Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America Read online

Of the coins I especially liked the largest, the One Dollar coin. It was not as finely wrought as the coinage of the Secular Ancients, but still very neatly pressed and stamped. The dollar contained a measurable amount of real silver, and had milled edges, and vine stalks engraved around the face, and the words In God We Trust written in letters so ornate as to be all but illegible, and in the middle of all this a relief portrait of a stern-looking man with small eyes and a pointed nose. There were silhouettes on the coins of smaller denomination, too, some of which I recognized from illustrations in The Dominion History of the Union as the historic patriots Washington, Hamilton, and Otis; but the face on the Dollar was unfamiliar to me, and when I showed it to Julian he laughed. “So the old villain’s vanity finds yet another expression! That’s my uncle, Adam—Deklan Comstock, or a flattering facsimile of him.”

  “He’s on a coin now?”

  “A new coin for a new year. And plenty of them, I imagine. The Mint must be working overtime to pay for the war effort.” Julian directed my attention to the obverse of the Dollar, on which was written DEKLAN COMSTOCK POTUS,* and the year 2173, with a representation of two Clasped Hands, signifying the concord of the Armies of the East and West, alongside the stamp of the Boston Mint, and the ambiguous but vaguely threatening legend NOW AND FOREVER.

  “Let me see that,” Sam said, and on examining the coin he remarked, “Yes, that’s him, a flattering-enough likeness. He could drill holes in wood with that nose of his. It was Bryce who got all the looks in the family.”

  Here we approached territory which I had not dared to explore—that is, the subject of Julian’s family. But I was not a stable-boy right at the moment, and Julian was not an Aristo. We were both soldiers, and would so remain, at least for the duration of our involuntary enlistment. So I dared to ask, “What was your father like, Julian? Did you know him well before he died?”

  Sam and Julian exchanged glances.

  “I knew him well enough,” Julian said in a softer voice. “I was but eight years old when he died, and he went to war two years before that. To be honest, Adam, he’s more an impression in my mind than a solid memory. He was always kind to me. He never condescended to me, though I was a child, and he was patient enough to explain what I didn’t understand.”

  “And your mother?”

  To my surprise it was Sam who answered. “Emily Baines Comstock is as fine a woman as you’ll ever meet,” he declared, “and perhaps you will meet her, someday. She’s exactly the kind of woman a man like Bryce Comstock deserved to have at his side, and she loved him dearly, and was inconsolable for a long time after his death. Emily’s more than just beautiful—she’s clever and resourceful.” And here he reddened, and cleared his throat.

  “Does she live in the Executive Palace?” I asked.

  “There’s a cottage reserved for her on the Palace grounds,” said Sam, “but she keeps a row-house in Manhattan where she prefers to stay. Emily doesn’t care for the rivalries and jealousies of the high-born. She’s happier with artists, actors, scholars—that type of person, from whom she has little to fear.”

  “My mother’s a cultured woman,” Julian added, “and doesn’t care to be in the presence of Deklan Conqueror, who is as ignorant as he is villainous.”

  That was how Julian had come to be raised in Manhattan, which was where he had seen so many plays and movies, and spoken with Philosophers, and picked up his heretical ideas. “But you must have met your uncle face-to-face,” I said.

  “Too often. After my father’s death it was all I could do to restrain myself from calling him a murderer. Oh, those holiday dinners at the Executive Palace! You have no idea, Adam. My mother and I pressed in with Deklan and his crowd of sycophants, while the craven agents of the Dominion blessed his every whim and impulse. We were on display, I think—Deklan’s way of announcing that he could command the loyalty even of his murdered brother’s widow and son. We were powerless against him. He could have snuffed us out at any time. He tolerated my mother because she was a woman, and me because I was a child, and both of us because we were a perverse emblem of his supposed generosity.”

  I had touched a hostility that ran deep in Julian, and the edge in his voice was impossible to ignore. The way he spoke of those Palace dinners, and the clergy who presided at them, made me wonder if this humiliation might be the ultimate source of his apostasy. But such speculation was not useful, and I dropped the subject because it made Julian so conspicuously unhappy.

