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Feb. 8th, 2006 12:57 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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mash_slashI'll Tell You In The Morning, Hawkeye
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Hawkeye's letter to Erin Hunnicut continues as he tries to get her to understand her father's actions after returning from Korea. Letter writing takes place in the 1980s, most of the events described are 1960.
Feedback: As much as possible, please!
I’ll give you some advice, Erin. I’m sure I’ve given you plenty of advice over the years, but there’s always space for more. This is it: never invite a priest into you home. They can’t step over the threshold unless you invite them, so if you value your stack of washing up by the sink, your unpleasant hairs in the bathroom, your clothes all over the place, do not ever invite a member of the clergy in.
If cleanliness really is next to godliness, Mulcahy was sitting on God’s right-hand side when I came stumbling down to breakfast. He had tidied everything in a kind of nervous hyperactivity common amongst young clergymen and businesswomen. The kitchen shone like it hadn’t since I bought the place, which was disturbing enough in itself, but that was nothing compared to the orderliness I discovered when I opened a cupboard at random.
“I’m sorry Hawkeye,” said Mulcahy quietly. “I know you like your … chaos. I was just a bit embarrassed about staying in your home without pulling my weight…”
So that’s priests. They tidy compulsively. Avoid.
BJ was sound asleep on the sofa, but not for long because I wanted my answer. The sofa and the answer to my question are as inextricably involved as Kurtz and Marlow, because it’s where your father spent his final days, nearly twenty years later. It was a large, squashy, brown suede affair, and BJ adopted it as his own, exiling me to the matching armchair. I know at least twice he started rows simply so he had an excuse to sleep on his blessed sofa rather than with me. But I digress.
He didn’t answer. Wouldn’t tell me. I pestered him the entire day, all the way to the station with the padre and all the way round the grocery store, and all the way home again.
“Beej, come on. Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Tell me you love me.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then tell me that!”
“Hmm … I’ll tell you later.”
It’s attention-seeking. He’s always done it. That’s a point; did he ever tell you what the ‘BJ’ stands for? Because he never, ever told me.
That first day together … I won’t say it was easy. Shell shock … battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder … whatever you call it, it catches up with you eventually. Every man has his breaking point, and in finding each other we’d both met ours. I’ve enclosed that old tape. When I walked in on BJ with Trapper, something in me snapped … Perhaps it was because Trapper always managed to get his hands on everything I wanted. Every nurse back in the early days, that discharge two years before me … BJ. I’d chased and yearned and pined for him for ten years, and all Trapper had to do was grin that soppy great grin of his, flex his muscles, and BJ fell for him. Which of course he didn’t. But you don’t hang around to glean all the details when something like that happens.
BJ was lost, and I think he had been for years. There’s nothing good about war. It just ruins and destroys and corrupts, and none of us can predict it or cope with it. BJ could see his future when he left his residency. He had you and Peg. He’d work and bring you up and love his wife. And then war into his life. He was wrenched away from you, shown a world in which nothing is as simple as he expected. He was forced to wade through pools of blood to salvage tiny shimmering facets of life from a raging sea of chaos and murder. And he met me. No one recovers from any of those things.
We didn’t talk much back then, except at night, under the covers. That was the only place it was safe. Together, in the dark, we could admit to the things that weren’t allowed to exist in broad daylight. We could talk about the black places of the soul, the horrors we had seen, the passions we felt for each other – which, in those days, were horrors to every decent god-fearing American. But that day we talked about you. Not us. BJ wouldn’t directly tell me he loved me, but he said it in other ways. We talked about moving to California together to be closer to you, and he told me it was almost your birthday so we discussed joint gifts.
When we got home, he broke a little bit more. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him genuinely cry. He was plagued by guilt, you must know that. He tried to put it into words, but for some things, words are no more substantial or meaningful than wisps of smoke. It hurt him to be away from you, but the years between Korea and Maine were, for him, like limbo. Purgatory. The ordinariness of his work, the thought that he would never again feel that thrill – and it is a thrill, Erin – of adrenaline as the first hum of chopper blades drifts into hearing range. Tonsillectomies just aren’t quite the life-or-death stuff we had grown used to.
