Make Quilts Not War (29 page)

“What about us? Were you going to tell anyone?”

“I was going to start with your aunt and Mavis and maybe Connie. No offense, but one of the keys to my story is the times we lived in when this started. I know the rest of you have read about it, but unless you lived it, you can’t really understand the emotion.”

“I promise not to pass judgment.”

“I know you won’t intend to, but let’s not make any promises until you hear my story.”

The tea water hadn’t even boiled when Lauren came into the kitchen through the studio. Harriet had given her a key so she didn’t have to keep digging the hidden one out of the flower box.

“I see you’re resting like you’re supposed to be,” she said as she took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair.

Before Harriet could warn her, Jenny came out of the downstairs bathroom.

“Okay,” Lauren said so only Harriet could hear.

“Fix yourself a drink and then, when we get comfortable, Jenny has some things to explain to us.”

Lauren pulled a bag of ginger snaps from her messenger bag and poured some onto a plate from Harriet’s cupboard then poured herself a cup of tea.

“Can we do this in your TV room so we can at least pretend
you’re resting so your aunt won’t bust my chops for not making you rest?”

Harriet looked at Jenny, who gave a small nod.

“If I’m going to tell you this,” Jenny began when she and Lauren were seated in upholstered chairs and Harriet was reclining on the sofa, “I need to do it my way in my time. Please don’t interrupt until the end unless you need clarification on a particular point.”

Lauren looked at Harriet and then they both agreed. Harriet had turned on a table lamp, but the light was dim, providing Jenny some feeling of privacy.

“I know you were taught about the war in Vietnam in history class, but that period of time was so much more intense than the pages of a book can convey. In January of nineteen sixty-eight, five thousand woman marched for peace and confronted Congress on its opening day. Jeannette Rankin led the march.”

“Excuse me,” Lauren said. “Remind us who Jeannette Rankin is.”

“She was the first woman to serve in Congress and was instru
mental in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, allowing women
to vote. Let me remind you, that amendment, was ratified in
nineteen-twenty. She was in her eighties when she led the march.

“An actress named Eartha Kitt denounced the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon with the First Lady. Boys had to sign up for the draft. In past wars and conflicts, journalists were supposed to downplay any losses and keep the masses uplifted about our efforts.

“But Vietnam represented a change. It was the first time a war was televised on the nightly news. Newsmen were reporting the horrors of war along with a true accounting of the losses we were suffering. The Pentagon Papers were published in the
New York Times
, exposing the differences between what we were being told by the government and what was really happening.

“Martin Luther King was assassinated, then Bobby Kennedy. The Chicago Eight, later seven, at first including the National Chairman of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, were charged with conspiracy to incite rioting. Later, Bobby’s case was severed, and he was given a four-year prison sentence for contempt of court. That length of sentence for contempt was unheard-of prior to his sentencing.”

Jenny stopped to sip her tea, and Lauren looked at Harriet and made a slight rolling gesture with her finger, which Harriet took to mean she, too, was anxious for Jenny to get to the point.

“I’m not doing this well,” Jenny said. “But what I’m trying to tell you is that these were highly charged times. Things were changing. People were protesting everything. Everyone knew someone who had been killed in Vietnam. When you protested, the police were the enemy, using tear gas and rubber bullets. Even the movies of the times were important statements. There was no such thing as pure entertainment.”

Harriet reached across Lauren and pointed at the cookie plate. Lauren scooped a couple into her lap then passed the plate. Jenny waited until Harriet was settled again.

“This is the hard part. I know I told you I’d grown up in a
commune and I did—part of the time, after what went down.” Jenny sipped her tea again. It was obvious she was stalling.

“My brother was, indeed, a drug dealer, but he was smalltime. He sold small quantities of marijuana to his self-important friends. We lived in Lynnwood, and they acted like we lived in Berkeley. We were a blue-collar working-class town where most of the adults we knew were just trying to get by.

“Every town had a Selective Service office, and Lynnwood was no exception. Prior to Vietnam, a large percentage of the town’s young men signed up to go in the army as a way of getting out and seeing the world. But now they were scared. The army might actually expect them to fight.

“Bobby hung out with a group of stoned underachievers with high ideals and low ambition. They were very full of themselves back then. Everyone had a guitar or drum and thought they were going to be the next John Lennon or Ringo Starr. They went through a phase where they were going to be artists and craftsmen.

“Back then, the nerds had slide rules and graph paper and were always working on some problem, the solution to which would end world hunger or create a renewable source of clean energy. The only trouble was, none of them was good at anything. And of course, they all grew their hair out and stopped washing it.

“I don’t even remember which one of them thought up the idea of breaking into the Selective Service office and stealing the punch cards with the names of registered eighteen-year-olds. Left to their own devices, nothing would have come of the scheme except a lot of hot air.”

“How many people are we talking?” Lauren asked.

“There were a dozen, not counting Bobby, but the core group was maybe half that. Then Cosmic started hanging out with them, and that’s where the trouble started. What I told you about that part was true. Cosmic had an uncle who was an ex-con, he brought in another ex-con friend, and they decided to rob the bank next door.”

