uncle jim

I learned later, much later, that Jim was my mother’s brother – my uncle. He’d gone off to the war and come home different, at least that’s how my mother explained it a few years after he disappeared – “different.” I never asked her why she never told us about him, before that summer. I wanted to, but everything happened so oddly that I never felt comfortable. I never asked my father, either. We didn’t ask him much. He was always wrapped up with something or the other, mostly to do with the church. I found out later, years later, that Jim, my uncle, had been a black sheep in the family, dating colored women and gambling and drinking and getting into fights, all the time. I told Nick, my best friend at school, about him, about him being in the war and all, and he said that Uncle Jim had probably killed a Jap or two and that that had changed him. Nick said his father’s cousin came home from the war different, too, because he had killed a man while looking him direct in the eyes. It must be a hard thing, killing someone, I guess, even if it’s war.