Boggy Depot E-Book

Steve Miller

• Herausgeber: Spines
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This book charts the captivating life of Steven who leaves home at seventeen and doesn't return until his twilight years. His adventures span from the southern plains and wilds of the American Southwest (including Navajo country and witchcraft) to the volatile Middle East, all against a backdrop of profound social change. Shaped by the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and the rapid pace of the 80s. His story is a compelling portrait of personal growth and adaptation to a dramatically evolving world.

Leseprobe

Boggy Depot, the journey

Steve Miller

Boggy Depot, the journey

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2025 by Steve Miller

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

Published by Spines

ISBN: 979-8-90002-690-9

Boggy Depot, the journey

(True stories Inspire Fiction)

Steve Miller

Dedication

I wish to thank all of those who helped me through the process of writing this story. The story is fictional but based on many first-person accounts of the author. I profoundly believe that true stories inspire wonderful fiction. I want to dedicate this book to all of those who know me and have helped me along the way. Particularly to my mother and grandmother, Melba Miller and Mabel Hyde.

Contents

The Secret

Summer

Across The River

The Rite of Passage

Southeastern Oklahoma State University

The Rez

Graduate School

The Last Frontier

Dangerous Games

Power

Melancholy

Home

The Secret

"Children are the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way—and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children."

Rainer Maria Rilke

All my life, from the earliest days I can remember, I had a thirst for adventure and the unknown, for a life that existed outside the normal and the everyday. The “everyday” for me was a small town in northern Texas called Sherman, with roots dating back to pre-Civil War days, where I lived with my parents and brother, sister, and dog Butch in a typical working-class neighborhood. Back in those days, working people made a decent wage and could afford to buy a home and raise a family. My father worked in an oil patch, and my mother, a pure-bred Okie, stayed at home to take care of the house and kids. The picture of our life was ordinary and Texas-provincial. Even Sherman itself was like so many other Texan towns, a mix of quaint small homes and larger Victorian ones, and wide lush green lawns, and a creek that ran directly across the street. As for our house, we had a large backyard with a chain-link fence, with two huge pecan trees in the front yard, and a big pear tree standing at the side of the house.

As fortunate as I considered myself to grow up in a town like Sherman, I still couldn’t shake the sense that something was missing, and that there was more to life than what I was seeing. My first experience with mystery happened when I was seven years old. One summer afternoon, my mother asked my sister Charlene and me to clean out the basement. We tried to moan and complain our way out of this chore, but our mother was insistent—the basement was a mess and it needed straightening, and she didn’t have time to do it. Eventually, Charlene and I resigned ourselves to our fates.

The basement was dim and cool with a few intricate spiderwebs hanging from the corners. We started going through boxes of old books and old clothes, trying to figure what was good to keep and necessary to toss out.

“How do we know what to throw away?” I asked Charlene.

“She doesn’t care.” Charlene opened a dusty book about magic tricks and then slammed it shut with a loud bang. “She just wants us out of her hair for a while.”

“Out of her hair?” I didn’t know what that meant. My mother usually kept her hair pulled back in a loose knot at the back of her neck.

Charlene sighed. “It means she wants us to work so she doesn’t have to bother with us for a while. Just toss what looks old and keep what looks new.”

I went through a box of shirts, most that were big and probably old shirts of my father. One flannel shirt was torn with a dangling sleeve. I put that in the toss pile and kept the rest.

“We need to toss out more than that,” Charlene told me.

I was the one who dragged mother’s old trunk from out of the darkest corner of the basement. “She probably wants to keep that,” Charlene said. “Grandma gave her that.”

When I opened the trunk, a strange odor lingered in the air, like something old and musty and closed-off. Inside was a colorful quilt stitched in Cherokee patterns, a couple of wool sweaters, a jewelry box, and a large yellowed envelope with some documents inside that looked boring.

“Just put the trunk back,” Charlene said as she rifled through more books. “Why do we have so many books? Do these even belong to us?”

Then I noticed, lodged in a corner of the trunk, a simple white envelope. I opened it and found a harmonica lying inside, the silver dulled by time.

“A harmonica!” I felt a strange thrill as I removed the harmonica from the envelope and held it in my hand. The harmonica was heavier than it looked, a dead weight in my hand. “Is this Mom’s?”

Charlene took the harmonica out of my hand and squinted down at the reed plate. “There are initials on it,” she said. “J.M.” She handed the harmonica back to me. “It’s probably J.M.’s.”

