Uncle Sean Read online

  Uncle Sean

  Ronald L. Donaghe

  A Two Brothers Press e-Book

  All Rights Reserved © 2009 by Ronald L. Donaghe

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Two Brothers Press

  For information address: 603 W. Las Cruces Avenue, Las Cruces, NM 88005

  www.twobrotherspress.biz

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and incidents described are strictly the creation of the author, and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or real incidents of similar nature is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 0-9823503-0-9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9823503-0-0

  This book is lovingly dedicated to all young gay people who have lived in isolation in time and place, who have had to discover by themselves those sweet and painful feelings of attraction for members of the same sex. Be not afraid. Others have come before you and others will come after.

  Contents

  Part One: The Big Chief Tablet

  Part Two: The Letter

  Part Three: The Spiral Notebook

  Part One

  ———————▼———————

  The Big Chief Tablet

  The way certain materials came into my possession (including a Big Chief Tablet, a letter, dog tags from the Vietnam Era, and a spiral notebook) is somewhat startling. Had it not been so hellishly hot, when I was tearing down the old barn, however, I might never have stopped the demolition long enough to notice the box that tumbled out of the rafters and fell onto the heap of trash I was going to haul off. As it was, though, we stopped frequently to rest and drink beer to reconstitute our body fluids, and it was during one of these rest periods when the box came into my possession.

  I was tearing down the old barn twenty miles south of Hachita, New Mexico, just west of the Big Hatchet mountains, where a long-time-ago farm had passed into oblivion. I had been asked to perform this demolition by one of the nearby ranchers by the name of Hill. I wasn’t being paid for the work, but from experience, I knew what old lumber from the turn of the century could be worth. Very little remained of the other farm buildings, but it was as though the barn, itself, had held the small treasure of documents from the passage of years, and gave them up reluctantly—but only when they were in danger of being lost forever.

  I had already removed the roofing tin and the sub-roof of one-by-eights, laying them aside for salvage, as they were remarkably well preserved. Because of the dry climate of Southwestern New Mexico, salvaging materials from old buildings is often rewarding. Yet, the very forces of dry weather and hot sun that can preserve material can also destroy it. I had already torn off much of the siding, which was not in such good shape; it was a form of fiber-board that had long since warped under the relentless sun, falling to pieces under the crowbars, hammers, and other implements I often use in this work.

  So it was that, when the barn was merely a skeleton of itself, I was standing inside the slatted shadows cast by the remaining rafters, when the box fell the nearly thirty feet to the pile of rubbish in the middle of the floor. It was sealed with disintegrating duct tape and simply burst open upon impact. Although there was evidence of some ruin due to mice and insects, when I kneeled over the contents that had spilled out, I was amazed at the condition of the Big Chief tablet. I chose to pick it up first, since I had not seen one for at least thirty years. As I turned the pages, I saw that the entire tablet was filled with what looked like a young person’s handwriting (due to the formation of the letters as much as anything else) with very little space left for margins, in a small script that was difficult to read, considering the way the ink had spread into the fibers of the pulpy paper.

  Realizing almost immediately that it was a diary or journal of some sort, and being a writer, myself, I treated this tablet and the other two documents with utmost care. After having read only part way into the contents of the tablet, I realized its value. The letter was written in an obviously more mature hand—and not that of the young writer. It was on regular typing paper from an era long gone, in that it was thicker than modern typing paper, only slightly yellowed after what must be twenty or thirty years. The salutation was simply to Will, and was signed simply as Sean. Yet I knew that it must have been special to whoever Will was, because it was much creased and tri-folded; perhaps even carried around in a pants’ hip pocket before being placed in the box. Who knew? The spiral notebook, like the Big Chief tablet, was much used. As I flipped through the pages, I saw that sometimes the writing was controlled and neatly written; at other times, it was scrawled, as if written in a hurry or when the author was sitting in an awkward position (maybe). While the writing in the spiral notebook appeared to be authored by the same hand as that in the Big Chief tablet, it was markedly improved in both expression and control of the cursive, itself. The most curious item in this collection, of course, was the set of dog tags that bore the name Sean Martin; who he was and how his tags came to be among the collection of writings would have to be revealed by the writing itself. Of themselves, the tags revealed only that the writer of the letter was Sean Martin, that he had been registered in the Army during the Vietnam era, and that the presence of the dog tags in the box was important to Will. But I could tell no more than that without further examination.

  I was so excited by the find that I took the afternoon off, sent my crew home, and sat in Kranberry’s Restaurant in nearby Lordsburg for much of the afternoon and into the dinner hour reading from beginning to end from the Big Chief tablet, to the letter, and to the very last page in the spiral notebook. I found myself subconsciously thumbing the raised lettering of the dog tags as I read and only noticed that I was doing so when the waitress interrupted me to pour more coffee, or when I reluctantly got up to use the Men’s Room. Taken all together, the tablet, the letter, and the spiral notebook made up an amazing story. But I will let the documents speak for themselves. While I have taken some liberties with the material (inserting clarifying marks of punctuation, puzzling out ruined or smudged portions of the writing by the context of the surrounding material, and ferreting out more sensible sentences and paragraphs), I have not interfered with the “voice” in any of the materials. I’ve also broken down the writing into “chapters” to aid readers in approximate breaks in time, though some other person editing this material might have chosen to divide the material differently.

