Sight

My uncle was a large man. His forearms were thick and hard from laying line after line of brick. I always thought that he was wild with his long hair falling down over his eyes, and his moustache hanging down over his mouth, and mostly with his eyes that danced. Framing all of this was the fact that I knew he was a marine who had fought in Vietnam, but we never spoke of this.

I was young when my aunt married him. They were both carefree and rebellious. When they would visit I used to pause before I entered a room where they were. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would hear about some of John's exploits that were not meant for younger audiences. One time I heard about a fight that he had at a bar. John was bragging about how he threw punch after punch at what sounded like an army. I was fascinated. Now I realize that this was the cause for his long absence from my Grandfather's house. I don't know if he was in jail or the hospital, but I heard that he won the fight. It must have been something.

There was another time when he was taking my family to his new house in the country. He was excited and laughing. He said, "See this dirt road, our house is at the very end of it. Sounds crazy but it's true."

I propped my self up from the back seat and looked out the front window. A rust red stripe stretched down the hill in front of us then rose again at the next hill. Then it appeared a little to the left as it crested the next slightly taller hill, and then it did the same thing one more time. There were no more hills that I could see, but I remember thinking how large the world was.

True to his word, the house was at the end of the road. A white gravel drive twisted through two fields of corn, by a large red barn, and ended under a large pecan tree that shaded a small white house. We had dinner there. The women, my aunt, mother and grandmother ate in the small kitchen, while my uncle, father, grandfather, and another uncle sat on the porch. While they were eating, I snuck into my uncles bedroom and looked at his dresser. I never tired of it. He had all of his buttons and medals from Vietnam sitting on a small tarnished plate. On the top corner of the mirror was a beret, but I don't remember the color, and just under that, tucked into the mirror was a faded color photo of my uncle and two men. All of them were in uniform in front of a tropical jungle, and all of them were smiling. It was the only photo that I ever saw of him in Vietnam.

When I returned to the porch, My uncle was recounting a conversation he had with a blind man that he met in a bar. My uncle's hair wasn't in his eyes. I remember that he worked hard to keep it away from them, and that he was sitting in a wicker chair holding his tea, and his eyes weren't dancing. For once they were focused, but I didn't know why.

"I asked him," he said, "what's it like being blind? And he said, 'I don't know, what is it like being able to see?' I thought he was being a smart ass so I told him so. He just laughed. I asked him again, and he said, 'really, I don't know.'" My other uncle said that he had heard that blind people see black, all the time and nothing else, but John assured us that this was not what this blind man saw. We all asked, "So what did he see?"

"Nothing, nothing at all," he said.

My dad asked, "How can you see nothing. You have to see something." John said, "No, he said that he never could see, so he sees nothing." There was a long pause and then John said, "How many things do we not see because we never did see them?" John turned his head and looked at his white gravel drive.

I wish I could say that things went well for John and my aunt after that, but they didn't. His hair grew longer and his eyes danced more and more until he was no longer able to stay whereever he happened to be. I don't know where he is now, but I used to think he must be trying to see something that he might not be able to see. Now, as I get older, I think he may be trying something much harder. I think he is trying to unsee things he has seen.