Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

He had not changed much, though I had new eyes (it seemed) to see him with. He was still bluff, stout, red-cheeked, and utterly in control of himself. “I’m out of the Army now—plain Adam will do,” I said.

“Not so plain as when you left us,” he said. “We all thought you and Julian must have been running from conscription. But you distinguished yourselves in battle—and in other ways—didn’t you?”

“What a person runs run from and what a person runs to aren’t always as different as we hope.”

“And you’re an Author now, and speak like one.”

“I don’t mean to put on any airs, sir.”

“A justified pride is never out of place. Very sorry about your father.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The Estate physician did what he could; but it was a bad bite, and your father wasn’t a young man.”

The carriage moved away from the clutter and noise of the train depot, past wood-frame hostels and the many bar-rooms and hemp-dens my mother used to call “the curse of Connaught,” onto the pressed-earth road leading north to Williams Ford. It was a warm and windless morning, and the rising sun picked out the peaks of the distant mountains. Devil’s Paint-Brush grew in colorful thickets along the verge of the road, and the sparsely-wooded land gave out its old familiar summer odors.

“The Duncans and the Crowleys,” Ben Kreel said, “are prepared to welcome you to town, and no doubt would have put on some sort of public reception if the circumstances were less unhappy. As it is, they’ve set aside a room for you in one of the Great Houses.”

“I thank them kindly; but I was never uncomfortable in my mother’s house, and I expect she would like me to stay there, and that’s what I mean to do.”

“Probably that’s wise,” Ben Kreel said, with something that might have been a suppressed sigh of relief.

When at last we came through the fields where the indentured men worked, into the low rolling hills near the River Pine, and reached the outskirts of Williams Ford, I mentioned that the Independence Day fireworks must have been extravagant this year.

“They were,” Ben Kreel said. “A peddler brought in a handful of Chinese rockets from Seattle for the event. Blue Fire-Wheels and some very colorful Salamanders… how did you know?”

“The air still smells of gunpowder,” I said. It was a sensitivity I had picked up in the war.

I won’t dwell on the details of my grief. The reader understands the delicacy of these painful emotions. [Or if the reader doesn’t understand it right now, he will before very long. That’s the contract Life makes with Nature and Time; and we’re all bound by it, though none of us consented to the bargain.]

I put in a brief appearance at the Estate, for the sake of politeness, and I was politely received by the Duncans and the Crowleys, but I didn’t stay long. It was more important for me to see my mother. I passed the stables on the way from the Estate to the lease-holds, and I was tempted to find out whether my old tormentors still worked there, and whether my new rank had made them afraid of me; but that was a petty urge, not worth indulging.

The cottage where I had grown up stood just where I had left it. The creek behind it still ran dappled and cheerful toward the Pine, and my sister Flaxie’s grave was where it had always been, modestly marked. But there was another grave beside it now, a fresh one, with a white wooden cross above it on which my father’s name had been burned. Though he was illiterate, he had learned to recognize his written name and could even produce a plausible signature—he would be able to read his own gravepost, I supposed, if his ghost sat up and craned its neck.

Graves are best visited by sunlight. The warm July weather was soothing, and the bird sounds and the faint chuckling of the creek made the idea of death more bearable. I hated to think of next year’s snows weighing down this fresh-turned sod, or the January winds blowing over it. But my father was next to Flaxie now, so she wouldn’t be alone; and I didn’t suppose the dead suffered very badly from the cold. The dead are immune to seasonal discomforts—there is at least that much of Heaven in the world.

My mother saw me standing by the grave and came out from the back door of the cottage. She took me by the arm, wordlessly. Then we went indoors and wept together.

I stayed five days. My mother was in a fragile condition, both because of her grief and because of her age. Her eyes were poor now, and she was no longer useful to the Aristos as a seamstress; but because she was of the leasing class, and had served faithfully all her life, she continued to receive chits with which to buy food at the lease-store, and she would not be forced out of her home.

Her eyesight had not dimmed so much that she wasn’t eager to see a copy of A Western Boy at Sea, and of course I had brought one for her. She handled it with exaggerated care, smiling a little; then she put it on a high shelf next to The Adventures of Captain Commongold, which I had also sent her. She would read it, she said, chapter by chapter, in the afternoons, when the light and her eyes were at their best.

I told her that I couldn’t have written either of these books if she had not been so determined about teaching me to read—teaching me the love of reading, that is, and not just the names of the letters, as most lease-boys were taught on Sundays.

“I learned to read from my own mother,” she said. “And she learned from her mother before her, all the way back to the Secular Ancients, according to family legend. There was a school-teacher in our family, long ago. Perhaps another writer, too—who knows? Your father’s greatest shame was his illiteracy. He felt it deeply, though he didn’t show it.”

“You could have taught him the art of it.”

“I offered to. He wouldn’t try. Too old and set for that, he always said. I expect he was afraid of failing.”

“I taught a man to read,” I said, “when I was in the Army.” That made her smile again.

She was keen for news about Calyxa and the baby. By a fortunate coincidence Julian had arranged to have a photograph of us taken shortly before Independence Day, and I showed it off. Here was Calyxa in a chair, her coiled hair shining. Flaxie sat in her lap, slightly lopsided, baby dress askew, goggling at the camera. I stood behind the chair with one hand on Calyxa’s shoulder.

“She has a forceful look,” my mother observed, “your Calyxa. Good strong legs. The baby is pretty. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I can still spot a pretty baby, and that’s one.”

“Your grand-daughter,” I said.

“Yes. And she’ll learn to read, too, won’t she? When she’s ready?”

“No doubt of it,” I said.

Eventually we talked about my father’s death—not just the fact but the circumstances of it. I asked whether he had been bitten during a Signs service.

“There aren’t any services of that kind anymore, Adam. Church of Signs was never popular except among a few of the indentured, and not long after you left the Duncans and Crowleys decided it was a ‘cult,’ and ought to be suppressed. Ben Kreel began preaching against the sect, and the most enthusiastic members of the congregation were sold off or sent away. Your father was the only lease-man among them, so he stayed; but there was no congregation to preach to anymore.”

“But he kept the snakes.” I had seen them in their cages out back, writhing unpleasantly.

“They were pets to him. He couldn’t bear to stop feeding them, or destroy them any other way, and it wouldn’t have been safe to set them loose. I’m not sure I can bring myself to kill them, either. Although I despise them.” She said this was a vehemence that startled me. “I do despise them very much. I always have. I loved your father dearly. But I never loved those snakes. They haven’t been fed since he died. Something has to be done about them.”