Chapter 9: Day of surrender
“Order anything you want. Make this last meal a good one.” His brother Larry beckons the waitress back. “We'll want drinks all around.”
It’s only ten in the morning but who is she to question their time for drinking? Lately she's found more people drinking after breakfast. These four look oddly agitated, nervous and secretive. They make her feel that something dreadful is astir.
“I don't think I should drink,” Jared says. “This day's already trippy for me. Just order for yourselves.”
Eddie shifts in his seat, seeking comfort for his gangly frame. He's ten years Jared's senior and even taller but not athletic. He grew up nicknamed Rubberband. Once comfortable in his twists and turns he speaks to Jared.
“That might not be a bad idea. But you also might not taste good booze for several years. Maybe just a beer?”
Jared shakes his head no. Eddie checks the menu and tells the waitress he'd like a martini. Larry orders a double scotch and adds that he'll take the crab meat omelet. Eddie—second son and three years younger has always been Larry’s “follower”—picks the menu back up, looks at it briefly and seconds Larry's order. Their sister Marian, the eldest, has been uncharacteristically quiet so far this morning. When seated she immediately popped three aspirins, inhaled a full glass of water, scanned the menu and put it down. Ready before the others, she has waited till asked.
“A Rusty Nail. A side order of the lasagna—just a taste.”
The three then look at each other, waiting for Jared to order. He just can't get his mind around food. Yet, he feels that he has to keep the form of this day intact.
“Okay, let's see . . . hmmm . . . I'll do thirds on the crab meat and, well, sure okay, just for you Eddie, I'll take a Hamm's draft.”
After the waitress departs, the foursome bends inward as if someone called a huddle. Larry, the shortest in the family except for Marian, has been chosen by his brother and sister as quarterback. He’s the oldest male, thirteen years Jared's senior, round though not fat, and by far the most articulate and smoothest. When he's not around, his siblings refer to him as “Slick.”
Larry has prepared their case with the same disciplined rigor that earned him his position as vice president of 3M's financial planning. With an eye-check of his confederates, he begins.
“I know you gave me some opinions on the matter before but I want you to reassess the pluses and minuses. The pluses outweigh the minuses if you go to Canada. It's not too late to leave the country. We've researched the mechanics of this for some time and there's a private plane and sufficient money to get you there before sunset.”
“Right,” Eddie cuts in, much to Larry's chagrin, and pressed by his need to elaborate and so convince, strikes an authoritative tone, “we've set it up with several influential relatives so you won't have any problems getting landed immigrant status or a job. In fact you can continue to teach theology if you want. There's a small college outside of Toronto that would be interested in you.”
Marian doesn't comment, she merely nods when Eddie ends. She's hoping that Jared will be snared by the hook, this time.
Jared rests back into his chair, momentarily tilting it upwards, searches for his feelings. Deep inside him there’s a desert, windless.
“As ever I really appreciate your concern and I'm a little flabbergasted you actually got into specifics, but no. No, it's both too late and I'm just too damn tired. I don't think I could put up with the strains and hassles of exile.”
“Strains and hassles!” they spit out in unison, but Larry takes charge again.
“What do you think it will be like for us when you're in prison? Do you think it will be any easier on the family, on Mom, if you spend five years locked away? What can offset her five years of loss? Has that hit you yet? Five years!”
Jared exhales a windy sigh that almost deflates him. “Dig it, man, five years—sixty months, two hundred and sixty weeks, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six days, counting leap year. Do I need to do minutes and hours?”
The others withdraw, embarrassed by their blunder. Larry suppresses his fury. He had tallied these numbers and planned to use them against Jared.
