Carry Me Home (96 page)

Everything was going well. Rick MacIntyre arrived. He stayed only a month but he made a major contribution. Rick was Rick of 2/4, Rick of Philly, legless Rick who was so bitter in the hospital, who was determined to have the doctors cut his legs off at his neck. I don’t know his journey but I know that when he came he brought the concept of
limiting beliefs
, that is, beliefs that limit the holder to actions consistent with those beliefs. As Rick put it, “I once believed I was a cripple. Then I found out I wasn’t.”

What an inspiration! He’d already become unstuck. In his first week he descended the Indian ladder, crossed the gap, scaled the far side, spent the night at the fire circle. After seeing him who could refuse to try? Thorpe and I were so proud, and I was relieved of some of my guilt for never having revisited him.

Everything was in place. Everything we did worked, was working. So why did it attract assault?

H
IGH MEADOW, THURSDAY, 21
August 1979, 6:40
A.M
.—Wapinski’s mind was scattered, attempting to solve a score of problems simultaneously. Nothing came out. His body too was bloated. He was in the upstairs bathroom, on the toilet, afraid to push again. Already the water was bright red. Damn, he thought. Damn it. I don’t have time for this.

He clenched his teeth, rested his forehead on the heels of his hands, his elbows on his knees. His back hurt. Not horribly, just pressure-pain and constipation. His hemorrhoid had been bleeding since Tuesday, since it had blown like a high-pressure line letting go and his pushing had produced the first
ptsssssss
and the bowl full of blood. Ten months earlier it had happened for the first time and it had scared him. He’d gone to a general practitioner who’d chuckled about the cold “butt-hole scope,” who’d laughed out loud, saying, “There it is. I can see the hole in the vein right there.” Wapinski had felt violated, humiliated. Since that time he’d treated himself with creams and suppositories. It had popped again in the spring and he’d worried but he had not told anyone. That flare-up had gradually subsided, had left him feeling embarrassed, vulnerable, angry, slightly anemic, slightly depressed.

Bobby rose, flushed, cleaned the red splatters from the porcelain and the seat, flushed again.

Noah was downstairs. Sara was in the boys’ room. Paulie, in a diaper and T-shirt, was holding her leg. “Igooutsidetoo?” He said it as one word, one long singing sound without any syllable being emphasized. Sara cocked her head questioningly. “Igooutsidetoo?” Paulie repeated. He looked anguished. “Igooutsidetoo?” he said again.

Bobby looked in. He stood with his buttocks squeezed tight. Sara bent, grasped Paulie’s hand. To Bobby Sara seemed bigger this pregnancy than she’d been with either Noah or Paul, and more tired. “Igooutsidetoo?” Paulie pleaded. Bobby chuckled at the babble. Sara kissed the boy. “Sure,” she said. It amaze her how complete and grammatically correct, if slammed together, were his sentences. “After breakfast,” she said. “Then you can go outside, too.”

Sara turned, saw Bobby watching them. Slowly she straightened, sighed. For five years she had been either pregnant or nursing or both. Noah was four years four months; Paulie twenty-three months. Sara was exhausted. She was not simply taking care of the two boys. There was Bobby, Josh and the house; there was the women’s group, the vets she tutored, and Tony with his new problem. She was six months along; her career was on hold; and she was feeling as if she hadn’t just married Robert J. Wapinski but had married his causes, High Meadow, EES, and the constant chatter about Viet Nam.

“Talk to your son, will you?” Sara said.

“Noah?”

Sara nodded.

“What’d he do?”

“I caught him with two pieces of candy this morning and I found broccoli stuffed behind his booster seat. And Josh is still shedding! Can’t he stay outside?”

Bobby lumbered to the kitchen doorway, spied Noah with half a dozen small cars and trucks lined up in a column on the kitchen table. He was pushing the last, tittering as the first crashed off the table edge. Bobby brightened. Then wailing like a police siren he barged in, twanged “Hold it! You’re under arrest. Anything you say will be held against you.”

Noah giggled. “Cut it out.”

