UNITED STATES—“You are a lot like my brother was. Popular in the same way my brother was,” Graydon Miller’s father said during an uncommonly expressive automobile ride one night in the spring of 1979. So expressive it ached. It was a shared moment of monumental intimacy for two men whom Dr. Vanderhorse would accuse of being clinically non-communicative.
His name was Kenneth Otto Miller; his middle name was a palindrome, spelled the same way both forward and backward. Kenneth’s elder brother was, if not exactly a junior. Oh, wait wait wait, let us mention that his father was Robert Adolph Miller, and perhaps prophetically Kenneth’s elder brother, the star of young Kenneth’s life, was named Robert Frederick Miller, due to the German tradition of utilizing a grandfather’s name for a middle name, and not Adolph which plummeted from being the sixth most popular name in 1933 to the basement of popularity for newborns by 1944. In the 1940 census the father Robert “Bob” Miller was 41 years and Robert Frederick, mirrored 14 years. There you see the glint of numerology behind the Luciferian mechanism of it all.
During the night-ride, on Riverside Road and College Drive young Grady heard a great many truths exposed, that disrupted the bland outward lives of the family. Since his father Otto was unable to work for a time, due to a skiing accident, he had confessions and truths stored up.
“My brother got blackballed by a fraternity at Idaho State, and he enlisted in the Army.”
He left Moscow (Idaho) for the European theater and joined the 7th Armored Infantry Battalion, 8th Armored Division. It was the endgame of the War, it was really all over by the 28th day of March of that year. By June it would really be all over. Bobby as he was known Bob was Boob, as young Graydon nicknamed him, already down the path of doddering dementia. Mr. McGoo.
According to stories Graydon’s mom told, never one to sand down the roughness of what her rampant gaze saw, said that Bob was quite effete. A real company man, Boob stayed with Idaho Bank and Trust till he got the gold watch, and lived with pictures of Bobby in his uniform and, head turned to one side, away from the camera, always self-conscious of his cauliflower ear on his left side.
“We always planned that after college we would go to a small town in Idaho or Nevada and run a local newspaper,” Dad said during that drive to nowhere.
And their mother, Myrtle, who was said to be very domineering and too much resemble our mother Ethlyn, so you can see how Oedipally their attraction played out. After the letter came informing that Bobby had died in a camp hospital, recuperating from the shrapnel the jags of torn metal that a mortar dropped from German anti-aircraft, and obliterated the Uncle Graydon Miller would never meet.
Back in Arco, Idaho which would become the world’s first nuclear-powered town in the world. When you entered and left the town the visitor was greeted by neon axis of protons dancing around the firefly core. In the Episcopalian Church, a flag draped over some chairs, and the choir sun “Danny Boy,” that Irish song.
Myrtle, who’d been wooed by the Future Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas who subscribed to that fine brand of Anarchy that grows native to the American Northwest. Myrtle had married the adipose plumpette Bob Adolph Miller. He was off at the bank when the Marines came to the door of the house on the hill. The Marines always sent two, and they brought the news that a German mortar shell exploded in the camp hospital, to which Bobby had been taken from the battlefield. He died in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.
Afterward, Myrtle waited, cigarette in hand, always with a blank sheet of paper wound around the rubber cylinder of the Remington typewriter in her desk nook off the kitchen.
“I am waiting for a message from Bobby. I know it’s coming. It has to.”
And she smoked like women of the time, the gains of creepy manipulator Bernard Lukasey, making it acceptable, and even stylish, for women to smoke. The tendrils of cancer bloomed inside her. And they moved to a bustling Burley on the Snake River. It was closer to take Myrtle to the cancer treatments in Salt Lake City. Still the students remembered her telling the students, “Don’t ever chew gum when you are dressed up in your finest.” It reached across the gulf of death, when Graydon and his dad drove the countryside one summer, the ring of a pure Millerism.
Myrtle wasted away and died.
My Mom, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Myrtle. She poo-poohed my dad’s often expressed desire to go to Margraten, the cemetery the U.S. Army in the Netherlands where Robert F. Miller is buried.
“You’ve seen one soldier’s grave. You’ve seen them all.”
Later, after Dad had passed and had gone off softly into his own good night. She listened to her dad Tex who belonged to a generation of men who had the power to make an unruly kid shape up with a single fiery glare of his dark brown eyes, I too respected the hell out of him, so when the adults visited old Bob delusional in a nursing home in Felton where the big trees are and it has the density and darkness of the Black Forest. My lucid and wise Grandad spoke:
“Don’t ever let your kids see this place.”
This place—the stench, the moans, the nicotine-colored walls of that squalid facility.
And she never did. We’d been spared the stench, the moans, the nicotine-coated walls.
Though Mom would later come to revaluate that, and also reconsider her word, “If you’ve seen one soldier’s grave, you’ve seen them all.” If she had been fifteen and lost a brother in a war and a mother soon after—then she might fathom what young Ken had gone through.
To be continued…
Graydon is the Wizard of Fiction.
