Tomb of the Unknown

By: David MacWilliams

Susan and her fiancé, Larry, arrived early for the changing of the guard at Susan’s insistence. She stands at the front against the rail opposite the tomb and Larry is at her shoulder. “It’s freakin’ hot,” he says. “And it’s in the sixties back in Boston.” Susan doesn’t reply.

A jet ascends over the cemetery. Larry mops his brow with a handkerchief. The sentinel glides past in a slow march, one shoe alighting directly before the other. Larry snaps a photo of him with his phone and nudges Susan in the small of her back. “C’mon.” He tries to sound light hearted. “I got a picture for you. We can look at it later.”

Susan is rolling a tourist’s pamphlet into a tube with both hands. She doesn’t turn around. She studies the young sentinel, his every movement an expression of certainty. She counts off the steps the soldier takes along the mat. Twenty-one. The soldier stops, does an about-face, clicks his heels. He shifts the rifle to the shoulder closest to the crowd. Twenty-one seconds pass and he glides down the black mat, his shoulders squared, backbone as straight as the bayonet at the tip of his rifle. Seven steps. Eight. Nine.

“No one needs to know we didn’t stay.” He has that tone again. Impatience? Frustration Command? All three? A tone she never heard when they started dating six months ago, but one that has emerged more frequently as the wedding day draws near. She’s told herself that he’s anxious about the wedding plans and the fuss. She planned this weekend away from parents and friends to give him and herself a respite. A chance to gather their thoughts. “C’mon, babe,” Larry says at Susan’s neck. His voice has risen. “I’m gonna melt out here.” He hooks a finger through a belt loop in her shorts and wriggles it. “How ‘bout it?”

Behind them a young boy whines to his mother. “It’s so hot,” he says, and she shushes him. The mother reminds Susan of a moment when her mother hushed her. She was seven, eight, sitting in a pew at church. Her back ached. “Not now,” her mother hissed. “Be still. Just wait.” And in waiting, things only worsened. How her back hurt by the time the service ended.

Susan is startled from this memory when to their left a woman dressed in white slacks and a blue T-shirt ducks under the rail with a camera to her eye. The sentinel stops, lifts his rifle across his chest, bayonet high, and commands, “Stay behind the rail!” The woman with the camera freezes, her face flushes red. She retreats into the crowd and withdraws among the tourists. The sentinel stiffens for several seconds, faces forward, returns his rifle to his shoulder and resumes his slow march. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. In the near distance, a bell chimes.

Larry whispers too loudly. “Geez, I almost thought he was gonna shoot her.” He pulls at her elbow. “A sign we should get going, you know?” Susan’s spine stiffens, her shoulders and stomach tighten. Does she really know this man? Without turning to him, she pulls her elbow from his grasp. He touches it again. She tugs her arm away.

“Susan?”

She imagines the scowl on his face, the tightened lips, the set of his jaw and the narrowed eyes. An expression he’s worn much of the afternoon on the mall and at the Smithsonian. Another side of the man emerging, but from where? Nerves? The true character of the man? He’s worsened this past month. Argued too strongly that the trip to D.C. was a waste of time with so much planning to do for the wedding and honeymoon. She has waited for him to soften back into the man he was three and four months ago, yet this trip seems to have doubled his demanding behavior. She inches further from him, closer to the rail.

If she could create a space between herself and him, a space just wide enough for her to breathe her own air, she might see things more clearly. She might understand the man who is emerging, the man she thought she knew. That’s all she needs. A small space for a moment. High above a second jet roars as it ascends.

To their right, a sergeant marches into view; the ceremony is about to begin. On either side, tourists raise their phones and cameras. She inhales and presses the flat of her stomach against the rail. She raises her chin and holds the pamphlet to her chest with both hands.

Larry leans in and speaks loudly, violating the code of silence that the ceremony demands. “Where do we go from here, Susan?” Strangers glance and look away.

She twists the pamphlet into a spindle and stares at the sentinel. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. The soldier stops, turns and pauses twenty-one seconds. The sergeant salutes the sarcophagus.

The sentinel marches up the black mat, each foot directly in front of the other towards the sergeant.

Susan turns halfway round. Our separate ways, she wants to shout. She takes shallow breaths. She raises one finger, a gesture to wait. Maybe after the trip, maybe after the wedding, he’ll return to who he was. She will wait till they return to Boston to have the conversation. Maybe he needs time. Maybe she does. She bows her head and grasps the rail with both hands, crushing the pamphlet. The sentinel reaches the sergeant and the ceremony begins. She lifts her eyes and faces the tomb again.

David MacWilliams lives in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. His personal essays have appeared in Pilgrimage, Mason’s Road, Apple Valley Review (nominated for “Best of the Net”), Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Wordrunner echapbooks, the tiny journal, Too Well Away, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and recently in Third Street Review and The Sunlight Press. He is an administrator at New Mexico State University, Alamogordo.