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

  “Not without a ladder. Although—”

  “What? Speak up, Adam, if you have an idea.”

  “This is where they store the risers—the long wooden blocks the choir stands on when they’re racked up for a performance. Maybe those would do.”

  Julian understood the plan at once, and began to survey the shadowy contents of the storage room as intently as he had surveyed the Tip for books. We found the raw pine risers, and managed to stack them to a useful height without causing too much noise. (In the church hall the Campaigners registered a unanimous vote for Deklan Comstock, and then began to break the news about the conscription drive, just as Julian had surmised. Some few voices were raised in futile objection; Ben Kreel called loudly for calm—no one heard us rearranging the furniture.)

  The window was at least ten feet high, and painfully narrow, and when we emerged on the other side we had to hang by our fingertips before dropping to the ground. I bent my right ankle as I landed, though no lasting harm was done.

  The night, already cold, had turned colder. We had dropped just near the hitching posts, and the horses whinnied at our unexpected arrival and blew steam from their nostrils. A fine, gritty snow had begun to fall. There was not much wind, however, and Christmas banners hung limply in the brittle air.

  Julian made straight for his horse and loosed its reins from the post. “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “You, Adam, will do nothing but protect your own existence, while I—”

  But he balked at pronouncing his plans, and a shadow of anxiety passed over his face.

  “We can wait this crisis out,” I insisted, a little desperately. “The Reserves can’t stay in Williams Ford forever.”

  “No. Unfortunately neither can I, for Deklan Conqueror knows where to find me.”

  “Where will you go, though?”

  He put a finger to his mouth. There was a noise from the front of the Dominion Hall. The doors had been thrown open and the congregants were beginning to emerge. “Ride after me,” Julian said. “Quick, now!”

  I did as he asked. We didn’t follow the main street, but caught a path that turned behind the blacksmith’s barn and through the wooded border of the River Pine, north in the direction of the Estate. The night was dark, and the horses stepped slowly; but they knew the path almost by instinct, and some light from the town still filtered through the thinly falling snow that touched my face like a hundred small cold fingers.

  “It was never possible that I could stay at Williams Ford,” Julian said. “You ought to have known that, Adam.”

  Truly, I should have. It was Julian’s constant theme, after all: the impermanence of things. He preached it like a sermon. I had always put this down to the circumstances of his childhood—the death of his father, the separation from his mother, the kind but impersonal tutelage of Sam Godwin.

  But I couldn’t help thinking once more of the History of Mankind in Space and of the photographs in it—not of the First Men on the Moon, who were Americans, but of the Last Visitors to that celestial sphere, who had been Chinamen, and whose “space suits” had been firecracker-red. Like the Americans, they had planted their flag in expectation of more visitations to come; but the End of Oil and the False Tribulation had put paid to those plans.

  Then I thought of the even lonelier Plains of Mars, photographed by machines, or so the book alleged, but never touched by human feet. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places. Somehow I had stumbled into one. The snow squall ended. The uninhabited moon peeked through the clouds, and the winter fields of Williams Ford glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

  “If you have to leave,” I said, “let me come with you.”

  “No,” said Julian. He had pulled his hat down around his ears to protect himself from the cold, and I couldn’t see much of his face, but his eyes shone when he glanced in my direction. “Thank you, Adam. I wish it were possible. But it isn’t. You must stay here, and dodge the draft, if possible, and polish your literary skills, and one day write books, like Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.”

  That was my ambition, which had grown over the last year, nourished by our mutual love of books and by Sam Godwin’s exercises in English Composition, for which I had discovered an unexpected talent.* At the moment it seemed a petty dream. “None of that matters,” I said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Julian said. “You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”

  “Isn’t that the Philosophical point of view?”

  “Not if the Philosopher knows what he’s talking about.” Julian reined up his horse and turned to face me, something of the imperiousness of his famous family entering into his mien. “Listen, Adam, there’s something important you can do for me—at some personal risk. Are you willing?”

