Stay (ARC)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  He doesn’t say anything. I wonder what he’s thinking.

  I’m watching family wander back to their cars. Slowly,

  and a few at a time. But we don’t wander. Because we’re

  not done.

  “Go ahead and call me a draft dodger if you want,”

  I tell Harris. But I know he won’t. “There are still a

  couple of people in town who do, though mostly behind

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  my back. Thing is, there was no dodge about it. I didn’t

  dodge anything. I didn’t go to Canada. I didn’t bribe or

  lie to anybody who could get me a better classification in

  the draft. I didn’t even try to register as a conscientious

  objector. My understanding was that the CO category is

  for people who have strong religious convictions against

  any kind of violence. I wasn’t going to lie, and it didn’t

  seem right to take one of their deferments.

  “I was honest, and I hit it head-on.

  “I walked into the sheriff’s office and ran into … guess

  who? Right. I knew you could guess because you’re good

  at this stuff. It was old Deputy Warren.”

  “The guy who broke down Grandma Zoe’s door on

  that day when she almost died?”

  He calls her Grandma Zoe not because she was any-

  where near the age equivalent of a grandmother to him,

  but because Connor called her that. Harris never met her,

  which is a damn shame. She died about a year before he

  was born.

  “The very one,” I say. “And if I told you he didn’t

  know what to make of me, let alone what to do with me,

  that would be an understatement.

  “I said, ‘I’m not going to register for the draft.’ And I

  held my wrists out so he could put the cuffs on me.

  “He stared at them like he’d never seen wrists before.

  “‘I don’t think that’s the way it works,’ he said.

  “‘How does it work?’

  “He scratched his head for a minute, and then he

  said, ‘I got no idea, son. Nothing like this ever happened

  around here before.’”

  I watch Harris’s eyebrows go up. Just a little bit. I

  keep talking.

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  “So then he disappeared for a few minutes, leaving

  me noticeably uncuffed. When he came back, I swear he

  seemed more embarrassed than angry.

  “‘Nobody else knows, either,’ he said. ‘But we fig-

  ure in time the Selective Service people’ll get tired of

  not hearing from you, and eventually they’ll put out a

  warrant for your arrest. Or something like that. We’re

  talking about the federal government here, son. It’s not

  really our department.’

  “I asked him, ‘So you’re saying I should just go home

  and wait?’

  “‘No,’ he said, and at this juncture I could hear the

  irritation rising in his voice. ‘No, if you’re asking me what I think you ought to do, I think you ought to sign up.

  You can get a deferment by going to college, at least for

  a while. That’s what all the other boys are doing.’

  “I said, ‘But they can pull that out from under me

  anytime.’

  “He said, ‘A lot of guys get a doctor to write up some

  excuse.’

  “Well, I guess I wasn’t a lot of guys. If you know

  what I mean.

  “I said, ‘But I’m fine. So that would be a lie. That

  would be a total insult to the guys who went over there.

  I’m not going to lie and cheat to live a nice, com-

  fortable life while they fight. I’m going to make a sacri-

  fice that they could make, too, if they wanted. I’m going

  to go to jail.’

  “He scratched his head again, and narrowed his eyes

  at me. Finally he just said, ‘Go home and wait, son. With

  ideas like that in your head, sounds like jail’ll find you

  soon enough.’

  I know he’s about to ask if it did. So I beat him to it.

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  “I hurried up the process by writing to the Selective

  Service and telling them I was never going to sign up,

  and whatever the penalty might be for that, they should

  just go ahead and get the proceedings going against me.

  “I served two years. I didn’t have to go to some ter-

  rible, dangerous federal prison. I just served my time

  in the county jail, which I think was fairly irregular as

  these things go. It was the federal government, like the

  deputy said. But somehow they referred my case to the

  local authorities for arrest. Maybe they didn’t know what

  to do with guys like me, either.

  “It was a blessing at least to be jailed close to home.

  “I got no time off for good behavior, not because I

  didn’t behave well, but because the guards and the warden

  and the parole board all had some family or friends who’d

  signed up for the draft just like they were supposed to do.

  “The food was incredibly bad, which I swear was the

  second-worst thing about the place, after the noise and

  the lack of privacy. But it wasn’t supposed to be fun. It

  was supposed to be the price I paid.

  “And damn it, I paid it.

  “Roy drove out twice a week and brought me some

  decent food, and your granddad came out twice on some

  weeks, three times on others. He promised to take me

  to the Place for one of those chocolate-dipped chocolate

  ice cream cones the day I got out. It was the only treat

  he couldn’t figure out how to bring me.

