Harvest

by Belva Plain

  Timothy was there. He had shaved off his beard, darkened his bright hair, and dimmed his bright eyes behind gray-tinted glasses with heavy black rims that gave him the sober look of an accountant or a banker.

  “Just window glass,” he said, laughing as he removed them. He caught Steve in a rough hug.

  “Hey! It’s good to see you. So damn good!” And holding Steve apart to get a better view of him, he cried, still heartily, “What have you been doing to yourself? You look lean and hard. You look great.”

  “Farm work. Real proletarian labor,” Steve said, reddening with pleasure over the welcome and the praise.

  “Well, you’ve been missed. A lot’s been going on. It’s almost incredible that you’ve been out of it, that you don’t even know about it. But we’ll fill you in right now. And who’s this?”

  For Susan, still standing near the door, was almost hidden behind a wide male shoulder.

  “Susan. She came with me.” Steve, speaking straight to Timothy’s eyes, said solemnly, “She knows everything. We’ve had long talks, and she understands everything. She’s all right, Tim, believe me.”

  “If you say she’s all right, then she is,” Tim replied with equal solemnity. “Come over, Susan. Join us.” He took her hand between both of his. “This is a serious business that we’re undertaking, Susan. There’s a lot of risk in it. You do know that, I hope? And a lot of trust too. Total trust.”

  She nodded. “I know. And I know it’s worth it.” She added proudly, “I’ve learned so much since I met Steve. Where I came from—you would have to know where I came from to understand what I—”

  Steve knew her emotional tender spots as well as he knew every intimacy of her body, and he said quickly, “You’ll have a chance to tell about that when we all introduce ourselves.” And addressing Tim, he questioned, “I assume that’s still the procedure?”

  Tim took over. “Oh, yes. Sit, everyone, so we can get started.”

  The small square room, which had once been a second-floor bedroom when the house was a single-family home and was now the front room of some anonymous apartment, held a rump-sprung green sofa, two soiled green upholstered chairs, and a card table with a single chair on which Tim now sat down to preside over the meeting. Since there were eight people present, two had to sit on the floor, Susan and Steve being the two.

  “Hi, George, hi, Sam.” The men gripped hands.

  “Hi, Lydia. Susan, this is the Lydia I’ve talked so much about.”

  Her bravery and resourcefulness he had talked about, but he had never said that he’d slept with her, and he was glad of that, because Susan B. would have to be looking at her differently now if she knew.

  He himself, as he looked at Lydia, was now totally dispassionate; like everyone else, female or male, she was a partner in the cadre and no more. He put his hand, tight with reassurance, over Susan’s.

  There were two new people, Ted and Shelly. Ted, who looked thirty but turned out to be twenty-two, had long, thin blond hair and a worried, ascetic face. Shelly had a pixie haircut and a finishing-school accent.

  “I’m twenty-five,” she began when Timothy called on her to describe herself. “I’ve been a radical all my life, ever since I was old enough to look around and really see where I was. Where was I? In a Massachusetts suburb. Horse shows, debutante dances, good families. That sort of thing, you know.” She glanced at the strange assortment in the room, two middle-class eastern Jews, one midwesterner from a Catholic parochial school, and the son of a Pittsburgh coal miner among them. “Or maybe you don’t know. All I felt was that this wasn’t for me. I finally got away when I went to college, where I majored in political science and got into politics. SDS, of course. After graduation I went to Washington, lived in a commune, and have been pretty much based there since, although I do move around some.”

  There was a laugh, and Tim said, “Most of us are aware of your moving around, Shelly, as you can see. But for Susan’s benefit, I’ll just say that Shelly has been one of the most active campus organizers we’ve ever had. Tireless. She’s been arrested half a dozen times or more, starting with stink bombs at the Chicago convention in sixty-eight and going on to high school demonstrations and the women’s militia—well, you go on, Shelly.”