“Who is Jem?”

“J.M.! I don’t know. Just put it back. I’ve told you. This is stuff Mom wants to keep.”

When Charlene turned back to the books with her dust rag, I slipped the harmonica into my pants pocket. Then I closed the trunk and pushed it back into the corner where I had found it.

That night after dinner, I went outside alone, stood under one of the pecan trees, and took the harmonica out of my pocket. The silver glinted in the twilight. I raised the harmonica to my mouth and blew. At first, no sound came out, so I blew again until I heard a faint croak, and I blew some more until a few musical notes emerged and hung in the air before drifting off. My heart pounded in my chest as I played. It felt good to play the harmonica, but also wrong. After all, wasn’t I a thief for taking the harmonica from the trunk and keeping it for myself? And yet I felt a strange compulsion to keep playing the harmonica, as if some unseen force was willing me to do so. Finally, when it was dark outside, I shoved the harmonica back into my pants pocket, said goodnight to Butch, and went back inside.

I went to bed with the harmonica beside my pillow and had a strange dream. A man was down by a river and yelling something, only I couldn’t understand what he was yelling—his words were mixed-up notes from a harmonica, curling and twisting in the air. Then I thought something had twisted around my neck, and I couldn’t breathe. I woke up, panting and yelling.

My brother Kurt, in the bed across the room, didn’t stir. I glanced around the room, trying to wake up fully. After a couple of seconds, the hallway light came on, and my mother came into the room, a bathrobe tied hastily around her, her hair mussed.

She turned on the lamp beside my bed and sat down. “Stevie, honey,” she whispered. “Lie back down. You’ve had a bad dream.”

I lay back down. My mother ran her hand through my hair. “The dream wasn’t real,” my mother said. “Remember that. Dreams are just stories our minds make up while we’re sleeping.”

I wanted to tell her about my nightmare but had already forgotten most of it. A man had yelled and something had curled around my neck. That’s all I could remember.

My mother looked down at my pillow and then picked up the harmonica. Her face hardened a little. “What is this?” she asked.

“A harmonica.”

“Yes, I know, but what are you doing with it?”

There was no use lying now that I’d been caught. “I found it in the trunk,” I said.

Her back stiffened, and she seemed to weigh her words. “What trunk?” she asked.

“The one in the basement.”

“And what were you doing in my trunk?”

“You told us to clean the basement.”

“I didn’t mean—” She sighed and stared at the harmonica once more and then slipped the harmonica into a pocket of her bathrobe. “Never mind,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Can I keep it?” I asked

“No. It’s filthy.”

“We could wash it.”

“It’s not yours, Stevie. You can’t just take and keep something that isn’t yours.”

“Whose is it then?”

My mother looked at me with an exhausted smile. “The man in the moon, that’s who.” She kissed my forehead, smoothed the sheet around me, and left the room with the harmonica.

The next day, I asked my mother again if I could keep the harmonica. Once again, she said no. As much as I begged and pleaded, she quietly but firmly refused. But the more she said no, the more I badgered her about it.

“It’s not yours,” my mother reminded me. “I’ve already told you.”

“It’s not yours, either,” I said. “You’re not J.M.”

“Stevie, I said no!” she said finally, her voice firm and unflinching. “No means no. Don’t push me on this.”

I knew from the sound of her voice that I shouldn’t press the matter. The more she said no, the more intrigued and obsessed I became, the unknown waiting for me like a thrilling roller coaster ride. I couldn’t help myself; I wanted to know what my mother had done with the harmonica. I wanted to play it again, one more time. If I never saw the harmonica again after that, I would accept that, but I wanted one more chance to try and make music from it.

I started moving through the house like a thief, looking for the harmonica. Any place where I thought my mother might have hidden the harmonica, I looked. I snuck into my parents’ bedroom when my mother was downstairs washing the clothes, and checked the nightstand beside the bed, the drawers with my father’s and mother’s clothes, the shelves inside the closet. When my mother was outside in the yard, I pulled up a chair, stood on it, and looked inside all the cupboards, behind the canned goods and the boxes of spaghetti. But I found nothing.

The living room: the bookshelf, the TV stand, the bureau. Anything with a drawer. Still nothing.

Once Kurt came from out of nowhere and caught me looking through the antique cabinet. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, my heart pounding with guilt. “Mind your own business.”