  “There!” Sam said. “Do you hear that?”

  It was the sound of a train whistle wind-borne over the thawing prairie—not the Caribou-Horn Train that had brought us here from Bad Jump but an Army train, which we would board first thing in the morning, and which would carry us to the battle-front in the East.

  “Pack away those Comstock dollars,” Sam said, “or you’ll have nothing to spend on women and liquor by the time we get to Montreal.”

  I blushed at his joke, and tried to laugh, though there was more truth in it, ultimately, than I like to admit.

  * One of the men was clearly tubercular, while two others showed evidence of active Pox about their wrists and throats. Five more were turned back simply because they had lost a great number of teeth, or their teeth were too loose in the jaw to be useful. A toothless man could not bite or chew Army hardtack, and such men had been known to starve to death on a long march.

  * The Oath, though we swore to it under a sort of compulsion, was not meaningless to me. I held those Institutions of Liberty in awe, and I had been feeling guilty about my draft-dodging, necessary though it seemed at the time. By swearing fealty I felt washed clean—despite the bug powder clinging to my mortal fraction.

  * Airier justifications were sometimes cited, including the theorized ancient landing of Vikings on the eastern shores of North America; but Julian assayed the tolerance of his listeners, and confined his argument to the most pertinent points.

  † Even this thumbnail sketch of history taxed the geographical understanding of his auditors, and Julian was reduced to scratching maps in the dirt with the point of his bayonet.

  * Described in the novel The Boys of ’60 by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.

  * Coincidentally—or so the textbooks say.

  † See Mr. Easton’s Against the Brazilians.

  * President of the United States.

  2

  The social atmosphere aboard the troop train to Montreal differed in instructive ways from that aboard the Phantom Car. Months had passed since we left Bad Jump, and those of us who had been strangers then had since become, if not friends, at least confederates—intimately known to one another, for better or worse. If we were afraid of the war to which we were being delivered, we kept that tender feeling to ourselves. We sang a great deal, to maintain high spirits, and I was not the prude and child I once had been, and I joined in on the less obscene choruses of Those Two-Dollar Shoes Hurt My Feet. Not because vulgarity had become especially desirable, but because merriment is an antidote to dread.

  I noticed, too, how the soldiers often appealed to “Julian Commongold” for an opinion or a verdict in some dispute, and accepted his judgment as settled law. This despite Julian’s evident youth, unsuccessfully disguised by his sparse yellow beard. It was as if he carried around with him an invisible but perceptible aura of authority, which perhaps was what Sam had called “the Comstock in him.” It manifested in his square-set shoulders, his careful grooming, and the easy way he wore the blue-and-yellow uniform of the Infantry. But it was a comradely authority, too, coexistent with his confident sense of himself and the evident pleasure he took in socializing even with those beneath his original station in life. He smiled often, and it was a smile only the most truculent among us could fail to give back.

  The train carried us out of the prairie and into a land of forest and lakes. Rain beat down steadily most of the day, but it made no difference to us, for we were inside a fully-equipped passenger car, with protection from the weather. This was
train travel as I had always imagined it. I sat at a window watching raindrops glide sideways as we passed in and out of cavernous pine forests and followed the smoky shore of a great gray lake. To the pagans of ancient Rome, Julian once told me, the Easter season had represented Death and Rebirth. Certainly there was no lack of Rebirth in the countryside through which we passed. Ferns unrolled in shady glens, the sodden limbs of trees were budding afresh, and cattails poked through ponded winter marshes. And there was Death, too, if you looked for it, in the occasional ruins we passed—not just old settled basements, as in Lundsford, but whole stone buildings, mossy-green, and once or twice the remains of entire towns, slouching brick boxes that shed raindrops as we rattled past them at thirty miles to the hour. Crows nested in those old buildings, and their eaves were crowned with chalky dung, and the only visitors were the local deer, or an occasional wolf or bear, as might be.

