Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman

Unusual book

1

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

--CHARLES A. BEARD

A chilly breeze rustles the leaves of an old elm, whose branches hang over me like a canopy. The sound of crackling and sizzling oak logs is all I hear as I sit wrapped in a quilt staring into the fire pit in my front yard. One log splinters and falls onto another. There is a snap and a swish as tiny yellow and red sparks scatter into the darkness, as if to join the flickering stars in the distance. I light my cigarette wondering what I would do if I couldn't smoke, if I couldn't blow out my anger, frustration, and sense of crippling loss into the night.

In forty-eight years I have never been a smoker, but now I am smoking to stay sane. Pulling the quilt around my shoulders, I wonder how it can be so cold tonight, when just weeks earlier I sat sweltering in a pink linen dress at my son's memorial service. It was important to me that I not wear black on that day. I wanted to wear something cheerful in celebration of his life and his spirit. However, as I sat in the intense heat listening to the whine of bagpipes, perspiration seeping through the light fabric, I felt vulnerable, exposed, as though people could see the pain of my loss through my sweat-soaked dress.

Ashes from my cigarette fall onto the quilt. I toss the butt into the fire and look around at what I can see of my yard from the light of the flames. In the two weeks following my son's death, this yard had been almost constantly full of people. I remember the movement of bodies and drone of voices, but I only recall a few specific faces, and I remember almost nothing of what was said. Now the yard is empty. My family members have returned to their homes to face their own void, and our friends have gone back to lives they neglected in order to support us and to deal with the shock over the death of their friend. I feel alone and frightened, wondering how I am going to live my life without my oldest son.

The fog is rolling in, obscuring the stars in the distance. I get up to place another log on the fire and stare into the blaze. My thoughts drift to another time, and I turn to look up at the elm tree behind me. My eye catches a six-inch stub, a remnant from a branch removed long ago, protruding twelve feet from the base of the sturdy trunk. A painful lump forms in my throat, and my sinuses sting as I try to hold back tears. But as my brain conjures the memory that my emotions fear to confront, a smile forms on my face, gently releasing the welling tears down my cheeks.

I see my son at nineteen, standing muscled and tan on the front stoop of our house, smiling devilishly, first at me, and then in the direction of the elm twenty feet away. I watch his smile slowly fade as his eyes stare intently at something I cannot see. Suddenly, he pushes off from the stoop and takes a running leap at the tree, planting his right foot about five feet up the trunk. His momentum propels him to grab the stub jutting at least five feet above his head and to swing himself with one solid tug onto an adjacent branch. He stands up with his arms raised and smiles down on me as if to say, "Life is great!" And then we both laugh.

It was under the umbrella of this big elm that my son played as a child. The house that stands before me, that holds so many memories, is where we lived when he was born. Patrick Daniel Tillman was full of life from the moment he came into the world at 9:39 on the morning of November 6, 1976, occipito-posterior, facing up--a stargazer.

He was brought home to this house, which is nestled in the rocky and wooded canyon of New Almaden, a California settlement developed in 1845 after a rich supply of quicksilver (mercury) was discovered there. Quicksilver was once a necessary component in processing gold and silver as well as in manufacturing munitions, which led President Lincoln to seize the mines in 1863, for the duration of the Civil War.

From the time I was ten years old, the Civil War has fascinated me; learning that New Almaden had in fact played a crucial role in that war made me feel we had moved to the perfect place. The mines operated under private ownership until the year Pat was born, when Santa Clara County purchased the surrounding property for a county park. These four thousand acres, with their twenty miles of beautiful and rugged trails, is where I would take Pat for walks as a baby.

He was not a cuddly infant. Actually, he was a little malcontent. He didn't like being swaddled and held like most babies; he preferred to be upright. I remember I would sit in a chair and hold him up so he could bounce on my knees until my arms got so tired I could no longer hold him. As an infant Pat was quite sinewy, displaying his father's quick-twitch muscles and the incredible coordination of his uncle Rich. When he was three months old, his father and I got a back carrier for him. He was really too little to sit in it properly, so I'd stuff diapers all around him so he would fit snugly. It was from the back carrier that Pat got his first exposure to Quicksilver County Park.

We would hike for hours while I described the sights. Along with the birds and squirrels, it was not unusual to see wild turkeys, families of quail, wild boar, or an occasional rattlesnake. On weekends, Pat's father and I also liked to take him on walks past the reservoir two miles up the road. We loved living in this quaint secluded place, but my husband's hour-long commute to Cupertino, where he worked, was grueling. So when Pat was seven months old, we moved to Campbell, California, where our second son, Kevin, was born.

About six months before Kevin's arrival, Pat went through a phase of regularly hurling himself out of his crib and onto the floor in protest of bedtime. He would crawl over to the bedroom door, put his hand through the crack underneath it, and howl, "O-o-o-u-t! O-o-o-u-t!" You could see the little pink balls of his fingers desperately seeking someone's attention. I would sit on the couch with a lump in my throat and tears rolling down my face. My pediatrician had told me I needed to let him cry, and eventually he would stop, and as a young mom, I still thought my doctor knew best. When Pat's crying stopped, his father and I would gently open the door to find him asleep, knees curled under him, diapered bottom in the air, and his hand still reaching through the space under the door. We would carefully lift him and place him back in the crib. After a week of this gut- wrenching ritual, we decided to get Pat a big-boy bed with a railing on it.