I even checked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom to see if she’d hidden the harmonica behind the Band-Aids or aspirin bottles and toothpaste containers. But there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Finally, one day, I crept down into the basement to my mother’s trunk, where I had first found the harmonica. It made sense that maybe she had just put the harmonica back where it had been before I’d found it. Only I couldn’t open the trunk now because there was a big lock on it.

My mother had put the harmonica back where I had found it, but had sealed the trunk so no one could get inside again without a key.

Disappointed, I pushed the trunk back into its place. I remained kneeling in the basement for a moment, surrounded by the coldness and the stacked boxes. Although I was only seven, it occurred to me for the first time that adults had secrets they didn’t want other people to know, including their own children. My mother’s life seemed mysterious to me then, like a whisper you can’t quite hear. But as much as I wanted to lay my hands on the harmonica again, I knew it was impossible and I couldn’t get around my mother on this. I would have to let go of the harmonica and pretend I’d never found it.

Summer

" In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.”

John Steinbeck

At the end of each school year during summer break, my parents allowed me to visit my grandparents and spend part of the summer with them in Oklahoma, after I had finished vacation Bible school and my yearly swimming lessons. My grandparents lived about sixty-five miles away from Sherman. They owned a store in rural Oklahoma on Highway 70 called Hyde’s Grocery near the small town of Lone Grove. The store sold livestock feed and groceries, and there was a Texaco gasoline filling station outside with two gas pumps, one for regular gas and one for premium. My grandfather also had a small Herford cattle operation on about 150 acres that he owned and about 80 acres that he leased for growing hay. His operation also included a substantial pecan grove on Cottonwood Creek that would produce about two tons of pecans during a good year.

I looked forward to my summers with my grandparents every year. My first summer with them happened when I was seven. During the weeks I stayed with my grandparents every year, it was like I was an only child. Kurt was still too young to spend such a long time away from my parents, and Charlene never showed much interest in being away from home for that long. When I stayed with my grandparents, life always felt special, like an adventure I couldn’t have when I was at home.

It was the summer when I was nine that I stayed with my grandparents and realized maybe they had their own secrets I didn’t know and they refused to talk about. One morning at the end of June, my mother, Charlene, Kurt, and I piled into our Plymouth station wagon for the drive to Oklahoma. My father was out of town again for work, so it was only the four of us. My father traveled all over the world doing his big oil work, so I had grown accustomed to his absence during notable family events.

As always, I was excited by the prospect of spending the summer with my grandparents, and my excitement only increased as my mother drove us out of town and onto the highway leading to Oklahoma. The drive was roughly an hour long, but it always felt like an eternity to me. Once we were on the highway, we rolled down the windows and let the wind rush through our hair with the force of a small tornado. All of us kids were especially excited to cross the dam that created Lake Texoma, at that time the largest man-made lake in the country. The colossal earthen dam stirred a mix of awe and reverence in all of us. It was about a mile long with floodgates and power generators on the Texas side of the Red River. In early summer, if you were lucky, you could catch a glimpse of the majestic water tumbling down the gates and rumbling through the air, so strong that you could feel the vibrations inside the car.

As we passed over the dam, my excitement was so great that I turned to my wide-eyed brother with a mischievous smile on my face. “Do you want to know a secret?” I asked him.

“Okay,” he said.

“Did you know that on this side of the dam—” and I pointed to where I wanted him to look— “there are catfish that live deep in the water and are big enough to eat you?”

I made a chomping sound with my mouth, just to scare him a little more. His eyes widened in both fascination and fear as his face hovered between curiosity and trepidation. Then his brow furrowed and his voice trembled as he desperately called out to our mother for reassurance.

“Steven, stop making up stories,” my mother said, glancing through the rearview mirror and giving me a look. “You’re scaring your brother.”

Charlene, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, turned around and rolled her eyes at me with a touch of annoyance. “You’re just making that up,” she said. “It can’t be true.”

“Of course it’s not true,” my mother said. “A fish isn’t big enough to eat a man.”

Charlene looked at her. “Well, a whale swallowed Jonah in the Bible,” she said.

“I mean, in real life,” my mother said without thinking.

“The Bible wasn’t real life?” Charlene asked, startled.

My mother sighed. “I’m talking about Stevie’s fish,” she said.

“But it is true,” I told them. “I heard Dad say that one time, that there are fish in the river big enough to eat you.”

