An incredibly diverse crew, to be sure. One thing to notice is that all the names came from the Bible. The boys started off with the four gospels, followed by the three named angels, and then they moved on to the saints. All the girls were named after saints or important Biblical figures. Even Marilyn! Within the house she was known as Mary, and when I asked her why, she explained that her father had named her Mary Lynette, after the Virgin Mary, and his baby sister Lynette. Unfortunately, the nurse was hard of hearing and changed it to Marilyn. Nobody noticed until she was enrolled at UCA, where the nuns demanded they use the names on their birth certificates.
Most of the older boys were quite mystified when I showed up. I don’t think a single one of them thought of their older sister as a person in her own right, deserving of a life and love of her own. I was the first guy she had ever brought home. Most of the boys found me a curiosity but got over it quickly. Matthew saw me as a guy his age and we talked together fine. From Luke on down the boys were quite a bit younger, and they basically ignored me.
Little Michael didn’t ignore me, however. I was the new friend who picked him up and played with him. After listening to me talk to his parents for a few minutes he popped up and asked, “How come you talk funny?”
Marilyn and his mother gasped and told him he was being rude, but I just laughed at him. “That’s because I’m a southerner and y’all are just a bunch of Yankees,” I told him. I wasn’t overly surprised by this. I had always had a strong southern accent, and simply hadn’t realized it until I went north to school. On my first trip through I had lost it almost totally within my first year, but I would still pick it right back up whenever I traveled south. This time I hadn’t lost it, and I didn’t think I would. For one thing, every time I went to boot camp or other training, I would be in the heart of Dixie!
“What’s a Yankee?” asked the little boy.
“A really lousy baseball player,” That earned me a lot of grief from Michael’s older brothers, most of whom were Yankees fans. “Just remember, buster, that where I come from, y’all are the ones that talk funny!”
Marilyn gave me a raspberry for that.
Mark, on the other hand, thought of me as a challenge. He was very smart, and more than a little brazen and egotistical. He would always try to push his luck with Marilyn and me, knowing that Marilyn would never go up against him and that she would keep me in line. Tonight was no different. After he and Matthew brought back the pizza and wings, he decided he needed to sit at the bar, so he took Marilyn’s barstool. No big deal, since she wasn’t sitting on it at the time, and the rule is, ‘you snooze, you lose.’ However, he ended up yanking it out from underneath her as she started to sit on it, and she fell on the floor. Everybody stared at Marilyn, although nobody offered to help her up, and he looked at me with a smirk.
Bouncing him off the wall would not get me in anybody’s good graces, especially Marilyn’s, so I simply stood up and helped her to her feet. As I did, I heard him snicker behind me. I took a deep breath, and Marilyn grabbed my arm. “Don’t!” she said lowly.
I took another deep breath and nodded to her. I turned to face Mark, and saw all of the family watching us. I slid my own barstool over to Marilyn and allowed her to use it, and then looked Mark in the face. “Mark, do you have a girlfriend?” I knew he did, since he married her a year after Marilyn and I got married.
“Yeah, why?” he said with a touch of bravado.
“Just curious. Suppose somebody you had never met came into her kitchen and knocked her to the floor in front of you. What would you do?” I reached into one of the pizza boxes and pulled out a slice of pepperoni pizza, but I never took my eyes off of him. Marilyn put her hand on my arm, but otherwise kept quiet.
Suddenly Mark’s eyes widened. I think he decided that maybe the new guy wasn’t somebody to test quite so boldly. He grabbed a slice of pizza and headed out to the living room. I took his abandoned bar stool and sat down next to Marilyn. I looked at her and gave her an innocent smile. “Can I get a beer?”
She smiled back and said, “You just behave yourself!” She got up and grabbed me a cold one from the fridge. I just smiled back, and nobody, including her parents, said anything about Mark and me.
Harriet instead asked, “What are you studying, Carl?”
“I’m going to school for mathematics, ma’am,” I answered.
“What do you do then?” asked Big Bob. “Become a math teacher?” He wasn’t asking in a rude fashion, but simply because he had no idea what college graduates did when they left college. The only thing he could imagine a scientist doing was working in some kind of school teaching science.
It struck me as a touch odd, so I looked over at Marilyn. “You never told them?”
“It never came up,” she answered, with a shrug.
I looked back at her parents. “I’m sorry. I thought Marilyn had already told you. I’m going to be a soldier. I’m on a military scholarship.”
“A soldier!?” squawked both her parents, loudly. I should have expected it. The Lefleur family was the biggest bunch of draft dodgers ever collected in a single place. There must be a gene for public service, and if so, the Lefleur family is completely lacking in this trait. The entire concept of joining the Army, and not just being drafted, but actually volunteering, was utterly alien to them. This actually led to a certain degree of friction between our two families, but it was just one of many reasons we were different.
The room fairly erupted with questions. The only soldiers these people ever had dealt with were the enlisted soldiers up at Fort Drum who would sometimes come down and buy a trailer. Marilyn’s parents were rather distressed, in that their daughter was marrying somebody stupid enough to go into the Army, and couldn’t come right out and say it to her face while he was sitting there. Likewise, her brothers all found this rather fascinating, if strange. The gene had skipped them as well, along with all their children. Of all of the grandchildren, only Parker ended up serving.
“You’re going into the Army?” repeated Big Bob. Sort of like, ‘You’re becoming a child molester?’
“Yes, sir. It’s an ROTC scholarship. They pay for four years of college and I need to serve four years as an officer.”
He looked at Harriet with a degree of consternation, and then shrugged. “Does the Army need mathematicians?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I wouldn’t know, sir. I intend to apply for combat arms. I’d like artillery, but I’d also go for either infantry or armor.”
They stared at me in utter disbelief, completely ignoring the look on Marilyn’s face. Her feelings were quite a bit more complicated. In many ways she hated the military, having a very idealistic view of the world. ‘Fighting never solves anything’ and so forth. On the other hand, she was also proud of our son and his decision to serve, and understood the hard work and sacrifice involved. On this trip through, she was equally proud of me. When I felt her take my hand, I looked over at her to see her smiling at me. That made it all worth it.
It was Harriet’s turn to speak. “But that could be dangerous. You could be killed.”
“Yes ma’am. I had a second cousin who died in Viet Nam. I never met him, but I heard he died in ’68 or so. Another couple of my ancestors died in the Civil War.”
Gabriel popped up and asked, “Which side?”
I smiled at that, and grabbed a second slice of pizza. “Both, actually. One died at Chancellorsville and the other died at Gettysburg, but I couldn’t say which side they were fighting for. I only know we played both sides of the bet.”