Arms Wide Open Read online

  Fortunately Mica can sleep through anything and took a long nap while we worked. Forty feet up, as the men walked back and forth on the peaked roof, I crawled on my hands and knees, scared shitless but determined to keep up with them.

  “Have you heard from Colin lately?” I repeat.

  “He just got out of jail in Hartford after the demonstration at the nuclear submarine base. Bad scene. Fasted without food and water for two weeks.” Aaron’s mouth tightens and he fiddles with his spoon. I watch his long fingers flip the cutlery back and forth.

  “When he was finally taken to court he’d lost twenty pounds. It’s only his jailers that kept him alive. They forced water down his throat with a tube every day.” The man we speak of is our mutual friend, a full-time activist from the Committee for Non-Violent Action in Connecticut.

  Stacy shakes his head. We’ve all been in jail for a few days, or a few weeks. Some of my draft-resister friends have been incarcerated for years. Stacy, Johan, Aaron, and Colin are only free now because they drew high numbers in the draft lottery. Whether a guy gets a 30 or a 300 can mean the difference between living free and protesting the war, leaving friends and family for Canada, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, or going to prison as a draft resister.

  We all admire Colin’s commitment but frown on his extremism, fearing someday he’ll die from one of his water fasts . . . or be beaten to death by frustrated guards. I listen as the men discuss the state of the peace movement. Far away from the napalm and death, the war in Vietnam still defines us.

  The men’s conversation veers to an analysis of Nixon’s five-point peace plan and the latest riot at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A professor was killed in an explosion targeting a research facility aligned with the Defense Department.

  “Guys, I’m beat. I’m gonna crash. There’s a pile of quilts on the floor by the heater stove or you can sleep with us in the big bed, Aaron.” I give him a one-armed hug and lean over to kiss Stacy, who pats me on the butt.

  Upstairs, Mica plays with my long loose chestnut hair as he nurses. It saddens me when I hear of Students for a Democratic Society’s violent demonstrations. Stacy and I are both against the war for moral reasons, but he has always been more politically sophisticated. My pacifism is simple. I learned it in Sunday school. Thou shalt not kill. You can die for the cause and some have, but you don’t kill. Pretty simple.

  In the window’s reflection over the bed, I see my image as an Andrew Wyeth painting, Farm Woman, Nursing. I’m not beautiful; in fact as I look at myself I have many complaints, but when I’ve desired a man, I’ve usually slept with him. I study my face, unlined, my soft white breasts in the golden lamplight. Colin was the only man who made it clear he wasn’t interested. I was in love with him once, maybe still am.

  Downstairs the soundtrack to our life starts up again, Stacy on the Autoharp and Aaron on the harmonica. They’re rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo. They’re rolling out the guns again . . . The moonlight streams metallic through the window at the head of the bed, and their song goes up through the rafters, out the patched roof.

  But they’ll never take our sons again . . . Becoming a mother has changed me; life always seemed precious, but even more so after I gave birth.

  No, they never will take our sons again. Johnny I’m swearing to you.

  MICA

  I look over at Mica lying next to me and touch the little brown birthmark by his right ear. The night I went into labor, I was two weeks past my due date and we’d returned home late from a meeting on alternative lifestyles at the university. I went straight upstairs with an aching back, but had hardly gotten into bed when my water broke. We were living in Duluth, at the Draft Counseling Center, with our friends Ernie and Darla and their three-year-old twins.

  “Guess what?” I rolled over and nudged Stacy. “It’s started.”

  We lay holding hands and timed contractions until dawn, then crowded into Ernie’s old Chevy and took Route 61 along the north shore to Two Harbors Hospital, the only facility within 150 miles that would let the father be in the delivery room. The sky was turning pink and Lake Superior reflected the sunrise. White seagulls cut the air and I wasn’t afraid.

  There’s an old wives’ tale that if your mother had a fast labor you will, too, but I’m sorry to say, in my case the old wives were off. My mom had me in two hours with hardly a pain, but my baby was sunny-side up, facing the pubic bone instead of the sacrum, a position that causes slow dilatation and constant back pain.