“All right, enough of that!” Mom said with a hint of exasperation. Anxious to draw our attention elsewhere, she pointed to a sign at the end of the dam and said, “Oh, look at that!”

We all craned our necks, fixating on the Welcome to Oklahoma sign. My palms grew sweaty with excitement, and I felt a knot of anticipation in my stomach. Soon, I realized that I had to pee badly. I clenched my fists, battling the urge to beg my mother to pull over for a bathroom break. A bathroom stop would just delay our arrival at my grandparents’ place.

Finally, we arrived in Ardmore, Oklahoma, which meant we had only about ten more miles to go. Ardmore was a lot like Sherman, only smaller, with old, weathered buildings from previous generations, buildings that had never been renovated or updated. At one time, Ardmore had been an oil town, and that bygone era still lingered in the buildings and the streets as we passed them.

“We’re almost there,” my mother said. “Now don’t start begging your granddad for candy as soon as we step foot inside. Just because he owns a store doesn’t mean you get to eat everything in sight.”

“Okay,” all of us kids agreed in a surrendering tone. I wasn’t too worried, though. I knew we wouldn’t have to beg for the candy, and that my grandfather would offer it to us freely. Still, I would miss begging for the candy, which had become part of the ritual.

After a few more miles, we started peering eagerly through the car windows, scanning the horizon for a glimpse of the store. Southern Oklahoma was a hilly part of the state; once we topped one hill, Charlene shouted, “I see Wolf Creek Bridge!” I strained my eyes, saw the bridge, and shouted, “Me too!” Then my sister and I started our chant, which had become a ritual once we spotted the store: “I see the store, I see the store!” We sang this chant until we arrived, which drove our mother crazy, but she had allowed us to sing this so many times that she couldn’t bring an end to it now.

Finally, we drove up to the store. My grandparents’ house was nestled about a hundred yards behind it. There was a huge front yard and a large grassy side yard. The backyard was circled with a protective fence and had a gate with a striking view of a vast pasture where cattle grazed freely under the immense blue sky, like an image of Oklahoma you would see on a postcard. Just beyond the gate lay a path to the storm cellar. Everyone in Oklahoma knew the importance of a storm cellar. Oklahoma was known for violent thunderstorms and tornadoes, part of what the rest of the country referred to as Tornado Alley. On the other side of the yard was an enormous rose garden and several majestic oak corrals used to load the cattle to market. My grandfather was proud of those corrals. Years ago, he had built them himself out of white oak, corrals that were sturdy and strong and built to last a lifetime.

My grandfather was sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch of the store, which was a customary position for him in summertime. The weathered rocking chair, worn down by years of use, stood as a testament to his unwavering presence. He loved watching the cars zoom past on Highway 70, headed for parts unknown, and to greet customers when they arrived. When my grandfather saw our car pull up, he nodded toward us and I saw his face light up with his familiar jagged grin.

We all herded out of the car to greet him. There were shouts and exclamations and vigorous hugs. “Y’all have grown since the last time y’all were here,” my grandfather said with his Oklahoma drawl. “Must be your momma’s cooking.”

My mother walked up to the porch and embraced her father. “How have you been, Daddy?” she asked warmly.

After my mother and grandfather gave each other a quick update, my grandfather turned to us kids with a broad smile. “Wait here a minute,” he said and went into the store. He returned with a big handful of penny suckers from the candy counter. “Here, take these,” he said.

All three of us kids swarmed around him as he handed out the penny suckers. My mother looked on with a playfully exasperated expression. “Daddy, be ready for the dental bill when they all get rotten teeth,” she said.

He chuckled. “Oh, it won’t hurt them to have a few suckers.”

After my mother made Charlene, Kurt, and I thanked our grandfather for his generosity, she asked about her mother. “Oh, she’s fine,” my grandfather said. “She’s making food for you at the house.”

I was sucking on one of my suckers, but still noticed, briefly, the look of concern that crossed my mother’s face when he mentioned my grandmother was “fine.” I lowered the sucker from my mouth. Was something the matter? Was something wrong with my grandmother? But when my mother saw I was staring at her, she changed her expression to a smile.

Finally, my mother told me to get my suitcase out of the car because we were walking to the house to see my grandmother. My grandmother never came to the store to greet us when we first arrived. She always waited patiently at the house for us to finish our greetings with our grandfather before we came to the house to say hello to her. It had always been this way. They were never in the same place where we could greet them together. We always made our separate greetings. For the first time, I wondered why that was.

