David Nickle - Eutopia

“It’s always a fight for men like us,” he’d said, exhaling a lungful of apple-scented smoke from his pipe, “and we’ve fought it hard. Now, Andrew… for a little while, it’s not going to be such a fight for you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Andrew replied. He was not twenty years old then, and his French was mostly from books, and he couldn’t imagine a harder job than learning the ways of the scalpel from Frenchmen. But his father explained it, how much easier it would be there than here: starting with just three words.

“ Liberté ,” he said, looking Andrew in the eye. “ Égalité. Fraternité .”

The French, Elmore Waggoner firmly believed, stood by those words. And in taking that stand, in casting down their aristocracy in their revolutions, they’d made a society where men might enjoy opportunities not much different from one another, regardless of the station of their birth, the colour of their skin. A place where a smart Negro had as good a chance of becoming a physician as any other man.

“It may not be a perfect society they made,” said Elmore, “but it’s nearer than anywhere this side of the ocean.”

Andrew chuckled to himself as he picked his way down a rock-fall, and held his splinted arm ahead of him to keep the branches of a stand of young tamaracks from his eyes. Not long after he said that, Elmore Waggoner had given Andrew a hug, and helped him haul the trunks he carried up the gangplank, and into the crowded steerage berth, that was the best accommodation an American Negro could expect on his way to the welcoming harbours of the enlightened Third Republic—and in that airless, low-ceilinged barrack, he’d seen nothing but opportunity— égalité , like the French would say.

Andrew stepped out onto a shelf of rock. It was getting light enough now that he could see his goal, not far now, over the tops of the low, neat orchards. Eliada spread before him, its rooftops spreading like a span of dark stones, smoke rising like river-reeds from their chimneys. At the river’s edge, Harper’s steamboat was pulling away.

Andrew bit down on the sour herbs and made himself swallow. He shut his eyes a moment, and squeezed the hand of his injured arm into a fist until tears rimmed his lids. Then he set out again.

He was nearly there—and much as he wanted to, Andrew couldn’t let himself rest. He had to deliver his warning; and meet Sam Green, and settle some other things that had occurred to him, as he walked in the near dark.

The fence marked the western boundary of Harper’s orchard.

It wasn’t high, but it was high enough. Andrew had set his bag on the other side of it and was halfway over himself, when he heard the hoof-beats, muffled as they were by the soft dirt of the orchard. He winced, pulled his other leg over the fence, and waited, as the man in the slicker with a rifle under his arm rode between the trees, bowing his head now and again, but never taking his eye off Andrew. As he got closer, Andrew thought he recognized the fellow by face, but not name. As he got closer, he shifted his hand to the trigger guard. The horse stopped, and the man sat high in the saddle, and he raised the rifle and aimed along its barrel at Andrew. Then he glanced down at Andrew’s feet, and the rifle went down.

“Dr. Waggoner?”

Andrew looked at the doctor’s bag at his feet.

“I am.”

“What’re you doin’ here?” The fellow threw his leg over and climbed down from the saddle. “There’s Klan on the move in town. You should be long gone, sir. Ain’t safe.”

“No,” said Andrew. “It’s not safe.”

And in spite of himself, he started to laugh.

“You all right, Doc?”

“I’m fine,” said Andrew, then added: “Not entirely, obviously. But—you’re right—it’s not safe.”

“Where can I take you, Doc? To the hospital, by the looks of you.”

“No,” he said. “Not the hospital. I need to see Sam Green,” he said. “Then Mr. Harper.”

“I can do that. Here, let me help you up on the horse.” He bent down and lifted Waggoner’s doctor’s bag. “I’ll carry this, and lead.”

Sam Green looked tired as he came down the path to the cider press—and Andrew thought he must have made the same impression on the Pinkerton here in the dawn.

Green waved his rifle over his head, and told his man: “Go on now. Leave me and the doctor be.”

When he was gone, Sam Green came over and set on one of the chairs. He took off his bowler hat and set it on the table, and laid the rifle across his lap.

“Thank you,” said Andrew finally.

“Thank me?”

“It does sound odd, doesn’t it?”

Sam shrugged. “Figured you’d be long gone. This place is no good for a Negro—particularly not you now. Why’d you come back?”

“I think you might have an idea about that, Sam.”

“Might I?”

“I’ll save you the bother,” said Andrew. “There’s worse trouble than men playing at the Klan in these parts. I spent some time up the hill, and I’ll tell you: Loo’s dead.”

Sam kept quiet, but a shift in his shoulders, a slump really, told Andrew what he needed to know.

“I tried to save her,” he said, “but she needed more help than I could give her. She had one of those monsters in her—one of Mister Juke’s children. And it tore her to pieces, on account of what you helped Dr. Bergstrom do out there a year back. I don’t think I have to go through every tiny detail of that, now do I, Sam?”

Sam looked away, and now Andrew nodded.

He’d put this together through the long night march he’d made down the mountainside—parsing the odd coincidences together. The family had stumbled upon him, as if by pure happenstance, as he rested on a rock that he’d stumbled upon, after marching straight in the direction that Jason Thistledown had sent him. And Jason had sent him that way, thanks to Sam Green—who sent him the warning at just the right moment. He put all that together with a guess, but he thought a pretty good guess: that perhaps one of those fellows with guns that had accompanied Dr. Bergstrom on his mission of sterilization, might have fit the description of Sam Green. Who, if he were accompanying Bergstrom on his hellish mission, might have concluded that the Tavishes and the others deserved kindlier medical attention than Bergstrom would ever give them.

“I put you to use, Dr. Waggoner,” said Sam.

“You did. But I wouldn’t have made it through the night, if you hadn’t sent the boy to drag me out of there. So don’t waste breath apologizing. Just don’t waste breath lying, either.”

“I won’t, then,” said Sam. “Answer me, though, what are you doing back?”

“The Tavish clan—they’re dead.”

Sam sat quiet at that. Finally, the Pinkerton ran his hand across his broad forehead, smoothed down a tuft of hair, and looked up. Andrew felt a heavy drop of rain on his forehead as he said: “Better get to shelter. Can you walk, or should I fetch a horse?”

Andrew pushed himself up. “I look worse than I am,” he said. Sam picked up his bowler, took Andrew’s arm, and they headed up the slope.

“Bergstrom stopped sterilizin’ a few months before you came,” said Sam finally. “And not because he finished the job, neither. There’re mayhap a dozen families living on the slopes of these hills up and down the Kootenai—kin of settlers whose wagons fell too far off the trail. Got to no more than half before he gave up on it.”

“You always in his company?”

“Often enough.” They crested the hill, and looked on the house. It squatted huge on the land, blocking out the river and the sawmill both. Andrew could still see the roof of the hospital, though, over the tree-tops. “The Tavishes were good folk. It’s true—I sent word you were on the road, and that you could perhaps help. What killed them?”