Anyway, the hippies seemed indulgent. It was all hedonism and music and too much sunshine. Edgar and Fern were seeking something much more real. To them, it felt good to cultivate discomfort, to live in coal country with people who had no luxuries, to push their young bodies and minds up against the grit and truth of danger and hardship, heat and sweat. Edgar had pictured miners with soot-faces and wrecked hands. He had decided that he wanted to write about their lives, the deep earthen dives they made for the sake of carbon, for the sake of fire, for the sake of metal. He imagined himself telling their story, the newspapers printing the truth, shaming the owners, his father declaring the miners heroes. He knew this was idealistic and stupid, but he thought: maybe. Weren’t good works always completed against the odds?
It was not only saving that Edgar wanted to do. He saw in the workaday lives a kind of relief and salvation. The daily job, the weekly pay, beans in the pot and freshly picked blackberries in the bowl, hands scabbed from the thorns. There was honor in this. Honor he envied.
Fern wanted to play house with her new husband. She wanted the little cottage with just enough windows for which to sew curtains. Just enough space in the kitchen to make an omelet. She’d knit something. She and Edgar would sit at the table and read aloud to each other. Marriage was a jailbreak. Fern was free from the slow and steady drip of dislike that was her parents’ experience of the world.
Ben, though. Fern thought about him all the time, how they had built a fort in the skirt of a pine tree in the prairie when they were ten where he had asked her to promise that they would die at the same time. He explained that it seemed like an important detail—they had entered as a pair and lived as a pair. She had said yes and meant it, but how quickly she had abandoned him when love sparked a few years later. She told herself that she was a good sister—she was doing what women did. Even twins were meant to go their separate ways. She sent care packages with cookies and candies and each time she enclosed a letter from the invented girlfriend, though Ben never told her if he used this story.
In the central highlands of Vietnam, American B-52s dropped seventy-six bombs. They counted more than a thousand Vietnamese bodies in the jungle after the battle. The news crew sent footage home, the reporter in his helmet crouched behind a tree, yelling over the chop of a helicopter, and right then, something exploded and the boy to his right, so dirty that it didn’t matter if he was blond or dark, flew off camera, and the reporter looked into the lens and his face was shock-flat, and he just sat there because he was not allowed to intervene. He was only there to observe.
And in Indiana, on an Army base that had trained and lost 59 Benjamins, 314 Johns, 211 Davids and enough other boys that they had ceased to track them by name, Ben sat on the edge of his bunk bed and watched a bird that had flown inside. He knew that he could not catch it so he waited for it to fly against the window hard enough that it fell to the ground. Maybe the bird would still be alive, he hoped, only stunned, and then he could carry it outside. He should have been in the mess hall. He would get in trouble but he didn’t care. Ben was suffering his own stun. That morning he had received his assignment: he was to be trained as a motion picture photographer, part of a four-man team that would film the war for military archives. Not an office job. Not safe. He would be deployed in four weeks, but instead of a gun, Ben would stand in front of the war holding nothing but a camera.
The bird fell. It was still breathing when Ben brought it outside and set it at the base of a fall-bright maple tree, encouraged it gently with a red, red leaf.
Ben did not tell Fern about his assignment. Shame and fear had knitted everything in him shut. He wrote to Fern and called once a week but all he reported were the meals, the exercises, the weather. He sounded farther away than he really was. His voice was mostly air, just a whisper. Each week she wished the same wish, “Just try to go unnoticed.” And then he went back to learning how to film without flinching and she went back to the game of husband and wife in the little house with the little pots and pans and a table just the size for two.
Fern and Edgar went to the market together and chose jam and bread, which they ate in bed, naked and too hot for sheets. They went dancing at the hotel ballroom on a Friday night, all the men clean-shaven and the women in gingham dresses. Fern’s blond hair was teased and set and she had on a short, straight dress and white pumps. She was delighted by the banjo and mandolin, instruments her parents would not have been able to name. There were two fast songs and then a slow one, the music growing soft enough that the overwhelming sound was of feet shuffling over wooden planks. Sliding together, landing together, everyone’s arms around a neck or a waist, each a scented pair: aftershave and rose.
—
There was pleasure in pleasure and Fern and Edgar had plenty of that, newlyweds that they were. There was also pleasure in bearing witness to the life of this unknown place. The miners really did come up from below with their faces black. Edgar felt validated in both his belief in good, regular work—these people were grateful, honest—and also his belief that what his father did for a living was possible because of the suffering of poorer people. All summer, Edgar picked the scab of guilt. It felt good to feel bad. Someone in the family had to.
Ben stopped sending letters but he still called on the phone. He was quiet while Fern skimmed over her everydays, not wanting to say too much about how happy she was, despite missing him. Ben said, “I don’t want to talk, Fern, but don’t hang up. Just hold the line.” She leaned against the wall until her knees ached and then she slid down and sat on the floor. She knew he was there from his breathing. More than an hour later Ben said, “Thank you. I have to go.” She heard his end of the phone find its cradle and then the line went quiet. She imagined him taking a deep breath before straightening his body into a pole, looking at the far horizon and saluting. This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love.