  The crisp voice continued. “I joined the Weathermen. There’s no point in giving you long lists and dates. You probably know about them, anyway. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that while stopping the war is an obvious goal, the main position, or what we’re really aiming for, is to change the political system, to give power to the people who have none. And that means ninety-nine percent of the people. So, that’s enough about me, isn’t it?” she concluded.

  Timothy said quietly, “She hasn’t told you that she threatened a policeman with a club or that she’s out on bail now, or that she plans to jump bail.”

  To Steve’s surprise Susan B. spoke up. “What can happen then?”

  “Nothing, we hope,” Timothy replied. “Actually, we’re fairly sure nothing will. We have our reliable network, safe houses like the one we’re in right now. Ted, your turn.”

  Ted had a southern drawl that in no way impeded the force of his speech; this forcefulness, however, contradicted the general limpness, not only of his hair and wisp of beard, but of his very torso, which seemed to struggle its way up from the tangle of his crossed, lanky legs.

  “I’ve had what you might call a checkered life,” he began with an ironic smile. “Brought up by my Baptist grandmother, went to college, lost my religion; made a friend named Ben Weinberg who’d lost his religion, then, when we both dropped out, started real life, you might say. Joined the Weathermen and went to Chicago, where we lived in a large commune. There were about thirty of us. Communes are a good thing”—this with a nod toward Susan and Steve—“in that you get rid of hang-ups about privacy and private property. But they have drawbacks too, especially if they’re escapist sanctuaries out in the boondocks. The main problem, though, is size. It’s unwieldy to have thirty people when you need rapid movement and utmost secrecy, as when you go underground. So I left for New York with five others.” Again he gave the ironic smile. “I must say we accomplished a few things: a bomb on the United Fruit Company pier, the Marine Midland Grace Trust Company, the federal office building, the army induction center, the criminal court building, the General Motors Building—”

  Tim held up his hand. “Thanks, Ted. We’ve got the picture, and it’s impressive. Now it’s Susan’s turn.”

  She stood up, looking more like a child than ever, Steve thought, with those braids dangling over the little shoulder blades exposed by her tank top. But her manner was assured.

  “I have nothing like all that to tell you. I’m not quite eighteen, and I’ve never seen much outside of my home, which I despise just as Shelly hated hers, except for different reasons. Yet, maybe not so different. Mine wasn’t a social-register family like hers, but it was materialistic; they were gimme-gimme people. Never cared much about anybody but themselves. I never connected that with the idea of revolution, I only hated it. Now I’m learning. I’m coming late to knowledge, but I’m getting there.” She looked around. “So that’s it. That’s me. I really don’t know what else to tell you.”

  There was a little patter of applause as Susan sat down. Steve was proud of her. She had come a good way from the day she had walked up to him carrying the kitten.

  “Well, now we all know who we are.” Timothy’s cheerful voice moved to its tone of command. “This is the working group, the affinity, no more, no less. No one enters it and no one leaves it except under further orders. Lydia will be in charge. She will know where I am at all times. No one else will, not because of any lack of confidence, as you well understand, but for the simple reason that information one doesn’t have can’t be gotten out of one either by an accidental slip or under threat or duress.

  “Now as to what comes next. Our plans are simply a continuation of the same here in the West. We’re going
to move up and down the Pacific coast from one university to another and blow up the ROTC buildings. Also bear in mind that these are the ports from which troops leave. That means other possibilities for us: army barracks, trucks, the very buses leaving for the ports.”

  Tim looked at his watch, frowned, and stood up quickly. “I’ll be late. Steve and Susan, leave with me. Here’s a slip of paper with an address where you’ll be staying. Memorize it and tear it up. Be there at all times so Lydia can reach you. You may, and probably will, be moved. She’ll tell you. Ted, you stay here for an hour or so after everyone else has left.

  “Ted’s being watched,” he explained, as Steve and Susan followed him down the stairs and out into the summer night. He gave Steve a piece of paper no larger than a postage stamp and pointed a direction. “That way. I go the other way.”

  “Shall we see you again?” asked Steve.

  Tim smiled. “Eventually. By the way, you probably need money, don’t you?”

