Place of duty—8

Place of duty—8

        Billy D said, “Ol’ Jimmy didn’t care. I mean, if he’d been in your position and you’d been in his, you think he’d of passed it up?”

        Wizard laughed. “Billy D, for once I got to agree with you. There ain’t a one of us wouldn’t have done what Kincaid did.”

        Kincaid said, “That’s not the weirdest funeral I was at. I mean, yeah, I screwed up, and I’m paying for it.”

        “What,” Wizard said. “You had a funeral and two women threw themselves at you?”

        “It wasn’t like that at all,” Kincaid said. “Two weeks before, we’d done a funeral at some little town in Missouri. We attended the services at the church, and when we were at the cemetery, the deceased’s mother came up to Sergeant Miller. I was standing nearby, and I heard her say there was a problem. Sergeant Miller asked what the problem was, and this woman said ... she said, ‘One of those soldiers is colored. We can’t have a colored soldier at my boy’s funeral.’”

        “No shit?” Hunter said. There was a chorus of “Damn!” and a whispered “Shit,” and “What the fuck is wrong with those people?”

        Kincaid nodded. “That’s what she said. I wanted to walk over and ask her what she thought her son might have to say about a colored soldier at his funeral. I mean, the dead guy was a grunt, you know? But, that wouldn’t have been the proper thing to do.”

        Hunter asked, “What happened?”

        “Well,” Kincaid said, “Sergeant Miller talked to the soldier in question, Specialist Sam Parsons. Parsons was from somewhere in Georgia. I don’t know what Parsons really thought, but he told Sergeant Miller that if it would make the mother happy, he wouldn’t participate in the service.” Kincaid drank at his beer. “Like I said, things are different back home.”