Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

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.