“I thought about joining. Even got as far as going to sign up for the National Guard. But I failed the physical.”
“That’s tough.”
Greg Coyle once called the National Guard units “steroidal farm boys looking to work out their feelings.” Dan wished for any other subject besides the military. Hell, he wished for Jonah and Bill to return and start talking politics again.
“Looks like you came through all right, though, Eaton.”
No point in explaining his prosthetic. While in recovery he’d met other guys who chose an eye patch over the prosthesis—even one dude who wore a bull’s-eye instead of the piece of acrylic that perfectly matched the living iris. Dan’s looked too good, even down to the orange tint that ringed the pupil. So much so that occasionally he’d look in the mirror and forget. The only hint a small clump of scar tissue near the zygomatic bone like a flesh parenthesis. Sometimes he’d even go a couple days and forget about it. Wait to be reminded by a nightmare of his long-gone right eye, free of his skull, a jellied lump in the dust.
When he got home from deployment #2, after the VBIED that convinced him to reenlist, he ordered a book from Amazon about a Union colonel name Marcus Spiegel. He’d resurfaced in Dan’s memory, a vestigial lesson from Mrs. Bingham’s long-ago Ohio history class. Maybe he was looking for reminders about why he was doing this, and Spiegel provided a template.
A German Jew who immigrated to Ohio after the failed German revolution of 1848, Spiegel married a farmer’s daughter and when war between the states broke out, he saw it as his duty to fight for the country that had given him this second chance. It was a reminder of patriotism’s bewitching promise, how the achievement of a common goal can inspire disparate peoples to do mighty things. Spiegel began the Civil War as an anti-emancipation Democrat, steeped in the prevailing racial attitudes of the day. He quickly rose to the rank of colonel and received command of his own regiment—the 120th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. As he and his men battled farther into the heart of the Deep South, fighting through Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, his perception of what the Union was fighting for changed.
“Since I am here, I have learned and seen… the horrors of slavery,” he wrote from the Louisiana bayous to his wife, Caroline, the daughter of the Ohio farmer with whom he’d made his American family. “You know it takes me long to say anything that sounds antidemocratic, but… never hereafter will I either speak or vote in favor of Slavery.”
It must be a shaming, damning, beautiful moment to understand such a thing. To have your heart changed.
Dan thought of how he felt before he left for basic training. The anticipation. The itch. He watched Saving Private Ryan over and over again. He read massive tomes about the Civil War and World War II. He tacked patriotic musings to the corkboard in his room, which were still there to this day: Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. That was Thomas Paine. And Lincoln: I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. Because what was he going to be? The quiet, skinny bookworm who nevertheless finished with an unspectacular GPA, who never stood out, who was the wallpaper of everyone else’s young experience, a face in a yearbook? Dan came to dream of himself as Spiegel. Selfless, determined, bound by a higher cause.
So he returned to Spiegel’s story and was still reading about it by the time tour #3 began in Afghanistan. The very first patrol a child walked up to him and asked, “You got girlfriend?” He wore a small white hat and one of those long shirts that looked like pajamas. They were doing good there, Dan was sure of it. The kid pointed to his M4. “Bang, bang, cowboy,” he said. And the sun dripped over the brown hills, the nearby clay homes, their new up-armored Humvees.
Two years into the war, Colonel Marcus Spiegel wrote to his wife Caroline: “I have seen and learned much. I have seen men dying of disease and mangled by the weapons of death; I have witnessed hostile armies arrayed against each other, the charge of infantry, cavalry hunting men down like beasts.” And yet, he said, he would never stop, never falter, never back down from the “glorious cause.” They were fighting not just to save the Union, he wrote, but to expand the reach of freedom.
Spiegel never made it back to Caroline. His regiment was ambushed during the Red River Campaign in Louisiana following the successful siege of Vicksburg. Most of his men were taken prisoner, and Spiegel was mortally wounded by an exploding shell. Just one of 35,475 Ohioans who gave his life for the Union.
“I’m having a boy,” Todd Beaufort told Dan. “Me and the mom, we ain’t together. Not my decision.” He pushed his hat back to scratch. Hints of gray rested on his head like ashes. “Told her I’ll be there for the kid no matter what, but she don’t believe me yet. Not that I exactly blame her.”
Nothing would change Dan’s opinion of the guy. He knew the kind of hick-jock shithead he’d been in high school, and yet the echo of Greg Coyle soured Dan’s stomach.
I hold her, Coyle had said, and I swear I feel the fucking weight of eternity.
When Bill and Jonah returned, the former was folding a piece of paper into his breast pocket. “Guy’s a delivery service,” Jonah told him. “He’ll meet you wherever, hook you up with grade A shit.”
On his way to the bathroom, Jonah said something to the same paunchy, nose-ringed young woman. The rolls of her chin contracted like the folds of an accordion when she jerked her head back. Yet there was something striking and sexual about the way she told Jonah to fuck off. He breezed by while the guy in the Oakley shirt stared him down with murder in his eyes.
It was a testament to Dan’s hometown—maybe to all small towns—that so much of the history and pathos could accumulate in errant pockets on any given night. Looking back and forth between Beaufort and Oakley Shirt, the pieces clicked together. Dan’s dad, one of New Canaan’s preeminent gossips, told him the story once.
Oakley Shirt was actually a Brokamp, which was one of those families that had been in New Canaan for as long as anyone could remember, the family tree simply sprawled across the whole county. If the Hansens embodied one New Canaan dynasty, the Brokamps were its diametric opposite. Like the Floods or parts of Kaylyn’s family, they were, according to Dad, “white trash that grows right out of the soil.” This Brokamp was from the meanest branch of that line, a tributary packed with stories of domestic abuse, jail, suicide. He lived in a west-side motel and had spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. Todd Beaufort was supposedly his son.
“When we moved down from Youngstown, I knew him from around the bars. Real piece a work,” Dad confided to Dan and Hailey on a drive to Columbus for a football game. “Todd’s mom was kinda turning tricks at the time. Not like in the sense that she was standing out on the street corner or nothing, but it was well known if a man had fifty bucks on him and was willing to buy her drinks all night—well.” Dan remembered his face growing fiercely hot as his father shared this story in front of Hailey (they’d only just started dating), but she was on the edge of her seat. “Brokamp was her frequent flyer, and that’s most likely Todd’s daddy. I mean, it don’t exactly take a geneticals test to look at the two side by side. You’d see him at every one of Todd’s football games.”