Read A Soldier's Poem

Joan King, Author

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

A troubled soldier’s homecoming—A daughter’s story

 

 

Toward the end of winter 1945, six and a half-year-old Gracie Timmons finds a photograph of the father who abandoned her. He’s in uniform, and she imagines him a hero with medals and that someday, he’ll come back for her.

Her father, Sergeant Aaron Timmons, survives the war. He endured the March to Bataan, the Hell Ships and the Japanese POW camps, but he’s not the father Gracie hoped for. First thing, he picks a fight with the sheriff, only to pee himself. To Gracie’s disappointment, he tells her he has no medals, but in his dresser, he keeps a stolen Bible and a row of small boxes he claims are coffins with dead soldiers.

They have nothing in common except nightmares of dead men and poetry—the good kind that rhymes.

As they stumble toward understanding, Aaron tangles with a variety of characters—Miss Redding, Gracie’s fiercely protective teacher, a Gypsy named Sam and Aaron’s bootlegging droopy-eyed brother Rag who warns Gracie she’ll get them all killed if she tells anyone about the moonshine stashed in the basement.

Before Gracie’s grandfather died, he taught her winters could be long and hard, but if she kept believing, spring would come and the orchard would bloom again.

The trouble is Gracie’s father says he no longer believes in spring. If it weren’t for a poem he wrote about a flower christened Grace, she could almost give up on him.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead is story of hope in the midst of spiritual winter.