And then … he simply didn’t love your mother any more. Couldn’t live his life with someone who had not seen the things he had, felt the way he had. It’s selfish. I know it is, because I felt exactly the same. I can’t say whether or not latent homosexuality had anything to do with it, or even if there was such a thing in BJ. I certainly never caught him looking at other men. I like to think I was some big exception to an unwritten rule. It keeps my ego happy.
If you could understand his pain, you might be able to forgive him for leaving. There was nothing else he could do.
Of course, he tried to keep in touch with you. You know he did. It was that second night he stayed with me that he picked up the phone and rang your mother. I don’t know how long he had spent away from you, but the call lasted a millennium. I sat on the floor outside my study, back resting against the door, listening to BJ’s side of the conversation.
“Peg … Honey it’s me. Don’t raise your voice … where’s Erin? Good. No, don’t fetch her. We need to talk…”
He told her everything. How he couldn’t bare to stay in California, how the memories plagued him, how he no longer loved her.
“I’m staying with Hawkeye … Yes, that Hawkeye. Yes, hon. It … I guess it is like that, yeah. I need to be round him … Peg, don’t ask me that. You know I can’t answer that…”
The short version is this: your mother came out to Maine the next day. Dropped you off at an aunt’s or something and just flew out. I was coming home from work when the car she had hired pulled into the driveway. We both froze. She sat there, I stood, and we stared at each other, and then, very slowly, she got out of the car.
“So you’re Hawkeye Pierce?” she asked.
I tried for a smile, but I probably failed. “And you must be Peg.”
“Margaret to you.”
I had heard her voice once before, on a recording, but she sounded nothing like I remembered. She didn’t look like any of your dad’s photos either. Her face was grave, her hair severely tied back, and small lines were forming at the corners of her eyes and lips. Her voice was flat, like someone had let all the air out of it. She glanced towards the house.
“Is BJ in?”
We went indoors to find out, and there he was, just sitting at the kitchen table and staring out of the window. He scarcely looked up as we came in.
This conversation lasted even longer than the previous night’s phone call, but at least I could hear both ends. BJ had stayed well and truly on the couch both nights he had spent in my house, and we hadn’t shared so much as a handshake, but by the way he was speaking, I found myself wishing Peg would hurry up and leave so we could do all the things she must have left thinking we had done already. He told her he was leaving her for me, that she mustn’t judge us but nor should she tell anyone. He wanted a divorce, and so did she. The most memorable moment was when BJ offered her anything in the settlement – money, house, car – so long as she agreed to allow him access to you. Like a striking snake she slapped him, and it nearly spun him off his chair.
“You think I want those things? And you think I want my daughter growing up not knowing what happened to her father? You keep your rotten money, and in return you can explain to Erin why her father is now living with a man!”
BJ suggested we take you every summer, and I thought Peg was going to hit him again. Her daughter alone with deviants? Never. But she wasn’t coming out to Maine, and we weren’t shifting to California, so it was finally agreed that you both would come for a holiday in Crabapple Cove in summer, and Peg would see how it went.
I offered her the spare room for the night, but she refused and got a room at the motel at the edge of town. This left BJ and I alone, and that was the night my room became our room. The suitcases full of his stuff which Peg had bright with her were unpacked in the guest room, but BJ never slept in it. On occasions we rowed, and he slept on the couch despite a full-sized bed sitting unused in that room. He always claimed guest room beds were stuffed with wood chippings and the sheets made of cold, thin paper, and having slept in a number myself, I’d say he was about right.
But that night … I’ll never forget it. BJ was angry, lost, guilt-ridden, miserable, and maybe a little crazy … I felt all of those things diffuse out from him a little as we made love. None of them ever completely left, but maybe I wouldn’t have loved him so much if he wasn’t capable of those emotions.
Afterwards I worried he would change. Lose interest. Become someone else entirely. So I asked him if he loved me, and he dispelled my fears by refusing to answer, and I began to realise it was his way of making sure we always had something. I would always want to know the answer, and he would always withhold it. There would always be something left unsaid between us, so that if it ever became the last thing left, we could cling to it like a kite string in a gale.
“I’ll tell you in the morning, Hawkeye.”
