An example being the sparrow incident the night after our wedding.
We dropped the apartment and rented a small house on the edge of town. It wasn't much of a house. The ceiling in the living room was too low and the plumbing squeaked like giant mice.
Trudy turned on the back porch light and went out there to toss some potato peels, and found a sparrow sitting on the porch. It was weak and nodding and couldn't fly. She called me and I looked at it. It was a baby, and as far as I could determine, there were no wounds on it. It seemed sick.
I picked up the bird with some reluctance, because I had once been told if birds smelled the human scent on another bird they would peck it to death, and carried it into the house. I got an old shoebox and tore some newspaper up and put it in the bottom of the box and the bird on that. I got an eyedropper and used it to give the bird some cold beef bouillon.
That was the procedure from then on. First thing in the morning, and between classes, we would give the bird bouillon and clean its box and put fresh paper in the bottom. At night we stood over it and looked at it and clucked our tongues like parents worried about a sick child.
About this same time, I went to work part-time in a restaurant in LaBorde, and brought home scraps I thought the bird might eat. At first he wouldn't touch them, but after a while he ate them out of my hand. Noodles were his favorite. I suppose they were as close as he ever got to worms.
The bird got stronger. He started flying around the house.
You could open doors and windows and he wouldn't fly out. He liked it in there. He liked us. He'd light on our shoulders and our outstretched palms. He cheeped a lot, and because of that, we named him Cheep. The only time he showed distress was when we weren't wearing black. Guess because I had on a black tee-shirt and Trudy a black peasant dress the night we found him, and he bonded to black.
We were so excited about our bird, we dyed everything we owned black. On those occasions when we did buy new clothes, they were always black. That way Cheep stayed happy.
Sweet alchemy was thicker in the air than radio waves then, and it seemed especially thick around Trudy and me. We thought it would last forever.
But the best-looking apple can contain a worm.
When 1970 rolled in just a few weeks after we were married, the Vietnam War still raged on. The relatively innocent smoking of grass had been exchanged by many for pills and shit-filled needles. The wonderful, if admittedly hokey, beauty of Woodstock had to stand shoulder to shoulder with the senseless tragedy at Kent State.
Our bird continued to fly about the house, but the magic of the era was gone. A deep, dark awareness that perhaps it had never actually existed settled in; we had glimpsed some shopworn cards up the magician's sleeve, and with each passing moment, the glow of the act was dimming.
The sixties were dead. They may never have lived.
I began to feel guilty about hiding out in college with my deferment when so many were dying in Vietnam. Asking that everyone be peaceful and love one another wasn't enough. I wanted to make some statement against the war, and I didn't want to hide behind a deferment to do it. I was one of those who felt our original cause in Vietnam was just, but that it had become a political nightmare. The government we were
defending, in spite of cries of "We are a democracy," showed little evidence of being different from the one we were fighting. Our role there was as aimless as the Flying Dutchman. We took a hill, we gave it back. The American dead stacked up. Seemed to me, we ought to have known when to cut our losses.
I talked to Trudy long and hard, and it was the sort of thing she loved. Noble involvement. It lit her like a torch.
With her blessing, I decided to quit college and allow myself to be drafted. When it came time to step forward and take the induction, I would refuse. I'd go the prison route instead. That would be my statement.
This was the time of the lottery, and I was drafted almost immediately. I was disappointed my draft notice didn't say Greetings. I had always heard that it did.
I went to Dallas, took my physical, passed, and refused to go.
The army tried to give me outs. I give them that. One officer even suggested I make a break for Canada. The war had soured even his way of thinking, and he was a lifer.
But I refused to run.
It was suggested I sign as a conscientious objector, but again I refused. C.O. status meant you thought fighting for anything, even your life, was wrong. I didn't believe that. Had I been around during the fighting of World War I or II, I would have gone and done my bit. The causes were just and the wars were fought with a conclusion in mind. I was an idealist, not a coward.
So I went to Leavenworth. Trudy and some of her friends came to see me from time to time and told me "right on" and how brave I was, and it felt good to hear it. They wrote me nice letters.
But that good feeling didn't last. It didn't relax me at night when I could hear the cons snorting and coughing and crying and farting and sodomizing each other. And there were guys in there who had bludgeoned their grandmothers to death who thought it their patriotic duty to kill me for not signing up to shoot gooks. If I hadn't been a pretty tough country boy with iron foundry muscles, I might not have made it.
Trudy kept coming to see me, but her friends dropped off. She kept writing, but the friends quit. She sent me clippings in her letters that told me what was going on outside, about the causes being fought for, the ground gained, the ground lost.
Then her visits thinned, and finally stopped. Next to last letter I got from her went on about how brave I was again and compared me to a number of counterculture heroes. It said Cheep had died and had been buried in a cream corn can out back of the house, and that she had met a man named Pete who was big in the ecology movement and they had this thing going. The last letter told me that the thing she and Pete had going was now really going, and she was filing for divorce. Nothing personal. She thought I was the bravest man she knew. It was signed like all the others: Love Trudy.
I did my time. Eighteen months altogether. I had planned the day they let me out for a long time. I thought I would come out on a bright warm day with my fist held high, and Trudy would be there looking sexy and soft in a short windblown dress that would give me a good view of her long brown legs, and as the music came up, sweet but triumphant, she would run to me with those legs flashing and throw her arms around my neck and give me a kiss that would knock me silly from head to toes. Then she would load me in a car and drive us away.
But when I came out it was cold and drizzling. I had to talk a guard into calling someone to drive me to the bus station. Between paying for the car and the bus, the money I had when I went in and the money the government gave me for the non stimulating manual labor I did inside was almost gone. Needless to say, I didn't feel like raising my fist.
I went back to East Texas and found out I didn't want to help the underprivileged anymore. I realized I was one of them. I got a job in the rose fields outside of LaBorde, and that's where I met Leonard. He was a Vietnam vet and a certified hardhead. He didn't like my views on a lot of things, but he didn't hold them against me either; I gave him someone to argue with. He was a martial artist, boxing, kenpo, hapkido, and he revived my interest. When I was in high school, until the time I met Trudy, I had been heavily involved in that sort of thing. Guess I dropped it later because I didn't feel it fit my new peace and love image or something. Anyway, I had been away from it for a time. I was glad to get at it again. I got better than ever before. It helped me work out some frustrations.