Larry sips his water then redirects their attack. “Look, try and see it as a balance sheet—with assets and liabilities. For Christ's sake, Jared, you've posted enough trying times during the past few years. Just the trial itself skewed everything onto the liability side. Every effort at bringing up Vietnam was ‘Objection sustained.’ And at the conclusion—I'm sure you’ve memorized this because I have—‘You gentlemen are worse than the common criminal who attacks the taxpayer's pocketbook. You gentlemen strike at the foundation of government itself.’ Now you know that that script was written by Tricky Dick himself. As was the sentence, the max, five years, the longest ever slapped on white anti-war radicals. All that topped with a ramrodded appeal that was instantly denied. Now doesn't that tell you something? Face it, they've closed you guys down! Wiped you out! You're in a political Chapter 11!”
All pause and as if on cue sip some water.
Then Marian makes her plea. Actually declares it, pitches it. For Marian is a no-nonsense charge nurse in County General’s ER. She’s used to giving tough orders and boding no deviance from their implementation. As the oldest of seven, survival dictated that she take command or else the world would run amuck! Her temperament matches her looks. Although it irritates her no end, their mother never tires of commenting—meaning it as a compliment, a sign of her specialness—“Marian must have inherited every German gene hidden in the roots from my side of the family tree!” To the point, she shows nothing of the fiery, Gaelic spirit that touches all her siblings, especially Jared.
Marian is in awe of Jared but it’s awe tinged with fear—a fear rimmed with respect but also with a gut-wrenching foreboding. From him she always expects the unexpected. Curiously, in him she meets more of herself than in the others. Although she can't see this common ground, it’s what drives her fear of him. Actually she believes, and has often stated, that she and Jared are polar opposites. Despite this blindness, they share a bond of soulfulness for which neither has words. Of all the brothers and sisters they feel that they are the farthest apart although they are near soul mates.
Today, she came determined to save him from himself.
“Jared you're our little brother. I remember pushing you around in a stroller. Look, listen, we bring both an objective and a very personal request. You're our hero but you don't have to be a martyr. You must take us up! Being in Canada will give you plenty of time to rest up, write, and find new ways to work against the war. That's true and you know it. We know it. I know it. Get yourself back on track!”
Jared replies quietly, in a deep, exasperated tone. “Do you really think that going it this far doesn't merit my going all the way? None of the others are planning to split. And—you couldn't be asking me to act like Corey?”
Rhythmically, the three lean back and away. The waitress comes and sets their drinks down. A beer glass stands tall and frosty in front of Jared. Its icy side casts thin spars out into the dim lighting. The sparkling, for some reason, cheers him up. This sparse reverie is broken by the weighty silence of his siblings.
So, his mind monologues, so the questions are asked right till the last step Inside!
Placing his right hand on the cold beer glass, Jared—eyeing each in turn—speaks to them from his gut.
“Larry, Eddie, Marian, I love you guys. You know that—” but he can't continue. He clutches.
What is for him a testimony of heartfelt words evokes a torrent of repressed frustrations from the others.
“Jared,” Larry forays, “aren't you ever going to straighten out your chaotic life? Are you just going to abandon your calling as a theologian? You convinced me that being a theologian during these times means more than being a hero or a martyr or a political heavy. But now you’re losing your nerve! You're
backing away from your biggest challenge at the last moment. You're throwing away the fruits of your own and our family's lifelong investment in your education and service to the Church. How can you be so self-centered?”
Eddie, riding the crest of Larry's heat, swoops in. “Christ! Larry, stop treating him with kid gloves.” He puts a hard grip on Jared's left arm. “You're the youngest, you were always Dad's pride and joy. He held you up to the rest of us. But he created a monster. A monster who broke his heart!”
The cruelty of his words boomerang and jolt Eddie himself, but his long-suppressed emotions numb him and he calls for the verdict.
“Don't deny it. Why do you think just the three of us came here today?” And he says to himself, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Larry, believe me! “Maybe not Delores—she out of state— but many in the family have written you off, like Thomas—your own brother—they're just sick with your narcissistic strutting and pious self-justifications.”
Thomas is a fascist pig, flits through Jared’s mind, Vietnam really screwed him up!
