Anthem Read online

  for the music makers

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Scrapbook 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Scrapbook 2

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Scrapbook 3

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Scrapbook 4

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Scrapbook 5

  Author’s Note

  Timeline notes

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Photo credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  EVERYTHING THAT TOUCHES YOU

  Written by Terry Kirkman

  Performed by the Association

  Recorded at Western Recorders, Hollywood, California, 1968

  Drummer: Ted Bluechel, Jr. (concert)/Hal Blaine (studio)

  Charleston, South Carolina June 12, 1969

  MOLLY

  It’s been so long since I’ve felt something.

  You know how it is when your heart splits open. Blood spurts everywhere. You can slap your palms to your chest, you can clutch at your breast, but your heart won’t be held. It struggles away from you, away from further damage. It won’t be held, I tell you. It begins to dissolve, to disappear. Soon you will have no heart. Soon you will feel nothing.

  This is how it is for me now. I survey the damage as I watch myself bleed to death. The mind can do that, you know.

  Sometimes I try to talk myself out of it. “You’re not bleeding to death, Molly.”

  But I am.

  If Barry hadn’t left, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. If the fight in our family hadn’t been so awful, if we could have talked about it together … but yes, it was, and no, we couldn’t have.

  “He’s eighteen. He can go where he wants, as long as it’s not here,” said Dad.

  “He’s your son!” sputtered Mom.

  “My son will enlist in the army and do his patriotic duty, just as I did, or he will not live one more night under this roof!”

  I just stood there. It was like watching television. Everything was happening right there in front of me, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to change it.

  “What is patriotic duty, Dad?” asked Barry. “Take a look at the news! You think what’s happening in Vietnam is patriotic?”

  My family is heartbreaking and the world is falling apart. I could make you a list.

  Dad turns on Walter Cronkite every night after supper. The Battle of Hamburger Hill, the People’s Army of Vietnam, the 101st Airborne, 72 Americans killed, 630 Vietcong, and that’s the way it is, says Cronkite.

  I want to leave the room, but the pictures on the television screen are so compelling. Angry people march in the streets, chanting, “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” The police stand there like hulking monsters with gas masks and bayonets. Boys burn their draft cards. I can’t look away.

  “Traitors!” spits Dad. “I served with honor in Korea, for this?”

  Dad runs his hands over his face like he’s trying to scrub it clean of all the bad news. Then he goes to the kitchen to get his coffee before Gunsmoke comes on. Mom dumps a laundry basket full of clean towels onto the couch. They are still warm from the dryer. I tear May off the kitchen calendar and June stares at me. It’s an anniversary month, a year since the argument. A year I haven’t seen my brother.

  When I was little, Barry would safety-pin a towel at my neck and let me jump off the coffee table into the pile of clean towels like Supergirl. “You’re flying, Polka Dot!” And then he’d zoom me around the room on his shoulders.

  But Barry is gone.

  “The Communists are trying to take over the world!” Dad had yelled at Barry. “That’s what they do! That’s why we’re in Vietnam!”

  “How are the Communists going to take over the United States?” Barry yelled back.

  “You never heard of the domino effect?” Dad’s voice choked, he was so angry.

  “Tell me about it!” I’d never heard Barry stand up to our dad like this, furious right back. “Tell me how the Communists are going to invade this country. Tell me we aren’t killing innocent people. Tell me how it works, Dad. Tell me!”

  Dad started for Barry, and Barry took a step back so quickly he stumbled. Dad stopped himself. Mom started up from the couch and then stopped herself. She put a hand on my shoulder like she was trying to protect Barry by protecting me.

  I could still feel something then, and what I was feeling was terror. Terror that Dad would keep yelling, that Barry would keep yelling back, that a war was breaking out, right in our living room, that we were helpless against it, and hopeless against its outcome. I sat as still as a statue.

  “The Red Chinese are right next door to Vietnam,” said Dad, waving his arms. “There are a lot more of them than there are us. They’re partners with the Russians — who now have the atomic bomb, may I remind you — and poof! No more Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, buddy boy. Don’t you understand anything?”

  “I understand plenty,” said Barry. He shoved his hair out of his eyes. His hair that slicked back like a seal’s when he swam all summer on the JCC swim team, the hair that got him suspended at school because it was longer than collar length, the hair that he’d defiantly stuffed under a wig in order to go to class — with all his buddies doing the same — so he could graduate.

  “Then show some sense, or I’ll show you the door!” said Dad.

  “I can find the door by myself!” said Barry. He stalked away, away, away from us.

  Wait! I wanted to call to him. Come back! But I couldn’t move.

  “And get a haircut!” Dad yelled after him.

  Then there was silence. The clock over our couch that’s shaped like a giant sun tick-tick-ticked in the silence.

  No one believed Barry would leave us for good until he did.

  His draft notice came in yesterday’s mail. It was marked Official Government Business. It looked serious.

