by Ann Tatlock
I too lean back in my chair and, shutting my eyes, I simply listen. There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul …
I listen until she fades away, and the room is quiet. I open my eyes. I walk to the front porch and look out over the sloping front lawn, the towering trees, the distant hills. I am here in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Come and rest awhile, she said. It is an invitation to spend time. It is, quite possibly, the loveliest invitation I have ever received.
32
Linda
Wednesday, August 21, 1968
WHEN I SEE Austin walking up the drive, I get the same feeling I used to get when I saw Brian walking down the hall at school. It’s like, the best thing in the world just happened, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else, or be anywhere else, or be doing anything else. I just want to be right here with him, wherever he is.
He sits down on the porch steps beside me. “You spend a lot of time here on these steps, don’t you?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “I guess I do.”
“You been waiting for me?”
“I guess I was,” I admit.
“Well, that’s good, because I was hoping you’d be here.”
“You were?”
“Yeah.”
We just sit there for a minute saying nothing, but it doesn’t feel weird or awkward. It just feels kind of nice. “Where’ve you been?” I ask.
“At work.”
I realize then that his cheeks are flushed, and his face is shiny with sweat, and his overalls are dirty and dusty. His longish hair, which he usually combs straight back, is hanging down around his ears.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I say. “If your family’s rich, why do you work?”
“To experience the life and hardships of the working class,” he says, and he sounds like he’s shooting back an answer to the Baltimore Catechism or something. Like it’s something he’s worked hard to memorize, and he can’t wait to recite it.
All I can think of is, oh yeah, we’re back to that mess about the poor working class. Austin seems like a different person when he’s talking like that, and I’d rather he just be the nice hunky guy instead of the intellectual socialist wannabe. “Um,” I say, “so where do you work?”
“The Swannanoa Furniture Manufacturing Company. It’s down by the river between here and Asheville. We make furniture.”
Yeah, I gathered that much on my own. “So, you walk all that way?”
“Naw. A guy named Chester Randolf picks me up and drops me off at the bottom of the drive. He got me the job there. We work the same shift.”
“So, you like it?”
He laughs a little at that, and gives me a look that says I’ve got to be kidding. “No, I don’t like it.” He’s mimicking me, and I don’t like that. I’m not going to say anything, though. He goes on, “It’s grueling and it’s demeaning, and it’s one more place for the bourgeois to take advantage of the working poor.”
“Oh. Okay.” I can’t even remember what bourgeois means, but I suppose he’s talking about the rich. Gee whiz, Brian never talked like that. He just talked about getting high on weed and drag racing at night in front of the school. Things I could understand.
“It’s just all wrong,” Austin goes on. “Long hours and little pay, and there’s not a man or a woman there who’s considered by the bourgeois owners to be a real human being. They’re just cogs in a wheel, they’re just part of the machine that does nothing for them but does everything to make the rich guy richer.”
“Uh huh.” I kind of scrunch up my eyes and try to look like I’m thinking hard on that one. “Is that how that Chester guy feels about it too?”
Austin’s quiet a minute. Finally, he admits, “He’s never said one way or another. But I’m sure he doesn’t want to be there.”
“How do you know if he’s never said?”
“No one in their right mind would want to be working in a factory. No one with any education, anyway. That’s the problem; Chester’s got no education. He told me himself he dropped out of school in the third grade. That’s why he’s doing what he does. Because he can’t do anything else.”
“So maybe he likes making furniture. Maybe he’s proud of his work. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I don’t need to ask him.”
“Why not?”
Austin looks at me and says, “Listen, you ever heard of Eugene Debs?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe in history class or somewhere.”
For a second, Austin looks cross. “Everyone should know who Eugene Debs is. Someday everyone will know who he is. Like George Washington. No, better than that, because Debs is going to change the country. Maybe the whole world.”
“So he’s what, some kind of politician or something?”
“He’s only the leader of the whole Social Democratic Party,” Austin shoots back. “He’s run three times for president on the Socialist ticket. Next time, he’s going to win.”
Yeah, well, I don’t remember learning about any President Debs, but I guess I’m not supposed to spill the beans about stuff like that.
Suddenly, Austin looks at me hard and says, “Listen, I know you know things about the future that I don’t know, and I don’t blame you for that. But 1968 isn’t the end of history. I mean, you don’t know everything. You don’t know what’s going to happen after 1968.”
I shrug and just kind of sniff, like of course I don’t know what’s going to happen after 1968 and what’s your point? Criminy, he’s all of a sudden got some sort of chip on his shoulder. I just look at him and say, “So?”
“So no matter what you might tell me about the next fifty years, I’m not going to stop believing in my dream, and my dream is that we’re going to end up living in a socialist society where everybody’s equal and everybody’s taken care of. It’s going to come sometime, whether it’s before 1968 or whether it’s after.”
I shrug. “Well, that’s okay, Austin. I mean, it’s a free country, right? You can believe whatever you want to believe.”
