Leaves Blown Apart

January 18, 2010 by Clair Button.

“Leaves Blown Apart” was read by Baker County Library Director Perry Stokes for the WGEO Second Friday Literary Night event in January 2010.  Though accepted for the Libraries of Eastern Oregon anthology, “A Sense of Place,” it was inadvertently omitted from the first printing of the anthology.  Some of the audience asked if I would publish it elsewhere to make it available, so here it is.

Leaves Blown Apart

by C. F. Button

Empty quiet filled hours between delayed flights in Chicago O’Hare airport. Leaves with faces swept by, rattling, skittering voices caught in droning conveyor winds that failed to stir me. Some were brightly colored, some drab. Some briefly lodged against walls or benches and others raced past to meaningless destinations. They were nothing to me until one bit of color dropped from an eddy of swirling forms and paused tentatively, as though seeking refuge in my quiet, still pocket of space.

I glanced up. “U. S. Marines” was emblazoned in a yellow band across a young man’s tee shirt. Judging by his short-cropped hair and muscular chest and shoulders, I concluded the shirt was probably authentic and belonged to him. There was something in the shy way he glanced at me that faintly tugged on my invisible shroud of isolation. I nodded and silently resumed eating my portable dinner. Without speaking, he settled next to me on the two-seater bench at the side of the hall, folded his arms across his chest, and self-consciously tried to find a balance between somnolent patience and expectant attentiveness to the other travelers busily hustling between flights.

It was the patience that got me thinking, the patience that had to be learned. Memories tumbled like leaves in wind, memories of young men always moving, being transported, and learning to sleep, to rest, to relax, and to tolerate uncertainty. Trucks, planes, helicopters, long marches in single file, it didn’t matter which, you always had to learn to wait, to gather each precious moment of rest and luxuriate in it, never to hoard what could not be saved. Patience does not come quickly or naturally to young men. I, too, had been attentive to each passing figure and feature in my landscapes once. Each bit of motion might lead to adventure, or danger, or nothing at all – it took a while to learn that patience. The young or inexperienced dislike waiting. The old and experienced learn to live with it.

At the beginning of my trip this time, I had met two friends, brothers-in-arms, from a never-ending yesterday 37 years long. Winds of time and fate had blown my friends and me away, each on a separate path, and made us strangers for so many years.  Yet we will always be twenty years old, those brothers and I, no matter what our bodies and faces look like now, no matter if some of the details of yesterday have started to slip from our memories. We learned patience together. We shared a fierce bond of loyalty that endured all those years apart.

Glancing sideways, I thought I could see the light of idealism in the marine’s face, and perhaps anticipation of challenge and glory. Clean-scrubbed innocence, the kind you only see in the young. My friends and I knew the brief exultation of living through the danger this young man could only imagine in his future, wondering how, when the moment came, he would face the challenge. It was such a silly conceit, that self-doubt and concern for living up to a romanticized notion of heroism. I had known it, too.

A single year can teach patience beyond measure, a willingness to wait forever for another adventure like the one this young man anticipated so eagerly now. I thought of my friends’ shared grief, the kind that made the exultation of your own survival so brief. Would this young man feel it someday? Would he and his friends grow old with forty years of never-ending nightmares filled by horror?

I could sense him taking my measure as well. Curiosity showed, and perhaps a desire to speak – yet he hesitated. Could he see the brittle old armor that still separates and protects me from the innocent pain of green, young soldiers like him? I wondered, should I say anything to him?  Is there anything I could say that he wouldn’t take as criticism or as the emotional wandering of an old fool?

An announcement of my impending flight, changed to another gate farther down the hall, broke through my whirlwind of thoughts, brought me to earth and present tense.

I looked at him directly. “Are you active in the Marines now?”

“Yes, Sir. I was just at officer training camp. Headed home to Kansas now.”

The “Sir” provoked me like the buzz of a mosquito. I had once been a sergeant. Sergeants don’t easily accept being addressed as “Sir,” but he meant it politely, as respect due an old man. I repressed an urge to laugh at the irony.

“Is that like ROTC in college?” I asked hopefully.

“No, Sir, no college. The Marines don’t have that program.”

No, I thought, the Marines would want them young and unpolluted. Another thought came unbidden. Oh, hell! A first lieutenant! He’s going to be a first lieutenant. My platoon had lost two of them in less than a year. He’s going to want to lead the charge into battle or take risks for his men, thinking that is his duty, to risk himself before his men. I thought of booby-traps and body parts flying through the air, images which still wake another of my old friends in his 37^th year of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Suddenly the sense of loss was heavy on my chest and I already feared for this eager young man’s life. Was there was anything I could say that he would understand, anything that would make a difference?

I stood to go. I held out my hand and he shook it.

“Good luck, then. Take care of yourself and your men. It’s an important job.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll try my best.”

I hauled my bag down the corridor. There are some things which can never be explained or understood unless you have seen the sunlight glance off the wing of a butterfly, or a mote of dust in the air turned to gold, or a drop of ruby-red blood suspended against an ice-blue sky – a moment before fate grasps all life in its rending jaws and leaves consciousness forever marked. No, he couldn’t have understood if I said more. Not then. Give him time. Give him time.

I give special thanks to Perry Stokes for reading in my place, because I had found this piece too difficult to read aloud once it was written, and to my friends from Recon Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Division, 196th Brigade, who have helped me face those buried memories and become more whole.
Clair Button

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