Luke

I was born and raised a farm boy. I've been a football player and a soldier. None of these things would lead you to believe I ever had much interest in my English classes. But there's one story my 9th grade Literature teacher made us read that's always stuck with me. Ray Bradbury I think it was. This guy goes back in time, to the age of the dinosaurs. He steps on a butterfly, and it changes everything. Everything.

I sometimes wonder if that's what happened that day Mrs. Taylor stepped on the Panthers field. She told me I had to go to East Dillon High, and I hated her in that moment. Maybe sometimes I still do. I've learned a lot about war these past few years, and I know something about battle pawns. She wasn't the commanding general, I know, but she had a country to defend, a country of two, her and Coach Taylor.

Oh, but, you'll say, how can you possibly regret that moment? Didn't Coach Taylor take the Lions and turn them into State Champions? Didn't he make them defeat the very team Mrs. Taylor yanked you from? Didn't he take you under his wing as a boy and turn you out as a man?

Well, I'd ask you this in return: in the end, where did all that get me? No one wanted me. Mrs. Taylor wanted her husband to rise from the ashes. The colleges wanted Vince. Becky wanted Tim. I've been a useful idiot, a proxy substitute, a tool in the hands of the most charming politicians, but, in the end, it's never been about me. Luke Cafferty, a convenient pawn on half a dozen fields, moved by the whims of others, by chance, by ruptured fences, and by the winds of war.

If Mrs. Taylor had never stepped onto that field, and I had never played under Coach Taylor, I might never have been fixing that fence at that moment. I might have played college ball, got a college education, found a better bed than this bunk where bombs whistle overhead. Or maybe I wouldn't have. Maybe I'd have been passed over just the same. But at least I never would have been set on fire. I never would have burned with so much ambition, so much hope, so much faith that I had the power to overcome the obstacles that litter this fallen world. Coach Taylor did that to me. He made me hope, made me believe, made me think my life could mean something in this world.

So when my brothers die as the bureaucrats in Washington go on slinging senseless slogans, the deaths strike deeper. When I go home on leave to the woman who killed my first child, but gave birth to my second and third, and I see the one she swears is my fourth, and I peer into eyes that look far more like a Riggins than a Cafferty, well…it hurts more than it ever could if Mrs. Taylor had never stepped onto that field.

Don't you see? You can't be disillusioned until you have ideals.

And that's what I would tell Coach Taylor, if I saw him today, but I don't want to see him, not today, as I lay on my bunk and listen to the sirens wail.

Or maybe I do. The war's nearly over now, or so the politicians say. And when this tour is done, maybe I won't volunteer for another. Maybe I'll go home for good, to Dillon, to Becky, and I'll finally turn that state ring into a wedding a ring. Maybe I'll call up Coach Taylor and tell him, "I've got a son I'm pretty sure isn't mine."

And he'll ask, "Do you love his mother?"

And I'll say, "God help me, but I do."

And he'll say, "Then love him just as if he was your own. You know, I've had a hundred sons who were never mine. So I made them mine."

And I'll put down the phone, my heart swelling with a wave of masculine determination beating against a shore of honor, and for a while I'll believe. I'll believe that doing right can make things right, that the underdog can win the battle, that the world, however fallen, will be bathed in lights, like a muddy, worn football field on Friday night, just waiting to be conquered.