Once We Had a Country (11 page)

Eventually, because there wasn’t really a way to avoid it, she came around to her father. It was easy enough to speak about the man she remembered from her childhood. Gliding through the story of her adolescence, though, she found herself running headlong toward describing his return to the Church. Instead of breaking off, she crashed right into it.

“In college, I lost my faith,” she said. A funny expression, she thought, as if her faith were something she’d misplaced somewhere, when the experience was more like a wave rolling over a sandcastle. “I took a course in World Religions, and that was enough, just learning about all those creeds with their different gods. Suddenly it seemed arrogant to believe in one true Church.” She saw Fletcher nodding and realized it was her first time talking about this with him. “I didn’t tell my dad, though. He wasn’t a churchgoer, but I thought he’d take it hard. When I’d gone away to college—”

She broke off, not wanting to tell Wale that her father had seemed lonely, that to make him feel better she’d often said how homesick and out of place she felt in Boston,
even though in fact she’d liked her classes, liked the city, was happy knowing she could go out whenever she wanted without letting anyone down.

“Then last year, while I was at teachers’ college,” she went on, “he called me to say he’d started going to Mass. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. I felt so bad, I finally told him about the World Religions class.”

“How did he take it?” asked Fletcher.

Maggie shook her head, still dismayed. “He wanted to have a theological debate. This guy who hadn’t gone to Mass since he was a boy, suddenly he was trying to argue me back into believing. He went on about Vatican II and all the reforms, the liturgies in English, the Masses at people’s houses. He even felt obliged to tell me they have Eucharists of milk and cookies now, because milk and cookies are more relevant.”

By the time Brid returned to the table, Maggie was explaining about her father’s plans for Laos. Fletcher squeezed her hand in sympathy, while Brid said missionaries were just another kind of soldier. Wale wanted to know if Maggie was familiar with Laos, and she admitted she’d never even seen it on a map. He said it was a squiggly turd of territory between Vietnam and Thailand with its own special brand of Communists, the Pathet Lao, fighting against the royalists. He said officially it was a civil war, but everybody had their fingers in it. The North Vietnamese were backing the Pathet Lao; the Thais and U.S. were helping out the royalists. There weren’t any American troops on the ground, though. Instead, they had CIA agents train the local mountain people, the
Hmong, to fight the bad guys. It hadn’t been going so well for the Hmong. Nowadays their typical soldier was a twelve-year-old with a machine gun. Wale said the only upside of Laos was that they’d legalized the opium trade, so you could make a lot of money if you didn’t mind being shot at.

“Not that you’d know anything about it,” said Fletcher with a laugh, but Wale looked at him with a blank expression, and Brid seemed less than pleased by the comment too, because a second later she steered the conversation toward how well Wale was getting along with Pauline.

The next evening after work, when Maggie stepped through the front doors of her school, Wale was waiting for her. At first she didn’t register him, because she was still suffering her daily wave of post-class recrimination, remembering the inanities she’d uttered, the moments when one second-grade delinquent or another had spoken back, refused to follow directions, or in some other way reduced her to a wheedler and a nag. The Christmas break was a week away and she still hadn’t wept in front of the students. It was her only success as a teacher.

The prospect of a stiff drink was beckoning when she noticed Wale ahead of her. Though it was ten degrees, he had nothing on his head or hands, and he was stamping his feet to stay warm.

“Thought I’d surprise you,” he called out.

“Well, you did,” she said, trying to sound unflustered. She almost asked how he knew where she worked until she remembered telling him at the bar. It had just been small talk. Now she considered making some excuse and turning
back into the school, but no, he was just an odd duck. She was grown-up enough to handle him.

“Got time for a beer?” he asked. When she told him she was late to meet Fletcher downtown, he seemed undaunted and said he’d ride there with her. On the way to the subway station he asked about her day, as if the two of them walking along together were an ordinary thing. At the station he offered to pay her fare and she told him not to be silly, thinking it best to give no sign of encouragement.

On the subway, she made a point of bringing up Fletcher, and there was relief in seeing how the mention of his name made Wale’s eyes lose their gleam. She said that without Fletcher she’d have quit her job already. She said how surprised she’d been to find herself dating him. Teaching had made her such a wreck, she couldn’t imagine being attractive to anybody. But that was the wrong comment to make.

