Billy Covington is killed in Vietnam after a bombing raid near Haiphong, and his death becomes more than a wartime loss in Dominick Birdsey’s retrospective account. Billy had been a boyhood companion to Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, then their paperboy and an older youth whose path seemed to preview their own. Ma’s grief makes his death a warning about what might happen to her sons; the memory also reveals how differently a child and his mother can understand the same loss.

Billy Before the War

Billy was four years older than the twins. As a child, he came to their house after school because his father had left the family and his mother worked downtown. He joined Dominick and Thomas in tag and baseball, and especially in their Superman game. Billy arrived with Superman pajamas in his school bag, changed into them, and completed the costume with a bath towel that Ma pinned around his neck. In the children’s play, he performed the hero’s opening boast; afterward, Ma would remark on the absence of a father in his life. The remembered episodes place Billy within the family’s ordinary routines before his later absence gave those scenes a different weight.

Years later, Billy was the twins’ paperboy, a lanky fourteen- or fifteen-year-old whose voice was changing. He could throw a folded copy of the Daily Record from the street to the base of the family’s cement flowerpot with striking accuracy. By the time Dominick and Thomas entered high school, Billy had graduated, enlisted in the Air Force, and receded from their daily attention. That change in perspective matters: the boy who had once seemed a vivid fixture of their childhood had become, to the teenagers, almost irrelevant. His death would abruptly restore his importance, though Dominick did not yet understand why.

Death and the Funeral

Billy was shot down during a bombing raid near Haiphong. Dominick recalls attending the military funeral at sixteen, but his attention did not settle on the meaning of Billy’s life, the cost of the Vietnam War, or the danger to himself and his brother. Instead, he noticed Billy’s grieving fiancée and considered whether Billy’s mother might sell his black GTO cheaply. The detail exposes the distance between the funeral’s public gravity and the adolescent concerns occupying Dominick. He could register the casket and the car while remaining emotionally removed from what Billy’s death might mean for the family.

Ma’s response was immediate and unmistakable. On the drive home from the memorial service, she cursed the war, shocking Dominick and Thomas because they had never heard her use God’s name in vain. Her words also startled them because Ray Birdsey, their stepfather, had fought in World War II and Korea and believed antiwar protesters should be shot. Ma’s condemnation therefore sounded especially forceful in his presence. Her reaction was not a passing remark: she remained subdued for days after the funeral.

Ma’s Grief and the Family’s Memorial

Ma found an old snapshot of Billy, bought a frame, and placed it on her chest of drawers beside portraits of Dominick and Thomas and framed photographs of her father and Ray. She prayed novenas for Billy’s departed soul, and seeing Mrs. Covington pass the house in grief brought tears to her eyes. These acts made the loss part of the family’s home life. Billy was no longer only a boy who had played with the twins or delivered their newspaper; his photograph joined the household’s family images, and his mother’s visible sorrow kept his absence present.

Dominick, at the time, considered Ma’s mourning an overreaction. His later account revises that judgment rather than pretending he understood her at the funeral. Billy had once been a child in need of the kind of protection and fatherly care Ma wished for her own sons. Now that same older boy, only four years ahead of them, had been killed in a war. The difference between Ma’s understanding and Dominick’s is central to the event’s significance: she saw a threat to her children where he saw a funeral and, briefly, a possible bargain on a car.

Safety, College, and Retrospective Meaning

The loss illuminates Ma’s insistence on her sons’ success. She had accumulated nearly 150 books of green stamps toward a German grandfather clock, which she loved visiting at the redemption store, but changed her plan and obtained a typewriter for the twins instead. She told them their success mattered more than the clock. Looking back, Dominick understood that success meant safety to her. Billy’s death had made that equation painfully concrete: if a boy who had seemed invulnerable in their Superman games could be killed, her younger sons could be vulnerable too. In her view, college might keep them safe from Vietnam.

That hope stood against Ray’s opposition to paying for both twins’ college education. He said the family could not afford two tuitions and distrusted colleges, which he associated with communism and drugs. His position sharpened the stakes of Ma’s investment in education: the typewriter and her appeal to the boys’ future belonged to a conflict within the household as well as to a national conflict over war. The book does not suggest that college could guarantee safety; rather, it shows how Ma grasped at it as a way to protect her sons after Billy’s death had made danger impossible to dismiss.

The event’s force thus unfolds after the death itself. Dominick’s first response is self-absorbed, while Ma’s grief takes the form of profanity, prayer, a framed photograph, and concern for the boys’ future. Years later, he recognizes Billy as a preview of what could happen to Thomas and him. The memory joins childhood play to military death without making the two equivalent: the towel cape and the fallen airman belong to different moments, but together they reveal how the imagined invulnerability of a boyhood hero gave way to a mother’s fear that war could take her sons as well.