Jenny rubbed her hands together and then rubbed them on her upper arms.

“Are you cold?” Harriet asked and started to get up.

“Sit,” Lauren commanded. “I’ll get one of the fleece throws from the closet.”

She opened the closet door behind her chair and pulled out an assortment of afghans and throws from a box. She gave Jenny the fleece one and tossed a ragged knitted afghan onto Harriet’s lap, keeping a lap-sized flannel rag throw for herself.

Jenny wrapped the throw around her shoulders and continued her narrative.

“What I didn’t tell you the first time was what my role was.”

Harriet looked at Lauren, and they both looked at Jenny, but she was lost in her recollection.

“I was fifteen, and my parents were always working, so I tagged along with Bobby wherever he went. My parents had been making him babysit me after school from the time I was nine and he was twelve. He was flat-footed, and in those days that was enough to get you a one-F draft rating, which meant you weren’t prime and would be given a noncombat job to free up more qualified soldiers, but they would only do that if they ran out of one-As, which wasn’t likely.”

Jenny was clearly pained having to tell her story and was dragging it out as if rescue were coming, which they all knew wasn’t the case. Harriet’s arm was starting to hurt, but she didn’t want to distract Jenny by asking Lauren to get her pain medication.

“Bobby was lacking in ambition, beyond his small drug operation, so whenever he could make me do his chores or run errands for the group, he would. At that time, I was in awe of the older kids. They used new names, like Cosmic and Paisley and Tranquillity. They called me Jonquil. It was all very glamorous, in a hippie sort of way.” Her voice took on a faraway quality.

“As I was saying, Bobby made me run errands for him, and he’d started having me fetch drugs from his stash when the group ran out. A few weeks before the planned robbery, I was walking the two-mile route along a dirt road, having just made a run to Bobby’s stash, on my way back to the ‘clubhouse,’ which was an abandoned tin hay shed on a piece of property Tranquillity’s dad owned. I was stopped by a police car.

“The police took me in for possession of drugs—I later learned they’d had Bobby and his friends under surveillance for weeks. Someone had tipped them off about the planned break-in at the Selective Service office. I have no idea who. Somebody trusted someone outside the group and that person tipped off the police. Like I said, there were always a few hangers-on at the fringe of the group.

“I was a minor, and they’d watched us enough to know I was doing errands for my brother and was not part of the planned crime, but they scared me into believing I was going to jail for ten years on the drug possession charge. They let me suffer for an hour or so, and then Officer James Sullivan came in and offered me a way out. If I would become a confidential informant there would be no charges. It would be like I’d never been stopped, and as a bonus, they would pay me when I told them anything useful. He was very convincing—he even tore up the reports with my name on them right in front of me.

“My life went from the ruin of jail time to the righteousness of being a crime fighter in a few moments time. Until that point, I hadn’t really thought of the break-in as a criminal event. It was a political protest—that couldn’t be a crime, could it?

“Of course, once I talked to James, it became crystal-clear. Bobby and his friends weren’t the new guard that was going to change our country. They were a bunch of deluded dopers. And my brother was worse. He didn’t believe in their ideals, he only believed that as long as they were excited about the ‘plan’ they would meet more often and need more of his product.”

“Where were your parents during all this?” Harriet asked.

“James told me we didn’t need to worry them with all this. They were at their jobs all the time and were distant, at best. They didn’t even notice that my brother had a marijuana patch growing in the woods behind our house.

“I was young and confused. My brother had played the parental role in my life for years, and now the police had me spying on him and his friends. It never occurred to me to talk to my parents about it.

“Everyone was too stoned by the time I got back to notice I was gone longer than usual. Over the next weeks, I listened, which was pretty easy, given their drug use. I dutifully told about Cosmic’s uncle coming with his friend to teach them how to execute the break-in. Those two were more savvy, never mentioning word one about the bank or their plan to rob it. James was paying me, and I was starting to think of a career in law enforcement.

“Break-in day arrived, and based on my information, James and his team were ready to step in when the job was in process. Bobby and his group had given me the role of bagman. I would be the one to take the bag filled with the punch cards to the car parked in a nearby alley.

“Of course, when the time came, the whole thing went sideways. Cosmic’s uncle and his friend got us inside, and then they blew a hole in the wall between the office and the bank, and the next time I looked, they were stuffing money into one of the duffel bags we’d brought for the cards.

“All of a sudden, the police started screaming over loudspeakers for everyone to come out with their hands up, which hadn’t been the plan James had explained to me. But then again, neither of us had expected the robbers to blow a hole in the bank wall.

“Chaos erupted. Everyone had been given a job to do, be it
lookout, bag packer, driver, whatever. They all abandoned their posts
and went into the bank, where the robbers had poked a hole
through the lobby wall with a pry bar and let them into the hair salon on the other side of the bank. They were able to break the glass out of the salon’s back door, and Bobby’s people were crawling one by one through the hole, scattering as they got out. I saw the bag I’d brought in and grabbed it before following the crowd.