Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (31 page)

"I don't guess we'll set these two free," Sam said, the keys still jingling in his hand.

"No," said Calyxa, "
please don't
—they're murderers, bush runners, and spies for the Dutch when the money is good—they've already been convicted and sentenced to hang."

She explained that in the melee between the Blake Brothers and the Parmentierists several shots had been fired, but only Job and Utty had struck targets. Job had killed a young Parmentierist, and Utty had gunned down a luckless bystander. Some Col o nel or Major of the local garrison had promptly appointed himself a court and sentenced the pair to public hanging ... perhaps not a wholly legal procedure even under the rules of military occupation; but no one, apart from the Blake Brothers, had taken exception to it.

Job had heard all about Calyxa's dalliance with a soldier, and he had deduced by the events of this evening that I was that person, the one who had come within an inch of blowing out his brains. He directed more curses and not a little saliva at me, before turning his vulture's gaze on Calyxa.

"Tu nous sers à rien, mais pire ... tu nous déshonores! Dommage que tu soispas mort dans l'utérus de ta mère!"

"What's he saying?" I asked.

"He says he regrets that I was ever born."

I looked Job Blake hard in the eye. "We all have regrets in this life," I said, philosophically. "Tell him I regret I didn't aim lower."

The wedding was arranged to take place on the Saturday after Easter, by which time Sam, Julian, and I would be civilians again; and after the ceremony we would all board the train for New York City, and begin our lives afresh.

I won't strain the reader's attention by narrating every detail of our mustering-out. Suffice to say that we rejoined our Regiment and concluded our business there. Sam performed one duty enabled by his new rank, which was to rebuke Private Langers, whom he suspected of having acted as a spy for Major Lampret. Langers had survived the Saguenay Campaign, and was running his "Lucky Mug" business whenever a skirmish with the Dutch provided fresh corpses to loot. Sam waited until a crowd had gathered around Langers's tent. Then he demanded to see the entire contents of the Lucky Mug, which he proceeded to inventory, demonstrating to the assembled soldiers that the numbers on the slips corresponded to the worthless trinkets, but never to the valuable goods. This revelation so incensed the Private's customers than no further discipline on Sam's part was necessary. I learned later that Langers survived his chastisement.

We signed ourselves out of the Army of the Laurentians and were given documents testifying to our discharge, along with something called a "recall number" which would summon us back to active duty in case of an emergency—but we gave that prospect scant thought. Sam, Julian, and I said goodbye to Lymon Pugh, who had re-enlisted, and vows of friendship were exchanged, and Lymon promised to write occasionally, now that he was able to do so. Then we rode a wagon to the City of Montreal, where Calyxa was waiting for me.

A few days remained before the wedding. Sam used the time to say goodbye to friends he had made among the Jews of Montreal, though they were not satisfied with his degree of orthodoxy. Sam was firmly a Jew, in his own estimate, and had been born such, but he never adopted the refined and intricate doctrines and habits that characterize that faith, such as not working on Saturday (a day the Jews had apparently mistaken for the Sabbath), or attending "shool" on a regular basis, or following every commandment of the Torah (which was some sort of cylindrical Bible, as Sam described it). "I was taken from those things too early," he lamented to me, "and they don't come naturally at my age. I never underwent a Bar-Mitz-Va. I don't read or speak Hebrew.
I'm lucky to have had a bris, come to that."
⁴⁵

"Don't the Jews of Montreal understand your limitations?"

"They do, but they're impatient with my apostasy. Properly so, it may be."

He shook his head. "I'm not one thing or the other, Adam. There's no suitable faith for people like me."

I told him not to feel sad, and that he was not the only person daunted by the complexities of religion, even under the generous rule of the Dominion of Jesus Christ. For instance, there was no congregation of the Church of Signs in Montreal, which meant I couldn't marry Calyxa in the faith of my father (had I wanted to—I confess I did not). We had settled on an in-terdenominational Dominion marriage, to be performed by the local Dominion man who licensed dioceses and collected tithes on behalf of Colorado Springs. We would at least be married in a church, albeit a nominally Catholic one. The church charged fees for its use by those who confess to other faiths, and the going rate was steep, and it used up much of the money I had saved toward the purchase of a typewriter; but Calyxa was worth it, I thought.