Eddie is tearing into a vein of dark gold. “We've all had to live with what your leaving the seminary did to Dad.” He pauses, knows the powder-keg he is close to igniting. Questions whether to say what will follow, then surges ahead “Face it—it killed Dad!”
Marian bolts and bristles, rattling the table and three water glasses fall over, two shattering on the floor. She is hiss and fury. “Stop this! Stop it, you two. This is not the time for that!”
The crash and tingle brings the waitress rushing from the kitchen. She expects to see a disturbance, but all she observes are her sole customers kneeling on the floor, picking up pieces of glass. As she sweeps up the shards and wipes the table, the four settle back down and with composure ask for another round. She can't figure out what’s caused the rift. “I thought they were having a business meeting,” is what she tells her boss.
“Eddie,” Marian states and enunciates in her stern “little mother” tone, “Eddie, you've never understood Jared. You're just frightened by what he's done.”
Eddie, chastised, sits simmering in his confused emotions. When he's confused, his habit is to wrap his long, long arms around himself. They are so long, almost unnaturally so—truly extraordinary in their double-jointedness—that his hands lock. No observer would question why his playmates teased, “Rubberband ! Rubberband!”
Larry grabs hold of what Eddie has unleashed but twists its anger into sugar. Ever the master tactician.
“Geez, Eddie put it kind of sharply there. But you do have to admit he has some half-truths. Dad was really blown away by your leaving the sem. You might've had all the right intentions but don't you see how wrong you can be about what effects your actions can have on others?”
Larry’s manipulating an unresolved tension among the brothers. Only his fearsome love for Jared protects him from the poison released by tapping into the sinister heritage of all the sons—patricide. “Who killed Father?” could never be directly asked, for it was a slaying question.
Larry deftly uses Eddie's tactless rendition of the mythic event to trick Jared into doubting himself. To surrender himself to the wisdom of the family. Eddie's thrust drew blood. Larry dons the mask of the smiling, benign Big Brother.
“In your defense, I think he was just reliving what he always believed was his own failure—his own leaving the seminary when he was a kid.”
Larry touches Jared's fuzzy cheek. “Don’t feel too bad about all that.” As he does their food arrives and they begin to eat. A jittery calm settles around them.
To Larry's dismay, Jared eats wordlessly. His trick has not worked. Damn!
Larry nervously strokes his own smoothly shaved cheeks and adjusts his tie several times in sequence. Then he uses his napkin to mop beads of sweat from his forehead and upper lip. After an endless string of such taut, mute moments, Larry puts his fork down and with conscious affect stares at Jared.
“It wasn't easy for me to accept your self-appointed role as ‘theologian.’ I used to think all your talk about being a marked man, a condemned man, was romantic bullshit. But I've come to accept your vocation. I've reassessed all of my past judgments and actions. Now I accept that you’re a genuine laborer of the Gospels—but an odd one. One who doesn't have the option to turn back.”
He continues, “I can't count the times you’ve ramrodded me with that biblical phrase, No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God. That's why I'm confused by the three-sixty you’re doing on us.”
Jared can definitely appreciate Larry's point of view. Canada had been an option, once. At a time when he convinced himself that he was too valuable to the Resistance to go to prison.
“Pride,” the Novice Master emphasizes over and over to the new group of novices, “pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. For Pride wears the mask of Humility. And it was Pride that made Eve first sin!”
When deep in his cups, Jared, himself, has found the points that Larry's making to be sound. In such drunken reveries he argues and plots for a life Underground—on the lam. “What good am I in prison? My task is to preach the word about Peace, to stop the war. After the war, then prison. Maybe.”
But he could not then or now be comforted by after. So he listens silently, cloaked with a heavy resignation.
Marian recasts her call for action. Her body is tense, her arms wave back and forth as she speaks, pivoting at her elbows. She’s a human tank, firing at will.
“Look, you must go to Canada. If you don't, nothing makes sense! Why set yourself up, let them render you impotent by putting you in jail?”
She pauses, keenly aware of the target she wants to hit. “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me, nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.”
