DRAFT NOTICE by J. Malcolm Garcia
DRAFT NOTICE
In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, my parents were staunch conservatives critical of war protesters and draft dodgers, firmly convinced that if Saigon fell, all of Southeast Asia would collapse with it. But when my mother heard that Johnny McGuire, the eldest son of our next door neighbor had been drafted, she talked openly and without concern for contradiction about sending my 19-year-old brother to her sister in Mexico.
“I don’t think we have to worry,” my father said at breakfast that morning. My mother had just gotten off the phone with another neighbor who had told her about Johnny.
“I’m just saying,” she said walking back to the table.
My mother’s politics weren’t conclusions she had reached on her own, but conservative values handed down from one generation of her family to the next and assumed without question. Her father wanted Charles Lindbergh to run against Franklin Roosevelt for president. He supported the internment of the Japanese during World War Two. My mother defended his positions more than twenty years later at our dinner table while she and my father rolled their eyes at the latest teen fashion, the Beatles haircut.
“Those boys should use their money to get an education,” she said.
Unlike her politics, however, my brother and I were not an intellectual inheritance. We were her children. She would protect us despite her politics. Her father could just roll in his grave.
“That’s certainly bad news for the McGuires,” my father said.
I knew he didn’t like the McGuires. They had a falling out when Mr. McGuire had offered to sell my father a piece of their property with a tennis court and pool. It abutted our back yard and my father was certainly interested, but he thought Mr. McGuire was asking too much. They never reached an agreement. Mr. McGuire sold the property instead to a developer who built a three-story house that blocked the view from our living room. My father built a fence separating our back yard from the encroachment of the new house.
“We should call them,” my mother said of the McGuires.
My father nodded. I reached across the table for a bowl of sugar for my cereal.
“Ask, don’t reach,” my mother scolded.
That afternoon, I walked home from the fifth grade. Thin clouds and leafy tree branches filtered the hot sun. Uneven shadows stained the crooked sidewalk. With the toe of my shoe, I nudged earthworms withering on the pavement from the heat onto bits of dry grass growing through the cracks.
Once I reached our driveway, I ran into the kitchen eager for a snack. My mother stood at the breakfast nook table sorting the day’s mail, empty bags from the super market standing on the floor.
“The mail was delivered late today,” she said.
The mailman rarely came to our house at the same time. His truck would appear as if out of nowhere looming outside the kitchen window at all hours of the afternoon. Often we wouldn’t hear or see a thing. We’d just find a stack of letters and magazines wrapped by a rubber band on the front stoop. On Saturdays, when I played in the basement with my brother’s train set, I’d hear the mailman walk to the front door. I’d hear the crunch of his steps as he passed a window well. I’d see his big black boots lift off the ground and come down again.
My mother always got the mail even on weekends when we were all home. She expected my brother and me to help out around the house except when it came to the mail.
“I’ll get it,” she would shout.
She enjoyed writing letters and hearing back from friends. My father was content to watch her go to the door. He didn’t write letters. He subscribed to various business-related newsletters and magazines that he often didn’t read but let pile up in our living room.
“Can I have a cookie?” I asked.
“May I.”
“May I?”
“Wash your hands.”
My mother kissed me on the forehead and I took my jars of inchworms off the window sill to see if they had eaten their leaves.
“Look,” I said, pointing at gnawed leaves.
My mother didn’t hear me. She held a letter and then dropped it away from the other mail where it lay by the salt and pepper shakers and sugar bowl that I was supposed to have put away after breakfast. I waited for my mother to say something about that, but she turned away and telephoned my father.
“Chuck,” she said, her voice rising. “Oh, Chuck. There’s a letter here from the draft board.”
I could hear his voice through the receiver but couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“All right,” my mother said after a moment and hung up. She called my aunt but no one answered. My mother left a message with the maid.
She went back into the kitchen and began unloading the dish washer, but stopped for no apparent reason and sat down by herself in the dining room. She stared at the floor and I watched her and I knew not to say anything, and together in that way we waited for my father.
