells Fargo will take it. They're open till 6."

"Ga-Mug," I said, and he winked. I realized that his was the first face that I'd looked full into since coming back. And when I looked into it I could see that he had already perceived, despite there being no outward evidence, each of my wounds: a staple-sized scar on my thigh, and two sickle-shaped dings on my ribs, one above and one below the heart. There was a fourth, but I could not remember what it was. As he turned, his limp surged and cascaded like a spring gone bad. And I was ashamed at how short my own convalescence had been.

Outside the bank I took a bench under the awning of a bus shelter, trying to decide what to do with the nine 100-dollar bills now in my hand. I divided them up, four in each sock and one for my wallet. I bought a bus ticket over to Oakland, where I'd pick up the railroad east. While I waited outside the station, I opened the other letters. The first, in a candy-cane envelope smothered in Christmas Seals, looked like it had been stuffed with a pillow. That was my mother's. And knowing my mother, I went first to the P.S. to work my way backwards.

P.S. Your father's in such a rage, Luke. Such a rage. He doesn't say anything. He stopped going to the VFW!! Won't be seen at the Legion. I don't see he's going to adjust. I don't know what to do. Please let me know what your Christmas plans are. You know I stay up later than your father if you're thinking of the phone. He's written you a letter. Things will be better next year. What made this have to happen?

My thumb ran along the paper's edge. A woman in an upper apartment across the street was spraying her windows with canned snow, over stencils. A sleigh and reindeer, then a fir tree. She went to the next window: ornaments, icicles, pine cones. A child came to the window, begged the mother low and received the can. She shook it with the stiff ceremony of a child and up went an off-centered Santa. Something twinkling in a room beyond them threw flickers of light over mother and child as they merged into the next room. At the last window the aerosol, like a bad cough, spit only a few flecks onto the stencil. Then the four hands of mother and daughter gripped the reluctant can and shook and shook and laughingly shook it in movements so gleeful that a miracle could be the only outcome. I recalled my mother shaking the dreadful thermometer against the croups of my childhood, the nightly studies of my father's self-renewing disappointment in me. I thought, too, of the empty cans of my own life and then all the spent aerosols of the world. I wondered what a miracle might feel like.

My neck was now cold. I flipped back through my mother's letter, finding only village particulars and niceties. 'A plus, Ma,' I thought.

A letter that I had sent my parents a month earlier was wedged within her own pages, as if snuck by a bad-mannered jailor. It's why it was so fat.

In that letter, which ran to 30 pages, I explained -- it was the first time I'd raised the subject -- why I was petitioning for conscientious objector status. At least I began the letter with that concept. I worked out for my mother and father my own moral objections. The fear for my soul. My ignorance of political matters. The loss of things I could never regain, and the acquisition of things I could never shed. I did not tell them what I had seen, or what I was ordered to do. I put several months into writing, rewriting, meditating. Perfecting what I knew was a one-shot memo: the most cogent manifesto I could muster.

I was nearing the end of my tour and got word that I was being reassigned out of my combat unit to specialty duty stateside. This wasn't an indicator of how the Army might rule, I was told, and so I didn't hold my breath. I had not sought to leave the Army, I'd not made plans to flee to Canada, I was prepared for prison, I was even prepared to die at the hands of any number of men in my battalion who'd made such threats: but on the issue, I would never again put a rifle in my hand.

And so, my tour ended 19 days early. I was being shipped home.

The second letter -- nothing more than a very long sheet of that waxy onion paper my father's firm used -- was folded sloppily in half and stapled in four corners. I slid my finger into an open seam and ripped it open. In the center was another envelope, my own. Also stapled. My mother had returned the contents, my father the wrapper. In my enthusiasm I had written on the back of the envelope a short phrase, again and again, beginning in the center and working outward in ever smaller print, nesting the phrase inside itself over and over: "I'm coming home!" It wrapped around the edges until the whole back was filled and the lines fell off every side. "I'm coming home!" When I pulled my envelope from the staple that pinned it to the sheet I saw, written with grease pencil -- in my father's own unyielding hand -- those squashed strokes that come from bearing down: "Don't Bother."

Next Chapter: Two For Chicago will appear Monday in Living. Tweet