For Veterans Day
Tues, Nov 21/67. A ball of cells no longer than a minute has
taken root in me. Virginia Woolf is screaming from her grave: You’ve ruined
everything. You were supposed to refuse to breed. Ron is puffed up with
blessing-from-God talk, already following me around with a pillow. God had
nothing to do with it. I missed a pill.
I know the moment the zygote burrowed into
my uterus, despite Ron calling it a romantic bit of retrospective
prognostication. October 22nd. We were watching TV, gripped by images of
protesters clubbed with rifle butts, desperately hoping our dear friend Carl
wasn’t one of them. I had belly cramps, chalked it up to an imminent period.
Never thought of implantation. Invasion. We saw blood splash onto steps, heard “Link
arms, link arms” and screams of pain. Carl said he’d be carrying a sign saying “Do
Not Ask For Whom The Bell Tolls” but we couldn’t spot it among the tens of
thousands of protesters there. He called next day to say he’d been tear-gassed
and dragged by his feet. My heart drums as if I’ve had ten cups of coffee. The
doctor says that’s normal.
~
Tavis bursts
from her in a bloody, briny-smelling torrent—no less extraordinary than Athena
emerging from the head of Zeus. It’s July 8, 1968, and the country is in shock.
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are dead. A hundred cities still lick
wounds from spring riots and not even Walter Cronkite believes in the war any
more. “Forgive me,” she whispers when the nurse lays seven pounds, six ounces
of slippery baby on her chest as gently as she might a soufflé.
~
Tues, Dec 2/69. We
watched the first draft lottery on TV last nite. They had the gall to open it with
a prayer. Numbered slips of paper in plastic capsules like cluster bomblets
determined who’d get drafted. A Congressman pulled the first from a deep glass
jar: 258. It corresponds to September 14. All guys born on that date between
1944 and 1950 almost surely will get called up next year. Imagine thousands of
September fourteeners across the country feeling kicked in the gut, their wives
or mothers too stunned to cry. Tavis’s birthdate was the 13th drawn. Though
they’re not drafting seventeen-month-olds yet, my heart stopped for a second.
The whole scene was coldly businesslike. There should have been women in black
weeping and wailing and on a big screen, footage of soldiers stepping on
landmines, babies getting shot, villages burning.
CP
Tricia Dower is a dual citizen of the US and Canada and
cannot watch scenes of war without tearing up. She’s the author of Silent Girl, a collection of stories
inspired by Shakespeare, and two novels: Stony
River (available in Canada now, in the United States fall 2016) and Becoming Lin (to be released in Canada March 2016). She lives in
Brentwood Bay, BC.
Thanks for this on our Veterans / Armistace Day.... Odd we'd forget the armistace. Today is a day of glory (thanks to the men and women who suffered because we asked them to do so), and a day of shame for sending them into mindless, fruitless, unnecesary wars. A day of shame.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Steven. I share your feelings.
ReplyDelete