by R.J. Ellory
So Eve Chantry was buried after a simple ceremony in Reverend Verney's church. She was not, however, buried in Reverend Verney's cemetery, but in a white plot, unmarked and obscure, beside a wall that separated the cemetery from the far end of Nine Mile Road.
With the money I had earned that summer I paid for a headstone.
It was plain white marble, and on it was the simple inscription:
Eve Chantry.
Mother.
Wife.
Friend.
Rest In Peace
My mother attended the service and the burial. She understood enough to know why I had spent my money this way and she neither questioned nor protested. This was my way of giving something back, and she respected that.
In losing Eve Chantry I had lost a lifeline, an anchor to a reality more real than that within which I lived, and I felt a greater wrenching of the soul than ever I had for my father.
I would remember 1967, for this was the watershed.
The circle grew smaller, bringing me ever nearer that flame.
On a small nail I hung the candlemoth above my bed. It was the last thing I saw before I slept, the first as I woke.
It was a reminder to be true to myself, to believe what I believed, and never to compromise.
That would prove, of all else, the hardest lesson of all.
* * *
Chapter Ten
It was a harsh winter. Folks who had been alive two and three times my lifespan spoke of it as the worst that ever was. Snow drifted eight and nine feet high, cars were buried, and in February a cow was found frozen upright against a fence. Ben Tyler and Quinn Stowell tied a rope around its neck to drag it away with a CMC Jimmy, but the cow's head snapped right off like a branch. It was that cold. Really that cold.
I stayed indoors much of the time, either at home or at the Radio Store. The post sometimes got through, but more often than not it would be delayed for up to a week. I was not certain if this was better or worse, for the thought of my Draft Notice lying in a sack somewhere near Myrtle Beach - something like that with my name on it and I just didn't know - gnawed at me relentlessly. I spoke with Nathan, and each conversation seemed abrupt, as if every word was strained and unnatural. We understood the significance of what would happen when those notices came, that we would be caught then, caught between a rock and a hard place, and though the thought of leaving haunted my thoughts, an ever-present shadow, I could not bring myself to voice it. Nathan possessed that thought too. I could read it in his eyes, and the aura of fear it precipitated was not even close to what we had experienced a thousand years before in Benny's. This was nothing to do with race or color or religion, this was life and death. Sometimes I pretended this thing would never come, but pretense it was.
Eve Chantry's house stayed empty, much of the back half buried beneath the snow drifts, and it wouldn't be until spring that the gray people with dark shadowed eyes would come to lay up signage and put fliers out for the auction.
If I'd had enough money I would have bought that house. Just for the way the light came in through the upper floor windows. Just for the smell. Just because it was hers.
But winter, despite itself, despite the tenacity with which it held the world in its icy grip, eventually released us into the quiet concession of a new season. The spring run-offs flooded the fields, and small children - black and white - skidded in the mud, fraying both their clothes and their folks' tempers, until the color they'd arrived in had transformed to a uniform gray-brown. Only from the length of their hair could you tell who was white and who was not. From where I watched from the Radio Store window I could see life emerging once more. It seemed like a new beginning, but somehow I knew that our time was coming, and our time was not a new beginning, but an end.
In May the boxer Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing the Draft. That was a premonition. He was black. He was famous. They could still kick his ass.
Nathan Verney came to see me that day, and it was that day I told him of Eve Chantry. I showed him the candlemoth, and as if in validation of my decision to hold him in his confidence, the original decision to have Nathan Verney as my blood brother, he was both enchanted and impassioned.
'She was right, you know,' he said later.
I looked across at him.
'That you can only make the decision yourself.'
I nodded.
'My decision is made,' he said quietly.
I didn't look up. I didn't want him to tell me. I wanted it to be mine and mine alone, and to hear what he had decided could only sway my thoughts.
'I won't go,' he said. 'I have decided that no matter what happens I won't go to Vietnam.'
His voice possessed such clarity and authority there was no mistaking his intent.
'It isn't cowardice,' he went on - a phrase I would hear as the opening of every explanation from every Draft dodger I would ever meet - 'it's the principle of the thing. It is not my war. I do not wish to kill people. I don't even know any Vietnamese people… I don't even know any communists come to that… so why should I go out and kill them? What did they ever do to me?'
'Killed your cousins,' I said.
Nathan was quiet for a moment, then, 'Sure, they got killed, but they wouldn't have been killed if they hadn't gone, would they?'
