Harry Frank - Alas, Babylon

When the wars subsided, the fort was decommissioned and Lieutenant Peyton was assigned to sea duty. Four years later he returned to Fort Repose with a wife, a daughter, and a grant from the government for one hundred acres. He had picked this precise spot for his homestead because it was the highest ground in the area, with a steep gradient to the river, ideal for planting the oranges just imported from Spain and the Far East. Peyton’s original house had burned. The present house had been built by his son-in-law, the first Marcus Bragg, a native of Philadelphia and a lawyer eventually sent to the Senate. The captain’s walk had been added for the aging Lieutenant Peyton, so that with his brass spyglass he could observe what happened at the junction of rivers.

Now the Bragg holdings had dwindled to thirty-six acres, but thirty were planted in prime citrus-navels, mandarins, Valencias, and Temples—all tended and sold in season by the county co-operative. Each year Randy received checks totaling eight to ten thousand dollars from the co-operative. Half went to his older brother, Mark, an Air Force colonel stationed at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, near Omaha. With his share, plus dividends from a trust established by his father, and his occasional fees as an attorney, Randy lived comfortably. Since he drove a new car and paid his bills promptly, the trades people of Fort Repose thought him well-to-do. The rich newcomers classed him with the genteel poor.

Randy heard music below, and knew that Missouri had started his record player and therefore was waxing the floor. Missouri’s method was to spread the wax, kick off her shoes, wrap her feet in rags, and then polish by dancing. This was probably as efficient, and certainly more fun, than using the electric waxer. He dropped into a deck chair and focused his binoculars on Preacher Henry’s place, looking for that damn bird in the hammock of pines, palmettos, and scrub oak. The Henrys had lived here as long as the Braggs, for the original Henry had come as slave and manservant to Lieutenant Peyton. Now the Henrys owned a four-acre enclave at the east boundary of the Bragg groves. Preacher Henry’s father had bought it from Randolph’s grandfather for fifty dollars an acre long before the first boom, when land was valued only for what it grew. Preacher was hitching his mule, Balaam—the last mule in Timucuan County so far as anyone knew—to the disk. In this month Preacher harrowed for his yam and corn planting, while his wife, Hannah, picked and sold tomatoes and put up kumquat preserves. He ought to go down and talk to Preacher about that damn bird, Randy thought. If anyone was likely to observe and recognize a Carolina parakeet floating around, it was Preacher, because Preacher knew all the birds and their calls and habits. He shifted his glasses to focus on the end of the Henrys’ rickety dock. Two-Tone had five bamboo poles out. Two-Tone himself reclined on his side, head resting on his hand, so he could watch the corks without effort. Preacher’s younger son, Malachai, who was Randy’s yardman, and reliable as Two-Tone was no-account, was not about.

Randy heard the phone ringing in his office. The music stopped and he knew Missouri was answering. Presently she called from the piazza, “Mister Randy, it’s for you. It’s Western Union.”

“Tell her I’ll be right down,” Randy said, lifted himself out of the deck chair, and backed down the ladder, wondering who would be sending him a telegram. It wasn’t his birthday. If some thing important happened, people phoned. Unless he remembered that the Air Force sent telegrams when a man was hurt, or killed. But it wouldn’t be Mark, because for two years Mark had been flying a desk. Still, Mark would get in his flying time each month, if possible, for the extra pay.

He took the phone from Missouri’s hand and braced himself. “Yes?” he said.

“I have a telegram, Randy—it’s really a cable-from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s signed by Mark. It’s really very peculiar.” Randy let out his breath, relieved. If Mark had sent the message, then Mark was all right. A man can’t pick his relatives, only his friends, but Mark had always been Randy’s friend as well as brother. “What’s the message say?”

“Well, I’ll read it to you,” Florence said, “and then if you want me to read it again I’ll be glad to. It says, ‘Urgent you meet me at Base Ops McCoy noon today. Helen and children flying to Orlando tonight. Alas, Babylon.’” Florence paused. “That’s what it says, ‘Alas, Babylon.’ Do you want me to repeat the whole thing for you, Randy?”

“No thanks.”

“I wonder what ‘Alas, Babylon’ means? Isn’t it out of the Bible?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” He knew very well what it meant. He felt sick inside.

“There’s something else, Randy.”

“Yes?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll tell you about it next time I see you and I hope not in those loud pajamas. Goodbye, Randy. You’re sure you have the message?”

“I’m sure,” he said, hung up and dropped into the swivel chair. Alas, Babylon was a private, a family signal. When they were boys, he and Mark used to sneak up to the back of the First Afro-Repose Baptist Church on Sunday nights to hear Preacher Henry calling down hell-fire and damnation on the sinners in the big cities. Preacher Henry always took his text out of the Revelation of St. John. It seemed that he ended every lurid verse with, “Alas, Babylon!” in a voice so resonant you could feel it, if you rested your fingertips gently on the warped pine boards of the church. Randy and Mark would crouch under the rear window, behind the pulpit, fascinated and wide-eyed, while Preacher Henry described the Babylonian revels, including fornication. Sometimes Preacher Henry made Babylon sound like Miami, and sometimes like Tampa, for he condemned not only fornication—he read the word right out of the Bible—but also horse racing and the dog tracks. Randy could hear him yet: “And I’m telling you right now, all wife-swappers, whisky-drinkers, and crap-shooters are going to get it! And all them who come out of those sin palaces on the beach, whether they be called hotels or motels, wearing minks and jewels and not much else, they is goin’ to get it! And them fast-steppers in Cadillacs and yaller roadsters, they is going to get it! Just like it says here in the Good Book, that Great City that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, that Great City was burned off the face of the earth in an hour. Just one hour. Alas, Babylon!”

Either Preacher Henry was too old, or the Afro-Repose congregation had tired of his scolding and awful prophecies, for he no longer preached except on those Sundays when Afro-Repose’s new minister, a light-skinned college graduate, was out of town. Randy and Mark never forgot Preacher Henry’s thundering, and from it they borrowed their private synonym for disaster, real or comic, past or future. If one fell off the dock, or lost all his cash at poker, or failed to make time with a promising Pistolville piece, or announced that hurricane or freeze was on the way, the other commiserated with, “Alas, Babylon!”

But in this telegram it had very special and exact meaning. Mark had secured leave at Christmas season last year, and flown down with Helen and the two children, Ben Franklin and Peyton, for a week. On their last evening at Fort Repose, after the others were in bed, Mark and Randy had sat here, in this office, peering into the bourbon decanter and the deep anxieties of their hearts, trying to divine the future. Christmas had been a time of troubles, a time of confusions at home and tensions abroad, but in his whole life, Randy could recall no other sort of time. There had always been depression, or war, or threat of war.