A History of the Future (36 page)

I found a packet on my desk Friday morning. It contained a printed ticket for an event the next afternoon called the Carter’s Creek 312 at a place called the Carter’s Creek Speedway and also my first week’s pay in silver, which amused me because it was made in old-times pre-1965 federal U.S. silver coin. The Foxfires hadn’t got their own mint going, apparently. There was another item in the packet, a card with the letters VIP printed on it and the words “Speedway Sanctum” under them, bearing the signature at the bottom of one Hunter P. Call, Chief of Security. It said “Enter Via Gate E.” A ribbon was attached to it for wearing around your neck.

This speedway was a ten-minute walk southwest of town, beyond the limestone quarries that figured so large in the old-times economy there. I went out at midafternoon along with hundreds of others from town and many hundreds more streaming in at all compass points from the countryside, a few in wagons or horseback but most on foot. It looked like the old county fairgrounds back home, except everything was new. A wooden grandstand rose out of the surrounding cornfields, all recently built and freshly painted. Harking back to Mr. Tillman, it did seem like how the Romans had built their arenas with the wealth of far-flung provinces. The track itself was a great oval a mile and a half around with a surface of what looked like tar sprayed onto crushed stone. There were Foxfire flags and standards and bunting all over the place. The Foxfire flag consisted of the old Confederate Stars and Bars in the upper corner, like the blue canton of white stars in the U.S. flag, and then a Christian cross with flames coming off the top on a snow white field in place of the old stars and stripes.

I migrated out to the grassy area inside the oval called the infield to mingle with the crowd for a while. Many of the country people were out there with their wagons and animals. They passed around plastic jugs of homemade liquor and not a few hawked food they’d brought with them, crying, “Pies! Boiled peanuts! Corn dodger! Sausage! Pickles! Punch! Muscadine! Divinity!” The grandstand across the way had two levels. I was so much in the habit of counting things after a week at the Logistics Commission that I toted up the rows of seats to estimate it held fifteen hundred people and it was getting filled up now. There were easily another thousand on the apron in front of it and two thousand more in the infield. In the center of the upper level of the grandstand was a distinctly separate large box, a substantial room, really, with a balcony at center. Even at a distance you could see they were the elite milling up there, in fancy clothes and hats. A diesel generator started up and soon a haze of oily smoke drifted over the speedway, then a loud crackling noise provoked the crowd to cheering and a man’s voice came over loudspeakers praising Jesus and thanking him for the blessed oil to power the race cars in Jesus’ name, and the whole while he spoke the crowd got louder and rowdier and more excited and expectant. I left the infield and strolled back across the track to the apron below the grandstand so as to get a closer look. Another roar erupted and I looked up to see the figure of a petite woman in a white robe, with a big mane of blonde hair, step onto the balcony above. She extended her arms as if embracing everyone in the crowd. The cheering and roaring died down quickly.

“My dear sweet precious angels,” Loving Morrow began, her amplified voice reverberating over the loudspeakers. “Thanks so much for coming out here on my fifty-first birthday. We gawn have some fun!”

Another roar from the crowd.

“You want to know how I feel at this,
ahem,
advanced age?”

People in the crowd shouted both “yes” and “no,” which provoked laughter and more roaring.

“I feel great,” Loving Morrow said. “Fact, I feel like I could take over the world. But what do I want with all those niggers and Jews and Islams and gooks and whatnot out there? Let the winged horsemen ride among them, I say, and winnow down their numbers naturally, and give this ole earth a little breathing room. I got my sights set on what’s here, in this precious corner of the globe. We are on the verge of taking back the country, and by that I mean the federal territories, like should have happened last time we come to differences on things.”

Another cheer, and whoops, plus respectful applause from the crowd.

She resumed. “First of all, I want to thank him, you know who, the Big Guy, for scheduling me to be born at the right time and all, and taking me on this wonderful ride I been on, and all the good fortune of becoming your Leading Light, my dear sweet precious angels. Praise him! Praise Jesus!”

The crowd does, so strenuously—some of them fainting in the heat from the intensity of their exertions—and for so long that Loving Morrow has to extend her arms again to get them to leave off of all their praising. She’s just getting warmed up, though.

