“He was. He was.” I can tell by her voice that this has softened her a little. “You know, Joel, he got two medals.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“A Silver Star and a Purple Heart. His father also got a Purple Heart. I have them on the wall right next to each other. But Rocco got the Silver Star too.”
“Yes, he was a hero,” I hear myself say. I know this is the kind of lie that keeps wars going, but now I also understand that this way of talking was invented because there is nothing else you can say to all the Mrs. Pizzuttis. I ask for Angela but she says she doesn’t live there anymore and gives me another phone number.
“Hello, Angela?”
“Joel!”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I knew you would call when you heard.”
“How’d you know?”
“Rocco always said it.”
“What?”
“Never mind. He talked about you a lot. So did I. When he got drafted I kept telling him to go to Canada and join Joel Bloom.”
“But he wouldn’t do it.”
“He just said that Major League Baseball wasn’t in Canada.”
“Yeah, he loved baseball.”
“Yeah, he loved it so much he was willing to kill Vietnamese people just so he could play.” Her voice was turning to that husky angry tone she used to have when she talked about the Kennedy assassination. “I think baseball and the military work hand in hand. They were the ones …”
I am not really listening. I’m thinking about Rocco, about how he could never bring himself to hurt a frog. I ask where she is living and she says, “Roxbury. I’m a social worker.”
“That’s great,” I say, and start thinking about how in my generation it will be the women who do all the interesting things while the men get drafted.
“It’s not that great. Hasn’t worked out like I thought it would. Can I come see you?”
I was expecting her. There was a doorbell ringing. I opened the door and she was standing on the stoop holding a suitcase, her black eyes burning through the icy air, and we both knew that she was never leaving.
It is funny the way when you see adults you knew as a kid, they look different. Angela had the same fiery black eyes and thick black hair on the verge of flying wild. But though she looked the same as she always had, I now realized that she didn’t really look at all like Rocco. In fact, she was stunning—thrillingly beautiful. How was it that I had never noticed this before?
She said that even after I moved to Canada, Rocco was always certain we would get together. “Rocco was like that,” she said. “He never doubted things. He knew he would make the major leagues. He was certain he wouldn’t get hurt in Vietnam.”
I am pretty much a Canadian now. There are rumors that Major League Baseball is going to expand, start new teams everywhere. Some people say there might even be one here in Toronto.
I heard that Rachel Apfelbaum married Donnie LePine. I never saw that coming. Then they went to law school together. I got one letter from Donnie but it didn’t say anything about Rachel. He did say that he had tried to volunteer for the army but they wouldn’t take him—“saw through my plan,” he said. I never hear from them. Maybe they’re embarrassed. Your best friend isn’t supposed to marry your girlfriend, even your ex-girlfriend. But it doesn’t matter to me. It all seems far away.
Stanley has come up here two other times for visits. He doesn’t seem any better. I hear from Dickey every once in a while. But I have my own life here and Haley seems a very long time ago.
Looking at the whole thing, I have to say that I’m proud that I wasn’t the German. That I took my stand and never hurt anyone. Except the time I punched Scaratini. I still feel bad about that.
But at least he was the only person I ever hurt. I have never killed any Vietnamese people. I feel good about that. I have never killed a German or a Japanese or a Korean. The day before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he talked about how people who didn’t stand up for anything were dead though they didn’t know it. I didn’t understand that at the time. But now I do.
I suppose I did hurt my family and I don’t feel good about that. I don’t have much contact with Sam. I am not sure if he is angry or if he just does not want to be seen having a connection to me. He did get a job with the McGovern campaign, one of the most catastrophic presidential runs in American history. McGovern campaigned against the war and only Massachusetts and Washington DC voted for him. Maybe Sam helped them carry Massachusetts. McGovern lost to Nixon, a man almost nobody likes, who kept insisting that if we bombed enough villages the Vietnamese would surrender. His campaign was caught burglarizing the Democratic Party offices.
Still, everyone voted for him. And the war goes on.
My parents write to me and my mother keeps sending Hebrew National salamis. She seems to think that I am lost on frozen tundra without salamis. So I am glad that they are coming to visit and can see what a good city Toronto is.
My mother brings me a box of salamis. I show them around Toronto—the theaters, the music, the lakefront. I show my mother that there are a lot of Jewish people in Toronto and a lot of Jewish food—much more than in Haley.
They are somber, as though a great tragedy has befallen me. I try to show them that I am all right. Someday someone of my generation will become president and we will all be pardoned. But I probably will never go back. Just because America forgives me does not mean I have to forgive America. Angela says she wishes she had left right after John Kennedy was killed.
Before my parents leave my father says to me in the same voice he used to use down in the shelter with the canned tuna, “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all this.”
But I’m not sorry at all. How often do you get a chance to stand for something? Refusing to go to war was actually one of the best moments of my life.
Angela and I don’t stay in Toronto. We move to Alberta to work with wolves that raise families and build communities in the pine forests, prowling the blue-rock snow-capped mountains killing elk, deer, and moose for the survival of their pack. But they treat their fellow wolves with love and the greatest respect. Sometimes they are suspicious of a wolf from another pack. But wolf packs don’t go to war with each other. Angela loves the wolves, loves their society, and claims she is still a social worker of a kind. We try to understand them. Sometimes we befriend them.
We are not going to forget or get over anything that happened. But for now we are tired of it all—tired of war and of trying to end it—just fatigued. And in protecting the wolves, misunderstood creatures struggling to survive in their violent but loving world, we begin to understand our world. Angela and I feel that we have been surrounded by war all our lives. Even now, far beyond the high crests of the Canadian Rockies, there is still war. But here we have found peace together. I think Rocco would have liked that.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, one of those “draft counselors” I wrote about; and to my good friend and publisher, George Gibson, who is the smartest baseball fan I know; and to Nancy Miller, who at last count has edited seventeen of my books—isn’t that some kind of record? Also my thanks to Emily Easton, Mary Kate Castellani, and all the people at Bloomsbury and Walker who have taken such painstaking care with this book. Thanks to Marian and Talia for understanding my unpopular ideas.
Also to the memory of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and more than a dozen other civil rights workers, millions of Vietnamese, and 58,267 Americans whose violent deaths filled my youth with a sadness from which I can never recover, a sadness that gives a wisdom that is at the heart of this book.
Also by Mark Kurlansky
NONFICTION
Hank Greenberg
The Eastern Stars
The Food of a Younger Land
The Last Fish Tale
Nonviolence
The Big Oyster
1968
Salt
The
Basque History of the World
Cod
A Chosen Few
A Continent of Islands
What?
ANTHOLOGY
Choice Cuts
FICTION
Edible Stories
Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue
The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories
TRANSLATION
Belly of Paris by Emile Zola
FOR CHILDREN
The Story of Salt
The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi
The Cod’s Tale
World Without Fish
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in November 2011 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in the USA in 2011 by Walker Publishing Company
a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
This electronic edition published in November 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © Mark Kurlansky 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Lyrics here from “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”; words and music
by Joe McDonald © 1965 Alkatraz Corner Music Co. Used by permission
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 2963 9
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Battle Fatigue Page 14