  “We’ve got ten dollars.”

  “Take twenty more till Lydia gets to you. Good luck.”

  They watched him replace the eyeglasses, go swinging rapidly down the street, around the corner, and out of sight.

  “Well, what do you think of them?” Steve asked, feeling proprietary and then, not waiting for an answer, declared enthusiastically, “They’re wonderful, all of them. I never got to meet Ted, but naturally I knew everything about him. He’s traveled abroad a lot to student meetings. He even went to Cuba to meet Viet Cong leaders. I wanted to do that, but something always seemed to get in the way at the wrong time.”

  They were toiling up a street that was angled almost like a propped ladder. On either side were wooden houses built in the postearthquake style of the early 1900s, with gables, stoops, and little turrets. Some were painted in a pastel, lemon yellow or leaf green, and had geraniums in window boxes.

  “I wouldn’t mind having one of these,” remarked Susan.

  “In a fairer world, everybody’ll be able to have one.” Steve studied the address on the slip of paper. “It’s near the Haight, I think. Matter of fact, from what I remember, it’s right in the Haight.”

  “You’ve been here before? You never told me.”

  “Really? You’d think I’d have told you everything by now. Yes, I was here in the summer of sixty-six. I was just sort of passing through. I’d wanted to see it. And it was beautiful, the music, the art, everything new and free. They had good values, you know, like the Peace Farm people’s. But then they went too far with drugs. Sure, they were against the war and against all the bad stuff, but they were too stoned to do anything about them except talk. Hippies, not New Left at all. I came back here in sixty-eight. After I got arrested in Chicago, I thought I’d go here for a while to cool off. But it was all changed, overcrowded, and gotten ugly besides with drug dealers killing each other on the streets. People were fleeing, going to places like Peace Farm.” He grinned. “So I left again.”

  They had reached the top of the hill and now stood still, panting a little from the climb and the weight of their duffel bags. They had arrived abruptly at the very edge of the continent. Below and behind them stretched the city, tied together with the brilliant ribbons of its avenues and highways. Ahead lay the bay and the fabled bridge beyond which gleamed the vast Pacific, and beyond that Asia, while above it all, the restless city, the dazzling bridge, and the moving water, hung a dome of stars.

  “How beautiful it is,” Susan murmured. “So far away from what we talked about in that room awhile ago.”

  “Yes. The night hides all the world’s dirt until the sun comes up.”

  “That sounds so sad.”

  “Not sad. True. And not sad, either, when you consider all the people who are cleaning up the world’s dirt. Men like Tim, for instance.”

  She was quiet for a minute before asking, “Who makes the bombs?”

  “We do. It’s not hard. You need dynamite, blasting caps, there’s a regular kit—it’s not hard,” he repeated positively.

  “Have you ever done it?”

  “Not exactly. Lydia once showed me some of the stuff, though.”

  “You admire her, don’t you?”

  “Of course. She’s committed. And fearless! She even knows how to use a hand grenade and a submachine gun.”

  “Has she ever used them?”

  “Not yet. But she would if she had to.… You look so scared, Susan. Are you?”

  “More thoughtful than scared, though I am scared some.”

  Steve looked down into the girl’s upturned eyes, dark flowers. “Nobody expects you to handle a gun. There are plenty of other things for you to do. Besides, Lydia’s been doing this for years,” he said gently, “and nothing’s happened. And she’s only one person out of many.”

  “I understand.”

  “We have to be smart and we have to be strong, strong in a good cause. But if you don’t want to go along, my Susan, you don’t have to.”

  “Oh, but I’m with you, Steve. Wherever you go, I’m going. Besides, I see the right of all this. I really do. You’ve convinced me.”

  Taking her face between his hands, he kissed it, forehead, cheeks, eyes, and lips. I’ll take care of her, he thought, from here to the end of the earth and back. Nothing will touch her while I’m alive, so help me. We’re in this struggle together, and we’ll win.

  “The house is just down the street,” he said. “Shall we go?”

