“I was honest, and I hit it head-on.
“I walked into the sheriff’s office and ran into . . . guess who? Right. I knew you could guess because you’re good at this stuff. It was old Deputy Warren.”
“The guy who broke down Grandma Zoe’s door on that day when she almost died?”
He calls her Grandma Zoe not because she was anywhere near the age equivalent of a grandmother to him, but because Connor called her that. Harris never met her, which is a damn shame. She died about a year before he was born.
“The very one,” I say. “And if I told you he didn’t know what to make of me, let alone what to do with me, that would be an understatement.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to register for the draft.’ And I held my wrists out so he could put the cuffs on me.
“He stared at them like he’d never seen wrists before.
“‘I don’t think that’s the way it works,’ he said.
“‘How does it work?’
“He scratched his head for a minute, and then he said, ‘I got no idea, son. Nothing like this ever happened around here before.’”
I watch Harris’s eyebrows go up. Just a little bit. I keep talking.
“So then he disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me noticeably uncuffed. When he came back, I swear he seemed more embarrassed than angry.
“‘Nobody else knows, either,’ he said. ‘But we figure in time the Selective Service people’ll get tired of not hearing from you, and eventually they’ll put out a warrant for your arrest. Or something like that. We’re talking about the federal government here, son. It’s not really our department.’
“I asked him, ‘So you’re saying I should just go home and wait?’
“‘No,’ he said, and at this juncture I could hear the irritation rising in his voice. ‘No, if you’re asking me what I think you ought to do, I think you ought to sign up. You can get a deferment by going to college, at least for a while. That’s what all the other boys are doing.’
“I said, ‘But they can pull that out from under me anytime.’
“He said, ‘A lot of guys get a doctor to write up some excuse.’
“Well, I guess I wasn’t a lot of guys. If you know what I mean.
“I said, ‘But I’m fine. So that would be a lie. That would be a total insult to the guys who went over there. I’m not going to lie and cheat to live a nice, comfortable life while they fight. I’m going to make a sacrifice that they could make, too, if they wanted. I’m going to go to jail.’
“He scratched his head again, and narrowed his eyes at me. Finally he just said, ‘Go home and wait, son. With ideas like that in your head, sounds like jail’ll find you soon enough.’”
I know he’s about to ask if it did. So I beat him to it.
“I hurried up the process by writing to the Selective Service and telling them I was never going to sign up, and whatever the penalty might be for that, they should just go ahead and get the proceedings going against me.
“I served two years. I didn’t have to go to some terrible, dangerous federal prison. I just served my time in the county jail, which I think was fairly irregular as these things go. It was the federal government, like the deputy said. But somehow they referred my case to the local authorities for arrest. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with guys like me, either.
“It was a blessing at least to be jailed close to home.
“I got no time off for good behavior, not because I didn’t behave well, but because the guards and the warden and the parole board all had some family or friends who’d signed up for the draft just like they were supposed to do.
“The food was incredibly bad, which I swear was the second-worst thing about the place, after the noise and the lack of privacy. But it wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be the price I paid.
“And damn it, I paid it.
“Roy drove out twice a week and brought me some decent food, and your granddad came out twice on some weeks, three times on others. He promised to take me to the Place for one of those chocolate-dipped chocolate ice cream cones the day I got out. It was the only treat he couldn’t figure out how to bring me.
“You have no idea how many of my days in that hole started with a wish for that ice cream shop not to go out of business while I was rotting. I mean, serving my time. Paying my debt to society.
“My parents had divorced by then—I know, what took them so long, right?—but my father flew all the way from North Carolina, where he lived with his new wife, to scream at me and tell me how much I’d disappointed him. How I’d ruined my whole life with this bonehead play.
“And I was a captive audience. Literally.
“But, you know what? It’s okay. That’s part of the price I paid.
“My mom only visited three or four times in that whole two years, but she was relieved by what I’d done. She never said so straight out, but I knew.
“And Zoe.
“Zoe not only came to visit me now and again, but she wrote me a letter every day. Every day for two years. Seven hundred and thirty letters. I actually counted. In jail, you have time on your hands for stuff like that. Some were full of news from town, others were just her thoughts on this and that. Some were longer than others, but I never had to watch a mail call go by with no letter from Zoe.