  I gazed on many more such overgrown ruins until night fell. It was wholly dark when we approached the outskirts of Montreal, where campfires smoldered in the rainy distance. We heard an occasional growl of thunder (or perhaps it was cannonade), and it was at this point that the singing stopped, and a wary silence replaced it, and we fell into less pleasant reveries about the future and what it might hold for us.

  An entire Regiment of draftees had been packed into the train—a big body of men, but it was nothing compared to the great Army assembled by General Galligasken outside of the City of Montreal. Our company was, in the common phrase, “a drop in the bucket”—and it was a large, ungainly bucket, uninterested in welcoming new drips. As soon as we collected our gear and left the train we were conducted to a muddy field in which we were invited to make our own contribution to a sea of tents—nothing but mud and canvas as far (in the rain and the night) as the eye could see. After much flailing about, during which we repeatedly slipped and stumbled in the glutinous muck, and cursed, and were cursed in turn by the soldiers trying to sleep in adjoining quarters, we had erected our own rough sleeping-places, and we tumbled into them fully-dressed, and woke a few hours later when reveille sounded, our uniforms all scabbed with mud.

  I could not help looking about curiously as we formed up in companies for roll call. The rain had ceased during the night. The morning was brisk and bright, and high clouds careened across the sky like runaway melon-carts. Everywhere, in every direction, men were being bugled out of bed and mustered up, and regimental flags popped in the breeze with a sound like knots bursting in a pinewood fire. The vast flat field in which we stood was cross-cut with muddy roads, and already horses and mules crowded these paths, straining to pull provision wagons or caissons; and I discerned in the distance the grander tents of regimental and battalion commanders. Otherwise there was nothing but an ocean of soldiers on all sides—infantry, cavalry, artillery. The nearest thing I could see that was not a part of the Army of the Laurentians was a line of low trees, as far away as a cloud seems when it sits upon the horizon.

  “Is this Montreal?” I asked Sam. If so, the city was considerably less grand than I had imagined it, though still very large.

  “Don’t be idiotic,” Sam said. “The City of Montreal is some miles distant, most of it on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Do you think they would muster so many men in the midst of a modern city? Half of them would be drunk by noon, if that was the case—the other half having absconded to the whore houses. And don’t blush like that, Adam: you’re a soldier now, you ought to be hardened to such things.”*

  It has been said, I forget by whom, that you can’t throw a stone in the City of Montreal without hitting either a church or a whore house. I would soon enough find out for myself the truth of that statement, for it was announced at noon mess that our regiment was to be allowed a supervised leave, and we would be escorted to the city for Easter services in one of the grand ancient Dominion churches there.

  “Do Jews celebrate Easter?” I asked Sam as we marched to the outskirts of Montreal. “I don’t suppose they do.”

  “It would be surprising if they did,” Sam agreed, “though we have our own holiday about this time of year, which is called Pass-Over.”

  “What event does it mark, if not the Crucifixion and Resurrection?”

  “The fact that the Jews were exempted from the plagues that fell upon Egypt.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s something to be grateful for,” recalling my Bible studies under Ben Kreel. “Those were unpleasant plagues, and not to be taken lightly.”

  “More than unpleasant,” Julian chimed in, and I was glad that the sound of tramping feet, though muffled by the damp ground, was loud enough to prevent anyone eavesdropping while Julian dilated on this delicate subject. “Inventive, I would say, almost to the point of madness. Insects—boils—the butchery of children—such work by any other agency would be considered an example of unexcelled sadism rather than celestial justice.”

  I was quietly shocked (though hardly surprised) by this fresh apostasy. “God is jealous by nature, Julian,” I reminded him. “It says so in the text.”

  “Oh yes,” Julian agreed, “jealous, certainly, but also forgiving; merciful, but vengeful; wrathful, but loving—in fact just about anything we can imagine Him to be. That’s the Paradox of Monotheism, as I call it. Contrast a Christian with a nature-worshipping pagan: if the pagan’s cornfield is ravaged by a wind-storm he can blame the bad manners of the Cyclone-God; and if the weather is kind he addresses his thanks to Mother Sunshine, or some such; and all this, though not sensible, has a kind of rude logic to it. But with the invention of monotheism a single Deity is forced to take responsibility for every contradictory joy and tragedy that comes down the turnpike. He is obliged to be the God of the hurricane and the gentle breeze together, present in every act of love or violence, in every welcome birth or untimely death.”