Click here for prologue and chapter one: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2785005/1/
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Hawkeye's letter to Erin Hunnicut continues as he tries to get her to understand her father's actions after returning from Korea. Letter writing takes place in the 1980s, most of the events described are 1960.
Feedback: As much as possible, please!
I’ll give you some advice, Erin. I’m sure I’ve given you plenty of advice over the years, but there’s always space for more. This is it: never invite a priest into you home. They can’t step over the threshold unless you invite them, so if you value your stack of washing up by the sink, your unpleasant hairs in the bathroom, your clothes all over the place, do not ever invite a member of the clergy in.
If cleanliness really is next to godliness, Mulcahy was sitting on God’s right-hand side when I came stumbling down to breakfast. He had tidied everything in a kind of nervous hyperactivity common amongst young clergymen and businesswomen. The kitchen shone like it hadn’t since I bought the place, which was disturbing enough in itself, but that was nothing compared to the orderliness I discovered when I opened a cupboard at random.
“I’m sorry Hawkeye,” said Mulcahy quietly. “I know you like your … chaos. I was just a bit embarrassed about staying in your home without pulling my weight…”
So that’s priests. They tidy compulsively. Avoid.
BJ was sound asleep on the sofa, but not for long because I wanted my answer. The sofa and the answer to my question are as inextricably involved as Kurtz and Marlow, because it’s where your father spent his final days, nearly twenty years later. It was a large, squashy, brown suede affair, and BJ adopted it as his own, exiling me to the matching armchair. I know at least twice he started rows simply so he had an excuse to sleep on his blessed sofa rather than with me. But I digress.
He didn’t answer. Wouldn’t tell me. I pestered him the entire day, all the way to the station with the padre and all the way round the grocery store, and all the way home again.
“Beej, come on. Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Tell me you love me.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then tell me that!”
“Hmm … I’ll tell you later.”
It’s attention-seeking. He’s always done it. That’s a point; did he ever tell you what the ‘BJ’ stands for? Because he never, ever told me.
That first day together … I won’t say it was easy. Shell shock … battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder … whatever you call it, it catches up with you eventually. Every man has his breaking point, and in finding each other we’d both met ours. I’ve enclosed that old tape. When I walked in on BJ with Trapper, something in me snapped … Perhaps it was because Trapper always managed to get his hands on everything I wanted. Every nurse back in the early days, that discharge two years before me … BJ. I’d chased and yearned and pined for him for ten years, and all Trapper had to do was grin that soppy great grin of his, flex his muscles, and BJ fell for him. Which of course he didn’t. But you don’t hang around to glean all the details when something like that happens.
BJ was lost, and I think he had been for years. There’s nothing good about war. It just ruins and destroys and corrupts, and none of us can predict it or cope with it. BJ could see his future when he left his residency. He had you and Peg. He’d work and bring you up and love his wife. And then war into his life. He was wrenched away from you, shown a world in which nothing is as simple as he expected. He was forced to wade through pools of blood to salvage tiny shimmering facets of life from a raging sea of chaos and murder. And he met me. No one recovers from any of those things.
We didn’t talk much back then, except at night, under the covers. That was the only place it was safe. Together, in the dark, we could admit to the things that weren’t allowed to exist in broad daylight. We could talk about the black places of the soul, the horrors we had seen, the passions we felt for each other – which, in those days, were horrors to every decent god-fearing American. But that day we talked about you. Not us. BJ wouldn’t directly tell me he loved me, but he said it in other ways. We talked about moving to California together to be closer to you, and he told me it was almost your birthday so we discussed joint gifts.
When we got home, he broke a little bit more. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him genuinely cry. He was plagued by guilt, you must know that. He tried to put it into words, but for some things, words are no more substantial or meaningful than wisps of smoke. It hurt him to be away from you, but the years between Korea and Maine were, for him, like limbo. Purgatory. The ordinariness of his work, the thought that he would never again feel that thrill – and it is a thrill, Erin – of adrenaline as the first hum of chopper blades drifts into hearing range. Tonsillectomies just aren’t quite the life-or-death stuff we had grown used to.
