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

“Not exactly―”

“Well, are you absolutely sure pirates exist ―since they’re so foreign to your experience? No, don’t answer that; I’m making a point. Why write about pirates, Adam, when you’re embedded in an adventure at least as momentous as anything C. C. Easton ever imagined?”

“What are you saying―that I should write about the war? But I’ve only seen a little of it.”

“No matter! Write what you know : it’s one of the abiding principles of the trade.”

“The worse for me, then,” I said ruefully, “for I don’t know much at all, when you come down to it.”

“Surely everybody knows something. The Battle of Mascouche, for instance. Weren’t you in the thick of it?”

“Yes, but it was my first.”

“Wouldn’t it be a sensible exercise to set down in pencil what happened on that day? Not what happened to the Army of the Laurentians―leave that to the historians―I mean what happened to you ―your personal experience.”

“Who would be interested?”

“It would be an exercise in writing, if nothing else. Adam,” he exclaimed, standing up from his desk, and flinging an arm around my shoulders in a surprising display of conviviality, “why are you wasting your time here? A writer must write, first and last! Don’t squander precious minutes gazing at my typewriter―or worse, touching it―now is the time to hone your literary skills, while the Dutch are quiet and the weather’s fair! Take up your humble pencil, Adam Hazzard, and set down in all the detail you can remember the events of a few days past.”

This made immediate sense to me―in fact I was excited by his suggestion, and reproached myself for not having thought of such an exercise before. “And when it’s done, shall I show it to you?”

He sat back down as if the wind had gone out of him. “Show it to me?”

“My account of the battle. So that you can point out what an experienced writer might have done differently.”

Mr. Dornwood knotted his brows and looked uncomfortable; then he said, “Well, all right… I suppose you can bring it to me next Sunday, if neither of us is killed by then.”

“That’s very generous!”

“I’m a well-known saint,” said Dornwood.

I meant to go straight to my tent and practice my literary skills as Dornwood had suggested, but on the way back I was distracted by a crowd of men who had gathered around the tent of Private Langers.

Langers, the reader will remember, was a passenger on the Caribou-Horn Train: a colporteur, as he pleased to call himself, who had been in the business of selling religious pamphlets on delicate topics to lonely men, who enjoyed the printed illustrations for reasons not necessarily allied to piety or faith. Private Langers had been put out of that trade by conscription, and he was just another infantryman now. But his entrepreneurial instincts had survived the transformation, and it seemed like he was back in business―some kind of business―judging by the eager crowd around him.

I asked another soldier what was going on.

“Langers was on burial duty,” the man said.

“Surprising that that should have made him so popular.”

“He collected all sorts of things from the bodies of dead Dutchmen. Jackets and hats, badges and wallets, eyeglasses and glass eyes, brass buckles and leather holsters…”

Enemy armaments had to be handed over to the Quartermaster, but everything else, I gathered, was fair game for the burial detail. I knew that men were often tempted to take a souvenir or two from their fallen foes, if their stomachs were strong enough for the treasure-hunt. But he had gone far beyond that modest impulse. He had harvested the fields of the fallen with a bushel basket, and put the culled trinkets on display. Dozens of Dutch prizes were arrayed on a blanket in front of his tent, under a sign which read: EVERYTHING $1.

It seemed to me an odd price. A few of the objects were obviously worth more than that, such as the collections of Dutch coins, which could be traded in Montreal for legal tender. But most were worth much less. The jackets almost all had bullet-holes in them, for instance; and even the glass eye, though lifelike, was cracked. But there was a trick to it, the soldier next to me explained.

“It don’t mean you pay a dollar and take what you like. Everything has a number beside it, written on those scraps of paper. And Langers has a jar, with similar scraps inside it. When you pay your dollar he says, ‘Reach into the jar,’ and you do so, and you pull out a number and find out just what it was you bought. It might be something good, like that mermaid buckle there. But it might be a sad little leather bag, or a shoe with a hole in it.”

“Isn’t that Gambling?”

“Hell no,” the soldier said, “it’s not half as much fun.”

I had been warned against gambling all my life, both by my mother and by the Dominion Reader for Young Persons, though the only gambling I had ever seen first-hand was the kind the indentured folks indulged in, betting tobacco or alcohol on dice or cards. Most of those games ended in fist fights, and I was never tempted by them. But Private Langers’s pick-a-number enterprise was more difficult to resist. I was curious about the Dutch, and felt that I ought to know a thing or two about the people I had been shooting at and, occasionally, killing. To own one of their possessions seemed almost a religious act (if I can be excused that small apostasy), like the custom primitive peoples have of eating their enemy’s hearts―a more Christian enactment of the same urge.

So I pushed to the front of the crowd, and took a Comstock dollar from my pocket, and paid it over for the privilege of reaching into Private Langers’s Lucky Mug. The number I retrieved was 32, which corresponded to a small leather satchel, much-scuffed and disappointingly slender. This was not, by any standards, a valuable thing to have bought―and Langers smiled with satisfaction as he tucked away my dollar and handed over the satchel. But my disappointment didn’t last; for the satchel, when I opened it, contained a letter, apparently written by a Dutch soldier shortly before his death. Again, this had no monetary value, and Langers had every reason to crow over the bargain; but as a souvenir of a man’s life, and a glimpse into the habits of the Mitteleuropan infantry, the letter interested me terrifically.

I unfolded the two closely-written pages I had bought, and thought about that deceased Dutchman putting his pen to paper, little suspecting that his words would become the property of a Williams Ford lease-boy (much less the booty of a corpse-looting colporteur). I took the letter to my tent and stared at it for nearly an hour, thinking about fate, and death, and other weighty and Philosophical subjects.

Lymon Pugh came by as I was deep in these reveries, and I showed him the letter.

He puzzled over it a moment. “My lessons in reading don’t seem to have advanced this far,” he said.

“Of course you can’t read it. It’s written in Dutch.”

“Dutch? They don’t just speak that noise, they also write it down?”

“That’s their habit, yes.”

“But you know all your letters, Adam: can’t you decipher it?”

“Oh, I can read the letters all right―so can you, though you might not be accustomed to cursive script. This word here, for example: L-I-E-F-S-T-E―those are all familiar letters.”

“I can’t make out what they spell, though.”

“It looks like it might be pronounced leafst. Or leaf-stee, depending on how they use their terminal vowels.”

Lymon Pugh looked scornful. “That’s not a word.”