Jared flinches as she quotes. He moves with instinctual riposte to foil her strike.
“Oooh!” He clutches his heart and fakes falling into his plate. “Got me! Brilliant! You're hanging me by my own words! Ah, treachery of memory! Great! Fitting. A renegade preacher hoisted on his own petard. Dear, dear . . . death by scriptural quotation!”
Jared surveys their eyes. There is no mirth. The intensity of their fear truly matches his.
“Look, the deal I cut with Jesus was negotiated long before I was born. I know you three have a hard time with my interpretation of all this but I know it to be true. In Baptism I was anointed. I am condemned.”
He says “condemned” as if describing an apple as “red.”
“I must do what I do and do it thoroughly or I will perish.”
Eddie blanches. He’s heard this monomaniacal statement before—but at this moment it sounds fairly true. Can it be so? He struggles with the question. It’s infested with wild terror.
Marian knows that Jared is right but she doesn’t want to accept it, not affirm it, not right now. Despite her self-control, his words force her to flash back to her little brother's First Communion. How that day had affected the family! The littlest and last of the seven. Jared, dressed in white, small and skinny in body, seemed wrapped in an angelic aura. He’d been so excited about the day. His first day with Christ. So earnestly had he memorized his Catechism. So piously had he prepared himself in prayer and penitence that the Sisters were drawn to contact the family. “We think Jared will be a priest someday. He has great promise.”
Great promise—how the family whispered and talked about that when Jared was asleep. They all knew that Jared had the mark on him. None of his three brothers had shown such an interest at such an early age. True, as with most Irish Catholic boys, all had had a long talk with the Vocation Director, but not until the eighth grade. Here Jared was only seven, ending his Age of Innocence, and at Mother Superior’s insistence, the area’s vocational director for aspiring seminarians made a special visit to their home.
Larry observes the mist rise in Marian’s eyes, watches it form the slightest of droplets upon the ridge of her
cheeks. She dabs at them quickly, nervously. Larry reflexively tightens the controls over his own internal feelings. He loves his brother very much. He knows his other brothers and sisters do, despite themselves. Who could doubt Marian? Yet he can't shake the foreboding that this is a truly foolish act, a reckless expenditure of life's non-recoverable assets.
As Jared grew into Resistance—first as a conscientious objector, then draft resister, and now draft raider—Larry escalated his assessment of the element of risk from “manageable” to “unnecessary exposure” to the current “foolish.” Jared's actions forced him to stretch his own beliefs concerning what is morally acceptable. His best instincts tell him to cut his losses and walk away from this madman, but he just can't do that.
“Look at it this way, Jared. If this was a matter of great consequence—say, that the war would end tomorrow if you went to prison—or say that a great theological doctrine was going to be promulgated in response to your action—then I could see the merit of your sacrifice. But all you're able to do now is dramatize your political viewpoint.”
“Right. Right,” Eddie opines, his brooding over, “they've taken the moral high ground away from you.” He follows with a non sequitur, “How many young guys have resisted and still the war isn't over?” In Eddie's mind, quantification validates action.
Larry tactically waits several moments before going at Jared again. “You know, you're just being Irish about all of this. Bad-tempered and mule-headed stubborn. You're being arrogant about your theological interpretation of what you're doing. Look, I heard theology justify what I did in the Korean War. I heard priests tell us that killing the Commies made God happy! Nothing—none of the slaughter, the terror in the eyes of the women and children uprooted by our bombings—nothing changed their theological certainty!”
Larry's stories about Korea never fail to fascinate Jared. His imagination plays them out like John Wayne films. Larry and John Wayne—Jared gets them mixed up at times. So this line of talk taps his attention.
Larry keeps going. “I'm beginning to think you don't want to leave because no one else has picked up your line. Who else talks about destroying draft files and offices as sacramental acts? How is it you phrase that exactly? ‘Sociopolitical sacramental acts,’ right? I haven't heard any of your friends talk that way. It hasn't become a flag for the radical Jesuits. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I see you as I saw those chaplains—you simply don't want to go to Canada because it would shatter your theology of Resistance. Your raid would be reduced to a simple act of political resistance—a highly ethical stance. I don't think you could handle that!”