And then … he simply didn’t love your mother any more. Couldn’t live his life with someone who had not seen the things he had, felt the way he had. It’s selfish. I know it is, because I felt exactly the same. I can’t say whether or not latent homosexuality had anything to do with it, or even if there was such a thing in BJ. I certainly never caught him looking at other men. I like to think I was some big exception to an unwritten rule. It keeps my ego happy.
If you could understand his pain, you might be able to forgive him for leaving. There was nothing else he could do.
Of course, he tried to keep in touch with you. You know he did. It was that second night he stayed with me that he picked up the phone and rang your mother. I don’t know how long he had spent away from you, but the call lasted a millennium. I sat on the floor outside my study, back resting against the door, listening to BJ’s side of the conversation.
“Peg … Honey it’s me. Don’t raise your voice … where’s Erin? Good. No, don’t fetch her. We need to talk…”
He told her everything. How he couldn’t bare to stay in California, how the memories plagued him, how he no longer loved her.
“I’m staying with Hawkeye … Yes, that Hawkeye. Yes, hon. It … I guess it is like that, yeah. I need to be round him … Peg, don’t ask me that. You know I can’t answer that…”
The short version is this: your mother came out to Maine the next day. Dropped you off at an aunt’s or something and just flew out. I was coming home from work when the car she had hired pulled into the driveway. We both froze. She sat there, I stood, and we stared at each other, and then, very slowly, she got out of the car.
“So you’re Hawkeye Pierce?” she asked.
I tried for a smile, but I probably failed. “And you must be Peg.”
“Margaret to you.”
I had heard her voice once before, on a recording, but she sounded nothing like I remembered. She didn’t look like any of your dad’s photos either. Her face was grave, her hair severely tied back, and small lines were forming at the corners of her eyes and lips. Her voice was flat, like someone had let all the air out of it. She glanced towards the house.
“Is BJ in?”
We went indoors to find out, and there he was, just sitting at the kitchen table and staring out of the window. He scarcely looked up as we came in.
This conversation lasted even longer than the previous night’s phone call, but at least I could hear both ends. BJ had stayed well and truly on the couch both nights he had spent in my house, and we hadn’t shared so much as a handshake, but by the way he was speaking, I found myself wishing Peg would hurry up and leave so we could do all the things she must have left thinking we had done already. He told her he was leaving her for me, that she mustn’t judge us but nor should she tell anyone. He wanted a divorce, and so did she. The most memorable moment was when BJ offered her anything in the settlement – money, house, car – so long as she agreed to allow him access to you. Like a striking snake she slapped him, and it nearly spun him off his chair.
“You think I want those things? And you think I want my daughter growing up not knowing what happened to her father? You keep your rotten money, and in return you can explain to Erin why her father is now living with a man!”
BJ suggested we take you every summer, and I thought Peg was going to hit him again. Her daughter alone with deviants? Never. But she wasn’t coming out to Maine, and we weren’t shifting to California, so it was finally agreed that you both would come for a holiday in Crabapple Cove in summer, and Peg would see how it went.
I offered her the spare room for the night, but she refused and got a room at the motel at the edge of town. This left BJ and I alone, and that was the night my room became our room. The suitcases full of his stuff which Peg had bright with her were unpacked in the guest room, but BJ never slept in it. On occasions we rowed, and he slept on the couch despite a full-sized bed sitting unused in that room. He always claimed guest room beds were stuffed with wood chippings and the sheets made of cold, thin paper, and having slept in a number myself, I’d say he was about right.
But that night … I’ll never forget it. BJ was angry, lost, guilt-ridden, miserable, and maybe a little crazy … I felt all of those things diffuse out from him a little as we made love. None of them ever completely left, but maybe I wouldn’t have loved him so much if he wasn’t capable of those emotions.
Afterwards I worried he would change. Lose interest. Become someone else entirely. So I asked him if he loved me, and he dispelled my fears by refusing to answer, and I began to realise it was his way of making sure we always had something. I would always want to know the answer, and he would always withhold it. There would always be something left unsaid between us, so that if it ever became the last thing left, we could cling to it like a kite string in a gale.
“I’ll tell you in the morning, Hawkeye.”
Click here for prologue and chapter one: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2785005/1/
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Date: 2006-02-08 03:46 am (UTC)You have made my night!
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Date: 2006-02-09 02:06 am (UTC)