Casualties

Miranda fixed her eyes on the sky. The soldiers lowered the flag-draped casket on the jet’s platform elevator. It made a sudden jolt downward then smoothed out into a steady, humming descent. The Marines in short-collared uniforms moved as automatons--straight-backed, eyes at attention. She unraveled a handkerchief from her fist and reached under the wraparound sunglasses to pat the tenderness under her eyes. She noticed small things: the whiteness of the honor guard’s gloves, the thick smell of jet fuel, the curling edges of paperwork clamped to a clipboard, the distant scream of a widebody’s engines taxiing for takeoff. She looked at the sky again, searching for something to focus on. She hugged herself. Her leather jacket felt icy under her fingertips, bloodless.

One month ago, they said goodbye the night before Jamie shipped out. She wondered at his energy. Miranda was tired from work, the tilting stack of dirty dishes, and helping Jamie Junior with his solar system project. Her world-weary resolution to hunker down and be about the business of survival was flagging. She climbed into bed yawning while Jamie stayed on the phone saying goodbye to friends. They kept one another awake till the early hours. She ran anxious fingers over him, the fresh stubble of his head, the impossible width of his shoulders, and the warmth that hovered over his skin. They whispered of blowing sandstorms, his sister’s wedding in June, and replacing the serpentine belt on the old Taurus. He dropped into an untroubled sleep, a school-boy arm flung over the pillow.

Two weeks ago, before the phone calls and the reporters on her front lawn, she took Jamie Junior to Rhode Island for a weekend to help her Aunt Grace clean out her house before moving to assisted care. Aunt Grace, snappy and outspoken, tottered over to the linen closet with her walker and settled into a chair. They chatted as Miranda emptied the closet, discovering a rubber crib mattress cover and a set of turquoise tea towels from the fifties. There was a cache of triangle-folded flags. Grace stretched out her quivery hands and gathered them in her lap.

“They were given to my mother,” Aunt Grace said. “The first was from a young man in an Air Force uniform who knocked on our door. It was about your Uncle Billy.”

She blinked and turned her gaze away.

“Those were uncertain times. We feared listening to the radio every night. Billy was in a fuel supply plane shot down over France. I remember my mother, swaying in the doorway, the flag clutched to her while the officer explained to her all they knew: Billy was gone, missing in action. After he left we were frightened for her.

She rocked on the couch and held that flag and wailed. There were no words, just a terrible sound from deep inside her.” Aunt Grace fingered the tattered old flag.

“Each time they came back, they brought another flag. They found engine parts in an onion field, then six months later dog tags of a crewman and, finally, some human remains burnt beyond recognition but mixed in with gunstocks that had serial numbers. The last flag was from the funeral. They buried the crewmen together in St. Louis, divided the bones into twelve caskets. We took a train out. My dead father’s union sent a spray of flowers, the only ones at the ceremony.

Wartime rations applied to flowers too. The other families borrowed them. Families from Texas and Philadelphia and Florida. They posed them with the coffins and took pictures. All I have left are these flags and the black and white photo of Billy sitting on the mantelpiece.”

Miranda and Aunt Grace remained quiet as they finished emptying the closet. Miranda thought of her long-dead great grandmother, her son evaporated in a foreign sky. The only man in a house full of women after their father died. She imagined the raw grief, staggering news hitting like a blow to the chest, the shared spray of flowers, a young baby-faced man with an easy smile who would never outgrow Billy into Bill or Will or William.

Now she straightened her back and gathered herself to walk forward. The Marines’ white gloves bore the casket to the waiting hearse. Their thick-soled shoes tapped a deliberate beat on the tarmac. Miranda allowed her eyes to fall on the flag, the distinct white of the stars sharp against the expanse of blue, the perfect seams along the contrasting stripes.