Julian had also made friends in Montreal, and he used the time before the wedding to take his leave of them. These were the Philosophers and Aesthetes who gathered at the coffee-shop called Dorothy's. Julian had not introduced me to any of them, and they seemed exactly as loose-limbed and pallid as Lymon Pugh had described them, when I saw them from a distance; but I was no judge of Philosophers.
At least they did not parade around with unpatriotic signs, or get themselves locked up in military prison.
⁴⁶

As for me, I spent my time with Calyxa. Part of this devotion was practical, since there were arrangements to be made and invitations to be delivered. But it was an indulgence, too; for we were at that stage of betrothal in which we craved each other's company in all ways and at all hours. If we

"anticipated our vows," perhaps the reader can forgive us for our eagerness; and I'll say no more on the subject, except to repeat that it was a very happy time for me.

Of course I wrote to my mother to announce the occasion, and to apologize for not being able to bring Calyxa to meet her, though I assured her I would do my best to make that happen, preferably sooner rather than later.

Calyxa had no family except Job and Utty, who had a prior engagement—they were to be hanged on the day of the wedding—but all the Parmentierists would be there, and the staff of the Thirsty Boot, and assorted street musicians and sundry revolutionaries; and "my side of the aisle" would be full up with survivors of the Saguenay Campaign, and perhaps a few Philosophers, Jews, and Aesthetes, at the invitation of Sam and Julian.

In the end it was a wedding like any other—familiar enough in its trappings to subdue the need for description. In short: we were wed; we kissed; there were cheers; refreshments were served.

A carriage had been hired for our trip to the train station. It was not quite a "wedding carriage," for Sam and Julian shared the transportation with us. All of us had purchased tickets for the New York Express, which was due to leave Montreal at sundown. I rode with my arm around Calyxa, and we cooed at each other, and uttered pleasant trivialities, while Sam and Julian blushed, or coughed into their hands, or made a point of staring out the curtained windows even though the city was dull in the fading light and decorated only with gray banners announcing boil all water or similar hygienic instructions.

There was one stop Calyxa insisted on, however, before we reached the train station, and that was the public square where the Army of the Laurentians conducted its hangings.

Job and Utty had already met their fate, at about the time Calyxa and I solemnized our vows. I suggested she might not want to sully the memory of the day by visiting a gallows; but she needed reassurance that her brothers were truly dead, she told me, and that they wouldn't spring back to life at some incon ve nient time in the future.

So I told the hired driver to stop where the hangings had taken place. It was the policy of the Army of the Laurentians to leave corpses dangling from the gallows until a day or two had passed, so the dead would serve as a useful advertisement of the wages of vice and rebellion. This custom had been but partially honored in the case of Job and Utty. Two ropes dangled from the elaborate scaffold, but only one was occupied. I asked a bystander about this, and the man explained that Utty Blake had been hanged first, but that the scaffold had been built too high, or the rope made too long, and at the critical moment Utty's head had been "nipped off," as the man put it, so that the body no longer depended from the rope, but slipped through at the neck and had to be hauled away in two pieces. Stains on the ground attested to the truth of this.

But Job was still "on duty." He looked much smaller in death. His face was purple, and not pleasant to contemplate, though I had seen uglier corpses during my military career. A chill wind had come up, and it flapped the banners adorning the nearest buildings and turned Job's corpse like a pendulum at the end of his mournfully creaking rope. Ponderous clouds swept through the darkening sky, and the mood of the place was altogether dour and unhappy.

Nevertheless Calyxa sprang from the wedding carriage energetically, and walked right up to the unkempt and frankly foul body of her brother. His bootless feet dangled at about the level of her shoulders.

I let her stand alone on that dusty, windy square, in contemplation of the ephemerality of life and all worldly things, for many long minutes. Then I joined her, and put a consoling arm around her waist.

"As awful as your brothers were," I said, "this must be hard to endure."

"Not very hard," she whispered.

"Say your goodbyes, then, Calyxa—we have a train to catch."

