A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [115]
Periodically, during the long afternoons, I’d have to sit in the shade and try to think out a few things. At thirty-six I was coming to understand some fundamental truths. I finally knew that all of our meanings are put upon us from the outside. There’s nothing much inside that belongs to us at the start, or even along the way. We are shaped, time and time again, by luck, the prevailing winds. I had been formed and reformed a dozen times, according to the personalities of my housemates. In high school I went to a friend’s cabin and did nothing but sit and fish under the hot sun. I kept looking in the mirror during those months, seeing not only my shaggy hair, my unshaven face, but also the clean-cut, good, smart, strong young man my father insisted was his son. Alice thought I had powers which probably all along I knew I actually did not have. She seemed to trust my capabilities. She would certainly not have believed me if she’d known how willing I had been to go to Vietnam. I had stood in line to get my physical after I’d been drafted. I was eighteen. I had been in ROTC in high school and I figured there wasn’t any chance of getting Conscientious Objector status. My father and I had talked about what it meant to fight for my country. We had talked about the burden of democracy. I would go to Vietnam and kill enough people and then hopefully I’d come home. I worked hard at accepting the duty. My friends and I argued about the war all summer. I talked myself into thinking there was justification for the conflict and that I was heroic to go. I probably sounded like a self-righteous ass. When I went for my physical I was excused because of a heart murmur. Not good enough for fodder. My hair grew long. I marched quietly in Ann Arbor and once in Washington, hoping my face wouldn’t show up on the evening news in Minneapolis. That wasn’t the last time I have felt one way and then right away felt another. When I told that story to Alice, she heard only the parts she wanted to hear. It was a happy ending, my being rejected. But to me, over the years, the story became emblematic of a flaw. My gravestone will say, “He never stayed any course. He was never sure.”
The weeks passed. I had lain in bed on the night of the Fourth and listened to the firecrackers going off in the subdivisions. Our Independence didn’t seem like much of a victory. There was a storm one morning at the end of July. I went out on the porch and watched the rain come down. According to the gauge there was six-tenths of an inch. Around noon the sun came out. The steam rose from the damp earth and by evening the soil was dry. The soybeans grew fairly well with my attention and the irrigation. All the sheep were dead. The cows lay under the oaks in their pasture in the heat of the day and chewed their cuds. Theresa used to say that the animals were blessed because they did not have the capacity to know or plan or remember. They didn’t seem blissful as they chewed. They endured endless passing hours. They endured the daylight and the dark of night. Their blessing was probably wasted on them, as I suppose so many of our blessings are wasted on us.
The last night Theresa came down wasn’t much different from any of the other nights that had come before, except that we had the previous accumulated nights and days behind us. Although she seemed unflagging, she must have been worn out after those three weeks. She had told me earlier, at lunch, that Dan was in Chicago for the weekend, at a convention of museum directors. We had laughed at the image of him at a black-tie banquet in the main hall of the Field Museum, having cocktails with the presidents of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. We said we were sure that he too was laughing at himself honorably representing the Dairy Shrine. I had said again at lunch that I hadn’t seen Dan in well over a month. “He’s working all the time. Spinning his wheels,” Theresa had said under her breath.
I was