Country Mailman Episode

 
 

Tune in every week to read about the adventures of Buck Buchanan, fictional country mailman, delivering mail out of Starz, Texas. He takes his job seriously and knows that customers count on him to deliver every piece of mail entitled to them. He is all about customer service. With a willing ear and a helping hand, Buck Buchanan goes the extra mile.

*  *  *

Friday - always a good day for me since I don’t work on Saturday like some mail carriers. Way ahead of schedule, I head up the long drive to Zeke McCarty’s house and get out with his mail in one hand and a grocery sack in the other. He's on the porch in the rocking chair, his bent shoulders rounded and gnarled hands resting in his lap. The white-headed man never sits outside during the day in summertime, only in the evenings, so I wondered why on this particular hot day. He still lives by himself and drives to town when he needs groceries. Everyone knows Zeke's old, black Cadillac and avoids him, easily done since he rarely drives over thirty miles an hour. In the city limits, he creeps along with two wheels touching the curb because he doesn't see so well. Occasionally, he calls me to bring coffee when he runs out, but as yet, has never asked me to bring him his chewing tobacco. It wouldn’t matter to me – I’d bring whatever he needs, including the kitchen sink. Zeke McCarty is a hero.

Suddenly, I realized he was sitting out on the porch, specifically waiting for me. It is July 30 - his anniversary, or rather, the anniversary of his horror in the shark-infested waters of the Philippine Sea. Zeke McCarty is one of the 317 survivors of the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

I delivered Zeke’s mail ten years before I discovered his story. In a brief conversation with his daughter about a missing check, she revealed he had been on the Indianapolis, which sent off signals in my brain. That evening I went back to Zeke’s house and listened to the bone-chilling, heartbreaking account of survival. He didn’t mind telling it, in fact, said I was the only person in years who asked to know about the experience.

After listening to the account, I understood more fully the sad situation of the war tragedy. The episode was full-fledged horror, punctuated with a selfish thread of hope that the next man would be the target. Men tried vainly to save themselves as well as reach out to the buddy who didn’t have a lifejacket; all the while waiting to be drug down to the depths of the ocean to be devoured by a man-eating fish.

The U.S.S. Indianapolis delivered the world’s first atomic bomb to the island of Tinian on July 26, 1945. It left shortly afterwards to join another battleship and was hit by two Japanese torpedoes on July 30, just past midnight. The bombs hit the ship in such a way that it split and sunk in twelve minutes. There were 1,196 men on board and approximately 900 made it into the water. Some had time to grab lifejackets. Others merely jumped to escape the fire and explosions. There was no time for lifeboats.

The shark attacks began at sunrise and continued for the next four days. Men floated alone and in groups, sharing lifejackets for buoyancy. There was no drinking water. There was no food. There were only sharks.

Pilot Lt. Wilbur Gwinn was flying on a routine antisubmarine patrol and spotted men in the sea. A seaplane and ship heard the call and responded. When the pilot of the seaplane saw the circling sharks and realized the situation, he went against orders and landed on the ocean. He pulled as many men as would fit, into the plane before dragging others from the sea and tying them to the wings with parachute cord. He saved 56. Others were saved when the ship arrived and a total of 317 men lived.

Zeke talked about the captain of the ship being a survivor, as well, but then court-martialed for failure to issue orders to zigzag. The commanding officer was reinstated and retired a Rear Admiral but later took his life, for reasons anyone could surmise - another tragedy, added to all the others. Those were the facts that I remembered of Zeke’s story, but there was so much more. In the telling of it, he paused several times, sometimes to regain composure, sometimes to reflect, perhaps to even suppress the more horrifying memories. But he got through it and we became friends.

Now, Zeke sat in his rocking chair outside on a hot July afternoon­­. I pocketed the ten-dollar bill he always gave me for the coffee and leaned against the porch rail.

“It’s a good day to be alive,” he said.

I nodded. “It’s hot and dry.”

He smiled slightly, a hint of teeth showing. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” The smile disappeared and he got a strange look in his eye. “Do you think I’ve made a difference, Buck? I promised my buddies if I made it out of there alive, I’d make my life count for something. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done enough.”

I didn’t answer quickly because I knew his friends didn’t make it home. “You raised a daughter who became a doctor. That counts. You taught at the University for thirty years. That has to mean something. You’ve written three books about subjects I can’t even pronounce so that has to be important to somebody. And you send a check to St. Jude’s Hospital, your church and the March of Dimes every month – have for as long as I’ve been a mail carrier.” I nodded. “Yep, you’ve made a difference. Have you made enough difference?” I paused and shrugged my shoulders. “I’m just a mailman, Zeke, just a mailman.”

As I drive down the road to the next mailbox, the remark isn’t easy to forget. Have I done enough? The question is worth pondering but I can’t ponder long or I might put Lydia Smith’s mail in her mother-in-law’s box by mistake again. Not such a terrible error, except that Lydia’s mother-in-law had not looked at the name on the front of the envelope, opened it and discovered the DNA test results that caused a divorce in two families. That day I had done a bit too much.