Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

“He won’t agree to that.”

  “He can get a deferment if he goes to college.”

  “His grades aren’t good enough.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s ready to get married, have a child.”

  Fern responds with an exasperated sigh. “Doesn’t it count that he’s all I’ve got?”

  “He could apply for a hardship deferment. I don’t know if he’s all I’ve got qualifies.”

  “He’d never apply.”

  It’s Lin’s turn to sigh. She doesn’t dare suggest Jeff flee to Canada lest she give herself and Ron away. Fern would never go for that anyway. “You must’ve given this some thought,” she says. “What ideas do you have?”

  “I want somebody to tell the Army they can’t have him. He won’t try to get out of it on his own. Somebody else has to do it.”

  Steve was right. Fern needs family counseling. Lin makes one last stab at it. “Do you know anybody on the draft board?” She’s heard of them doing favors, not that it’s fair.

  Fern gives a little yelp. “I do, I do. That’s it. You’re a genius, Mrs. Brunson.”

  “Lin, please.”

  “You’re a genius, Lin.”

  She imagines Artie Gilchrest beside her when she hangs up. The woman says I’m a genius, she tells him and laughs. Not a doubt in my mind, he says back.

  That Sunday she places a few pamphlets on a rack in the church vestibule. Ron informs the congregation about them before his sermon. She’s elated when she notices them gone, rattled when they reappear the following week in pieces.

  19

  Thurs, Mar 9/67

  We take turns being brave.

  March howls in like a marauding white wolf with enough diving, swirling and drifting snow to clog the streets. Ron makes a run to the hardware store for road salt. She hears the garage door grind open when he returns, the stamp of his feet on the front steps, the double scrape of his boots in the entry. She pictures him shaking the snow off his furry-hooded parka, placing the boots on the newspaper she set out. He finds her in her office, guiltily warm and safe.

  “This came for you,” he says. A white envelope addressed to “The Pastor’s Wife,” the ink smeared. Maybe the draft counselors they visited last month couldn’t decipher the name she wrote on their mailing list. She doesn’t recall saying she was a pastor’s wife, though, and Ron wasn’t wearing his clerical collar that day. He rests his hand on her shoulder as she opens the envelope and withdraws a stark white sheet with words typed all in caps. She sucks in a breath.

  “What?” he says.

  She hands him the paper. He reads it aloud, a question mark in his voice: “Traitor beware? The man shoveling snow outside the Red Owl may have a pistol with a silencer under his parka?” He turns it over. “No signature.” He sweeps up the envelope she let fall onto the desk. “The top half of the postmark’s missing. The part that shows the location.”

  Her uneasy laugh is like a tickle in her throat. “Is this a joke?”

  He thrusts out his jaw. “Not to me.”

  She rocks back in her chair, chilled as much by his gravity as she is by the letter. “Is it because we hid draft dodgers?”

  “Then why address it to you alone?”

  “The survey?”

  “I can’t see that generating this vicious a response.”

  “Peter Hemstad said I was fomenting dissension. I told you that, right?”

  “You did. Peter’s a bully, all right, but he’s not evil.” He waves the letter. “This is evil.”

  She stands and breathes against his chest, the ribs through his sweater a comfort. “Peter would know where I buy groceries.”

  He strokes her hair. “Probably a lucky guess by somebody else. I’ll go to City Hall, see who’s at the police desk.”

  “You can’t go back out in this mess,” she says. Snow swaddles the trees outside her office window, only a few of their branches, like fractured bones, visible. “They’ll be out, anyway, towing cars gone off the road.”

  “Rafe might be there. I’ll give him a call. I have to do something.” Rafe Sagen, chief of Prairie Fire’s three-man police force, attends Open Door from time to time, as he does other churches, as part of his community outreach. He has a rodent face with a bristly dark mustache but he looks her in the eye when she speaks, seems to really listen.

  Ron kisses the top of her head and strides to the kitchen, reports back that Rafe predicts it’s a harmless prank but he’ll make some inquiries. He locks the breezeway door and checks the back door bolt, builds a fire, then heads out with broom and shovel to clear the paths to the house and church. No use suggesting he wait until the snow stops. He needs to take his mind off the letter. So does she. She tunes in to the radio for storm news and keeps the fire going, persuading herself not even an assassin would be out in this brawling weather.

