Death Coming Up the Hill Read Online Free Page A

1968
    Week Twenty: 549
    Â 
    Seventeen is my
    favorite prime number, and
    not because I’m a
    Â 
    number nerd. Dad wore
    seventeen in college, just
    like Dizzy Dean, his
    Â 
    old baseball hero.
    I wore it too, of course, but
    it wasn’t just sports
    Â 
    that made me like it.
    When I was young, Mom really
    loved a Beatles song
    Â 
    that had the line, “Well,
    she was just seventeen, you
    know what I mean . . . ,” and
    Â 
    I thought it was cool
    to hear a song based on my
    birthday, and then I
    Â 
    started noticing
    seventeens everywhere, and
    it made me feel like
    Â 
    I belonged to a
    secret club. The Celtics’ John
    Havlicek wears my
    Â 
    number, and it’s the
    number of syllables in
    a haiku poem,
    Â 
    and it’s the day in
    May when
Brown versus Board of
    Education
was
    Â 
    announced, and it’s the
    age you can give blood, join the
    military, and
    Â 
    get married, and it’s
    the name of a magazine
    for girls, and it’s the
    Â 
    number of years a
    weird kind of cicada lives
    underground before
    Â 
    coming out to mate,
    and it’s the day I was born,
    and for years I’d been
    Â 
    looking forward to
    turning seventeen on May
    seventeenth. I can’t
    Â 
    say for sure what I
    expected to happen the
    day when my birthday
    Â 
    stars all aligned, but
    I figured something special
    would take place, something
    Â 
    I’d never forget.
    In a way, I felt like that
    cicada, and I
    Â 
    was ready to dig
    out from underground and get
    on with adult life.
    â˜…  ★  ★
    But my birthday got
    off to a lousy start when
    I heard on the news
    Â 
    that the past two weeks
    were the bloodiest ever.
    More than one thousand
    Â 
    Americans died
    in Vietnam in those two
    weeks, and Angela’s
    Â 
    family still had
    no word from Kelly, and Mom
    was in bed acting
    Â 
    sick the whole time. How
    could I celebrate when so
    much was going wrong?

May 1968
    Week Twenty-One: 426
    Â 
    When you start to love
    someone like Angela, you
    learn how to talk and
    Â 
    how to listen, and
    you start talking about things
    you’ve never before
    Â 
    dared to say out loud—
    all kinds of things: dreams, goals, and
    fears. Angela planned
    Â 
    to change the world by
    joining the Peace Corps and then
    teaching grade school kids.
    Â 
    â€œIf we want to change
    things,” she said, “that’s where we’ve got
    to start.” I loved her
    Â 
    confidence, her faith
    in the future, and I wished
    that I had some of
    Â 
    her rock-solid self-
    assurance. I thought a girl
    like her feared nothing,
    Â 
    but I was wrong. She
    was worried about what might
    happen if Kelly
    Â 
    turned out to be a
    POW or, worse,
    missing in action.
    Â 
    â€œI don’t know if Mom
    could take it.” Her voice soft now,
    edged with dread. “I don’t
    Â 
    know if
I
could take
    it.” She sighed, and a heavy
    silence filled the air
    Â 
    between us before
    she spoke again. “And sometimes
    I’m afraid, just plain
    Â 
    afraid of all the
    craziness in the world right
    now. There’s so much I
    Â 
    want to do, Ashe, but
    what if something happens that
    blows up all my dreams?”
    Â 
    The ache in her voice
    surprised me, and I didn’t
    know what to say, but
    Â 
    I knew that if I
    had to, I’d gladly dive on
    a grenade for her.
    â˜…  ★  ★
    Angela knew that
    I was afraid of getting
    drafted and sent to
    Â 
    Vietnam. She knew
    it wasn’t politics that
    made me oppose the
    Â 
    war, it was plain old
    fear. I can’t explain it; I
    was as loyal as
    Â 
    the next guy, but the
    thought of battle turned my spine
    to ice. I didn’t
    Â 
    want to die, but I
    also worried that in a
    life-and-death battle,
    Â 
    my hesitation,
    my fear might cause someone else
    to die. With bullets
    Â 
    flying and mortar
    shells exploding all around,
    would I have the