“I believe you,” Sara said. “I know you can do it. But ... we’re not going to rip the roof off—”
“Oh! No. Not till summer. Or late spring.”
“Phew! I could picture us in here without a roof. And Cheryl’d be saying, ‘I don’t know how you can stand it.’”
Bobby chuckled. “You’d have to snuggle against me all the time.” He pulled her closer.
“I’d do that anyway,” Sara said. “But you’re getting so thin.”
“Naw. I’ve been gaining some back ever since we got here.”
“How much?”
“I’m one fifty-five, now. Anyway, I want to ask Tony to take over the farm.”
“You think he’s reliable?”
“I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about those guys. In San Jose. I’ve been asking myself, what happened to them? Good men. Most of em. Did you know Tony was a platoon sergeant?”
“Are you going to ask some of them to live here?”
“All I know right now is I’ve got to do something. Put em to work.”
“Building solar collectors?”
“Um-hmm. The whole works. Collection, control, storage. Retrofits. New construction. Whatever we can sell. Someplace along the line they gave up. Remember Granpa used to say, ‘Never give up.’ These guys learned to give up. They learned to be helpless. They can learn to achieve. I’ve got to show you it on paper. I can’t keep it all in my head.”
“Bobby, where are they going to sleep?”
“Well ... maybe ... in the barn ...”
“Could you convert that old pig house ...”
“Hey, the little barn! That’s an idea. We could look at it in the morning. If ... um ... you know ... like if we changed the roofline ... I’m sure the foundation ... then separate the length into cubicles ... it’d be like the hootches we had over there. Like a low barracks or a bunkhouse.”
“I could go back to work. Linda says the school system’s expanding. But I’ll need my Pennsylvania certificate.”
“Me too. If Nittany Mountain will accept those courses I took in California, I think I’m only a few credits shy of my degree. And I’ve got to get my contractor’s license. General and plumbing.”
Sara laughed. “You mean you’re going to be a plumber!”
“Yeah.” Bobby chuckled.
“My husband the skinny plumber.” Sara tickled him.
Bobby wiggled away, grabbed her hands. “And a roofer,” he said. “If we’re going to embed the collector arrays we’ll need to be roofers, too.”
“I could be a farmer’s wife, a plumber’s wife, and a roofer’s wife all at once.” Sara worked a hand free.
“And you could run the school. You could teach them everything they didn’t learn in grade school. And everything they forgot.”
“Ooo! All these men.” Again Sara laughed.
“Yeah.” Bobby laughed with her. Then he asked, “Do you remember what Granpa said about the self needing minimum maintenance? About being able to expand beyond one’s self?”
“Um-hmm. Opening oneself to teach, to create, to love.”
“How can you teach someone to expand beyond his or her self?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you know,” Bobby said. “That’s why you’re such a good teacher. That’s what you were teaching those spoiled brats in San Martin. That’s what I hope you’ll teach here.”
By eight thirty the next morning Tony had the forge roaring and the first iron bar glowing. His shirt was off. Outside the temperature was five degrees Fahrenheit. Wind gusts buffeted, bringing in the cold wall, then the pressure backed up and the hot air about the furnace surged out—oscillating, purging like freezing baths and hot saunas except better because his activity was also purging, requiring 100 percent concentration on the furnace, the metal and the turbocharger. Even the artillery bursts of ice fracturing on the pond didn’t divert his attention; even Linda was gone from his mind.
“Hè,” Bobby shouted. He was bundled up in hooded sweatshirt, jacket, a scarf over his mouth and nose. “Hè.” He shouted the Lenape word for hello, one of the few local Native American words he’d learned, found in a file tagged Monsee-Lenape in Grandpa’s office. No response. Between the turbocharger, the furnace roar, the wind and the ice Tony didn’t hear him. “Hey Man! Tony!”
Tony snapped his eyes over, then immediately back to his work. “Yo!”
“When you can, take a blow. I’d like to go over the plan with you.”
“Be a while,” Tony shouted. He did not divert his eyes.
“That’s okay.”
