HOME

The outline of the house stood bleakly against a stark, black stormy sky. Joe Sackett stood at the bottom of the driveway and gazed at the old Victorian house. Joe was a ruggedly handsome man despite an ugly scar that ran from his forehead to his left ear. He put a hand up to it and thought of the events that had happened since he had left this old house where he was born.

Joe Sackett had been a young man of nineteen when he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong. He had served his full tour of duty and had even been in the battle of Khe San. Just before he was scheduled to return home, he was wrongly implicated in a blackmarket raid in which two military policemen were killed. Joe was court-martialed and dishonourably discharged and stripped of his rank. His shame prevented him from returning home and he had caught a plane to America.

That was many years ago – nine to be precise. It was a long time to be away from home. Home. There was a word he hadn’t used much for a while. The sky was darkening, and there was a fresh smell of coming rain. It had been raining when Joe said his goodbyes to his family.

His parents, his younger brother, Jubal and he had been standing on the verandah while the rain poured down and the lightning lit up the sky in brilliant flashes. He had returned from basic training a week ago and now an army Land Rover was waiting to take him to the airfield where a transport plane was waiting to depart to Vietnam with him and the rest of his platoon on it. His dad was shaking his hand and asking him to take care of himself and his mother was crying softly and telling him to listen to his dad. His brother, Jubal, was staring at the Land Rover with the burly corporal in the driving seat and two M-16’s on the back seat. Jubal had been so excited at his brother’s leaving to fight “those b . . . . . . commies” and had been blowing up his toy soldiers with fire crackers. Now that Joe was about to leave, he was suddenly quiet and quite detached. They had sent the first bodies back the day before from Vietnam. They had shown the coffins being unloaded on TV and death was suddenly part of Joe’s leaving. Joe had run to the Land Rover and climbed in and had shouted goodbyes while the vehicle trundled down the driveway.

Joe walked up to the house and stood on the verandah. The old heavy wooden door, the stained glass windows and big round doorbell which had never worked, brought memories flooding back. It had been so long.

After he had arrived in America, he had traveled around the country doing odd jobs just for cash to eat and carry on. After a couple of years he had got a job driving a taxi in New York. That suited him fine for a while but after a few years he had got the itch to travel again and went west. In Nebraska, he got a job as a trucker and traveling was paid for. He had received an assignment to send a truckload of farm machinery up to New York to be sent to Brooklyn to be exported. It was about two in the morning when he was driving through Harlem that he was caught in a gang clash between blacks and Hispanics.

Joe smiled grimly at the memory. It was the first time he had seen the face of a man he killed. In Vietnam, killing had always been so ‘impersonal’, as a colleague of his out it.

The big eighteen-wheeler had the front tyres shot out and it crashed into a parked car. Joe had jumped out of the truck to be faced with a machete-wielding Hispanic who was obviously ‘high’. That’s when his face was cut open. The Hispanic died from a broken neck.

Lying in the hospital, Joe had decided to come home and there he was on the verandah. The house was in pitch darkness and Joe frowned, puzzled. Even if they were out, they would have left a light on.

A car suddenly pulled up behind him and he turned to face it. It was a police car. A young policeman stuck his head out of the window and asked Joe whom he was looking for. Joe replied ‘The Sacketts. Do you know where they are?’ The policeman said that the old couple had died a couple of years ago. Seemed like their youngest son had been killed in action two days before he was supposed to come back from Vietnam and the older one had been missing for quite a while. The policeman asked if they were friends of his, and Joe said, ‘no’. It’s just that he had come by this house when he was younger and he liked it. He thanked the policeman and walked off down the driveway. The policeman watched the lonely figure, carrying his duffel bag, walk down the road through the rain. ‘Strange,’ he said.



Gregory Lim
Year 11, 1988
St. Peters Lutheran College, Qld.

Pic : Greg on his bike outside his home in Melbourne