  By 10:00 a.m. I was five centimeters, and Stacy joked that I might have the baby by noon. Then progress slowed. The nurses wouldn’t let me walk, so I threw off my blue hospital gown and swayed on the bed, on my hands and knees, naked. Shocked, they stopped coming into the room.

  Stacy rubbed my lower back for hours and timed the contractions while I did the hee-hee’s and hoo-hoo’s we’d learned at the Lamaze class in Minneapolis. He was my rock, keeping me centered, suggesting changes of position. Whenever I’d get off track, he’d help me relax.

  For hours I stared out the hospital room window across a wide expanse of snow. I saw the light change; the shadows lengthen then turn to dusk. Nothing moved except an occasional car on the road a mile away. I was grateful even for that, any distraction, something to take my mind off the grinding pressure in my sacrum.

  There were five pine trees in the field and one of them, if you looked at it right, had a face. The woman I saw there gave me strength. You can do it! she would say as I stared at her through contractions. You can do it. Just take the contractions one at a time.

  By ten at night I had the urge to push and was taken into the delivery room, a green-tiled space dominated by a gleaming silver instrument table and a stainless steel platform with stirrups. I wasn’t strapped down like in most hospitals, but I was still flat on my back. Stacy supported my shoulders. If he wasn’t touching me, I panicked.

  I pushed and I pushed until the veins stood out on my neck like an Amazon warrior and my face turned blue, but nothing moved. Two hours later Dr. Leppink, our peacenik physician, arrived and told the nurses I was pushing too early. I was only eight centimeters. That’s when I lost it and took the Demerol.

  It wasn’t pleasant, but sometimes you just have to choose, medication or insanity, and I’ll admit, it relaxed me while we waited for my cervix to withdraw. My disorientation from the medication was worse for Stacy than me. I couldn’t keep my eyes open and was incoherent. The combination of no sleep for two days and the drug made me hallucinate. It took another ninety minutes, but finally my cervix was fully dilated.

  When at last they took me back to the delivery room, feeling the baby move down spontaneously gave me hope. Getting sugar water in my IV gave me strength. In the end, forceps and a large mediolateral episiotomy were necessary, but it didn’t matter.

  Birth always alters you. It’s a learning experience, and what Stacy and I came to understand is that no matter how many classes you go to, how much you practice relaxation, how many books you read, or how many prayers you put out into the universe, childbirth is beyond your control, a force of nature, like a tornado, a blizzard, or an earthquake.

  As Dr. Leppink pulled and I pushed, the baby shifted.

  “Look down,” the nurses said. “See your baby being born.”

  I could feel each part of his body slip out. His head. His shoulders and feet. Then, flop, a wet life on my stomach. This I didn’t expect. Babies were usually dangled in midair to drain mucus, spanked, and given to the nurses.

  Mica, our son, let out a cry and flung his trembling arms wide. A baby all wrinkled and tired! Our baby. Stacy is crying. I am crying. We’re exhausted. We’re elated.

  We made this new being out of our imperfect love; gave life to him from our common belief in a universe that says yes.

  CHAPTER 3

  Shadow

>   “So, are you up for it?” Stacy looks out the window. “The teach-in isn’t for three days, but we could go to town early.”

  The sun is just rising and, as it warms, the mist lifts off the golden water. A cardinal sits like a drop of blood on the curved cedar tree. I inspect our provisions on the shelves under the kitchen counter, jars that once contained beans, wheat berries, cornmeal, and powdered milk. It’s been weeks since we’ve been to the city or seen anyone but each other. The food containers are mostly empty, but our money jar’s empty too.

  “Maybe you could get work at the docks. We’re low on supplies, plus I want to make some posters for my introductory childbirth class and put them up in the library.”

