The Strong

The Strong

My uncle died without ever having a wife or a serious long-term relationship. He was 60-something at the time of his death. I’ve never been good with remembering ages, but I know it wasn’t that many years after I stopped talking to him, and I know he was in his late 50s by then.


He never had children of his own, so I guess he considered us to be something of his legacy. He would be over at the house for hours at a time, everyday, sitting in our living room when we got home from school, to late at night, where he’d help my brothers and I with our homework and tell us these long, must have been an hour each, stories about his childhood, my father’s teenage years, and all that.


He lived twenty minutes away in the urban side of Middletown. He didn’t like being there. Said all the blacks and Hispanics didn’t like him there, either. He said they would curse at him while he was walking out of his apartment and steal things off his car. My uncle was tall, barrel-chested, and fat. I was never afraid for him, just thankful he was at our place all the time.

***


My mother married my father when she was 21 and had my older brother when she was 22. Her life beforehand has never been a mystery to me. I’ve heard the story about my father coming into the diner she worked at every night, talking about his job at Shortline, how he left a note one night underneath her windshield wiper asking her for a date, and how she first thought it was a parking ticket.


I’ve heard all the stories about my mother’s adolescence. About the 4-year relationship with the cheating boyfriend, the fights over money with her drug-addict brother, her running away from home to escape her alcoholic mother and her naïve father.


She told them during car rides to the supermarket and to her friend’s house. My brother and I sat in the backseat and listened over the light sound of Donna Summers on the radio. My mother flicked cigarette ash out of the window and apologized every now and again. Children shouldn’t know these things, she said, and then gave context to why during the only time we visited her parents, there were bags of beer bottles lying next to the door.


During one of these trips, 8-year-old me interrupted her mid-sentence to say I remembered a time I was born and that I was happy to have chosen this family as my own. Then I undid my seatbelt, reached over and gave my mother a kiss on the cheek. I remember this happening, but for the life of me, I don’t know if what I said was true.


***

My father has never had a problem with the way he’s lived. And if he’s said so, it’s never been to me. For the majority of my childhood, I only saw my father during the weekends and over summer break. He worked the nightshift and usually went to work as I got home from school. I’d see his truck--black as tar--pull out of the driveway and into the street as I reached the door. He’d wave out the window, the back of his hand, the buttoned sleeve of his blue work shirt.


On the weekends, my mother kicked us out of the house and it’d be the four of us—my father, Uncle, and my brother—in the car, going up to Home Depot to pick up some lumber, or to the junk yard to see if they had whatever car part my father needed at the time. They were the only times my Uncle didn’t talk exclusively to my brother and I. Instead, we’d sit in the backseat and listen.


“Yeah, she was a fat ass.”

“But, Mitch,” Uncle said, “you’re not listening. Thirty-two. Thirty-two, and fuck, must be 240 pounds.”

“Eh,” my father said. “Probably from the kids.”

“Jean had two kids and she doesn’t look any different than when you met her. No, it’s not that.”

“Maybe it’s because she’s been eating too much of that government cheese.”


When we got home, my mother already had dinner cooling on the stove—chicken, meatloaf, or the like—and she’d was in the living room, quietly smoking in front of the television. She hollered to my brother and I to wash our hands and Uncle hurried us to the kitchen sink. Come on, it’s supper-time, he said, grabbing the dish soap and squeezing it onto our hands. Our father walked into the living room silently.


***


Normally the stories Uncle told us after dinner involved playful things, like the time his near-blind sister shot the head off a turtle 50 yards away with a shotgun, or how it’d been so cold one winter, they’d peed into the snow only for it freeze in mid-air. But one time we asked him about his childhood friends, why we never saw or heard about them. He sat quiet for a moment and took off his glasses. He stared off into the distance and wiped his eyes, and then explained about Vietnam.


He told us that he’d just turned eighteen and that every morning during first period, he and his friends would listen to the loudspeaker’s announcement of casualties from his school. Boys he’d known and grown up with. He said that they’d listened for the past three years, and when he turned eighteen, all he thought was now it’s my time to die. He knew it was only a matter of time before he got the draft letter in the mail, and so him and his mother made plans for him to go to Canada, as many did back then. From where they lived in Sullivan County, it’d of been a day-trip north, not even.


