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

“Does she live in the Executive Palace?” I asked.

“There’s a cottage reserved for her on the Palace grounds,” said Sam, “but she keeps a row-house in Manhattan where she prefers to stay. Emily doesn’t care for the rivalries and jealousies of the high-born. She’s happier with artists, actors, scholars―that type of person, from whom she has little to fear.”

“My mother’s a cultured woman,” Julian added, “and doesn’t care to be in the presence of Deklan Conqueror, who is as ignorant as he is villainous.”

That was how Julian had come to be raised in Manhattan, which was where he had seen so many plays and movies, and spoken with Philosophers, and picked up his heretical ideas. “But you must have met your uncle face-to-face,” I said.

“Too often. After my father’s death it was all I could do to restrain myself from calling him a murderer. Oh, those holiday dinners at the Executive Palace! You have no idea, Adam. My mother and I pressed in with Deklan and his crowd of sycophants, while the craven agents of the Dominion blessed his every whim and impulse. We were on display, I think―Deklan’s way of announcing that he could command the loyalty even of his murdered brother’s widow and son. We were powerless against him. He could have snuffed us out at any time. He tolerated my mother because she was a woman, and me because I was a child, and both of us because we were a perverse emblem of his supposed generosity.”

I had touched a hostility that ran deep in Julian, and the edge in his voice was impossible to ignore. The way he spoke of those Palace dinners, and the clergy who presided at them, made me wonder if this humiliation might be the ultimate source of his apostasy. But such speculation was not useful, and I dropped the subject because it made Julian so conspicuously unhappy.

“There!” Sam said. “Do you hear that?”

It was the sound of a train whistle wind-borne over the thawing prairie―not the Caribou-Horn Train that had brought us here from Bad Jump but an Army train, which we would board first thing in the morning, and which would carry us to the battle-front in the East.

“Pack away those Comstock dollars,” Sam said, “or you’ll have nothing to spend on women and liquor by the time we get to Montreal.”

I blushed at his joke, and tried to laugh, though there was more truth in it, ultimately, than I like to admit.

The social atmosphere aboard the troop train to Montreal differed in instructive ways from that aboard the Phantom Car. Months had passed since we left Bad Jump, and those of us who had been strangers then had since become, if not friends, at least confederates―intimately known to one another, for better or worse. If we were afraid of the war to which we were being delivered, we kept that tender feeling to ourselves. We sang a great deal, to maintain high spirits, and I was not the prude and child I once had been, and I joined in on the less obscene choruses of Those Two-Dollar Shoes Hurt My Feet. Not because vulgarity had become especially desirable, but because merriment is an antidote to dread.

I noticed, too, how the soldiers often appealed to “Julian Commongold” for an opinion or a verdict in some dispute, and accepted his judgment as settled law. This despite Julian’s evident youth, unsuccessfully disguised by his sparse yellow beard. It was as if he carried around with him an invisible but perceptible aura of authority, which perhaps was what Sam had called “the Comstock in him.” It manifested in his square-set shoulders, his careful grooming, and the easy way he wore the blue-and-yellow uniform of the Infantry. But it was a comradely authority, too, coexistent with his confident sense of himself and the evident pleasure he took in socializing even with those beneath his original station in life. He smiled often, and it was a smile only the most truculent among us could fail to give back.

The train carried us out of the prairie and into a land of forest and lakes. Rain beat down steadily most of the day, but it made no difference to us, for we were inside a fully-equipped passenger car, with protection from the weather. This was train travel as I had always imagined it. I sat at a window watching raindrops glide sideways as we passed in and out of cavernous pine forests and followed the smoky shore of a great gray lake. To the pagans of ancient Rome, Julian once told me, the Easter season had represented Death and Rebirth. Certainly there was no lack of Rebirth in the countryside through which we passed. Ferns unrolled in shady glens, the sodden limbs of trees were budding afresh, and cattails poked through ponded winter marshes. And there was Death, too, if you looked for it, in the occasional ruins we passed―not just old settled basements, as in Lundsford, but whole stone buildings, mossy-green, and once or twice the remains of entire towns, slouching brick boxes that shed raindrops as we rattled past them at thirty miles to the hour. Crows nested in those old buildings, and their eaves were crowned with chalky dung, and the only visitors were the local deer, or an occasional wolf or bear, as might be.

I gazed on many more such overgrown ruins until night fell. It was wholly dark when we approached the outskirts of Montreal, where campfires smoldered in the rainy distance. We heard an occasional growl of thunder (or perhaps it was cannonade), and it was at this point that the singing stopped, and a wary silence replaced it, and we fell into less pleasant reveries about the future and what it might hold for us.

An entire Regiment of draftees had been packed into the train―a big body of men, but it was nothing compared to the great Army assembled by General Galligasken outside of the City of Montreal. Our company was, in the common phrase, “a drop in the bucket”―and it was a large, ungainly bucket, uninterested in welcoming new drips. As soon as we collected our gear and left the train we were conducted to a muddy field in which we were invited to make our own contribution to a sea of tents―nothing but mud and canvas as far (in the rain and the night) as the eye could see. After much flailing about, during which we repeatedly slipped and stumbled in the glutinous muck, and cursed, and were cursed in turn by the soldiers trying to sleep in adjoining quarters, we had erected our own rough sleeping-places, and we tumbled into them fully-dressed, and woke a few hours later when reveille sounded, our uniforms all scabbed with mud.

I could not help looking about curiously as we formed up in companies for roll call. The rain had ceased during the night. The morning was brisk and bright, and high clouds careened across the sky like runaway melon-carts. Everywhere, in every direction, men were being bugled out of bed and mustered up, and regimental flags popped in the breeze with a sound like knots bursting in a pinewood fire. The vast flat field in which we stood was cross-cut with muddy roads, and already horses and mules crowded these paths, straining to pull provision wagons or caissons; and I discerned in the distance the grander tents of regimental and battalion commanders. Otherwise there was nothing but an ocean of soldiers on all sides―infantry, cavalry, artillery. The nearest thing I could see that was not a part of the Army of the Laurentians was a line of low trees, as far away as a cloud seems when it sits upon the horizon.

“Is this Montreal?” I asked Sam. If so, the city was considerably less grand than I had imagined it, though still very large.

“Don’t be idiotic,” Sam said. “The City of Montreal is some miles distant, most of it on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Do you think they would muster so many men in the midst of a modern city? Half of them would be drunk by noon, if that was the case―the other half having absconded to the whore houses. And don’t blush like that, Adam: you’re a soldier now, you ought to be hardened to such things.” [The sensitive reader, not so hardened, may dislike to see rough talk set down verbatim on the innocent page. I apologize, and rest my defense on the cold grounds of veracity.]