Larry has Jared right where he and the others want him. But his slickness is not lost on Jared. In his mind he is crediting his brother for staging such a fine performance. Logic. Point and counterpoint. Assets and liabilities. Shit, Larry must be pleased as punch!
Despite all this, Jared is royally pissed. You fucker! is what he wants to say but he doesn't.
Larry has swooped and torn the lid right off one of Jared's most private secrets. Just like Char so often does. But Jared, as ever, is quick to parry, using his self-deprecating wit as a shield of defense. “Yeah, Big Bro, that's me—narcissistic, self-centered, spoiled, wild-assed and wild-eyed—a fumbling innocent whom everybody wants to help! If I'm so screwed up, why not just let prison do its job on me. Maybe I will be rehabilitated!”
Eddie misses Jared's mock message and says with a touch of macho, “Maybe he has a point there! Like the army made you a man, eh, Larry?”
Larry winces at that insidious slogan, for only he of all the brothers knows the reality, the kiss of evil that lies behind it. Contrary to Eddie's intent, his words make Larry more desperate to get Jared to desert.
“Hear me, Jared, I'm ashamed. I am ashamed of you! You have so much promise and you're so damn smart but you're taking the coward’s way out, fleeing the field of battle. This is not what I know you are up to.”
“Up to?” groans Jared. His fists tighten. “Up to?” He slaps the phrase back at the three. “Aw, c'mon, for Christ's sake, you guys, gimme a break. It'll be just hours before I'm locked up and you want me to remove myself from all I've been doing for years? Up to? Shit, I've been handling that criticism for ages. Spare me! We've run it down before.”
Eddie breaks back in, unable to restrain himself. Arms flailing like a jellyfish in flight he speaks from confusion, from bitterness mingled with fear and a curious hope. “The life you've been living, the life of a teacher and a theologian, is pure bullshit. It's a deadening way of living. Day by day giving people words on which to hang their social sanity and go out to exploit and war against others. Believe me, it’s true—you give people a vision, a justification for war. All this ‘nonviolence’ crap—hell, you preach it and they make someone an enemy. The Establishment, right? Don't you see, you've been snookered? Don't you see, they hear what they want to hear? The congregation is fickle! It blows with the wind. You've been duped into thinking that vast crowds of people have been following you. You've begun to believe your own underground press—that there is a counterculture.”
Eddie presses both arms onto the table. Rigid. Jared recognizes this habit. When the arms stop whirling about Eddie is about to say something he feels strongly about. “Take my word for it. People are people. Nothing ever changes. Nonviolence is just another excuse for subtler forms of violence!”
Jared: “If that's true, then no one should do anything?”
Eddie: “No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that . . . that when your dream breaks down, get another dream. Don't hang on to broken dreams. Broken dreams are what nightmares are made of!”
Marian pounces with indignation. “You're just a real stupid jerk, Eddie. I should've let you drown in the bathtub years ago!” She turns to Jared, clearly moved by deep affection, but it’s all carried in her eyes. Her voice is dry, almost academic.
“Your trial, Jared, the public witness—that's something. I realized it the first time I heard you preach. I realized that all you had previously done as an academic was to carve bits of words from books and glue them back into yet another book. Like model airplane building. But I know that just can't be what it's all about for you.
Lord, Jared, when you preach, then I know the Presence. Then I can feel the meaning of Jesus's words take deep in my heart's blood! You’ve just got to understand . . .”
The gush of emotion sends her words in all directions and once again ties down her tongue.
Larry positions himself into the split fracture of time. He’s now beyond desperate. He’s being driven by a need so subterranean that he will never understand his guilt over failing to get Jared to desert to Canada. He tears the short end of an envelope, taps it, unfolds a letter. The paper is old, yellowed, with frayed edges.
