Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (60 page)

Her eyesight had not dimmed so much that she wasn't eager to see a copy of
A Western Boy at Sea,
 and of course I had brought one for her. She handled it with exaggerated care, smiling a little; then she put it on a high shelf next to
The Adventures of Captain Commongold,
 which I had also sent her. She would read it, she said, chapter by chapter, in the afternoons, when the light and her eyes were at their best.

I told her that I couldn't have written either of these books if she had not been so determined about teaching me to read—teaching me the love of reading, that is, and not just the names of the letters, as most lease-boys were taught on Sundays.

"I learned to read from my own mother," she said. "And she learned from her mother before her, all the way back to the Secular Ancients, according to family legend. There was a school-teacher in our family, long ago. Perhaps another writer, too—who knows? Your father's greatest shame was his illiteracy.

He felt it deeply, though he didn't show it."

"You could have taught him the art of it."

"I offered to. He wouldn't try. Too old and set for that, he always said. I expect he was afraid of failing."

"I taught a man to read," I said, "when I was in the Army." That made her smile again.

She was keen for news about Calyxa and the baby. By a fortunate coincidence Julian had arranged to have a photograph of us taken shortly before Inde pen dence Day, and I showed it off. Here was Calyxa in a chair, her coiled hair shining. Flaxie sat in her lap, slightly lopsided, baby dress askew, goggling at the camera. I stood behind the chair with one hand on Calyxa's shoulder.

"She has a forceful look," my mother observed, "your Calyxa. Good strong legs. The baby is pretty. My eyes aren't what they used to be, but I can still spot a pretty baby, and that's one."

"Your grand- daughter," I said.

"Yes. And
she'll
 learn to read, too, won't she? When she's ready?"

"No doubt of it," I said.

Eventually we talked about my father's death—not just the fact but the circumstances of it. I asked whether he had been bitten during a Signs ser vice.

"There aren't any ser vices of that kind anymore, Adam. Church of Signs was never pop u lar except among a few of the indentured, and not long after you left the Duncans and Crowleys decided it was a 'cult,' and ought to be suppressed. Ben Kreel began preaching against the sect, and the most enthusiastic members of the congregation were sold off or sent away. Your father was the only lease-man among them, so he stayed; but there was no congregation to preach to anymore."

"But he kept the snakes." I had seen them in their cages out back, writhing unpleasantly.

"They were pets to him. He couldn't bear to stop feeding them, or destroy them any other way, and it wouldn't have been safe to set them loose. I'm not sure I can bring myself to kill them, either. Although I despise them." She said this was a vehemence that startled me. "I do despise them very much. I always have. I loved your father dearly. But I never loved those snakes. They haven't been fed since he died. Something has to be done about them."

We didn't discuss the matter any further. That night, however, after she had served a modest stew and dumplings and gone to bed, I left the house very quietly, and went out to the cages.

A bright moon hung above the distant mountains. It cast a steady pale light on my father's family of Massasauga Rattlers. The serpents were in a bitter mood, no doubt from hunger. There was a slashing impatience in their motions. Nor would they have been milked of their venom recently. (This was something my father used to do secretly, before ser vices, especially if he thought children might participate in the handling. He would stretch a bit of thin leather over the mouth of an old jar, and let the serpents bite it. It took the poison out of them for a period of time. That was his own private apostasy, I suppose—an insurance policy against any momentary lapse of attention on the part of higher powers.) The snakes were aware of my presence. They twined and curled restlessly, and I imagined I could feel a cold fury in their blank and bloodless eyes.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

I was not a faithful man by most definitions. I wasn't a devotee of the Church of Signs, and I had never adopted its doctrines as my own. Nevertheless I lifted the latch and opened the door of the nearest cage. I didn't wear gloves or any such protection. My hands and arms were exposed and vulnerable.

I reached inside.

I had entered some wordless principality of grief and anger. There was no logic to the act, only the memory of the advice my father had given me, years ago, when I watched him feed living mice to his snakes while dodging their strikes and lunges.
It shouldn't be necessary to kill a serpent,
 he said,
in the ordinary course of things, if you know what you're doing. But unexpected events happen.

Perhaps a stray viper threatens some innocent man or animal. Then you have to bedecisive. You have to be quick. Don't fear the creature, Adam. Grasp it where its neckought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack itsskull, hard and often enough to subdue it
.

And that is what I did—repetitively, mechanically—until a dozen serpen-tine corpses lay stiffening at my feet.

Then I turned back to my familiar old home, and went to the bed that had comforted me through many winters, and slept for hours without dreaming.

In the morning the wire cages were bright with beads of dew, and the carcasses I had left behind were gone—some hungry animal had carried them off, I supposed.

The day before I left Williams Ford I asked my mother whether she believed in God, and Heaven, and Angels, and that sort of thing.

It was a bold question, and it took her by surprise. "That's not the sort of thing a polite person ought to ask," she said, "outside of church."

"Perhaps not; but it's the kind of question Julian Comstock enjoys asking, almost every chance he can get."

"And it gets him in trouble, I expect?"

"Often enough."

"You can take a lesson from that. And you know the answer, in any case.

Haven't I read to you from the Dominion books, and told you all the stories in the Bible?"

"As a parent to a child. Not as one adult to another."

"You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see."

"I'm sure you're right. Do you, though? Believe in God, I mean?"

She looked at me as if to gauge my earnestness. "I believe in all sorts of things," she said, "though I don't necessarily understand them. I believe in the moon and the stars, though I can't tell you what they're made of, or where they come from. I suppose God falls into that category—real enough to be felt from time to time, but mysterious in His nature, and often confusing."

"That's a subtle answer."

"I wish I had a better one."