“We should fit the hinges on the posts,” Tony bellowed. “That set’s done.”
“Looks great.”
For a while Bobby stood watching Tony heat the bar then withdraw it, lay it on the old anvil and whale on it with the peen hammer, methodically flattening and forming the end of the thick bar into a hawk’s talon—the one strap alone a week’s work. Then he left, inspected the old pig shed, returned, watched Tony in his concentration. Finally he shouted, “I gotta show it to you.”
Tony sighed, leaned back, withdrew the bar and laid it in the ash bin, then hit the blower switch. Immediately the turbo wound down, the roar of the furnace sank to nothing more than the creaking of the firebrick. Again the pond fractures could be heard. “You make coffee?”
“Yeah. And Sara made fritters with syrup.”
“I gotta get these last two finished and the gate hung before it’s time to set out the taps.”
“Yeah. And more.”
In the kitchen Bobby laid out parts of the plan. “The structural design of the solar collector is flexible. The more we learn, the better we’ll be able to make them. Interested?”
“Hey.” Tony shrugged. “If that’s what you want, Man.”
“We build one, sell it.” Bobby could see Tony was not excited. “Build two, four, eight, sixteen. Sell em cheap. Get the venture rolling.”
“Fine.”
“And the farm’s got to produce, too.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“No, I don’t mean the way it’s been. You know that stuff you were doing for Granpa?”
“Yeah.”
“Double it. Triple it. Sugarbush. Strawberries. Feed corn. Apples and pears. Maybe vegetables. Maybe some chickens.”
“And alfalfa?”
“Yeah.”
Tony looked to the side. “Get serious, Man. That’d take ten people.”
“A whole squad, huh?”
Tony shifted uncomfortably.
“Maybe grapes,” Bobby said. “Run em up the hill at the north end of the pond. Like they grow em in Sonoma.”
“What the fuck!” Tony pushed his chair back.
“You were really getting into it, for Granpa. Getting inta those journals.”
“One crop, Man. I just thought we could make money with strawberries. There’s no fuckin ...” Tony peered around, through the hallway to the living room, through the doorway to the dining room. He didn’t want to offend Sara or anger her by cursing where Noah could hear. “There’s no fuckin way.” His voice was low, dispirited; his eyes cast to the back door.
“Figure a way.” Bobby was intense, leaning toward him. “You be in charge.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Do it slow. Let it evolve.”
“Where you comin from, Man?”
“Could you do it if you had ten people?”
“Who the fuck’s goina—”
“Roof rats.”
That stopped Tony short. His face came up, eyes suspicious.
Bobby broke the silence. “Better ’n sleepin on roofs?”
“Maybe.”
“Vets. Only vets. You be in charge. It’s time we took care of our own.”
“Wait a fuckin minute.” Tony slid his chair back to the table, leaned in, picked up his coffee. “In charge a what?”
“Our farm. Your squad. Your platoon. You teach em how to farm. S
et em to work. Any income above expenses is for you and them to split. But it’s got to be done right.”
“How you goina get these guys, Man?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “One at a time. How are we goina do it?”
“Well—” Tony put his cup down, gestured with his hands, “I could put the word out. The bartender at the White Pines, Holtz, he might—Hey, wait a minute.”
“You’re on, Tony,” Bobby said. “We’re looking for homeless guys. Down-and-out guys. Guys we can help. We want to bring em here. Let em help us while we help them. You with me?”
Again Tony eyed Bobby. “What about the solar collectors?” he asked softly.
“Guy wants to farm,” Bobby said, “he farms. Guy wants to build, he builds.”
“What’s all that other stuff you got there?”
“This?” Bobby ticked the fat file folder on the table with his fingernail. “That’s the ... ah ... program. Just ideas. It’s not finished.”
“For farming and building?”
“Yeah. And for rehabilitating the crop.”
