He doesn’t say anything. I wonder what he’s thinking.
I’m watching family wander back to their cars. Slowly,
and a few at a time. But we don’t wander. Because we’re
not done.
“Go ahead and call me a draft dodger if you want,”
I tell Harris. But I know he won’t. “There are still a
couple of people in town who do, though mostly behind
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my back. Thing is, there was no dodge about it. I didn’t
dodge anything. I didn’t go to Canada. I didn’t bribe or
lie to anybody who could get me a better classification in
the draft. I didn’t even try to register as a conscientious
objector. My understanding was that the CO category is
for people who have strong religious convictions against
any kind of violence. I wasn’t going to lie, and it didn’t
seem right to take one of their deferments.
“I was honest, and I hit it head-on.
“I walked into the sheriff’s office and ran into … guess
who? Right. I knew you could guess because you’re good
at this stuff. It was old Deputy Warren.”
“The guy who broke down Grandma Zoe’s door on
that day when she almost died?”
He calls her Grandma Zoe not because she was any-
where near the age equivalent of a grandmother to him,
but because Connor called her that. Harris never met her,
which is a damn shame. She died about a year before he
was born.
“The very one,” I say. “And if I told you he didn’t
know what to make of me, let alone what to do with me,
that would be an understatement.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to register for the draft.’ And I
held my wrists out so he could put the cuffs on me.
“He stared at them like he’d never seen wrists before.
“‘I don’t think that’s the way it works,’ he said.
“‘How does it work?’
“He scratched his head for a minute, and then he
said, ‘I got no idea, son. Nothing like this ever happened
around here before.’”
I watch Harris’s eyebrows go up. Just a little bit. I
keep talking.
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“So then he disappeared for a few minutes, leaving
me noticeably uncuffed. When he came back, I swear he
seemed more embarrassed than angry.
“‘Nobody else knows, either,’ he said. ‘But we fig-
ure in time the Selective Service people’ll get tired of
not hearing from you, and eventually they’ll put out a
warrant for your arrest. Or something like that. We’re
talking about the federal government here, son. It’s not
really our department.’
“I asked him, ‘So you’re saying I should just go home
and wait?’
“‘No,’ he said, and at this juncture I could hear the
irritation rising in his voice. ‘No, if you’re asking me what I think you ought to do, I think you ought to sign up.
You can get a deferment by going to college, at least for
a while. That’s what all the other boys are doing.’
“I said, ‘But they can pull that out from under me
anytime.’
“He said, ‘A lot of guys get a doctor to write up some
excuse.’
“Well, I guess I wasn’t a lot of guys. If you know
what I mean.
“I said, ‘But I’m fine. So that would be a lie. That
would be a total insult to the guys who went over there.
I’m not going to lie and cheat to live a nice, com-
fortable life while they fight. I’m going to make a sacri-
fice that they could make, too, if they wanted. I’m going
to go to jail.’
“He scratched his head again, and narrowed his eyes
at me. Finally he just said, ‘Go home and wait, son. With
ideas like that in your head, sounds like jail’ll find you
soon enough.’
I know he’s about to ask if it did. So I beat him to it.
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“I hurried up the process by writing to the Selective
Service and telling them I was never going to sign up,
and whatever the penalty might be for that, they should
just go ahead and get the proceedings going against me.
“I served two years. I didn’t have to go to some ter-
rible, dangerous federal prison. I just served my time
in the county jail, which I think was fairly irregular as
these things go. It was the federal government, like the
deputy said. But somehow they referred my case to the
local authorities for arrest. Maybe they didn’t know what
to do with guys like me, either.
“It was a blessing at least to be jailed close to home.
“I got no time off for good behavior, not because I
didn’t behave well, but because the guards and the warden
and the parole board all had some family or friends who’d
signed up for the draft just like they were supposed to do.
“The food was incredibly bad, which I swear was the
second-worst thing about the place, after the noise and
the lack of privacy. But it wasn’t supposed to be fun. It
was supposed to be the price I paid.
“And damn it, I paid it.
“Roy drove out twice a week and brought me some
decent food, and your granddad came out twice on some
weeks, three times on others. He promised to take me
to the Place for one of those chocolate-dipped chocolate
ice cream cones the day I got out. It was the only treat
he couldn’t figure out how to bring me.
