The Draft
©2012 by Michael C. Boxall
Smashwords edition
Discover other short fiction by Michael C. Boxall at Smashwords.com:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/110537 The Tent
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/109195 Timeline
The Draft
More sweepings from the cutting-room floor. Only Pierre, still burdened by guilt, and Madeleine made it through to the final version of The Great Firewall, twenty years younger than I had originally envisioned them. I’ve never been to Massachusetts, other than to change planes at Boston airport. I don’t know why I wanted to write about an Irish-French Catholic family in the 1960s. I’m not even American. But then, why not?
How quickly we judge our parents. I knew all along that Cathleen was smarter than our father. With her beads and painted face and the long Indian dresses she brought back from increasingly frequent trips to Boston, she could have been a poster girl for the times, Hippy Schoolkid, circa ‘69. That was what made her gift for putting her opponents on the wrong foot so surprising, and so effective.
The ten-year age difference meant she was more like an aunt than my sister. Aunt-like, she read me stories and brought me presents. For my seventh birthday Gerry gave me a toy Sharp’s buffalo rifle, which delighted me. The Sharp’s had an S-shaped hammer on the side that made me think of an old man in a battered ten-gallon hat. A galloot. What could be more beautiful than a gun? Expressionless, Cathleen put down her royal flush: a kaleidoscope.
Right from the start I was fascinated by light, and the way it shifted and changed, and what it revealed. I spent an eternity enchanted by a pair of spectacles with what looked tortoiseshell frames, although they were probably plastic. They had been left on a windowsill, and sunlight poured through the frames and made pools of amber on the cracked white paint.
At the bottom of the yard was a wooden shed where Gerry kept shovels and rakes and trowels. In summer it smelled of dry earth. There were tubers and daffodil bulbs wrapped in old newspaper, and a shelf with geranium seedlings in pots. Spiders awaited tremors at the edges of their webs, one of which had lost its shape and collapsed in a tangle of weightless debris, a shroud for the desiccated thorax of a dead fly. In the wall opposite the door was a window. On drowsy afternoons, when sunlight streamed through the grubby pane, I would sit and gaze at the angled shaft of light and the slow, twirling dance of the motes of dust, drifting flecks of brightness which had no body or bulk, only a reflective glint. The motes looked like stars, except that the stars moved together in a cluster. And there were a lot more of them. Or were there?
“How many stars are there?” I asked Gerry one night. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, now, I don’t remember the exact number offhand. But more than you could count in a month of Sundays.” Were there as many motes of dust? Of course, you could only see motes when the sunlight fell on them. Perhaps there were motes everywhere, all around us, all the time, but we couldn’t see them because there weren’t enough shafts of sunlight.
One warm Saturday afternoon Maddy and Gerry went shopping and I wandered down to the shed. As I got to the door I heard Cathleen say in a low voice,
“Don’t worry, it’s okay. It’s not as if you’ve done anything wrong.”
Then a man’s voice, also low and quiet, said,
“No, ma’am. But your daddy might not see it that way.” I’d never heard a man speak like that, so soft, so caressing.
They were sitting on a blanket beneath the window, backs against the wall, while Cathleen filled a paper sack with brownies. The man had his legs apart, one arm resting on his knee, other hand lifting a crude-looking cigarette to his lips. It smelled like autumn leaves. He stopped when I came in and I could see the palm of his half-raised hand, so pink, as if he had been holding onto a bar while he was plunged into whatever ink had made the rest of his immense bulk so black.
Cathleen smoothed down her plaid skirt.
“Pierre, this is a friend of mine, Sherman. He’s going on a trip. Up north. I was just packing him something to eat.”
In a fluid, effortless movement, Sherman rolled forward and squatted down on his haunches in front of me, hugging his knees. His eyeballs were startlingly white, though the rims of his eyelids were red. He studied me for a moment, then grinned and held out a hand the size of a baseball mitt.
“Hi, Pierre, good to meet you.”
His hand was warm, like his voice, and the skin on the back was covered in a tracery of fine lines.
“Pierre, you don’t have to tell anybody you saw Sherman here. Let’s keep it a secret, okay? He’ll be leaving soon, anyway. Won’t you, Sherman?” I could tell she didn’t want him to.
“Yes, ma’am, I better be going.” But he made no move.
“Why don’t you go back in the house, Pierre? Go and wait for Mum and Dad, okay?”
I nodded, solemnly.
“Just don’t say anything about Sherman.”
Sherman grinned again, and flashed a peace sign. I grinned too, and flashed one back. I’d seen black people before, but I’d never talked to one. How dark his skin was. How different he looked.
When Cathleen came in I followed her to her room. “Has Sherman gone?” I asked. I hoped he hadn’t.
“Don’t be such a busybody,” she snapped. She didn’t usually do that. “Yes, he’s gone. But it’s very important that nobody knows he’s been here.”
“Why not?”
She gave me a long, sober look, assessing how much I could understand.
“You know there’s a war in Vietnam. Thousands of soldiers have been slaughtered.” There was a seriousness in her face I had not seen before. She took my shoulders between her hands, fixing me with sea-green eyes.
“They had to go because of the draft. And now a lot of people are refusing. That’s what Sherman is doing, keeping out of the draft.”
I nodded, although I couldn’t see why he had come to our shed to keep out of of it.
Monday was washing day. After Gerry and Cathleen left my mother cleared away the breakfast things and shook out the tablecloth for the birds, then began to collect the laundry.
“That’s funny,” she said. “One of Cathleen’s blankets is covered in bits of dead leaf.” She held it up to her nose and sniffed. “And it’s got a strange smell. What has she been doing with it?”
“Keeping Sherman out of the draft,” I said, unthinkingly.
She stopped, blanket held to her nose in both hands.
“Whatever are you talking about? Who is Sherman?”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. Telling lies did not come easily back then.
“A cat. A black cat. He was in the shed. But he ran away.”
She looked at me closely. “When was this?”
“Saturday. While you were out.”
“A cat. Why did she need a blanket to keep it out of the draft?”
My mind went blank and my stomach felt suddenly hollow. I sensed that, for reasons I didn’t understand, this was all very important. But why? I’d heard Gerry say to Maddy, “No wonder your dad likes a nip of brandy to warm his bones. The draft in that workshop will be the death of him.” Why did keeping Sherman out of it have to be a secret?
That night my mother tried to shield me by sending me up to my room. I heard shouting, a slap, screaming, the slam of the door, and I knew it was all my fault.
The anger and the tears I had caused were just a prelude to the bitterness that soon split the family apart, a rift more terrible than anything I could have imagined.
When Cathleen was home she stayed in her room with her Rolling Stones records–her jungle music, Gerry had jokingly called it in happier times–and her books. Her face became thinner, and her eyes as red-rimmed as Sherman’s. Once I thought I caught the smell of burning leaves. She looked bedraggled. Then one morning I was woken by the sound of her being violently sick.
Of course, I did’t know what it meant. All I knew was that next day she went away and didn’t come back and nothing was ever the same. Gerry no longer sang, or rested his chin on top of the grandfather clock and waggled his ears, or told jokes. He left in the mornings without a word and did not come home until Mulvaney’s tavern closed. He didn’t even wind the clock on Sundays; Maddy did that, last thing at night, when she thought I was in bed.
And so my childhood ended–the time when the seeds of all that is to come afterward are sown.
*****
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