  “Yes,” I said immediately.

  “Then listen closely. Before long the Reservists will be watching the roads out of Williams Ford, if they aren’t already. I have to leave, and I have to leave tonight. I won’t be missed until morning, and then, at least at first, only by Sam. What I want you to do is this: go home—your parents will be worried about the conscription, and you can try to calm them down, but don’t allude to any of what happened tonight—and first thing in the morning make your way to the Estate and find Sam. Tell him what happened at the Dominion Hall, and tell him to ride out of town as soon as he can do so without being caught. Tell him he can find me at Lundsford. That’s the message.”

  “Lundsford! There’s nothing at Lundsford.”

  “Precisely—nothing important enough that the Reservists would think to look for us there. You remember what the Tipman said last fall, about the place he found those books? ‘A low place near the main excavations.’ Tell Sam he can look for me there.”

  “I will,” I promised, blinking against the cold wind, which irritated my eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely. “For everything.” Then he forced a smile, and for a moment he was no longer the President’s nephew, but just Julian, the friend with whom I had hunted squirrels and gazed at the moon. “Merry Christmas, Adam,” he said. “And all the Christmases to come.”

  Then he wheeled his horse about and rode away.

  * The illusion was quite striking when the Players were professional, but their lapses could be equally astonishing. Julian once recounted to me a New York movie production of Wm. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which a Player had come to the theater intoxicated with drink, causing the unhappy Denmark to seem to exclaim “Sea of troubles—(an unprintable oath)—I have troubles of my own,” with more obscenities, and much inappropriate bell-ringing and vulgar whistling, until an understudy could be hurried out to replace him.

  * Not a talent that was born fully-formed, however. Only two years previously I had presented to Sam Godwin my first finished story, which I had called “A Western Boy: His Adventures in Enemy Europe.” Sam had praised its style and ambition, but called attention to a number of flaws: elephants, for instance, are not native to Brussels, and are generally too massive to be wrestled to the ground by American lads; a journey from London to Rome can’t be accomplished in a matter of hours, even on “a very fast horse”—and Sam might have continued in that vein, had I not found an excuse to leave the room.

  4

  There is a Dominion cemetery in Williams Ford, and I passed it on the ride back home, but my sister Flaxie wasn’t buried there.

  As congregants of the Church of Signs we weren’t entitled to plots in the Dominion yard. Flaxie had a place in the acreage behind our cottage, marked by a modest wooden cross; but the cemetery put the thought of Flaxie in my mind, and after I returned the horse to the barn I stopped by her grave, despite the shivery cold, and tipped my hat to her, the way I had always tipped my hat to her in life.

  Flaxie had been a bright, impudent, mischievous small thing—as golden-haired as her nickname implied. Her given name was Dolores, but she was always Flaxie to me. The Pox had
taken her very suddenly and, as these things go, mercifully. I didn’t remember her death—I had been down with the same Pox, though I had survived it. What I remembered was waking up from my fever into a house gone strangely quiet. No one had wanted to tell me about Flaxie, but I had seen my mother’s tormented eyes, and I knew the truth without having to be told. Death had played lottery with us, and Flaxie had drawn the short straw.

  (It is, I think, for the likes of Flaxie that we keep up a belief in Heaven. I have met relatively few adults, outside the enthusiasts of the established Church, who believe very fervently in Heaven; and Heaven was scant consolation for my grieving mother. But Flaxie, who was five, had believed in it wholeheartedly—imagined it was something like a summer meadow, with wildflowers blooming, and a picnic eternally under way—and if that childish belief soothed her in her extremity then it served a purpose more noble than truth.)

  To night the cottage was almost as quiet as it had been on the morning after Flaxie’s death. I came through the door to find my mother dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, and my father frowning into the bowl of his pipe as if it had posed a question he couldn’t answer. “The draft,” he said, as if this explained everything, which in fact it did.