—
Fern and Edgar became friends with a black miner and his wife. They did not say aloud that they were proud of this fact, yet they were. They wanted to transcend the legacy, to be the generation that made it right. The couple, in their fifties with children already grown and gone, invited them over for hamburgers and beer. They talked about summer and weather and winter and parents and food and it seemed like skin was just skin. They got a little drunk. The men stood on the porch smoking and the stars were just beginning to pop and a few fireflies drew lines in the dusk and there was no moon and it was perfect, a perfect night.
The man said, “I wonder if I could ask you for a favor.” He admitted to Edgar that he was illiterate and asked for help writing a letter to his family at home.
The man produced an oily piece of paper from his pocket and Edgar understood how much it cost the man to make this admission, to hand the blank sheet over. The paper was slightly wobbly in front of Edgar and he wanted to go home with his wife and drink water and bite her neck and sleep. He rubbed his eyes and used the railing as a hard surface on which to write.
He wanted Edgar to describe a particular lake with a rope swing. He wanted to say how much he missed his mother.
Fern and the miner’s wife walked outside with a plate of cookies. Fern said, “You might have to take me home now, my love.” It was very dark by then, all stars. The miner and his wife drew close together and he kissed her on the top of her head.
“We forgot a flashlight,” Edgar said.
“No trouble,” the miner told him and sent his wife inside. She returned with a laundry basket full of headlights, flashlights and lanterns, a man well prepared to move through unlit places. He insisted that Fern and Edgar each have their own. “Better to have too much light,” he said.
“Wait. We have to finish your letter,” Edgar said.
“Don’t worry,” the man said, “I can sign my ow
n name.” It was a joke; it was not a joke.
Fern chose an old-fashioned kerosene lantern and Edgar took a flashlight with batteries. They went out into the rich blackness, making halos of yellow and white. Fern pressed away a thought of boys like her brother in a night yet darker than this, the only bright spots explosions that might kill them. She took Edgar’s hand. With less vision they noticed sound: their feet on the grass, mosquitos, the pop of a firecracker a few miles away.
—
They stayed on into winter. Edgar kept writing letters for the black miner. They went to the Friday dances and ate pancakes on Sundays at the diner. They adopted a stray tabby cat. Edgar’s parents kept asking if they were finished yet, ready to come back to the regular world, and Fern and Edgar kept trying to tell them that they had it wrong: this was real. The other life was the one full of falseness. Fern’s parents had no such question. Fern and her father talked only about Ben, though there was little to say. She and her mother talked only about the cherry tree in the house orchard that had been overpruned and the gardener who now had to be fired.
It was already cold outside by November. “Gin and tonic?” Edgar asked and she smiled for him. She heard the tink of the ice but not its hiss. He hummed to himself while he poured.
“You know where I’d like to go is Egypt,” she said.
“Because it’s warm there?”
“Because of all the old things they have. And because it’s warm.”
The snow had fallen for the last week. It had rounded out the corners on everything—the tables, the wooden chair Fern knew she ought to have brought in. She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.
“Add another log to the fire, would you?” she asked. This was a beloved job of his. If he tended his fire as completely as he would have liked, they would have gone through their season’s supply of wood in a few days.
“I’ll wait a few more minutes.”
“We can get more wood,” she said.
“This is a winter’s worth,” he said, gesturing to the pile under the eaves. “This is enough for everybody else.”
Whether to buy their way out would be a constant question. To be like everyone, to be regular, a constant dream. For him it tasted sour because he failed at it and for her it tasted sweet because occasionally she succeeded.
Edgar whittled, turning something rough over in his hands, imagining a way to smooth it. Reflected in his thick glasses: the bald trees outside, grey-gold. A siren sounded.
Fern untangled a length of yarn, which was orange and scratchy. The cat was at the other end. For the cat, this ball was its own celebration. Fern carried the one end carefully through each knot, loosening as she went.
Another siren and another. “I wonder what’s going on,” Edgar said.
Edgar turned on the radio but it wasn’t music that came out. A man’s deep voice said the second half of a sentence, “. . . no known survivors.”
The cat, at that exact instant, choked on the orange string. Fern dragged it, wet, from the cat’s throat.
They turned the radio up, listened until they had heard the whole story. The mine had collapsed with twenty-nine men inside. There was a fire. No one could go down to search, and it was unlikely they would find anything but bodies if they did.
Edgar called the wife of the miner but the line was busy. Everyone’s lines were. He called his father. “Turn on the news,” Edgar said.
“It’s on. They’re talking about the hippies.”
“Your mine just killed twenty-nine people.”
“I don’t have a mine, Edgar. I have a steel factory and we have an excellent safety record. And if you’re still spending that money then it’s your factory too.”
The line was quiet. “Edgar,” his father said. “I should tell you. There’s a letter here for you.”
“Don’t you feel responsible at all?”
“Edgar. It’s the draft.”
