I
suppose I should begin with the conspiracy-the first one-and how they
took turns drawing each other's blood into cheap, too-thin syringes
the day before. Jim's brother was dying in the VA in Belton, so he had
managed to steal about a dozen on his Tuesday visit, though only half
of them would be needed. My father-Pastor Walt to everyone else-had
said to plan on seven, but to get some extras just in case. Mrs. Watson,
whose cardigan always smelled of candy canes and nursing home, began
by telling everyone that it would probably hurt more than the shots
they were used to getting at the doctor's office. "It's the difference
between the highest and lowest strings on a guitar," she said of the
extremely large bore of the needles Jim had stolen versus the tiny hypodermics
of immunization.
Steeled by the
warning, Pastor Walt rolled up his starched blue sleeve and received
the pinprick communion Mrs. Watson offered. In his fist was an gently
undulating tennis ball, held as if he were checking the ripeness of
a tomato, pumping the beginnings of the movement from his extremities
and into the clear balloon at the other end of the evacuation tube.
In fifteen minutes, he had fainted and there were but four ounces to
show for it. Instead of a deterrent, the controlled pain served as a
reward to the others, an advancement of their commitment; the hope of
fainting, a vision quest.
Still, they had
between them all not quite two pints, and from the looks of the Coplin
Six the next day-sitting in a circle, praying amidst the massacred files-they
had worked hard to give just those two. My uncle said that it was little
Marcia who came up with the idea of duck blood, little hillbilly Marcia
whose brother was KIA and whose father had been missing since two months
before she was born. And so while the others mixed gasoline and Ivory
soap flakes into napalm, Marcia drove to Walker's Poultry with her learner's
permit and her boyfriend's Corvair and bought two gallons of duck blood.
Their symbols would just have to be more symbolic.
The plan was simple--they
would rendezvous at the First Baptist Church at seven in the morning
for preparations and a final prayer before marching over to the courthouse.
Preparations meant awkward donuts and orange juice while my father put
on his "preachin' suit," complete with a priest's collar he had to borrow
from a Lutheran minister friend two towns over. Baptists, especially
in those days, eschewed trappings as they did dancing, but he thought
the collar added a Christian air to what could, on the news, appear
formless and aimless. They waited until ten after eight, their number
frozen at six.
Jim took up his
post at the corner of Pecan and Preston to serve as a lookout, while
the others waited under the eaves of the courthouse for the signal.
Growing up, I always wondered what kind of signal it was. Uncle Whit
would never tell me anything about the raid or the trial, so I had to
fill in the details with my own fantasies of A-team espionage. When
I finally came back to town and started interviewing people, conspirators
and witnesses, it came out that Jim waived a handkerchief of some sort.
More likely than not, it was the soiled orange rag that was tucked into
the back pocket of his blue mechanic's coveralls like a tail. It's hard
to imagine that flag fluttering in the wind as a beacon of justice or
a beacon of anything, really. Soaked in oil, dried, soaked again, it
had faded and stiffened into a perverse meringue, a snot rag someone
had decided to bronze like baby booties. That's what I suspect, anyway.
I couldn't ask Jim, because Jim was dead. He had blown himself up in
a meth lab in southern Colorado while I was in high school. Ten years
later, no one remembers anything about him, not even his last name.
There was nothing but "Jim" sewed onto his dirty coveralls.
After Jim waived
his signal, the others, led by Pastor Walt, walked (or rolled) to the
squat, bureaucratic annex next to the courthouse to make their stand.
Jim, anxious as prey, waited about a minute longer to ensure that no
one was going to interrupt the not-quite-impromptu sermon. It was also
his job to erect their poster board declaration on the steps when he
came over, something he forgot to do. Later, my father said he preferred
it that way, no "hand-scrawled sharpie propaganda". Already forming
a battlefield apology to their leader for the mistake, Jim scurried
across Pecan Street and joined them for the baptism of the 1-F and 1-A
draft cards. It was to be a baptism of fire for the 1-Fs and blood for
the 1-As. They were sure the police would be there in minutes, Sheriff
Danville with his anachronistic mountie hat and fleshy cheek tumor of
dip. As it happened, it was Deputy Bozeman who was the first on the
scene, whose duty it was to survey the damage and arrest his old Sunday
School teacher. He cried as he clickety-clickety-clacked the handcuffs
around Pastor Walt's spindly, feminine wrists. But Bozeman's brother
Ricky, home with two medals and one leg, pushed him through it, so much
so, that past the myopic haze of tears, he could tell that he had ratcheted
the manacles too tight on the clergyman's left wrist. He left them on
and turned antagonistically to the next conspirator.
There was something
shocking, they all said (all but Jim, that is), in the mechanical inevitability
of the arrest. To each other, to themselves, they had said that part
of their witness was the arrest, indeed, without it, there was nothing
civil to their disobedience. Even so, to a man, woman, and girl, they
each half-expected for their crusade to be an immediate breakthrough,
that the machinery of government, appalled and then chastened by the
acts of next-door revolutionaries, would let them be. Such naïveté was
not that of the utopian, but was instead grounded in the intimate realities
of small town life. I found out from Marcia that the younger of the
two clerks present that day was a bridesmaid at her shotgun wedding,
and that the older clerk often brought her wash down to her family's
laundry by the river. And yet, the clerks were shrieking, flapping their
hands when they weren't clutching their faces as my father and Marshall
Ruckley began methodically throwing files into wire-mesh trash baskets
to place on the stoop in front of the office and burn.
They had mixed
their napalm in a large coffee can, and with agonizing slowness, the
rubbery stalactite of flammable goo stretched its way down toward the
two baskets sprouting manila and white shrapnel, as if a bomb had already
exploded beneath them. Ruckley cursed the napalm lower, then cursed
himself for breaking character on such a holy day. Ruckley's presence
unnerved the young clergyman for a couple reasons. First, he was the
only member of their group who wasn't a parishioner of his. Ruckley
was a forty-something former geography teacher who attended the Assembly
of God that met in the cornfield next to his. I remember eerie rumors
of snake-handling and babbling in sinister ancient tongues associated
with Ruckley's church, but the only evidence of anything unorthodox
was the Pentecostal zeal he brought to the planning and execution of
their "dynamite witness," as he called it. "Yes sir, we're gonna show
everybody how the Lord works, and his ways ain't always mysterious.
Sometimes he speaks in the whirlwind, and sometimes the fire, and we're
gonna bring both to those people who can't even find Vietnam on a map."
Continued
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