Hefting another load onto my shoulder, I trudged back into Uncle John’s store. It was honest work and I was lucky to have it, having finally come back stateside. Sweat dripped down my back, a tickling stream between my shoulder blades when I first heard it. That familiar droning that meant danger for far too long, that sound that threw a switch I no longer had control of. Incoming, Incoming, Incoming! I remember nothing after that until Uncle John and Mama’s repeated yelling finally cut through my blazing mind, my screams of terror. I came back into myself and found I was swinging around the bell pole in the side yard, like some crazed version of a children’s game. My screams faded slowly on my lips, their familiar voices that meant I was safe finally grounding me to the spot.

“Jack, Jack, it’s over, you’re home! We’re here. Honey, you to get this sorted. You can’t live like this, you have a family that needs you whole, you gotta work through it,” Mama said. In my heart, I knew she was right. I trusted her love, her wisdom, her anchor. She was not my real mother, but my my stepmother. My mother, Minnie Pearl, had put me and my brothers, save one, on a train to our father when we were towheaded children. We interfered with her business with her girls. She didn’t sell herself to men, only the bodies of other women and thought herself a saint for it. I remember the man on the train that had seen us boys crying, heartbroken and scared at being unloved and castoff to a life and people we didn’t really know bending down low to our eye level. His long mustache twitching with his smile, his eyes leading ours down to his outstretched hand holding a peppermint candy for each of us. I remember the crinkle of the smooth plastic as I opened it, the mint mixing with the taste of tears, snot and too much anguish. As much as it seems like a nothing much thing, that small act of kindness did allay our fears that we deserved no kindness, had no place in the world. I would always love peppermint after that, it would always secretly touch that place that meant I could matter, that kindness existed in the world.

Mama had loved us more ferociously than any tie of blood could forge. She had worried, calmed, disciplined, taught. She had dealt with my need to run off about every spring since the fourth grade. My feet would just get itchy and I had no means to calm the itch except to put feet to pavement and leave. I would join up with passing Medicine Shows, groups of actors, whatever struck my wandering fancy. I didn’t understand until much later that I was trying to outrun things that would follow me anyway. But somehow she understood that bereft of love feeling that worried me. Maybe its because she was not the kind of woman that drew a man’s eye, tiny, bespectacled and spare featured. She loved Daddy, but understood his fondness was born out of need, never want.

I know she’s right and I need to put this into the past, but I don’t know how to outrun this. How do I outrun something I have only the barest memory of, no real knowledge of what my life had been? I only have the lasting feeling of terror, not always the concrete reason of how it got there. I don’t remember coming out of the jungle, hemorrhoids hanging like fleshy worms, my body broken by men I don’t recall, wracked with malaria. That time is a mix of fever dreams and the hellish reality of the brutishness of men. I don’t remember where I was, if I was held with other men, only the fear, the uncontainable need to escape as I always had. I don’t remember how I got out, I only know that I was found in pretty rough condition and sent to Australia to treat the malaria and injuries. I was a special case, because the treatment for malaria nearly killed me. Later in my life my children and grandchildren would fill in opinions disguised as facts about what they thought happened during that time. That I escaped and emerged from the jungle with a man I saved slung over my shoulder. That they had forced bamboo shoots under my fingernails in order to get me to talk. I let that one go on, because it secretly made me giggle. They would ask about my medals, where they were, why I didn’t care about them. I could never answer, the gaping whole of both the things I did remember and the things I didn’t was too carefully constructed to risk the shift of movement talking about it would cause.

Before I was allowed to go back stateside, I was placed with a family to help with my convalescence. I don’t remember what the house of a neighboring woman I had made friends with looked like. It slips my mind whether her blue, maybe green, eyes were closed when I found her near dead. I remember the blood pouring onto my shirt as I lifted her, hearing the drip, drip, drip that meant I didn’t have much time. I remember seeing the police, the feeling that they could get her help. I remember every blow from their batons. Every scream of frustration with every swing to beat their version of the truth out of me. I remember the gruff “you’re free to go.” I remember letting my breath out, and sucking it sharply back in when the door closed behind me. I remember her wrists wrapped in bandages and eyes full of apologies when she told me her end of the story from that night. At that time I was separated but married still, with a mind to fixing things when I got home. I hadn’t learned yet that sometimes bad marriages make bad parents. But during what I had felt was just a friendship, light and no deeper connections to worry about, it didn’t feel the same for her. When she’d come to in the hospital she’d woken to policemen eager to pin me down and had to further injure her fragile emotions, admitting it was a case of the lovelorn lass.

I made another good friend when I was there, an officer. It made me puff up a little every time he chose to spend time with a regular fella like me. I liked hearing him say “Now, PJ…” during those long days eased by the permission to rest. I kinda liked having a just between us nickname, like real friends. I don’t remember the name of the girl he fell in love with, I don’t remember what she looked like, what it felt like to see them in love and carefree in a way we hadn’t been allowed in so long. I do remember him coming to me for a favor. I remember him clapping me on the shoulder in that “do a favor for a pal” way. “Now, PJ, I know I’m slated to leave before you, but I just want a little more time. I love her, and I need a little time to figure out how things are gonna go. Just switch flights with me, what’s it gonna hurt? It’s a win-win situation, PJ. I get more time here, and you get home sooner.” I remember agreeing, happy that I could be instrumental in this couple of lovebirds story. I remember getting the news after I had returned home that the plane had gone down. No survivors. The plane I should have been on. The plane that should have left my children fatherless, erased any more children I would have, the grandchildren. The millions of moments that would have made up his life were given to me instead.

That day in the side yard I said none of those things. I tucked into myself and pushed down the memories of every year, every battle, those lost months and what happened in them, the sounds, the smells, the faces behind guns and on bloody land. I would later push them down so hard that I would begin to have migraines or blackouts, or both. The doctors said it was because they didn’t know anything about how to treat what happens to a person’s mind when it’s been moved, twisted, broken, shaped and reshaped by war. They didn’t know how to stop the war that continued in our minds, whether in vibrant color, or pushed down under the surface. I would not remember any of those terror filled days, the things that were done to me, the things I’d seen, the things I’d done in the name of war for most of the rest of my life. When my vision faded, my hearing muffled, and I settled into old age my Julia began to have pain. She’d always been a steady one, strong in body and faith. As the cancer consumed her, the walls I’d built around all those old pains began to crumble. They never came back to me during the days filled with making the time I had my Julia last as long as I could, drinking in every sweet second. But at night when the walls were at their weakest, the memories came back, were screamed, groaned, murmured bouncing between the walls of my small room. I felt like that young man swinging around that pole again, but this time I remembered why. They’d mostly retreat back into their dusty corners at daybreak, but I knew they would replay on my eyelids as they closed for one more battle every night.