  One

  ———————▼———————

  Uncle Sean sure is pretty. But there’s something wrong with him, anyway. I got to write about this though. My chest feels all funny, and I don’t think he knows I’ve been looking at him, least not so he really notices much. I’m only fourteen though Mama says I’m big for my age.

  I know I don’t write too well. Daddy don’t believe too much in book learnin’, so I got the old Webster’s down from the shelf, so I can look up words. Come to think of it, I don’t know as I’ll be letting nobody read this. But I got to write it down here in this tablet.

  When I went into town with Daddy in the pickup, I got me this Big Chief tablet. We was picking up some fertilizer for the cotton, and since it’s so hot the end of May, we went into the Rexall and he bought us sodas, and I seen the school supplies and got this idea I wanted to write down how Uncle Sean is so pretty and how it makes me feel. So I asked Daddy if I could buy me the tablet and one of them blue pens for 19 cents.

  I told him I like to draw and he says “you ain’t no sissy,” and I said I ain’t and I told him “when I go back to school in the fall, I want to draw hotrods since people l
ike to race on the flats up near Lordsburg and drawing pictures is fun.”

  He acted like it was too much bother, but when he was finishing up his soda, he slaps a dollar on the table, then grins and says “well, what you waitin’ on?” I kept the Big Chief and the pen in the sack they give me at the Rexall and, on the way home, I held it in my lap and tried to pretend it weren’t much, me buying it and all, but Daddy, he keeps looking over at me and shaking his head.

  “I ain’t never seen much use in book learnin’,” he says. “If you ain’t got a strong back and hard hands, you ain’t gonna make it. But I reckon other boys’ll draw them hotrods, too.”

  But I do have a strong back and all. So, even though there’s smudges now from what I wrote down, cause I got grease on my hands from helping Daddy with the equipment, I got to write, and ain’t got much time to wash the grease off with gasoline before I can sneak off.

  The sun’s nearly down and I’ve snuck into the barn, up in the loft. I don’t think nobody saw me though and I got the Webster’s tucked up under the rafters. Nobody’s gonna miss it, least not right away.

  It’s hot up here, though, so I shucked my shirt. And I can see way out from up here, looking east toward the Big Hatchet Mountain. It’s still light enough to see, too, and I got good eyes. Long as I get my chores done before supper nobody comes looking for me, neither.

  So Uncle Sean. He came back from Vietnam Christmas of ’68. That was last winter. Mama says he’s lucky he weren’t killed, though there’s something wrong with him. Like he’s real mad and quiet, and he and Daddy yell at each other, and Daddy says if he weren’t Mama’s brother, he’d fire him. But you can’t fire kin.

  I come in to the kitchen that morning, the day after Christmas, and there he was sitting at the table with Mama and Daddy, drinking coffee. And Mama says, “Will, come here and say hi to your Uncle Sean. You ain’t seen him since you was about six, so you probably don’t remember him.”

  And I didn’t and he looks up at me and I’m staring into his eyes the color of cornflowers, a blue so pale they swam. The way the light struck his face from the sun coming in through the kitchen window over the sink put a glow over his blond hair, too, and though he’s got darkish brown eyebrows, they’re real pretty shaped and his eye lashes are black and kind of wet looking. He smiled at me, and I must have stood there slack jawed like a dimwit. I never seen such soft girlish lips on a guy before. Now, he don’t put on none of Mama’s Revlon or nothing but they’re pink and soft anyway.

  My hands are shaking so much but I’m gonna write this: I wondered right then how it’d feel to kiss those lips. I get a sweet feeling sometimes just wondering about that.

  I never felt much a couple a years ago about things like this in the way I feel funny in my chest, now, every time I get a close look at him. His blue eyes cut right through me when he gives me one of his funny, straight-on looks and kind of grins when he don’t think Daddy’s looking. Like it’s me and him in on some kind of joke on Daddy. Specially when Daddy’s all hot and sweaty and him and Uncle Sean have been yelling. But I guess that comes later, cause I’m writing about the first time I laid eyes on him, and how it was like a crush or something. I know about crushes because my two oldest sisters, Julianne and Marsha, used to get them all the time.

  Now that it’s hot, he don’t wear no shirt, neither. And they fed him good in the army and made him do pushups and tote stuff when they was on patrol, though he don’t talk about that, except to tell me I don’t want none of it, so stay on the farm and get what he calls a deferment or something like that.

  I tell him “what am I gonna do but stay right here?” because Mama and Daddy just had me and my five sisters, Julianne, Marsha, May, Rita, and Trinket—two of them are younger than me, and three of them are older. Julianne and Marsha got out as soon as they graduated high school and never looked back. But even though May is older than me, it’s not by much, and we’re actually the closest.