“It’s a free country, yeah, but not in the right way. Until everyone is equal, we’re free in the wrong way. We’re free only for the few. The few rich and the few powerful, and that’s it. Everybody else is in bondage to the system.”
“They are?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my family’s sure not rich, but I’ve never felt like I was in bondage to any system.”
“That’s because you just don’t know.”
“I don’t?”
“You’re just going along with it because you don’t know there can be a better way.”
“I am?”
“Listen, Linda, there’s a new day coming. I don’t know when it’s going to come, but I’m going to help bring it in. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why I’m alive. I can feel it in my bones.”
His talk about a new day coming sounds familiar. That’s what all the hippies are talking about, isn’t it? I mean, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, right? “Oh, well, you know,” I say, “there are plenty of people today who talk about a new day dawning, stuff like that.”
“There are?”
“Sure. I mean peace and harmony. Brotherhood of man. People say it’s coming. So, yeah, I guess you could say people are still working on it. People want it, that’s for sure.” I give him one nice big, peace-loving smile.
“Yeah?” he says, smiling back at me. “That’s good. That’s good. That means we’re still moving forward.”
“Sure, I guess so.” I might have just won myself a few points with Austin, even though I don’t believe a word of it.
“You know what it’s going to be like to live in a classless society, Linda?”
“No. I guess I don’t.”
He smiles serenely, closes his eyes, lifts his face a bit higher. “Paradise,” he whispers.
I’m not going to say as much, but he looks like he’s just hit the sawdust trail at a Billy Graham Crus
ade. I mean, I should know. I’m the daughter of a Baptist preacher who gave an altar call practically every Sunday at church. So I don’t know—I guess whatever your idea of Paradise is, that’s cool.
“Okay,” I say, “so that would be, the world’s going to be perfect someday, right?”
“Yes.” He opens his eyes. “Once we get rid of capitalism and we’re living in a classless system. Think of it, Linda. No more war, no more poverty, crime, hatred, hunger. No more illness—”
“No more illness?” Okay, here’s where I draw the line. Seems a big stretch to me, saying no one’s going to get sick anymore just because there’s been an overhaul in the government.
“Well, yeah, eventually.”
“And how do you figure that?”
“Knowledge,” he says. “Progress. Education. We can master science; we can learn how to keep people from getting sick.”
I think about how far we’ve come in the way of medicine since 1916. Sure, we got antibiotics now, and we got the polio vaccine; I know that much. But I can hardly believe we’re going to get smart enough to keep people from getting either a cold or cancer. I mean, like what? We’re going to start producing perfect bodies or something? Blame it on my upbringing, but I just can’t see things getting that good. Everything’s too much of a mess and, to me, people are basically rotten. I don’t know about the Fall and all that stuff, but it sure seems to me the world’s way too bad to ever be as good as Austin thinks it’s going to be.
“I’m not sure I can see it, Austin,” I admit. “I mean, the world’s a pretty bad place, you know? Bad things happen all the time, and I don’t know if we can change that. Dad says it’s because of the Fall.”
“The Fall?” he says. “Well, your dad’s a preacher, right?”
“Yeah. Used to be, anyway.”
“So, all right, he has to believe that. But listen, forget about the Fall. Forget about evil. It doesn’t exist.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No. Not really. But ignorance does. It’s ignorance that causes the problems. That’s why we have to get rid of ignorance. We need to keep moving forward, gaining knowledge all the time. That’s the only thing that’s going to save us.”
Baloney. And I’m not just saying that because I’m fifty years ahead of him, and not just because I’ve got Baptist roots, but because I’ve got eyes, and I can see where the world’s headed, and it isn’t toward any sort of Paradise on earth, that’s for sure. Just the opposite, far as I can see. Bottom line: I don’t think we can be saved. I think people are going to go on being rotten till we wipe each other out—probably in some sort of atomic war or something. But what, like Austin’s going to believe me if I tell him about flying across the ocean to drop atomic bombs? He probably can’t think any bigger than Molotov cocktails, and far as he’s concerned airplanes are nothing more than oversized kites. And I’m going to try to tell him we dropped a bomb out of a plane that wiped out an entire Japanese city in a matter of minutes? Right. Let his 1916 mind chew on that one for a while. Yeah, sure. Say Austin, we got this little thing called nuclear power now. So while you’re back there in time worrying about things like chopping enough wood to keep your feet warm in the winter, over here we’re ducking under tables in air raid drills in case Russia decides to drop the big one on us. Think about it, will you? If I said the words “air raid shelter” and “nuclear fallout,” you wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about. So welcome to the world of progress.
I’m not going to try to tell Austin any of that stuff, wouldn’t do it even if the Great Rule-maker let me. One, Austin wouldn’t believe me. Two, I like him too much to disappoint him.
“Well, I’ll say this much for you, Austin. You’ve got big plans for the human race.”
