John Adams - Wastelands 2

Gordon laughed. “Oh surely you’re not that young! What about before the war?”

Abby blushed at his laughter. “I was only four when it happened. It was so frightening and confusing that I… I really don’t remember much from before.”

Gordon blinked. Had it really been that long? Yes. Sixteen years was indeed enough time to have beautiful women in the world who knew nothing but the dark age.

Amazing , he thought.

“All right, then.” He pushed the chair by his bed. Grinning, she came over and sat beside him. Gordon reached into the sack and pulled out another of the frail, yellowed envelopes. Carefully, he spread out the letter and handed it to her.

Abby looked at it so intently that he thought she was reading the whole thing. She concentrated, her thin eyebrows almost coming together in a crease on her forehead. But finally she handed the letter back. “I guess I can’t really read that well. I mean, I can read labels on cans, and stuff. But I never had much practice with handwriting and… sentences.”

Her voice dropped at the end. She sounded embarrassed, but in a totally unafraid, trusting fashion, as if he were her confessor.

He smiled. “No matter. I’ll tell you what it’s about.” He held the letter up to the candlelight. Abby moved over to sit by his knees on the edge of the bed, her eyes rapt on the pages.

“It’s from one John Briggs, of Fort Rock, Oregon, to his former employer in Klamath Falls… I’d guess from the lathe and hobby horse letterhead that Briggs was a retired machinist or carpenter or something. Hmmm.”

Gordon concentrated on the barely legible handwriting. “It seems Mr. Briggs was a pretty nice man. Here he’s offering to take in his ex-boss’s children, until the emergency is over. Also he says he has a good garage machine shop, his own power, and plenty of metal stock. He wants to know if the man wants to order any parts made up, especially things in short supply…”

Gordon’s voice faltered. He was still so thick-headed from his excesses that it had just struck him that a beautiful female was sitting on his bed. The depression she made in the mattress tilted his body toward her. He cleared his throat quickly and went back to scanning the letter.

“Briggs mentions something about power levels from the Fort Rock reservoir… Telephones were out, but he was still, oddly enough, getting Eugene on his computer data net…”

Abby looked at him. Apparently much of what he had said about the letter writer might as well have been in a foreign language to her. “Machine shop” and “data net” could have been ancient, magical words of power.

“Why didn’t you bring us any letters, here in Pine View?” she asked quite suddenly.

Gordon blinked at the non sequitur. The girl wasn’t stupid. One could tell such things. Then why had everything he said, when he arrived here, and later at the party, been completely misunderstood? She still thought he was a mailman , as, apparently, did all but a few of the others in this small settlement.

From whom did she imagine they’d get mail?

She probably didn’t realize that the letters he carried had been sent long ago, from dead men and women to other dead men and women, or that he carried them for… for his own reasons.

The myth that had spontaneously developed here in Pine View depressed Gordon. It was one more sign of the deterioration of civilized minds, many of whom had once been high school and even college graduates. He considered telling her the truth, as brutally and frankly as he could, to stop this fantasy once and for all. He started to.

“There aren’t any letters because…”

He paused. Again Gordon was aware of her nearness, the scent of her and the gentle curves of her body. Of her trust, as well.

He sighed and looked away. “There aren’t any letters for you folks because… because I’m coming west out of Idaho, and nobody back there knows you, here in Pine View. From here I’m going to the coast. There might even be some large towns left. Maybe…”

“Maybe someone down there will write to us, if we send them a letter first!” Abby’s eyes were bright. “Then, when you pass this way again, on your way back to Idaho, you could give us the letters they send, and maybe do another play-act for us like tonight, and we’ll have so much beer and pie for you you’ll bust!” She hopped a little on the edge of the bed. “By then I’ll be able to read better, I promise!”

Gordon shook his head and smiled. It was beyond his right to dash such dreams. “Maybe so, Abby. Maybe so. But you know, you may get to learn to read easier than that. Mrs. Thompson’s offered to put it up for a vote to let me stay on here for a while. I guess officially I’d be a school teacher, though I’d have to prove myself as good a hunter and farmer as anybody. I could give archery lessons…”

He stopped. Abby’s expression was open-mouthed in surprise. She shook her head vigorously. “But you haven’t heard! They voted on it after you went to take your bath. Mrs. Thompson should be ashamed of trying to bribe a man like you that way, with your important work having to be done!”

He sat forward, not believing his ears. “What did you say?” He had formed hopes of staying in Pine View for at least the cold season, maybe a year or more. Who could tell? Perhaps the wanderlust would leave him, and he could finally find a home.

His sated stupor dissipated. Gordon fought to hold back his anger. To have the chance revoked on the basis of the crowd’s childish fantasies!

Abby noticed his agitation and hurried on. “That wasn’t the only reason, of course. There was the problem of there being no woman for you. And then…” Her voice lowered perceptibly. “And then Mrs. Howlett thought you’d be perfect for helping me and Michael finally have a baby…”

Gordon blinked. “Um,” he said, expressing the sudden and complete contents of his mind.

“We’ve been trying for five years,” she explained. “We really want children. But Mr. Horton thinks Michael can’t ’cause he had the mumps really bad when he was twelve. You remember the real bad mumps, don’t you?”

Gordon nodded, recalling friends who had died. The resultant sterility had made for unusual social arrangements everywhere he had traveled.

Still…

Abby went on quickly. “Well, it would cause problems if I asked any of the other men here to… to be the body father. I mean, when you live close to people, like this, you have to look on the men who aren’t your husband as not being really ‘men’… at least not that way. I… I don’t think I’d like it, and it might cause trouble.”

She blushed. “Besides, I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep a secret. I don’t think any of the other men would be able to give Michael the kind of son he deserves. He’s really very smart, you know. He’s the only one of us youngers who can really read…”

The flow of strange logic was coming on too fast for Gordon to follow completely. Part of him dispassionately noted that this was all really an intricate and subtle tribal adaptation to a difficult social problem. That part of him though—the last Twentieth-Century intellectual—was still a bit drunk, and meanwhile the rest was starting to realize what Abby was driving at.

“You’re different.” She smiled at him. “I mean, even Michael saw that right from the start. He’s not too happy, but he figures you’ll only be through once a year or so, and he could stand that. He’d rather that than never have any kids.”

Gordon cleared his throat. “You’re sure he feels this way?”

“Oh, yes. Why do you think Mrs. Howlett introduced us in that funny way? It was to make it clear without really saying it out loud. Mrs. Thompson doesn’t like it much, but I think that’s because she wanted you to stay.”