Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  “Invitations to the party. Give them out,” he instructed, his voice gone hard.

  When Haynes and his partners walked back down the hallway, they saw through the studio windows that Wendy-Rose Bixby had disappeared and been replaced by a husband-and-wife accordion team. It was their turn to stand in front of the white home-movie screen with the big camera lens in their faces. A foot-tapping polka came live over the loudspeakers, while back in the control room, the needles on the signal monitors were jumping around like beetles in tall grass.

  MERCY MEDICAL CENTER

  DECEMBER 26, 1985

  4:00 P.M.

  A sheriff’s deputy stood by the nurses’ station. Another patrolled the stairwells. They’d cleared the fourth floor except for staff and relatives of patients in the critical care unit. In the public area, an extended family was eating Mexican food from Styrofoam boxes. Jo must have passed them a dozen times as she paced the floor, waiting for Robbie Fletcher to return with information on Honeybee Jones. Each time she heard the elevator stop she’d hurry back, and turn away disappointed, until the doors opened and there was an embarrassed Randy Sturgis holding a ridiculous number of balloons.

  The sheriff’s deputy immediately blocked his way. “Do you have a family member on this floor, sir?”

  It was a joke, since they knew each other from the force.

  “Hello, Mark,” said Randy Sturgis. “Everything okay up here?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the deputy, smothering a smile.

  There were so many balloons of all shapes and sizes taking up the elevator that Randy looked like his own birthday party.

  “Can I help you with those?”

  “I brought reinforcements,” Randy said.

  Jo was coming down the hallway. It was late afternoon. Her hair was twisted up in a stringy bun. Her skin was oily and her face was drawn. Balloons weren’t going to make her happy.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Look who’s here,” said Randy.

  A tall, imposing woman with teased white hair stood beside him. She wore a black midi coat and nice boots. She was carrying a shopping bag filled with Christmas toys.

  “I’m Verna Bismark,” she said. “I’m an old friend of your parents’.”

  Jo said, “I’m sorry, Verna. I don’t remember.”

  “That’s all right. I think the last time we saw each other was at the trial. Gosh, more than twenty years ago.”

  “Verna was a bigwig in the Democrats,” Randy said.

  “Was and still am,” Verna said.

  She handed the shopping bag to Jo. Inside were teddy bears and a model airplane.

  “These are for Willie.”

  “Thanks, but he’s kind of out of it right now.”

  “Of course, for when he recovers,” Verna said briskly, emphasizing the inevitability of when. “They have very good doctors here. I’m so sorry about Wendy,” she continued, unbuttoning her coat. “What an awful, awful thing.”

  Jo was at a loss. She felt overwhelmed by this overbearing person who had nothing to do with her life, yet responsible for whatever Verna Bismark had meant to her parents. How to tell her to leave?

  Randy was still holding the balloons.

  “What should we do with these?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know. Give them to those people.”

  Randy presented the balloons to the kids in the family that was waiting. They were delighted.

  Jo took a deep breath. “You guys didn’t have to do all this—” she began.

  “Us? We didn’t do a thing,” Verna said. “We’re the messengers.”

  Randy had rejoined them. “Haven’t you seen the crowd?” he asked.

  Jo shook her head. Verna beckoned and she followed them to the window. A group of people swathed in winter jackets had gathered at the hospital entrance below. Many held candles in the gathering dusk. There was a new pile of toys and flowers.

  “It’s a vigil. For Willie and Lance,” Verna said gently. “They heard it on the news and just showed up.”

  “Cold out there,” Randy said, rubbing his hands.

  The darker it became, the brighter the candlelit faces.

  24

  It was billed as a town meeting so that the public could weigh in on the Minuteman program, but it quickly turned into a lynch mob. Dutch Roy made good on his side of the bargain and Thaddeus Haynes’s cash incentive sealed the deal. More than two hundred members of the region’s most ultra-right-wing groups packed the low-slung brick Legion Hall building, situated among bleak warehouses on a windswept road that crawled like a lost pioneer out of Rapid City into nothingness.

