After the Flag Has Been Folded by Karen Spears Zacharias

Mill. After supper the adults would sit at the dinette table, playing cards and smoking cigarettes until well after midnight.
    Frankie, Cousin Barb, and I would stay awake for as long as we could listening to the grown-ups talk. Sometimes in those late hours, our parents spoke of how Uncle Tub got up one morning, ate his bowl of oatmeal, walked out in the backyard, and dropped over dead. Just like that.
    Had to be poison, they concluded. How else could you explain the rigor mortis that had set in before the doctor could get to him? And why else did his wife, Ollie, have him cremated, unless she was trying to hide something? She probably deserved that spray of bullets that boy gave her years later. He obviously hadn’t wanted her to marry his daddy, or maybe he just didn’t like her cornbread.
    Uncle Charlie never whispered anything, so we kids were hardly eavesdropping when we heard him tell our folks about how Aunt Ollie and her new husband, Dan Swanson, were murdered in their trailer home in Madras, Oregon. “Ollie was sitting on the sofa,” Uncle Charlie said, “and Dan was sitting at the table working on a fly reel. His boy was outside when he just started shooting up the place. The windows, the walls, everything was riddled with bullets. Crazy boy.”
    Uncle Charlie had his own bouts of irrational behavior. He once told me he came to Oregon because he was running from the Tennessee law. Family legend has it that Uncle Charlie attempted to rob a drugstore in Rogersville. Rather than face a jail term, he ran off across the country. Years earlier, Uncle Tub had supposedly done the same thing when he got caught robbing a store at Christian Bend.
    â€œWhen I got to Oregon, I sent that sheriff a postcard,” Uncle Charlie bragged. “It said, ‘Here I am. Catch me if you can.’”
    I didn’t know what to think. Charlie was always full of tall tales. I had a hard time imagining Mama’s brothers doing anything to attract the attention of a lawman. And I had an even more difficult time understanding how come Mama’s brothers would be given over to trouble when their own daddy had been a policeman.
    Grandpa Harve served as Rogersville’s patrolman for years. Well liked, he was urged to run for sheriff, but he wouldn’t do it. Uncle Roysaid it was because he couldn’t drive. Grandpa Harve insisted it was because he didn’t want to run against his good buddy John Hale. Because it was true that he didn’t know how to drive, Grandpa did all his patrolling by foot, doing his part to keep the streets of Rogersville clear of illegally parked cars, suspicious-looking characters, and would-be vandals.
    Uncle Tub was the first of the Mayes boys to leave Tennessee and migrate west. Tub and his first wife, Bea, were having marital disputes. He was in the service, but he left his military post so he could come home and tend to the kids that Bea had gone off and left. That absent-without-leave status was Tub’s first run-in with the law. Things just escalated from there. Finally, tired of the marital upheaval and ensuing legal battles and financial woes, Tub reportedly broke into a store, where the store owner caught him rifling through the cash register. The owner put a gun to Tub’s head and told him to get the hell out. Tub took the fellow’s advice and moved away, far away.
    Eventually, Roy moved out to Oregon, too, leaving his seventeen-year-old wife, Katherine, and the couple’s children in Rogersville. As soon as he got a job, he promised to send her money to join him, and that’s how Uncle Charlie ended up in Oregon.
    â€œI couldn’t have made that trip without Charlie,” Katherine said. Charlie, who would never father children of his own, helped Katherine get her kids, Wanda, a toddler, and Eddy, an infant, to Oregon via the train. The trip took three nights. Charlie entertained Eddy the entire way.
    Charlie was always good with kids;