Thirty-Eight

“Navin and his scouts couldn’t make a good trade if it bit them.”

—Ty Cobb

Cagney stood staring at his own image reflected in the bathroom mirror. April’s knock sounded softly on the closed door; Cagney opened it.

“You okay?” she asked. “I heard the water shutoff a few minutes ago.”

“I’m fine,” Cagney said, glancing at the mirror. “I—”

“What?”

“I thought I saw my dad standing behind me, as he did when he taught me to tie a tie. I was attending my first high school homecoming dance as a junior.”

“Sounds like a nice memory.”

“Until you take into account that he got pissed when he had to show me again a few months later, when I next had occasion to wear a tie.”

“I’m sorry.”

Cagney shrugged. “He was a drill instructor. I guess he expected to have to show me once and I’d remember.”

“You were a teen. Not like you wore a tie every day.”

“I know that.” Cagney sighed. “It seems for every pleasant memory, I have six others that would make your hair stand on end.”

“Hold onto the pleasant ones, Cagney. That’s all you have left, now that he’s gone.”

Cagney nodded. “We only just started to connect, in the last weeks.”

“And now you wish you’d had more time with him.”

Cagney nodded again.

“That’s understandable.”

“I have some good memories. Too few. And I suspect the unpleasant ones will haunt me always, just as he was haunted by his.”

April said nothing, and Cagney added, “Dad always joked that no one wants to live to be 90, unless they’re 89—a milestone he missed by four months. Well, at least he lived to see the new millennium.”

“Come on,” April said, taking Cagney’s hand. “Let’s go open that footlocker that’s filled with your father’s life.”

The key to the padlock that safeguarded Cale’s life as a marine was, as Cale had promised, not well hidden. It was one of the keys on the keychain he’d always carried with him. Cagney had suspected as much; but he couldn’t bring himself to open the footlocker once Cale had moved to hospice. His curiosity had had to wait in deference to his father’s avowal that Cagney would find everything he wanted to know about his life in the Corps after he was gone.

Cale had died yesterday morning; the crematorium sent a team to pick up his remains within an hour. Before they arrived, Cagney removed the ring his father wore; it was 10K gold and bore the emblem of the Marine Corps—the anchor piercing the globe at an angle, the eagle, wings spread wide, perched atop the globe. Cale wore it on his left hand, as a wedding band, but the ring was a gift from a woman he’d dated before he met Cagney’s mother. Cale told him the story, what the inscription read (no longer legible due to wear), the name of the woman, a few days before he slipped into coma. It was a story even his mother hadn’t known. Cagney couldn’t bring himself to ask his father if that other woman had meant more to his father than the one he’d married and treated so poorly; he wasn’t sure the reason was out of respect, because it wasn’t his business, or because he feared knowing. In the end, he let Cale take the truth with him to the grave, along with all the rest of what he’d withheld from Cagney over the years.

Cagney also removed his father’s watch—a gift from his own mother 60 years ago, before departing for overseas. It, too, had survived events on Okinawa. Cagney had kept it wound, the time set, during the final three days of Cale’s life. But when he removed it from Cale’s wrist for the last time, he noted it had stopped, just minutes before death. When Cagney tried to wind it, he found the stem frozen.

In planning for a memorial service, Cagney hoped to find some relic of Cale’s life in the Corps to mention in the eulogy he would write. But more important to him was quenching his curiosity, to learn that which his father had, with purpose, withheld from him while he was alive. You’ll find in my footlocker, in the basement, all you need to know about my service with the Corps. Would the locker’s contents rock Cagney’s world, or simply serve to disappoint? He was about to find out.

He looked at the lid he’d recalled from so many years ago as a kid: reddish brown, the address of his father’s parents’ home carefully markered in block letters. Cagney wondered a moment, as he slid the key into the padlock, whether the key would even turn. He had no idea when the last time his father might’ve looked in on the contents of this part of his life, long hidden away in the corner of a damp basement. Perhaps he had no need; he’d lived the boxes’ contents every day of his life, haunted during his waking hours as well as by nightmares from which he woke, drenched in sweat, once with his hands gripping the throat of his wife—or so Iris once told Cagney. Even at age 16, the story had both terrified and intrigued him. Cagney never let on to Cale that his mother had shared that frightening bedroom encounter, but he asked him shortly thereafter to share some stories of the war. Cale only looked at him with haunted eyes mixed with anger and told him very sternly that he should never ask him about the war.