“This is the High Meadow vice squad,” Bobby said. “No cutting it out allowed.”

“Papa!”

“Ahha!” In a cartoon characterlike voice. “A code name. Write that down, Sergeant.”

“Papa, what sergeant?” Noah was becoming unsure of his father’s intention.

“Sergeant Sara informs me that you have been observed perpetrating a vicious vice,” Bobby continued the charade. “That without provocation or permission you viciously attacked and ate two—not one but two—pieces of candy before breakfast!” Wapinski grabbed the boy about his chest, lifted him. Noah squirmed, half-heartedly attempted to escape. “And broccoli behind your booster seat?! Yeck!”

“Paulie did it.” Noah wriggled to the floor.

Bobby had been up since five. There were so many things going on, so much to do. Yet his ass was dragging. He blamed it on the hemorrhoid. He blamed it on Sara’s tiredness and his extra effort helping her with the boys. He blamed it on Paul Volker, chairman of the Federal Reserve. The discount rate had been rising steadily since its 1977 low of 4.75 percent. It was now at 11.75 percent. Construction loans, if available, were at 13 percent or more. Bobby blamed his tiredness on all the prominent economists who were predicting recession, and on the national financial columnists who, in spite of the recent Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident and OPEC’s July jolt to oil prices, were declaring that “Energy from the sun may be free but the capital outlay for the collection apparatus is so high it is cheaper to heat, even today, with conventional fuels.”

High Meadow sales were not bad. The columnists declared a solar water and space heating system would cost between $13,000 and $20,000. EES was installing equivalent systems for $6,600 to $8,000. The columnists claimed the solar equipment would not last long enough to reach a monetary break-even point. Bobby was confident that EES collector panels were of such quality and design they should be trouble-free for forty years. Every collector panel, every control box, every storage system now carried a small engraved brass plaque:

MADE IN AMERICA

by Veterans of The Viet Nam War

Bobby was absolutely committed to quality workmanship, to the belief that only quality workers produced quality work, and that anyone who strove to be a quality worker would be a quality worker. Further, he believed that with superior product design and superior craftsmanship any company would succeed, would ride the rough economic waves of recession, the changing tides of social attitudes.

High Meadow’s problem was not product, not price, not even buyer resistance. It was simply that High Meadow and EES still had but one full-time salesman. Bobby had tried to induce Tom Van Deusen into a sales role but Tom had shied away. He’d tried Charlie Knabe and Gary Sherrick without success. Erik Schevard showed some interest, but he was still at the beginning of the program and simply wasn’t ready; and Don Wagner, who may have been ideal, was running fire circle sessions full time.
T
ë
pi
!

Bobby was out of steam. Even on the farming side, Bobby was the prime seller. Tony could sell, did sell, but he didn’t enjoy it and always settled for the initial offer. Mike Treetop and Mark Renneau helped, but ... Bobby knew, selling is an art. None of them were sales artists.

Cash flow was again a problem. Attempting to support thirty-five vets plus three families on the two businesses was stretching High Meadow and Bobby to the limit. Vets were sympathetic—they hadn’t come because of the wage structure—but Bobby insisted they be reasonably paid because that was essential to their understanding of their own worth and their learning successful money management attitudes. Bobby held stringent reins on his and Sara’s expenditures. That too sapped him.

And, though he had not yet realized it, he was empty because High Meadow had grown so fast that it had outpaced its goals. Each facet of business and program individually was chugging along but collectively High Meadow was adrift, unsure of where it was going. Bobby was so busy selling, acting, re-acting, there was no time to plan, redecide, pick new targets, assess. Elation evaporated.

In the hour before Sara and the boys rose, Bobby had thought about these problems, about his own energy, about how, in California, he’d planned a running regimen, gotten into shape, finally run the Dipsea and felt strong, full of energy and endurance. And he thought he’d better get back into shape if he was going to keep up with his sons and the vets. Yet after fifteen push-ups and twenty sit-ups he’d been puffing, fatigued. He’d told himself, one higher each day. That’ll do it.

