Independence Day

O.T. Martin

Inspired by the song Independence Day written by Bruce Springsteen

Dedicated to My Father

        I looked out the window. It was a warm summer evening but the wind had really started to cool everything down. I could just barely make out the dead tree outside with the light that shone through the windows of our house. The room was silent. The room was empty, or it felt that way. I looked at the counter, and then I looked up at my father’s stone cold face. My father was staring right at me.

        “You are my son, and I love you, boy. But if you do not fulfill your duty to this country, I will never view you as my son again.” The calmness of his voice really alarmed me the most, because for the past few weeks we had both been screaming at each other at the top of our lungs and even come close to blows.

        I looked away from my father and squinted to see the time on the clock. The time read 11:35 PM. I looked back at my father and said, “Well Papa go to bed now, it’s getting late. Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now.”

        My father picked up his half finished Pabst-Blue Ribbon beer and started to walk up the stairs. He got about halfway up, stopped, turned his head about halfway back and exhaled as if he were about to say something. The man looked like he was about to cry. He paused for a moment, but couldn’t bring himself to speak. He turned and continued walking up the stairs slowly. The life in the room came back in. Our small suburban home in northern New Jersey could breathe again, and I took it all in. I looked at the oven, the TV on the family room, and the family photos. I quickly glanced at the framed photo of a four year-old version of me on my father’s shoulders at a Yankees game during Mickey Mantle’s rookie season. I wished that man was still my father, my father was a new man now. A different man.  

        My father worked two jobs, usually doing construction or working on repairing roads, and he had been laid off many times in the past, but he did everything that he could to be able to make ends meet. I have four younger siblings and our tiny house isn’t enough room for all of us. In fact, my father could be pitied if he did not pull his most recent stunt.

        Three months ago my father had an episode. Since that night my father has only had two moods: one where he is silent and filled with melancholy, and one that is enraged and screaming as loud as he can. And since that night I have always gotten great joy of watching him walk up the stairs and finally retire for the night. But this night was different. I didn’t have the spite that I usually did. This time I felt empathy for my father. Trying to change something that simply can’t be changed is horrible. He was Sisyphus, and his life was the rock. He would wake up everyday trying to push that rock forward, but he never made any progress. I looked back out the window and the dead tree was no longer visible, because my father had turned out the light in his bedroom.

        I walked over to the cabinet and took out the box of cornflakes. I made myself a bowl with the cold milk from the fridge and sat down at the counter and started to eat them. There was no sound in my ears, save the crickets. As a child, I hated that noise. If you start thinking about the noise they make, you hear them. I would lay down to go to sleep at night and think about the those damn bugs, and at that very moment, I would hear the them. But right now, eating a bowl of cornflakes, I realized that I liked the sound. I liked the sound of familiarity. I did not know if there would be crickets where I would be going, and the thought of falling asleep in a place that didn’t have that comforting noise scared me.

        I finished my bowl of cornflakes and got out of my chair, and walked outside. The sweet smell of summer filled my nostrils and the symphony of crickets filled my ears. I took a deep breath and then exhaled. I started to walk down the middle of my street and knew where I would be going, my favorite place in the world: a tree swing that hung by a pond about half a mile from my house.

        I climbed through the brush and saw someone slightly swinging back and forth in the swing. I immediately knew who it was.

        “I knew you’d come sooner or later, Peter.” Said Mary, my best friend for as long as I can remember. She seemed relaxed, as she always was.

        I walked over closer to her and said, “One last time returning to my childhood can’t hurt, can it?”

        Mary fired back, “If you never left your childhood you would make a lot of people happy.”

        This comment made my skin get very hot and I said quickly, “Yeah, everyone but me. I can’t stay here Mary. And I can’t go to Vietnam either Mary. I have to go.”

        Mary looked at the ground and started to push it with her feet and swing a little bit more. I knew what I had just said didn’t make her sad. It was everything that started three months ago.

†

        The April air was blowing outside now, and it was the perfect day to walk into town with my mother. We made a bee-line through town to the jewler. “Do you like that one, Ma? I think it’s beautiful. Only three-hundred dollars too.”

        My mother looked at the ring I was pointing to and asked the man behind the counter if she could get a closer look at the ring. The man smiled and took it out of the glass case and handed it to her. My mother squinted and put the ring up to her open left eye.

        “Why, my son, this looks beautiful. I think that it would be a fine ring to ask her with.”

        I looked at the man behind the counter and said, “I’ll take it!”

        The man said, “Fine selection sir.”

        I paid for my engagement ring with a one hundred dollar bill, seven ten dollar bills, sixteen five dollar bills, forty-seven one dollar bills, and twelve quarters. He handed me the ring in a little black box, and I tucked it into my pocket.

My mother hugged me and then looked up at me, “Oh, I am so excited for you Peter. Mary will make a lovely wife for you. When do you want the wedding to be?”

        “I was thinking mid-July Ma. That gives us about three months to get ready for the big day.”

        “Have you asked for her father’s permission, Peter?”

