Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [143]
We all left Cleveland together, with Charlotte and Greensboro, New York, LaCrosse, and Milwaukee on our schedules. We stayed where the children wanted in Milwaukee: the Hilton with the indoor water park. We would have done it for the children, but it was also fun to see the Secret Service, in their suits, avoiding the cannonballs and water sprays. And then we were off in our different directions. Gone now were off times, walking the property in North Carolina we had purchased accompanied by the Secret Service; B.A., the architect; Tom Hunter, who would help us with the site plan; and Andrew Young, all of us sitting on fallen trees eating the sandwiches Andrew had brought. Gone were times for the parent conferences at the children’s school that I had managed to fit in earlier. I would see the children on the weekends and in the evenings, but there was less than a month left before the election.
As we traveled, in a sense we took with us the people we had met, thinking of them and speaking of them. How often I mentioned McKinley Bailey, a beautifully spoken boy, not much older than Cate, who had already served in Afghanistan and in Iraq. “When I was in Afghanistan,” he said, “I knew why I was there. When I was in Iraq, none of us knew why we were there.” A woman in her eighties, like Mary, should not be driven to tears because she could not afford her medicine, and I could not, would not drive her from my thoughts. And then there was Beverly. I had spoken to an organizing meeting, a rally really, in Grand Rapids. I gave a speech, which I am not very good at doing, and then I took questions. The last question came from Beverly, who was maybe just shy of forty, her skin so dark I had to focus to see her in the darkened theater. “My son is in Iraq,” she got those words out, and then she fell apart. “I can’t sleep, he can’t sleep,” she gasped between sobs. And then she could not speak at all. Her whole body was racked by fear and love. I’d seen this grief, and it would be wrong to say she hadn’t earned the right to such debilitating grief. She had. I could only hug her and pray for her son. And take her with me.
The last days felt particularly intense, for we knew that it was our last chance to change minds. I did a town hall in Sandusky, with, as improbable as it sounds, a veteran named Del Sandusky, who had been on John Kerry’s Swift boat, and with a woman whose husband had been called up at fifty and had trained to go to Iraq using his finger as a gun and a make-believe transport to practice how to evacuate after a roadside bomb exploded. He practiced without guns and without vehicles, and then he was sent to Iraq. If there was anyone other than a true believer in that town hall, surely they would be convinced, but were there any? From there we went to a union hall in Lima, where I was introduced by a young woman, Christina Lhamon. The next day I heard that her car tires had been slashed that night after we left. I knew from what she’d said when she introduced me that she had no money to replace them. Get them replaced. We can do that for her. Ryan agreed.
And I went back to Pittsburgh. First to the Southside Market House, where my Aunt Alba Whitacre, my father’s youngest sister, waited for me. She asked not to be identified, so of course I made her do everything but twirl around. I was proud of her: she raised a houseful of children alone, she’d taught school. A few days later I went to Brownsville, south of Pittsburgh. I had asked to go; it was my father’s hometown. And it seemed the whole town was there to see his daughter. Certainly every living member of his high school class was there, including Frank Ricco, who was the head of the Sons of Italy lodge where we met and who had been class president when my dad