The Radio Gunner
9781465667908
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Early in the twentieth century the annual Memorial Day parade was passing through a New England town. The sun shone hotly down till the tarvia of the road felt soft and sticky underfoot. At the head of the procession the usual brass band led the way with martial music. Every one in the town was out, the older citizens for the most part standing reverently with uncovered heads, while the children, in anything but a solemn mood, tagged along on the flanks of the band. Jim Evans, a boy of six years, stood by the sidewalk in front of the little white house in which he lived, his mother beside him, holding him by the hand. At the rhythmic crescendo of the approaching music, his pulse throbbed, and as the band swept by his eyes sparkled with delight. Then came the aged veterans of the Civil War in their faded blue uniforms, their grizzled white beards and wrinkled features giving them a quaintness in the child’s eyes that made him want to call his mother’s attention. He tugged at her hand and looked up at her. The look in her face struck wonder to his childish soul; there were tears in her eyes. He gazed at her in amazement. Tears had always been to him the expression of childish grievance—nothing more. He had never seen them shed by a grown-up. To his inquiring mind a mystery had now presented itself. More than that, deep down within him there was an awakening of something he had never felt before. His mother looked down and saw the expression of wonder in the child’s serious face. Her only answer was a tightening of her grip on his hand and a quiver of the lip. The sound of the beating drum died away down the street; the procession was gone. The mother and child returned to the little garden behind the house. Seating herself in a garden chair, she took him in her lap. “Jim,” she said in a low tender voice, “my father would have been marching with those old men if he had lived. I remember so well when he said ‘good-bye.’ I was a little girl about as big as you are, and he picked me up in his arms and kissed me. Then he went away and never came back. He died fighting bravely for all of us who stayed behind.” Thus with the vision of the parade fresh in his eyes and the sound of martial music still ringing in his ears, and with the wonder of this new meaning of his mother’s tears stirring his soul, the tradition of an heroic life and death, the most precious heritage of the mother, was handed on to Jim, the small boy. In after years he never saw a Memorial Day parade but the memory of that day rose vividly before him, and he never forgot what the day stood for.