  So Uncle Sean’s chest is all nice and muscled, and his arms are ropy with muscles. Mine are too, because of my size, and I been working along side Daddy since I was like six years old.

  Then he wears them fatigues. He says “why throw away good work clothes?” They hang low on his waist and I can tell he don’t wear nothing underneath. I sometimes see the wiry hair on his patch, though mine ain’t nothing much yet.

  So Christmas. I sat right down and started in talking to him and he’s polite and quiet, and Mama says, “don’t pester him, he drove all night.” Then I got to help him bring his stuff in from the car. He got Julianne and Marsha’s room right off the bathroom, and he didn’t have much stuff.

  I asked him, “why don’t you have one of them rifles from the army? I thought they let you keep stuff like that, or at least a dagger, or some kind of neat knife.” But he looked funny when I said that, but he still smiled and said, “because I don’t want anything that can kill. I’ve had enough of that.”

  So I knew enough to clam up about it, hoping he weren’t mad at me for talking about rifles and daggers. But he did have a duffel bag, a bunch a boots, and boxes with some books. And he pulled things out and I asked him if he minded if I watched him and he said, “no, but don’t touch anything unless I give it to you.” But I didn’t care about touching none of his stuff. So I sat on the bed and watched him, the way his back looked once he’d shucked his jacket and the way his hair hung down over the neck of his t-shirt, kind of curled at the ends cause he needed a haircut, and the way his hands looked kind of slim and smooth when he took stuff out of his duffel bag and shook out shirts and pants and things.

  He put a picture out on the dresser. It was a picture with two guys in it, arms around each other’s shoulders. I went over to it and he says “you can pick it up,” so first thing I did was see right off it was him, looking real pretty like I say, smiling real big, and so was the other guy, and it made me feel all funny looking at it, and I wanted to keep it. I asked him “who’s that?” and he looked, and I watched his eyes and they turned all sad, and then he took the picture from me and said to run along. He needs to get some sleep. He drove all night.

  Mama was already doing the dishes and my two little sisters were eating cereal. Daddy and May were already outside, though there wasn’t much to do, as it was cold and the wind had already picked up. So I dried dishes and asked Mama where did Uncle Sean come from that he drove all night and she tells me San Antonio, Texas.

  “But I thought he was in the army,” I said.

  “He was,” she said, “but he’s been in the hospital,” and I asked what for, and she looked out the kitchen window then looked back at me.

  “You go on, now, Will. When Sean gets up you can show him around.”

  So I went outside, and Daddy and May were on the sunny side of the barn sitting in between the big doors where the wind wasn’t whistling past. It faces east, but where they were, you can see south and the mountains all the way down into Mexico from there. They had drug a tarp out of the barn and laid it open and were working on a transmission from the cotton picker. May’s older than me by just eleven months, makin’ her fifteen, right now, and me and her are the only ones that like to work outside, even though Mama makes everybody work outside some of the time. Me and May, though, do it because we want to. So when I ain’t in the mood to help Daddy, May usually is, and when May ain’t, I am. So we’re kind’a good buddies, besides being brother and sister, though we don’t look nothin’ alike, as I got blond hair and blue eyes and May’s got red hair and green eyes, and freckles, and turns red from her teeth to her toenails when it’s hot out. I tan pretty good.

  Daddy’s older than Mama, and he’s got black hair and dark brown eyes and thin lips and strong arms and big hands with black hair on the back of them. So when I found May and Daddy working together, both with grease on their hands, I thought about Uncle Sean and how pretty he was as I watched Daddy work and May handing him tools out of the toolbox.

  “Mama says Uncle Sean’s been in the
hospital,” I said. “Was he wounded?” May squints up at me, and Daddy didn’t look up at me, just kept working. But he stopped for a second, hunching his shoulders like he was about to lift something heavy.

  “No he weren’t wounded,” he said. “Now you gonna talk or help me?”

  So, anyway, there’s something wrong with Uncle Sean. Cause I saw that sad look that December morning and I knew not to ask too many questions, since both Mama and Daddy acted like they didn’t want to talk about it, neither.

  So later, when Uncle Sean got up and we all ate lunch, Mama says “you take Uncle Sean and show him around.” Daddy gave me the keys to the pickup and said, “show Sean how well you can drive,” and Uncle Sean grinned at me with those pretty lips and says “you won’t run off the road will you?”

  I felt as goosey as a girl. Don’t ask me why, but I seen the way Julianne and Marsha acted when their boyfriends would drive up and they would squeak and giggle, and so I felt like that, only I didn’t show nothing as I drove.

  Our farm is cut up into different sections, cause of the arroyos running through the property, and we farm one patch here and one patch there. “Me and Daddy built this bridge,” I say, as we drive over it. Most of our farm lies north of the house, but I headed out south, first from the barn, down the Hill place road. It’s a ranch on the south of us. When we turned west about a mile from the house, we came to the bridge.

  “We built it out of railroad ties,” I tell him. “Got them from the old rail line that ran past here when they was shipping out the ore from those hills yonder.”