William Forstchen - The Final Day

“Don’t blame yourself, Janet,” he replied, though inwardly he wished she had indeed done just that, for memory of a conversation with a dying man that one was trying to nurse at the same time could indeed become garbled.

“There was something.” She sighed. “Again, I’m sorry; I should have written it down as he was whispering to me. He rambled about going to Roanoke. ‘Find Bob there’ or something like that.”

John looked over at Forrest and Lee, who were taking it all in but wisely were remaining silent.

“I got to add—maybe call it a perspective—sometimes he was talking as if it was before the war, kept saying he had to get his wife and kids out. When he talked of them, he would cry. It was terrible to see him like that; poor man was such a tortured soul.”

“Who isn’t?” Lee said softly, gazing out the window.

“He said something about looking up H. G. Wells’s epitaph, that the guy was right and will be right again.”

Why would he mention H. G. Wells’s epitaph? John wondered. He had read Wells as a kid, but all he could remember was The War of the Worlds and an old movie, Shape of Things to Come, Wells wrote the script for back in the 1930s predicting the coming of World War II.

“And you checked over everything he had on him?” John asked.

“Everything. Forrest and I stripped him down to check for injuries. He was in military fatigues but no winter overcoat, weapons—something about the marauders after taking him had stripped him down and joked they were going to sell him.” She paused. “You know, there are still some hideaway groups out there that won’t hesitate to take someone as food.”

John nodded. Fragments of groups like the Posse were still out there in remote valleys and on mountaintops. They had learned to stay clear of his communities, but like jackals, they did linger on out on the fringes of a slowly reemerging civilized world.

“What he still had on was soaking wet. We stripped him down and found no paperwork or anything like that. All we could do then was to bundle him into warm blankets, give him aspirin and a few shots of moonshine, and hope for the best. I told Forrest to fetch you; the poor man kept saying you were the one he had to speak to. Sorry, but that is all that I can tell you. Whatever answers he had rest now with his soul.”

John stood up and went back into the temporary morgue, respectfully pulling the blanket back to gaze at the battered corpse as if somehow an answer would emerge or, like Lazarus, he might rise up “to return and tell thee all.”

He sat by the body for several minutes, the others not entering the room, as he gazed at the mortal remains of a major he could barely remember.

The dead offered him no answers, just silent wondering. He covered the body and returned to the room where his friends waited in silence.

“Forrest, can we get home before dark?”

Forrest sighed and nodded.

“So that’s it,” John said, leaning back in his chair after reciting the adventure of the previous day and the mystery it now presented.

The small office was crowded, representatives of the “Senate” for what they defined as the State of Carolina packed into the room. The body heat from so many people, along with the woodstove, made the room hot, the scent of the air all but overpowering with its warm, musky smell of unwashed men and women.

The long-ago paintings of the Founding Fathers gathered in debate made them always look all so clean. He now understood far better why old films would at times show an effete French or English nobleman daintily holding a scented handkerchief to his nose. With the onset of winter, even the weekly bath had become a laborious chore. Makala was one of the few who still insisted upon a Saturday-night bath for both of them, and during the summer a skinny-dipping jump into Flat Creek on a near daily basis, even though it was freezing cold throughout the year. But at least in the summer they could lie out in the backyard to sunbathe and wistfully talk about a day to come with electricity restored when they might even scavenge up an old Jacuzzi and somehow get it running again.

Most had reverted back to the nineteenth-century practice of putting on long johns when the cold weather set in and not taking them off until spring arrived.

John often wondered if the Founders had smelled as bad; hard to picture the brilliant Jefferson or Washington himself smelling like those gathered in the room, even when at Valley Forge.

He tried not to breathe deeply, but Makala, who was impervious to such things, noticed his discomfort and cracked a window open, letting a gust of frigid air into the room. A few shifted uncomfortably, but others nodded a thanks.

“I’ve reached a decision as to what I think we should do—or, to be more precise, what I should do,” John said, “but we are no longer under martial law. It will require significant resources; therefore, it is up to you.”

“It’s precious little information to make any kind of decision on,” Reverend Black said, starting off a debate that John feared might run for hours. “A stranger who you think you recognize wanders into our region, claims he wants to talk with you regarding something that involves an old army friend of yours.”

“Yes, that’s basically it.”

Black sighed. “When a man’s time is drawing to a close, he often drifts back years, decades. A good friend of mine, a colonel during the Second World War, climbed out of bed the night before he died and started to wander about the hospital corridor, yelling at the staff to put their helmets on and get ready because a banzai charge was coming in. The poor guy had to be restrained. He kept yelling and cussing at everyone, this from a man who until his final days you never heard a foul oath from.” Black smiled wistfully. “It was good old soldier cussing at its best.”

Forrest chuckled softly. “I can teach some new ones any time you want, Preacher.”

Black gave him a bit of a baleful glance but then smiled.

“Even the way he was talking, the turns of phrases sounded like something from an old movie rather than the way we talk today. My point, he was back in 1944 up until the moment his last breath slipped out of him with me holding his hand and praying by his side. His last words, though…”

Black’s voice faded to a whisper, and he was obviously struggling to hold back on his emotions. “His last words: ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.’”

That put a lump in John’s throat. “Stonewall Jackson’s last words,” he said softly.

“Precisely my point,” Black replied. “He was in a different time and place, perhaps remembering that quote from a class in West Point when he was still a plebe. I think it might be the same with this poor tragic Quentin. Therefore, John, I have serious doubts as to anything he said.”

“Tell A. P. Hill he must come forward,” Lee Robinson interjected.

John looked over at his friend and nodded with understanding.

“What?” Ernie asked.

“Some of the last words of both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” John said. “They were back on the battlefield calling for a trusted general to bring his troops into the fight.”

“So the whole thing could be a hallucination?” Ernie asked.

“It could be,” John replied.

“Then take it as such, John. We’ got way too many other things to worry about—that report that a new band of marauders is camped in what is left of Charlotte, the chatter we’re picking up from BBC and other sources that the Bluemont government is officially ceding all territory west of the Mississippi to China and Mexico, the fact that we have to face the reality that as we incorporate more isolated communities into our state, food supplies through spring are coming up short. Let’s stick with what we know.”