Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
VIRGINIA
At twenty-five, Frankie moved with the kind of caution that came with age; she was constantly on guard, aware that something bad could happen at any moment.
She trusted neither the ground beneath her feet nor the sky above her head.
Since coming home from war, she had learned how fragile she was, how easily upended her emotions could be.
Still, she had learned to hide her outbursts, her crying jags, even from her two best friends, who, for most of their first year in Virginia, had watched her intently, trying constantly to divine her moods, assess her level of self-destruction, her grief and anger.
In the beginning, it had been difficult, settling into the time-honored McGrath camouflage of I’m okay.
The nightmares had been terrible when she first arrived here, had still wrenched her out of sleep and sent her careening onto the floor.
But time—and friendship—had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft in her hands, almost pliable.
She found she could form them into something kinder if she was deliberate in thought and action, if she lived a careful, cautious life, if she stayed away from anything that reminded her of the war, of loss, of death.
By Christmas of that first year, she’d felt strong enough to write to her mother, who had promptly written back.
In their family’s way, neither spoke of the terrible night that had precipitated Frankie’s flight across the country.
They simply merged back onto their familiar road, the ground a little bumpy between them, but both determined to stay the course.
Frankie remembered, and often reread, that first letter from her mother: I am so grateful to your Army girlfriends for being there for you when your father and I were not.
We love you, and if we don’t say it often enough, it is because we grew up in families where there was no such vocabulary.
About your father and his… reticence about you and the war.
All I can say is that something in him was broken by being unable to serve his country.
All the men of his generation went to Europe, while he stayed home.
Yes, he was proud of Finley and ashamed of you.
But perhaps in truth he is ashamed of himself and worries that you judge him harshly, as he feared his friends had done…
Frankie never spoke about her struggles, tried never to say Vietnam out loud. And when she felt a rise in her blood pressure, a flood of grief or anger, she smiled tautly and left whatever room she was in. She’d learned that people noticed a raised voice; quiet was the perfect camouflage for pain.
Initially, it had been almost impossible to sever Vietnam from her life story. The world, it seemed, had conspired against such a healing.
The war was constantly in conversation. In bars, in living rooms, on the television.
Everyone had an opinion. Now the majority of Americans seemed to be against the war and the men who fought it.
In 1969, the world had learned about the horrifying massacre at My Lai, where American soldiers had killed as many as five hundred unarmed South Vietnamese civilians—men, women, and children—in their village.
It had intensified the baby-killer talk about vets, more and more of whom were turning to heroin in-country and coming home addicted.
America was losing the war; that was obvious to everyone except Nixon, who kept lying to the people and sending soldiers off to war, too many of whom came home in body bags.
Each of the women had responded differently to the rising tide of violence that was ripping the country apart, dividing young from old, rich from poor, conservative from liberal.
Ethel was in her third year of veterinary school and worked part-time with her father.
She and Noah had begun to talk of marriage, kids.
The two of them never missed a Sunday at church or a local high school football game.
Their fondness for casseroles and cribbage had created long-standing jokes between the women.
Ethel had grown up on this farm, among these people, and she intended to be buried here.
So she kept her head down and did her job and said nothing controversial to her friends and neighbors.
This war will be over soon, she always said, but I’ll always live here.
My kids will be in 4-H, I’ll probably run the damned PTA.
Barb was the opposite in every way. She’d become a vocal, participatory member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
She went to meetings. She painted signs.
She protested. And not just the war. She lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
She marched for a woman’s right to a safe abortion and basic health care.
When she wasn’t trying to change the world, she earned money by bartending.
It was, she said, a great job for a woman who hadn’t yet decided where she belonged.
Frankie, on the other hand, had found her way back through nursing.
She’d put up with the initial prejudice and disregard for her Vietnam training and become determined to show her skills.
She’d worked harder and longer than most of the other nurses, put in the hours, and had taken specialized classes.
In time, she’d become a surgical nurse; now she was working toward a specialization in trauma surgery.
On this cool April morning, she woke well before the dawn and dressed for riding. It would be cold out, a spring crispness in the air.
She had come to love the sweet-smelling air of the South, the way mist clung to the grass in the morning.
It calmed the tumult in her soul. Today, the cherry trees along the driveway were in full pink bloom.
Ethel had been right, all those years ago, when she’d said that riding horses was restorative to one’s sense of peace.
Frankie loved the undulating green fields, the black four-rail fencing, the trees that changed their color with the weather.
Now the leaves were the bright lime hue of new growth, and full of pink blossoms. But mostly it was being around the horses that calmed Frankie.
Ethel had been right about that. Riding had steadied Frankie as much as friendship had.
Frankie ducked through the empty space between fence rails and headed into the barn; she could barely see her boots, the mist was so thick and gray.
Inside, the barn smelled of manure and fresh bales of hay and the grain they stored in large metal garbage cans. The horses nickered at her as she passed.
At the last stall on the left, she paused and lifted the latch. Silver Birch walked toward her, lips moving, looking for treats, breath snorting.
“Hey, girl,” Frankie said, holding out her gloved hand.
Silver ate the grain messily, more falling to the ground than getting in her mouth. Frankie led the mare out into the aisle and saddled her quickly, pressing a knee to the mare’s belly to aid her in tightening the girth.
In no time, Frankie and Silver were out on the trails, galloping through the mist. When Silver started to sound winded, Frankie slowed the mare to a trot, then a walk. They walked home slowly, clomping at a steady, calming pace.
Back in the barn, she fed and watered the horses, turned Silver out, and headed back to the small bunkhouse.
Early morning sunlight drenched the fields.
Off to the left was the main house, with its steeply pitched roof, large and welcoming porch, and whitewashed wooden sides, where Ethel lived with her father.
Well off to the right was the bunkhouse that had once boarded farmworkers.
Over the past eighteen months, it had been remodeled into a two-bedroom cottage where Frankie and Barb lived.
The three women had learned how to paint, demolish, rebuild, and do rudimentary plumbing.
They’d spent hours haunting garage sales and hauling other people’s junk to be their treasures.
Many evenings were spent sitting around the sooty river-rock fireplace, talking. They never ran out of things to say.
Frankie climbed the few steps and went into the bunkhouse’s only bathroom, where she showered, changed, and dressed for work.
She was out of the house and on her way to work before Barb was even out of bed.
At the end of a twelve-hour shift in the OR, Frankie waved goodbye to her coworkers and headed out to her car—a dented old Ford Falcon that she and Barb shared—and jumped in. On the way out of town, she popped a John Denver tape into the eight-track and sang along.
She drove to the tavern where Barb currently worked and parked among the battered old trucks of the regulars who were there this time of day. Barb’s bicycle stood slanted against the rough exterior plank wall.
Inside, the place was dark and musty-smelling, with sawdust on the floors and barstools worn to a velvet feel by one hundred years of faithful customers.
Barb had worked here for the past few months; it was not a job she intended to keep much longer. Or so she often said. Soon she’d look for something higher-end, nearer to the city, where the tips were better. But this was close to the farm and gave her lots of time to volunteer for her causes.
Now she stood behind the bar, a soggy bar rag over one shoulder, a red-white-and-blue cotton kerchief over her Afro. Huge gold hoop earrings caught the light.
Frankie sidled up onto a barstool. “Hey, there.”
“Jed! I’m taking a break,” Barb called out. A moment later her boss, Jed, shuffled out from the office and took his place behind the bar.
Barb grabbed a pair of cold beers and led the way out back, to one of the picnic tables. Come summer, the bar would sell house-smoked barbecue on red plastic plates, but not till the weather warmed up.