'And if everyone said they weren't going then no-one would be dead, and there would never have been a war in the first place… and then there would be communists everywhere.'
Nathan shook his head. 'You really believe that?'
I smiled. 'No, I don't believe that.'
'Then why do you think there's a war?' he asked.
'I heard that someone bet LBJ a dollar that we would win.'
Nathan laughed.
'I don't know, Nathan, I really don't know. I also don't need to know why you have decided not to go, but I wish you hadn't told me.'
Nathan frowned. 'How come?'
'Because I have to make my own decision and I don't want to be influenced by anyone else.'
Nathan smiled. 'Then you've missed the whole point of what Eve Chantry told you.'
I looked questioningly at him.
'The point, Danno, is that you have to stick to what you think regardless of what anyone says whether you know what they're gonna say or not.'
I shook my head. 'But -'
Nathan raised his hand. 'But nothing, Danny. You think what you think and everyone else thinks what they think, and you go ahead and do whatever you're gonna do regardless.'
I didn't reply.
He was right.
More often than not Nathan was right. His daddy was a minister and sometimes I believed he had God on his side.
We didn't speak of it again that day, nor the week following, or the week beyond that. In fact, I can't remember speaking to him about it again until much, much later, and by then words were as meaningful as the nineteen-year-old lives that went out to Vietnam.
Nathan had his wireless radio with him. He found KLMU on the dial and we listened to Johnny Burnette and Willie Nelson.
The mood between us changed, the challenge was gone, and I for one was grateful. This was a subject so close to home I did not believe I could be challenged and survive with my sanity intact.
Dark times were coming, I knew that much, and still the decision evaded me. Perhaps I believed in some small way that the war would skid right by me, miss me in its hurry to collect the youth of America and slaughter them wholesale. Someone was reaping children, less than children, and beneath the great sweep of its scythe I would duck and become nothing for just a heartbeat.
It would take just that long to be missed perhaps.
About the same amount of time it took to die.
In October the largest anti-war demonstration in history moved on the Pentagon. There were two hundred and fifty arrests, including that of Norman Mailer. The government's response was to step up the bombing of North Vietnam.
I remember watching the demo on TV at the Radio Stor
e. I don't believe I'd ever seen so many people gathered with one united voice in all my life. With the death of Jack Kennedy we wept as a people, but on this day we raised our hearts, our voices, our fists in anger. It was a release, an impassioned and desperate plea for someone out there to listen, to understand, to hear us. That cry fell on deaf ears. Another 35,000 filed quietly up gangways and into aircraft, strapped themselves into helicopters, checked their weapons for operational status, chewed their gum, closed their eyes and remembered their sweethearts' faces, said a brief prayer to a God they doubted could really exist, and looked down at American soil for the last time.
In most cases they were dead within hours; the rest got a week or two.
The year ended as it had started. America felt like a clenched fist, a seized heart, a twisted muscle. So much power, so little use.
And it hurt.
The strain was beginning to show.
1968 began with the indictment of Benjamin Spock for anti-Draft activities. He was a hero, and though his voice was loud it was like the creaking of a door in a hurricane. Only if you hid behind it could you hear it, and the protection it would afford you was of no value.
In February Richard Milhous Nixon said he would run for president. That face, the expressive gesture, everything that would become more recognized than perhaps any president before him, was not the image that we remembered from that time.
There was a photograph. It leapt at us from the TV, from the newspapers, from the human interest magazines: South Vietnamese Army General Loan holding a revolver against the head of a suspect in a Saigon public square. The suspect's head was tilted to the viewer's right, his face twisted in a grimace of horrified anticipation.
General Loan was quoted.
He said: Buddha will understand.
Some people asked who Buddha was; was he responsible for the war?
Some people asked why General Loan thought Buddha would want anything to do with such a thing.
Some people just turned away, sickened, repulsed, disbelieving.
The picture haunted me for days.
Perhaps it was that picture that gave me closure.
In March LBJ said he would not run for office again. To temper the sense of loss many would feel at such an announcement he sent another 35,000 to Vietnam.
Robert Kennedy said he would run. That gave people a lift somehow. He was so like his fallen brother.
They came crashing to earth once more in April.
Like Marty Hooper. Boom. Down.
Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis.
Reverend Verney, a sequoia of a man, wept openly in the street. He hugged his wife and his son to him and they wept with him.
The negro quarter of Greenleaf was deserted. In times such as these we had learned there were no such things as divisions and quarters. United only in war and grief it seemed.
