*Author’s note: Please don’t miss Al’s poem, “David,” shared at the end of this essay (with permission from the poet himself). “David” won the 2015 Amherst Writers and Artists Peregrine Magazine Prize and was first published in the book, War and Moral Injury: A Reader.
There’s a grandfather in my neighborhood who owns the title to a big piece of land near the Connecticut River. Al. He and his wife, Suzanne, let people do cool things on their land like raise sheep, raise tipis, build herb farms, build sweat lodges, run nature programs, run men’s circles and women’s circles and vision quests and ceremonies. It’s all a ceremony on that land, a living relationship, a prayer. Becca, one of the neighbors, goes down to the sweetwater spring once a week (or is it once a day?) to say thank you to the water, to the earth, to whomever might be listening. Her man, Dale, builds a fire every morning before the sun rises. Dale just texted me (and two hundred other people) a photo of today’s fire. It’s that kind of place, an unusual oasis of intergenerational cooperation and interspecies community.
Al, the grandfather, an elder who sometimes calls me brother, is a tall maple of a man, delicate now in his years and clarified in the way that suffering has the unique ability to clarify. He gives the word “patriarch” real hope in the face of some pretty rough odds. He has a hard time receiving a compliment, puts himself down a lot, or maybe I’m just not used to seeing a man as humble as he is. He doesn’t particularly want me to be writing this story in which I give you a glimpse of him. He’s taking a deep breath and letting me share it anyways. When he read the first draft, he was concerned I made him look too good. “You are that good,” I told him, “at least in my world.” I kept at him, hopeful that he would allow me to let you see him.
He finally relented, giving me his blessing via text the other day: “Well Andrew how fortunate I am that you’re in my life it’s hard for me to read but I’ll take it as something you see and feel the gratitude that comes please know that flaws and weaknesses are as real.”
God I want that precious man to love himself. I think he does. I know he does his best, and his best really is extraordinary, given what he’s been through.
Al gives poetry readings at schools sometimes. “I’m a father,” he’ll say by way of introduction. “I’m a husband. I’m a friend and a woodworker and a poet. And I’m also murderer.”
Al killed five men the summer he turned 21 (five that he’s aware of, he told me), the same summer a projectile blew through his right shoulder and took off half his ear, the summer he saw his buddy Daniel obliterated by a landmine, the summer he was an infantry squad leader in the U.S. Army, the summer of 1969 in the jungles of Vietnam.
“It was a transformational experience for me,” he said when I interviewed him for this piece. “Some of the things I saw, no one else saw. I saw people die, and I saw their spirits continue. It was a shakeup of my constitution in almost every way. A rattle. Like the rattling in the sweat lodge. It was the bomb version of that.”
About twenty years after Vietnam, Al started having a recurring nightmare.
“In the dream, I was hiding along rivers kind of like the ones I grew up on, with thistle and brambles, and I realized in the dream that I was being hunted, and I was hiding, and the men who were hunting me were the old men of my childhood, the elders of my childhood, which in southern Missouri were miners, and they showed up with the old fashioned weapons of that era, hunting me. And I’d wake up in terror at that point, until the last time it happened in the 80s. It happened four nights in a row, the same dream. And at the end of that dream on the fourth night, I said, ‘Oh, I am a murderer,’ and I never had the dream again.”
When I hug Al, his shoulders feel like maple burls. He walks gingerly, as if on hot coals. I think walking might hurt somewhat, for him. Even standing seems uncomfortable, as if things might suddenly give way, and yet he stood outside with me this past autumn for four hours, into the night, under the stars, to help me disassemble a sweat lodge we’d built on the land. A few years back, he and Suzanne gave me permission to build that lodge with my mentor Darryl Slim, a Diné (Navajo) medicine man. Darryl taught me that when you build a sweat lodge, you have to care for it, and you care for it primarily by using it. We used it a lot, with Darryl, the year we built it, but then my travels took me away from the neighborhood and the lodge went too long unused, and so this past fall I returned to take it down. Al stayed with me till the ceremonial fire had burned down to embers and the willow branches of the lodge had smoldered to sacred ash.
We told each other stories about the lodge, reminisced about those ceremonies with Darryl. I recalled the first time Al and Darryl met. The two men embraced, just stood there in each others’ arms for over a minute. I snuck a photograph. In the photograph, Darryl is wrapped up in Al’s long arms, cradled, his head tucked against Al’s chest, his long midnight hair unbraided, cascading down his back while Al’s eyes glisten. When Darryl came back later that year to run another sweat lodge ceremony, he and Al embraced again, long enough for me to snap another picture. This time, it’s Al who is the cradled one, his head resting on Darryl’s chest, wrapped in Darryl’s arms.
When you think about what we’ve been through, our personal histories, our collective history, a hug like that is no small thing.
For example: This neighborhood here on the Connecticut River is the place where 415 Indigenous people were killed by a militia of about 150 European settlers in 1676. This bend in the river was where the local tribes would come to fish and plant twice a year, every year, for thousands and thousands of years. The Nipmuc. The Pocumtuc. The Narragansett and the Wampanoag and the Wabanaki. That year, 1676, the warriors slept in a separate camp, as was the custom during wartime. In the dark hours before dawn on May 19, a militia of settlers marched through a thunderstorm to the main camp where the Native women, children, and elders were sleeping. The militiamen weren’t seasoned soldiers. They were mostly farmers, homesteaders, just a bunch of neighborhood guys. They infiltrated the camp and fired at point blank range into the domed huts, killing 415 people before beating a hasty retreat. The warriors pursued them, killing 38 men, torturing and burning those who didn’t die immediately from their wounds.
