by Tricia Dower
He tells her student parliament is “copacetic” with the center. They’ve invited the Quakers and some draft resisters from Wisconsin to present at a coffee meeting. She tells him Ron can speak about conscientious objection and he says, “Cool.” She’s been chewed up with envy that Carl will march at the Pentagon, considered scraping up the money to go but Ron can’t get away and he says it’s not fair to expect Carl to take care of her. The info center project almost makes up for it. The best part is she didn’t get asked because she’s Ron’s wife. “Color me excited” she writes in her journal that night. Uses the excuse of her news to phone Artie the next day. She can tell he’s pleased for her, not just the antiwar cause. Each time they speak she senses a stronger connection.
20
Tues, Nov 21/67
A ball of cells no longer than a minute has taken parasitic root in me. Virginia Woolf is screaming from her grave: You weren’t supposed to breed! R is puffed up w/blessing-from-God talk, following me around w/a pillow. God had nothing to do w/it. I missed a pill.
I know the moment the zygote burrowed into my uterus, despite R declaring it a romantic bit of retrospective prognostication. Oct 22. We were watching TV, gripped by images of protesters clubbed w/rifle butts, desperately hoping Carl wasn’t one of them. I had belly cramps, chalked it up to an imminent period. Never thought of implantation. Invasion. We saw blood splash onto steps, heard “Link arms, link arms” & screams of pain. Carl said he’d be carrying a Do Not Ask For Whom The Bell Tolls sign but we didn’t spot it. Tens of thousands were there. Helen phoned next day to say she’d heard from him. He’d been tear-gassed & dragged by his feet, but it was worth it to be w/Hoffman, Rubin & Ginsberg. He said it was the 2nd best day of his life, the 1st being his wedding. Woolf said a woman’s life is small compared to a man’s if she’s cut off from the world. Could’ve had the 2nd best day of my life if I hadn’t cut myself off w/fearful excuses. R would’ve thrown a fit if I’d insisted on going w/out him. VW again: So what if he’d thrown a fit? My heart drums as if I’ve had 10 cups of coffee. The doctor says that’s normal.
21
A deep moan, foreboding as thunder, rises from the beast trapped beneath her, a reeking behemoth groaning in pain and desperate to escape. Its heaving shoulders threaten to upend her bed and cast her onto the floor. She gestures wildly yet no help arrives and the beast lifts her up, up, up until she turns into a long deep breath in an ocean of breaths inhaling and exhaling mellifluous sighs. Oh to drown in its waters. But there’s a baby on her chest and a raspy voice in her ear: “It’s a boy, praise Jesus, it’s a boy.”
22
Wed, Aug 14/68
R got “fixed” yesterday. That’s how he put it, trying to be funny & take the sting out of not telling me beforehand. I nearly fainted, thinking he’d been castrated. He thought I’d be pleased he’d saved me from another pregnancy, said he couldn’t bear to see me in such pain ever again, couldn’t bear the part he played in it. I said what if I die & you want another child? You marry one person at a time, he said. This is for the best. The Pill is bad for you. It’s as if he’s given me his kidney. I don’t need more guilt. It’s true I said I didn’t want to bring another child into this world but my gut aches knowing the option is closed to us.
23
Thurs, Aug 29/68
Helen brought T a button to wear when he’s older. It says Dr. Spock Brought Me Up. I Won’t Go. She said that gasbag Norman Vincent Peale said Dr. Spock is ruining American youth w/his libertarian ideas. I say: Let’s ruin all the kids.
She paces like a caged, hungry tiger when Tavis naps, wants to spend every minute with him, wallowing in the cockeyed smile that isn’t gas despite what Grace says, each minute more precious since Ron’s vasectomy. But she needs Physiological Psych and American Lit to finish her degree. Grace offers to watch Tavis when Lin’s in class. She’s eager to cuddle with him more. Lin hopes the course load will keep her from obsessing about Artie. She needs to end her imaginary conversations with him. They’re not the least bit erotic so technically she isn’t in violation of “forsaking all others.” But still.