“You have no idea how many of my days in that hole
started with a wish for that ice cream shop not to go out
of business while I was rotting. I mean, serving my time.
Paying my debt to society.
“My parents had divorced by then—I know, what took
them so long, right?—but my father flew all the way from
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North Carolina, where he lived with his new wife, to
scream at me and tell me how much I’d disappointed him.
How I’d ruined my whole life with this bonehead play.
“And I was a captive audience. Literally.
“But, you know what? It’s okay. That’s part of the
price I paid.
“My mom only visited three or four times in that
whole two years, but she was relieved by what I’d done.
She never said so straight out, but I knew.
“And Zoe.
“Zoe not only came to visit me now and again, but
she wrote me a letter every day. Every day for two years.
Seven hundred and thirty letters. I actually counted.
In jail, you have time on your hands for stuff like that.
Some were full of news from town, others were just her
thoughts on this and that. Some were longer than others,
but I never had to watch a mail call go by with no let-
ter from Zoe. I think she single-handedly kept our little
branch post office afloat during that time.
“I still have every one of those letters. Stacked and
organized by date and rubber-banded in shoeboxes in
my closet.”
My head fills with
a very clear, very painful image.
It’s taking me off in a different direction in my head. And
I go with it. And I retell it.
“I watched the fall of Saigon from the TV room in
the county jail,” I say. “I watched those helicopters teetering on rooftops, trying to take off with too many people
loading them down. I watched people try to hang on to
the bottom of them, desperate to get out of there. I saw
how many never made it out.
“The war is over, I thought in the back of my head while I watched. But I knew my jail sentence wasn’t.
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“I remember I wondered how Roy felt, watching that
on TV. Or Joe, from the NA meeting. Or Darren Weller.
It just seemed like everything they’d gone through added
up to nothing—at least, nothing anybody got to keep.
“Next time he visited, I asked Roy what he was feel-
ing when he saw that.
“He said he hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch.”
I let a beat fall after that statement. In my mind, it
warrants a beat.
“What about my grandpa?” Harris asks, his face open
with awe. His mother is trying to get his attention from
over at the cars, and he’s studiously ignoring her. “Was
he okay with what you did?”
“Funny thing about that,” I say. “We actually only
talked about it once. He came to the county jail to pick
me up on my release day, your granddad, because Roy
had to work. He took me out for that ice cream, just the
way he’d promised.
“‘Chocolate ice cream with chocolate coating,’ he
told me while we waited in line. ‘That still seems like an
awful lot of chocolate.’
“I said, ‘You still don’t say that like it’s a good thing.’
“When we’d gotten our cones, I purposely led us to a
table right by the front window. Because the whole point
of not going to Canada was to be able to hold my head
up and feel like I had nothing to hide.
“We licked our ice cream in silence and just sort of
watched the town go by. Some of the locals waved at me,
like they were glad to see me back. Others looked away
like I was invisible. Except … if I’d been invisible, they
wouldn’t have needed to look away.
“I did better with the mothers than the fathers, and
better with the young women than the young men. But
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that was just a generality. Somebody will always come
along and break the mold.
“After a while I said to your granddad, ‘I never could
bring myself to ask you this. I purposely never asked. But
I’m going to ask you right now. Do you think I did the
right thing?’
“He said, ‘I think you did the right thing for you.’
“After that we never spoke about it again. Probably
not because we didn’t feel we could. Probably because
we never needed to.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good.”
He’s not saying a lot, but he’s deeply invested. I can
tell. I’m sure this isn’t all new information to him. He
must’ve heard bits and pieces. He probably never heard
my side of the thing.
His mother is trying to flag me down now. And now
I’m studiously ignoring her. Because I’m telling this kid the truth. If there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s
that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell
them the damn truth.
“But you said people still call you a draft dodger,”
he says.
“Some. Not all. Different people have different opin-
ions. My dad was right about one thing, though. It does
follow you around, all through your life, that time in jail.
I’m not saying nobody would hire me after that, but the
pickings got slimmer. I had to look at that same decision
that faced Grandma Zoe after the accident. Should I just
get out of this town and go someplace where nobody
knew me? But I didn’t think that would work well in my
situation, because the arrest record follows you wherever
you go. Anywhere I lived, when I applied for a job, a
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simple background check would turn up that conviction.
