The Traveller Read Online Free PDF Page B

director; a man she’d never seen before. He’d looked at her intensely, then, to the surprise of her family, led her into a side office. He had sat her down, businesslike, in a chair across from his desk. For a moment he’d shuffled papers, while she sat, waiting. Finally he discovered what he was searching for. ‘They didn’t tell you, did they?’ he asked.
    ‘No,’ she said. She hadn’t known what he was talking about.
    ‘They just told you he was dead, right?’ That was true. She nodded her head. ‘Well,’ he said brusquely, then suddenly slowing, ‘you sure you want to know?’
    Know what? she wondered, but she nodded again. ‘All right,’ he said. Sadness crawled into his voice. ‘Corporal Barren was killed while on routine patrol in the Quang Tri province. The man next to him stepped on a land mine. A big one. It killed your husband and two others.’
    ‘But why can’t I …’
    ‘Because there wasn’t enough of him left to look at.’ ‘Oh.!
    Silence filled the room. She didn’t know what to say. ‘Kennedy would’ve got us out,’ the funeral director said. ‘But we had to kill him. I think he was our only shot. My boy’s there now. God, I’m scared. It seems like I bury another boy each week. I’m so sorry for you.’ ‘You must love your boy,’ she said. ‘Yes. A great deal.’ ‘He wasn’t clumsy, you know.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘John. He was graceful. He was a beautiful athlete. He scored touchdowns and he made baskets and home runs. He would never have stepped on a mine.’
    She thought of the old children’s rhyme: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a mine, break my heart for all time.
    Remains nonviewable.
    ‘Hello, lover,’ she said. She took the flowers out of the box.
    Detective Barren sat on the gravesite, with her back against the headstone, obscuring her husband’s name and the dates of his life. Her eyes were lifted toward the sky; she watched the clouds meander across the great blue expanse with what she thought was an admirable purposelessness. She played the children’s game of trying to guess what each cloud’s shape was like; she thought of elephants and whales and rhinoceroses. She thought that Susan would have seen only fish and aquatic mammals. She allowed herself a pleasurable fantasy, that there was a heaven up beyond the clouds and that John was waiting there for Susan. The idea comforted her some, but she felt tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away swiftly. She was alone in the cemetery. She thought that she was fortunate, that her behavior was decidedly ungrave. She felt a small wind that cut an edge off the heat, rustling in the trees. She laughed, not in humor but in sadness, and spoke out loud:
    ‘Oh, Johnny. I’m almost forty and you’ve been dead eighteen years, and I still miss the hell out of you.
    ‘I guess it was Susan, you see. You were dead and she got born and she was so tiny and helpless and sick. Boy. Colic and then respiratory problems and God knows what eke. It just overwhelmed Annie, you see. And Ben, well, his business was just starting and he worked all the time. And so I just got caught up in it. Sitting up all night so that Annie could get a few hours’ sleep. Rocking her. Walking her. Back and forth, back and forth. All those little baby tears, you see, all the pain and hurt she was feeling, well, I was feeling too. It was as if the two of us could cry together and feel a little better and I think if it
    hadn’t been for her, I don’t think I would have made it. You big creep! You had no right to get yourself killed!’
    She stopped.
    She remembered a night, crammed together in a small bed in his dormitory room when he told her that he had refused to submit his request for a student deferment from
    the draft. It wasn’t fair, he’d said. All the farm boys and ghetto kids were getting slaughtered while the lawyers’ sons went to Ivy League schools in safety. The system was