I was moved by her somber expression, which implied a soul less hardened than she liked to pretend; and I was even more moved when she found the Christian charity to utter a quick prayer
⁴⁷
for the soul of poor dead Job.

Then we climbed back into the carriage, and I instructed the driver to take us on to the train station. The atmosphere had cooled somewhat, and there was no more post- nuptial cooing. Instead, Calyxa attempted to make conversation.

She didn't know Sam or Julian very well just yet. In a sense she didn't know them at all: despite the confidences we shared, I had avoided telling her that Julian was actually Julian Comstock, the President's nephew, or that Sam had been the best friend of Julian's murdered father. I had promised Sam and Julian that I wouldn't mention these awkward truths, and I had been true to my promise.

But I had told her other things about my friends and my adventures with them. She looked squarely at Julian and said, "You like to tell Bible stories."

Julian was uncomfortable—as he often was in the presence of women—and seemed not to know how to respond. He swallowed repeatedly, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. "Ah, well ... do I?"

"According to Adam. Bible stories of your own invention. Most of them blasphemous."

"Perhaps Adam exaggerates."

"Tell me one," Calyxa said, as the carriage rattled down the gloomy, windy street, and a small rain began to fall. Her gaze drifted to the window of the carriage. "Tell me an Easter story, if you know one."

I didn't like the trend of this conversation. Julian's apostasies were often shocking to the uninitiated, and I had hoped Calyxa would get to know him better before he trained the cannon of his Agnosticism on her at close range.

But Julian liked a challenge; and I think he was charmed by Calyxa's boldness and directness.

He cleared his throat. "Well, let me see." The overhead lantern teetered on its gimbals. Rain drummed on the carriage-roof, and Julian's breath hung visibly in the chill air. "God created the world—"

"That's starting a long way back," Calyxa said.

"Perhaps it is; but do you want to hear this story or not?"

"I beg your pardon. Continue."

"In the beginning God created the world," Julian said, "and set it turning; and let events transpire without much in the way of personal intervention. He stage-managed a few tribal disputes, and arranged a misguided Flood that cost many lives and solved very few problems; but in the end He decided the human race was too corrupt to be salvaged, and too pathetic to destroy, and so He stopped tinkering with it, and left it alone.

"But humanity, on the whole, was conscious of its fallen condition, and went on petitioning God for unearned gifts or the redress of grievances. All this badgering, in God's eyes, amounted to a lament for lost innocence—a nostalgia for the abandoned paradise that was Eden. 'Make us innocent again,' humanity cried out, 'or at least send innocence among us, to serve as an example.'

"God was skeptical. 'You wouldn't recognize Innocence if it handed you a calling card,' He said to humanity, 'and Goodness exceeds your grasp with the regularity of clockwork. Look for these things where you find them, and leave Me alone.'

"But the prayers never ceased, and God couldn't indefinitely ignore all that grief and lamentation, which lapped at the walls of Heaven like a noxious tide. 'All right,' He said at last, 'I've heard your noise, and I'll give you what you want.' So He fathered a child by a virgin—in fact a
married
 virgin, for God was fond of miracles, and for a woman to be simultaneously a wife, a virgin, and a mother seemed like a miracle with compound interest accrued.

And so in the fullness of time a child was born—innocent, bereft of sin, invulnerable to temptation, and good-hearted down to the very marrow of him.

'Make of him what you will,' God said grimly, and stood back with His arms folded."

(I tried to evaluate Calyxa's reaction to these blasphemies. She kept her face motionless, but her eyes were attentive and unblinking. The rain came down stiffly, and the wheels of passing carts made a muted sound in the dusk.)

"A quarter-century or so went by," Julian continued. "And eventually that child of God was returned to his Creator—scorned, insulted, beaten, humiliated, and finally nailed to a splintery cross and suspended in the Galilean sunshine until he died of his wounds both physical and spiritual.

"God received this much-abused gift by return mail, as it were, and He was ferociously scornful, and said to humanity, 'See what you do with Innocence? See what you make of Love and Goodwill when it looks you in the eye?' And so saying He turned His back on Mankind, and determined never to speak to the human race again, or have any other dealings with it.