While my father enjoyed Ruckley's excitement at times, and he certainly
loved not having to be the dynamo of righteous energy behind their tiny
movement, he sometimes suspected that Ruckley's real problem with the
war was the former geography teacher's complaint that no one could locate
the country on a map. He worried that there were personal demons battling
with the angels of Ruckley's better nature, and that the cataract where
they met supplied the energy for his action. But Peter hacked off the
Roman guard's ear, after all, and Christ could still use him. "Not that
I'm likening myself to Jesus, of course," he told me once from his hospital
bed, the miracle accordion of a respirator allowing him to speak in
halting, unfinished bursts. I had to wait for the next infusion of oxygen
into his ailing throat before he could continue the thought--"I just
knew it took all types to populate the Kingdom of God." Mom said that
he pursued tough characters and causes as if he were hoarding up karma,
or its permissive Protestant substitute, grace. This made the easy seem
not worth his effort, and so she always flew beneath his radar, as I
flew beneath hers.
When Ruckley finally
coaxed the disgusting, enormous teardrop to fall with a rustling of
papers into the can, they both realized that they should have made two
cans, or at least mixed the potion in two smaller ones. There was nothing
left in the bottom of the corrugated aluminum container but a noxious
icing along the sides and bottom. My father was about to advise pouring
the remaining basket of draft refuse into the one with napalm, but he
was afraid the fire would grow too large. As usual, while he was deliberating,
Ruckley took action. He seized a 1-F from the unsoiled basket and began
scraping the inside of the coffee can, stopping for a moment to fling
the sticky substance that, if you didn't know any better would think
was semen, onto the papers and folders below. Sam Robbins, the youngest
man among them at eighteen, told me that it reminded him of getting
to lick the bowl whenever his mom would make a cake, working the miniature
plastic and rubber paddle to make sure every drop of the delicious batter
was reached. While Ruckley was swabbing the bowl, Sam was straddling
the threshold between the draft board office and the steps outside,
not too fearful to join either episode, but too manic.
Sam was always
stuck in "a spot like that," he told me, whether it was an anti-war
protest or a family barbecue on the Fourth. He could have gone outside
with the men and been useless, standing in the background while Ruckley
and Walt started the first and only draft card fire in the state of
Texas. Or, he could have stayed inside the draft board office with the
women, pouring mostly duck blood in file cabinets and on counter tops,
useful, but flanked by little Marcia and the elderly Mrs. Watson. He
wasn't sure how he wanted the cameras to catch him, a fake grownup or
a real woman. And so he fidgeted there on the stoop, ducking his angular
and anemic blonde head inside to check on things, then holding the door
open and leaning outside to watch with primeval wonder at the fire that
was beginning to consume the first basket.
Jim rescued him
from his indecision by bounding up the street from his lookout and into
the office, glancing quickly at the neighboring DMV to see if they had
been noticed yet. "Let's go, man, let's go, they'll be here any minute"
he said to Sam before pausing to look down at the second, sickly, almost
invisible flame taking root in the other wastebasket. Sam, grateful
to be moving in somebody's wake, followed Jim back inside as Ruckley
and Pastor Walt brought up the rear. Walt's gaze lingered on the flame
as if trying to read just whose salvation was being effected by the
crisp rolling glow up the sides of each paper. He looked up, over the
hedgerows and streetlamps bearing "Go Bobcats!" signs, feeling like
he was in a movie, surveying the scene like he thought Steve McQueen
would-furrowing his brow and squinting into the distance at tiny figures
coming to get them. Not seeing anyone, he turned back inside and left
the baskets to their burning as he closed the door behind him.
The tiny figures
were coming for them, the younger clerk, Deputy Bozeman, and Gloria
Rambie from the paper. Bozeman's hand was on his gun, though since it
was still in its holster--and given the report of the presence of an
old woman and a man of God--Walt suspected it was to keep his heavy
belt from bouncing as he ran. They were about a block away, the deputy
about ten yards in front of the press and the aggrieved officer of the
Department of Defense, and Pastor Walt had about thirty seconds before
Act Two began.
No one's exactly
sure what sermon he gave to his troops in those last moments together,
alone. Walt himself admitted that his thoughts were elsewhere, and no
one I could talk to remembered feeling in complete control of their
rational faculties--certainly not enough to afford the luxury of factual
remembrance. Marcia said that it was "beautiful, simple, like a bedtime
prayer," and Mrs. Watson's Alzheimer's-wracked mind swears it was the
voice of God and Perry Como, singing together. I don't know that they
both couldn't have been right. What we do know for sure is that my father
had written in the journal no one knew he kept--it was Exhibit D, after
the two bloody cans and the one sticky napalm one--a short "Prayer for
Tomorrow," which is part Sermon on the Mount and a little bit of his
own:
"Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they who are
persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Create in us a pure heart, O Lord, let us make peace, and grant us the
fortitude to suffer persecution...make us righteous."
Uncle Whit tried
to make the argument that "Prayer for Tomorrow" was hardly conclusive
evidence of a plan to act the day after it was written. He said it was
"tomorrow" in the metaphorical sense, in the way we mean when we say
"leaders of tomorrow". His client would not cooperate and scuttled any
attempt to mitigate, evade or lessen his punishment. "The trial is part
of the witness," he would say, and my uncle would have to remind himself
that he was more friend and ally than defense attorney in his brother's
case.
Whatever the prosecutor's
evidentiary concerns over the journal, it's probably pretty safe to
say that my father was praying something along those lines as Bozeman
threw open the door and saw the six of them sitting in a circle--even
old Mrs. Watson had shed her walker--praying. "Were it not for Pastor
Walt's calm in those frantic moments of discovery," Mrs. Watson said,
"we all would have lost it." Even the seasoned rabble-rouser Ruckley,
with his Bolshevik fanaticism wrapped in country fried fundamentalism,
looked like was about to piss his pants. Wide-eyed, a face too startled
to form an expression, his hand trembled in Marcia's, and Walt was the
only one who spoke to the authorities or the press. Later, this would
cause him no small amount of grief with the Robbins family, who would
have signed the indictment against Socrates for corrupting the youth.
In any case, when Deputy Bozeman was silent, too awed, cowed by the
seeming carnage the small and until that point banal group of people
was capable of, my father placidly turned his head to both the deputy
and God, and said "I suppose I should begin with the conspiracy, and
how we took turns drawing our blood into cheap too-thin syringes yesterday."