  An hour later, Ron comes in and hollers, “Hey, Lin, come look at this.” His parka stands by itself in the entryway, covered with ice. Bless him. He loves to make her laugh.

  She drapes his sopping pants over a radiator, stretches out with him before the fire and blows on his cold, red thighs. “I’m going to assume Rafe’s right,” she says. “I refuse to go into hiding.” After Eldon Jukes assaulted her, she holed up inside for two days, sure he was waiting for her, the rancid smell of his ejaculate still curling up in the back of her throat.

  “Of course not,” he says, “but no Red Owl without me until this gets cleared up, okay?”

  That night it’s so dark in their bedroom it’s as if the moon has crashed into a snowbank and shattered. She read that the jungle is so black at night a soldier’s eyeballs ache from scanning it for danger, his state of mind as volatile as a live grenade. She curls into Ron, listening blind to the house settle down for the night and the wind mugging the trees. The safest place she’ll ever live, he said the day they moved in.

  They hear back from Chief Sagen a few days later. A retired lumberyard worker named Hub Bauer shovels snow at Red Owl. His family’s been here since the mid-1800s. He has a hunting shotgun like most men in Prairie Fire and “it doesn’t have a silencer,” the police chief says, making a funny, Lin supposes, although she knows zilch about guns. Supposedly he’s not the malicious-letter type. Rafe’s a good guy but his words don’t mollify them. What’s to prevent a stranger showing up someday with his own shovel and silencer?

  A week after the first letter, another—poetic in its alliteration—arrives, its capital letters adding to the sense of assault. Again addressed to her, again no postmark. TRAITOR, BEWARE! THAT FOUNTAIN PEN IN A PARISHIONER'S PURSE MIGHT BE A CYANIDE GAS GUN. She hands the paper over to Ron, watches his brow furrow, his mouth get hard. She tries brushing it off for his sake. “Cyanide? It’s like a Cold War movie.” She strikes a cocky pose, thumbs in dungaree pockets, back against the doorframe between the kitchen and dining room. “Call me Bond, Jane Bond.”

  He doesn’t smile.

  Carl drives out the following day to arrange for another wave of draft dodgers. She crazily wonders if he sent the letters and has stopped by to witness her terror. He looks a little wild and unpredictable, not as solidly planted on the ground. Over the winter he’s grown a beard and let his sandy hair fall to his shoulders. She stands by the window, staring across the meadow at dead grass clotted with tenacious snow, as he sits on the couch beside Ron, frowning at the letters. “I’ve seen this Traitor, Beware crap somewhere before.” He looks over at her. “In a bar or gas station john. Just some psycho copycat trying to scare you.”

  Ron says, “But who and why only Lin?”

  Carl shrugs. “Who knows why anybody does anything.”

  Ron informs him there’ll be no more fugitives at the parsonage.

  Carl smirks. “So a few chills down your spine stop you from doing what’s right?”

  Ron gives him a steady, sober look. “Ther
e’s more than one right thing to do. I’m considering taking the letters to the post office. If I’m not mistaken, it’s against the law to make threats through the mail.”

  “Great way to deliver the FBI to your door. What’ll you say when they ask why somebody thinks Lin’s a traitor? Maybe they sent the letters. It’s what they do.”

  “I’m not dangerous,” she says. “Why’d they be interested in me?”

  Carl’s laugh is scornful. “For shitsakes, you can’t be that green. You’re a threat to the quote ‘existing social and political order,’ unquote. You married a Freedom Rider, marched against the war and visited draft counselors, all public knowledge. They might’ve found out you hid war resisters, too. To the government, that stuff is dangerous.”

  “So why aren’t you getting letters? Or Ron?”

  “Ah, they’d have other plans for me. And they might figure threatening you is enough to get to Ron. Enough to scare you both off.”

  That my own government would target me is absurd, she imagines telling Artie that night. He agrees it has to be Peter even though he’s never met the man. Sleep is kind when it takes her.