This happened just upstream of where we built that sweat lodge . It’s why I took those pictures of Darryl and Al. What are the chances that a white man and a Native man would ever be able to hug each other after a night like that night, 347 years ago, or was it last night? How many nights like that have we seen over the course this long war that seems to burn on and on across the many lands of the earth? I wonder if all wars are different campaigns in the same war, and that maybe this singular war is at its root, beneath the various geopolitical casualties, a war against the inconvenient and bewildering fact that we are one.
“If we have no peace,” Mother Teresa said, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
When Darryl first came out to raise the tipi and lead us in ceremony, Al took center stage at one point by the west side of the center fire, standing up from his rocking chair to weep. I’d never seen a man openly grieve like that before, certainly not a man of his generation, standing tall before us all, willing to be seen, let it loose. I don’t remember who or what he was weeping for, but I remember feeling the profound sanity of this act. Somehow, without having it explained to me, I understood that this was not a shameful thing, not a problem in need of fixing, but a natural and necessary response to catastrophic loss. Something I wanted to learn how to do.
The grief seemed to transcend Al’s personal experience. He was grieving for me, it seemed, and for the rest of us in that tipi who couldn’t go there ourselves, or wouldn’t, channeling with his body a teaspoon or maybe a tablespoon of saltwater from that ocean of dammed grief that is our inheritance in this age of catastrophic losses.
Watching Al, feeling him, I remember wondering what the world might be like if men grieved regularly like that, just as a matter of course, the way we get together to barbecue on a hot summer day. What if the power of men was yoked to such a labor? What if we were esteemed for this work? Our bodies have literally moved mountains. What if our girth and musculature and physical prowess were employed to the task of undamming that ocean? If Al’s aged and compromised body could do what it did that night, what could the body of a young man do? An army of young men?
I won’t forget how he stood there before us, swaying as if in a great wind. My mother was there with us in the tipi that night. She and I were both supporting Darryl in the ceremonial process. She went over to Al, brushed him off with a heron wing, blessed him up, and said out loud, “The sounds of grief are the new battlecry for men.”
I take this to mean that there is a certain valor in the willingness to face and feel the impact that loss has on us. To actually open ourselves to that pain. To cry out with it. To show it and to share it. This takes courage. What is missed when we keep it all to ourselves? What is lost when we avoid the truth? It’s a battlecry, to be so true, so honest, to take responsibility in such a personal, somatic way, to be as vulnerable as we are, to belong to each other.
“It meant survival, to talk and not live with it in silence,” Al told me when I asked him how and why he is so open about what he experienced in Vietnam. “I think it would have killed me. It was that forceful in my mind and in my heart. I know people who won’t talk about it. Don’t want to because they go back and re-experience it. But for me, that’s kind of a form of denial. I thought that would kill me, to deny it by not being willing to vocalize it. I trust the truth. That’s where I feel the safest. Even when it’s not personally glorifying. Even when it’s painful to tell the truth.”
When we were taking down the sweat lodge in the cold twilight this past autumn, he told me he wants to love his death whenever it comes, that he wants a beautiful death. I said, “I’m at your back, brother,” and he said, “Yeah?” and I said, “Yeah,” and then he said, “Oh, that’s good to know.”
He’s been having some health problems. Just the other day, when he texted me his blessing to publish this essay, he sent a second text telling me that his doctor thinks he might have Parkinson’s disease.
“Amazing,” he wrote, “how something can illuminate a moment all there is that can instill an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it all the dimensions it can create in us and the depth we can have and feel for the other.”
He and Suzanne went out to California toward the end of this past winter to see the desert verbena bloom. We were trying to find a time for our first interview, and he texted me a snapshot of the flowers, a glorious flush of violet against the arid sands, blushed yellow by the brittlebrush. “Desert bloom yesterday,” he wrote. “The verbena scents the air.”
It wasn’t until a few days later that I found my own way to weeping, thinking about that picture, and about Al, in the tipi, in Vietnam, in Darryl’s arms. That he had survived the war, the one in the jungle and the one inside himself. That he was now surrounded by flowers. That he could see the flowers at all, despite everything else he’d seen. That he himself was a flower, whether he knew it or not, growing impossibly in the arid soil of the desert of these times. I saw his face in my mind, his somber eyes, his hand reaching out, reaching up, my elder, my brother, our warrior in that desert field of flowers.
David
by William Allen Miller
I don’t remember clouds or the color of the sky,
the sound of birds.
Who his father might have been, the significant trees in his
life as a child,
the way he ran to go home at the end of a day.
The things
he passed that told him who and where he was, or if he had known
the loyalties of a dog.
When I think of him I say “David,” though I never
heard his name.
When we found him you couldn’t tell if he was Asian, Anglo or African
not as if anything was equal.
I don’t know if he had ever known the unity of a ball game. I think he might have been
Chinese American from California.
I wonder if his grandfather had ever taken him fishing. We wrapped him in a poncho
that would protect him from the rain,
tied the poncho to a bamboo pole, carried him as if we were all
going home that night in a pilgrimage of the bewildered.
I regret the way we dropped him to the ground near morning, brushing one palm against the other as though we were finished.
I just love your writings, your stories, your wisdom in distilling the beautiful truth in all beings and things. Thank you, Andrew.
Thank you Andrew for blowing this story on the winds of a pure love, rich and moving, so universal in our daily lives. Your writing passes on the embraces of Al and Darryl and seems to caress us all in your retelling. Many blessings dear one, with much love and admiration, Ricki