  The landowners who gathered at Legion Hall had been harassed for months to give the federal government right of entry to build silos on their properties, and hauled into court if they resisted. Patriots to the core, many were nonetheless fed up with being singled out by some think tank in California that decided they should make the sacrifice of two acres of land, for which the air force was offering the pitiful amount of $950, in order to plant a missile carrying a 1.2-megaton bomb, equal to 12,000 tons of TNT, within blast range of their houses.

  If you had one of these babies, the value of your property would plummet. People might agree the United States needed the atomic bomb for defense, but nobody wanted to live on top of one, or to go around feeling like they had a great big target on their back. Cal had heard plenty of worry from his constituents and was feeling confident as he and Betsy stood at the door shaking hands with supporters, including Verna Bismark, the Fletchers, and the regulars from the Bison Café. Vaughn Anders, the knife-throwing mountain man, was on their side. Shirley Hix and Lucille Thurlow supported Haynes, but Spanky Larson and State Trooper Randy Sturgis were for Cal. There were other familiar faces: school secretary Kay Angerhoffer, Jolene Johnston from the A&J, parents of Lance’s and Jo’s friends, several of Cal’s clients, and Doris Roy in the front row. But meanwhile the militia paid for by their opponents streamed steadily past, and a K-HAY cameraman stood in the aisle taking a reading on a light meter. Good, thought Cal. Let Haynes put it on the ten o’clock news. He was ready for the fight.

  Adding to the mood of discontent in the sweltering hall that night was the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to master the movie projector. While promoting technology capable of blowing up the world, they somehow couldn’t get the sound system to work right, so a propaganda film about the Minuteman program had to play during fifteen minutes of restless silence.

  The movie ended. The moderator, a mild-looking tax attorney dressed all in tan named Patrick Bissonette, vice commander of the American Legion post and deacon of the Methodist church, called the town meeting to order. The audience stood and said a prayer, and then, in unison, a sea of blue American Legion caps were removed from white heads and held over white hearts, as they chanted the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Before Vice Commander Bissonette introduced the first speaker, air force master sergeant Hayley Vance, he gave the rules.

  “We are here for the facts,” Bissonette announced. “Politicking will not be permitted.”

  Master Sergeant Vance, in full dress uniform, marched up the steps to the lectern and gave the air force spiel. He hardly needed to convince this crowd of the imminent danger they saw every day in the news. The Cold War was playing out in Cuba, ninety miles from our shore, and the Soviets had launched a satellite and put a man in space—proof they had the rocket power to lob ICBMs at the United States.

  “Most of you are veterans. You’ve put your life on the line for your country and we thank you,” he told the attentive crowd. “Now the United States of America is asking you to stand for freedom once again, and gentlemen, we’ve got to heed that call. I’m just a Missouri country boy, but I know it when I see it, and Russia is out to get us. Is it a burden to surrender two acres in order to protect your children and grandchildren’s way of life? No, sir. It’s an honor and a duty. Even an East Coast liberal by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
—”

  The hall was filled with hisses and boos. Vance paused, grinning to show he was with them.

  “—even Kennedy is telling every family to build themselves a bomb shelter, so this thing is for real. Honor. Duty. Love of country. I think that says it. Let’s show ’em South Dakota is the most patriotic state in the Union and say YES to Minuteman!”

  It was the ideal lead-in for Thaddeus Haynes. The audience gave the air force spokesman a standing ovation, and stayed on its feet for a boisterous welcome to the local TV personality and senatorial hopeful. Without hesitation, Haynes launched his “Coline Ferguson” bomb. It was nothing but smoke, but it made a big bang.

  “There’s something evil…festering…stinking…in this community,” he intoned. “I can smell it. Right here in this room.”

  The audience stirred. Something was going on. Volunteers had appeared in the aisles distributing flyers.

  “I disagree with Master Sergeant Vance,” said Haynes, stalling until they were passed down the rows. “The greatest threat to the United States is not that Russia has the nuclear bomb. It’s the threat of Communism itself. That’s what I smell right now. That’s what makes me want to vomit.”