  The earth softens. Minnesotans crawl out from under their rocks in a bacchanalian celebration of life returning, yoo-hooing to each other from rolled-down car windows, clasping arms on street corners, their voices delirious with relief they haven’t gone winter-mad. Lin takes deep breaths of the suddenly sweet air. She marches for peace on a mild Saturday in April under a brilliant sky—one of hundreds in Northfield, unencumbered by coats, out in solidarity with half a million marching in New York and San Francisco. For a sliver of time they’re all united behind a longing to end the war. Only one sour-faced man holds a Hanoi thanks you sign.

  Could his denim overalls hide a gun with a silencer?

  Artie recruits her and Ron for a vigil ten days later outside the federal courthouse in St. Paul where Steve, one of the draft counselors she visited in February, will be sentenced. Like Cassius Clay (now Muhammad Ali) he has refused induction but without the attendant hoopla. She welcomes the chance to see Artie again. If he hadn’t been in such a rush when they met, she’d have asked him about the shelter he works at, told him what she did at the home for delinquent boys and what it meant to her. She senses she could spill her heart out to him, feels an intimacy that alarms her, a trust in him not yet earned. If they could have a moment alone, she might even confide in him about the letters. At the courthouse his smile splashes her like warm, sweet water. He touches her shoulder, her arm, looks into her eyes as intently as he did the first time. She’s flustered. Is he flirting with her? She’s had pitifully little experience, only one date before Ron, and that with a boy in high school.

  Ten others are there with candles and signs. During the tedious wait for sentencing under a murky sky—two years, delivered with a lecture from the judge about unnecessarily choosing martyrdom—Artie gives Ron a copy of a speech Martin Luther King Jr. made in New York before he led three hundred thousand on a march to the United Nations. Three hundred thousand! Artie read the speech to his small flock last Friday, he says, and it moved a few to weep. She wishes she’d been there.

  Ron asks her to read it to him in the car on the way home and she hears Artie’s fervid voice in her ear as she does, feels the remembered heat of his attention. Some of the words trip up her emotions, phrases like “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” and “If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time, reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

  The speech says sending blacks eight thousand miles away to guarantee freedoms they don’t have in the South is cruel irony. And any soldier, black or not, is bound to become cynical as he discovers we’re not fighting for the peace and democracy we claim to be.

  “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own country,” gets to her the most. She leans back. “I have to stop reading for a minute.” Gazing out the window she senses the earth shift ever so slightly. A memory flames like a struck match. “It’s disgraceful.”

  “What is?”

  “How self-righteous I was as a kid. My fifth grade class had to form a citizenship club.” What a priss she was, pumped with self-importance as recording secretary of the club, taking minutes at a scratched-up desk, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing the brown plaid dress with the foolish bow Mother had made. “Government orders, according to our teacher, because American soldiers captured in Korea hadn’t been patriotic enough to withstand torture and brainwashing.”

  “I don’t recall citizenship clubs,” he says.

  “You were already in high school. Maybe fifth grade’s the optimum age for counter-brainwashing. I didn’t understand then a soldier in battle would be in a state of constant alert like we are now. I was arrogant enough to believe I’d never crack. Oh God.” She’s ashamed of her younger self. Doesn’t want to die before making up for it.

  His right hand gently presses her thigh. “Sweetheart, you were a child.” He pulls over by a farm stand closed for the season. His arms open like wings.

  Half an hour later the third letter waits in the mailbox at the start of the gravel road. TRAITOR, BEWARE THE MILKMAN! ARSENIC IS SLOW BUT SURE. The words take up little space yet weigh the page down. The very air around her feels contaminated. She pins her shaking hands between her knees and attempts a smile. “Aha, his first mistake. We don’t have a milkman.” But even she isn’t convinced by her bravado. On the short drive home, she practices holding her breath for as long as she can, as she did during grade school air raid drills.

  “Don’t tell the bishop or the superintendent about the letters,” she says back at the parsonage. “We can’t let Peter get rid of us too easily.”

  “You still believe it’s him?”

  “Who else would’ve cut up the draft counseling flyers?”