Back on campus, that heady feeling returns: the hormonal urgency to fight the war she experienced after Tavis was born. The Ole Draft Info Center she helped design in January started up at school last semester, with Marine recruiters in khaki shirts and dark pants only too happy to help staff it and students only too ready to dub it “The Dick.” Not everyone deems it a fine idea but the DIC is in business for real now that deferments for grad students are over. Such a difference in the mood of the senior men facing the draft after graduation and the freshmen in their black and gold beanies, four years of freedom ahead if they don’t flunk out. Her brother might have been a college senior by now. Illogical, this sense of loss about a soul who never drew breath. Even so, it comforts her to know she’s helping other young men.
The DIC is open for counseling on Wednesday nights and Friday afternoons. Dr. Spock says parents should show their children what they’re doing to solve the world’s problems so she hands out flyers on Tuesday afternoons in the Cage, the campus coffee shop, with Tavis strapped to her back. She takes a hiatus from choir, prayer breakfast and Crafty Gals, despite Ron’s disapproval, so she can help devise a free course for students about draft law and resistance to military service. Carl has made contact with a draft resistance organization in Philly and passes along their tips. He also lays his hands on a manual from Toronto for draft-age immigrants to Canada. That gives her added currency among the three other course developers, all guys, who gather with her in the Cage, forearms on table, ideas exploding over pads of paper. They make fatalistic jokes and light cigarette after cigarette, taking the smoke in so deeply she wonders if they’re trying to snuff themselves out before war can.
The semester passes in a blur of classes and coursework and diapers flapping on the line. Tavis is not one of those angels who sleep through the night. Her days are haphazard, cluttered, exhausting. She startles and weeps easily, bumps into furniture and doorways, bruising her arms and legs. Has to drag herself to church every Sunday. Tavis graduates to puréed sweet potatoes and corn. She records that in his baby book along with a list of his favorite toys: measuring spoons, a Quaker Oatmeal box, the mobile over his crib, a stuffed giraffe, a cloth book in the shape of the moon. She tries to ignore lettuce putrefying in the fridge, mold slithering around the bathtub and crumbs in the toaster. The smell of ammonia from the diaper pail is relentless.
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Sat, Nov 23/68
A bear of a day. T threw up his breakfast. Teething, feverish. Then Carl & Helen came by & I welled up like a peevish water balloon. It takes them an hour to get here. You’d think they could pick up the phone & let us know they’re coming. The house was a mess. My hair was greasy. Helen came in all rested & chirpy, saying she needed her Tavis fix. I wanted to say go away & take him w/you, try surviving on a thimble of sleep every nite. She swooped him up from the playpen & bounced him on her knee, handed him back when he threw up again. Then Carl started talking about a guy named Marv who was on the Freedom Ride w/him & R. Seems Marv wants to take on Honeywell, pressure them to stop making cluster bombs & he’s looking for help. C showed us a clipping, a photo of a little boy torn up by a bomb & I burst into loud, convulsive sobs. Couldn’t stop. It scared me, being so out of control, so unguarded in front of H&C. Like ooh, look at the crazy lady. I’ve got finals next week. Can’t afford to fall apart.
She can’t get the wounded boy out of her mind. His pain, how distraught his mother must have been, knowing she couldn’t keep him safe. She pressures Ron to attend an exploratory meeting about Honeywell with her on December fourth. Two dozen, including Carl, Helen and Artie, are there in a wood-paneled room at the Sons of Norway building in Minneapolis. (Carl said they could invite Artie if they were sure he wasn’t FBI.) Lin always forgets how short Artie is. He towers in her thoughts. Ron and Marv Davidov, the man who ca
lled the meeting, backslap each other like brothers reunited after a tragic event. It’s been seven years since the Freedom Ride. Marv greets Lin like she’s long lost too. She warms to the smile peeking beneath his walrus mustache and shining through his Einstein eyes, likes his flat-as-a-prairie voice.
He has them sit in a circle on metal folding chairs under a photo of a stern, beribboned King Olav. Every other person seems to be smoking. The overheated room is desperate for an open window but the air outside is raw. Lin stretches the collar of her white turtleneck and blows down onto her chest. Marv is more sensibly attired in baseball cap and peace sign T-shirt. He introduces himself as a “nonviolent revolutionary” then asks, “Who are all of you?”