I figured I was better off staying close to home, where
people had a fair shot at knowing it was my version of a
principled stand. I say ‘fair shot’ because I knew not ev-
erybody was destined to see it that way. You can’t change
the way a person’s going to see a thing. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-four years on the planet,
it would be that.
“But some people understood it.” I end on that. Or
try to, anyway.
“But you were doing what you thought was right,”
he says.
“Yeah. But some people don’t want you to do what
you think is right. Some people want you to do what
they think is right. Anyway, it all shook out okay. I ended up working a pretty menial job at the hardware store.
The owner had lost his son in Vietnam. You’d think
that would’ve pitted him against me, but it was just the
opposite. He was burned by what I guess he felt was the
pointlessness of the whole thing, and wishing his son had
taken jail time instead. So he hired me, and he treated
me with respect.
“I worked hard, lived over the store, and put away
every cent I didn’t need to live on. And on the other side
of town your uncle Roy was doing the same thing. And
we weren’t even talking to each other about it. It wasn’t
even a plan.
“Now the old owner is deceased, and we own that
store.”
“I knew that,” he says. “I didn’t know all of this, but I know something.”
“Of course you do.”
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His mother is waving to me again, and I raise one finger
high. Asking her to wait. To let us finish. Surprisingly,
she does. I guess she just needed to be acknowledged.
“Here’s a thing I don’t know,” he says. And I wait, and
let him figure out how to say it in his own way. “Nobody
really told me why Grandpa didn’t have to go fight in
the war. I asked my mom once, but I never really got a
straight answer.”
“I can understand that,” I say. “It hits on a touchy
subject. But you’re a smart boy, and you’re mature for
your age. And you know your great-grandma Pauline
was not always very … well.”
“In the head, you mean?”
“Yeah. That.”
He nods. He knows.
“It’s like this,” I say. “Grandma Zoe had this thing
she used to say. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.’”
He wrinkles his nose. It almost makes me laugh. “I
don’t understand that saying at all,” he says.
“You know, honestly, it never made a great deal of
sense to me, either, but for years I didn’t say so. It sounded like it just meant ‘bad things have bad effects.’ And I
thought, Yeah, so … what’s your point? Fi
nally one day I was a little grumpy and tired, so I called her out on it.
Turns out it means even most really bad winds are going
to blow something good to somebody.
“Which leads me to my point about Connor and
his mom. It would be nice to report that everybody’s
story had at least a fair or satisfying ending, but that’s
not life, is it? And you’re old enough to know it. And
I’m not going to lie to you about life, Harris. Your
great-grandma Pauline didn’t fare well. She had a break-
down when Connor was sixteen. At the time we all
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thought, well, people come back from breakdowns. But
she never did.
“They couldn’t afford to put her in any kind of facil-
ity, at least not one Connor could bear to think of using.
And they couldn’t afford any kind of in-home nursing or
professional care. So Connor took care of her.
“In our last year of high school, Zoe came over and
sat with Pauline every day while Connor went to school.
After he graduated, Connor found a college that would
let him earn a degree from home—you know, a corre-
spondence course sort of thing.
“He got a nice, cushy job in the county planning
department and bought a house for your grandma Dotty
before he even asked her to marry him. It’s just who he
was. He didn’t want to live and raise a family in that
spooky old house he’d grown up in, which I think was
a smart move. So he sold it and got a new one with no
bad memories, where they could make a life from scratch.
With four bedrooms. One for them. A couple for all the
kids he knew they wanted. And one for his mom.
“Your grandma looked after Pauline for years while
Connor worked. It wasn’t all that hard a job to do. Pauline
was never difficult or unpleasant. She just couldn’t do much of anything for herself. She died of a blood infection in
1984. But maybe that part you knew.”
“Right,” he says, “I did. But I still don’t get the part
about the wind.”
“I was getting to that. So that ill wind blew something
good to someone. Connor—your grandad—was her sole
caretaker when he turned eighteen. And that kept him
deferred from the draft. And he didn’t have to go.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I think I finally get the part
about the wind.”
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I feel a little tug on my jacket sleeve. I’m wearing a suit
jacket, even though it’s summer, just like it was where I
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