Vaughn helped people with their taxes. He seemed to enjoy the nuisances of tax laws, relish in his ability to help people, and savor the once a year opportunity to help Art. In the winter of 1985, on Fox Street, I was staying with Vaughn and working as the computer guy for an environmental company in Portland. Vaughn had a PC with tax software on it that he used for his clients. I discovered a floppy disk a technician had left at my office with numerous obscurely named files on it. It didn’t seem right to test out the programs at work so I waited until I got home. I inserted the disk into Vaughn’s computer and began to experiment with the files. They turned out to be a series of low level diagnostic tools. I eventually clicked on a file named simple wf.exe. Moments later, I turned white and my stomach dropped to my ankles as I realized I was formatting Vaughn’s hard drive, destroying all of Vaughn’s client records.
Later that evening Vaughn came home. You might think he’d be angry, he wasn’t. You might think he would call me stupid, he never would do that. Vaughn always encouraged me. He always tried bolstered my self-esteem. Instead, he said it was no big deal. He had a backup. I know it was still a big deal; he just kept it to himself.
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He played the guitar (when I was 4, with a speech impediment, I called the guitar a zumzum). He played Jimmy Crack Corn. Thinking now of the lyrics I wonder if Vaughn would choose to teach me something else?
In deference to Nancy, I will say Vaughn ‘played’ the piano, he wrote, maybe memorized is more accurate, a half dozen very catchy tunes. From time to time a melody of his will creep from my subconscious and I will hum the tune for a spell. He took a classical music appreciation class, which was something perhaps not really in his wheelhouse, but I know he enjoyed it. After this class, we would listen to some classical music and he was able to distinguish many distinct instruments. This was my introduction to classical music, a genre I still listen to today. Picture an idyllic Foster Pond, with its glass like reflection of pines at the far end of the lake. Picture Vaughn, without a tinge of grey in his newly forming beard and me paddling with my big brother in an aluminum canoe that unwelcomely clanked every time a careless paddle hit its side.
Oh! to be sure, Vaughn was not a Cagey Fisherman but: His scraggily beard and plaid shirt did dress him the fashion. And his knowing banter of experience, real or imagined, did pretend him to boast. As many casts we did make, time and time from the boat, to catch our quietly querulous foe. Until the one cast of mine, the rod did wrench, only to plummet into the perilous depth. Without malice, without thought, the young boy launched himself aloft. To dive, dive deeply to retrieve the rod. With rod in hand, pleased as could be, the young boy surfaced, To see, Vaughn with white knuckles gripping the gunwales of the canoe, And hear the fading echoes of Vaughn’s battle resounding from the nearby hill. Words of wisdom from a Cagey Fisherman, “We could have planned that better.” Fall is my favorite time of year. I enjoy walks in the woods when the mosquitos have drunk their fill and the crush of dry leaves under my feet brings the dried sent of the earth to my nose like an elixir to nourish the soul. On a day like this, I was on my first deer hunt with my big brother Vaughn. I was soaking up the sun and smells and time with my big bro when we walked into a ravine off the Burnham road south of Art and Elaine’s. There were a series of shots fired in the direction of Mr. Whitney’s fields. Vaughn said that we were, “In a good place to hold-up.” He said that whatever they were shooting would likely come through this ravine. I had the family’s double barrel 12 gauge shotgun. It was heavy for me; it had a large darkly stained oak stock and the longest barrel of any rifle in our family. But it also gave me the best chance of hitting whatever it was pointed at. Its double barrels were loaded with two shells of buck-shot. How could anyone miss?