“There’s your problem,” said Wale, the gleam returning. “You don’t see yourself like other people do.” She didn’t know how to respond to that. “For example, the way you listen. Last night you asked me all those questions. Most people don’t bother doing that, especially with a vet. You pay attention, though. It’s a turn-on.”

She wanted to point out that she’d barely asked him anything, and that asking questions didn’t mean she was into him; it only meant she found it easier than talking about herself.

“You know, your dad will probably be okay in Laos,” said Wale out of the blue. It was disconcerting to have the matter raised so unexpectedly, and she had to shunt away a sudden feeling of despair.

“Probably he won’t go,” she said. “He’s never even left the Northeast.”

“If he does, will you join him?”

“Why would I do that?” But as she said it, she knew why she would. Guilt about leaving him had already sent her back to Syracuse summer after summer. How could she let him go to Laos on his own?

“Last night you made it sound like you two are close,” said Wale. “Or you used to be, at least. Maybe you’d want to look out for him.”

Maggie didn’t reply.

“Well, if you do go, tell me,” said Wale. “I might come over and look you up.” He grinned at her, and she decided he was probably insane.

In silence they exited the train and rode the escalator to the surface, Maggie worrying the whole way up that he was going to say something else she’d have to deal with. It was a relief when they reached the cold air outside, but Fletcher was nowhere to be seen.

“He said he’d be here,” she explained, unable to hide her unease, needing to be out of Wale’s company. He seemed to think she was only concerned about Fletcher’s welfare.

“You’re really stuck on this guy. It’s not for his money, is it?”

Even though he said it jokingly, Maggie scowled. She often worried about the Morgan family’s wealth, not because people like Wale would think she was a gold digger, but because her father might feel self-conscious about his own money problems.

It was only another minute before Fletcher arrived. He seemed taken aback to see Wale with her, and she found herself saying that the two of them had run into each other on the subway. Wale winked at her, and immediately she regretted the lie. As he said goodbye and started away from them, she could imagine him growing ever bolder with her, not caring what Brid or Fletcher thought, until there was some confrontation and Maggie got blamed. The next time she and Fletcher met up with Brid, though, Wale wasn’t there. He’d re-enlisted and shipped out to Vietnam, beating her father to Indochina by a good four months.

Between the hours of gardening, cleaning, and making dinners, Maggie retreats to her camera. She films George Ray atop a ladder as he tends the trees, a transistor radio in his shirt pocket piping music to him through an earphone. She captures Fletcher and Wale on the farmhouse roof with their hammers flashing. From the creek bank a mile downstream, she films them and Brid swimming in a shady pool beneath an old concrete dam, while water passes over the edge in a smooth, clear stream and an empty bird’s nest bobs in an eddy. Across the road, the church’s steeple pokes up from the horizon, scratching a human presence into the sky. Pauline sits cross-legged on the bank in her pink swimsuit, collecting pebbles for a tiny, slowly growing cairn.

By now Maggie has recognized that when the others are conscious of the camera, they each have their reactions. For Brid, to be filmed is an affront, as though someone has
called her a dirty name. Wale tries to escape, so that often there are only blurred glimpses of him quickening away like a sasquatch. George Ray is almost as elusive, cloistered in the barracks when he isn’t working. Those times she does catch him out, he acts embarrassed. By contrast, Pauline squirms her way into every shot she can, dancing and hamming. A camera appears and the world rearranges itself in response. Fletcher alone changes not a bit, as if he’s been exposed to cameras all his life.

With each person, it’s the private moments Maggie’s after. She doesn’t want self-consciousness; she doesn’t want performance. In daydreams she imagines aerial shots that would let her study everyone at her leisure, unobserved, but in practice she’s limited to filming from ground level, so she stays on the periphery and wills herself to be part of the landscape, carrying the camera even when it’s turned off, hoping others will become less sensitive to its presence.

It would be easier to blend into the scene if more people were around, but no one else arrives. Even Frank and the girls next door remain absent from the lawn in front of the mobile home when Maggie walks by. As the middle of July approaches, Fletcher’s optimism about the farm starts to dwindle.

