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

We didn’t discuss the matter any further. That night, however, after she had served a modest stew and dumplings and gone to bed, I left the house very quietly, and went out to the cages.

A bright moon hung above the distant mountains. It cast a steady pale light on my father’s family of Massasauga Rattlers. The serpents were in a bitter mood, no doubt from hunger. There was a slashing impatience in their motions. Nor would they have been milked of their venom recently. (This was something my father used to do secretly, before services, especially if he thought children might participate in the handling. He would stretch a bit of thin leather over the mouth of an old jar, and let the serpents bite it. It took the poison out of them for a period of time. That was his own private apostasy, I suppose—an insurance policy against any momentary lapse of attention on the part of higher powers.) The snakes were aware of my presence. They twined and curled restlessly, and I imagined I could feel a cold fury in their blank and bloodless eyes.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

I was not a faithful man by most definitions. I wasn’t a devotee of the Church of Signs, and I had never adopted its doctrines as my own. Nevertheless I lifted the latch and opened the door of the nearest cage. I didn’t wear gloves or any such protection. My hands and arms were exposed and vulnerable. I reached inside.

I had entered some wordless principality of grief and anger. There was no logic to the act, only the memory of the advice my father had given me, years ago, when I watched him feed living mice to his snakes while dodging their strikes and lunges.

It shouldn’t be necessary to kill a serpent, he said, in the ordinary course of things, if you know what you’re doing. But unexpected events happen. Perhaps a stray viper threatens some innocent man or animal. Then you have to be decisive. You have to be quick. Don’t fear the creature, Adam. Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.

And that is what I did—repetitively, mechanically—until a dozen serpentine corpses lay stiffening at my feet.

Then I turned back to my familiar old home, and went to the bed that had comforted me through many winters, and slept for hours without dreaming.

In the morning the wire cages were bright with beads of dew, and the carcasses I had left behind were gone—some hungry animal had carried them off, I supposed.

The day before I left Williams Ford I asked my mother whether she believed in God, and Heaven, and Angels, and that sort of thing.

It was a bold question, and it took her by surprise. “That’s not the sort of thing a polite person ought to ask,” she said, “outside of church.”

“Perhaps not; but it’s the kind of question Julian Comstock enjoys asking, almost every chance he can get.”

“And it gets him in trouble, I expect?”

“Often enough.”

“You can take a lesson from that. And you know the answer, in any case. Haven’t I read to you from the Dominion books, and told you all the stories in the Bible?”

“As a parent to a child. Not as one adult to another.”

“You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you’ll see.”

“I’m sure you’re right. Do you, though? Believe in God, I mean?”

She looked at me as if to gauge my earnestness. “I believe in all sorts of things,” she said, “though I don’t necessarily understand them. I believe in the moon and the stars, though I can’t tell you what they’re made of, or where they come from. I suppose God falls into that category—real enough to be felt from time to time, but mysterious in His nature, and often confusing.”

“That’s a subtle answer.”

“I wish I had a better one.”

“What about Heaven, though? Do you think we go to Heaven when we die?”

“Heaven is generally regarded as having strict admission requirements, though no two faiths agree on the details. I don’t know. I expect it’s like China—a place everyone acknowledges as real, but which few ever visit.”

“There are Chinamen in New York City,” I volunteered. “And a great many Egyptians, besides.”

“But hardly any angels, I expect.”

“Next to none.”

That was as much Theology as she would tolerate, so we dropped the subject, and spent our last day together discussing more cheerful matters; and in the morning I said goodbye to her, and left Williams Ford behind me for the second and last time.

“In your many travels since we last met,” Ben Kreel said to me as we drove back down the Wire Road to Connaught, “did you ever get as far as Colorado Springs?”

“No, sir,” I said. It was another sunlit day. The telegraph wires hummed in a warm breeze. The train that would take me away from my childhood home and all its memories was due in just three hours. “Mostly I was in various parts of Labrador, well north and east of Colorado.”

“I’ve been to Colorado Springs five times,” Ben Kreel said, “for ecclesiastical training. It isn’t at all like the pictures in the Dominion readers. You know what I mean—the Dominion Academy is all they show, with its white pillars, and those big paintings of the Fall of the Cities.”

“It’s very impressive, and worth a photograph.”

“Certainly it is; but Colorado Springs is more than just the Academy, and so is the Dominion.”

“I’m sure they are, sir.”

“Colorado Springs is a town full of pious, prosperous men and women who are loyal to the Union and to their faith; and the Dominion isn’t strictly a building, nor even an organization, but an idea.

A very bold and ambitious idea, an idea about taking the battered and imperfect world we live in and making it over fresh and new—making a Heavenly Kingdom of it, pure enough that the angels themselves wouldn’t be reluctant to tread there.”

Unlike Manhattan, I thought to myself. “It seems as if we’re a long way from that. We haven’t taken Labrador yet, much less the world.”

“It’s a chore for more than one lifetime. But we can’t commune directly with Heaven until we perfect the world, and we can’t perfect the world until we perfect ourselves. That’s the job of the Dominion, Adam: to make us all more perfect. It’s a stern duty, but it arises out of the common instincts of charity and good will. Those who chafe under it are generally too attached to some imperfection of their own, which they love with a sinful stubbornness.”

“Yes, sir, that’s as you used to tell us at holiday services.”

“I’m pleased you remember. Our enemy is anyone who rebels against God—perhaps you remember that aphorism, too.”

“I do.”

“What form do you suppose that rebellion generally takes, Adam?”

“Sin,” I guessed.

“Sin, yes, certainly, and plenty of that to go around. But most sin only sabotages the sinner. Some sin is more insidious, and aims directly at impeding the Dominion in its work.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Though I had my suspicions.

“Don’t you? When you were in the Army, did your regiment have a Dominion officer in it?”