Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Though she never said as much, I think Shellie thought the two of us shared a bond as criminals of conscience. I didn’t have the heart to tell her this wasn’t at all the case with me, and that Thoreau would have called me a coward to my face. And in any event, Kate absolutely adored her.

“Well, that’s true,” I said. “Many people did.”

“Your father. My grandfather.”

“He was one, that’s right.”

“Did you?”

I sipped my cocoa and thought. I had been waiting to have this conversation for years. But now that it had finally come, I felt completely unprepared, like a kid taking an exam he’d studied too hard for. Everything I’d planned to say was suddenly forgotten.

“I didn’t like it. Nobody likes war, except maybe generals. But on the whole I’d have to say no, I didn’t think it was wrong. If there hadn’t been a good reason to fight, they wouldn’t have asked me to go. That was how I thought of it.”

“They didn’t ask you. They drafted you.”

“That’s their way of asking, Kats. Like, when me or mom says, Kats, please pick up your room. It’s a request, but we mean business. It’s sort of the same thing.”

“Quakers didn’t go. Mrs. Wister told us about them. She said they were…” Her brow wrinkled with the effort of a new word. “Con-scious objectors.”

“The word is conscientious. And you’re right. But if Mrs. Wister told you about them, then she probably also told you that Quakers are pacifists. You know that word, pacifists?”

Across the table, she nodded. “They don’t believe in war.”

“That’s right. Any war. Or any kind of fighting at all. I don’t feel that way, and if they’d asked me, that’s what I would have said.”

She frowned the way she had since she was small, her thoughts turned inward as she prowled the hallways of her argument, looking for an unlocked door.

“You could have been killed.”

“True, I might have. But probably not. And in any case, that makes no difference. It was complicated, Kats. Those were crazy days. The truth is, I wanted to go to Vietnam. Well, not wanted. I thought it was my duty to go. But my father asked me not to.”

Her eyes flashed-a hunter with the quarry in her sights. “Asked asked, or pick-up-your-room asked?”

“Well, I was a grown man by then, Kats. But yeah, that’s pretty much how it happened.”

“So, the government told you to do one thing, and your father told you to do another.”

“That’s right.”

“And you had to choose.”

“Smart kid. You’ve got it exactly.”

That frown again. She looked into her mug a moment like a diviner reading tea leaves. “Then you were one,” she said finally.

“One what, Kats?”

“Con… scientious objector.”

Kate was nine when she said this to me. Nine years old, and she actually said this!

“Mrs. Wister asked me something after class. To give you a message.”

I had seen this coming too. “Okay, shoot.”

“She wanted to know if you’d come to school someday. To talk about the draft. About being a draft invader.”

The mistake was such a treat I decided to let it go by. Draft invader-why hadn’t anybody thought of this before?

“I don’t really have much to say about it, Kats. Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Four years cleaning fish and feeling homesick. It’s not really a very good story. It was pretty smelly, actually.”

“And you came back because I was going to be born.”

I nodded. “Yup. I missed your mom, and your grandpa was getting sick and needed me to look after things here, and the whole thing had begun to look pretty stupid. But it was mostly for you.”

“Tell me again about sleeping on the floor.”

This was the part of the story she knew and loved the best-the part in which she was the main character.

“Well, let’s see. You were born a bit early. About a month. And after you were born, Mom was pretty weak, and had to stay in bed for a while. So I slept on the floor by your crib to watch over you.”

She got out of her chair and climbed onto my lap. “How small was I?”

She knew all of this already, of course, had heard it a hundred times. “The smallest person I’d ever seen, Kats. Five pounds and something.” I showed her with my hands. “But not too small. Just the right size for a girl baby.”

“Tell me about the snow.”

“Who said anything about snow?”

“Daddy!”

“Okay, okay, the snow. A couple of days after you were born there was a big snowstorm-”

“How big?”

“Well, pretty big. Huge, in fact. Four, five feet at least. Snow like you’ve never seen in your life. And then it got cold, as cold as I’ve ever felt. Ten, fifteen below zero. It was so cold that if you sneezed it would turn to ice as it came out your nose.”

“Daddy, gross!”

“I’m just saying it was cold. And with all that snow and cold the power went out, and there was too much snow even for the plow, so there was no way anybody was going anywhere for a while, it was just the bunch of us all holed up together, me and your granddad, and your mom still weak and you so tiny.”

“And you kept me warm.”

“That’s right. When it got really cold at night I wrapped a blanket around the two of us and held you tight by the fire, and that was how I did it. It was when I knew how glad I was to be home. It was like you were saying to me, Daddy, you’re back now, and this is your job, keeping me warm. Just like now. Kats?”

“What?”

“You want me to tell this story to your class?”

She considered this a moment, then shook her head against my chest. “I guess not.”

“That’s what I was thinking too. But you don’t have to tell Mrs. Wister. I’ll tell her myself.”

Which I did: when school resumed the next day, I instructed Kate not to take the bus home and drove into town to get her instead. Waiting by my truck in the pickup line I told Shellie Wister that Kats and I had talked things over and decided that four years gutting mackerel in New Brunswick and two more pushing a broom and boiling bedsheets in a VA psychiatric hospital weren’t anything anybody else’s children would actually be interested in. Our family story would stay just that: something for us, and not for the public record.

“I’m sorry to hear it, Joe. Anything I can say to change your mind?”

We were standing by the open door of the truck, our conversation blanketed by the roar of buses and yelling kids and general end-of-the-school-day chaos. Kate had wandered up the salted sidewalk to spend a last minute with her friends; though the air was still cold, the sun was bright as a heat lamp, a shining gift after two solid days under a dome of falling snow. Kate had removed her parka and tied it around herself, the empty arms dangling at her waist. Like most of her friends she was wearing an enormous purple backpack with the name of some singing group on it-New Kids off the Tracks or whatever it was-a Christmas present I had driven nearly two hours down to a Bradlees in Waterville to find. What in blazes did she keep in that thing? When she glanced in my direction I lifted my eyebrows to tell her to move it along.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, Shellie. I just don’t have anything interesting to say about it. You’d probably be bored.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Joe. The kids could really learn something from you.”

“All they’d learn from me is how to pack fish. I’m really not the best person to ask about this stuff.”

She let her eyes hold mine another moment. She was wearing a bunchy sweater of raw gray wool, the kind that looks homemade and in Shellie’s case almost certainly was. (No doubt she’d woven the wool, too.) A bright purple scarf circled her throat; she smelled a little of wood smoke, and beneath that, almost imperceptibly, a wispy hint of lilacs. I knew what she was doing with her eyes-she was a teacher, teaching-and bless her heart, I thought, thank God above for the Shellie Wisters of the world; though I also wanted very badly to shoehorn Kate from her friends and hit the road without having to explain any more than I already had. Shellie was clutching a clipboard across her chest, and as she stood before me, her dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, letting the silence do what talk could not, I felt the conversation slip from its course and snap into a fresh line like a tacking sail.