  He waited until everybody was staring at the leaflet. “Meet Your Enemy—Coline Ferguson” it said. Underneath was an ominous silhouette of a woman in a trench coat smoking a cigarette.

  Legal experts would later admire the way Haynes and his coconspirators used the power of suggestion to imply guilt. The veiled threat could have been aimed at anyone. He never identified “Coline Ferguson” by name, although he referred to her as “The wife of a certain politician,” clearly implying the shadowy figure was Betsy Kusek. A list of questions left no doubt, especially for anyone who’d heard the tape:

  Why did she change her name?

  Was it to hide her membership in the Communist Party?

  Is her husband also a spy for Moscow?

  Why would anyone oppose the defense of our country except a traitor?

  When Betsy, standing in the back near the door, got her hands on the leaflet, her knees buckled and she went dizzy. She became incapable of understanding anything except the terror of the hunted that filled her body. She lost track of Cal, the crowd, where she was, until Stell dragged her outside into the heavy summer air and someone brought a folding chair and someone else told her to put her head below her knees.

  “Don’t cry,” Stell said firmly. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

  “Pigs!” It was Verna.

  Cal was squatting down to meet her eyes, which were fixed on the dirt between her shoes. “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m going to rip his throat out,” Cal said.

  “Put it out of your mind,” warned Verna, standing beside them in the mosquito-filled night. She crumpled the flyer and let it drop. “It’s a piece of trash. When you get up there, don’t acknowledge it, don’t refer to it—”

  “They can’t do this to Betsy.”

  “It has nothing to do with Betsy,” Verna said.

  “It’s a vicious, personal attack.”

  “Forget about it. For now. Just for tonight.”

  Fletch was pacing, distressed. “We’ll get the bastards,” he promised.

  “Stick to our agenda. Don’t let them get to you. You’re going to be a United States senator,” Verna reminded Cal. “These are small-time brats. It’s just chump change.”

  Betsy lifted her tearstained face. Stell gave her a tissue.

  “I told you I should have come clean,” she sobbed. “A long time ago.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Cal. “You have a right to free speech. You never broke any law.”

  “What they’re doing is mind control,” Stell, a fan of science fiction, said wisely. “It’s like when they put an electrode in your neck and turn you into a robot, so, Betsy, hon, just…think hard and picture a brick wall in your mind and say, They can’t get through this.”

  Fletch stared at his wife incredulously.

  “It works in the movies,” she said.

  They could hear Haynes’s voice over the loudspeakers.

  “I have serious questions, and you should, too,” he was saying inside the hall. “Who is the real Coline Ferguson, and why does she turn up now, in western South Dakota? Knowing, as I do, how the Communist apparatus works, I must ask, is she here to use her marital connection to a certain politician to secretly pressure the state legislature to reject the Minuteman program in a left-of-center coup?”

  “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me,” Cal said bitterly. “For not believing how low they could go.”

  Betsy was standing. “I’m going in there.”

  “No!” cried Stell. “The mob will tear you apart!”

  “I’m going up on that stage and telling the truth.”

  “That would be wrong,” said Fletch, observing the volatile crowd from his post at the door.

  “Friends!” roared Haynes. “We have been called! We have been called to defend our country. And we are blessed. We are blessed because we are the chosen people. Chosen to get money and jobs and brand-new roads in exchange for our loyalty to the Minuteman program. We don’t ask for this, but it is given. Prosperity is given because His love is free.”

  The dreary hall was transformed to a bloodthirsty arena, erupting with shouts of “Yes!” and “Amen!” and raised hands.

  Verna reached into her purse and gave Betsy a compact so she could powder her face.

  “Compose yourself. Cal will handle this.”

  When they walked inside, Haynes was pounding away. Cheers and applause rocked the room. Faces turned to look at Betsy, but not all were hostile. Betsy straightened her shoulders and followed her husband.

