The Uniform My Father Tried To Destroy

The night before my wedding, I found my grandfather’s suit in ribbons on my closet floor, and the man who did it was standing in my bedroom doorway with his arms crossed, waiting for me to break.

I did not break. That surprised both of us.

My name is Bertrand Bellamy, and I have been a Marine for fourteen years. I made Gunnery Sergeant the hard way, the way everyone does, one hot summer and one cold winter and one bad deployment at a time. But before any of that, I was just Coyt and Clemmie Bellamy’s oldest boy, growing up in Bramble, in a house that smelled like motor oil and my mother’s coffee, above the hardware store my father ran and his father ran before him and his father before that.

Bellamy Hardware and Feed had been on the corner of Main and Church Street for sixty-one years when I told my father I was leaving for Parris Island. I remember the exact look on his face. Not anger. Something worse. Disappointment dressed up as calm.

“You’re going to throw away a business with your name already painted on the window,” he said, “to go get yelled at by strangers.”

I told him I needed to know what I was made of, and that the store would still be there if I ever wanted it. He said something quiet then, something I did not understand until years later: “Some of us didn’t get the choice you’re taking.” I did not know then that my father had tried to enlist himself, back in 1974, and been turned away for a heart murmur that never once slowed him down in sixty years of hauling feed sacks. I did not know that his whole life, he had swallowed that rejection and turned it into pride about the store, about staying, about being needed exactly where he was planted. I only found that out much later, and by then the damage between us had already set like concrete.