In the afternoon Bobby sat in Grandpa’s office, alone. The roar of the forge two stories down was his background music, Sara’s enthusiasm his sustenance. How had she phrased it? “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day,” she’d quoted the old proverb. “Teach a man to fish and he’ll be able to feed himself for a lifetime.” Then she had added, “But give him a cause and he’ll learn to fish and he’ll teach others to fish, too. That’s how one learns to expand beyond the self. Give him a cause.” With that she had kissed him and taken Noah back to the house, leaving Bobby alone with his clutter of ideas, books and reports, papers and outlines, flow diagrams and fiscal projections.
In his mind he had kicked things off exactly as he’d wanted. Now he was lost. He needed to envision the next step. Bobby restacked his program papers, began relaying them out. Taken separately, each general category was easier to understand. For a while he worked on questions: What do we want to do? How do we transform attitudes, develop minds, attain and maintain defensible, sustainable life positions? At the foundation of every economic system there are people—what microsystem is best suited to the High Meadow community?
Bobby shifted to the more concrete sub-subcategory of jobs—job counseling, portable job skills, training and apprenticeships, practice. Then to detoxification. Then to leadership. (“Even if they’d only made corporal, or PFC,” he’d told Sara earlier, “they’ve learned something about leadership; and leadership principles are the same whether in the military, in business, or even within a family.”)
Bobby returned to the overall outline. He felt stuck. How could he integrate all the parts? For a moment he envisioned a circle, but that was cumbersome. Then he saw a vertical cylinder made up of vertically separate and removable leaves, or files. That, he thought, would work but the cross-referencing would be a bitch. A computer might be able to do it, but you had to be a major corporation or a university to afford a computer. Stuck. He was stuck. On a clean sheet of paper he wrote, “Overcoming Stuckness—A Program for Veterans.” Two stories down the high whine of the turbocharger slowed, lowered, ceased.
At the forge Tony was having trouble with the claw. His concentration was off. His back was cold, his front hot. He donned a T-shirt and rustic leather vest, returned to the forge. He’d been steamrolled. He’d been steamrolled in the kitchen, had been steamrolled by the last half decade. Even if he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t seen the steamroller at all, ever, he’d been flattened. He wanted to resist. He had no desire to run the farm. He didn’t even want to talk. “Your squad. Your platoon.” What was this shit? “Take care of our own.” Hey, he’d done that. In San Jose. Hadn’t he been the Catcher? But he’d barely been able to take care of himself. His stomach felt tight, bloated. He shut down the forge, went back to his cubicle, climbed into his sleeping bag, pulled the pillow over his face to shut out all light. “Fuck it, Man,” he mumbled. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.” Again and again like a mantra, trying to drive the thoughts away, wanting to toke up, to drink, to mellow out, to vegetate with the boob tube, to dose himself out of the confrontation with Wapinski’s challenge. Better en the roof. What the fuck does he know? Nobody asks you nothin on the roof. Steamrolled, Man. Just fuckin flattened. “If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it.” Don’t go fuckin settin me up.
Bobby rose. How could he unstick himself? He needed a break. For some time he simply stared out the window at the graying sky and the fading landscape. Then he poked into old files, files he’d packed away more than five years earlier.
There was the Newsweek magazine from June 9, 1969, the issue he’d found in the airport on his way home. He glanced at the cover, flipped open to the article and photo of Dong Ap Bia, Hamburger Hill, and was swept with feelings—disappointment, excitement, revulsion, nostalgia. He wondered about the men who’d served, about Tyrone Blackwell Dorsey with whom he’d lost contact.
The Nixon Administration, rattled by Congressional criticism over the battle, sought last week to disclaim responsibility for stepping up the pace of the war....White House aides insisted to reporters that there had been no escalation of military operations ... since President Nixon took office.... As with many arguments about the Vietnamese war, the truth in this case seemed to be ... elusive....