I did not understand the reality of what had happened.
I knew enough of King to appreciate that all the progress made had been carried forward on his shoulders. There was no-one to take his place, no-one who could take his place. I felt that the ignorant whites were responsible. The same ignorant whites who'd started the war.
When they named James Earl Ray I wondered why they always used all three names. Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. John Wilkes Booth. Why did they do that?
And when Nathan told me they were going to Atlanta for the funeral I knew I would go with them.
I considered it was not necessary to understand all the details to get the message.
My blood brother was a black man. We were different. Of course we were different, we would always be different. But we were not so different as to justify different streets and different bars and different jobs or houses or salaries. Martin Luther King believed in what he was doing. I believed in him. I felt I owed him enough to go to Atlanta.
There were, in fact, about 150,000 people who felt the same, Jacqueline Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey among us, and when I arrived in Atlanta in the back of Reverend Verney's station wagon - tired and nauseous from the endless jolting - I sensed a collective consciousness had arrived.
I had never witnessed nor experienced anything like it in my life.
The streets were impassable. I gripped Nathan's hand for dear life, and Nathan held onto his daddy like our only connection to the shore. People wept and screamed, people sang, people hugged one another and kneeled and prayed, and some folks lay prostrate right there on the sidewalk and cared not that they were trampled underfoot.
The noise and heat and commotion tested both my patience and my lungs, but beneath this there was a tangible sense of brotherhood and unity. I did not feel threatened, either by the crowds or the police, and where I had assumed I would be the only white man there, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, color immaterial. We were just people, grief-stricken, outraged people.
That was the only important thing.
Until I saw Linda Goldbourne.
We had stopped to get a drink at a diner somewhere in downtown Atlanta. I was weak, dehydrated and exhausted, and sweat ran off me in rivers. Sweat like a fall testimonial.
Linny Goldbourne stood at the counter. Her hair was long and dark, and around her forehead she'd tied a beaded headband. She wore rings in her ears, a necklace made of a leather lace with a stone tied to the end, and when she turned towards me she knew who I was.
Images of all those I had loved from afar in my own quiet way came flooding back, and when she smiled - genuinely thrilled to see me - my heart leapt.
'Danny!' she shouted across the room, and elbowed her way through the crowd towards me, her arms wide.
When we met she threw those same arms around me and pulled me tight.
'Wow!' she said. 'Wow! Danny Ford! Christ, man, what are you doing here?'
I turned and glanced at Nathan and Reverend Verney.
She shook her head, realizing she'd asked the most obvious of questions.
'Of course,' she said, tempering her enthusiasm for a moment.
I had not spoken with Linda Goldbourne since 11th grade. I had seen her, of course, the girl I believed would have been reserved for a far better man than I, but we had never connected. Now, in that moment, there it was: a connection.
'So you're travelling back?' she said.
I nodded. 'Yes, I'm going back tonight with Nathan.'
I looked at her face, her eyes, her lips. She was more beautiful than ever.
'Me too,' she said. 'I haven't been home for about six months.'
'Where've you been?' I asked.
'California,' she said. 'San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, L.A. for a couple of weeks, travelling around you know?'
I did not know. I was not a traveller. I had been in Greenleaf all my life.
'So we should connect up when we get home,' she said.
She used the word, not me. We should connect up.
I nodded. 'I would really like that, Linny. I would really like to do that.'
She smiled. She hugged me again. She held me a little too long for this just to be the excitement of a chance meeting.
Then she withdrew, and as she withdrew she held her cheek against mine for just a split second, but in that second I felt all the warmth of the world encapsulated within a touch.
My heart was racing.
I could feel my pulse in my temples.
In that second I believed every loss I'd ever felt was healed. My father, Eve Chantry, even Caroline Lanafeuille - all seemed insignificant as I held Linny Goldbourne against me. I could smell her skin, feel the power of her presence, and around me the hubbub of the crowd within which we stood was silenced.
And then suddenly, all too suddenly, she was gone, breezing past me with her grace, her beauty, the scent of something autumnal from her hair.
I watched her go.
She did not look back.
I did not want her to.
My cheeks burned with something close to a fever, closer perhaps to
passion.
I would think back later, and despite the reason I was in Atlanta, despite this being the first time I had left the State of North Carolina, I did not think of Martin Luther King again that day.
I thought of Linny Goldbourne and how her body might feel against mine in the coolness of the night.