Harry Turtledove - Joe Steele

Whatever he’d expected, this wasn’t it. This was better. Much better.

* * *

Mike Sullivan didn’t know what he’d done to deserve-or rather, to get stuck with-covering Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral. No, he knew, all right. By accident, he’d covered the Governor’s incineration for the Post . Having him at the burial would neatly finish things off. Too many editors thought like that.

Hyde Park was a hamlet on the Hudson, about halfway between New York City and Albany. Roosevelt had been born here. He would go to his eternal rest, and Eleanor with him, behind the house where he’d come into the world.

The house was a mansion. A lot of fancy buildings in Hyde Park were connected to the Roosevelts one way or another. FDR always played down his patrician roots in public. If you were going to go anywhere in politics, you had to act like an ordinary joe, even-maybe especially-if you weren’t. You had to gobble hot dogs, and get mustard all over your face while you did it.

But the people who came to bury Franklin Delano Roosevelt were rich and elegant and proud. They weren’t on constant public display, and weren’t so used to disguising wealth and power. They wore expensive, stylish clothes, somber for the occasion, and wore them well. They stood straight. When they talked, Mike heard more which es and whom s than he would have in a month of Sundays from hoi polloi, and almost all of them fit the grammar.

When Roosevelt’s relatives and friends talked, Mike also heard, or thought he heard, a certain well-modulated anger and frustration in their voices. They’d been sure one of theirs would get something they felt equally sure he deserved. Now, instead, he was getting what all men got in the end: a plot of earth six feet by three feet by six.

“Can you imagine it?” a handsome young man said to a nice-looking girl whose sculptured features were partly obscured by a black veil. “Now it looks as though that damned raisin picker will be President of the United States.”

“I wouldn’t mind so much if he’d won fair and square at the convention-not that I think he would have,” she answered. “But to have it taken away like this-”

“They say it wasn’t arson,” the young man said.

“They say they can’t prove it was arson,” she corrected him. “It’s not the same thing.”

He clucked in mild reproof. “As long as they can’t prove it, we have to go on as if it wasn’t,” he said. “If we start seeing conspiracies behind every accident, we might as well be living in Mexico or Paraguay or some place like that.”

“But what if the conspiracies are really there?” she asked.

Mike stepped away before he heard the young man’s answer. He didn’t want them to think he was eavesdropping, even if he was. Not hearing how that conversation ended didn’t much matter, anyhow. He listened to bits of half a dozen others not very different before the service started.

The Episcopal bishop presiding over the funeral wore vestments that looked a lot like their Roman Catholic equivalents. Mike had voted for Al Smith in 1928, and knew Charlie had, too. The walloping Hoover gave Smith convinced Mike no Catholic would be elected President in his lifetime, if ever.

Of course, when you looked at how things had turned out under Hoover, you had to wonder how Al Smith could have done worse. It sure wouldn’t have been easy. But here Hoover was, up for a second term. Like so many generals in the Great War, the Republicans seemed to be reinforcing failure.

And here crippled Franklin and homely Eleanor were, side by side in closed coffins because nobody wanted to look at the charred bits the firemen and undertakers thought were their remains. The bishop ignored that as far as he could. As countless clergymen of all denominations had before him and would long after he was dust himself, he took his text from the Book of John: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

What could you say after that? Anyone who believed it would be consoled. Anyone who didn’t. . Well, chances were you couldn’t say anything that would console unbelievers. They would say it didn’t mean a goddamn thing, and how were you supposed to tell them they were wrong?

The bishop did his best: “Franklin and Eleanor were snatched away from us all untimely. They might have done great things in this world had they been allowed to remain longer. They were true servants of mankind, and were on the brink of finding ways to serve commensurate with their talents and abilities. But Almighty God, from Whom spring all things, in His ineffable wisdom chose otherwise, and His judgments are true and righteous altogether, blessed be His holy Name.”

“Amen,” murmured the man next to Mike. Mike missed the sonorous Latin of the Catholic graveside service. Just because it was so hard for a layman to understand, it added importance and mystery to the rite. He supposed the Episcopal cleric was doing as well as a man could hope to do when he was stuck with plain old mundane English.

He was if the fire that killed the Roosevelts was a horrible accident, anyhow. If it was something else-if they really might as well have been living in Mexico or Paraguay-that was a different story. Then it wasn’t God’s will being done: it was the will of some rival of Franklin Roosevelt’s.

Or was it? If you honestly believed God’s judgments were true and righteous altogether, wouldn’t you also believe He had placed the impulse to roast FDR to a charcoal briquette in the arsonist’s mind and then allowed the bastard’s plan to succeed? Wouldn’t you believe God had let Roosevelt roast in his wheelchair so the world as a whole could become a better place?

Mike Sullivan couldn’t make himself believe any of that. He had trouble thinking any of the mourners, or even the Episcopal bishop, could believe it. Accidents? Yeah, you could blame accidents on God-hell, insurance policies called them “acts of God.” Murder? Unh-unh. Murder was a thing that sprang from man, not from God.

“Let us pray for the souls of Franklin and Eleanor,” the bishop said, and bowed his head. Along with the mourners and the rest of the reporters, Mike followed suit. He doubted whether prayer would do any good. On the other hand, he didn’t see how it could hurt.

Down into the fresh-dug holes that scarred the green, green grass went the two caskets. FDR and Eleanor would lie side by side forever. Whether they would care about it. . If you believed they would, you also believed they found themselves in a better place now. Mike did his best, and wished his best were better.

Dirt thudded down onto the coffins’ lids as the gravediggers started undoing what they’d done. Mike’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a soundless snarl. He’d always thought that was the loneliest sound in the world. It left you all by yourself against mortality, and it reminded you mortality always won in the end.

The pretty girl in the black veil spoke to her young man: “Sweet Jesus Christ, but I want a cocktail!” He nodded. If they weren’t feeling the same thing Mike was, he would have been amazed.

He took a notebook out of his pocket and scribbled notes that only he and the God Who probably wasn’t presiding over this ceremony had any hope of reading. That told the people around him he was a reporter, not one of their prosperous selves. Some moved away from him, as if he carried a nasty, possibly catching disease. Others seemed intrigued.

They were more intrigued when they found out he’d witnessed the fire. “What did you think it was?” asked a middle-aged man whose horsey features put Mike in mind of Eleanor Roosevelt.