Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (8 page)

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.

—

In the evening, the phone rang and Fern picked up. “It’s Ben,” her mother said. The kitchen lost its air. Her voice sounded like a rattle; this could only be an ending. Fern sat down on the floor.

“What happened?” she asked. Ben had not been deployed yet. He should have been safe.

“He’s not dead,” her mother said. “He’s all right. They say he’s going to be fine.”

Fern imagined lost limbs, severed arteries, blood lost. In a single second she had pictured a hundred accidents: a misfired gun, a grenade that was supposed to have been fake, a car crash, a fight. “Tell me what’s happening,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly. They just said they’re sending him to a hospital. He’s seeing things. He tried to fly away.”

In the morning Fern took the train to Indiana and stood in the hospital room with the pale yellow walls where her brother lay in bed, his arms and legs encased and strung up from the ceiling. She asked him what happened and he told her that he had only meant to fly a short distance, just to the grassy place outside his room. He said, “I really thought I could do it. I never meant to hurt myself.”

The nurse came with fish sticks and a pool of corn pudding and a slice of white bread. Ben, broken Ben, was so calm. He ate and they turned on the television and he laughed at places where a person was meant to laugh. Fern understood that he had indeed flown himself away. He had broken six bones to do it, but tonight Ben was not going to sleep in the Army barracks where he would be spit on from the upper bunk. He was not going to wake up to
a hundred push-ups or the names, over breakfast, of the soldiers who had died in the war the day before. Fern was proud of her brother. Before she left she found a marker and drew a cluster of stars in the crook of his elbow.

—

On the day Edgar was to leave, Fern put on the green sheath dress she wanted him to remember her in and she melted the last-day-butter in the last-day-pan, and flipped his eggs without breaking them.

He said, “My girl, what a girl I have.”

Fern said, “I’m about to get a lot better in your mind,” and smiled. “When you come home, you might be disappointed.” She did not want to say everything—she did not want it to be complete so that some god would think they had said goodbye so well that when someone needed to die, he would direct the bullet or the mortar in Edgar’s direction.

“No matter what happens—” Edgar started, but Fern cut him off.

“You’re going on a journey, an adventure. Your whole regular life will be here when you return. It’ll be just as plain as ever.”

Fern wanted to sit on his lap and kiss him all over his tanned face and give him the store of good-luck charms she had been gathering—the red-to-grey feather from a cardinal, her father’s watch, a lock of her hair, a square of satin from her wedding dress. Instead, she let the silence settle in. She let Edgar mop the yolks and drink his coffee.

As they waited on the platform, a higher-up approached Edgar and said, “Change of plans, son,” and handed him a folded piece of paper. “When you get to St. Louis, you’ll be taken to the airport.” Edgar looked at the typewritten page.

“Alaska?” he asked. “What do they need me to do in Alaska?” He looked at the paper again. “Because of my eyes? They didn’t seem worried about that before.”

Edgar looked like something shaken out, wet fabric in the wind. Fern stared at the ground. She did not explain that she had called his father after Edgar had gone to sleep the night before and asked for help. That she had begged him to find someone who knew someone.

“Oh, sugar,” Hugh had said, “I already have.”

It had been easier even than Fern could have dreamed. Edgar’s father had had to make only one phone call to a college buddy, a General, and in his conversation he had not even had to ask for the favor—just in mentioning that his son was bound for the central highlands of Vietnam, Edgar had been rescued. The two men had spent the rest of the conversation talking about football, and within an hour, Edgar’s assignment had been changed from the frontlines in the jungle to a post in the icy north where the only threat was an impossibly unlikely attempt by the Russians to cross the frozen churn of the Bering Strait.

“Thank you,” Fern had whispered into the phone.

“Don’t worry—I’ll never tell him that you called.”

When Fern had woken up in the morning and there had been no messenger at the door to tell Edgar that his post had changed, she had thought they had forgotten or that the message would be too late to save him or that she had dreamed the whole thing.

“Did you do this?” he asked. Was he angry? His face was red.

Here was money, rafting Edgar northward, alone again.

—

The base was a tatter of lonely women. The black women must have gathered in a different house because the luncheons Fern was invited
to were populated with girls as pale as her. When they gathered, the sound of them was shrill and made Fern nervous. It was as if they had all grown up together in the same house, were all sisters.

“What would you like to drink, Fern?”

“Water? Please,” Fern said. The next person wanted punch, and the person after her.

“Sure, punch would be nice.”

“I’d love punch, if you have it.”

“Punch, punch, punch,” they all said with the same cheerful smile.

A tray came out of the kitchen with twelve glasses of bright red and one clear. Fern lowered her head. She had no problem with being just like everyone, but here she wasn’t.

One of the girls asked Fern where she was from.

“Chicago,” she said.

“Me too! Whereabouts?”

“North Shore,” she said.

“Oh, fancy,” the girl said. “What are you doing here? I thought people like you got out of situations like this.” Indeed they did—all of Fern’s and Edgar’s classmates were in medical school, working towards PhDs in Russian Literature or already employed by law firms. They were secure in the idea that they were more valuable at home than in the jungle. Fern did not mention that while all the girls from the city, the girls from the town and farms had boyfriends and husbands who had been deployed to the jungle, her love was in Alaska. She was on an unknown planet, the only one of her kind. Fern wished for her brother. She was a person who had a match in the world—someone who had been born beside her, grown up beside her, who knew the particular nick and burn of their family and home.

The girl pressed for more details. Town, street. She kept know
ing the places Fern described right down to the fence, the meandering drive at the end of which was a perfectly calculated view of a big house. “It’s white with blue shutters, right? Aren’t there some kind of pink flowers in window boxes?”

“Geraniums,” Fern said. She felt as if someone had removed her skin.

“We used to go for Sunday drives up there. Papa liked to look at the big houses and pretend we were going to buy one.” She turned to the group. “We should be nice to Fern,” she said. “She lives in a mansion.”

“It’s not a mansion,” Fern said.

“You should be happy. Aren’t you happy? Don’t you wake up every morning and think how lucky you are?”

—

When Fern got home, there was something in her mailbox. It said only,
Miss you.
He did not sign his name but she knew the writing: Ben. She called the rehabilitation facility and asked for his room.

“Am I crazy?” Ben asked.

“You are you. The world is what’s crazy.”