He worked close to the house at a cigar store started by his father. On weekends, I swept the floors and dusted the shelves to earn my allowance. Truck drivers who delivered cases of cigars were allowed to use a back bathroom. One of them hung up a Penthouse calendar on the door. I’d go back there when my father wasn’t looking and flip wide-eyed through its glossy pages.
My father was a graduate of Harvard Business School. He had wanted to start his own firm, but his father told him to take over the cigar company when his older brother, a playboy at heart, began frittering away the profits. He often scanned the newspapers for start-up announcements of new businesses, a look of regret on his face.
“If my father told me to jump, I didn’t say why, I asked how far,” he liked to say when I complained about doing chores around the house.
Through the open kitchen windows, I heard his car tires crunch the gravel on our driveway. He drove into the garage. I heard the slam of his door, the scuff of his shoes on the cement floor. When he walked into the house, my mother gave him the letter without speaking. He kept his jacket on turning the envelope over in his hands. He loosened his tie.
“You haven’t opened it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Open it.”
“It’s not mine to open.”
“Then we don’t know. We don’t know what it might be.”
“It’s from the draft board, Chuck, for Lord sake!” my mother snapped, jabbing a finger at the return address.
“Where’s Butch?” he said asking for my brother. When he was born and my parents couldn’t decide immediately on a name, my father started calling him Butch. Finally, they settled on Charles Jr. but at home his nick-name stuck.
“He’s out with Andy,” she said, referring to one of his friends whom I didn’t like. Andy threw stones at me when I was in the third grade and I hadn’t forgotten. I was tagging along with him and Butch when they were playing basketball in the driveway and Andy wanted me out of the way.
“We should just open it,” my father said.
“No.”
My mother had certain rules she adhered to. She was just over five feet but she had a way of looking at us that made us think twice about questioning her. If we tried, she would give us a stony look.
“Listen to me, my friend,” she would say in a voice deeper than our basement.
Butch and I were taught to stand when a woman entered a room. We knew to keep our left hand on our laps during meals and chew with our mouths closed. We held forks and spoons almost like we would a pencil instead of gripping them in our fists like some of my friends. We stripped and made our beds. We took out the garbage. We attended church on Sundays. We wrote thank you letters to relatives after we received gifts on our birthdays and at Christmas. We read postcards no matter who they were addressed to but knew not to open other people’s mail.
Our mother believed a woman should stay at home with her children and thought daycare programs broke up families. She ran errands during the day, but was always back by the time I got home. It seemed to happen without fail that the phone would ring as she rushed to unpack grocery bags, fix me a snack and begin preparing dinner.
“Lord, I’ve been gone all day, and I have a thousand and one things to do before I get dinner going. I can’t talk to anyone now.”
She would dash through the kitchen and out the screen door to the back yard, scattering the air above her head with her hands, and instruct me to say that she was out. She would stand on her tip toes and frame her face against the screen door, mouthing, “Who is it?” as I would explain that my mother was out and no, she shouldn’t be gone too long.
The draft board, however, had shattered her defenses against interruption. Her shock and outrage weighed down time and made the air electric. She paced the kitchen. My father bit his lower lip and strummed his fingers on the kitchen counter.
“Stop that,” my mother told him.
He sighed and slumped a little against the wall. His arms hung loosely at his waist and he hung his head. He was different from my earliest memories of him. I remembered when I sat on his lap and he would hold my arms, spread his legs and I’d drop through the gap almost hitting the floor before he pulled me back up with his strong hands. I remembered walking our dog with him, his long stride. I had difficulty keeping up. We used to play catch in the back yard. I felt the hard smack of the ball when he hurled it into my mitt. We had dreamed together about owning a ranch.
My father had taken us all to Colorado for the summer when I was six. We fell in love with the craggy mountains crowded with fir trees and the snow-capped peaks spread unevenly against a brilliant sky the pale blue of ashes. My father watched men in cowboy hats pass us in their pickup trucks. He watched them riding along a flat plain on horseback rocking with the movement of their mounts washed in sunlight against the wind-bared hills. He thrust his face into wet winds. He smelled snow melting off distant peaks and was refreshed.