  “I know,” I said. “I heard all about it.”

  My mother was too distraught to speak. My father said, “We’ll do what we can to protect you, Adam. But—”

  “I’m not afraid to serve my country.”

  “Well, that’s a praiseworthy attitude,” he said, and my mother wept even harder. “But we don’t know what’s necessary. It might be the situation in Labrador isn’t as bad as it seems.”

  Scant of words though my father was, I had often enough relied on him for advice, which he had freely given. He was aware, for instance, of my distaste for snakes; for which reason, abetted by my mother, I had been allowed to avoid the sacraments of our faith, and the venomous swellings and occasional amputations that sometimes followed. And although that aversion disappointed him, he had nevertheless taught me the practical aspects of snake-handling, including how to grasp a serpent in such a way as to avoid its bite, and how to kill one, should the necessity arise.* He was a practical man despite his unusual beliefs.

  But on this occasion his well of advice had run dry. He looked like a hunted man who has come to the end of a cul-de-sac, and can neither go forward nor safely turn back.

  I went to my bedroom, but not to sleep. Instead I bundled a few of my possessions for easy carrying—my squirrel gun, chiefly, and some notes and writing, and the History of Mankind in Space. I thought I should add some salted pork, or something of that nature, but I resolved to wait a while, so my mother wouldn’t see me packing.

  Before dawn I put on several layers of clothing and rolled down the rim of my packle hat until the wool covered my ears. I opened the window of my room and clambered over the sill, and closed the glass behind me after I had retrieved my rifle and gear. Then I crept across the open yard to the barn, where I saddled a horse (a gelding named Rapture, who was fast and strong), and rode out under a sky that had just begun to show first light.

  Last night’s snowfall still covered the ground. I was not the first up this winter morning, and the cold air already smelled of Christmas. The bakery in Williams Ford was making Nativity cakes and cinnamon buns, and the yeasty smell from the ovens covered the northwest end of town like an intoxicating fog, for there was no wind to carry it away. The day was dawning blue and still.

  Signs of Christmas were everywhere—as they ought to be, for today was the Eve of that universal holiday—but so was evidence of the conscription drive. The Reservists were already awake, passing like shadows in their scruffy uniforms, and a crowd of them had gathered by the hardware store. They had hung out a faded flag and posted a sign, which I couldn’t read, because I was determined to keep a distance between myself and the soldiers; but I knew a recruiting-post when I saw one. I didn’t doubt that the main ways in and out of town had been put under close observation.

  I took a back road to the Estate, the same riverside road Julian and I had traveled the night before. In the calm air our tracks had remained undisturbed, and I could see that no one else had recently passed this way. When I came close to the Estate I lashed Rapture to a tree in a concealing grove of pines and proceeded on foot.

  The Duncan-Crowley Estate was not fenced, nor was there any real demarcation of its boundaries, for under the Leasing System everything in Williams Ford was owned (in the legal sense) by the two great families. I approached the Estate from the western side, which was wooded and used by the Aristos for casual riding and hunting. This morning the copse was not inhabited, and I saw no one until I had passed the snow-mounded hedges where the formal gardens were planted. Here, in summer, apple and cherry trees blossomed and produced fruit, flowers bloomed, bees nursed in languid ecstasies. But now the garden was barren, its paths were quilted with snow, and there was no one visible except the senior groundskeeper, sweeping the portico of the nearest of the several Great Houses.

  The Houses were dressed for Christmas. Christmas was an even grander event at the Estate than in the town proper, as might be expected. The winter population of the Duncan-Crowley Estate wasn’t as large as its summer population, but a number of both families resided here year-round, along with their retinues, and any cousins and hangers-on who felt like hibernating over the cold season. Sam Godwin, as Julian’s tutor, wasn’t permitted to sleep in either of the two most luxurious buildings, but bunked among the staff in a white-pillared house which was smaller than its neighbors but would have passed for a tolerable mansion among the leasing class. This was where he had conducted lessons for Julian and me, and I knew the building intimately. It, too, was dressed for Christmas; pine boughs were suspended over the lintels, and a red and white Banner of the Cross dangled from the eaves. The door wasn’t locked—I let myself in.

