Free Eli the Good by Silas House Page B

was one about how they had to go into the jungle for two weeks, another about the way the B-52s would zoom in over them and bomb the Viet Cong. After that my father had to go on what he called search-and-destroy missions, although he never explained exactly what that meant. It seemed to be an understanding between him and my mother that he wouldn’t spell out every single thing. He mentioned being dropped from helicopters into bamboo grass that was eight feet tall.
    He talked about stringing Constantino wire around the camp, about building a bunker out of rubber trees and sandbags. In one letter a small newspaper article from
Stars and Stripes
fell out. The entire first sentence was underlined in fat blue ink:
A Viet Cong forward aid station was discovered while on a search-and-destroy mission 15 miles south of Phuoc Vinh by Company A, 1st Batallion, 2nd Infantry, 1st Infantry Division.
A shaky arrow snaked out to the margin where my father had written in matching blue ink:
Our brigade.
    One letter detailed the prisoner of war my father had to guard. The POW was tied up with rope in the center of a big field, with a soldier on each corner. There were long declarations of homesickness and admissions of fright and descriptions of the land and the people. My father wrote that in Saigon there was an old Vietnamese man who spoke perfect English and cooked a wonderful meal of rice and shrimp for my father and his buddies. The old man’s teeth were solid black from opium, and he ate three fish heads while they feasted on their supper. “He could squat down for hours on his haunches,” Daddy wrote. He told of children who stood beside the roads as the troops passed, all dressed in long sleeves no matter how hot it was. My father and the other soldiers broke Hershey bars into five pieces and handed them out. He told of riding for miles up and down Highway 1 in the back of army trucks while the land sped by.
    And always the trees; he was obsessed with them. Especially their leaves. Their bigness, slickness, the way some of the leaves would hold rain like cups and leaves that were slender as green beans and smelled musky and sweet at the same time. Each letter was different in some way except that he always talked about the trees and he always said how much he missed my mother and Josie. He longed to touch my mother’s pregnant belly.
    The thing that struck me the most about all these letters was his love for the trees.
    I knew that he could name any tree he saw. He was apt to be walking along somewhere and nod in the direction of a beech and speak its name, or run his hand down a scaly bark and say, “Hickory” or peer far up into the branches and say, “Look, a persimmon tree.” But he did this same thing with cars, too. Often when I was at a station with him, he would stand outside beside the Pepsi machine and watch as people sped by on the highway and sometimes by only the sound of the approaching engine he’d say, “’66 Mustang,” or “Ford LTD,” or “1971 Plymouth Duster.” So I never knew that he loved the trees as much as I did.
    This undisclosed connection that bound us now, the secret trees that neither of us spoke of to each other; it seemed like something that would be easy for a son and father to talk about. I lingered on this a long while after the fourth letter, thinking it over while the room grew smaller and darker and Edie relaxed into the silence of the house so much that she all but disappeared to me.
    “One more, then,” she said, at long last. Still quiet, still a whisper. I loved her for her quiet, for her lack of interference. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her for it, but I thought this would be a crazy thing to do and she would only punch my arm and laugh in that jaunty, menacing way of hers.
    So I opened the one that would change me forever.
    Dearest Loretta,
    I usually start your letters with Hey Baby but I need to use your name now. I’ve been whispering it to myself all day long.