Back home in our living room, my mother drew the curtains to keep the sun from fading the furniture. My father and I read brochures about dozens of ranches mailed to him by Colorado real estate companies. I imagined lassoing cattle. I’d start camp fires and heat metal irons in the flames and brand longhorn steer. I’d wear boots and jeans and red plaid shirts and I’d learn how to shoot. I wouldn’t attend school. I’d spend my days outside, the smell of sage brush and smoke seeping into my clothes beneath a starlit sky.
My father and I reviewed brochures together almost every weekend until I realized our dream would go no further than our living room. It came to me gradually as I listened to him make one excuse after another about why he wouldn’t consider any of the ranches we read about. Thin slivers of light shone through cracks in the curtains and I knew. I knew.
I didn’t understand the difficulties involved with moving, starting over again, risking the security of your family for a dream. I just knew we weren’t moving. When more brochures came, I gave them to my father promising to be right back. Instead, I went to my room, closed the door and played a record. After a while, he stopped asking for me.
As I grew older, I fell increasingly under my mother’s domain. She saw to it that I got off to school in the morning, did my homework, washed my hands before dinner and went to bed by nine o’clock. I presume that was the case for Butch too.
Out of the loop, my father could only appeal his point of view about the draft letter.
“I think we should just open the damn letter.”
“No.”
“Well, then find him.”
“He’s out with Andy.”
“You can call the house.”
“OK. You call the house if you want to, Chuck.”
“Jesus, do you just want to worry?”
“I said if you want to, call him.”
My father noticed me as he picked up the phone and told me to go outside.
“Don’t leave the driveway,” my mother said without looking at me.
“Mom!” I said.
“This is not the time to argue,” my father snapped.
I stomped out of the kitchen and through the garage to the driveway. A patrol car drove slowly past our house. The officer waved and I held up my arm and he disappeared behind some trees.
It was mid-afternoon. Later, the street would be busy with men returning home from work, but now it was still and quiet. I didn’t move. I heard myself breathe. I didn’t know anyone who had been drafted. I understood that meant my brother would be taken away. I wished Andy would get drafted.
My father served in the Navy in World War Two. He was stationed in Puerto Rico where he met my mother. His ship was about to leave for the invasion of Japan days before Hiroshima. The atom bomb stopped him from experiencing combat and he was eternally grateful. I had seen enough World War Two John Wayne movies on television Saturday mornings that I thought he would have wanted to go to war and kill Japs. I had killed hundreds of them myself playing outside with imaginary machine guns. I was disappointed when he said he was glad he stayed in Puerto Rico.
A car stopped in front of the driveway and my brother got out. I recognized Andy but he ignored me. Butch came over and rubbed my hair, something he liked to do in front of his friends. It made me feel small and I ducked away from him. He was tall and thin with a mop of brown hair and thin sideburns. He was trying to grow a mustache out of the peach fuzz beneath his nose.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. “You got some mail.”
“I got mail?”
“Yeah.”
“How would you know?”
“I saw Mom go through it.”
“Who from?”
“I don’t know. Pop’s home.”
“Pop’s home?”
“They say its from the draft board.”
He stared at me.
“I thought you didn’t know,” he said.
I followed him into the house. I heard my father still strumming his fingers. He and my mother hadn’t moved. They both looked in our direction.
“What’s wrong?” Butch said.
“You have some mail,” my mother said, sounding not like my mother at all but someone whose voice sounded like it was coming from another part of the house.
“We don’t know what it is,” my father said, giving Butch the letter.
“We won’t let anything happen to you,” my mother said.
Butch looked at it and then at my mother and father who stared back at him. My mother’s eyes began to tear up and she asked me to give her her purse and she put on her sunglasses.
“Just open it,” my father said. “We can’t do anything until we know what they want.”
“We know what they want,” my mother said.
“Open it.”
