Shrapnel

[The following is retrieved from the blog site The Unburied where it was originally posted in 2008 and posted here with slight edits.]

Through the late sixties we saved shrapnel tweezered free from Al’s thighs and arms. Size didn’t matter. Pepper-flake small bits or pellet-size line weights for fishing bits—they were evidence of enemy fire. By the seventies, unless they were pencil-eraser size or greater, not much was said, no tweezing announcements made, and if he kept slag dug from his skin in those quiet times, I never knew. Gratefulness was with us in the sixties. Grateful to be alive. Pure unadulterated awe at the amount of uncontainable laughter (not to mention good sex) still to be had—despite the fact half a leg had been left in The Gulf of Tonkin. He might have said, “Lynnsie, got another one. Bring the tweezers.”

We kept every dark bit of foreign substance that surfaced. It was fascinating, how they kept coming. The creamy white skin of his thigh, clear of any blemish on Monday, might be pebbled with peppery-colored floaters just under the skin by Friday. Or a month later, or six months after that. We just never knew. Unblemished one day, then suddenly there. Usually only one to three in number, shrapnel occasionally surfaced like a flock of small birds flown up from some deeper branch to try to break through the sky of his skin.

For twenty-one years we kept those bits in a prescription bottle for pills we had worn out. We kept the bottle in the nightstand drawer on his side of the bed. I remember its roll, banging the drawer front, then the back, when I opened the drawer too fast or slammed it shut too fiercely. It was Al’s nightstand, his drawer for things drawn from his Levi pockets before he brought the legs of his pants together and settled them over his prosthetic leg like a blanket over the back of a horse in preparation for the saddle. He was tidy that way, even fussy at times. And the nightstand drawer on his side of the bed wasn’t a place I ventured. Nothing of mine was there. No keepsakes. No earrings removed from lobes after my head hit the pillow. My ears weren’t pierced back then, back in 1988, in the Fall of that year, in November, when a blood clot ended Al’s life.

I suppose the rolling about of the prescription bottle inside the nightstand drawer, the slamming and jerking of the drawer pull, occurred after his death. After his death I may have tweezered Lincoln-head pennies from corners of that drawer, picked through Dear Abby clippings he had torn from the paper and saved, read the names and numbers on each and every business card, turned the cards over, looked for, perhaps, a soiled thumbprint Al might have left when his hands could still hold cards, could still hold me.

2020 now. Thirty-two years since Alphonse Leon Doiron graced this place we call Earth. I have no recollection of when that prescription bottle filled with tiny fragments of enemy fire disappeared. Nor any memory of what may have become of that nightstand. Maybe, if I patiently think long and hard, I might recall what happened to the nightstand—but why?