by Forest Hamer
1.
When my father finally spoke to me
about war, he didn't mention Viet Nam,
but a bone-chill Korea, cleaved into before
I was born. And he told me a white man
saved his life there, the white man
his friend, another Southerner
away from home for the first time.
Billy McGee saw the land mine my father
almost tripped, and he moved him
out of the way. When McGee moved on,
2.
stateside, my father said he missed him
openly and for days, until another
white soldier, also a Southerner,
told my father what the other whites knew,
that McGee belonged to the Klan
back in South Carolina, and he'd boasted
he was even one of their leaders.
My father's sadness ended quick, he said,
and he never wrote the letters he had
promised, never heard again from McGee.
3.
My father hasn't told me I could tell this.
He didn't say I could show the naive love
he can have for men, how ashamed a man
who is also a black man can be when
a white man saves his life. But when he says
he doesn't care whatever happened
to Billy McGee, he hasn't told me
not to wonder whether people do move
each other in the end, or if saving
someone's story is the same as saving life.
4.
During my father's second Viet Nam tour,
something between us changed -- he came back startled
and quiet. And I began demanding
he let me wear my hair long and in braids.
We seemed to find no more to say, so
I plotted to leave my father's house.
Once every few months, after some fight,
I asked him what had happened over there.
There was nothing to tell me, he said:
he came home, a lot of others didn't.
5.
Leaving a father's house is never as easy
as moving away. For a long time, sometimes
always, one of them, the father, the child,
wishes away ever having loved the other,
and the other resents being loved this way.
When I became grown, and my father began ending
the rest of his life, he finally told me
about war and the man there who saved him.
My father told me that was the blessing
I'd wanted. He asked me to give him mine.
