Fields of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

of them to broach the subject to the other. And they both tacitly realized that, if one were to mention it, the other would have cause for some sort of hurt and questioning.
    If his mother were to mention it, his father would have immediate grounds to feel hurt: she would have been thinking about Him, the other man in her life. What, he could wonder, reveling in the hurt, made you think of Him again after all these years? And if his father mentioned it, his mother could feel righteous indignation that, even after all the years and the assurances and the solid base of their relationship, he couldn't cope. He would be showing the insecurity he felt in their life together, trying to drive the Other Man and all his traces completely from her life.
    So the footlocker sat, year in and year out, gathering rust and mildew in the shed. And only he had the temerity to open it and experience its contents.
    He went to it on the last day before he left for Vietnam. He was alone in the small tar-paper house that he had grown up in, and had spent his morning sorting in boredom through his childhood things. He then sat in the small front room and attempted yesterday's newspaper, but could not concentrate on it. Finally he paced before the front window, wondering if his mother would return early from her shopping trip to Salt Lick, and, satisfied that she would not, he left the house and waded through dead grass and patches of horseweed to the shed.
    It was a personal thing for him, something he would have considered sharing only with his mother, although he never had. He had discovered the contents of the locker when he was twelve, and they had always been a very special secret.
    He slid the heavy door of the shed, stirring dust and spiderwebs, and entered it, pulling on a frayed cord that lit a bare light bulb. The footlocker sat in a far corner, guarded by cobwebs, unbothered and unmoved since the last time he had explored its contents.
    He removed the gray footlocker, sitting on it, and sprang the weak padlock on the green one with a twist of his powerful hand. Then he flipped the latch and pulled the top open, turning his face at first from the odor.
    There before him, in the musty browns and yellows which seem to accrue in all things with age, lay the remains of his real father.
    Not the physical remains. Those had been lowered into a hole in the side of some European hill on a cold winter morning four months before he was born. The trunk held other, emotional remains. Two brown army uniforms of World War II vintage, replete with corporal stripes and a single ribbon he had earned before going overseas. A stack of newspaper clippings about the goings-on in the European theater during the late fall and early winter of 1944. A larger stack of letters to his mother, written in a rather bold but undeveloped scrawl. A brown scrapbook, half-full of pictures of his father and mother, singly and together. And a manila envelope containing the letter which informed his mother that his father had been killed, and three medals, including the Purple Heart.
    He did not know the story behind the accumulation of those things in the footlocker, and he had never asked about them. It was enough for him that he had found them, and was able to experience them.
    He thumbed the scrapbook, rediscovering pictures he had forgotten, wondering again what it would have been like to have known him. Hello, Father. Real father. What a sad and inglorious shrine. How unfortunate to have given so much in the hills of another country and to then be relegated to a forgotten footlocker in the corner of another man's shed. How sad to have sacrificed your life for your country, to have faced the bullet on the fields of fire only to have your memory purged as a part of a jealous lover's insecurity. A jealous lover of your woman. And how sad to have carried the infantry rifle, only to have your tale hidden in a shed, while the ones who fought the war from behind a typewriter tell