Chapter 7 - A Lesson in the Rain
That Saturday, the rain came down over Montgomery County in sheets. It was the kind of gray, miserable late-autumn deluge that turns the red Tennessee clay into soup and makes your joints ache three days before the clouds even roll in from the west.
I was sitting in my kitchen, wrapped in my wool cardigan, holding a cup of black coffee with both hands to keep my knuckles from throbbing. The clock over the stove said six-forty-five.
I didn't expect him.
Young men in uniform have a way of forgetting promises when the sun goes down and the beer starts flowing on a Friday night. I figured he would call the dining facility, get Holloway to make an excuse, or simply decide that taking an Article 15 was easier than spending his weekend scrubbing mold off an old woman's gutters in the freezing rain.
At six-fifty-two, a beat-up Ford F-150 with a dented tailgate pulled into my gravel driveway.
The engine cut out. The door opened, and Sergeant Reese stepped out into the mud.
He wasn't wearing his uniform. He had on a pair of grease-stained Carhartt overalls, a battered gray hooded sweatshirt, and work boots that had seen real labor. He didn't run for the porch to get out of the downpour. He walked to the bed of his truck, hauled out two heavy toolboxes, a circular saw, and an armload of pressure-treated two-by-sixes, and carried them toward the back steps.
I didn't go to the door. I watched him through the small diamond pane in the kitchen window.
He set his tools under the eaves, took off his wet canvas gloves, and immediately knelt down in the mud to inspect the rotting steps. He took out a pry bar and went to work.
By nine o'clock, the rain had turned into sleet. The wind was whipping around the corner of the house, whistling through the bare branches of the big sugar maple in the yard.
Reese hadn't stopped once. His sweatshirt was soaked through, sticking to his broad shoulders, his breath coming in white plumes that vanished into the gray air. He pulled the rotted stringers out, measured the new lumber with an old wooden folding rule, and cut the notches with hand tools when the rain got too heavy for his electric saw.
At ten, I opened the back door.
"Come inside, boy," I called out over the rattle of the sleet against the tin roof. "Before I have to call an ambulance and explain to your captain why his staff sergeant died of pneumonia on my back steps."
Reese looked up. His nose was red, his knuckles were skinned, and there was a streak of black chimney soot across his forehead where he had bumped against the foundation.
"I’ve got two more boards to set, ma'am," he said.
"They aren't going anywhere. Get in this house."
He wiped his boots on the mat until there wasn't a speck of grit left on the rubber, took off his wet outer layer on the porch, and walked into my kitchen in his socks. He looked enormous in that little room, surrounded by my blue floral wallpaper and the framed needlepoints of scripture my sister had made back in the fifties.
I pointed toward the table. "Sit."
There was a plate of warm biscuits on the oilcloth, a crock of apple butter, and a mug of hot coffee that smelled like chicory and dark roast.
He didn't move toward the food. He stood by the radiator, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at his socks.
"Eat the biscuits, Reese. I didn't bake them for the wallpaper."
He sat down slowly, took half a biscuit, and chewed it as if he were trying to make as little noise as humanly possible.
"My grandfather used to talk about the rain in Vietnam," Reese said suddenly, his eyes fixed on the coffee mug. "He said you didn't know what wet was until you lived in a hole for six months where the water came up to your ribs."
"He was right," I said, setting the sugar bowl between us. "The worst part wasn't the cold. It was the smell. Everything smelled like sulfur and wet canvas. You forgot what dry skin felt like."
"He never talked about the medals," Reese whispered. "He kept them in a cigar box in his sock drawer. We only found them when we cleaned out the house after the funeral. A Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with 'V' devices, three Purple Hearts. He never wore them to the parades. He never went to the VFW."
"Most of the ones who actually saw it don't go to the parades," I told him, sitting down across from him. "The parades are for the people who stayed home to feel good about the ones who died. The ones who lived just want to wake up, go to work, and pretend they don't see the jungle every time the lights go out."
Reese stared at his hands. "I deployed to Mosul in 2017. We were clearing a schoolhouse on the west side. A kid... he couldn't have been more than twelve... threw a grenade through a window into the courtyard where my squad was staging."
The room went very quiet, save for the rain clicking against the glass.
"I didn't see him," Reese said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Corporal Miller saw him. Miller pushed me behind a concrete pillar and took three fragments in his hip. He walks with a cane now. He’s out of the Army. And I got promoted to Sergeant."
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He looked up at me, his eyes wide and dark with a pain that had nothing to do with the sleet outside.
"Every day since then," he said, "I felt like I was wearing somebody else’s clothes. I felt like if I wasn't the toughest, loudest, meanest bastard in the company, somebody was going to look at me and see that I was just the coward who let his corporal get blown up so he could wear stripes."