  It was still early in the morning, as the Aristos calculate time. The tiled entranceway was empty and silent. I went directly to the room where Sam Godwin slept and conducted his classes, down an oaken corridor lit only by the early sun shining through a single window. The floor was carpeted and gave out no sound, though my shoes left damp footprints in the weft of it.

  At Sam’s particular door I was confronted with a dilemma. I was afraid to knock, for fear of alerting others. My mission as I saw it was to deliver Julian’s message as discreetly as possible. But I couldn’t walk in unannounced on a sleeping man—could I?

  I tried the handle of the door. It moved freely. I opened the door a fraction of an inch, meaning to whisper “Sam?” and give him some warning.

  But I heard Sam’s voice, low and muttering, as if he were talking to himself, and I stopped and listened more closely. The words were strange to me. He was speaking a guttural language, not English. Perhaps he wasn’t alone. It was too late to back away, however, so I decided to brazen it out. I opened the door entirely and stepped inside, saying, “Sam! It’s me, Adam. I have a message from Julian—”

  I stopped short, startled by what I saw. Sam Godwin—the same gruff but familiar Sam who had taught me the rudiments of History and Geography—was practicing black magic, or some other form of witchcraft—and on Christmas Eve! He wore a striped cowl about his shoulders, and leather lacings on his arm, and a boxlike implement strapped to his forehead, and his hands were upraised over an arrangement of candles mounted in a brass holder that appeared to have been scavenged from some ancient Tip. The invocation he was murmuring hung like a fading echo in the still air of the room: Bah-rook a-tah atten-eye hello hey-noo …

  My jaw dropped.

  “Adam!” Sam was nearly as startled as I was, and he hurriedly pulled the shawl off his back and began to unlace his various unholy riggings.

  This was so irregular I could barely comprehend it.

  Then I was afraid I did comprehend it. Often enough in Dominion school I had heard Ben Kreel talk about the vices and wickedness of the Secular Era, some of whi
ch still lingered, he said, in the cities of the East—irreligiosity, skepticism, occultism, depravity. And I thought of the ideas I had so casually imbibed from Julian and (indirectly) from Sam, some of which I had even begun to believe: Einsteinism, Darwinism, space travel.… Had I been seduced by the outrunners of some fashionable paganism, borne into Williams Ford from the gutters and alleys of Manhattan? Had I been duped, that is, by Philosophy?

  “A message,” Sam said, concealing his heathen gear, “what message? Where is Julian?”

  But I couldn’t stay. I fled the room.

  Sam barreled out of the house after me. I was fast, but he was long-legged and strong for all his forty-odd years, and he caught me up in the winter gardens—tackled me from behind. I kicked, and tried to pull away, but he pinned my shoulders securely.

  “Adam, for God’s sake, settle down!” he cried. That was impudent, I thought, invoking God, him—but then he said, “Don’t you understand what you saw? I am a Jew!”

  A Jew!

  Of course, I had heard of Jews. They lived in the Bible, and in New York City. Their equivocal relationship with Our Savior had won them opprobrium down the ages, and they were not approved of by the Dominion. But I had never seen a living Jew in the flesh, and I was astonished by the idea that Sam had been one all along: invisibly, so to speak.

  “You deceived everyone, then!” I said.

  “I never claimed to be a Christian! I never spoke of it at all. But what does it matter? You said you had a message from Julian—give it to me, damn you! Where is he?”

  I wondered what I should say, or who I might betray if I said it. The world had turned upside-down. All Ben Kreel’s lectures on patriotism and fidelity came back to me in one great flood of shame. Had I been a party to treason as well as atheism?