        “No I haven’t, Ma, but I plan to do so tomorrow while Mary is at work early in the morning. Her father doesn’t leave for work until around 10 o’clock.”

        “Oh, Peter I am so excited! You both will look so handsome at your July wedding. This day has finally come, it was just fourteen years ago when you got down on one knee at the neighborhood block party and asked Mary to marry you!”

        “Well, kids grow up, and now that we are both nineteen I think that it is time for me to show the person I love the most how much I really care about her.”

        When my mother and I got home from the jewelry store, my mother sifted through the mail and I ran up stairs to put my ring away for safekeeping. I walked over to my drawer, opened it, and pulled the ring out of my pocket, kissed it, and placed it softly in the open drawer. Then I opened my window and inhaled the sweet spring air when I heard my mother scream.

         I sped down the stairs and saw my mother sitting at the kitchen counter with her arm clutching the counter. Her face was distraught and her entire body was tense. She looked up at my face, which was confused and anxious and said, “Peter.”

        I walked over to her closer and examined the envelope that she was holding out to me. Her extended arm was shaking. The envelope was from the United States Federal government and was addressed to me. I took the envelope slowly and opened it. I knew what the envelope would say before I even opened it. Drafted. Drafted to go fight in a war halfway around the globe for a cause that was vague and uninspiring. This wasn’t my time. I had an entire life ahead of me and it was just taken away. I was going to have a wife in three months. Reading the words on the page took the life out of me, and I stood still staring at the page like a zombie. The look I gave the letter was all that my mother needed to burst into tears.

        My mother lay on the ground in a heap, “I can’t lose you Peter. I just can’t. When your father went to war I didn’t sleep the entire time he was gone.”

        I sat down on the floor next to her. “I know Ma. Papa will be proud when I come home from the war though. Who knows, maybe I could be a hometown hero.”

        “Promise me, Peter, that you will marry Mary when all of this is over. You have to promise me that.”

        I looked around the room. It was empty again. It was silent. She looked up at me with her bright green eyes. She was in pain. I knew that I could heal her with just saying two simple words, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t see the future, and I refused to lie to her. I kissed my mother on the top of the head and walked out of the room. Her crying got louder with every step I took.

        For the rest of the day, I sat on the roof looking at the tops of trees and studying the landscape of my neighborhood. I was really trying to wrap my head around the fact that I could be shipping off to basic training in just three months. I was trying to focus on every little detail of my neighborhood, but the sun was beating hard on my body during the day, and at night the crickets distracted me. I did not want to talk to anyone, especially Mary, or even do anything. The thought of grabbing a cold beer or lighting up a cigarette crossed my mind, but I was too numb at this point. I just wanted to sit and stare at the home that I loved so much as a child.

        After about nine hours of sitting on my roof studying the neighborhood and watching very few cars drive by, it was almost midnight. My father had not come home yet, and I could just barely hear my mothers muffled crying from inside the house. But something caught my eye. There was a car going much too fast speeding down my road swerving from side to side. The high beams illuminated everything in front of the car, and I could tell that this car was doomed. The car swerved to the left, then cut back very quickly to the right and slammed into a telephone pole. When the car’s motion was stopped, I immediately recognized the white pickup truck. I climbed off my roof and sprinted the almost two hundred yards down my street and threw open the door.

        “Dad!” I screamed, “Are you crazy??” I looked into the car and saw my father’s eyes closed, and his head resting on his right shoulder. He stunk of whiskey and beer, but I was pretty sure that he was still breathing. I pulled him out of the car and laid him flat on the road. I sprinted up Mary’s front yard and banged on her front door.

        Mary opened the front door wearing a white top with jean shorts, with a worried visage. “Peter what is-“

        I cut her off and screamed, “Call the police!”

        The rest of the night is a blur. I remember paramedics coming, and talking to my father’s drunk friends in the hospital. They explained to my mother and me how my father had lost three weeks worth of pay gambling that night.

        The one thing that I remember the most, is what Mr. Johnson said to my mother and me. He was our family friend and the doctor in the hospital. He said, “You’re lucky your father is alive. The fight he had in him didn’t give up when he was shot in Saint-Lô, and it won’t fail him now. He is a fighter. A true American man.”

†

        I looked up at Mary again. She looked beautiful. I thought about the promise that my mother tried to hold me to. I started to wonder what was stronger, was it going to Vietnam, or was it going to Canada?

I piped up, “I’ll be leaving in the morning from St. Mary’s Gate, and then up into Canada.”

        Mary looked up at me and said, “Can’t you take me with you, Peter? We can start all over and wipe the dust of this small-“

        “No.” I said sternly. “I can’t be a part of this town anymore. I am not my father, and I will never become him. My entire life I have respected him until that incident. Nothing can keep me in this town, and nothing can make me be within a hundred yards of him.”

        Mary got off the swing and walked closer to me, “You’ll miss the fireworks if you leave, Peter. I know that the fireworks are your favorite.”

        I looked down at Mary, kissed her head one last time, and said, “No. They are my father’s favorite.”