He’d thought too about Father Tom Niederkou at St. Ignatius who had announced on Sunday that the parish was going to sponsor a family of Viet Namese refugees and would everyone volunteer a little time or clothing or ...

And he thought about the newest vets, about his conversation last night with Sara. She’d said something about their dreams having been crushed. He’d answered, “That’s a problem, Sar, but that’s not the biggest problem. People have to have dreams for dreams to be crushed. Some of these guys have never had one. Their ‘pipe dreams’ were put down at one or two or three years old and that damaged the dream-making machinery. They have no dreams, no images, no visions. They can’t see themselves being anything other than what and where they are.” As the sun had risen, Bobby’d thought hard about this syndrome being worse than posttraumatic stress because there was virtually no foundation upon which to build.

Sara came down with Paulie. Now Bobby was at the table, reading a story in the newest issue of
Newsweek
entitled “The End of the Hmong.” More crushed dreams, crushed dream machines, he’d been thinking. Noah had taken his cars into the living room where he was crashing them against Josh’s legs. Without speaking Sara put Paulie in his high chair, shuffled to the stove where the teapot was whistling. We’re like the 101st, Bobby thought. We’ve got a rendezvous with destiny. A rendezvous with those crushed dreams, with the Miriams, with the dream crushers. It was not yet seven.

Gary Sherrick was in the barn library. He, too, had been up since five, reading, studying, making notes. The 1979 barn exercise, as he conceived it, would put both the American government concept of the war, and the prime American players in the war effort—from Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—on trial. Sherrick had had no difficulty persuading the vets to participate, nor any problem getting pro and con volunteers, but the vets had resisted his tight rules of evidence and procedure, issues of law and discovery phase exchanges. “Damn it.” Sherrick had seethed at Wagner and Mariano. “There’s a format here that’s got to be followed.”

Mariano had countered, “Gary, I thought you hated attorneys because of that shit.”

“You dumb shit, no! It’s because they don’t follow it. They twist it, use it to harass the other side, use it to bury facts and evidence.”

Sherrick wanted to charge the federal government with not being true to the founding principles of the nation. With that as the formal charge, he’d set out to prosecute while Steve Hacken and Jim Thorpe had taken the roles of defense attorneys. The trial was set to begin in October. Currently the vets were in investigation, abstract, and the first phase of discovery.

Gary continued with his notes. He was adapting a speech delivered in another time. He had been reading Joseph Buttinger’s
The Smaller Dragon
and
The World’s Famous Orations, America,
Volume III, edited by William Jennings Bryan. By changing the parties, Sherrick thought, the words could have been spoken in the late ’40s or early ’50s by Ho Chi Minh.

Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in infancy? ’Tis a strange species of generosity which requires a return infinitely more valuable than anything it could have bestowed....

Courage, then, my countrymen; our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty....

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!

Sherrick was thinking, could Ho have said to the Viet Namese “colonists” what Samuel Adams had said to the Americans in 1776? The question was difficult. Hacken, Sherrick was sure, would first attack him on the phrase “shall be left to mankind as asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.” All year there had been a steady flow of news stories indicating that united Viet Nam was anything but an asylum for liberty. Sherrick thought to strike the phrase but he also thought if he could find a speech by Ho that stated the same idea, he’d be able to support the entire Adams’ speech. What had happened post-1975, he reasoned, should not demean Ho’s early intentions. Sherrick bracketed the phrase, picked up his photocopy of Uncle Ho’s March 6, 1946, speech to the “multitudes” before the Municipal Theater in Hanoi, on the occasion of the government accepting French reoccupation. Underlined were Ho’s words, “I would rather die than sell our country.” Sherrick stopped. Outside there was a rush of cars. Then banging.

“I’m gonna make it. Man, I’m gonna make it.” Tony was muttering, talking to himself, trying to convince himself. He lay on the cot behind the barred door in his old cubicle. It had been a long time since he’d spent nights there and the past two nights had not been by choice. Linda was irate.

“How could you?!” she’d screamed.

“It was years ago.” He’d twitched. He’d fidgeted. He hadn’t thought she’d get so angry.