Hope is the thing with feathers
Featured in Ginosko Literary Journal #19
By
(…apologies to Emily Dickinson)
Jacksonville, NC, has the skeleton of a quaint downtown, but it exists largely because of war and to meet the needs and desires of Marines, the “combat-ready units” who sit awaiting “expeditionary deployment”, or recovering from it. So explained my husband, Cpl. Bryant, who also said that Camp Lejeune, like several USMC bases, sits on a swamp because that’s what the Marines usually buy—cheap land that nobody else wants. That’s not to say it doesn’t suit their purpose: preparing men and women to exist—or stop existing--in the most unpleasant situations.
This particular unpleasant situation, this former swamp, was our new home. Our first home. I met a woman while shopping for my wedding dress that was enthusiastically planning to move there and “loved the area.” She must have meant some other area. Nobody loves Jacksonville.
After our honeymoon in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, we began the long drive south. We borrowed my parent’s van and filled it with things you can live without for 8 short months. That’s how long I would end up having before Daniel deployed again.
At the time, I thought I was moving for three years. I didn’t yet understand “combat-ready units” and “expeditionary deployment.”
We got lost in New York City--misplaced the George Washington Bridge or something--and I ate the last of our wedding cake while Daniel studied our map in a disreputable looking parking lot.
It had been raining in New England when we left, on the green hills, the stony fields, the picturesque farms. It was still raining when we arrived in Jacksonville on a Tuesday afternoon, on the dingy pawn shops and tattoo parlors. The bridal shops and the tawdry lingerie shops looked alike. The little markets and the tobacco shops looked alike. One cheap cinder-block building begged you to sell your plasma and save a life; another identical building, a souvenir shop, was decorated with a poster, “Kill ‘Em All and Let God Sort ‘Em Out”. Save a life, as long as it’s the right life. One strip club had emblazoned its windows with “God bless America!” This was the place where we would plant our fragile hopes for the future, our seedling family, and pray for it to flourish; we had to plant it here. My brand-new husband was a Marine, and this was where Uncle Sam had sent us.
It rained a lot in Jacksonville. I guess that’s how it became a swamp. Some weeks it rained nearly every day. Everyone at home worried about the threat of hurricanes and tornadoes, but I found the violent, windy rains exciting. I’d sit and watch as the wind peeled the siding off the building across the way. I preferred it to the more usual dreary drizzle or steady grey assault. I thought it would be a fertile place for growing things, all that warm, moist air, but the little flowers I planted died, despite the numerous hopeful green stems that had shot up initially. Drowned? Poisoned by acid rain? Rotten from damp?
There had been thunder and lightning and hail throughout the week. In the night, we heard the gutter by our bedroom window gushing water constantly, like a large and powerful faucet. It emptied onto the cement patio in back, which flooded, becoming a pond outside our back door.
In the morning, when it had drained, I was able to go out to check on my flowers, hoping for their revival. There was a little pile of something on the cement, a little bit of rubbish or something. I bent over it.
The little bird, the dead little bird was twisted, here its beak, here its one twiggy foot, here the other bent behind it. Its down was all soaked or torn out, so that it was partly bald, and its pitiful thin neck stretched out, making it looked emaciated. In reality, it was quite a plump little thing for a baby, and it was a baby, though, like a starving child, it had an eerie look of age in its grim mortality.
I summoned Daniel; he buried it. He pointed to the gutter above, and to the big black bird peering out at us. “There’s where your bird came from”, he said, “Papa bird built their home in a bad place, Papa and Mama did.”
That night, we swam in the community swimming pool that was the focal point of our backyard. In Maine, I knew veterans, of course, and had even heard of local men who had died in OIF; but in Jacksonville, I saw personally the gruesome work of IED’s and gunfire. That night was the first time. The man was swimming with his wife and baby, burns on his face and back, lip distended from his injury. He looked to be in fairly good health otherwise; he was well enough to lift his baby high in the air until she giggled. He laughed and smiled with his wife. In fact, it was a happy scene.
“I wonder if it happened over there”, my husband said, speculating about the man’s injuries from the other side of the pool.
“Of course it did,” I said darkly.
“She’s a good wife to stay with him, after that. Which is more than can be said for a lot of them…” He didn’t see any of his buddies get hurt “over there”; but plenty of them got hurt when they came back to find the lover they had longed for had been unfaithful, to walk in on her with another man. They’d have traded burned flesh for fidelity. Semper Fi indeed. “I’m glad I have a wife I can trust”, he said, then and often in days to come.
We went on to laugh and splash, happy newlyweds, excited to have a pool in our own backyard to use anytime we wanted. Daniel, as usual, checked the drains for frogs and other fun amphibian friends. None in the right drain. In the left…
“Is it alive?” I heard him say to himself, “Oh…no….” “What?” I said, still caught up in our play, our laughter, thinking some interesting curiosity had fallen into the pool. He tried to keep me from seeing it, but I craned my neck to see past him. A second baby bird was in the drain, floating dead and swollen.
I grimaced and we moved away. He knew how much I hated the sight of it. We tried to play again. We smiled at the antics of some kids trying to make a big splash. Daniel, big Marine, jumped in and splashed them. I laughed. The pool was about to close. The man with the burns got out and wrapped his baby in a towel, and he and his wife played Frisbee on the lawn. He was okay. Even if catastrophe occurred, it could be okay. But God forbid! I put my arms around Daniel’s neck suddenly and said, “Don’t go away! Don’t go away again…”
He couldn’t promise, only pray. “I hope not, love.”
Monday morning brought down the rest of the baby birds. I saw them with revulsion when I looked out that morning, in a soggy heap under the gutter. It was beginning to make me sick. There seemed to be horror around every corner, and nothing I could do to escape it. I called Daniel and chokingly told him what happened. I rarely called him at work, but mortality on my door step was getting to be more than I could handle.
“Shhh, love, its all right. I’ll take care of it when I come home.” He buried them in the backyard so I couldn’t see them, and by a mercy of God no creature dug them up.
This was my welcome to Jacksonville; Camp Lejeune, Camp “the young” I had thought poignantly at first, knowing only the French and not the Marine it was named for. I wanted to hope for our future, our family, for happiness, security, and that Daniel would not have to return to Iraq. I worried he had used his luck up the first time, though I didn’t really believe in luck. We were surrounded by healthy Marines who had survived unscathed; but the maimed and dead spoke louder, the young grotesquely thwarted from their promising lives.
“Hope is the thing with feathers…”
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So true and on target, that yearning for life to be different than its possibilities. Love this.