"What about Heaven, though? Do you think we go to Heaven when we die?"

"Heaven is generally regarded as having strict admission requirements, though no two faiths agree on the details. I don't know. I expect it's like China—a place everyone acknowledges as real, but which few ever visit."

"There are Chinamen in New York City," I volunteered. "And a great many Egyptians, besides."

"But hardly any
angels,
 I expect."

"Next to none."

That was as much Theology as she would tolerate, so we dropped the subject, and spent our last day together discussing more cheerful matters; and in the morning I said goodbye to her, and left Williams Ford behind me for the second and last time.

"In your many travels since we last met," Ben Kreel said to me as we drove back down the Wire Road to Connaught, "did you ever get as far as Colorado Springs?"

"No, sir," I said. It was another sunlit day. The telegraph wires hummed in a warm breeze. The train that would take me away from my childhood home and all its memories was due in just three hours. "Mostly I was in various parts of Labrador, well north and east of Colorado."

"I've been to Colorado Springs five times," Ben Kreel said, "for ecclesiastical training. It isn't at all like the pictures in the Dominion readers. You know what I mean—the Dominion Academy is all they show, with its white pillars, and those big paintings of the Fall of the Cities."

"It's very impressive, and worth a photograph."

"Certainly it is; but Colorado Springs is more than just the Academy, and so is the Dominion."

"I'm sure they are, sir."

"Colorado Springs is a town full of pious, prosperous men and women who are loyal to the Union and to their faith; and the Dominion isn't strictly a
building,
 nor even an
organization,
 but an
idea.
 A very bold and ambitious idea, an idea about taking the battered and imperfect world we live in and making it over fresh and new—making a Heavenly Kingdom of it, pure enough that the angels themselves wouldn't be reluctant to tread there."

Unlike Manhattan, I thought to myself. "It seems as if we're a long way from that. We haven't taken Labrador yet, much less the world."

"It's a chore for more than one lifetime. But we can't commune directly with Heaven until we perfect the world, and we can't perfect the world until we perfect ourselves. That's the job of the Dominion, Adam: to make us all more perfect. It's a stern duty, but it arises out of the common instincts of charity and good will. Those who chafe under it are generally too attached to some imperfection of their own, which they love with a sinful stubbornness."

"Yes, sir, that's as you used to tell us at holiday ser vices."

"I'm pleased you remember. Our enemy is anyone who rebels against God—perhaps you remember that aphorism, too."

"I do."

"What form do you suppose that rebellion generally takes, Adam?"

"Sin," I guessed.

"Sin, yes, certainly, and plenty of that to go around. But most sin only sabotages the sinner. Some sin is more insidious, and aims directly at impeding the Dominion in its work."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean." Though I had my suspicions.

"Don't you? When you were in the Army, did your regiment have a Dominion officer in it?"

"Yes."

"And was he universally loved?"

"It wasn't a unanimous sentiment, no."

"Nor could it have been, since it was his job to elevate virtue and excoriate wrong-doing. Thieves do not love prisons, and sinners don't love the Church.

My point is that the Dominion stands in relation to the United States as that pastor stood to his troops. His purpose wasn't to be loved for
himself,
 but to coax and herd a recreant population into the corral of
divine
 love."

For some reason I had a recollection of Lymon Pugh and his description of the meat-packing industry.

"The Dominion takes a profound interest in the destiny of this nation, and every nation," Ben Kreel said. "Compared with that
institutional
 interest, the whims of Presidents are fleeting."

"This conversation is too cryptic," I complained. "Is it about Julian? If that's what you mean, just say so."

"Who am I to stand in judgment of the Chief Executive? I'm just a country pastor. But the Dominion watches, the Dominion judges; and the Dominion is older than Julian Comstock, and ultimately more powerful."

"Julian has nothing against the Dominion, except in some particulars."

"I hope that's true, Adam; but, if so, why would he attempt to sever the ancient and beneficial connection between the Dominion and the Armies?"

"What! Did he?"

Ben Kreel smiled unpleasantly. For many years this man had seemed to me a minor deity, above reproach. He was a kindly voice, a useful teacher, and a sturdy peacemaker when there was conflict in the community. But looking at him now I detected something sour and triumphant in his nature, as if he delighted in having stolen a march on an upstart lease-boy. "Why, that's exactly what he did, Adam; don't you know? The news came by wire from Colorado Springs this morning. Julian Conqueror, so-called, has ordered the Dominion to withdraw its representatives from the nation's Armies and cease participating in military counsels."

"That's a bold step," I said, wincing.

"It's more than a
bold step,
 Adam. It's very nearly a declaration of war."

He leaned close to me and said in an oily and confiding tone, "A war he cannot win. If he doesn't understand that, you ought to enlighten him."

"I'll be sure to tell him what you said."

"Yes, thank you," said Ben Kreel. "You're a good friend to Julian Comstock."

"I try to be."

"But you shouldn't walk in the footsteps even of your best friend, Adam Hazzard, if the road he's following leads to Hell."

I was tempted to tell Ben Kreel that my belief in Hell was even shakier, these days, than my confidence in Paradise. Or I might have said that I had met a man in New York who claimed the only God was Conscience ("have no other"), under which standard the whole Dominion was an Apostasy, if not something worse; but I didn't want to engage him in any further discussion, and I sat sullenly the rest of the way to Connaught.

Shortly thereafter I boarded the train that would take me back to Manhattan. It was a more comfortable ride than the Caribou-Horn Train had been, the first time I left Williams Ford. But I felt no less afraid as I traveled in it.

After I had arrived back home, and made my reunion with Calyxa and Flaxie, and bathed away the grime of travel, and slept a night, I went to the Palace to see Julian.