Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

“Yes, sir, that seems best.” Carpy withdrew past him, back up the steps. He peered down into the sarcophagal blackness of the instrument. Was that the top of a pale head way down inside there? The thing was some kind of sign, like chicken blood or a hanged man. This was a blight upon the family.

Halfway up the stairs, Doc found himself confronted by his wife. Sally had a way of looking at him that reduced his stature. That he was standing on a lower step of the stairs didn’t help, either. He tried to take control of the situation quickly. “Damndest thing I ever seed,” he said as he leaned back over the rail. Sally gave the thing a quick look. “Clarinet,” she said sagely, “but you’d have to stand on the roof to play it.”

“What the hell kind of clarinet is that?”

Sally replied, “A big clarinet.” She moved to let him up.

Muttering, Doc stepped around her and headed for his room at full tilt. There, Lizzie had already removed the chamberpot and finished making the bed. The child did look after him well. He thought again of Carpy’s mother, but dismissed the memory as both provocative and immaterial. Sally trod solemnly along the hall. He sensed her lingering in the doorway, and he turned around. He walked over and started to close the door. “I have to git dressed if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve dripped on yourself,” she indicated, staring at his crotch.

Doc shut the door. He listened to her move off. “Sally,” he said softly, “you are workin’ my last nerve.”

Once he had finished dressing, Doc went down to breakfast. He had barely scooped up his first forkful when a cry from outside stopped him. His name upon the air brought Doc running out to the porch. Sausage in his mouth and a checkered napkin bibbing his neck, he towered over Ed Rose, who stood in a panic on the ground. Ed blurted, “You gotta come quick, Doc. You gotta see this thing.”

Doc told him to calm down. He threw off the napkin and followed his foreman into the fields. The steamy Mississippi morning pumped the sweat out of him as he waded through waist-high cotton plants. Branded workers had stopped their business to watch as the man himself strode past them. Ahead, a cluster of them surrounded “the thing.”

It had crushed rows of plants but no one had been hurt. It was a thin gold tube, far longer than the thing inside the house, and it had spread a blue stain in a band over some of the cotton. The tube stretched out twenty yards before curving back—a piece from something much larger and more grotesque. In the flattened cotton the shape of the whole instrument could be discerned, as if it had slept there overnight and then moved on at daybreak, leaving the sloughed hand slide behind. Doc walked in its rut while trying to formulate an identity for the thing. He had trouble.

“Hell,” he said, “looks like ... looks like ...”

One of the fieldhands spoke up. “Like God’s trombone.”

Doc whirled around angrily but as quickly realized that was exactly what it looked like. “That’s right. A big trombone.” And the thing in the house—it, too, was some sort of instrument. What had passed across his land during the night? “This don’t make no kind of sense.” While he wore a consternated smile, he marked the worker who had spoken—a young man. A smart, clever, and unbranded young man. Wouldn’t do to have a smart satchel-mouthed nigger roaming in their midst. Liable to foment all sorts of trouble. He would have to sublease Spangler’s Mill again. Soon. As for the mystery trombone, it was so great a mystery that he saw no point in trying to wrestle it to earth. “Drag this curlicue outten here now, and you all get back to work,” he told them. “And don’t be worrying yourselves over what it portends. It don’t portend shit.”

They continued staring at the trombone shape for a while before moving off; all save the satchel-mouthed boy. He caught Doc in his stare, and it penetrated and drew fear like a venom from the white man’s heart.

Doc retreated from the field. Back on the lawn beside his house, he grabbed Ed Rose by the arm and asked him, “Who is that boy?”

“A-which?” Ed answered.

Doc turned him around and pointed. The workers had all returned to their labors. He knew them, knew their shapes, but he could not pick out the one who had stared at him. “Where the hell he get to?” The cotton grew waist-high. Doc convinced himself that the boy was crouched down, hiding, afraid. He wanted very much for that particular bastard to be afraid. Ed interrupted his search. “By the way, Doc, you seen Curly this morning? He ain’t around. Nobody’s seen him since last night, when he went out after our little business. Said he couldn’t sleep, had some kinda tune in his head.”

“Too much booze in his head, you mean. He gets back, you send him to see me. I’m not in a tolerating mood this morning.” Curly did not reappear all day. Doc’s mood developed a razor edge.

That night, alone in his bed, he heard distant thunder, rhythmic and incessant. Jungle drumming derived from a jungle band whose members existed solely in the aether; travelers in the air, ghosts as surely as a skeleton scuffling on his grave.

The image jolted him awake. The sound of jungle thumping diminished. It rounded into words or something like words, briefly: “Juba, juba, juba,” a droned spell, which pressed the consciousness out of him. He lacked the means to fight its power, but prayed to keep the evil music far out in the bush. “Don’ ever let ’em in,” he muttered, then faded away himself like a lost radio signal.

Screaming woke Doc. Unmistakably Sally’s voice, it sawed through the ceiling below. He wrestled his pants over his long Johns, snapping up his suspenders while he ran along the hall. As he pivoted around the newel post, the screaming subsided into blubbering hysteria, and he followed it to the first floor. Such a sprawling Goddamned house, this antebellum layer cake of his.

He stormed along the hall, cursing “God damn you, Sally, shut up,” but his anger couldn’t hold in the face of the new anomaly. It overwhelmed him—as big and broad as a church steeple. This time he knew what he looked at: He had forged the musical link. It was the bell of a trumpet, and for absolute sure it had dropped from out of the sky, because it had pinned somebody beneath it. One arm protruded, nearly severed by the swept gold rim. One arm, a white arm. A familiar white arm. Bubba’s arm. His cold hand gripped tightly an equally cold branding iron. The dead idiot, what was he doing parading through the house with the fucking eye of God on a stick? Somebody would see, and some of them had surely been on the wrong end of it. A crawdad could have figured it out and put a name to it: Grand Cyclops and Son.

Doc got down on his knees to pry back the fingers. He drew the iron out of his son’s hand. Sally continued her bubbly whining. He would’ve liked to have smacked her with the iron. Instead, he struck the trumpet bell. It clanged loudly. He thought, “Music destroyed my son.” More than that, the trumpet like the clarinet was hollow.

Tossing down the bent brand, he tried to move the bell. He shoved it, grabbed onto the top and tried to tilt it up, he pushed it, climbed up the side and tried to pull it over. His bare feet squealed as they slid down the curved surface. He hung from the lip, his head back. He mewled to God, noticing abstractly that the ceiling remained intact. Yet the thing had passed right through it, must have done—the whole floor had buckled when it hit. He wiped the spittle off his lips and backed up into the counter. Lizzie stood there, struck stupid in her horror. She didn’t even notice him.

What plague had been visited upon him? For what? He went to church like clockwork, prayed to and paid the Lord. He knew about original sin, the flood of Noah and the plague of locusts, about coveting your neighbor’s wife, about the exodus. How could a man who comprehended those things be thus cursed?