1944 (October of '45)

I arrived in Tennessee in October of 1945. Virgil’s parents, as he had said, lived in the country, just outside of a small farming town. I found a garage apartment on the road leading toward their home. My landlady was a widow, like Kathrin. We talked some but she didn’t ask a lot of questions and I didn’t volunteer much information. Mainly, just small talk. Who she really was, I never knew. Her eyes held a sorrow I simply had not the strength to bear and she not the desire to share. So we lived in the shallows, always within sight of the shore, cordial like strangers. We said our good mornings and our good nights and talked of the weather and gardens. But that was about it.

The town was small, conservative, and if not quaint, clean. Main street was as it appeared in pictures a hundred years ago, with old brick facades and canvas awnings. People were friendly without poking into your business. That I had served in the war seemed to go a long way with both being accepted and left alone. Many in town had lost boys, just as the Kanes had lost Virgil. To talk about it was to relive it and there wasn’t much economy for that, although you knew it was all anyone thought about, sitting on sidewalk benches, eyes full of empty road. So I lived mainly among, or perhaps between, two generations. Of storefront glass holding faded wool skirts but not too many pants, pleated or otherwise.

Virgil’s father was a retired university professor who dabbled at farming. Each morning, after chores, he would come to town, talk with the men and drink coffee, black. His skin, tanned as the others, was not the same, had not the mileage of those who had lived all their lives on the land. I watched him drink and talk, but mostly I watched him listen. And if I looked just to the side, holding his profile in my peripheral, I could smell Virgil. A certain muskiness of lumbered floor, of pungent chewing tobacco, sometimes a whiff of muddied denim, of the farm, of chores, of men who earned their sweat honestly. Their eyes as clear as mine were not.

And I thought of the women, back home, perhaps cleaning the kitchen of breakfast, washing dishes while taking inventory of lunch or even dinner. I thought of the table, and those empty chairs, one’s worn of boyish energy, perhaps a groove in the wooden floor, of the lacquered back dull from dirty hands not washed of the day, of mothers and their sons, of that sacred place of conversation and food, of family, of a togetherness known in laughter and light hearts. And I knew then why these men came to town, to look upon chairs full and not empty, to see faces haggard in labor and worry but not grief. They drank their coffee to forget. I drank mine to remember.