Becoming Lin Read online

  Becoming Lin

  a novel in moments

  tricia dower

  Caitlin Press

  Copyright © 2016 Tricia Dower

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  Caitlin Press Inc.

  8100 Alderwood Road, Halfmoon Bay, BC V0N 1Y1 www.caitlin-press.com

  Edited by Jane Hamilton Silcott

  Text design by Vici Johnstone

  Cover design by Andrea Routley and Vici Johnstone

  Cover image Arcangel image #AA1263307, by Nagib El Desouky

  Lyrics from “Draft Dodger Rag” by Phil Ochs Copyright © 1964 Barricade Music, Inc.Copyright renewed. All rights controlled and administered by Almo Music Corp.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Ebook by Demian Pettman

  Caitlin Press Inc. acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dower, Tricia, 1942-, author

  Becoming Lin / Tricia Dower.

  ISBN 978-1-987915-07-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-987915-28-0 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8607.O98742B43 2016 C813'.6 C2015-908098-3

  The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.

  —Widely attributed to Gloria Steinem without a scrap of evidence

  To Mike and Katie For making it all worthwhile

  Snapshot by Earl Wishart, 1972

  ~

  He bursts from her in a bloody, briny-smelling torrent—no less extraordinary than Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. The moment seems to splinter time and yet float above it. Seems to inhabit the same space as every moment she’s ever lived, as if there were no then, only now. Too soon she remembers the country is in shock. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are dead. A hundred cities still lick wounds from spring riots and not even Walter Cronkite believes in the war anymore. “Forgive me,” she whispers when the nurse lays seven pounds, six ounces of slippery baby on her chest as gently as she might a soufflé. In dumb wonder, she watches her little god turn pink as the man who loves her more than she thought possible supports her head. “We can’t bring another child into this violent world,” she says. He mumbles assent into her sweaty hair, his voice shot after hours of prayers and abject apologies for his part in her pain. Under the stark gaze of the delivery room lights, she sends up silent thanks the baby isn’t a girl who could end up in a stranger’s car. She won’t surrender this boy to war’s sacrificial altar or let him become an Eldon Jukes. She will keep him perfect. She will keep him safe.

  Deliver me

  1

  It’s stinking hot.

  If linen truly breathes, Linda’s navy blue sheath is gasping. She’s wedged between Mother and Daddy as usual but not yet bored senseless. A gangly seminary grad with a voice as raw as salt air holds her attention this Sunday. He’s twenty-six, according to the bulletin, and from Minnesota, a place she knows only as desperately cold and teeming with Swedes.

  He doesn’t look Swedish.

  His hair is too dark.

  The Reverend Paul Judge, broad beam spilling over a throne-like chair on the opposite side of the altar, grins like a puffed-up uncle. He’s taking off for six weeks, abandoning his flock to this guy who has lifted his arms to heaven twice already. If he turns out to be a Billy Graham Crusader like Pastor Judge, Linda might stay home the rest of the summer. Maybe the rest of her life. This praising the Lord business is undignified and must they sing the Crusade anthem, “How Great Thou Art,” every Sunday? Its vocal range is as brutal as “The Star Spangled Banner’s.”

  Hard to believe she once wanted to carry Christ’s love to mystical Africa, like those Bible thumpers Sam and Tootie Burns who brought back slides of half-naked women and children with swollen bellies, along with tales about black mamba snakes, scorpions bigger than your hand and ants that could devour a live cow in under an hour. They blazed with the fervor she yearned for back when she believed God would touch her life with magic if only she were devout enough. Back before what Mother and Daddy call her Troubles. Before she questioned crediting God with the joys while giving him a pass for the sorrows.

  Take the gravel-voiced Ronald Brunson up there, praising the Lord for the new Voting Rights Act without blaming Him for keeping Negroes from voting in the first place. He speaks of an Alabama county that’s eighty-one percent Negro without even one registered to vote, of protesters brutalized by state troopers four months ago when they marched from Selma to Montgomery. Gripping the sides of the pulpit, he leans forward and says, “Can you imagine?”

  Of course she can. She reads Look and Life, watches Walter Cronkite each night with Mother and Daddy. Horrific images cleave to her mind: that poor boy lynched in Mississippi, those girls firebombed to death in their Alabama church, all betrayed by the adult world they trusted to protect them. The South must be a place of enormous injustice, not to mention perversion and debauchery. She’s seen Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire. And isn’t Texas, where President Kennedy was shot nearly two years ago, part of the South? Such a terrible day, the whole world weeping, Daddy saying he didn’t for a minute believe it had to do with Communism. New Jersey is a relative nirvana despite the race riots in Elizabeth last year spilling over into quiet little Stony River, population eight thousand, where the twenty percent or so who are Negro don’t get hassled when they vote. As far as she knows, that is. Not much interracial mixing in Stony River except at high school football games and the annual Christmas tree lighting. During the riots, somebody fired at Daddy of all people as he drove to Bing’s Pharmacy for Mother’s pain pills.