Artie, who has taken the chair to her left, shouts out, “Troubadour for Jesus.” Everybody laughs. Two nuns applaud. Lin settles on “wife and mother,” can’t say student anymore with classes over. She’s surprised to hear Helen, who seems so ordinary, say “feminist.” Carl declares himself a “draft resistance activist,” says nothing about his construction work. He’s taken to wearing his hair in a ponytail and blends right in with the antipoverty worker, the writer and the reps from the Young Socialist Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party. Trotskyites, Marxists. Lin experiences a frisson of excitement at being in such radical company, wishes she’d said “dissident, wife and mother” and didn’t look like such a square in her Sears and Roebuck slacks.
Marv talks for nearly an hour. He has a heh-heh chuckle that escapes more often than you’d expect, given the subject. He tells them Honeywell is more than “those cute little round thermostats.” It’s the state’s biggest military contractor, “making a shitload of weapons. Land mines, missile guidance systems, cluster bombs.” He reaches down for a shoebox on the parquet floor, pulls out a gray, dingy metal shell the size of a softball. “A deactivated bomblet,” he says. “Cute name, huh? The flanges make it spin.” He hands it to a man on his left, asks him to examine it for a bit then pass it to his left, and so on.
When Ron passes it to her, he whispers, “The Russians and Germans dropped them in the Second World War. I didn’t know we were using them.” She shudders at the cold, hard feel of the bomblet in her hand, the terrible power in such a small object. She passes it to Artie, who briefly covers her hand with his as he takes it, and she can hardly breathe. Shame on her letting her feelings for him intrude at the very moment Marv tells them each cluster bomb has hundreds of these bomblets jammed with ball bearings that shoot out two thousand feet per second when the shells explode, their trajectory inside the body long and irregular.
“Deadly rain,” he calls it, making Lin picture a biblical plague of locusts. “Some are duds and when a little kid picks up one that hasn’t exploded…” he pauses and whispers loudly, “boom, one dead kid.” Lin clutches Ron’s arm, thinking of their son, safe at home with Grace, having experienced nothing worse today than a DPT shot.
Marv tells them last year’s War Tribunal in Stockholm condemned the use of cluster bombs against Vietnamese civilians. “The Pentagon claims they use them only against enemy soldiers,” he says. “Our mission is to let people know that’s a lie.” He stands and strolls the circle, shaking everyone’s hands, speaking their names. “This has to be a sustained effort. You don’t confront a major corporation about their war profiteering for a week or even a year. We have to be like the poor bastards who worked on China’s Great Wall their whole lives with no promise they’d see it finished. What do you say? Want to help me stop those bombs?”
Many call out their assent. So does Lin. The country’s indifference to killing children has gone through her like a bomb fragment.
Thurs, Dec 5/68
R’s not keen on me signing onto the Project, says he’s worried about me watering myself down too much. But I need to do something more than wring my hands over the news. Classes are over. I can catch up on sleep when Tavis naps. He said my priority should be getting back into church activities. I can do that too, I said. Honeywell is only one meeting a wk. For now, he said. Marv’s got plans to go big w/this, get a lot of publicity; I don’t like the idea of your picture in the paper someday. Aha, I thought, the real reason. It’s been 20 months since the 3rd letter & nobody’s snuffed me out yet. I’m sure now it was a prank & whoever pulled it has lost interest. But he can’t relax. Insists the doors stay locked. Cases rooms before I enter. Leaves a note on his pillow when he goes for an early morning jog so I won’t wake up frightened to be w/out him. He says Peter Hemstad would’ve stopped at one letter. I brought up the picture Carl showed us of the boy mangled by a bomb & said I had looked into his accusing eyes & realized his life was as precious as our son’s. If I don’t act on that, I said, how black will my soul be? He shook his head slowly like he was trying to work something out, conceded he didn’t want my soul on his conscience. But we do it together, he said. Together is good, I said.
25
Tavis starts to crawl and so does she—down on hands and knees every day looking for objects he could choke on: buttons, coins, paperclips. Ron buys wonderful thingies that cover unused wall outlets and gates to keep Tavis from stairs and the bathroom where he could drown in the toilet. She moves anything poisonous out of reach, replaces books with toys on the bottom bookcase shelves and has Ron bolt a heavy screen to the fireplace.