“Let him alone.”
Butch fingered both sides of the envelope. He found a corner by the flap that wasn’t glued and wiggled his little finger into the gap. His hands shook. I tried peering over his shoulder and he shot me a look. The silence in the kitchen was fragile as glass. Butch worked his finger along the length of the envelope until he tore it open. He pulled the letter out, dropped it on the floor. He wiped his hands on his pants and picked it up and read it.
“It’s a form letter,” he said after a moment, his hands still shaking.
“Let’s see that,” my father said.
Butch handed him the letter and my father put on his glasses. Butch sat down shaking his head.
“Letty . . . it’s a change of address form,” my father said to my mother. He spoke in the same voice he used when he explained math problems to me. Slowly, carefully. To make sure I understood. “They’re updating their records. In case he had moved. That’s all. Look.”
He held it out to her. She looked at him. She turned her back to us and faced the kitchen. She stared out the window she used to watch me when I played outside. A breeze ruffled her hair. She took off her sunglasses. Then she walked into the dining room and we heard the muffled sounds of her crying as she went upstairs to the bedroom above us. My father continued holding the letter out in the empty air. After a moment he stood and followed her.
I don’t remember what we did that night. I imagine my brother and I set the table and stood by our chairs until my mother came into the dining room and sat down at the table for dinner. I’m sure she reminded us to keep our elbows off the table and sit straight. We would have waited until my parents finished eating before we got up and cleared the table. After dinner, they probably sipped glasses of sherry. Later, my father would have watched the ten o’clock news while my mother paid bills in the kitchen. Maybe she wrote a note to the McGuires.
Johnny McGuire returned home unharmed. Butch was never drafted and neither was I. By the time I was old enough to register the war was over. Now there is a new war but we’re both too old to serve. We follow the news and take political positions. He’s a Republican. I’m a Democrat in the George McGovern mold. We own several cats between us and talk about them when we get together. Now with the Iraq war, he recalls the draft.
“After you signed up, they threw all the birthdays into a hopper,” he told me. “Depending where you lived, the pool was larger or smaller. I was lucky. My pool included all of the suburbs around us. In the lottery, my birthday was 161. It was listed in the newspaper. They never called me up though.”
American G.I.s seemed so old when I was a kid watching them fight the Viet Cong on the news.
“. . . and that’s the way it is March 16th 1968 . . .” Walter Cronkite intoned. Now, I’m at least twice the age of the average grunt.
These days when I travel overseas as a newspaper reporter, Butch cautions me not to accept an assignment in Iraq. He supports the war, as do our parents, but they would be frantic if I went to Baghdad.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, I’ve been abroad more often than not. My father has maps of the central Asian countries I’ve visited. He was surprised when I told him Afghanistan reminded me of the American West with treeless mountains like the Rockies and vast expanses of empty prairie.
In the states, I continued, the glow from city skyscrapers absorbs the sky robbing the night of its vastness. But in Afghanistan, a country without power, the night sky was a deep, tar-rich black unfurling endlessly above me. I could read by the reflected light of the moon and stars. My father looked past me at our back yard, his view blocked by the house built on the McGuires old property.
“Now that would be something,” he said.
I have not experienced combat. I did see the body of an Afghan farmer killed by a mine. He looked asleep while the lower half of his body drained bloodily into the hard dry soil. His donkey brayed just feet away, untouched.
In the summer, when I see people stretched out on beach towels tanning their backs, heads rolled to one side, eyes closed, I’ll sometimes think of him. Actually, I’ll see him. The way he was on the ground under the sun, clear blue skies all around. I’ll hear his donkey too.
I go about my days propped by the habits of my upbringing. Left hand on my lap, yes please, no thank you, please pass the sugar, let me get the door for you. The phone rings, the mail comes. I expect to be surprised and am grateful when I’m not.
J. Malcolm Garcia has been published in The Virginia Quarterly, Missouri Review, and Ascent Magazine, among other publications. His essays have received “notable mention” in the annual anthologies, The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.