Reawaken

13.

October

A full week had gone by since the night of Slick and Tip's gambling party. A week since Daddy led me to the shack and me and Dudley found each other.

            The entire week I did things as I normally would, my fullness unbeknownst to the Mayfair's. I walked Celia to school and me and Reed would walk to work like usual, him knowing the big secret about me.  It ain't phase him, though. If anything, Reed said I was something like a hero.

            Every night right when the Mayfair's would be having supper, I'd walk a long trek to the shack­– a scenic route from paddling across the bayou that only Dudley only knew to keep wanderers away, learning more stories about the Claude family. Them nights with him filled an emptiness in me I didn't know I was harboring. And finally, it felt like a piece of something that left when Daddy died had been connected back to my former self. This was the fullest I had ever felt since then.

            Dudley didn't seem to mind my slew of questions, all the stories I wanted him to tell, all the things about Daddy and ancestors I wanted to know. To me, it seemed like a piece of himself may have been connected with my blazing curiosity.

            Every night since the gambling party I hadn't been able to sleep, so I stayed up organizing the letters between Dudley and my Daddy putting them in order by the postmarks. When I had majority of them in order, I began to some dating back to 1957 to read – learning about Dudley and his time in the Vietnam war, his full details of all the things he was experiencing and seeing, and the God-awful war that was taking place. He talked about the friend's he lost in battle; the nights he was to terrified to go to sleep.

            My Daddy was a strong proud man, but in these letters, I could see that even a man like him was lost for words. In one of the letters, Daddy simply put:

"This war is not only on the fighting countries, but the brothers enduring the pain of it all. You are always in my prayers, Lee. And I hope the evil you seeing ain't making you forget how strong of a man you are."

-       Lincoln

Attached to those letters was a picture of Dudley in his uniform, his dark face emotionless and hard eyes cold. Out of all the things Dudley would tell me stories of, the war was never one he recounted.

Dudley was able to be discharged early on during the war after having an accident that injured his leg. From there he would just ask Daddy about life in Alabama. Daddy would never go into detail about life like Dudley would. He would talk about being between jobs, jobs I knew meant were hustlers' tricks, and Nana working on a farm. He talked about missing Eva Parish and wanting to visit again if he got his money right. Then in those letters he'd go on very long about how I was growing like a weed and me being "smart as a whip" or something funny I'd do like putting my small feet in his work boots or standing on his feet while we danced to songs on the radio. Even if Daddy didn't have much to talk about, he would always somehow find a way to talk about me. Seeing my name in them letters made my heart swell.

It wasn't until I moved past a lot of letters passed between Daddy and Dudley during his years from Vietnam when I saw a few earlier letters from when Daddy and Nana first moved to Alabama, and where Nana introduced Daddy to a girl in the Spring of 1945 by the name of Loretta Hines.

I dropped the letters from my hand then, feeling a similar chill race down my spine the same night I met Dudley. Despite the nagging pull on my heart, a turmoil rolled over me that I ain't ever felt before, a need to know but a sharp pang of fear.