The room stilled. Edgar looked at the scratched wood of the table, at the seam between floorboards and wall, at his wife, his beauty, their marriage still so new. “The war?” he asked, and Fern—who had watched the fall of her husband’s face had asked, “What? What happened? Is everyone all right?”—understood.
“But we’re married,” she said. “They’re not drafting married men.” Love saves us, she thought. What better reason could there be?
Edgar hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Fern sat on his lap and smelled his scalp and made cuffs around his wrists with her hands. Their lives were promised to each other, legally bound, but they still felt another body in the room.
—
They drove that night through the town. In one house there was a solemn gathering, everyone in the lamplight in a circle around the blue flicker of the television. Fern and Edgar had lost no father, no husband, no son. They were tourists, observing the everyday marvel of working-class lives, black lives. Edgar wanted to apologize for his very existence. He had spent his father’s money to rent the little cottage, to buy the diner pancakes on Sunday morning, the Friday night steaks, the stamps he had given to the miner.
Edgar slowed the car in front of the house where the black couple lived hoping to be surprised to find the big man’s frame at the table, safe. “Maybe he had the day off,” Fern said. But the curtains were drawn and there was only one silhouette behind them, one small female shadow. The miner’s grandfather might have been owned by Fern’s great-grandfather; the miner’s father might have died fighting to be free; the miner had died because he was poor. Edgar took his wallet out of his back pocket and emptied the bills. He did not count them but Fern saw a hundred-dollar note in the pile and a book of stamps. He got out of the car and put them in the mailbox. Edgar thought of the word fortune, both accumulation and luck. Inside was a woman on the wrong side of both, while his own numbers ticked steadily upward. He drove home holding Fern’s hand, coasted the last mile with his lights off. The emptiness of night, the darkness, seemed like the only honest thing.
Edgar said, “We could go to Canada. We could go to Mexico.”
“We don’t have to run away. You just tell them you’re married and you don’t have to go.” She would not have been ready to flee even if she had to. She was eighteen years old. She was, for the first time in her life, cooking her own meals. She was learning to drive a car. She was imagining going to college someday and having pretty little babies who grew into pretty boys and girls whom she would raise and admire with the man she loved. She wanted a home, her own home.
Edgar stopped the car in front of their house. He looked at his wife. He understood in her face that she was afraid, that she knew there existed the possibility of losing him. They watched three bats disappear behind the house and come back, disappear and come back.
“I’m scared too,” he said.
Edgar thought of the miners, still under the ground. The wrongs in the past, the wrongs in the present. He thought of the miners’ wives and daughters, their mothers.
Edgar squeezed hard on the gearshift. “Everyone else in the world has to do what they have to do to survive.”
“Are you saying you’d rather kill and maybe die than get out of it for a legitimate reason?”
“I’m saying the world isn’t fair. Why do I deserve safety when someone else doesn’t?”
All night, Edgar dreamed of being buried. At daybreak he pressed his body against Fern’s back and said, “I’m going to go where they tell me. Love doesn’t save everyone else. Money doesn’t save everyone else.”
“You’re half blind. What about that? Isn’t that an excuse?”
“I’ll leave that up to them. I’m sure they’ll give me an appropriate post.”
Fern felt a pain in her gut so sharp she put
her hand there to feel for a cut. She said, “You have to come back.” She turned to him. She wanted to slap him hard across the cheek, to burn herself onto him. “You have to fucking swear that you will come back.”
—
The first weeks on base in Tennessee before Edgar left for the war were sweet, which surprised both him and Fern. He stood behind her while she cooked, imprinted the curve of her hipbone on his palm. She made him pork chops and buttered peas and they stayed up too late playing cards and drinking gin. He trained with other boys and his muscles changed shape, sharpened. She undid his buttons to find a new version of her husband, made it her work to leave all his muscles weakened and tired. They were a young couple in a house the same size as all the other young couples’ houses; his income was earned. Their bed was always warm.
They saw hippies on television and one morning a carful of them pulled up to the pump beside Fern and Edgar at the filling station. Edgar felt a vague tug, sure that he would have been at home in their conversations, much more than he was with the other Army boys. Three girls spilled out of the backseat in jeans and cropped shirts. Fern felt suddenly as if she was wearing her mother’s clothes. She touched her hair, which she had dried and sprayed. How had these girls managed to grow their hair so long already? Even if Fern had been brave enough to join them on their westward migration it would have taken years before she could look the part.
Edgar, dressed in the giveaway green, washed his windshield and kept his head down. One of the hippies passed him and said, with distaste, “Morning, man.” A few years later people like him would spit on anyone in a military uniform, but it was early still and hatred for the war was a source of heat but not yet fire.
“Morning,” Edgar said, trying to mimic the hippy’s distaste, “man.” The guys came out of the filling station a few minutes later with chocolate candy and sodas. The girls came out with cigarettes and matches. Fern and Edgar sat in their station wagon and watched the van pull away, pause at the street and turn right, heading west.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 7