  Fine snow blows like sand as we cross the fallen elm that serves as our bridge over the Lester. Stacy, wearing a heavy hooded parka, carries Mica on his back in the baby carrier, first through the woods and then across Jacobsen’s pasture to the Jean Duluth Road. We pass shallow pools of marshland surrounded by cattails that harbor mallards and mergansers. They rise as we pass.

  “Hi, ducks. Better hurry south. Winter’s here.” I pull my rainbow scarf tighter, lean into the wind, and review my mental list of what we’ll buy in town. Whole-wheat berries to grind into flour, pinto beans and cheese from the natural foods co-op. But we also need nails. Maybe we can borrow some money from Aaron.

  Amazingly, as soon as we stick out our thumbs, we’re in luck. A beat-up blue pickup pulls over. “It’s a cold one,” the driver grumbles, leaning over and throwing open the passenger door. I’m assaulted by my childhood smells, cigarettes and beer, but settle myself in the middle of the front seat with Mica in my lap.

  “So,” says the old guy, dressed in gray coveralls with a green John Deere cap, “what you fellas doing way out here?” I realize that with my braids tucked inside my hood, a wind-burned face, and no makeup, he thinks I’m a man. “Name’s Tollefson,” he bites out. His face is a wrinkled road map and he has one large dark mole, shaped like Lake Superior, under his eye.

  “I’m Stacy Woodrow and this is Patsy, and Mica, our boy.” Stacy doesn’t call me his wife, but implies it, letting the man know I’m a girl. The driver gives me a quick once-over, adjusting to my femaleness, and pulls back on the road. “Whatcha doing way out here?” he asks again.

  “We live about two miles back, on the Lester. Bought eighty acres and built a cabin by the river.” I let Stacy do the talking, happy just to be warm and out of the wind. Hitchhiking always makes me wary.

  Mica pulls at my coat, wanting to nurse, but embarrassed in such close proximity to Mr. Tollefson, I distract him by playing patty-cake. The radio’s tuned to the news and I catch a report that the Khmer Rouge attacked an airport in South Vietnam, but the driver impatiently reaches over and turns the sound off.

  “I remember the family that used to own your place, the Lindquists.” Tollefson rubs his grizzled white whiskers. “They lost their eighty acres to taxes four years ago. Weren’t too happy about the state repossessing it. Farm had been in the family for generations. They had to move into Duluth. That how you got the place? Foreclosure from the county?”

  Stacy answers yes, not saying more.

  I frown. I’d never thought about who owned our land before, just assumed someone died or maybe flew south, like a migrating bird, to avoid the harsh winters. The thousand dollars we paid for the property was what we had left after Stacy gave his grandmother’s inheritance away.

  “When the rich die and give their money to their children, they just perpetuate the class system,” Stacy had explained to me as he wrote checks to the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee, and the War Resisters League. The ethics of inheritance had never occurred to me. In my family, we’d be lucky to get enough for the burial.

  Mica falls asleep against my chest. The rough sound of the motor reverberates in the cold. Our driver works his jaw back and forth like a saw and drums on the steering wheel with his weathered hands. I’m not sure if he resents us for buying the Lindquists’ farm or just doesn’t have anything else to say. Twenty minutes later, we pull up in front of the brick post office in downtown Duluth.

  “Thanks, we really appreciate the lift.” That’s Stacy.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I chime in.

  As we stride down the sidewalk toward Chester Creek House, I glance over my shoulder. Tollefson hasn’t moved, and I turn back and wave. The man seems friendly enough. He picked us up when many people wouldn’t. But he doesn’t wave back.

  Chester Creek House

  Whitewashed stone walls. A worn red oriental carpet. Mattress on the floor with an Indian-print cotton spread. I’m in our room in the basement of Chester Creek House, folding clean diapers.

  The cold light from one tiny window up near the ceiling illuminates Mica, who’s playing with wood blocks at my side. On the wall hangs a picture I drew after Mica’s birth, showing how I felt after twenty-four hours of constant back labor and three hours of pushing: a wet noodle, but powerful too.