“A hundred thousand draft dodgers in this country and we can’t get one of them,” he complains. He stays up late watching television, feet on the coffee table, pulling at his moustache while twin quadrilaterals of light reflect in his eyeglasses. He has never drunk much beer, alcohol being long shunned by his family, but now as he watches he always has a bottle in hand. When the Democratic convention
begins, he takes up near-permanent residence in the living room, and no one bothers to chastise him for not working. At the dinner table he speaks less often about his plans for Harroway and more about the failings of the party leadership. On the convention’s last night, they all sit together to watch McGovern take the nomination. By the time Eagleton’s declared the running mate, though, Brid and Wale have given up and gone to bed.

“I still can’t believe Ted Kennedy refused to stand,” says Fletcher. Maggie knows that he and his father once went fishing with Ted Kennedy.

It’s almost three in the morning when McGovern makes his acceptance speech. Maggie’s lying with her head against Fletcher’s thigh, wanting to luxuriate in this propinquity, the stillness of the night, everyone else asleep and his hands resting in her hair, but she can’t get comfortable. There’s a tautness in his muscles; the speech has got his attention. She hasn’t even been listening, but now she tries to focus on the words. Through the stupor of her tiredness she sees McGovern as a mass of light distinguishable only by eyebrows and sideburns. Then a phrase hooks her.

“From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America.” Her heart begins to thud. “From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation,” McGovern says, “come home, America.” She glances at Fletcher, but his face is unreadable. “Come home, America. Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.”

Gently, Fletcher lifts her head from against his leg, and she thinks he’s going to kiss her, but instead he gets up and turns off the television, then says he’s going to bed.

Upstairs in the dark, she lays her arm across his chest.

“You know, we can go back if you want,” he says.

For a while she doesn’t answer.

“Do you want to?” she asks.

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m happy here,” she tells him.

“That’s good,” he replies, kissing her on the eyelids. “I am too.”

It isn’t long before she hears his breathing stretch and deepen. Before she joins him in sleep, she marvels at the fact that although she was prepared to lie, her words felt like honest ones. It’s the truth of Fletcher’s response she can’t quite take for granted.

Wale stares into the camera as if daring it to look away first. A window behind him reveals the cherry orchard’s rustling leaves. He seems to have dressed up for the occasion, wearing a collared shirt and black denim pants.

“All right,” he says, sounding a little bored, “where do I start? Well, maybe the kookiest thing about the whole story is that I served my time in the army back in sixty-five. I wasn’t in college, so of course they drafted me right off the bat. Yeah, I’m not a spring chicken like you and Fletcher. The kicker is, back then I didn’t even go to Vietnam. The army found out I had certain, what do you call them, aptitudes, so I was with Special Forces in other places.” He produces rolling paper and tobacco from his pocket. “I’m not going to talk about that stuff, okay?” The camera closes in on his hands, perhaps to ascertain what
the fingers of someone in Special Forces look like. The knuckles are a bit knobbly, and there are fine dark hairs on the bottom joints.

“I did my time, then got out. After that I started rapping with guys who’d been in Vietnam. Some of them were hanging out with SDS types. That’s how I met Brid.” Once the cigarette is rolled, he flicks his lighter. “Then last December my buddy enlisted. He’d hit some hard times and wasn’t thinking straight. The two of us grew up together, and back then he saved my ass more than once, so I figured I’d join up and watch out for him. Brid was pretty pissed off about it—but I guess you know that.”

There’s a cut, a change of angle. Now his face is visible from the other side.

“What can I tell you about Vietnam? It was a good gig, all right. For most of the guys it’s their first time out of the States. They get to Saigon and suddenly they’re in this whole other world with banana palms and two-buck whores. They love it. Lots of them think that with the nice weather, the drugs, and the easy pussy, they’ll just stay there to open a hotel once their tour’s done. Our boys don’t want to fight, they want to be Bogie in Casablanca.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Who cares if the locals live in hooches made out of Coke cans? Uncle Sam feeds his boys pretty well. Every night at dinner the chaplain says the same prayer, ‘Forgive us any harm we may have done today,’ and you tell yourself that’s goddamn magnanimous of him. You repeat that little prayer before you go to bed and you think America’s doing a pretty decent thing.” He covers his mouth to cough. “You meet
some pretty interesting people, too.” At this he gazes past the camera intently.