The Telegram

Paul Hemphill

The cab driver did not want to knock on that door any more than Becky Sanchez wanted him to. She was asleep in the front room with David, the two-year-old, and it was a few minutes past six o'clock in the morning. It had been difficult enough for her to sleep lately, because the new baby is due any day and she has diabetes and David has chicken pox. They sleep on the same bed—a narrow little Army cot in the front room of the tarpapered frame house she and her two sons and her mother share with another family in the old part of Atlanta—and having her husband gone has not made it any easier.

It was still dark outside when the cab rolled down the bumpy street and stopped in front of 656 Grady Place SW. The driver looked at the telegram again, shivered against the cold, and walked up the steps and knocked on the door.

Becky Sanchez tried to clear her head. Who in the world? She slipped into a robe. She got out of the bed very quietly so she would not disturb David. She walked past the chest of drawers. On top of it were the tinted picture of her husband in uniform and the black Bible with the name "Frankie Sanchez" engraved in gold, the Bible the church had given him before he left. She found the doorknob. She twisted it and opened the door a crack.

"Are you Mrs. Rebecca Sanchez?"

"I'm she."

"I have a telegram for you."

"Who—?"

"Will you sign here, please?"

"It's so dark I can't see. Where?"

"Right here."

Becky Sanchez found the line on the form and initialed the telegram. Maybe it's Frank's mother. Maybe they're coming to visit. The cab driver said, "Do you have someone here with you?"

"Why, yes, my mother's here. And my boys. Why?" "We're supposed to ask."

Becky Sanchez still didn't know what was going on. Without thinking, she shut the door in the driver's face. She walked around the bed where David was sleeping. She sat down on the edge of the bed. She tore open the yellow envelope and opened the telegram. There were two pages to it, and they had been stapled together. At the top of the telegram it said in capital letters DO NOT PHONE AND DO NOT DELIVER BETWEEN 10 P.M. AND 6 A.M. Then Becky Sanchez read the rest.

THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND, SPECIALIST FRANKIE SANCHEZ, DIED IN VIETNAM ON 23 FEBRUARY 1966 AS A RESULT OF GUNSHOT WOUND TO THE HEAD WHILE ON A COMBAT OPERATION WHEN HIT BY HOSTILE SMALL ARMS FIRE ...  PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY ... 

Becky Sanchez blinked her eyes. I must be dreaming. She got up off the cot and walked across the cold board floor. The cab driver was still waiting on the porch. He did not want to look at Becky Sanchez.

"It's my husband," she told him.

"Yes 'm. I figured that."

"He's. Dead. They killed him in Vietnam."

"Yes 'm. Is there anything I can do?"

She said, "Can you take me to my preacher's house?"

"Yes 'm."

Becky Sanchez stumbled back to the bed. She quickly wrapped David in a blanket. Tommy was sleeping in the other room with her mother. He would be all right. Becky picked up David and walked to the cab with the driver. They stopped at a neighbor's house to leave David, and then they went to her preacher 's. Rev. Garland Odom, of Grace Baptist Church, wasn't at home. He was in south Georgia at a revival. When Mrs. Odom opened the door it was Becky Sanchez, wearing a robe and crying, and the two women embraced without having to speak. The cab driver was relieved to know he had done what they had told him to do. He fired up his cab and got the hell out of there.

Frankie Sanchez was born and reared in Dodge City, Kansas. His father worked on the railroad, and his grandparents had come into the wheat country from Mexico. When Frankie finished high school he worked for a while on a construction gang around home, and then, when he was nineteen, he decided to make a career out of the Army. He went to boot camp and then was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, and that is where he met Rebecca Charlotte Morgan one day when she was visiting Columbus.

They married. Becky learned what it is to be an Army wife. Frankie had to leave her once to do a tour in Europe. Two sons were born. They lived in a house trailer. They hit all the Army posts, but they always seemed to come back to Benning, and that is where they were stationed last August when Spec. 4 Frankie Sanchez of the First Air Cavalry Division got his orders to go to Vietnam. Becky was expecting a baby. They prayed it would be a girl. Because most of the Benning doctors had also gone to Vietnam, she decided to move to Atlanta so her mother could help her through the pregnancy.

Army wives know what war is all about. They live with it in boot camp and they live with it at the washeteria and they live with it at night when their men are gone and there is nothing to do at two o'clock in the morning except look at the ceiling and imagine headlines about Vietnam. But they are never prepared for the cold consequences. They are never prepared for a telegram that arrives at six o'clock in the morning to tell them that the father of their children is dead.

The afternoon of the day Becky Sanchez got her telegram she sat on the edge of the Army cot in the front room of her dismal house. She wore a light-blue denim maternity dress and brown loafers. Her dark-brown hair was sweaty and awry. David sat on her lap eating a Fudgesicle. Tommy was down the street somewhere playing with his pals. The tinted picture of her husband, and the engraved black Bible, were still on top of the chest of drawers. The telegram lay with them. In the middle of the room was the white cradle filled with white sheets and fluffy blankets still in their cellophane wrappers.

"He was going to reenlist this June," she was saying. "I think, from his letters, he might have had a few doubts about staying in the Army since he got over there. But he's an Army man. He would've stayed in. When he left I just knew he was corning back. I never thought any other way. We didn't ever really discuss the war. He felt it was his duty to go, and that was that."

"When's the baby due?" she was asked.

"The doctors have said March ninth all along—that's a week

from today—but I've got diabetes, and it made my blood pressure go up. I wanted them to induce labor, but the baby's not ready yet."

"The boys. How've they taken it?"

"They don't understand yet."

"Your last letter? From Frankie?"

"A week ago. The day he was killed. I'll get it."

Becky Sanchez returned in a minute and opened the letter. David had sneaked out the back door to play in the dirt. "I won't read it all, because some of it's personal. But he said he'd been out for twenty-three days and had about two more weeks to go before he'd get three days off. He said in all that time they hadn't made contact with the Vietcong but once." She read from the letter:"'Write and tell Mom I'll write her when I get more paper as this has gotten wet and it's all I've got ...  Send me some dried fruit and last, but not least, a little girl ...  '" He had bought a doll and some Vietnamese pajamas for it."'If it's a boy, it's gonna be the biggest sissy in the world. I won't be coming home until June or July so send me pictures of you and the kids. And if it's a girl I want you to name her Karen Dianne ...  '" Becky Sanchez began to break as she read the end of the letter."'Tell the boys I'll be home before they know it.'"

After she had wiped her eyes and put the letter and the telegram away, Becky Sanchez walked out onto the front porch. David was playing with rocks in the front yard. The sun was slipping away. "I don't want to question it," she said. "I have my faith. I know it's the will of the Lord, but it still hasn't hit home. It's robbing him, not getting to see the baby, but I know he was saved before he left. If he had been lost, it would have been worse. He's in heaven now. That's better than where we are." She snapped at her youngest son. "David, you come on in the house, now."

From Writing Day by Day, ed. by Robert Atwan & William Vesterman. Harper & Row, 1987.