Of course, Uncle never told us what happened to that plan. Around that part of the story he cleared his throat, put on his glasses, and went into the kitchen to pour himself another glass of soda. When he got back, he resumed to when he’d already gotten the letter and had to go into the city for a mandatory physical examination. Looney Tunes crap, he said, all that was missing was the rubber stamp over your forehead telling you were good to go.


I remember the whole thing as being pretty horrifying. Not only was the government coming to get you and make you go to war, but you had to go into the City and stand in a line at a factory in only your briefs. Uncle did it twice. Once because he’d gotten the letter but there was a typo in the paperwork. Twice because they fixed said typo and were ready to process him all the same.


He said there were many on the line ready to cripple themselves in order not to go, either by breaking their legs or hands. They were men of all ages and races of course, but it was the white boys Uncle recognized from school who held this humor the strongest. I asked, why didn’t they do it? And he shrugged, always thought they wouldn’t have to.


Uncle got out of the war the same way people have gotten out of wars throughout history: he lied. Remember Uncle was a heavy guy, probably around 250 pounds at that time. The way he told it, when it came down to measuring height, they had a scale that’d determine whether or not the recruit was in good-enough shape. The army-guy was on one side of the factory floor and Uncle and a line of other men were standing across from him with their backs against the wall, with height measurements painted behind them. Uncle was 6’2 and at that point might’ve been the tubby soldier you see in all the movies, but he’d been drafted nonetheless. He knew this, so to mess distort the measurements; he crouched forward about four inches, enough so he looked shorter at a distance.


I remember turning to my brother and laughing along with him at Uncle’s ingenuity. Uncle simply shook his head and said sometimes I think I should’ve died then.


We never asked him about it again.


***


By the time my brother and I hit our teens, we heard enough of his stories. Coming home from school, we saw his Chevy parked along side the house and decided to take a walk around town, hoping he wouldn’t stay for dinner and he’d be gone by the time we got back.


This attitude suited our mother fine, of course. After coming home from our after-school walk, we approached the house and found our mother smoking outside. She smiled and took our boredom with his stories as a kind of camaraderie to talk about her own dealings with Uncle. They day she met him, she told us, she’d gotten off an early shift from work and found him and our father standing in the parking lot. Our father had flowers in his hand—something I still have a problem imagining—and was there to pick her up. He said he didn’t want her to take the bus and then introduced our uncle. Our mother politely smiled and asked Uncle what he liked to do. Hunting, he laughed and looked at our father. They walked to the car. Uncle took the front passenger seat. Our mother sat behind him.


The whole damn ride, she said, all he did was ask questions about where I came from, what my last boyfriend was like. I was being dissected. And after the questions ended, all I heard about was what their cousins were up to, like I knew what they were talking about.


Uncle waited in the car while our father walked our mother to the door. She said she didn’t have the nerve to tell him then what she thought about our uncle. Standing on the porch and listening to her, we found the difference between the motherly anger we’d known in childhood and the rage that comes from having almost twenty years of a marriage interloped. I felt pity. Guilt, too. If not for us, I know she would’ve given our father an ultimatum long ago. But we were too sensitive an audience, our uncle too large a part of our lives.


When she finished her cigarette, we went inside and fell back into position. She went into the kitchen and picked up a paperback novel that was gull spread over the counter top. We joined Uncle in the living room and watched television.


***


It’s tempting to say that they eventually had it out, but it’s really as simple as this: one day after my senior year of high school, she kicked him out.


In the weeks before that, my uncle had taken to walking with a cane because of the water blisters on his legs. They bleed water, he said, rolling up his pant leg and pinching a blister open. I was at school when he used the cane to the whack the pup my mother had recently gotten, and that was that.


I was surprised not to see Uncle’s Chevy parked in front. When I walked inside, my mother was seated on the couch with the dog on her lap. I asked, Where’s Unc? And she responded, I had enough. I called your father and he understands.


I nodded. Uncle died a year later, alone in his apartment. My father found him there one afternoon before he went into work. The blinds were drawn and the apartment was dark, save for the television. I’d been in his apartment once in the months before he died. I sometimes visited with my father, sometimes without, hoping to hear what he’d been up to.


Nothing, my uncle said, sitting in a recliner. Just been sitting here and watching my shows. He coughed into a handkerchief he pulled out from the chair’s cushion and wiped his lips. The water weight had gained around his face, pushing in his eyes and giving every expression a type of uncertainty. I sat beside him on a steel chair he’d set up as an end table and waited for him to continue. But he did not. He watched television until he fell asleep and then I left.

-Adam Tyrrell