  “You have no idea how many of my days in that hole

  started with a wish for that ice cream shop not to go out

  of business while I was rotting. I mean, serving my time.

  Paying my debt to society.

  “My parents had divorced by then—I know, what took

  them so long, right?—but my father flew all the way from

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  North Carolina, where he lived with his new wife, to

  scream at me and tell me how much I’d disappointed him.

  How I’d ruined my whole life with this bonehead play.

  “And I was a captive audience. Literally.

  “But, you know what? It’s okay. That’s part of the

  price I paid.

  “My mom only visited three or four times in that

  whole two years, but she was relieved by what I’d done.

  She never said so straight out, but I knew.

  “And Zoe.

  “Zoe not only came to visit me now and again, but

  she wrote me a letter every day. Every day for two years.

  Seven hundred and thirty letters. I actually counted.

  In jail, you have time on your hands for stuff like that.

  Some were full of news from town, others were just her

  thoughts on this and that. Some were longer than others,

  but I never had to watch a mail call go by with no let-

  ter from Zoe. I think she single-handedly kept our little

  branch post office afloat during that time.

  “I still have every one of those letters. Stacked and

  organized by date and rubber-banded in shoeboxes in

  my closet.”

  My head fills with
a very clear, very painful image.

  It’s taking me off in a different direction in my head. And

  I go with it. And I retell it.

  “I watched the fall of Saigon from the TV room in

  the county jail,” I say. “I watched those helicopters teetering on rooftops, trying to take off with too many people

  loading them down. I watched people try to hang on to

  the bottom of them, desperate to get out of there. I saw

  how many never made it out.

  “The war is over, I thought in the back of my head while I watched. But I knew my jail sentence wasn’t.

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  “I remember I wondered how Roy felt, watching that

  on TV. Or Joe, from the NA meeting. Or Darren Weller.

  It just seemed like everything they’d gone through added

  up to nothing—at least, nothing anybody got to keep.

  “Next time he visited, I asked Roy what he was feel-

  ing when he saw that.

  “He said he hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch.”

  I let a beat fall after that statement. In my mind, it

  warrants a beat.

  “What about my grandpa?” Harris asks, his face open

  with awe. His mother is trying to get his attention from

  over at the cars, and he’s studiously ignoring her. “Was

  he okay with what you did?”

  “Funny thing about that,” I say. “We actually only

  talked about it once. He came to the county jail to pick

  me up on my release day, your granddad, because Roy

  had to work. He took me out for that ice cream, just the

  way he’d promised.

  “‘Chocolate ice cream with chocolate coating,’ he

  told me while we waited in line. ‘That still seems like an

  awful lot of chocolate.’

  “I said, ‘You still don’t say that like it’s a good thing.’

  “When we’d gotten our cones, I purposely led us to a

  table right by the front window. Because the whole point

  of not going to Canada was to be able to hold my head

  up and feel like I had nothing to hide.

  “We licked our ice cream in silence and just sort of

  watched the town go by. Some of the locals waved at me,

  like they were glad to see me back. Others looked away

  like I was invisible. Except … if I’d been invisible, they

  wouldn’t have needed to look away.

  “I did better with the mothers than the fathers, and

  better with the young women than the young men. But

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  that was just a generality. Somebody will always come

  along and break the mold.

  “After a while I said to your granddad, ‘I never could

  bring myself to ask you this. I purposely never asked. But

  I’m going to ask you right now. Do you think I did the

  right thing?’

  “He said, ‘I think you did the right thing for you.’

  “After that we never spoke about it again. Probably

  not because we didn’t feel we could. Probably because

  we never needed to.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Good.”

  He’s not saying a lot, but he’s deeply invested. I can

  tell. I’m sure this isn’t all new information to him. He

  must’ve heard bits and pieces. He probably never heard

  my side of the thing.

  His mother is trying to flag me down now. And now

  I’m studiously ignoring her. Because I’m telling this kid the truth. If there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s

  that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell

  them the damn truth.

  “But you said people still call you a draft dodger,”

  he says.

  “Some. Not all. Different people have different opin-

  ions. My dad was right about one thing, though. It does

  follow you around, all through your life, that time in jail.

  I’m not saying nobody would hire me after that, but the

  pickings got slimmer. I had to look at that same decision

  that faced Grandma Zoe after the accident. Should I just

  get out of this town and go someplace where nobody

  knew me? But I didn’t think that would work well in my

  situation, because the arrest record follows you wherever

  you go. Anywhere I lived, when I applied for a job, a

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  simple background check would turn up that conviction.