“Believe me, I didn't know if I'd read this, but it’s something you wrote to me when you gave up your Conscientious Objector status and burned your draft card.
The war is not an academic matter. Yes, research is done on campuses and policy is determined by intellectuals but war itself is the abandonment of words, it is the step beyond into blood. A warrior doesn't carry a book with him, he carries his body and soul into the battle. He wagers his limbs and eyes against the limbs and eyes of the enemy. War is the enactment of the word, just as Christ is the enactment of the Word of God. Christ is peace, the word peace. War is the Devil made flesh. It is hatred and evil. When I preach the gospels I know this, know this, because a hand, yes, an actually sensate hand touches my head and my heart and my bowels. This hand heals me, strengthens me, and shakes me. Challenges me. Taking a stand against the war is not merely a matter of shuffling words, of allowing the ruling powers to let you use your words, chanting “Peace now!” Shit, I wish it was that easy.
As Larry reads, Jared's words fly around the room, circling back to draw them together.
Dealing with war means getting into the blood. Truly getting the blood on your hands and into your
eyes and caught in your breathing. Dealing with the war is not getting deferments or people to sign protest statements. It's getting into the blood. And here in this country, now, it means destroying the military system. Means ripping out its heart. Means robbing files. And destroying research centers. And encouraging desertion. And working, working hard to pick up the tempo of nonviolent sabotage. Oh, Christ, what does it take to make this clear?
Larry settles the pages on the table, neatening them as his executive habits demand.
“I want you to desert!” He articulates the sentence word by word as if there was a magic behind, linking them all together. He says it and as he does he hears it echo in that deep part of him where little has entered since Korea.
Jared's head sags, lowers into his shoulders. Without voice: Here I am standing on the platform as the train comes in and people—my family!—are still asking me whether I want to go. Can't you see that I can't but go? Can't you see that? That the war is not over. That the Resistance is only begun, only the first thoughts acted on? That I must go further inside the belly of the Monster? I must be eaten by the Devil. I must be intimate with evil. That unless I experience this, I will never be free? Yes, fucking yes, it is the curse of my generation to suffer such intimacy with evil. To dance so nakedly before the ravisher's eyes. Accept it: Our lives are only and ever ones of Resistance. There is no peace. There is not even the rumor of peace. The Day of the Abomination is on us. Our wandering has no end.
But all Jared can muster in memorable response to Larry is a softly mumbled mutter. Nothing intelligible. Just a fist of muffled grunts.
Larry can't stifle the wailing love in his heart. He wants to protect Jared, to whisk him away from the prison danger—it's my role!—but he can't. Jared won't let him. At the same time, he’s pained by the contempt for Jared that lingers a bit too precariously at the edge of his heart. Always, what Jared names as acts of freedom and conscience, Larry struggles with as disobedience.
In some ways, for Larry, only his dreams permit a counter scene to be enacted. He’s shutting a jail cell door behind Jared. It closes with a metallic thud. Clang! Larry pockets the key and walks back to Control.
After this dream, something howls in terror and Larry wakes. He must cross himself and pray if sleep is to come.
The four have eaten—food and words, images and emotions. They are filled and depleted. Each has wound down into a hard silence. The waitress came and cleared the table during Larry's reading. She’s been invisible to them. She noticed that they did not notice her. She’s perplexed by what is happening. Disturbed, she forgets to ask them about dessert.
As she leaves their table, it’s as if another presence has just arrived and joined them. Truly, a presence touches each one with a kiss on the cheek. The four look at one another and as one spectral eye behold him now present with them. What more could any of them say? Why should anything else be said?
Eddie is the one most clearly aware of the change. He knows that familiar presence. It’s their Dad. He was about to speak but the presence alarms and overwhelms him. He’s not one to surrender to tender moments but this he cannot control. He begins to weep, ever so lightly and softly. The others notice.
