Eutopia (7 page)

It was finally in the Dempsey store that he confronted the dead of Cracked Wheel. It was only one of them, but one was enough.

Jason went into the store as prepared as he could be. He wore one of Aunt Germaine’s handkerchiefs over his face, and he’d dipped it in the juice from a jar of pickled onion (which she had said would help kill the smell). To make sure he didn’t stumble over anything in the dark, he carried the kerosene lamp in one hand. And so he wouldn’t have to make more trips than one, he carried a big sack in the other. He was on an errand for a few items that, as Aunt Germaine put it, they could not do without.

First, they needed more food and ammunition. It was going to be a week’s journey anyhow to Helena and the rail station and they couldn’t make it on what supplies they’d found in the town office.

And second, Jason needed a decent suit of clothes. If he were going to get on a train with Aunt Germaine, he could not be wearing his mama’s home-sewn duds. Jason, having proved his own immunity to the germ, was the one who would have to go inside.

“It is possible that the store is as safe as the town office. I simply cannot say for certain because I have not been inside,” his aunt said.

So under a crisp blue sky, hands full and shaking, Jason made his way across the muddy road and to the store. The shades were open, but the awning cast a shadow to make it entirely black within. So Jason stopped to light the lamp and then pulled open the door. He wondered as he entered if this would be enough to put “Thief” next to his name on the card that Aunt Germaine wrote for him. The sign on the door said “Open”—and that, he thought, should count for something.

Jason glanced back to where Germaine stood at the stoop of the town office, wringing her gloves nervously. “
Courage
,” she mouthed at him. Then Jason stepped into the dark.

The pickle juice helped mask it, but the minute he crossed the threshold Jason could tell he was not alone in the store. The smell reminded him of his mama at the end, only sweeter, if sweet could make a fellow upchuck his breakfast.

Jason’s inclination was to stop breathing it, so he stood there still for a moment, breath caught in his throat. He held the lantern high and surveyed the room.

The Dempsey store was pretty big, with a ceiling maybe a dozen feet up and shelves running all the way up every wall. Free-standing shelves held blankets and clothing and made a dark little alcove in the back. And there was a long counter with a box for money and a little balance scale on it for folks that still liked to pay with metals. Jason could see everywhere but behind the counter and in that little cubbyhole in the back—and there were no bodies he could see. He worried about those other spots, though: behind the counter, behind the shelves. Anything could be in there, and he didn’t think it would be anything he wanted to see.

His lungs were burning, so he took a big gulping breath and that set him coughing—the air from the pickle juice stung fierce, and the smell was only worse for gulping it in.
All right
, Jason thought,
no point dawdling
. He set to work.

He got to the clothes and food cans first. Both were in the open, although he had to use the stepladder to get at a shirt and an overcoat that would fit him properly, they were so high up. He found himself a pair of new boots too—they were rawhide, but stained dark and etched with a swirling design, and were marked to cost three dollars. He also took a couple of blankets, because who knew what they’d need on the trail, and a folded sheet of canvas that he figured he could make into a tent if they needed it. He spent some time checking out the different cans of food and ended up taking a lot more than they needed.

Finally, there was nothing for it. He had to get ammunition: a box of cartridges for the Winchester, another box of bullets for Aunt Germaine’s revolver. And all of that was behind the counter.

Before he went, he took the sack and set it by the front doors. Then he got hold of the kerosene lamp, and made his way around the counter.

It was a bad enough sight there that Jason pulled down his mask and let go some breakfast.

When he was done, he didn’t bother putting the mask back up. He didn’t think the pickle juice would help him a bit, faced as he was with the befouled remains of a fellow Jason was pretty sure used to be Lionel Dempsey.

He guessed that more because of the clothes than anything else. The body still had its apron on, and the white shirt with the arm-bands on it. The little shopkeeper’s visor still dangled over the slick forehead. The body was sprawled along the floor. One hand held the leg of a wooden stool in a very determined grip, and Jason could imagine what had happened: Lionel had been sitting on his stool, waiting for a customer an afternoon back in February when none were coming. A spell came over him. He got dizzy enough that he fell off, and knocked the stool too. And thinking that it was just a little dizzy spell, he got the idea he could grab the stool, right it and use it to pull himself back up. And he got as far as grabbing it before he got too sick to move.

Because he didn’t have a boy or girl to watch over him, he would have died there of thirst and fever. And then because there was no one to do anything else, he stayed there on the floor of his general store, smelling up a bit until the fire in his stove went out, then freezing, and then, in the last couple days as the thaw came, thawing out himself.

Which point, the creatures got at him.

His face was a dark colour, and bits of the flesh were gone, revealing stuff of a blacker hue still underneath. One eyeball was mostly gone too, and the other stared up lidless and dried. To account for all that, Jason suspected mice or something like them had got at him, gnawing little holes in the half-froze flesh and feasting on the eyeball that was gone. And lately, judging from the things that moved where his lips drew from his teeth, and in that one empty eye socket, the maggots had hatched.

Jason wiped his mouth with the vinegary face mask and bent closer to look.

It was a funny thing: now that he’d seen what happened to Mr. Dempsey, the fear that’d possessed him evaporated, and he was just sad. Looking at Mr. Dempsey like this made him compare with the memories he’d had of him alive. And because all those memories included his mama, it made Jason think of her again. He wondered how it could be, that folks like his mama and Mr. Dempsey could be taken down by something so little like a germ. Aunt Germaine seemed to think she had the answers to that in her little file box—those eleven numbers and the percentage of how fit they were.