As we neared the house, I saw my grandmother standing on the front porch of the house, wearing an apron with streaks of flour dust on it, waiting for us excitedly and waving. I squinted my eyes to see if there was anything different about her—was she “fine?”—but she looked the same as always. After our greetings, we filed into the house. My mother told me to take my suitcase back to the room where I would be staying. Charlene and Kurt followed me back to my room, then we hurried through the rest of the house, looking at the furniture and the rooms to see if anything had changed. Nothing had. My mother pulled my grandmother to the side and I watched them talk briefly and quietly. I was curious what my mother was asking my grandmother, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t ask. Even at the age of nine, I knew the importance of respecting privacy.

Once my mother and grandmother were done with their private conversation, my grandmother turned to me and said, “I’m glad Stevie is staying for a while because I am going to put him to work helping me carry cow manure from the cow lots to fertilize the flower beds.” Then she looked at me and laughed. I didn’t know whether she was joking but she looked serious. I pictured a heap of stinking cow manure in front of me with random flies buzzing around. As much as I liked adventure and new experiences, this wasn’t what I’d had in mind.

Even though my mother told my grandmother that they couldn’t stay long and this was only a “short visit,” my grandmother insisted that everyone stay for lunch. She already had a spread laid out on the dining room table. On a platter, there were recently carved slices of ham. Also, there was a plate of deviled eggs, a plate with a large round hunk of cheddar cheese shrouded in cheesecloth with several thick slices of cheese already carved, a plate with sliced tomatoes, lettuce, and sweet pickles, a bowl of potato chips and two loaves of bread, white and brown. For drinks, there were pitchers of sweetened ice tea and Kool-Aid.

My grandmother told Charlene, Kurt, and me that we had to wash our hands first, so we hurried into the bathroom and splashed water on our paws, then hurried back to the dining room. When we returned, my mother and grandmother were again talking quietly about something. I heard my mother mention land and five acres? They quickly changed the subject but I wondered, again, about the quick private conversations they were having when “the kids” were out of the room. That thought quickly left me when I sat down in front of the ham. I ate voraciously, unlike Kurt, who said he wasn’t hungry and complained the whole time. We all knew he was happy to eat candy and ice cream but not actual food. My grandfather didn’t join us for the meal. I supposed he had to stay and look after the store.

After I’d finished eating, I got up from the table and started to run out of the house so I could return to the store, where I knew my grandfather would give me ice cream. But my grandmother stopped me and told me to wait while she prepared a plate of food. “You can take it down to him,” she said.

I walked to the store carrying the plate of food covered with foil, careful not to drop the entire plate to the ground and ruin my grandfather’s lunch. When I got to the store, he was helping some customers, a middle-aged man and his wife who were wearing matching Roadrunner T-shirts. My grandfather was boxing their groceries. He told me to put the plate of food in the back and then come and help him carry the groceries to their car. I did as he asked, and as I was carrying the biggest box out to the car of the man and his wife, I saw that my mother, Charlene, and Kurt were on the store porch, ready to get some ice cream before saying goodbye and heading back to Sherman. My grandmother was not with them, and I wondered, again, why my grandparents seemed to keep such a distance between them.

My stay with my grandparents usually lasted for about a month, and that summer was no different. Every morning, I woke up, excited by the prospect of another day of fun and adventure, unencumbered by my mother’s watchful eye or my brother and sister always underfoot. I was worried that Kurt would get into the box of my toys under my bed—my Tonka trucks and race cars and G.I. Joe—and break them, which he’d done often in the past when I wasn’t there to keep him from doing it. But even that fear didn’t dim my excitement and anticipation for the month ahead.

My grandmother made it clear early on that there were several special activities planned for me while I was here. She told me that a neighbor of theirs would soon start baling his hay and would probably let me ride on the tractor with him. She pointed out that a nearby pond was full of fish just waiting to get caught, and if I was lucky, my grandfather might take me there at night to shoot some bullfrogs. The thought of shooting bullfrogs filled me with anticipation because I’d never shot a real gun before.

I had a strong bond with my grandfather but only knew part of his life story and family history. He had lived in Oklahoma all his life and was born there before statehood. His clan was from a place called Boggy Depot on the Blue River in southeastern Oklahoma, where many of my relatives still lived. Eventually, he settled in Carter County, where he met my grandmother whose family came from Greenwood, Mississippi. After the Civil War, my grandmother’s family migrated to Louisiana and then to Oklahoma during the oil boom. The blend of my grandmother’s genteel Southern charm and hospitality, mixed with the rugged Oklahoma spirit of my grandfather, made them a unique couple.