  When Mica finally was born, even though the doctor had to help at the end, I felt I could do anything, move a two-ton truck with my bare hands, lift a mountain, part the waters of Lake Superior. In the drawing, which is done in pastels on a large sheet of stiff white paper, Stacy stands guard at the end of the bed, saying, “Push!” On his chest is an H, for My Hero.

  It was his strength that got me through the long labor. Women often say they couldn’t have done it without their support people. I know now that’s true. The pain would suck you down under the earth. People who love you are your anchor to life.

  “Shit!” The front door of the three-story Victorian communal house bangs open and male voices echo from the front hall. “My hands are freezing.”

  It’s Stacy, Aaron, and Jim, a pale, quiet, ponytailed refugee from the Kent State massacre, where the Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds into the crowd and four students were killed, one paralyzed, and eight others wounded. For three days they’ve worked unloading cargo ships while I hung around Chester Creek House.

  “Hey,” I call out, hurrying upstairs with Mica on my hip. “How’d it go?”

  The men are pulling off their boots and combing the frost from their beards and mustaches. “We were lucky; another ship came in from the Soviet Union,” Stacy tells me. “It might be the last.” They’re tired and cold, but have cash in their pockets.

  Duluth, at the westernmost end of Lake Superior, is linked, via the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean, over twenty-three hundred miles away. Like any seaport, it’s a great place to get day labor . . . I’d try it myself, but they don’t hire women.

  The smell of garlic and cheese fills the house, and it’s already dark as we seat ourselves around the long dining table. The Benders, Terry, Joan, and their three kids, have made vegetarian lasagna, tossed salad, and homemade bread for all thirteen of us. Courtney, a pensive, dark-eyed librarian, serves us from the end of the table.

  “Patsy and I will split tomorrow. I have fifty-five dollars and we’re set for another month, but we want to chip in on the food. We put five bucks in the kitchen money jar,” Stacy announces. Though we act like it’s not important, money here, as in most communes, is a sensitive issue. As a group, we declare, “To each according to his need and from each according to his ability,” but without regular jobs, Stacy and I can’t afford to live like the rest of them.

  Since last summer, when we gave up our beautiful window-lined bedroom on the second floor and moved down to the basement of this big old Victorian, our role in the community has been awkward. We don’t contribute to the rent but still crash at the house when we’re in town. Everyone says we’re welcome, but I’m concerned their generosity has a limit; that’s why I’ve been helping Leila, Aaron’s new girlfriend, paint their turreted bedroom for the last three days . . . to contribute labor instead of cash. Even be
fore we officially moved out, these issues were a tug-of-war.

  “Forget it,” says Patrick, the balding ex-priest, now a history teacher at Holy Rosary School. “You need the bread more. We’ll sponge off you sometime.”

  That’s my cue. “We’d be happy to share the farm . . .” I flash him my innocent blue eyes and take another delicate bite of lasagna. For two years, Stacy and I have tried to get these friends to join us on the land. The group laughs uncomfortably and I join in, but my laughter’s tinged with resentment and everyone knows this. I catch Stacy’s eye. He flashes me a look to cool it.

  The fact is that Stacy and I are ambivalent about sharing the land. We yearn for community and believe in land trusts, but don’t really want to give up control. If these people join us on the farm, even for just the short three-month growing season, they’ll bring chain saws, power lines, and vehicles, ripping our Ansel Adams wilderness apart.

  Jim pushes his chair back, escaping the rough edges around the table, and slips into the living room, where he turns down the lights and tunes up his twelve-string. One by one, eager to avoid the mealtime strain, we trail after him and slouch on sofa and chairs.

  When the sun comes up and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd, Jim sings.

  For the old man is a waitin’ for to carry you to freedom. Follow the drinking gourd, we all join in.

  Outside, the wind whips the dark cold. Our relationship with these friends is complicated.

  Like yarn, we unravel and then run straight. We have to be careful with each other’s feelings, but when we sing, our frayed edges mend.

  Left foot, peg foot, travelin’ on. Follow the drinking gourd.

  From the Heart