Larry is unnerved by Eddie's tears. He fears a breakdown into maudlin sentimentality. Artfully, he seeks to regain the moment by moving center stage with a toast.
“Let me speak for our collective heart.” He lifts his cocktail, holding it a short distance in front and motions with it to all three. He offers, “A toast to ourselves. A toast to the struggle that is our family. To the memory of Dad who loved all of us so deeply and who is here in our hearts, and—” the solemnity of the memory is lighten by Marian's completion—“to Mom, who like all good Irish lassies is in church right now lighting candles for her wee one!”
Each glass to the center of the table, there met by the other three. “A toast of hope. That we may all be together in common heart again soon.”
With this swing in their mood they call the waitress back. More drinks are ordered and consumed. The boys burn offerings of cigar. During this time Eddie talks about his kids and how they are adjusting to living in a rural Iowa community. Marian reconfirms her long-desired hope that all four will someday create a family restaurant. Ever the Town Crier, Eddie checks his watch as he drains his third martini. “It's one o'clock . . . almost time, no?”
Jared has never worn a watch but the whole day has felt like one thirty, the Time of Surrender. When he awoke and rose to dress he felt the temporal demand of surrender. Time is curious today. Each moment feels auspiciously proper as if self-aware of its service to him on this final sweep of freedom. In appropriate response he acknowledges that the clockwork mechanism is setting his life's course into its turnings, and with that sense of relief that comes to those completing a long, long journey, he lifts his hands as if to sign a benediction and says, “Right, guys, I think we should walk down there.”
The four stand up together, don coats together, walk out together, almost stride in cadence down the city mall together. Nearing the Federal Building, a cluster of well wishers comes into sight.
“Looks like some people came anyway,” Marian comments. All knew—like Sean the week before—that Jared and Matt had requested that no one be there when they surrendered. Each wants the day to be his own. A day with family and loved ones. A day of personal meditation. However, as is the case with political situations, some had not heard and so they came. Rather small in number—so few that compared to the swell that could have been assembled they look apologetic.
Jared is sure that the Feds will once again interpret the small group as a sign of a debilitating, waning interest in the Resistance. But he doesn't want to think about that. Instead, he walks through the crowd touching faces, holding arms, kissing lips and hugging.
Several TV cameras are recording the event. A cluster of newsmen break as he comes by, each reporter soliciting comments. Jared doesn't feel like saying much. After all, after these years, what has he left to say? Most of the media people know him, a majority have become friendly over time. But no one has ever had the guts to “take on the System” as he constantly prods them to. No one has ever drawn Cronkite out into the open, pinned “Uncle Walter” with the true meaning of his, “And that’s the way it is . . .” No one has spent time in the streets with him struggling with nonviolent Resistance to the rulers of the Warrior State. Not one has thus seen, through that discipline, the militarization of their own voice.
Who among them would name themselves “Good Soldiers”? Yet despite it all, there had been small victories. The initial “Commie baiting” of the early coverage became tempered through personal contact. How soon do you think the war would end if you guys stopped doing damage control and exposed the government for what it's worth? How many body bags has your cowardice produced? But he never says that.
This day, Jared merely utters the bland, “Yeah, man, I'm feeling fine. It's a great day isn't it? Hope to see you when I get out.” Among them, he is looking for Burston. He would talk with Burston. “Is Burston here?” Jared asks one, then another. No answer.
Burston's just another casualty of the war, man.
Several of the supporters are part of a local “guerilla theater” street troupe. For years they have provided a “people's theater,” commonly acting on street corners, providing a creative outlet for radical anti-war sentiment and biting satire. Right now, their “Hevy Gunz” takes the meaning of the day to its symbolic heights. They march around with protest signs—which in itself is certainly not unusual—however, these signs only have pictures of bugs on them!
As they march, they say nothing, which is highly unusual. Instead of their customary chatter, preaching and demagoguery, today they mime their protests. The absurdity of their signs is highlighted by this weird muteness.