Again Wapinski was revolted by the article. In retrospect of Saigon’s fall, he found it even more abhorrent. As he looked at the photograph, he thought of the sacrifices of so many; thought of the men who’d become, in an instant, his men; thought of the cause for which the sacrifices had been made. He skimmed the article. In the back of his mind he was thinking about stuckness, about Sara’s “Give them a cause. That’s how people learn to expand beyond the self”; about criticism, responsibility and achievement; about John Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. In 1963 President Kennedy had talked about “America’s stake in Vietnam.” He had said South Viet Nam was “a proving ground for democracy in Asia. ... If this democratic experience fails ... then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy” to Asians. Senator Kennedy had countered in 1969, “even before the battle was over” (Newsweek), by characterizing Bobby Wapinski’s sacrifice and the cause for which he had made that sacrifice as an “outrage,” as “senseless and irresponsible,” as “symptomatic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention.”
Wapinski clenched his teeth. The political, the controversial, was mixed and muddled with memories of the repeated assaults, of the WIAs who’d been left behind. What had become of them? Bobby squeezed his eyes shut. To sacrifice, he thought. To expand beyond one’s self. To expose one’s self. The country had committed us, had given us a cause greater than ourselves and we expanded to a higher level, to defend freedom and establish democracy in Southeast Asia. Then the country withdrew its commitment, denied the cause, devalued the sacrifice and said, at best, we were only fighting for ourselves. That in turn caused the collapse of our ability to expand beyond our selves, caused us to shy from exposure, to isolate ourselves in our fears.
In retrospect Alsop, in that same six-year-old issue, had been right.
What the Communist side is proposing, of course, is a Popular Front government, precisely patterned on the popular fronts established under Soviet sponsorship after World War II, as a prelude to total communist control. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the distinguished historian [described] ... the process as consisting of three stages: “Government by a genuine coalition of parties of the left and left-center, government by bogus coalition, and a final stage in which the bogus coalition was transformed into a monolithic block ...”
For Bobby there was a flash of clarity and the fog of neopolitical, historical interpretation.
Bobby took a new sheet of paper. “To become unstuck,” he wrote, “make a decision.” Again he paused. Perhaps this was not the right approach, he thought, but he realized it did not matter. To be stuck on theory or form was like attempting to decid
e, in the heat of a firefight, which weapon to use—thumper or M-16. One indeed might be superior but debate could make the point moot. There were people to care for. Practicality would have to dominate theory while theory was being developed.
He smiled, felt satisfied. Make a decision. That would work. In the outline under Personal he wrote, “Pursue Elation.” That’s important, he thought. “Without the pursuit of elation, responsibility, decisiveness, and self-authorization atrophy. Elation from expansion is the real aim of self-fulfillment. That is what satisfies. Being filled with our causes. When a cause is accepted a person will do anything, sacrifice anything. A man will assault a fortified enemy hilltop eleven times. This is grunt psychology. Debase the cause and you deny the pursuit of elation. Total debasement produces irresponsibility, indecisiveness, helplessness, stuckness, and resentment. In the wake come the disempowered, the indefensible, the unsustainable, the self-pitying, the dregs.”
Again Bobby paused. The potbellied stove had cooled, the sky had blackened. He rose, closed the thermal curtains on the bay window. Then he sat, pondered for a few more moments, grabbed another sheet of paper. In block letters he wrote: “WAS THE CAUSE JUSTIFIED? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? DID SOMEONE, SOMEHOW, GET TO OUR MINDS?”
The January thaw arrived almost as if it were scheduled. Beneath the snow cover rivulets trickled, in depressions puddles formed. The warm temperatures continued for ten days—above freezing each day, seldom dropping below twenty degrees at night. On Groundhog Day it rained. In the house Sara threw a “party” for Josh, and Noah, clinging to him, “cruised” for the first time. By midnight in the hill country the rain turned to snow and the snow stuck. At dawn, under a clear sky, Sara beamed to Bobby that the entire glittering, fluff-coated world was a winter wonderland.
An hour later Bobby and Josh walked to the tractor garage. Tony was up, out. The day was magnificent. “You’ve done it again, Lord,” Bobby muttered quietly. “Absolutely perfect.” He walked to the little barn, wished that Noah were with him, that his son could walk in the snow, or cruise holding Josh’s thick hair. Surrounded by this beauty, with Sara and Noah secure, inside, Bobby thought, Dear God, you’ve given me this day, this beautiful day. I don’t need any more.
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