I waited anxiously amid the oaks, maples, and birch, trying to stand quietly on the crispy leaves that just begged to be kicked and shuffled. Vaughn urged me to stand quietly and just wait. So I did. Even for an impatient 13 year old, the time passed quickly and a buck peacefully ambled through our ravine. I was slightly above it and Vaughn was somewhere higher up the hill, but I could no longer see him. I started to raise the shotgun and point it at — ‘Bambi”. I didn’t want to shoot Bambi, but somewhere, behind me, above me, watching me, was Vaughn. The double barreled shotgun now weighed a ton as I pointed it at the ambling Bambi. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. Well I actually pulled both triggers. With my feet placed side by side, and not front to back, the recoil of both barrels, fired simultaneously, sent me on my back looking through the patchwork of brightly colored leaves that still clung to the trees. Unhurt, I stood to watch Bambi prancing away. I pulled the trigger again, not realizing I had already fired both shells. Nothing happened, I heard Vaughn’s shout, “Shoot again!” I tried. I even opened the gun, like a claim shell, to make sure I had two shells in it. Clicking it back together, I aimed at the now dancing Bambi and tried to shoot again. “It won’t shoot!” I shouted into the air. I heard the single report of Vaughn’s rifle and Bambi, now dead, fell to the ground. After-all, my brother Vaughn was a marksman. Some weeks later, during a Sunday meal with the whole family, Vaugh took a bite from the steak and said, “Hey, I bit into a buck shot. You did hit the deer.” He never did show me that buckshot. With the VW bug loaded with provisions, we drove to Sebago Lake State Park, and located our campsite. Admittedly, it was not quite the setting I had pictured, large campers flanked us and a Winnebago took point in our platoon like formation of campsites. Vaughn pulled out this army issued piece of canvas cloth, someone in procurement called a tent. He stuck up two poles and a ‘ridge’ beam, each of which looked like it came out of dad’s barn. He pounded four stakes, like daggers into hard packed ground, but like the heart of a vampire the ground would not yield and one of the stakes barely penetrated the ground. Later that night, the rains came, the lighting flashed, the thunder roared, and the winds came to blow our tent down. Vaughn was up and wide awake as if conditioned by hundreds of military drills, he dashed out of the tent, telling me to stay. In the unrelenting down-pour, he hurried about the tent, suddenly, louder than the thunder itself, he shrieked, but continued like MacGyver on TV, to contrive some mechanism involving rope, fender, and tree in order to support the tent and keep me, at least, dry under its shelter. He shouted above the rain that he’d sleep the rest of the night in the car. I remember hearing the door to the VW slam, and then just the rain.
The morning came, cool puddles were everywhere, and everything was soaked but me. I peered into the bug Vaughn’s stubbly face looked strange as it was torqued at a weird angle to the right. He was partly on his side, kind of curled into a fetal position with his right knee wedge between the black knob shifter and dash, and his left hip jammed under the steering column. VW Bugs were not meant for sleeping. I rapped on the glass.His eyes opened quickly, but his movements were subdued, tentative, as he experimentally uncoiled himself and got out the bug. I noticed that he limped, he had his foot wrapped. During the storm, in his barefooted rush to secure the tent for me, he had stepped on that stake. He had wrapped his foot in an extra sock or two, but that didn’t seem to help much. He opened the trunk and reached for the styrofoam cooler lifting the cooler asking me what kind of eggs I wanted. The styrofoam handle broke, the cooler fell back into the trunk and he paused for a time. The morning’s gentle breeze stopped blowing, the chickadees on their branches stopped singing their happy song… Finally, he spoke, “I think we will have scrambled.” We left for home shortly after breakfast. Heroes are made by the circumstances they find themselves and Vaughn’s circumstances were these. A war ends and he is born. Another war rages as he grows but it is not until the start of yet another war when I come along to chronicle his heroism.
Two respected voices rang out for me during the long years of the Vietnam War. One was Walter Cronkite who informed the nation nightly about a grizzly ‘Death Toll.” The other came from the heavy black phone in the den when Vaughn would call home. He was my hero. Vaughn had no Red Badge of Courage, thank God. For a purple heart would be tainted against his ‘award’ and the Congressional Medal of Honor would barely glint on the brightest of days when held next to his. You see Vaughn had a brass shooting award. And it had rifles dangling from a bull-eyes target. Now how cool is that! Imagine being a ten year old kid and having your brother give you that--best thing ever! It was either a cloudy day, or night was soon to fall, but I rushed to the door to see Vaughn lifting his ginormous duffle bag out of the front trunk of his grey VW ‘super’ bug. It had been forever since I’d seen him. He’d grown a foot taller than Paul Bunyan and was so strong he hefted me high into the sky, and I soared and roared with happiness. But he was home now, at least for a time, a soldier, a brother, my hero. He said he was taking me camping, just imagine my glee, it would be just Paul Bunyan and me. It took Vaughn to illuminate Art’s dark side. As hard it is to believe, Art has one. On a gloriously brilliant winter’s day with the sun splashing off the icy snow, Vaughn sat with Art looking over Art’s 197? tax forms. Never before or since, have I heard Art lightly chided and restrained, by one of his little brother’s, but on that day, deliberating over tax exemptions, I heard Art be disallowed. Vaughn was never angry although Art seemed—‘frustrated’. As Vaughn would matter-of-factly but authoritatively state, over and over again, “No you can’t do that, or that won’t work either”.
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