  “I could do with a little less Mother Sunshine at the moment,” remarked Sam, applying a handkerchief to his brow, for the day had grown warm, and the march was tiring.

  “But you can’t blame the Jews for celebrating their exemption from His wrath,” I protested.

  “No,” Julian said, “no more than I can blame the sole survivor of a train wreck for crying out a heartfelt, ‘Thank God I was allowed to live!’—though the same God who spared him must therefore have abstained from preventing the wreck, or rescuing any other person from it. The impulse to gratitude on the part of the survivor is understandable, but shortsighted.”

  “I don’t see how monotheism makes it any worse, though. It seems to me, once you start multiplying your gods, you might not know just where to stop. A crowd of gods so numerous you can’t recognize most of them seems hardly better than no god at all. Especially once they begin to bicker among themselves. Don’t you often tell me to seek out the simplest explanation for a thing?”

  “One is a simpler number than a dozen,” Julian admitted. “But none is simpler than one.”

  “That’s enough of this, thank you,” said Sam.

  “Why Sam,” said Julian, grinning mischievously, “are you afraid of a little Philosophical Conversation?”

  “This is Theology, not Philosophy—an altogether more dangerous subject, Julian; and I’m not so much afraid of the loose talk as I am of the loose tongue behind it.”

  “Where is the Dominion that we should censor ourselves?”

  “Where is the Dominion? The Dominion is everywhere—you know that! The Dominion is at the head of this very march,” referring to our newly-installed Dominion Officer, one Major Lampret, who strode before us, a handsome man in a handsome uniform.*

  Julian might have insisted on continuing the conversation, if only for the purpose of aggravating Sam, but by this time we had come upon a great iron bridge, by which we crossed a body of water so immense that I could hardly credit its christening as a River. Vessels from many nations moved beneath that bridge, some with immense white sails and some powered by boilers, some warping toward the Port of Montreal and others bound for the inland Great
Lakes trade or for the wide ocean far to the east; and beyond this bridge lay the astonishing City of Montreal, and it was the City that finally drew all of our attention—all of mine, at least.

  I would see bigger cities in my life, and travel farther from home; but as Montreal was the first true City I had seen I could not help but contrast it with Williams Ford. By that measure, it was immense. And it had once been even larger, Julian reminded me, for we had all morning passed through a landscape that was essentially one vast Tip, played-out and burned-over, with scrub brush and low trees overlying what must once have been zones of industry or sprawling suburbs. What remained was only the core of the city as it was known to the Secular Ancients, all its rind and peelings having been stripped away.

  But that central core preserved many wonderful antique structures. “The buildings are so tall!” I could not help exclaiming, and Julian said, “Though once much taller. Even these buildings have been scavenged, Adam.” He drew my attention from the stark concrete walls, complexly chambered, to the crude peaked roofs above them with their fluted red-clay tiles and slumping chimneys: “You see how the roof is less sturdy than the building under it, though considerably newer? There’s nothing much over four or five stories tall here (yes, yes, ‘tall enough,’ and stop gawking, Adam, you’ll embarrass yourself), but some of these buildings were once almost ten times higher, the greater part of them having been taken down by inches for their wood, wire, and aluminum. Even their steel frames were eventually whittled down and sent to the re-rolling mills, leaving only the subdivided stumps for people to inhabit. If you think this city is magnificent, Adam, conjure up in your mind’s eye the city it once was. Run the decades back and you’d see marvels of steel and glass—man-made mountains—a city halfway to infiltrating the sky itself. New York City is the same,” he added with evident pride, “only larger.”

  I was not daunted by his comparisons, however, for modern-day Montreal seemed quite astonishing enough, with its bricked or cobbled streets and busy occupants. Let Julian dwell on the glories of the past—there was enough here to occupy the inquisitive mind.