Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow

Uncle David asked, “Was he guilty?”

“Of proselyting? You know better than that. The men of Bartorstown don’t proselyte.”

“Then he was from Bartorstown?”

“Soames came from Virginia. I knew him as a trader, and a fellow man.”

“Guilty or not,” Pa said heavily, “it’s an unchristian thing. And blasphemous. But as long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob like that will turn cruel.”

“All of us,” answered Hostetter, “have our old fears.”

He climbed up on the seat again and drove away. But Len never heard the end of his going.

Three weeks had gone by, lacking a day or two, and in Piper’s Run it was October, and a Sabbath afternoon. Len sat alone on the side stoop.

After a while the door behind him opened, and he knew from the scuffling footsteps and the thump of the cane that it was Gran coming out. She clamped one bony, amazingly strong hand on his wrist and clambered down two steps and then sat, folding up stiffly like a dry twig when you bend it.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Gran, and began arranging her several layers of skirts around her ankles.

“Do you want a rag for under you?” asked Len. “Or do you want your shawl?”

“No, it’s warm in the sun.”

Len sat down again, beside her. With his brows pulled together and his mouth pulled down, he looked nearly as old as Gran and much more solemn. She peered at him closely, and he began to feel uncomfortable, knowing that he had been sought out.

“You’re mighty broody these days, Lennie.”

“I guess so.”

“You ain’t sulking, are you? I hate a sulker.”

“No, Gran. I’m not sulking.”

“Your pa was right to punish you. You disobeyed him, and you know now he forbid you for your own good.”

Len nodded. “I know.”

Pa had not delivered the expected beating. In fact, he had been gentler than Len would have dreamed possible. He had spoken very seriously about what Len had done and what he had seen, and he had finished with the statement that Len was not to go to the fair next year at all, and perhaps not the year after, unless he had been able to prove by then that he could be trusted. Len considered that Pa had been mighty decent. Uncle David had licked Esau to the last inch of his skin. And since at this moment Len did not feel that he ever wanted to see the fair again, being denied it was no hardship.

He said so, and Gran smiled her toothless ancient smile and patted his knee. “You’ll feel different a year from now. That’s when it’ll hurt.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, if you’re not sulking, there’s something else the matter with you. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Lennie, I’ve had a lot to do with boys, and I know no natural healthy boy should mope around like you do. And on a day like this, even if it is the Sabbath.” She looked up at the deep blue sky and sniffed the golden air, and then she looked at the woods that encircled the farmstead, seeing them not as groups of individual trees but as a glorious blur of colors she had almost forgotten the names for. She sighed, half in pleasure, half in regret

“Seems like this is the only time you see real colors any more, when the trees turn in the fall. The world used to be full of colors. You wouldn’t believe it, Lennie, but I had a dress once, as red as that tree.”

“It must have been pretty.” He tried to picture Gran as a little girl in a red dress and failed, partly because he could not imagine her as anything but an old woman, and partly because he had never seen anybody dressed in red.

“It was beautiful,” said Gran slowly, and sighed again.

They sat together on the step, and did not speak, and looked at nothing. And all at once Gran said, “I know what ails you. You’re still thinking about the stoning.”

Len began to shake a little. He did not want to, but he couldn’t make it stop. He blurted out, “Oh, Gran, it was—He still had one boot on. He was all naked except for this one boot, and he looked so funny. And they kept on throwing stones—”

If he shut his eyes, he could see again how the blood and the dirt ran together on the man’s white skin, and how the hands of the people rose and fell.

“Why did they do it, Gran? Why?”

“Better ask your pa.”

“He said they were afraid, and that fear makes stupid people do wicked things, and that I should pray for them.” Len ran the back of his hand violently across his nose. “I wouldn’t pray a word for them, except that somebody would throw stones at them.”

“You’ve only seen one bad thing,” said Gran, shaking her head with the close white cap slowly from side to side, her eyes half shut and looking inward. “If you’d seen the things I saw, you’d know what fear can do. And I was younger than you, Lennie.”

“It was awful bad, wasn’t it, Gran?”

“I’m an old woman, an old old woman, and I still dream—There were fires in the sky, red fires, there and there and there.” Her gaunt hand pointed out three places in a semicircle westward, and from south to north. “They were cities burning. The cities I used to go to with my mother. And the people from them came, and the soldiers came, and there were shelters in every field, and people crowded into the barns and the houses anywhere they could, and all our stock was butchered to feed them, forty head of fine dairy cows. Those were bad, bad times. It’s a mercy anybody lived through them.”

“Is that why they killed the man?” asked Len. “Because they’re afraid he might bring all that back again—the cities, and all?”

“Isn’t that what they said at the preaching?” said Gran, knowing full well, since she had been to preachings herself many decades ago when the terror brought the great boiling up of faith that birthed new sects and strengthened the old ones.

“Yes. They said he tempted the boys with some kind of fruit, I guess they meant from the Tree of Knowledge like it says in the Bible. And they said he came from a place called Bartorstown. What is Bartorstown, Gran?”

“You ask your pa,” she said, and began to fuss with her apron. “Where’d I put that handkerchief? I know I had it—”

“I did ask him. He said there wasn’t any such place.”

“Hmph,” said Gran.

“He said only children and fanatics believed in it”

“Well, I ain’t going to tell you any different, so don’t try to make me.”

“I won’t, Gran. But was there ever, maybe a long time ago?”

Gran found her handkerchief. She wiped her face and her eyes with it, and snuffled, and put it away, and Len waited.

“When I was a little girl,” said Gran, “we had this war.”

Len nodded. Mr. Nordholt, the schoolmaster, had told them a good bit about it, and it had got connected in his mind with the Book of Revelations, grand and frightening.

“It came on for a long time, I guess,” Gran continued. “I remember on the teevee they talked about it a lot, and they showed pictures of the bombs that made clouds just like a tremendous mushroom, and each one could wipe out a city, all by itself. Oh yes, Lennie, there was a rain of fire from heaven and many were consumed in it! The Lord gave it to the enemy for a day to be His flail.”

“But we won.”

“Oh yes, in the end we won.”

“Did they build Bartorstown then?”

“Before the war. The gover’ment built it. That was when the gover’ment was still in Washington, and it was a lot different than it is now. Bigger, somehow. I don’t know, a little girl doesn’t care much about those things. But they built a lot of secret places, and Bartorstown was the most secret of all, way out West somewhere.”

“If it was so secret, how did you know about it?”