Pat never really crawled in the way babies do. To get around, he would hold a plastic doughnut in each hand and push them around the floor with his legs straight, butt in the air, and knees never touching the floor. He learned to walk when he was eight and a half months old.

By the time Kevin was born on January 24, 1978, fourteen-month-old Pat seemed very much a little man. Now the crib that had been so repellent to him just months before became a curiosity; it held his baby brother. Pat began climbing into the crib and carefully curling up next to Kevin, as if he had an innate sense that he could hurt the baby if he rolled over. Pat was quite pleased to have Kevin in his world and liked to help me bathe, feed, and change him. Pat did not like to nap; he hated the idea that he might miss something, but some days I needed him to take a nap, so I would sit on the floor, with Kevin in the infant seat next to me, and read aloud as Pat played. Eventually, Pat would sidle up and sit between his brother and me. Often he fell asleep holding Kevin's hand.

Pat was talking all the time by twenty-two months. If you asked him his name, he would say, "Packet Daniel Tillman." He pronounced Kevin "Nubbin." As months passed, Pat learned to pronounce his own name properly, but he continued to call Kevin Nubbin or Nub. To this day, everyone close to Kevin calls him Nub.

We had a nice little front yard at the triplex. My husband and I had put in a new lawn six months before Kevin was born, so the grass was thick and green. But I was nervous about the boys playing in the front yard close to the street, so I usually had them play in the back, where there was a tiny patch of grass alongside the cement parking area.

My mother, Victoria Spalding, who lived twenty miles away in Fremont, often came to visit us when she wasn't working. One morning she and I took the boys to the PruneYard, an outdoor shopping mall ten minutes from our house. My youngest brother, Mike, who was around eighteen at the time, was going to come to visit in the afternoon. Time got away from us, and I was worried we wouldn't get home in time for my brother's arrival. I told the boys, "We have to hurry. Uncle Mike is coming. We don't want him to have to wait for us." I strapped Pat and Kevin into their car seats and we headed home. Pat, not wanting to keep his uncle waiting, kept saying, "Hurwe, Mom! Hurwe!" As we turned the corner onto our street, Pat unbuckled his seat belt, scrambled out of his car seat, and planted himself behind the front seats, poking his head between my mom and me. When he saw his uncle's Volkswagen parked in our driveway, his face looked grave. Concerned that his uncle had been waiting, he yelled at the top of his lungs, "Here we come, Unka Mike!"

Pat was always unbuckling his car seat. In the late seventies, the car seats were easy to buckle and unbuckle. It was constant worry and aggravation. I would be driving down the freeway, glimpse in the rearview mirror, and see Pat out of his seat. I'd turn around to find him unhooking Kevin and helping him out. Both of them would start to giggle and squat behind the seats, covering their heads with their blankets. I'd have to pull over, put them back in their seats, and scold them. We would then head off down the road. Within ten minutes, Pat would be out of his seat and letting his brother loose again. It didn't matter how annoyed I got; they both seemed to think the routine was a hoot. I can't recall when this little antic stopped, but I was grateful when it did.

Just before Kevin turned a year old, we moved to another location in Campbell, where we rented a white elephant of a two-story house. The beauty of it was that it had a fairly good-sized backyard. My husband hung two ropes from some beams that at one time had supported a patio roof. The boys would wear Spider-Man Underoos with Superman capes and swing from one side of the patio to the other, clearing their world of bad guys. By the time Pat was two and a half, he could hold on to both ropes and swing into a back flip. Kevin, at fourteen months, would hold on to both ropes, lift his feet in the air, and wait for his own flip to happen. He wouldn't put his feet down until his brother clapped in approval.

At this stage, the boys looked very much alike. Strangers would often mistake them for twins. They both had blond hair with the same bowl cut. Firm, chubby cheeks padded faces of similar structure. Their skin was naturally a creamy pink, but a day or two in the sun turned them brown like berries and streaked their brown eyebrows with golden strands. The difference in their faces was in the eyes. When serious, Pat's deep, dark, almond-shaped eyes had an intensity and earnestness that could be startling as well as unsettling. When he laughed, they turned into horizontal black crescents that twinkled and teased playfully. Kevin had enormous blue eyes surrounded by feathery black lashes that made him look curious and surprised at the same time. For several years, I called Kevin my Tweety Bird. Within six months or so, Pat's jaw became much more angular, and once again, it was clear he was the older brother.

Several months before Pat turned three, on a very windy day, he and Kevin were upstairs playing while my mom and I baked cookies in the kitchen below. At about the same moment, we looked at each other, thinking the same thing: "The boys are too quiet!" As I rounded a corner to head up the stairs, there was a knock on our front door. It was my neighbor from across the street. She told me Pat had climbed out the second-story window onto the roof of the porch.

I bolted upstairs, questions racing through my mind: How had Pat unlocked a window I could barely open myself? Had I forgotten to lock it? I ran into the room and found Kevin on his tiptoes, peering outside, watching his brother. I gathered myself, my heart racing, walked to Kevin, picked him up, and handed him to my mom, who was now behind me. Kneeling down, I stuck my head outside to discover Pat had leaped from the roof to a tall, thin tree that grew about three feet from the house. He had his arms wrapped around the trunk and yelled with joy, "Here it comes!" as the wind blew the tree back and forth.