Ollie Mayfield grew flowers all day long. He had a little nursery on the corner of Sevier Street and Charlemont Avenue. It used to be part of the old slaughterhouse. It loomed over the corner like a fat, brown giant. It was one of the oldest buildings in town, built around the time of the Civil War, when our little place in the world was a hub of commerce, with the trains coming through and everything. Pigs were slaughtered there by the thousands, gallons and gallons of pig blood and pig flesh cleaved away and falling onto the old oak floors, and then the meat shipped off to feed the mouths of hungry Confederate soldiers. Then later in the two world wars, and Korea. But the place closed down before the other war. Boarded up, the blood left to dry and seep into the dark wood, pollute it, change the very molecules of the place into death. I think it was around 1974 when Ollie bought the place. Turned the front office into a flower shop. And in there, Ollie grew flowers all day long.
 
I used to stop by Ollie’s place after school. I always kind of sneaked in. I didn’t want anyone to know I was in there. Boys don’t like for people to know things like that, especially other boys, but Ollie had the prettiest flowers I had ever seen and Ollie had a story or two to tell. I used to sit on the counter and watch him do his thing. Watch him dote over those flowers and care for them like they were children. His children, I guess, born not in the blood and travail of labor, but in the calm, serene womb of earth. I think he told me that, one time. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything while he worked. And sometimes he would talk, but I don’t know if he was talking to me or not, cause his eyes never left his flowers, and he sort of sounded like he would be talking whether I was there or not. But it was a good thing to see, him taking care of his flowers, and his voice was like music, soft, almost a whisper, rising and falling like the gentle cadence of a sweet, southern wind.
 
When he talked, he didn’t usually talk about a place called Vietnam, and a war that was fought there maybe a hundred years ago, or maybe yesterday, but sometimes he would speak of it. Never any gory details. The geography would come up when he would talk about the flowers he had seen there. The peach blossoms and the orchids and the mimosa and the hydrangea and the Da Lat Rose, the way they looked, the way they smelled.. And maybe there would be the name of some soldier mentioned here and there, like an afterthought, and then he would act like he wanted to say more, but he would start talking about something else, or just be quiet, or spray a flower with a mist of water. Sometimes I would want to know more, but I was not allowed to ask questions. I was just allowed to sit and watch and listen. But I knew stories from history books, and I had seen all the movies. I knew the gory details, and really, one doesn’t have to even hear them to know, anyway. Somebody just says the word “Vietnam” and they all get served up for you in your mind. The mention of the word and we see boys and blood, pictures of sweethearts caked with mud clutched in thin, bony fingers. We see napalm and pungi stcks and children with grenades hidden in their asses. We see severed limbs and scorched flesh. We hear the cries of a million orphaned babies and the wails of a million childless mothers. We hear last words uttered beneath explosions and bullets. We smell the stench of a million rotting corpses and the shit of a million empty bowels. But we do not smell flowers. Not when someone says the word “Vietnam.”
 
Once, Ollie talked about coming home. He talked about all of them coming home. He said a lot of guys tried to forget what happened over there. A lot of them drank. A lot of them became drug addicts. A lot of them hanged themselves from rafters, or shot themselves in the face. A lot of them lost their minds and welcomed the loss like the loss of some fatal disease. But him, all he needed was his flowers, he said. As long as he could keep looking at them, he wouldn’t have to see or think about anything else. He said you can’t help but think about a flower when you look at it. And he looked at flowers all day long.

But you can’t put a flower shop in an old slaughterhouse and expect people to stop calling it a slaughter house. And Ollie’s flowers were not born in the soft, silent earth. They were born in the blood and guts of scores of dead faces, in the carnage of ruined flesh and the orchestra of 58,000 young voices crying “mamma.” Some flowers can be grown in this soil. And Ollie grew flowers all day long.