  Mom hid it from Dad. “Not a word, missy!” she warned me. Then she turned up the volume on Another World, her favorite soap opera, and kept ironing. The iron hissed and steamed as she slammed it onto the collar of one of Dad’s Sunday dress shirts.

  “Mom,” I ventured, hesitant. “I don’t think you can hide something like this. It’s an official government document.”

  Mom put the iron in its cradle, snapped off the television, and stared at the blank screen.

  “Mom,” I tried again. “You’re scaring me. You could get in trouble. Barry could get in trouble. And maybe it isn’t what we think it is.”

  Mom stiffened her shoulders, glanced at me, then stalked to the
kitchen, where she fished the envelope out of the junk drawer. She coaxed it open using the steam from the iron. A minute later she pulled the letter out of its perfectly intact envelope and showed it to me. Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Exam. On Monday, July 2, 1969, at 8:00 a.m., at the Federal Building in downtown Charleston.

  She folded the letter and slipped it back inside its envelope. Then, very quietly, she said, “If it were an honorable war, I would be proud for him to go. But it’s senseless. I know that now, even if your father doesn’t. Amelia Daniels’s son is missing. Naomi Reynolds’s husband is dead. And for what? So many have died.”

  I held my breath.

  “Even Walter Cronkite says we can’t win,” Mom continued, her voice rising. “He said it last summer, right on the Evening News.”

  Then, a catch in her throat, my mother said, “I don’t know where my son is. And now he will go to a senseless war halfway around the world in a little Asian country we never heard of before all this mess started, and he will be killed. For nothing.”

  My heart winced. What could I even say to this? I could only reply to her heartache with my own.

  “I dream sometimes that I have found him,” I finally said.

  Mom gave me a long look. “Do it.”

  “Mom?”

  In one swift movement, she dropped onto the couch, pulled me to her, and held my hands in hers. “He loves you best. Barry is your heart. That’s why it’s breaking.”

  Instinctively, I pulled my hands away and clutched at my heart, but it would not be held.

  Mom spoke quickly, as if a plan was suddenly being born and bursting from her as the words tumbled out. “From the time you were old enough to toddle, you chased after him. You were his shadow, and he allowed it. He loved it. No one else can talk to him like you can.”

  “I can’t talk to him at all now,” I said. “We don’t know where he is.”

  Mom stood up. A black sock from the laundry pile clung to her housedress.

  She bit her bottom lip, then said, “Barry writes letters to Norman.”

  I blinked.

  The rest came in another rush. “Your Aunt Pam told me, months ago, which is why I’ve been able to bear his leaving. He’s staying in touch. But Norman has sworn not to give Barry away, so we don’t know where he is. We just know he’s safe.”

  I rocketed from the couch. “I can’t believe Norman didn’t tell me! All this heartache! All this worry! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! Mother!”

  Truth? I couldn’t believe Barry hadn’t told me.

  “I was sworn to secrecy by Aunt Pam,” Mom said. “And you know I couldn’t tell your father. He and your Uncle Lewis would have dragged it out of Norman, and he would have sent the entire U.S. Army for your brother with his draft notice in their hands.”

  My mother — I thought I knew her — was keeping secrets and hiding official government documents from my father.

  The giant sun clock tick-tick-ticked from its place on the wall over the couch, waiting for us to choose our next words.

  Finally, I whispered: “What do you want me to do?”

  Again clutching my heart. Foolish. The heart will not be held.

  Mom dabbed her eyes with a clean pillowcase that was waiting to be starched and ironed. She looked at me like she was trying to memorize my freckled face, like she might see some of her son in it, like she was about to make the most important decision of her life.

  She straightened her shoulders.

  “Find him, Molly. Find your brother. Norman will help you. Bring him home, where he belongs. We’ll figure something out. Maybe Dr. Kingsley will agree to declare him unfit and write us a note for the draft board — he’s been Barry’s doctor since he was a baby. Maybe my friend Sandra’s husband — he’s an attorney — can help us, or Barry can be a conscientious objector. Maybe on religious grounds.”

  “Religious?” Barry and Norman had a standing challenge to see who could get out of going to church the most.

  Mom was pacing now, wearing a path on the shag carpet. “Your dad will listen to reason — I know he’s upset that Barry is gone. Deep down he knows it’s his fault. We’ll figure it out as a family. All of us. Together. You just need to go get him and bring him home.”

  IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA

  Written by Doug Ingle

  Performed by Iron Butterfly

  Recorded at Gold Star Studios Hollywood, California, and Ultrasonic Studios, Long Island, New York, 1968

  Drummer: Ron Bushy

  NORMAN

  I’m a drummer. My name is Norman. I hate that name. My mother named me after Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking. She’s a positive person. She kills me.

  So I’m going to change my name. Who has a name like Norman anymore?

  “Norman Rockwell!” says my mother. “Look! He paints covers for Boys’ Life!”