The Honeywell Project gains a black guy with ties to the Panthers and an Anishinaabe from the American Indian Movement. Two physics professors join and at one meeting throw out the idea of peace conversion: recruiting economists, scientists and engineers, who will show Honeywell at no charge how to convert to the manufacture of peaceful products without shedding jobs. In exchange, Marv says, the Project will demand Honeywell stop making weapons and start giving workers and the community control over what the company manufactures. Lin admires his absolute certainty about what’s right, can see why he’s the emotional heart of the Project. Ron isn’t sold, says, “He’s overreaching,” on the drive home from the meeting. “Like expecting East Germany to open their gates if we ask nicely.”
In May, Mother and Daddy fly in to see her don cap and gown and hear Senator Mondale’s commencement address in which he says student unrest is a reflection of the disarray of American life. A fellow grad with coffee breath leans in and whispers, “No shit.”
Ten days later, the fourth letter arrives, two years and a month after the third, this one with a metal gun sight enclosed. What sadistic game is someone playing, letting her believe he’s lost interest, then provoking her again? A shock travels down her arm when she reaches the end. A sick realization thumps deep in her bowels that something brutal and dark has entered her life.
Again.
SEE THE MAN SHOVELING SNOW OUTSIDE THE RED OWL? HE MAY HAVE A PISTOL WITH A SILENCER UNDER HIS PARKA. THAT FOUNTAIN PEN IN A PARISHIONER’S PURSE MIGHT BE A CYANIDE GAS GUN. ARSENIC IN MILK WORKS SLOW BUT SURE. YOUR AUTO MECHANIC MAY STAY UP NIGHTS STUDYING BOOBY TRAPS. THESE PATRIOTS ARE NOT GOING TO LET YOU TAKE THEIR FREEDOM AWAY FROM THEM. THEY HAVE LEARNED THE SILENT KNIFE, THE STRANGLER’S CORD, THE RIFLE THAT HITS SPARROWS AT 200 YARDS. TRAITOR BEWARE! EVEN NOW THE CROSSHAIRS ARE ON THE BACK OF YOUR NECK.
This letter is signed “The Minutemen.” The only Minutemen she knows are from high school Revolutionary War history. She and Ron take the letter to the next Honeywell Project meeting thinking others may have gotten one. They haven’t.
Artie looks pained, says, “I had no idea this was happening to you.” He yanks off his glasses and presses his eyelids with thumb and forefinger. She doesn’t know whether to feel contrite or noble for keeping it from him.
Marv says, “Sounds like what a union leader said he’d like to do to me.”
A guy who spells his name Leroi and identifies as a Yippie-pacifist poet tells them a few years ago he saw a sticker with similar words in a men’s room and copied it down, reasoning it might offer creative fodder. “Don’t recall Red Owl or parishioner in i
t, though,” he says. “Somebody’s gone to the trouble of personalizing it for you.”
A moment of hope. Peter would be able to do that. It could still be him.
Leroi’s wide bearded mouth opens and shuts almost robotically, like a hole at mini-golf, as he tells her the Minutemen are a shadowy militia group that trains in guerilla warfare for when the Communists invade. They’ve stockpiled rifles, pipe bombs, mortars, machine guns, grenade launchers and bazookas. “They dynamited a house in Arizona a couple of years ago,” he says, “got stopped before they could bomb two summer camps out east.”
A cold sensation spreads from her belly to her chest.
“They operate out of runty secretive cells,” Leroi says. “The only cat you could reasonably call their leader was arrested last year for an arms violation but he skipped bail. He’s on the lam.”
Fear crouches at the edges of Ron’s eyes. “Who wrote this letter, then?”
Carl, standing where only Lin can see him, mouths, FBI.
“Could be a rogue cell or member,” Leroi says. “They’re encouraged to act alone.”
She pictures a man with a tricorn hat and a musket lurking in a deep pool of shade in the woods surrounding the parsonage, waiting for the precise moment to send her to perdition. It would be justice, in a perverse sort of way, a settling of accounts. Her life in recompense for the girl Eldon Jukes left in the woods.