  “Have no doubt,” Haynes shouted. “We need these missiles. But Communism is more deadly than the atom bomb—and it’s right here under our noses. That’s why we are correct to ask questions about this mysterious person called ‘Coline Ferguson.’ Let us hope someone with a Christian conscience will come forth and name the real source of this pestilence!”

  Haynes left the stage to a raucous standing ovation. Rather than igniting their western spirit of independence, Haynes’s inflammatory speech made them feel that allowing the government to move in on their land was their American duty. United against a common enemy, the crowd rose as one. Cal walked the gauntlet up the aisle with his eyes focused on the microphone, determined to strike back with concise words, to cut through the bloated rhetoric. He saw sympathetic faces in the audience. His trust in the will of the people was firm, and that they would respond to reason. When Cal stepped up and took the microphone, the cheering stopped. He had their silence.

  “We do have a plague,” Cal declared in a resonant voice. “But it isn’t Communism. Nor is it the drought. Or missiles. It’s cancer. The cancer of fear that is being spread right here, tonight. The kind of fear that scares men off their rightful land. Men like Tim Ehrlich.”

  The room stayed quiet. They all knew Tim Ehrlich and were hooked—except for Thaddeus Haynes, who would not give his opponent the courtesy of his attention and kept his eyes down, insolently studying his Bible.

  “Tim was a family man. An experienced rancher and a good neighbor. He had bad losses like we all did in the blizzard of ’54—in fact, Spanky Larson and Trooper Sturgis and I, we helped pull his dead cows out of the snow,” Cal said, making eye contact with his supporters in the crowd. “Tim held on until the air force showed up and informed him that they were taking two acres of his best pasture to build a silo, like it or not, and that he had no choice in the matter. No, he couldn’t even choose which two acres—that was up to the government. In the process, they cut his irrigation lines and dug ditches that killed his cows. They gave him no recompense. Finally Tim gave up. He sold his ranch and moved to Wall for a job in a cement plant. His grandkids will never know what it’s like to grow up free, on a ranch, out in the open. We all face the same choice.” />
  Cal saw Haynes with his head down reading his book, and all he could think about was punching his lights out. He began to lose his footing. He went on with his rational arguments: South Dakotans were victims of the defense industry, run by outsiders. He hit them with numbers: each Minuteman would cost $75 million—all of it lining the pockets of profiteers. The audience looked blank. He wasn’t getting the message through. It seemed inconceivable, but nothing could penetrate the paranoid distemper that Haynes had created. Cal’s speech was greeted with halfhearted clapping and a few boos.

  Moderator Patrick Bissonette took over and asked Haynes if he had a rebuttal. He got lazily to his feet as if awakened from a nap.

  “Anyone who’s against the missiles, I call them a Communist sympathizer!” he said, to favorable applause. “And anyone who’s married to a Communist, why, he’s in on it, too.”

  Vaughn Anders stood up, a filthy throwback pioneer figure amid white shirtsleeves and blue American Legion caps.

  “How’d you figure that?” he shouted.

  “Ever hear of pillow talk?” cracked Haynes.

  The crowd roared.

  “Now we’ll open up for public discussion,” Bissonette announced over the laughter.

  There was a brief argument in the Kusek camp about who should speak. Verna Bismark raised her hand and was recognized. She made her way to the stage, waving confidently at many she knew who were customers at her bank.

  “Hello, everyone,” she said cheerfully. “Hello, Verna!” the audience echoed back with mocking chuckles, as they were at the peak of emotional arousal and she was dressed in her usual tight-fitting business suit that emphasized bosom and hips; one of only a dozen women present.

  “This is not the Rapid City that I know,” she began. “We used to look out for one another, now we’re split apart. I’ve heard people threatening to boycott each other’s businesses over this. Tires have been flattened. People don’t trust their neighbors. And it’s not just because of the Minuteman program. It’s the obscene smear and fear campaign against Calvin Kusek that has poisoned the well. In a few weeks we will be going to the polls to choose the next senator from South Dakota, and the speakers here tonight—”