  Who reads Boys’ Life anymore? My mother wants me to be an Eagle Scout. It’s a positive thing to do. I haven’t been to a Scout meeting in three years.

  Rock and roll drummers have names like Keith and Ron and Ringo. At school I get called Normal, especially by the hoodlums in PE. I’m going to change that.

  I’m spending as much time as I can this summer grooving on rock tunes and woodshedding in the garage, sharpening my chops, so I can start my own band.

  Barry bought a Harley and sold me his school bus before he left, so I can carry my drum kit wherever my band plays. As soon as I get a band. As soon as I fix up the bus. It’s a clunker from the Charleston school bus yard. It runs hot. In South Carolina, high school seniors drive the school buses — they don’t need special licenses and they save the state money because the state only has to pay teenagers thirty dollars a week. They also give them first dibs when the clunkers are sold and replaced.

  “It’s not the one I drove,” Barry said as he lifted the hood, “but it’ll get you to gigs with those drums and you can tinker on it as you go. Keep a toolbox under the driver’s seat.”

  That was last summer and I’ve been tinkering ever since.

  “Groovy!” I said to Barry. “Thanks, man!”

  “Nobody says ‘groovy’ anymore, Norm.”

  “I do.”

  Barry laughed and shot me that famous Barry grin. “Let me show you how to change the oil, man.”

  And just like that, the bus was mine. I practiced my turns and stops until I could do them in my sleep. CHARLESTON COUNTY SCHOOLS blazes across the sides in fat black lettering. I’m going to paint my band name over that when I get a band. And a band name.

  Barry was going to be my guitar player — he has a brand-new Fender Stratocaster just like one that Jimi Hendrix smashed on stage — but now Barry is gone. He sent me postcards at first, then he switched to letters. Last month he wrote me about this guy Duane Allman over in Macon, Georgia, who Barry says is better than Hendrix. I’ll believe it when I hear it.

  Marching band practice starts in August at the high school. I’ll be a senior and also section leader for percussion. I’ve talked Mr. McCauley into letting the band march into the football stadium this fall to the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” That means the toms, snares, bass drums, crash cymbals — they’ve all gotta know their percussion parts.

  And I’ve got to write them. Mr. McCauley — who I like because he started a jazz band in school last year and introduced me to Buddy Rich and Big Swing Face — gave me the job. “They’ve all got to know the cadence, Norman.”

  People named Norman march in high school bands, so I gotta get out of band, but if I’m honest, I like band, and band’s all I got right now: 22-1/2-inch steps on the field, 18 steps between the five-yard-line markers, pointed toes, crisp pivots, full roll-steps, sweeping flanks, sharp about-face, mark time, halt. Play in place. Play your crazy heart out.

  I don’t have anything else to do this summer except work my job at Biff Burger and get to Folly Beach as much as I can. I want to sit in with the beach bands, and I’m good enou
gh now to do it. So: job, woodshedding, figuring out how to make the girls fall in love with me at my gigs, and trying not to be killed by my mother’s positivity.

  And, if I’m lucky, I can drive the bus to Macon or Atlanta. Barry said this Duane and his band play free concerts at the parks there. He sent me a copy of The Great Speckled Bird all about it. The band has two drummers! This I gotta see.

  And Pam will let me go. She’s cool that way, especially since she and Dad split last year. Now Dad — Lewis — lives in Mount Pleasant with the floozie and Pam has joined NOW — the National Organization for Women. She put a sign in our front window on Mother’s Day, Rights Not Roses! I won’t go with her to the grocery store anymore because she hands out pamphlets and tells all the checkers, “I’m liberated and you can be, too!”

  Pam and my Aunt Janice are always cooking up some scheme that no ordinary mother would even think about. Hiking and camping for two weeks along the Appalachian Trail with me and Molly — one tent and no dads. Building a bomb shelter in the backyard with plans from Life magazine. Stuff like that.

  Pam doesn’t like it that I call her Pam.

  “But you’re liberated!” I tell her, and she sighs. “But I like being called Mom,” she says. It’s all very confusing. It’s confusing, too, that Lewis doesn’t come around much anymore. At least once a day, Pam brushes invisible lint off my shoulders and says, “You are a treasure. Don’t feel abandoned by your father!” But I do.

  When I listen to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” I listen loud, with my head right next to the speaker, lying on the floor. The world is going down the crapper, but when I’m lost in the music — any music — I don’t care. Sometimes I fall asleep to the song and I dream Barry and I are on a stage, and Barry is singing: Oh, won’t you come with me, and walk this land? Please take my hand!

  When I wake up, the song is over and all I hear is the record spinning on the turntable, that scratchy sound the needle makes while it waits for me to come rescue it.

  WINDY

  Written by Ruthann Friedman

  Performed by the Association

  Recorded at Western Recorders, Hollywood, California, 1967

  Drummer: Ted Bluechel, Jr. (concert)/Hal Blaine (studio)