  A hot-rodder guns it down River Road, making her jump. The tenderfoot at the pulpit raises his voice against the rumble as he asks them again to imagine, this time how much fear and hatred must’ve festered among the white minority in that Alabama county to incite them to keep the Negroes from a right men have had since 1890. He doesn’t mention it took women three more decades to gain that right, something her American History prof said should inflame all women. She swats that thought away, gazes up at him and nods with those around her. Pastor Judge has preached enough about protecting Negroes’ civil rights it would be hard to find anyone against it at River Street Methodist. Or so she’d like to believe.

  Daddy leans forward, clasping a crossed knee. The fat ruby in his Rutgers ring, class of 1939, snares a splinter of light. Such terror on his round, florid face when he came home with a bullet hole in the turquoise Dodge he was so proud of and another excuse for not letting her go anywhere by herself. Every day, fall through spring, he drives her to and from Douglass College for women where she’ll enter her third year in September. Every day, fall through spring, she stares out the window, pretending she’s at the wheel.

  Alone.

  Headed far from those who know of her Troubles.

  She’ll be twenty-two next month and still five years away from becoming a social worker like Angela Brohm at the home for delinquent boys where Linda interns for credit towards her major. Five more years shackled to Mother and Daddy in a stone-hard pew, praying the Rapture s
woops them up and leaves her behind with the rest of the doomed.

  The stoop-shouldered guy at the pulpit pauses to pull out a water glass from inside the lectern. Someone thought to look after him in this heat. He takes a swallow and reveals he was a Freedom Rider to the South in 1961.

  That gets a rustle or two from the crowd.

  Some people, he says, tar-brushed the Riders as “misguided…dangerous…provocateurs, part of a Communist Party conspiracy to destroy America.”

  Mother clears her throat and leans over Linda in a miasma of lemony Jean Naté and foul liniment. She raises her eyebrows at Daddy and whispers, “Meddlers.” He gives her a curt nod back. Linda’s mortified to think the Reverend Brunson might have noticed. But his head is turned away from her and moving in a slow arc across the congregation. If he’s looking for dark-skinned Methodists he’ll have to visit the AME church a few blocks away.

  “Propelled by adrenaline and outrage,” he says, “hundreds of us boarded Greyhounds and Trailways, determined to ignore the back-of-the-bus shibboleth, the White and Colored signs in terminals.” (Despite years of “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” in Reader’s Digest she’ll have to look up shibboleth later, if she can spell it.) The Riders hoped to create a crisis so the government would have to enforce the law against racial segregation in interstate bus terminals. Charged with breach of peace, Ronald Brunson spent a week with sixty men in a cell designed for twenty-four. Five more weeks at a notoriously barbarous prison farm. “Think it’s hot and miserable today, folks?” He waves his long hypnotic hands about. “Try summer in Mississippi, sleeping on an infested mattress, using an open toilet, every day a meditation on death.”

  Daddy clucks his tongue.

  Linda would rather die than let anyone see her on the toilet. If she couldn’t close the bathroom door, she’d hang herself. Bad enough Mother hounds her if she retreats to her room other than to sleep. What are you doing up there? Are you okay? She hasn’t hidden Oreos under her bed in nearly four years. Not since the intense guy at the pulpit went on his Freedom Ride, it occurs to her, although one has nothing to do with the other. She wonders if he calls himself Ronald or Ronnie or Ron and hopes he doesn’t mind the worn spots in the maroon carpet running down the aisles.

  “At the prison farm,” he says, “they made us strip and walk naked down a starkly lit corridor in front of guards and other prisoners.”

  Mother inhales sharply.

  Others cough.

  If Linda’s heard “naked” in church before it was in a Bible verse. She focuses on her hands, sweating in their white gloves, and tries not to picture Ronald, Ronnie, Ron naked. Despite the oscillating fan behind him, he must be melting under that black robe. Daddy surrendered his jacket right away to the heat and the half-moons of sweat under his arms. The ushers have opened the lower panels of the stained-glass window, severing the apostles’ feet, but there’s no breeze to be had. Trust Mother to snag the lone Polanski Funeral Home paddle fan in the pew and leave Linda and Daddy flogging the air with their bulletins.

  “The point was to humiliate us, make us less than human in their minds and show us how powerless we were. For the same reason, Jews herded into concentration camps were stripped and photographed naked.”

  That word again. More coughing. Mother fans herself with sudden ferocity. Linda crosses and uncrosses her legs. A photograph taken at Auschwitz wrests itself from her memory: two naked, open-eyed corpses so skeletal she couldn’t tell if they were men or women. Even though she hasn’t done dreadful things to Jews and Negroes, she’s often flooded with remorse when other people do, the cold pit of her stomach saying now you’ve done it, her mind asking but what have I done? In a second-year psychology class she learned about survivor’s guilt, which doesn’t apply to her, of course, yet she’s ashamed to give even one thought to her own suffering.

