By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker

to each other, and in fact had stiff drinks and a hearty dinner that very same day.
    As we were leaving the restaurant, Manuelito, singing drunkenly, and turning first toward me and then swinging his arms up as though to embrace the rising bright moon, was hit by a bus. The bus dragged him for half a block. By the time I got to him, he was gone.

To Be a Sister
    And that is why I am coming down the mountain, the place of refuge where I write left far behind me. The guardian spirit I am gradually beginning to feel, which hovers there, left on the oak tree swing. I am going to be a sister to Magdalena, June, Mad Dog, MacDoc, as she is submerged by another flood of pain.
    But I am not sad, Susannah, she said when I arrived on her doorstep. Frazzled from the flight, the midday traffic, and lack of sleep, I gazed at her through bloodshot eyes. Big as I remembered her, she seemed now twice her usual size. Her green hair was lank and her nose rings unpolished. But there was definitely something different about her. What was it?
    It was a miracle, our finding each other again, but it was not meant to last, she said. I felt, even as we made love, that Manuelito was on loan to me from someplace else. Not just from Maria, his wife, and their children. There was a pause. Actually, she continued, glancing at the bottom of her teacup, I think he was killed in Nam.
    Oh, darling, I said, you make it sound like
The Twilight Zone.
    There
is
a twilight zone, she said softly. Where do you think the one on television comes from?
    Come on, I said.
    Oh, I understand it isn’t rational. She put down her cup. But look at the world, she said. Should any of us give a shit that something’s not rational? Nothing out there looks rational to me.
    So you met him on a plane from Las Cruces. What was he doing? Where was he going?
    Oh, she said. Get this. The “job” the government found for him was to make speeches to high school students. Speeches about the Army. About Nam.
    Wow, I said.
    Right. She said. So there he traveled, a kind of Indian Flying Dutchman, only alighting at home to get drunk, bully his family, and change into a fresh uniform. A nightmare.
    Well, what could he possibly tell the youth? I asked sarcastically.
    Magdalena laughed. Exactly. There he was in his neat little Army suit. His body stitched together with metal thread … did I tell you the metal detectors in stores always went crazy when he passed by? He had a special travel document that he presented to the guards at airports.
    No kidding, I said. Still pondering the change in my sister’s character. She had eaten nothing since we came from the airport. She’s dieting, I thought; perhaps that explained a certain ethereal radiance that surrounded her.
    He wanted desperately to tell the youth the truth, of course. He wanted to tell them to run like hell, from him and from anybody else in uniform. But there he was, stuck to his Purple Heart and Congressional Medal of Horror, I mean Honor, like a fly stuck to a piece of cheese.
    So what did he do? I asked.
    He tried to tell them how to stay alive. That, he said, was his field of expertise. The only thing he felt he knew how to do. But they weren’t Indians. They were soft American farm boys and even softer and sillier urban ghetto youth. Besides, he and they knew the military was the only job they were ever likely to get. The farm youth were bored to death with peace and television; the urban youth risked death several times a day just walking to the corner. He would talk to them all morning, then go back to his hotel room and drink.
    He didn’t know how to stay alive, I said. Accepting the cup of coffee she handed me.
    She shrugged. He died singing, she said.
    Oh, I said.
    Yes. He died singing his initiation song. When we lived in the mountains he taught it to me, and I used to sing it all the time.
    Magdalena began to hum, then to sing softly under her breath:
    Anyone can see that the sky is