Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Our man picked out a fairly new clarinet, made a down payment—I had been working fairly regularly and had accumulated a small cash reserve—and brought it back to our cabin. It was doubled, and about a week later—we didn’t want to give the instrument dealer an impression of hopeless frivolity—the original was returned and traded in on a cornet.

Meanwhile, our new building was progressing rapidly. In a few days we finished leveling the site, dug it out to a depth of about two feet, and filled the hole with broken stone, this operation being vastly simplified by doubling. Then one of us went to the local lumber yard, and bought one each of all the materials we needed: a small bag of cement, a two-by-six, a two-by-four, a few different kinds of board, roofing, insulation, nails, a window and so forth. I don’t know what the lumber dealer made of the order, but he certainly couldn’t have suspected we were going to build a house with it, so there was no danger of gossip from that source revealing, our plans.

We all felt that complete secrecy was vital. Now that we had each other, we had no further need of even the small amount of social life I had maintained, and we didn’t want outsiders coming around and perhaps asking awkward questions. For all we knew, magic was still illegal: they used to burn and hang witches in the old days, and laws have a way of staying on the books long after they cease to be enforced. We all looked exactly alike, but as long as we took care to go out singly, no one could tell that there were more than one of us.

We mixed a bucket of cement, poured it into the hole we had dug, and by rapid doubling filled the hole with a solid block of concrete. When it was hard, we built the wall frames on it, and raised them as units—like an old-fashioned barn-raising. We only had to cut one master rafter to double from, but even so, inexperienced as we were, putting up the roof was a big job.

Once the rafters were set, the rest of the work on the building went quickly. It was a large barnlike structure, with a high ceiling, and good acoustics. There were plenty of double windows, and a big wood stove, the kind they used to have in the elevated stations, which we picked up cheap in a junk shop. For illumination, we had a whole lot of big hanging kerosene lamps and a few small ones; we were too far from the power line to make electrification feasible, and anyhow, we didn’t see how we could double electricity.

Inside, we left the walls unfinished, and put up no partitions. There was a wide shelf at one end, where we set all our mattresses side by side; a big table built out of heavy lumber, with benches on either side of it, sat in the middle of the room, and a sort of bar was placed near it, against the wall. On the bar was a three-burner alcohol stove—on which pots of soup, beans, and coffee were constantly simmering—a number of platters loaded with cold cuts, cheese, pickles, sauerkraut, and sliced bread, and a tub of bottled beer—imported German beer: since we had to buy only one bottle, we felt we might as well have the best—and a box of good cigars. At the other end of the room from the bed shelf, we arranged eight chairs in a semicircle, for our band practice.

We had returned the original of the cornet and traded it in on a baritone horn, but our building was so nearly finished that we decided against using any more trickery on the instrument dealer—we had been feeling pretty shabby about it anyhow, he was such a nice guy—and pay cash for whatever other instruments we wanted. We had used up all our cash reserve, what with down payments at the instrument store, buying building materials and food, but we had a fine oak tree on our property, tall, straight, and free of branches for at least thirty feet. We felled it, cut it into saw logs, snaked them out to the road with the jeep, and there doubled them into a substantial pile, which we sold to a sawmill for considerably more than all the instruments we wanted would cost—the mark-down of second-hand band instruments being approximately as large as that on cars. The sawmill man had his own woodlot, and didn’t like to lay out money for other people’s logs, but when he found we were willing to take an absurdly low price, he bought readily enough. We weren’t commercially minded—had we been, we could have easily made a fortune in almost any manufacturing or merchandising business—and the price we asked was more than adequate compensation for the relatively trifling amount of actual labor we had done. Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm we unthinkingly let him take every last log in the pile, thus preventing us from doubling any more lumber out of it to meet future contingencies. Timber was our only natural resource, and apart from that one tree, all we had was second-growth stuff, useful only for firewood.

We wanted the same instrumentation as the traditional New Orleans marching bands, lacking only the second cornet—all of us were determined to play different instruments: it was our only claim to individuality. We already had the trombone, cornet, clarinet and baritone horn, so we needed an alto, a tuba, and bass and snare drums. The alto cost only two dollars—the instrument dealer had an old one, that he said would require at least twenty dollars worth of his labor to take out the dents, and was willing to, let us have it for what it had cost him, since used alto horns are slow sellers. We didn’t mind the dents, and were well satisfied with the horn, which was otherwise in good working order. An E-flat tuba was twenty dollars, and the two drums came to thirty, complete with sticks.

It took us a while to get the feel of playing together, but we enjoyed it right from the beginning. The cornet and clarinet, although they had gotten their instruments first, and had a slight headstart on the rest of us, had trouble mastering the unfamiliar instruments—the three saxhorns were enough like the trombone, for which we all had a pretty good embouchure, that we could play them fluently right away. The cornet got his lip into shape in a couple of weeks, and this gave the band a tremendous lift. The clarinet took longer, that instrument being completely different from any of the brasses. He was able to provide an accompaniment of sorts in a month or so, but the solo from “High Society” continued to elude him for the better part of a year, the two drummers had, in a way, the hardest time, since my sense of rhythm was the weakest side of my musical ability, but they persevered, and in time got pretty good, at least by our not very exacting standards.

I’m sure the ensemble would have sounded terrible to an expert, even at its best, but there is an exhilaration to playing in a group, even one composed entirely of dubs, and we were playing only for ourselves. Our tastes were identical, and our enthusiasm keen, so our technical shortcomings didn’t bother us. Then, too, there was an unlimited supply of beer, and that helped us not to be too critical.

By conventional standards, our life was impossibly disorderly. We ate and drank when we felt like it, slept when we had to, and spent the rest of the time playing, or loafing around, reading and talking. We didn’t even bother to wash the dishes—we kept a master set in a cupboard, and doubled from it when we needed any. Dirty dishes were tossed on the dump, which gradually reached monumental proportions. We solved the laundry problem the same way. Sometimes, when one of us came back from a trip to the dump, there would be talk of the advisability of working up the spell for making things vanish, but nothing came of it. We just couldn’t be bothered.

It was, in most respects, a thoroughly satisfying life. The food was good, better than I’d ever had before. The soup and beans, from constant simmering, acquired a flavor that was unbeatable; the coffee, by the same token, was usually terrible—we were usually too lazy to start a fresh pot— but we didn’t drink much coffee, and the beer was excellent. The only serious lack was sex. We kidded around about finding the most beautiful girl in the world and doubling her up for all of us, but we didn’t really mean it. We were much too nervous about letting outsiders into our little world, and anyhow, we felt that the presence of women would probably take away more than it added. I had become accustomed to abstinence over the years, so I don’t believe we suffered too intensely on that score. We had no particular ambition about our music. We periodically discussed the possibility of going on the road if we ever got good enough, but that seemed a long way off, and wasn’t important. We were having enough fun playing for ourselves not to need an audience.