  As if reading her mind, the Reverend Brunson says, “What I suffered was nothing compared to the nooses, flames, police dogs, billy clubs, fire hoses and tear gas others defied over the years to stand up for rights I took for granted. Not only the right to vote. The right to visit any public beach, check out any library book, apply for any job, find food, shelter and restrooms along any highway. How about the right to not be lynched by vigilantes?”

  The catch in his voice stings her eyes.

  “When the first Riders pushed on after a mob firebombed their bus and attacked them with metal pipes, clubs and chains,” he says, “I was moved. When the governor and the police betrayed the second team, after promising them safe passage through Alabama, I was angry!”

  Angry leaves his mouth in a thrilling explosion she feels up and down her spine.

  “The chance to climb aboard a Freedom bus fired me up. I’d rarely acted on my convictions.”

  The passion in his voice makes her wonder if she has any convictions at all. Does she truly want to be a social worker or only to have Angela’s approval? Since flubbing the master’s program, she’s felt a paralyzing lack of purpose, the absence of a single ambition.

  “True, I’d decided on the ministry, as my father and great-grandfather before me, but this felt singular, the historical consequence of it. I wondered what I’d tell my yet unborn children if they asked about this time.”

  Children.

  Linda hopes she’s barren. The thought of bearing a child who might suffer someday like those girls in the burning church makes her shudder. Even worse would be discovering she’d grown someone inside her who could do such a thing to them. She’s heard shocking tales of abuse at the Home. Not that she’d ever hurt a child, but, honestly, can you keep one safe from those who would? A social worker would at least be able to try. Reapply for the program, Angela urged her. Let them know what made you want to understand these little boys. But Linda had shared that with her in confidence. Angela doesn’t know she sabotaged herself by not showing up for the selection committee interview, afraid of what dark corners of her past they’d compel her to illuminate.

  “I’m ashamed at how fearful I was at Parchman,” Ronald Brunson says, “while my fellow prisoners, a sea of Davids up against Goliaths, were ready to die there. We were two to a cell facing a wall, our only windows seven-foot-high slits.” He lifts one arm and looks toward it as though those slits are directly above the heavy brass cross dangling over the chancel. Linda looks too. “All we could see was a poignant sliver of sky, God’s promise of Heaven. Solid walls isolated each cell from another and we got out only twice a week for showers. Tactics intended to break our spirits. But we sang of freedom across the walls, my favorite a children’s song about how the light in each of us can break through the darkness. A reminder that a boy trusting in God’s gifts slayed a giant.”

  He starts singing “This Little Light of Mine,” his voice even raspier from emotion. Mrs. Horne catches up with him on the organ. Pastor Judge stands and windmills his arms, mouthing, “Everybody, everybody.” The choir joins in right away, then the congregation, the many voices forming a single soulful prayer. The organ rumbles in Linda’s chest like a second heart. She can barely get the words out. What kind of faith does it take to embark on such a desperate journey? Oh for a cause to die for, a spiritual union with others who have a larger vision. She’s been lonely for that her whole life, she realizes, is unaware she’s crying until Daddy slips her his handkerchief.

  The congregation sits back down with a thud.

  A few months ago a herd of Douglass students traveled to DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Even if Mother and Daddy had agreed, Linda wouldn’t have gone for fear of being branded a rabble-rouser. She’s never tried to help troubled kids outside the Home’s safe environment, the boys locked in their rooms at night, always a guard on duty.

  What a lazy coward she is, a sorry excuse for a human being.

  Sunlight from an open window floods the Reverend Brunson’s transported face. He ends the service with “God is at
work in human history, shining His truth through the darkness, the ancient truth that love endures and overcomes oppression, discrimination and violence.” His voice reaches down into her toes. “John Wesley looked on the world as his parish. I want to speak God’s truth to that parish on behalf of the powerless.” He steps from the pulpit and raises his arms. “Who will stand with me?”

  She apparently. Up without a thought, his smile hooking a finger around her heart, the words deliver me washing ashore on her consciousness like a message in a bottle.

  Too late it registers that he might beckon her down for some embarrassing salvation ritual. She grips the back of the pew in front of her and swallows back nausea. Then, in a flash of brilliant clarity, she knows, just knows, God has made her endure the ignominy of remaining in Stony River so she can meet this man. She sees them wielding signs at marches and bonfires, shouting audacious words about injustice, their faces smoldering with resolve. He will infuse her so completely with the certainty of his faith an understanding of God’s intentions will surge through her veins, as surely it must through his.

  She hears only the rush of blood in her head until floorboards groan as the congregation rises for the benediction. When “How Great Thou Art” comes trumpeting from the organ, her mouth and throat open and her voice reaches out, miraculously grabbing hold of the notes. During the last verse, Pastor Judge and the younger minister exit through side doors to form a receiving line in Fellowship Hall. The congregation is to follow.

  Linda collapses in the pew, hand over her tap-dancing heart.

  Daddy grips her shoulder. “Okay, kiddo?”

  “Yeah.” Euphoria gives way to chagrin. She’s made a spectacle of herself.