  “Peter’s on the parsonage committee,” he says. “He’d know we don’t have a milkman. He may be irascible but he doesn’t have a black enough heart to sit at a typewriter and hammer out TRAITOR BEWARE. Whoever it is has to be crazy and Peter isn’t that.”

  Eldon Jukes was crazy but she hadn’t been able to see past his boyish smile, his Brando T-shirt and his waxed-up convertible. He invades her thoughts now, a symbol of the fear that waits in the shadows. If Peter hasn’t written those letters, maybe it’s somebody she wouldn’t in a million years suspect. She studies her pale, drawn face in the mirror. If she were dangerous, what sort of look would her green eyes hold? Could she spot it in someone else? She sizes up people in church. Their faces appear newly dark and hostile, their movements predatory.

  They switch to powdered milk. It tastes like chalk.

  Wed, May 3/67

  I’m still alive, looking at R for proof.

  Ron gets it in his head he has to answer MLK’s call for clergy to give up their ministerial exemption, apply for concientious objector status and spend two years on what Carl calls some vital but meaningless task the government might classify as essential for national defense—like emptying bedpans at a VA hospital. Lin asks if Artie will give up his exemption, too, and Ron says, “Why do you care?” and she says, “Just curious.” She thinks that's all she is.

  He comes back from his interview with the draft board committee looking as if they force-fed him worms, says their questions were clearly meant to shame him by suggesting he’s unpatriotic, selfish, weak and gutless. You say you object to killing but aren’t you just afraid to die? How do you feel about living a comfortable life while others risk their lives for you? Isn’t it your job to prevent evil from happening to others? (He asked how they define evil. They told him he didn’t get to ask the questions.) The one that hit him hardest: So you wouldn’t protect your wife if someone threatened to kill her?

  He passed their test because he could prove he’s made his
antiwar position known, but they mocked his sincerity by saying he’d serve the country just as well at Open Door as anywhere else. Lin is weak-kneed with relief—she wondered what would happen to her studies if he qualified—yet she can see how insulted he is. “One good thing,” he says. “I’m onto them now. I know how to help others get through the interview.”

  He spends the rest of May preparing a seminar on conscientious objection, sends her to New Jersey for two weeks in June in the expectation an assassin won’t find her there. But the air hangs so listlessly over Stony River she has to take shallow breaths and Daddy urges her not to walk anywhere alone. He says it’s not safe since “hoodlums” stole Elvira Melton’s pocketbook on her way home from church. Pocketbook thieves. She doesn’t tell him or Mother about the letters, feels a perverse sense of pride in keeping it secret and a hunger deep inside her for Ron.

  Thurs, June 29/67

  Relieved to be back. I don’t fit in Stony River anymore, if I ever did. I have no status there except as Betty and Roger Wise’s daughter. Here I’m a bonafide Ole undergrad, not just the Reverend Ronald Brunson’s wife, although that has its charms. How many women can claim it’s their job to spend 3 guilt-free hours a month making fairy ornaments out of pipe cleaners & nylon net under the aegis of the loving yet firm Edna and Edith Bertle, who founded Crafty Gals 20 years ago for the sole purpose of making Christmas ornaments. Their annual bazaar funds the Sunday school program. From time to time, I’m told, heretics have suggested the Gals might also make cornucopias for the fall Pumpkin Pancake Breakfast or nosegays for the Mother-Daughter Banquet but they’ve been shot down. Kindly, of course. Such bold moves will have to wait until the elderly Bertle sisters crochet their way into the Great Beyond.

  Back in February, she slipped a few flyers from the draft counselors into the Students for a Democratic Society campus mailbox. One of them made its way to a guy who, eight months later, approaches her after Music Appreciation to ask if she’ll help set up an Ole Draft Info Center during Interim ’68. He’s a bit of a campus celebrity. Earlier this year he publicly waived his student exemption and returned his draft card, declaring it a symbol of his bondage and now his freedom and responsibility. It’s been six months since the last sinister letter arrived—Lin’s own bondage symbol. Once upon a time she thought dying young would be romantic. The possibility of it now makes her feel full of some nameless ambition, anxious to get on with it, whatever “it” is. She says yes to the opportunity.