My father was in the Korean War, but he never talks about his experiences. I couldn’t imagine my father being a soldier because I’ve invested too much in believing that his emotional detachment signals a lack of courage. Instead, I thought that he was a cook in an Army mess hall, although he can’t boil water or fry an egg.
My father doesn’t believe in dwelling in the past. I know nothing about his childhood or his adolescence. I have only sketchy information about his aborted career as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, his dream of being a pro-football player, his short stay as a monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, the moment I was born while he was down the hall having his back operated on to repair a slipped disc. I know nothing about how he met my mother or where they lived in the early days of their marriage. I know next to nothing about his own family, his siblings, his parents, his other relatives. I’ve never heard him utter a word about the culture he grew up in or the society that fostered the conservative ideas he is so proud of touting, the unbendable ethics and uncompromising moral stances.
If he hears fireworks go off, his body trembles not in the way the hunters’ in the woods make my body involuntarily jump when their gunfire seems too close. I know the hunters are anywhere near the garden where I’m thinning out the corn shoots, but still my body senses danger. His body shakes uncontrollably from the memory of some long forgotten battle in a barely remembered war, my body’s reaction is simply instinct.
My brother told me once that in the war my father was an infantryman. He fought on the front lines day in and day out facing the enemy and listening to the sounds of gunfire and mortar rounds go boom boom boom. Once, his company was ambushed and the men he’d come to admire and trust were mowed down around him, one by one until he was the only survivor.
He has taught himself to forget his past, but on the Fourth of July his body betrays his stoicism. It will not let him forget that he is a man whose body, at least, registers the sensations of having lived and of living still.
In the garden, I stand up to relieve the pressure on my knees from