At night, after supper, we would often sit in the living room and watch TV together. This was the only time of the day when my grandparents were consistently together in the same room, for dinner and then TV viewing afterward. My grandmother would pull out a feather bed for me to lie on, and she would make popcorn that we all enjoyed. But we didn’t do a lot of talking during those times. Mostly, we just stayed focused on the television set. Occasionally, one of my grandparents would make a remark, or I would crack a joke, but mostly there was silence between my grandparents that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. It was simply the reality of their relationship together. Eventually, my grandfather would climb out of his lounge chair, stretch his lower back, say goodnight, and then head off to the backroom of the store where he slept every night. Sometimes, I would watch out the window while the light from his flashlight danced in the darkness, until he disappeared inside the store.

“Doesn’t Granddad ever sleep in the house?” I asked my grandmother one night.

“No, he likes to sleep out at the store.” My grandmother stood up, turned off the TV, and started cleaning up the popcorn bowls and the drink glasses.

“Why?”

“He just does, Stevie. We’ve had a few break-ins at the store at night. If he sleeps at the store, he can stop anyone who tries to break-in.”

But I noticed she didn’t look at me while she explained this. I was at an age now when I didn’t automatically believe everything an adult said to me. I wasn’t sure I fully believed that my grandfather slept at the store just to guard his stuff. At home, my mother had mentioned once to my father that her parents’ “estrangement” might have something to do with a falling out they had over the death of their son, who was killed in World War II. As usual, my curiosity was strong, and as I went to bed that night, I wondered what kind of fight my grandparents might have had that caused them to spend so much time apart now. Did they blame each other for the death of their son, or harbor guilt for some reason, or was there something even more going on that I couldn’t imagine? These were questions I couldn’t ask my grandparents. Once again, the adult world seemed mysterious to me, filled with secrets and bottled-up emotions that no one wanted to admit existed.

As my first week passed with my grandparents, I was reminded how their dead son Vestal was still such a strong presence in the house. They’d lived in a different house back when their son was still alive, but they’d taken some of his possessions with them in the move to the new house. In the spare bedroom where I stayed during my visits was where many of my Uncle Vestal’s belongings were kept. My grandmother had cleared out the top two dresser drawers so I would have room to put my clothes, but the bottom two dressers were filled with a few of Vestal’s old clothes—T-shirts and jeans and shorts that were child-sized. The closet also had a few of Vestal’s old clothes, and a few of what I assumed were his toys shoved in a dark corner of the closet—a baseball bat, a heavily creased baseball mitt, a few old board games, even a pair of old sneakers he’d probably worn in high school. The sneakers were still in good condition, so I tried them on in secret, but they were too big for me, so I took them off and shoved them back into the darkness where I’d found them.

One morning, when I overslept and my grandmother was calling for me to come have breakfast, I scrambled out of bed and dressed hastily. The T-shirt I’d been wearing over the past couple of days was dirty now, so I tossed it in the hamper my grandmother had left in the room and went to the dresser drawer for a new T-shirt. I grabbed the first one my hand landed on, slipped it over my head, and went out for breakfast.

My grandmother took one look at me and her face fell. The horrified expression on her face scared me and I froze in my place.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Getting ready to eat breakfast,” I said, confused.

“That’s Vestal’s shirt.”

I looked down at the T-shirt I was wearing and saw it was a couple sizes too big for me, not my shirt at all.

“I guess I opened the wrong drawer,” I stammered. “I didn’t know it wasn’t mine. I’ll go change.”

I hurried back to my bedroom and took off my uncle’s shirt. It had Calvary printed on the front but that meant nothing to me. For a moment, I just held his shirt in my hand, staring at it, then I put it back in one of the drawers designated for my uncle’s clothes, and I put on one of my own shirts, careful to make sure it was my own.

When I returned to the breakfast table, my grandmother smiled thinly at me and pulled out a chair for me to sit down in. The breakfast she had prepared smelled and looked delicious—homemade biscuits, bacon, eggs fresh from the chicken coop, thick gravy, honey with a comb in the jar, and a big glass of milk. Yet I felt guilty for having made the mistake of putting on my Uncle Vestal’s T-shirt. “I’m sorry, Granny,” I told her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It was a mistake.”

