My father joined the army in the 1930's, I think around 1936 or so. He said. He was a fabulist, a deeply wounded one, and a lot of the things he told me when I was very young turned out not to be strictly real. The woundedness was real, but the stories, a lot of them, weren't. He told me he'd been in Hawaii then, in the 30's when he was in the peacetime Army, and land was for sale on Oahu for $100 an acre. A lot of money in the Depression for land you had to take a long boat ride to get to, he said.
As near as I can tell, or remember from the little bit of family history I retain from what little I was given, when the Second World War started he was still in the Army, stationed on the West Coast, and that's when he met my mom. There's some vagueness in the narrative about the years just before the war began.
He was in it for the duration. He told me a story about being blown up by a land mine on the Burma Road, seeing his friend die. Later, as the stories lost their credible substance as fact, as the things I knew and found out refuted what he'd said too many times for trust, I had to put the rest of them into a kind of "wait and see" file, because some of them were true, or had truth in them, some of them were attempts at saying something that needed saying.
He was on the Burma Road toward the end of the war, that much is true, it was in his records. The Burma Road is generally regarded as one of the most arduous campaigns of the war. Also in his records is that he was Section 8'ed out of the Army - that his discharge was medical, for psychiatric reasons. That can cover a lot of territory when it's applied to combat veterans.
Later, when I was 14 and applying to enter a Catholic pre-seminarian boarding school, I had to sit for a personal interview that was conducted by the arch-bishop. He only asked me one question - whether or not there was any insanity in my family.
As far as I knew there wasn't, so I told him that; though no more than a few years later I would become convinced that virtually everyone I knew was more or less insane, and not in a lighthearted or silly way.
What makes that question interesting to me, the asking of it, and what makes my father's discharge interesting to me - and what makes some memories I have of events that took place around the time we were living in Ione, where Preston was, interesting to me - is that my father had been molested by a Catholic priest when he was an altar boy.
My uncle told me this a few years after my father had already died. My uncle was younger than my father by enough years that he wasn't there when it happened. What he said he'd been told, in one of the rare times anyone in the family would talk about it, was that my grandfather had charged the parish house, gone down there in person, made as big a stink as he could with what little power he had - he was a blue-collar Irishman, he worked for the railroad. My uncle said the end result was the family had moved across the city, had had to move out of the parish and across the city; this was in I believe Syracuse, New York.
The precise interplay of forces that caused that move are unavailable to me. But it happened. And, years later, the bishop asked me if there was any insanity in my family. It was the only thing he asked me in our private interview to see whether, at 14, I was sufficiently pious enough to enter the pre-seminary.
Once, earlier, on a trip to Mexico with my mother and father, we stopped south of LA in Oceanside to see his Army buddy Dave. We went body-surfing at night. The water wasn't cold, and it was dark out; swimming in the ocean with the two of them, grown men half-lit on beer and bourbon. It was a big event for me. And seeing my father with someone he knew, who knew him from that time, whatever shared nightmares they had, that was big, something like the ocean was, dark and huge and right there in front of me.
He left my mom and I when I was 5, moved to Santa Rosa to a different job to live with a different woman. My mother and I stayed where we were living, in Ione - where he'd been working at Preston, the California Youth Authority, a penal institution, essentially a prison for under-18 year-old boys.
I remember clearly an afternoon from those days, in the turmoil of grief and emotional panic my mother's life had become, and mine with it, when a man came to the house, and talked with me a little while, and gave me a book. He said his name was Joe Crossman, he wanted me to remember that, and I did; I have ever since, and I've forgotten an awful lot of very important things along the way.
My impression was he was a friend of my father's, from the Army, not from Preston; though later, when I was in my thirties I asked my father about it, and he said he'd never had a friend with that name, and he had no idea who it might have been.
I had that book all through my childhood, from before I could read until I could read the Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language cover to cover. Neither my mother nor my father ever remembered that man coming to the house, or anyone with that name in their lives, but he was there, he'd been there, in my life. I had the book to prove it - C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair.
Lewis' religion and his religious activism make it hard for me to get back to the visions of Narnia I had as a boy, reading and rereading that book. I'm not a Catholic in any sense of the word. Not a Christian in most people's sense of that word. Like a leper on the streets of Calcutta I've been grateful for mercy and kindness that have come my way from that long ragged line of compassionate believers. The best teachers I had - few as they were, when they were good they were brilliantly good - up until my junior year in high school, were perforce Catholic nuns and priests.
But there's the corpulent bishop with his ring and his question, and that priest that hurt my father; a series of educationally-credentialed madwomen whose cruelty and gibberish poisoned my early education with nonsensical lies and torment; and a vicious Jesuit priest, the Dean at the seminary, whose jealousy and rage scarred me for life. There's the buzzing swarm of the mindless faithful, waiting like locusts for the signal of their Redeemer. And Ratzinger and Lustiger in the Vatican - imps of Mordor with a burnished gloss of sanctimony.
And yet there's that book. And all along, at the edge of things too horrible to recount, with none of the smug confidence and institutional courage that makes cheap angels out of moralistic thugs, some kind of light above the layer-on-layer of spiritual politics and gang war.
It's how I imagine the American military now, the struggle behind the facade of unity; there are, there have to be, good men and women still in positions of power in the American military, who can see the darkness they're being driven toward, and who are trying like the rest of us to find a place to stand.
That book. I think about it sometimes, it sparks a kind of dread and hope simultaneously; it's a reminder, for when the veils of conspiracy darken what seems like everything, that there were, that there still are, others - the presence of good intrigue in an evil world, in spite of what seem impossible odds.
