Chapter 7: The Walk (pages 67-71)

After he could walk well on his own, my three-year-old son would invite his father for a walk. “We go to walk now, Daddy?”

            I used to stand and watch them from our living room window. It would break my heart to watch them walk. I can’t say exactly why it hurt so much. After all, they looked so beautiful, the two of them lost in a world of their own. The small left hand of a little boy, cupped and held up by the big right hand of the daddy. The younger walked on the outside, for his dad must have known the path was much smoother for him there, though it appeared as if the younger led the elder. It was a slow walk, not very far, through clots of red dirt alongside the plowed field of a local farmer.

            We lived in a small town in Texas. Several mobile homes surrounded our own. We were a small group of people, centered between a lonesome highway and a field of dirt—this field of dirt where Aaron would take his daddy to walk.

            I never knew exactly what they talked about on these walks. It was their time, and I was never given a clue from either of them as to the words that passed between father and son. Perhaps, for Aaron, it was like a sweet secret, and for Doug, well, Doug and I didn’t talk much back then. When we spoke, it was usually to argue. Our marriage was ending, and it was a slow and painful demise.

            For a while, each day was always the same. “We go to walk now, Daddy?”

            “Come on, Little Man,” his dad would say.

            Off they’d go.

            Me. Standing at the window, looking and wishing. Today, I can’t even remember all my heart must’ve wished for then.

            Things changed. We separated. After that, when Doug called, Aaron asked his dad, “We go to walk?” My son’s young voice quivered and then broke.

            Doug and I both loved him so much. At one point, Aaron went to live with his daddy. Then, finally, it was back and forth. He never voiced his feelings to me about all of this then, but I know he must’ve expressed them to someone else, for I’ve been granted the privilege of reading at least a part of these conversations, rendered in Aaron’s own young hand.

            I don’t know when the prayers of my son were written. I found them several years ago. By his penmanship, it’s evident Aaron was just learning to write in cursive. I remember all the practice hours he spent back then. Cursive writing covered our phone books and used pieces of mail. His wobbly words were everywhere. He must’ve been in the third grade when he wrote the first three prayers.

            Aaron would watch me read, then mark and write in this blue book, my worn King James Version of God’s curses and blessings. At some point, my son must’ve felt inclined to do the same, for on a particular page, there are the numbers from one to sixteen, with each number circled. Circle number one: Help me learn about God. Circle number two: Help dad with taxes. Circle number three: Help mom and dad stay to gather. He spaced and misspelled it like that.

            The first three prayers, written in blue ink, circle number four, skipped, and beside circle number five, written with a pink felt-tip pen, is the prayer that concerns his hope for a bond between his dad and my brother-in-law: Help Roy and Doug be friends. Circle number six, skipped, and circle number seven, in the same pink ink. Its concern is with me and the man I pledged myself to on December 14, 1993, the man I’m still with today. June 15, Thur. 1993, help Greg and De’on be happy. So, these last two prayers, written later than the first three. Circles numbered eight through sixteen are empty, without written words.

            He used to say, “I wish my whole family could all just live together in one big, happy house.”

            So much to ask.

It must have been April 28 when Captain Teague called to tell me the time and place Doug and I could meet the arrival of the plane. It had to have been this date, because despite all the noise in my home, with everyone’s cell phone ringing at once, friends and relatives talking in every corner, delivery people bearing flowers too sweet, despite all this commotion and upset, I can still remember sitting there in my bathroom and out of desperation, ripping off that page of the pink inspirational calendar. One that constantly required re-bending, re-folding—anything, something. Something for propping it up on the back of the uninspirational toilet.

            The date of this page is April 28. That day I kept those words close to my heart. Today, these words rest in a small trunk, ornamented in brass and hand-painted in hues of antique white, stenciled with roses. That pink page I take out from time to time gently reminds me:

Let us live in the blessing of Today…

Cherishing our memories, but not holding them too tightly...

Treasuring our dreams, but not building our future on them.

Let us live in the present, rejoicing in the gifts

God lends to every moment of Today.

I called Doug right after Captain Teague and I finished our phone conversation. Then, as I was seated there on the closed lid of the toilet, I gazed up at the white rose, singular then, wrapped in a layer of waxed paper, its frail color barely faded, its perfume now only imagined. It stood at attention, pressed between two layers of glass. A rose separated from the rest of its family. One tiny part of my memories, those blessed memories of mother and son.

            This much is all very clear to me.

            I don’t remember now what time the arrival of this important flight was to be, but the plane would land in Oklahoma City, several hours from my home. I remember feeling hurried. But mostly I remember Doug’s words to me, “De’on, I just want to walk with him one more time.”

            I think my response must have sounded something like “Okay, Doug, I’ll be there. We’ll have to get all our stuff together because we won’t have time to come back here. We’ll meet you in Amarillo.”

            It must have been something like that because we gathered our stuff, and Greg drove us to Amarillo. I sat and I listened to the chain beat against the flagpole and a bird sing. It was such an odd mixture of tones to me at the time, while we waited for Doug and his middle son to arrive. To meet us there at the funeral home, just off I-40.

            Dad. Mom. Eric. The three of us close together. For Aaron, we made the long drive.

            Hours later, in Oklahoma City, it was hard to miss hearing the heavy dragging and pushing of such a burden, from rear to front, of wood over steel, over and over and over, as those Marines, just as strong as their load, escorted and lowered the crate that held the casket. The flag-draped casket.

            And the three of us walked those few steps with others. Not a long distance at all. In fact, it was only a short walk from the commercial cargo jet door to the door of the hearse. And we all walked together, together and beside this final armor. Our own.

            We walked.

            The local newspaper in Amarillo reported that over three hundred cars drove behind us in the long and slow drive that day. To lay him to rest in Texas, land that he loved, dressed in his Blues, ornamented in brass. I remember people standing out in the fields, fields of plowed dirt.       

            Some of them surely must’ve been poor souls out there that day, without some temporary home. Perhaps they felt as lost as we did on that third of May. They spoke to us in a symbolic language: beating their chests with their fists, then holding their palms open and up, emulating our pain, touching their hearts as well as our own, saluting my son’s final ride and those who followed.

            And we follow.

            I remember our families turning into a family. And I think that surely Aaron must have been smiling up there with Jesus, watching Mom and Dad, stepparents and a brother, uncles, cousins, and aunties, a lone grandmother. A cadre of Marines. All holding and helping and leaning.

            Gathering.

            Now he is waiting for us in that big, happy house.

            Yes, Roy and Doug are friends. As they hugged.

            As we hugged.

            As we walked.

            As we talk even now. And all of us are to gather.

            As we heal.