Julian: A Christmas Story Read online

  It was a debate to which I could contribute nothing, so I took a little slip of paper from my back-satchel, and a pencil, and wrote a letter.

  It was addressed to my mother, since my father was without the art of literacy. You will no doubt have noticed my absence, I wrote. It saddens me to be away from home,especially at this time (I write on Christmas Day). But I hope you will be consoled with the knowledge that I am all right, and not in any immediate danger.

  (This was a lie, depending on how you define “immediate,” but a kindly one, I reasoned.) In any case I would not have been able to remain in Williams Ford, since I could not have escaped the draft for long even if I postponed my military service for some few more months. The conscription drive is in earnest; the War in Labrador must be going badly. It was inevitable that we should be separated, as much as I mourn for my home and all its comforts. (And it was all I could do not to decorate the page with a vagrant tear.) Please accept my best wishes and my gratitude for everything you and Father have done for me. I will write again as soon as it is practicable, which may not be immediately. Trust in the knowledge that I will pursue my destiny faithfully and with every Christian virtue you have taught me. God bless you in the coming and every year.

  That was not enough to say, but there wasn’t time for more. Julian and Sam were calling for me. I signed my name, and added, as a postscript:

  Please tell Father that I value his advice, and that it has already served me usefully. Yrs. Etc. once again, Adam.

  “You’ve written a letter,” Sam observed as he came to rush me to my horse. “But have you given any thought to how you might mail it?”

  I confessed that I had not.

  “The Reservist can carry it,” said Julian, who had already mounted his horse. The Reservist was also mounted, but with his hands tied behind him, as it was Sam’s final conclusion that we should set him loose with the horse headed west, where he would encounter more troops before very long. He was awake but, as I have said, sullen; and he barked, “I’m nobody’s damned mailman!” I addressed the message, and Julian took it and tucked it into the Reservist’s saddlebag. Despite his youth, and despite the slightly dilapidated condition of his hair and clothing, Julian sat tall in the saddle. I had never thought of him as high-born until that moment, when an aspect of command seemed to enter his body and his voice. He said to the Reservist, “We treated you kindly—” The Reservist uttered an oath.

  “Be quiet. You were injured in the conflict, but we took you prisoner, and we’ve treated you in a more gentlemanly fashion than we were when the conditions were reversed. I am a Comstock—at least for the moment—and I won’t be spoken to crudely by an infantryman, at any price. You’ll deliver this boy’s message, and you’ll do it gratefully.”

  The Reservist was clearly awed by the assertion that Julian was a Comstock—he had been laboring under the assumption that we were mere village runaways—but he screwed up his courage and said,

  “Why should I?”

  “Because it’s the Christian thing to do,” Julian said, “and if this argument with my uncle is ever settled, the power to remove your head from your shoulders may well reside in my hands. Does that make sense to you, soldier?”

  The Reservist allowed that it did.

  * * *

  And so we rode out that Christmas morning from the ruins in which the Tipmen had discovered the HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE, which still resided in my back-satchel, vagrant memory of a half-forgotten past.

  My mind was a confusion of ideas and anxieties, but I found myself recalling what Julian had said, long ago it now seemed, about DNA, and how it aspired to perfect replication but progressed by remembering itself imperfectly. It might be true, I thought, because our lives were like that—time itself was like that, every moment dying and pregnant with its own distorted reflection. Today was Christmas: which Julian claimed had once been a pagan holiday, dedicated to Sol Invictus or some other Roman god; but which had evolved into the familiar celebration of the present, and was no less dear because of it.

  (I imagined I could hear the Christmas bells ringing from the Dominion Hall at Wiliams Ford, though that was impossible, for we were miles away, and not even the sound of a cannon shot could carry so far across the prairie. It was only memory speaking.)

  And maybe this logic was true of people, too; maybe I was already becoming an inexact echo of what I had been just days before. Maybe the same was true of Julian. Already something hard and uncompromising had begun to emerge from his gentle features—the first manifestation of a new Julian, a freshly evolved Julian, called forth by his violent departure from Williams Ford, or slouching toward New York to be born.

  But that was all Philosophy, and not much use, and I kept quiet about it as we spurred our horses in the direction of the railroad, toward the rude and squalling infant Future.

  Footnotes

  1

  Whom I would meet when he was sixty years old, and I was a newcomer to the book trade—but that’s another story.

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  2

  Our local representative of the Council of the Dominion; in effect, the Mayor of the town.

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  3

  I beg the reader’s patience if I detail matters that seem well-known. I indulge the possibility of a foreign audience, or a posterity to whom our present arrangements are not self-evident.

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  4

  Julian’s somewhat feminine nature had won him a reputation among the other young aristos as a sodomite. That they could believe this of him without evidence is testimony to the tenor of their thoughts, as a class. But it had occasionally redounded to my benefit. On more than one occasion, his female acquaintances—sophisticated girls of my own age, or older—made the assumption that I was Julian’s intimate companion, in a physical sense. Whereupon they undertook to cure me of my deviant habits, in the most direct fashion. I was happy to cooperate with these “cures,” and they were successful, every time.

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  5

  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 inebriated, 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.

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  6

  Not a talent that was born fully-formed, I should add. 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, were not native to Brussels, and were generally too massive to be wrestled to the ground by American lads; a journey from London to Rome could not be accomplished in a matter of hours, even on “a very fast horse”—and Sam might have continued in this vein, had I not fled the room in a condition of acute auctorial embarrassment.

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  7

  “Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.” I had recounted these instructions to Julian, whose horror of serpents far exceeded my own: “Oh, I could never do such a thing!” he had exclaimed. This surfeit of timidity may surprise readers who have followed his later career.

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  8

  Or “culs-de-sac”? My French is rudimentary.

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  9

  Though Old Miami or Orlando might begin to fit the bill.

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  10

  Julian’s sense of timing was exquisite, perhaps as a result of his theatrical inclinations.

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  11

  O
nce confined to the southeast, corn snakes have spread north with the warming climate. I have read that certain of the secular ancients used to keep them as pets—yet another instance of our ancestors’ willful perversity.

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