  It was another narrow, clapboard late Victorian, neglected and shabby, with a gate and low railing at the top of the steps. Somebody had apparently started to paint the drab railing an electric blue and had, after doing half of it, given up for lack of paint or money or desire. But lively music was coming out of an open window. Bob Dylan was singing “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

  And to Steve came a charge of excitement as intense almost as the sexual. He was bursting out of a chrysalis, he was taking flight into life again, he was on the wing, he had his own woman, and he was a man.

  18

  “Such a pretty wedding in a perfect setting,” Iris said to Theo.

  A week had passed since Laura and Robbie McAllister had been married at Anna’s house, and Iris was still talking about the garden, the marvelous food, visiting cousins, and Jimmy’s brand-new baby girl.

  “Imagine, Mama’s a great-grandmother! You’d never think it, she seems so young and well.”

  They were having a slow Sunday-morning breakfast in a quiet house, Philip having gone to soccer practice.

  Theo looked over the top of the Times. “Speaking of youth,” he said, “Laura’s too young to be married.”

  “You’re just shocked because it’s happened so soon after Jimmy’s wedding.”

  “Maybe.” Theo smiled. “And you don’t have to tell me, because I’m well aware, that no father ever thinks anybody’s good enough for his daughter.” Becoming sober, he added, “I hope they never have a problem with the religious difference. There are enough other difficulties, God knows.”

  Yes, Iris thought. I tried to point them out to her. We sat talking for an hour in her room, but her only answer was that people make too much of a “big deal” about marriage; as long as you love each other, what can be so hard about it? You and Dad, she said, don’t seem to have had such awful problems.… Oh, poor darling Laura!

  Now Theo put the newspaper away and, still darkly sober, said, “I’ll tell you what almost ruined the day for me! Steve’s not coming to either wedding, that’s what.”

  Iris sought to pacify. “He didn’t forget, though. He did send those lovely white moccasins that he’d made himself. I thought that was rather sweet.”

  “Sweet! Is that what he’s to be, a maker of moccasins, all his life?”

  “Well, at least he’s still on the commune,” she said softly. “He’s not in jail or on the way to it, or blown up in an explosion like that one in Colorado last month when the ROTC building was bombed.”

  “Thank God for small favors, I
suppose,” Theo muttered angrily. And she knew that he was not so much furious as furiously hurt.

  “Besides, who knows what’s coming next with him? Do you? Can you say what’s coming next week?”

  “No, and I’m not going to let myself think about it. You shouldn’t either, Theo.”

  She was determined to keep alive, as long as possible, the glow of the wedding. They were a beautiful pair. Might they always feel as they so obviously had felt, standing with joined hands among flowers, friends, and birdsong! And she thought: I remembered, as I watched them, how it had been on my own day. I wish I could feel exactly like that again. But I suppose too much has happened.

  She rose and began to clear the table.

  “I think I’ll call Mama. Maybe she’d like to go to an early movie tonight.”

  “Good idea. Go ahead.”

  The telephone rang in the kitchen. Agitated sounds came out of it when Iris picked up the receiver.

  “Who? What? You went upstairs and—I can’t understand you! What? Yes, I’m coming right over. Five minutes—yes.” She called to Theo in the dining room. “It’s Mama’s new housekeeper. I couldn’t make any sense of her, whether the house is on fire or Mama’s sick or—hurry, hurry!”

  Theo had already taken the car keys from the drawer and was on the way to the garage.

  “Steady, steady,” he said when they were in the car. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. The woman may be overreacting to something that’s not so terrible. We’ll be there in a second.”

  Iris ran up the steps toward the open front door, crying, “What happened here? What is it?”

  “I went upstairs. Missus always gets up early for breakfast, and it was late so I went upstairs, I went—” Lula wrung her hands.

  Theo was already halfway up. “Iris, stay down there. Wait.”

  But she was just behind him. It flashed through her mind that her mother had had a stroke and Theo didn’t want her to see. And she followed him into the familiar room.