Read Heartwood for Free Online Page B

Normandy. It was his finest hour. If you want to know the truth, he hasn’t done anything better since.”
    “But that was different. That war was justified.”
    “It doesn’t matter. ‘America, love it or leave it.’ That’s what my father says.”
    “But when he stops and thinks about what we’re really doing over there—”
    “You don’t understand!” he shouted. “Your parents think. My father doesn’t.”
    “My father supported the war at first.”
    “But eventually he saw the light! Mine never will. He’s never read the kind of books that make people question themselves or the things they believe. He’s never traveled and tried to understand a different culture, or studied a religion other than the one he grew up with. He doesn’t live near a big city with different people and ideas that aren’t exactly like his own. He doesn’t think, Laura.”
    “What about your mother?”
    “When she hears about my number, she’ll be scared to death.She won’t care about patriotism or any of that crap, she’ll beg Uncle Donald to fix it, which he can’t do.”
    “But your father could.”
    “Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because he won’t. Because Uncle Sam will make a man of me. I’ll go into the army and get rid of all those crazy notions about making mud pies in the desert.”
    Laura finally accepted reality; even if Robby’s father could have helped, he wouldn’t. And there certainly wasn’t anything Iris and Theo could do except worry about their daughter and the young man they were so fond of. It didn’t help matters any that the war that was probably going to take Robby away had nearly torn their own family apart and because of it their son Steve was still estranged from them. Laura did her best not to talk about Vietnam in front of them.
    But it seemed to her as if that was all her contemporaries
were
talking about. In every dorm, coffeehouse, or hamburger joint where the college kids congregated, no matter how the conversation started, eventually it would turn to Vietnam and the draft. Or, more specifically, avoiding the draft. There were few supporters of the military on Laura’s politically liberal campus, where most of the students and faculty had been taking part in protest marches long before the televised images of young Americans coming home in body bags, and Vietnamese children burned by American napalm, finally turned the rest of the country against the war. In 1968 their school had firmly supported the peace candidate Eugene McCarthy. Robby and Laura, and everyone they knew, attended rallies wearing black armbands for the slaughtered Vietnamese and bracelets for American soldiers missing in action. But before the advent ofthe lottery, those protests had been intellectual exercises engaged in for abstract beliefs. The new policy brought the war and fear of dying onto their lovely campus and into their protected dorm rooms.
    Suddenly Robby had a new circle of friends; all of them boys who had low- or middle-range draft numbers and would probably be inducted by the end of the year. Before the lottery had gone into effect, most of these boys had planned to wait out the war safely tucked away in graduate school, or in jobs deemed vital to the national interest. But the government had declared most of those deferments unfair and ended them. Now the boys gathered in Robby’s dorm room every night to rant and rave about the old bastards who had started this mess. And to spend hours trying to figure out how to get out of it.
    Robby was always the one who brought up the subject of leaving the country or going to jail. “It’s the only honorable way,” he said over and over again. And Laura would remember the night when he’d told her that he’d wanted to be Ivanhoe when he was a kid.
    Sometimes Robby talked about Laura’s brother Steve, who was now deeply into the underground movement. Steve was doing it the right way, Robby declared. Laura was torn when Robby started saying