The Summer Guest

Ta

I received my induction notice in early October. A virtually identical letter: for a moment I thought some mistake had been made and I was being asked to report for a physical a second time, one of those army screwups my father always carped about. But then I read more closely. Back to Bangor, two days after Christmas. Bring my social security card. Settle my affairs. And, at the bottom, a single sentence: “Failure to report to the place and hour of the day named in this order subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment.”

I showed my father the letter that night at di

When he was done 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.”

“Ta

I wanted to laugh. “Ta

“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. Ta

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; she swears it was in the office at the mill. In either case it would have felt the same. A year, I probably said, and then I’d be home. Don’t believe everything you hear. I’d probably end up in some supply hut, handing out socks and skivvies, listening to American radio. You? she said. I doubt that. Maybe some city boy, slept his whole life on silk sheets and taking cabs. A man like you, handing out underwear? They’ll know just what to do with you, Joe Crosby.

My father said nothing else; my impending departure was one more wedge of silence hammered down between us. There were times I even imagined that I felt in him a new respect, albeit begrudging, for the path I had chosen to follow. We were still boarding up for the season when the first snow fell, a week into November. I awoke that morning and looked out the window and saw, where just a day ago there had been cha

I dressed and went downstairs. I could smell my father’s cigarette smoke even before I reached the kitchen. He slept at most four hours a night, and had been up since well before dawn. Probably he had already shoveled the walk and dug out the truck. As I entered the kitchen he turned from the window.

“First snow, I guess,” I said.

He looked at me, his face impossible to read, like a headstone faded by decades of weather. He ran his cigarette under the tap, then deposited the butt in the trash pail under the sink.

“It’s stopped for now, but there’s more on the way.” He cleared his throat. “A bad one. Supposed to start tonight. They’re saying a foot, anyway.”