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

“This is the war we are to fight?” asked Lymon Pugh, whose attention had been strained by Julian’s narrative.

“That’s exactly the war we are to fight, and it isn’t going well for us. The Dutch are arrayed in force, we’ve already lost the railroad to Schefferville, and both Quebec City and Montreal are threatened by the enemy. The Army of the Laurentians took heavy casualties last summer, which is why the draft was doubled up.”

“Sounds like we have the short end of the stick, then,” another soldier remarked.

“Perhaps not,” said Julian, for he was not a defeatist, or a friend of the Dutch. “The enemy are well-provisioned, but their supply lines stretch all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and our Navy is making things hot for Dutch shipping. Their army is of a fixed number, while ours is growing. And,” Julian added, grinning broadly, “we’re Americans, and they are not, which makes all the difference.”

There followed a cheer for the Union, and much chest-thumping, and the crowd of draftees went off bragging about how they would rout the enemy, and show the Dutch what American soldiers were truly made of. It was Lymon Pugh, lingering behind, who asked, “How do you know all these things, Julian Commongold? Are you some kind of scholar? You talk like one.”

Julian deflected the question with a shrug. “I’m from New York City―I read the newspapers.”

This put Lymon Pugh’s mind back on the subject of reading, and literacy in general, and he grew thoughtful as we broke for mess.

Of course Julian’s tutorials on the state of the war did not escape the attention of the camp’s ranking officers for long. Word spread, and (according to Sam, who kept his ear to the ground) the Dominion men on the staff were unhappy with Julian for his editorializing, and wanted him to receive a reprimand. But the camp’s military commander vetoed that idea, for Julian was a promising soldier, and his blunt talk had braced the men more effectively than a dozen fire-breathing Sunday sermons.

Sam was not bound by such scruples, and chastised Julian roundly for his loose talk―reminding him that in the long run notoriety might be as dangerous as combat ―but Julian paid little attention.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Sam said to me after one of these confrontations. “It’s the Comstock in him.”

“He’ll make a fine soldier, then,” I said.

“Or a famous corpse,” said Sam.

We were scheduled to be shipped east for the spring campaign; but before then, on another Sunday afternoon, Lymon Pugh approached me once again on the subject of reading and writing.

“Thought perhaps I could learn all about it,” he said sheepishly. “Unless I left it too late. What about that, Adam Hazzard? Is it something only children can learn?”

“No,” I said, for I considered myself, in this community, a sort of Evangelist of Literacy. My writing skills had been mooted about, and many of the men came to me to help them read or compose letters. “Anyone can learn it at any time. It’s not especially difficult.”

“Could I learn, then?”

“I expect you could.”

“And will you teach me?”

I was feeling magnanimous―the day was bright, the air had a delicate warmth, and a general languor had descended over the camp (along with the swampy smell of the thawing prairie and an unfortunate breeze from the latrines). I reclined on my cot with my boots off and my toes exposed to the air. Lymon Pugh sat on the cot adjoining, where he greased his rifle in a distracted way, his scarred hands moving almost of their own volition. A charitable act did not seem out of order. “But I can’t do it in one lesson, mind. We’ll have to begin from first principles.”

“I expect we’ll have plenty of time, if neither of us is killed in the war. You can give it to me piecemeal, Adam.”

“In that case we’ll begin with the letters of the Alphabet. The Alphabet is a collection of all the letters there are, and once you learn them no unexpected letters will come along to confuse you.”

“How many of these letters are there?”

“Twenty-six altogether.”

He looked crestfallen. “That’s a large number.”

“It only seems so. Here, I’ll write them out for you, and you can keep this paper and study it.” I took a page from my notebook and copied down all the letters in their large and small incarnations, thus: Aa―Bb―Cc―(etc.)“Seems like you’re wrong on the count,” Lymon Pugh observed when I had finished. “That’s at least fifty, I estimate.”

“No, only twenty-six, but each one comes in a greater or lesser variety, the larger being called a capital letter.”

He studied the page uncomprehendingly. “Maybe we should call this off… it don’t seem like anything I could ever commit to memory.”

“You underestimate yourself. Suppose, while you were wandering east from the Willamette Valley, you came upon a village with just twenty-six people in it, and decided to stay there. You’d learn the names of the whole tribe soon enough, wouldn’t you? And many other things about them.”

“People aren’t scratches on a page, though. People walk about, and talk, and such.”

“Letters may not walk about, but they do talk, for each one represents a sound. Look, we don’t have to introduce you to all twenty-six at once. That would make you like a stranger at a crowded social event, which is always an uneasy experience. Take the first three by themselves, as if they were sitting around a campfire and invited you to join them.”

“This is fanciful.”

“Bear with me. Here is A, and his companion the lesser a,” and I pronounced the sound of the letter and its variations, and instructed Lymon Pugh to repeat them, and to associate the sounds with the letter’s shape, the way he might connect a face with a name. When he had done this satisfactorily we proceeded to blunt, simple Bband the more elusive and chameleonic Cc. By the time he mastered these three letters nearly an hour had passed, and it seemed to me that Lymon Pugh, like a sponge, had absorbed all the knowledge he had room for at the moment, and any more of it would simply leak out around the edges.

He agreed to defer further instruction until the next lesson―perhaps the following Sunday―but observed, “These are only sounds, and I don’t see how they connect to writing or reading.”

“You can stack and arrange them to make words, ultimately. But don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Is there a word I might make with just these three?”

The only one I could think of was the word CAB, so I wrote that out for him, and he was delighted by it. “Damn if my uncle didn’t drive a cab in Portland some years back, and it was a fine rig, with a four-horse team. I wish I could have written out that word for him! He would have thought I was a Dominion scholar, or an Aristo in disguise.”

“Practice the letters in your spare time,” I said, giving him a blank page to work with, and an extra pencil I had stolen from the Quartermaster’s tent last week previously (because I like to keep a stock of pencils on hand: they’re perishable, and often hard to come by). “You can write CAB,” I said, and showed him, “or cab―they mean the same―but you should practice both.”

“I will,” he said, and after a moment’s pondering added, “But this is too generous, Adam Hazzard. I ought to pay you for all this work.”

I was happy enough that he had got out of the habit of striking me with his fists, and that was all the payment I wished for; but to smooth the awkwardness I said, “There must be many things you know about that I don’t. Someday you can teach me one or two of them.”