He nods, and he actually looks kind of proud. “It’s not just me, Linda. Lots of people believe it. Lots of people are working for it. I’m just sorry I won’t live long enough to see it, but maybe it’s enough to have a part in bringing it about. We’re building a kingdom here on earth better than anything heaven has to offer. I mean if there were a heaven, that is.”
“But there isn’t.”
“No. We can’t be hoping for some sort of eternal life that’s going to make up for this one. That’s why we have to work to change the world. All we have is now.”
I have to think about that for a while. Something’s bugging me, something I don’t understand, and I’ve got to figure out how to get it into words. Finally, I say, “Okay, I think I’m following you, Austin, but I’m wondering about one thing. If you’re right—and I’m not saying you’re not—but if you’re right, and all we have is now, would that be your now or mine?”
Austin looks at me like I’m asking him a trick question—even though I’m not really—and then he changes the subject. I guess he doesn’t know the answer.
33
Sheldon
Sunday, August 25, 1968
“IF I’M NOT being too intrusive, do you mind if I ask you what you’re doing with that machine?”
“Why, hello, Sheldon. I didn’t notice you. Have you been here long?”
“No, only a moment.”
Gavan looks from me back to the screen of—what did he say it was? A PC? A personal computer. He had been staring at it intently until I interrupted him. “It’s—well, I’m reading a letter. It’s from my wife, Melissa.”
“A letter?” I lean forward in the wing chair and try to see the words on the screen, but then I realize that if it is indeed a letter, it’s not addressed to me and not mine to read. I look away, settling my eyes on Gavan’s face again.
“It’s called an email,” Gavan explains. “That is, electronic mail.”
“But how did you get the letter into that, um … computer?”
Gavan is frowning in thought. “I didn’t put the letter in there. Melissa sent it to me from the computer where she is. It comes to me through cable modem.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Hmmm. You see, the message is sent from one computer to another, something like—well, say, the way a telegram was once sent from one telegraph machine to another. Melissa types the message into her computer, then sends it to mine where I’m able to call it up and read it.”
The gap between our eras is somewhat too great for me. I can see why people must move forward moment by moment, taking in small bits of life at a time.
“Your wife,” I say. “She’s a soldier, right?”
“Yes, with the National Guard. Her unit has been deployed.”
This to me, too, seems inconceivable. The woman has gone off to war while the man is here on the home front. With the child. And this, not forty years from now. What lies in those individual moments ahead that would bring about this kind of change?
“How is it,” I ask, “that it’s the women now who go to war?”
He chuckles at that. “It’s not as though our troops are made up entirely of women. They’re still far in the minority as far as the military goes. And they aren’t drafted. Well, men aren’t drafted anymore, either. We have a volunteer military, at least for the present. Both men and women volunteer.”
“So the women who go to war, they want to go?”
“I suppose you could put it that way, though it isn’t that they want to go to war. What they want is to be in the military, whether our country is at war or not.”
“And so they become soldiers, just like men?”
“Well, for the most part, yes.”
“Women? Wives and mothers?”
“Yes.”
“They go to war and—get killed?”
Gavan nods solemnly. “Sometimes.”
I am stupefied. I try to imagine Linda marching off to war, and I can’t. She won’t, of course. Not Linda. Though, perhaps, her daughter might if this is indeed what the future holds. “And we as a country—we allow this?”
“We can’t not allow it. That’s what gender equality is all about.”
�
��I’m not sure I like the idea,” I say.
“You’re not alone in that,” Gavan assures me. “But women have many more choices today than they did even in your time.”
“I guess they must. But how do you—well, I’m not sure I could let my wife go to war.”
Gavan gives me an understanding smile. But then, just as quickly, he shrugs and says, “Melissa was a member of the National Guard when I married her. It wasn’t something she surprised me with later. Being a soldier was part of who she was.”
“But wouldn’t you rather the tables were turned? That is, that you were there and she were here?”
“You have to understand,” he replies gently, “it was her choice to go.”
“Does that make it right?”
“For her, I think it must.”
He seems unsure, and perhaps uncomfortable, as though I am questioning him as a husband, as a man. I’m not, really. I simply want to understand. But I’ll let it drop, turn the conversation to a slightly different vein. “At any rate, we’ve got ourselves into another war, haven’t we?”
“I’m afraid so.”
I think about Vietnam, of how little has been gained, how we likely shouldn’t be there. “Is it a necessary war, this one we’re fighting in your time?”
“I believe it is, yes. Though certainly not everyone thinks so. Many are dead-set against it. So, unfortunately, it’s a divisive issue in our country right now.”
“Something like Vietnam, then.”
“It’s similar, as far as our being unable to agree about it. Really, the last war that saw us unified was the Second World War. You know, Victory bonds, scrap metal drives, everyone pulling together—that sort of thing. Now Americans are too busy arguing with each other to present any sort of united front to the enemy. So,” he smiles morosely and shrugs, “war within, war without. It can get rather ugly on the editorial pages.”
“The world seems a strange place in 2005.”
“Yes. But then, the world was a strange place in 1968.”