Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  Ethel Harvest Moon was one of a group of Indians who occupied the old prison on Alcatraz a couple of months after Woodstock, claiming that under the Constitution of the United States redundant federal land reverted to them, the indigenous people. They were still there, arguing the case well into 1970.

  Jack Feaver stood trial. The only one who did. As much of America was for him as against him, a fact on which he surely gambled. He became a cause célèbre. Said his piece, got a derisory two-year sentence and was out in ten months. His name remains a symbol. A by-word for mindless slaughter, a mnemonic for the shabby way we failed to back our boys in ’Nam. I, and the nation, have not heard from him since.

  A few weeks after it opened I went down to that cold, cobalt wall that is our monument to the Vietnam war, still clutching my snapshot of the New Nineveh Nine. The Quick—Notley, Al Braga, Lee ­Puckett—looking for the Dead—Stanley Mishkoff, Tod Foster, Bob Connor, Pete Chambers, Gus Gore, Marty Fawcett. I suppose I hadn’t really expected to find the last two there—they’d died at home. The other four I had, but they weren’t there either. It was as though they’d been erased from history. I stood by as guys of Huey’s generation traced out the names of the dead with fingertips outstretched and tears in their eyes and I looked in vain.

  William Colby returned from the field, crossed his Rubicon and became, exactly as Hammond had told me, Director of the CIA. There followed a much-vaunted cleansing of the agency stables in which few outside the CIA could believe.

  Abbie Hoffman killed himself five years ago. And I heard just the other day Jerry Rubin got hit by a car crossing Wilshire Boulevard—he died twelve hours later.

  My brother Huey never came home. Six weeks after he failed to show for induction two grey-suited FBI agents drove out to Bald Eagle and called on the old man.

  ‘We’re looking for Samuel Houston Raines.’

  ‘You found him.’

  ‘No, sir—we’re looking for a much younger man.’

  Sam reached for the phone, pulled a string for the first time since I’d got my head kicked in on the Freedom Rides, called his old pal in the Texas Hills, and fucked up his retirement—writing his memoirs, waiting for death, whatever.

  ‘Lyndon, get these pieces of shit off of my porch.’

  We none of us ever heard from the feds again.

  Lois paid for Huey’s college time in Toronto, and when Carter amnestied the draft dodgers in ’77 she begged him to come back and make his peace with Sam. He wouldn’t. Sam died without ever seeing Huey again. In his seventies the old man had planted vineyards and reaped a second fortune with his ‘Never Raines Texas Cabernet’—slogan on the bottle, ‘Never Raines But It Pours’. Still embarrasses the hell out of me every time I see it.

  Lois will be sixty-five this year. Her hair has dulled. Not much else has. When Rose died she urged me to come ‘home’. Two widows in that great glass mausoleum. I couldn’t do it, though for a while I seriously considered going back to live in the cabin—but then the Plains Historical Association, Society, Museum, whatever, approached Lois and asked if they could adopt it as some sort of state monument to open to the public at $5 a head on summer weekends. Lois passed the request on to me. I said OK.

  My brother Billy? God knows. A white-frocked saintly hobo of the backroads come to tell you life is meaningless?

  Me? Like I said, I live alone now. But then from this vantage point it seems to me I always have. I sit in Fish Bridge Park and listen to the rumble of the traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and once a week I will walk to the other side and gaze at Liberty from the Heights. No one whispers sweet heresies in my ear. The sound and the fury gone silent. A stream of white noise in the head that just seemed to turn off. And what would I not give to hear those whispers again? For a voice that would simply tell me where the next battle is to be found—a voice that would avert the inevitability of loss and make me feel that life need not always come to down to this—the emptiness of ease, the comfort of inaction. Oh Sweet Jesus, just whisper to me one more time.

  Geographical Note

  Occasionally I get accused of playing fast and loose with history. Whatever. With this novel, I’ll own up to having played slow and loose with geography, geology and time. I’ve compressed all three. The main story is strung out over about five months. If you add up the days and weeks my hero spends here or there, it’ll never make five months. Vietnam is a composite. The march undertaken by the New Nineveh Nine passes through a ‘sampling’ of most of the terrain Vietnam has to offer. Arizona—well, you’ll search the Chiricahuas for anything quite like Notley’s hideout. I threw in bits of geology and flora from New Mexico and Texas as well. Lubbock is Lubbock and Texas is pretty much Texas—but I wanted Mt Bald Eagle, a vast shale tower sitting on the plains. There isn’t one, so I made one up. A couple of years after, I was pleasantly surprised when, heading north to Amarillo, I found a tower actually existed, not on the Texas plains—I should be so lucky—but at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon a few miles outside Amarillo. I call this vindication—of a sort—a touch of ‘build it and he will come.’

  Acknowledgements

  There are plenty . . .

  Gordon Chaplin

  Marcia Gamble Hadley

  Patty Ewald

  Sue Freathy

  Ion Trewin

  Clare Alexander

  Rachel Leyshon

  Victoria Webb

  Mike Cochran

  Ray Robertson

  Phil Marchand

  Alexandra Anderson

  John Armour

  Sarah Teale

  Zoe Sharp

  Jerry Kearns

  Rex Weiner

  Dwight Hobart

  Zette Emmons

  Peter Blackstock

  Deb Seager

  Morgan Entrekin

  Sam Redman

  Frances Owen

  Allison Malecha

  &

  Arthur Cantor . . . who spent a lifetime in the hip hooray and ballyhoo, who housed me and argued the toss and made dreadful jokes while I wrote several novels up on West 72nd. Arthur died a few weeks before I finished this one. No one in the history of New York had a wittier, more literate landlord.