  I figured I was better off staying close to home, where

  people had a fair shot at knowing it was my version of a

  principled stand. I say ‘fair shot’ because I knew not ev-

  erybody was destined to see it that way. You can’t change

  the way a person’s going to see a thing. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-four years on the planet,

  it would be that.

  “But some people understood it.” I end on that. Or

  try to, anyway.

  “But you were doing what you thought was right,”

  he says.

  “Yeah. But some people don’t want you to do what

  you think is right. Some people want you to do what

  they think is right. Anyway, it all shook out okay. I ended up working a pretty menial job at the hardware store.

  The owner had lost his son in Vietnam. You’d think

  that would’ve pitted him against me, but it was just the

  opposite. He was burned by what I guess he felt was the

  pointlessness of the whole thing, and wishing his son had

  taken jail time instead. So he hired me, and he treated

  me with respect.

  “I worked hard, lived over the store, and put away

  every cent I didn’t need to live on. And on the other side

  of town your uncle Roy was doing the same thing. And

  we weren’t even talking to each other about it. It wasn’t

  even a plan.

  “Now the old owner is deceased, and we own that

  store.”

  “I knew that,” he says. “I didn’t know all of this, but I know something.”

  “Of course you do.”

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  His mother is waving to me again, and I raise one finger

  high. Asking her to wait. To let us finish. Surprisingly,

  she does. I guess she just needed to be acknowledged.

  “Here’s a thing I don’t know,” he says. And I wait, and

  let him figure out how to say it in his own way. “Nobody

  really told me why Grandpa didn’t have to go fight in

  the war. I asked my mom once, but I never really got a

  straight answer.”

  “I can understand that,” I say. “It hits on a touchy

  subject. But you’re a smart boy, and you’re mature for

  your age. And you know your great-grandma Pauline

  was not always very … well.”

  “In the head, you mean?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  He nods. He knows.

  “It’s like this,” I say. “Grandma Zoe had this thing

  she used to say. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.’”

  He wrinkles his nose. It almost makes me laugh. “I

  don’t understand that saying at all,” he says.

  “You know, honestly, it never made a great deal of

  sense to me, either, but for years I didn’t say so. It sounded like it just meant ‘bad things have bad effects.’ And I

  thought, Yeah, so … what’s your point? Fi
nally one day I was a little grumpy and tired, so I called her out on it.

  Turns out it means even most really bad winds are going

  to blow something good to somebody.

  “Which leads me to my point about Connor and

  his mom. It would be nice to report that everybody’s

  story had at least a fair or satisfying ending, but that’s

  not life, is it? And you’re old enough to know it. And

  I’m not going to lie to you about life, Harris. Your

  great-grandma Pauline didn’t fare well. She had a break-

  down when Connor was sixteen. At the time we all

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  thought, well, people come back from breakdowns. But

  she never did.

  “They couldn’t afford to put her in any kind of facil-

  ity, at least not one Connor could bear to think of using.

  And they couldn’t afford any kind of in-home nursing or

  professional care. So Connor took care of her.

  “In our last year of high school, Zoe came over and

  sat with Pauline every day while Connor went to school.

  After he graduated, Connor found a college that would

  let him earn a degree from home—you know, a corre-

  spondence course sort of thing.

  “He got a nice, cushy job in the county planning

  department and bought a house for your grandma Dotty

  before he even asked her to marry him. It’s just who he

  was. He didn’t want to live and raise a family in that

  spooky old house he’d grown up in, which I think was

  a smart move. So he sold it and got a new one with no

  bad memories, where they could make a life from scratch.

  With four bedrooms. One for them. A couple for all the

  kids he knew they wanted. And one for his mom.

  “Your grandma looked after Pauline for years while

  Connor worked. It wasn’t all that hard a job to do. Pauline

  was never difficult or unpleasant. She just couldn’t do much of anything for herself. She died of a blood infection in

  1984. But maybe that part you knew.”

  “Right,” he says, “I did. But I still don’t get the part

  about the wind.”

  “I was getting to that. So that ill wind blew something

  good to someone. Connor—your grandad—was her sole

  caretaker when he turned eighteen. And that kept him

  deferred from the draft. And he didn’t have to go.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I think I finally get the part

  about the wind.”

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  I feel a little tug on my jacket sleeve. I’m wearing a suit

  jacket, even though it’s summer, just like it was where I