Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The cat, at that exact instant, choked on the orange string. Fern dragged it, wet, from the cat’s throat.

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.”