The key turned easily and Cagney removed the lock from the hasp. He sat back, conscious of April’s bare thigh against his own; the footlocker looked strange, having been brought up from the basement, a relic from some distant past, not having seen the light of day for decades.

“Cagney?” April whispered when Cagney hesitated to lift the lid. She seemed as curious as Eve surely must’ve been when the serpent approached her with its temptation of knowledge.

“Right,” was all Cagney said, and he opened the box.

The first item to greet April and Cagney was the backpack Cagney recalled from his youth; he’d worn it often while playing war with his childhood buddies. It was olive green and worn, and Cagney was aware, as he’d never been as a boy, of where it had been; yet through no fault of its own, it could no more betray the events that took place on that South Pacific island than could the marine to whom it had been issued.

The next item was a navy blue cloth bag with draw strings that Cagney guessed was Navy issue, for the voyage from San Diego to Okinawa. Cagney lifted these two items from the box and found a holster that had housed Cale’s sidearm.

Next to appear were a number of framed black and white photographs. Two appeared to be taken on Parris Island, where his father had trained. They were group shots of Cale’s unit and it didn’t take long for Cagney to pick out his father, standing in the back row with the other taller young marines; Cagney pointed him out for April. In one photo the unit looked serious, confident; in the other, most wore smiles, no doubt ignorant of what lay ahead for them. He thought he recognized Murphy, standing to his father’s left in each photograph, but he couldn’t be sure.

The other photos were taken years later, at Marine Corps reunions his father had attended through the years. Cagney was saddened both by the aged faces as well as by the smaller number of marines in these photos, although he always recognized Murphy.

Next came a photo of Cale, a bust shot in his dress blues (although the photo was black and white), his hat at a jaunty angle. Smiling broadly, he looked proud. Cagney couldn’t recall ever seeing his father look so innocent, and so he wondered if the photo had been taken prior to the nightmare that was Okinawa.

“He was very handsome,” April said.

“Yes, he was.”

“I see where you get your looks.”

Cagney only chuckled.

“I’m serious,” April said.

“Thanks,” Cagney said as he pulled a plaque from the footlocker. The plaque bore the Marine Corps emblem and read:

“To the most important girl in my life.”

Each day I love you
a little more … than
I did the day before

Serving Proudly

United States Marine Corps

“Your mother must’ve loved that,” April said, laughing.

“No doubt.”

Cagney pulled a framed presidential unit citation to the First Marine Division, reinforced. Typed, it honored the recipient for “extraordinary heroism in action against enemy Japanese forces during the invasion and capture of Okinawa Shima, Ryuku Islands from April 1 to June 21, 1945.” It went on to describe the marines’ efforts against “a formidable system of natural and man-made defenses protecting the main enemy bastion at Shuri Castle.” The citation was signed, for the President, by the Secretary of the Navy, John, L. Sullivan.

“Wow,” April breathed; but Cagney was pulling the next item from the footlocker: another framed citation, this one, with his father’s name typed at the top, from the White House:

To you who answered the call of your country and served in its Armed Forces to bring about the total defeat of the enemy, I extend the heartfelt thanks of a grateful Nation. As one of the Nation’s finest, you undertook the most severe task one can be called upon to perform. Because you demonstrated the fortitude, resourcefulness and calm judgment necessary to carry out that task, we now look to you for leadership and example in further exalting our country in peace.

It was signed, Harry S. Truman. The signature didn’t appear to be a rubber stamp, although it likely had been mimeographed as part of the citation.

Cagney felt his eyes tear up and he choked back a sob. So much his father had kept hidden from him. He felt April’s hand on his knee. He set down the citation and reached to remove the last two items from the footlocker: a third citation—this one unframed and folded in half—and a small navy blue box with twin gold pinstripes down its center. Cagney unfolded the citation to read how Cale Nowak had been left, alone, to guard a narrow pass to the rear of his unit as they advanced on Shuri Castle. Against overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers that appeared from an undetected tunnel, Cale had emptied his sidearm, thereafter defending himself armed only with his bayonet knife. By the time help arrived, the fight was finished; Cale, overcome by exhaustion, lay unconscious but otherwise unharmed, beneath a dead Japanese soldier and surrounded by eight other enemy corpses.

Cagney opened the box, its spring-hinged lid stiff with age, and pulled from it a satin ribbon; from the vertical red, white and blue stripped ribbon hung a silver star.

It was too much for Cagney and he gave in to his grief.