The Beauties of this Earth Mark Powell (bio) In his first spring after the war, Walt Berger went home, home to see the old man, and home to rest. He had a bottle of Jim Beam between his thighs and his discharge papers in his seabag. He sipped the coffee and topped it off with Jim Beam, and by the time he hit i-40, he was thinking of Leigh Ann, but was still sober enough to miss her exit north of Sevierville. He knew the old man was waiting. Back home, he drove down Main Street, catching the first red light by the new Kawasaki dealership. atvs, motorcycles, jet-skis, three-wheelers. The place was usually populated by men in caps and jeans, guys in Dickies and bib overalls with long goatees flowering down their throats, heads shaved and bolts driven through their noses. Berger had seen one with a series of three or four silver hoops embedded in his eyebrow, looked like a grizzly catfish with a beard of five-pound test lines. The place was quiet this morning, however, and he watched a giant American flag unfold itself in the breeze, then collapse down onto the pole. Three blocks down, he passed the Otasco his granddaddy had managed for better than forty years. Town had changed in the last decade, he could see that. With the rich second-homers laying waste to the mountains came stores selling lawn sculptures and blown glass ornaments, solar lights to line walkways, paintings that looked like an infant had slung his peas and carrots against the wall. There was a store that sold nothing but flags, a thousand different flags bearings pineapples and watermelons and ut and etsu logos. The Otasco had closed right after Home Depot opened on the bypass. There was no diner left, but a place selling humus wraps. There were Mexican restaurants and three pizza joints, but nowhere besides Hardees to get a decent cup of coffee. A single feed and seed store down near the abandoned railroad tracks. The big fifty-pound bags stacked and plastic-wrapped on pallets. Dog food. Fish food. Sweet feed. He remembered climbing the loading dock as a boy, standing inside the high hangar-like expanse, going with the old man to buy feed or grass seed for whatever his granddaddy was working on at the time. His granddaddy had been a Marine, joining in January of ’42 when he was seventeen years old. By the time he was twenty he had made four amphibious assaults, suffered two Purple Hearts, and earned the Navy [End Page 56] Cross. His granny was dead now, and all that was left besides the old man was a cousin living in Charlotte, working for a bank and running for the board of the pta. His granddaddy, alone for years, drank too much and talked about the way they had died along the cliffs on Okinawa. Then he would pass out to dreams of Jesus Christ wading ashore at Guadalcanal, whisper in his sleep about Tarawa and Siapan, about dead SeaBees and the nights sleeping in the cool insect mud. Now and then, he would drag out a box of photographs, gruff children in Marine fatigues, the blush of a three-day beard on a skinny nineteen year old as he shouldered his rifle across on some faraway moonscape. The beagles bellowed and twisted around Berger’s feet when he stepped out of his truck at home. He stood in the living room and imagined his granddaddy waking from his dreams. Christ wading ashore through the early mist off Siapan. His granddaddy’s feet would be socked, and he would rise from the musty blankets of the couch to walk out onto the porch, testing the weather and his joints. It would be early, not yet daylight though moonlight might move cloud shadow across the open fields, the pasture land cropped as close as a shaved skull. Berger saw his granddaddy running one foot forward until his sock caught against the head of an eight-penny nail, half-dreaming. Christ coming ashore at Siapan. Guadalcanal. Tarawa. The old man in the rocker, the thread of...
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 2016
Mykola I Tynianskyi 
Open Access