The first time Mary Pat overheard Freebird mention how he lost his leg, he sat on the far side of the front porch with Miss Mildred who’d been widowed early in her marriage to a WWII marine. They watched squirrels gather twigs to build their nests in the poplar tree across from Silver Oaks Retirement Community’s parking lot.
“It was an ordinary day during extraordinary times. I was 18 years old, drafted six months before and slogging through the thick vegetation in Vietnam jungles overgrown with elephant grass its leaves so sharp they sliced the skin right through our thick jackets. We were foot patrols weighed down by heavy packs and rifles, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all of which slowed our patrolling. ‘Humping the boonies,’ they called it. Then, late one evening, yards from where we’d camp, the thud of a tossed grenade stopped us cold. The last thing I recall was a flash bright enough to see part of my leg fly off to the right, then losing my balance and the rest of me spun to the left.”
Three days later, she listened outside the sunroom where his splayed fingers held Miss Rose’s yarn while she gathered the strands and wound them into a ball. Her husband hauled cargo for 30 years before a slick icy road flipped his tractor-trailer and crushed him.
“I’d been racing in Europe’s motorcycle circuits, frustrated with only winning a single race, and so determined to win, I went faster than a wiser man would. A huge cash prize was at stake. As a boy of 23, I appreciated how my life could change with those winnings. My cycle overshot the curve, spun out of control into the ravine by the track and well, the way I landed cracked the lower half of my leg beyond repair.”
She’d overhear him tell his story three more times, each version different—a shark attack swimming naked celebrating his 29th birthday, a felled tree smashed his limb while working as a lumberjack, and he told Hank, a retired cop, how a drive-by shooting riddled his leg with stinging metal.
This morning, finding him alone awaiting the arrival of his daughter, she decided to ask him herself.
“How’d you lose your leg, Mr. Stone, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She mentioned the fluid nature of his storytelling, promising she’d make no judgment, all she asked for was the truth. He looked wistful as if gathering details of a bigger-than-life story.
“No judgment?”
Mary Pat flattened the right-and-wrong expression written on her face. “None,” she said.
His eyebrow arched by a hair before launching his tale.
“I was lying beside the most beautiful woman right after we’d… well, you know… when a noise downstairs made us both sit straight up. We heard her husband call out her name. I scrambled into my jeans, grabbed my work boots and t-shirt, and pulled up the window overlooking the backyard. The two stories down looked higher than I would’ve liked but I could hear his footsteps coming down the hall. I threw down my boots and shirt first, then jumped hoping the recently spread mound of mulch I’d put there that morning would soften my landing. It did not. The pain from my shattered leg felt like baby kisses compared to the beating I took from the husband before the ambulance arrived.”
Mary Pat studied him like a woman who’d accused her lover of cheating.
“Can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Miss Mary Pat?”
“Born storyteller. Kind of like that about you. Give your daughter my best, Mr. Stone,” she said before walking away humming something mellow and smooth.