But she seemed lost in thought, her eyes moist with tears. We sat for a few awkward seconds, then my grandmother shook off the sadness and pointed at my silverware. “I’ve put out your special knife and fork,” she said. “Do you see?”

The knife and fork managed to cheer me up. They were embossed with the letters USN, for United States Navy. Every time I stayed with my grandparents during the summer, I ate with those utensils. My grandmother had several military utensils that she had collected during the war, and for some reason, eating with them gave mealtimes an extra thrill. At that age, I was fascinated by the military. Every Saturday, I would watch Mighty Mouse, The Lone Ranger, and then The Big Picture, which was a documentary-style show about the United States Army.

After breakfast, my grandmother wrapped up the food in tin foil to keep it warm, and then went to the store to take care of any customers while my grandfather came up to the house to eat breakfast. I didn’t tell my grandfather that I’d accidentally spooked my grandmother by wearing one of Vestal’s shirts.

I knew only a few details about my Uncle Vestal, who had died before I was born. He had served with the Oklahoma Thunderbirds 45th Division and fought with General George Patton. He survived the North African campaign, which ended in 1943, and was field-promoted to lieutenant. He was then part of the invasion of Sicily, where he was severely wounded in the battle of Palermo. He was rushed to a field hospital and died three days later. Overall, he had received a Silver Star for valor, as well as a Purple Heart and a Presidential Citation. I was proud of my uncle, even though I had never known him, other than from the framed pictures of him that my grandparents had displayed on the living room shelves: pictures of him as a skinny boy posing with a fish he had caught, and as a teenager with a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. There was also a wedding picture of him and his wife, and a picture of Vestal in his military uniform.

Later in the day, after I had finished chasing grasshoppers and had come back home, my grandmother took me into her bedroom to show me Vestal’s medals. She even let me try them on, and then cried as she looked at me. “You sure do remind me of him,” she said. “You even act like him.”

Seeing her tears reminded me of how devastated they had been, losing their only son in the war. Again, I wondered how much Vestal’s death was responsible for the distance between my grandparents now, but how did you ask a question like that when you were nine years old? Instead, I asked her what had happened to Vestal’s wife.

“Oh, we don’t hear from her anymore,” my grandmother said, almost in a whisper. “We were in touch with her for a while, but then she remarried and we drifted apart.”

I had never known Vestal’s wife, either. I knew nothing about her or her life. To me, she was just a woman in a picture in a wedding dress, smiling over at her husband, my uncle.

I enjoyed my summers with my grandparents so much that sometimes, my mother grew concerned that I would end up preferring to live with them. My imagination always ran wild as I played and roamed the woods on Cottonwood and Wolf Creeks. Many of my days were spent going to the various ponds in the area and fishing for crawdads, using bacon rind as bait, or fishing for sun perch with a pole carved from a willow tree limb, or watching the ducks paddle around and squawk, or making slingshots and bows and arrows to hunt with. Once, I took a newly made slingshot into the woods with me and went on a long walk. I pretended I was my Uncle Vestal and a soldier at war, fending for myself and fighting an unseen enemy. I darted behind trees and pretended I was hiding from the enemy. I raised my slingshot in the air, firing at a German soldier and plugging him in the back. The game of war was exhilarating, but eventually I grew tired and my arms were getting bitten by insects.

But when I tried to return back to my grandparents’ house, I couldn’t find the right path that led out of the woods. Everything started to look the same to me—the trees, the brush, the dirt paths. I grew disoriented. I started feeling like I was moving in slow-motion, like in a dream where everything feels unreal. Trees slanted overhead, blocking out the sun. How late was it getting? The more I worried, the more lost I became. My arms got scratched from brush that I was climbing through, trying to find my way. At one point, I heard a noise on the path ahead, and then an animal of some kind—I’m not sure what it was—hurried across the path and disappeared in some long grass. My heart was pounding in my chest, like a fist beating from inside, and yet, beneath my growing worry that I would never find my way back, I also felt excitement as my adrenaline kicked in. I turned it into a game: I was my Uncle Vestal again, separated from Patton and the rest of the army, staggering through a foreign land with no food or water, and growing sweatier and weaker but still determined to survive. “This way, Colonel!” I called out a couple of times, just to add to the game and to hear my own voice. When I ended up on a path that led out of the woods and onto the road where I saw my grandparents’ house in the distance, I was relieved but also a little disappointed that the adventure was over.