They perform under the banner, “Thanks for the Pie!” Two who do not carry banners present themselves cloaked and painted as De
ath. It’s a riotous mix of gloom and the absurd, effecting a release from the somberness of the Federal monolith before which they perform. Their message is the message war conveys, that “Humans are only insects!”
But no one has to say this, not today. Idiotically, Jared knows that the Feds and others of the Warrior mentality are scratching their heads, baffled and bewitched, not getting the message. The tone of the mime fits Jared heart and spirit to a tee. It etches a smile on his soul.
One reporter cuts out and corners his two brothers. He wants to know how they feel about Jared's going to prison. Eddie has become so uptight that all he can do is peer darts at the questioner. He stands rigid, arms folded, shielding his heart.
Larry reacts hastily. His stifled energies find release in a blurt that shocks him with its self-disclosure. “How do I feel?! Christ, how do you think I feel? My brother's going to prison for being a nonviolent person. I . . . I killed people—and got a medal for it! My brother's being locked up and taken away from me and my family because he doesn't want to kill. How the hell do you think I feel? I feel ugly. I feel angry. I feel . . . I feel . . .” His voice cracks. “I feel so damn proud of Jared. I love him. He's my brother. How else do you think I feel?”
None of these comments will reach the paper. The reporter knows that there’s an FBI lock on making these guys look like some kind of heroic anti-heroes. He covered the trial, has been to Resistance parties, has listened to Jared preach—more, knew him when walls bore the cry, “Hang the fag Pinkos! Death to The Four!”
His reporter instincts drew him to this event. There’s true drama here. Humans laughing and weeping. Families broken but loving. But, so what? He knows that the only story they'll approve will mutilate the day's truth and beauty. No doubt, sure, there's a great American story here, he chides himself, but only the historians will ever put it in print.
A smattering of clapping draws attention to Matt walking up the sidewalk towards the crowd. His ex wife is at his side. Matt feels and shows little emotion when he sees the crowd. Neither anger nor peace. He simply desires to begin the time so that it will end.
Jared has only seen Matt twice since jail. Both times Matt has refused to recount any part of the memory. Jared has had to accept that Matt has no need to relive those events. That somehow, through his own way, whatever happened, he has handled it.
As Matt walks up to Jared, a guitar strums and a single voice begins singing. It’s a song that the straggling flock picks up. It’s a hymn of The Movement, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” They sing off-key and the strumming is erratic. Jared is warmed, however, by its faithfulness to itself.
“Matt,” Jared whispers, “Matt, when do you think we should go? Do you want to stay here and rap? Do you want to speak to the press?”
Matt nods a no. On this point Jared knows how his ever-placid brother in crime feels. His worldview is unencumbered. He simply hates war. He simply abhors all and any kind of violence. He would suffer any outrage inflicted upon him without violent reprisal. Matt simply wants to act. Act against violence, true, but act for nonviolence. And so together in action, towards the closing act, they stride side-by-side.
Matt reaches for the handle to the building's huge glass doors. He pauses, waiting for Jared, who is detained by the final embraces of his brothers and sister.
As Jared finally joins him, Matt braces for the huge canopy of flesh, face, and kiss that is about to fall upon him. Jared, ever the bear-hugger, picks him up, holds him tightly like a lover, and after a long moment, gently releases him.
Together they look once more, finally, towards their friends and families, raise their hands in the familiar V sign of peace, open the doors, step inside, and walk down the corridor, leaving themselves as distorted images on the eyes of those straining to catch their last goodbyes.
Larry stands stolidly, gathering the last felt holdings of his brother into his arms and across his neck. Gathers them to scar them deeply into his soul. As Eddie takes his arm and Marian touches his shoulder Larry moans, deeply, from a bitter pool of revenge.
Only in the testimony of dreams was the count made of how many family members and friendly hands had reached out to slam the prison gate shut. Only in the Canada of broken dreams did they all sit round in circle and bewail their cowardly deed.
PART II: PRISON
Kill the dove! Page 9