Jason could see how a fellow like Lionel Dempsey might fall based upon those numbers. He was always skinny and pale, and his chin didn’t come out more than halfway as far as his top teeth. And he was getting on past forty and hadn’t lifted much beyond his stock of cans and foodstuff and hardware in many years, and probably he drank too much over at the saloon which made him weaker still. But Jason Thistledown’s mama was strong and fit and beautiful. And she did beget Jason, who was strong enough to not be bothered a bit by the germ that came across the land. That had to count for something in Aunt Germaine’s eugenical numbers. It should have meant Jason’s mama could stand up to anything, at least as much as Jason could.

And yet, the only difference between her and slow old Mr. Dempsey now was a lick of flame.

Jason shook his head. Before he could upchuck again, he went to the ammunition shelf and got what he came for: plenty of bullets and a good knife besides.

Outside, Germaine was nowhere to be seen. The only sign she’d been there was a couple of steaming tubs of water, set out next to one another on the wooden sidewalk.

She reappeared when Jason was in the bigger one, dutifully scrubbing the germy dirt off his winter-white skin.

“Take your time,” she said. “We won’t leave for Helena ’til morning.”

“Where we goin’ then, Aunt? Somewhere by train?”

She looked to the west, shading her eyes with her hands and peering hard, as though looking at some distant oceanic horizon.

“Idaho,” she said. “The mill town of Eliada, at the very north end of the State of Idaho. We . . . I’ve an appointment there, one of which I am well overdue in the keeping.”

“We going to set a fire on the way out?”

Aunt Germaine looked at him. The sun reflected from her glasses and made it hard for him to look back.

“To clean the place up,” said Jason when she didn’t answer him. “Get rid of all the germs. Like we did the homestead.”

“Nephew,” she said, “they
hang
arsonists.”

Jason opened his mouth to argue. He wanted to ask her why she hadn’t thought of that when they cremated his mama and everything she’d made, just to start. But he recalled his aunt’s madness that first night; something in the set of her mouth this day told him not to bother.

“Eliada it is, then,” was all he said.

“What is Eliada?

“Well, let us take its measure.

“A thousand or more acres of woodland and scrub, stretching from the banks of the fast River Kootenai to the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. The soil is rocky and saturated with acids from the needles of the pine trees that have taken hold up the banks. It is a hard ride, two days to the north of Bonner’s Ferry if the weather is fair, which is a rarity. It is inhabited sparsely; the children of settlers who’d lost their way seventy years ago—some prospectors who strayed south, fifty years past. Indians pass through it, as Indians do. But Eliada is on the path to oblivion.

“It is, one might say, forsaken.

“Yet, gentlemen, that is not the truth of Eliada. The truth I might only describe using the language of poets.

“Eliada is the majesty of a sunrise, spreading gold across the white water of the Kootenai River. It is clear birdsong. Rising mist. The jumping of river trout. The roar of the grizzly.

“Eliada does not give quarter. It demands, rather, that we rise to its challenge.

“I challenge any of you to make the journey, arduous though it may be, and inhale the clean air from the mountains, look upon their great granite faces, implacable as the gods themselves—and find fault with the conclusion that I drew, when I dismounted my steed, and wiped the sweat dewed upon my brow, and beheld it all in breathless wonderment.

“Gentlemen, I concluded thus:

“If we are to make our Utopian dreams a reality any place in Nature’s realm—we could do worse than drain our purses carving it from this stern Paradise.”

—From an Account Given of Mr. Garrison Harper, in His Address to the Philadelphia Race Betterment Society, July 19, 1904

The first time that Jason Thistledown encountered Ruth Harper, he did not learn her name and had no reason to believe he ever would.

He spied her as he and Aunt Germaine boarded the train at Helena, and she, a passenger from further east accompanied by an only slightly older chaperone, was taking a stroll along the vast station platform before the train debarked. Jason could not help but stare, and later, as the train crossed a deep gorge but an hour to the west of Helena, Aunt Germaine told him that he would have to learn to be more circumspect when be-spying young ladies in public places. “One does not gawk,” she said. “It is a sign of bad breeding. And it offends.”

“Then how come she smiled like that?” Jason had been gawking hard he figured, because although he was now looking out the window at a true spectacle of God’s handiwork—down what seemed like a mile to a fast silver river wending serpentine through tree and rock—the view was eclipsed by his memory of the girl: the light brown curls of hair that peeked out from beneath her wide hat the colour of fresh cream, her greenish-blue eyes that glanced between her soft hands and Jason’s own hungry eye, and the smooth red lips that touched up to a smile at one corner only, near a place where a tiny dark birthmark marred her otherwise unblemished cheek.

“She was being well-mannered,” said Aunt Germaine. “That was all. There is a tolerant streak in these modern young girls that sometimes expresses itself in what may seem like licentiousness. Do not take too much from it.”

Jason leaned back on his seat. He supposed he shouldn’t be thinking about young ladies now anyway. Never mind Aunt Germaine’s views; Jason’s mama always advised nothing good came of licentiousness, and she was still not dead more than two months. Any of her advice he could still remember, Jason figured he’d better heed.

He thought he might pay particular attention to what little of that advice still applied as he drew far from the homestead and Cracked Wheel. Sure, his mama knew how to strike a camp and had some wisdom that Jason could apply to that. She knew how to talk to strange fellows who might or might not want something that you didn’t want to give up.

But if she ever knew how to do up a man’s cravat, she’d never let on; if she ever said how to negotiate price for a room in a hotel for a boy and his aunt coming late and on foot, she said so too quiet for Jason to hear; and as for counting up money bigger than dimes—well, she didn’t have much to say on that ever. It was a good thing for Aunt Germaine, who was wiser in the ways of the roads and towns on the way to civilization. Yes, it was a good thing for Aunt Germaine.