“There was a time,” she says, “when someone of true Foxfire spirit could find comfort only in the past, while the present was something to be ashamed of, the years of welfare socialism, bridge-to-nowhere-ism, decline of faith, decay, corruption, race mixing, Jew usury, same-sex consort, moocherism, me-tooism, abortion, and every other evil whatnot that Godless vandal mutts could contrive to rot our character and turn us into slaves of Mammon. They dragged us into that Holy Land War to save the bacon of wicked hypocrite, lawless, mongrel Zionists and stood by as those monsters stabbed our boys in the back and left them to die out in the Wilderness of Zin. And that is why we dissociated these blessed Foxfire states from the depraved federals, just as our great-great-great-grandfathers stood on the righteous ground of self-determination at Charleston and Ball’s Bluff, Chancellorsville, Pittsburg Landing, Antietam, and all the rest, including the unfortunate event of November 1864, just up the road a ways . . .” She’s referring to the Battle of Franklin, a disaster for the Confederates.

The crowd whoops, cheers, and emits lots of other interesting noises to demonstrate their range of emotion. Loving Morrow gazes out over her people with supreme confidence that they were in thrall to her, nodding her head slightly as if to affirm herself, a demi-smile on her full lips, and her eyes slitty with determination. You could tell she knows they were enjoying every minute of her antics. She lets them run themselves down naturally before resuming.

“There was only a handful of us back in the day who subscribed to the Foxfire vision, back when it was just a political party. But it grew and grew. Fifty core members, then five hundred members, five thousand members, fifty thousand, five hundred thousand, five million. The time will come when those who condemn and oppose us will join us. What started as just a teeny-tiny movement is now a nation, the Foxfire Republic, one nation truly under God, and the right God, too, praise him, Jesus Christ!”

The crowd eats it up. Grown men stagger in the direction of Loving Morrow’s pulpit and fall to their knees. Some break into babbling nonsense speech, what the Foxfire true believers call
the tongues
. People of all ages, both men and women, are shedding tears, even bawling.

“It was our recognition,” Loving Morrow goes on, “that a vicious gang of criminals tried to destroy our Foxfire founding heritage in the halls of Washington and the law courts, which provoked the need to separate, and we will not rest now until we overcome their vile and illegitimate so-called government and restore that founding vision among all the states, from Maine to Minnesota, praise him, praise Jesus. And likewise to that rapist, murderer, cannibal, self-proclaimed N-word prophet, Sage, also known as the usurer Milton Steptoe, in lawless occupation of our legacy cotton states, we proclaim a warrant of eviction! Let those monkeys move south to a monkey land in the South American tropics were they can laze under the banana tree all the live-long day and make monkey babies and do nothing worthy of the true human being.”

The crowd commences, as if on cue, to making monkey noises and gestures—going
hoo hoo hoo
and pretending to scrape their knuckles on the ground and scratch their flanks. The Leading Light beams at them and nods her big gold-maned head with approbation. This goes on for some time. They are all excellently rehearsed and orchestrated in their roles, the leader and the led.

“Do you know the true origin of the Jew?” she continues. “In sixth-century before-Jesus Babylon, where all the bad apples of Judah’s barrel got mongrelized. And, then, you see, they return to Canaan and mingle with the mongrel descendants of Esau, and this bunch become the self-righteous, blaspheming Pharisees of our New Testament times. Didn’t the apostle John say of them:
Ye are of your father the Devil, and the lust of your father ye will do?
With the rise of these Pharisee Jews and the Christmas Nativity comes the battle between the racially pure holy Christian ones of the world and the unholy mixed mongrel Jew. The dearest belief of the Pharisee Jew is that they are the highest life-form on earth. They are special—chosen people!—while the white Christian is on a par with the beasts of the field. Can you beat that?”

“No-o-o-o-o . . .” the crowd replies as one. They’re going wild, brows knitted in righteous rage and eyes all scrunched together, turned-down mouths, and fists pumping in the air.

Loving Morrow’s voice has begun to get a little shrill as she winds up to a carefully calibrated higher pitch of demagoguery. “These are the same ones that teach that Jesus was the bastard offspring conceived of a menstruating prostitute, and that Jesus dead on the cross was consigned to hell to forever boil in hot semen.”

Shouts and catcalls.

“The Pharisee Jew theology goes by the names secular humanism and dialectical materialism, but it all just boils down to atheism, hatred of God, denial of God, worship of God’s enemy Satan. Didn’t these same Pharisee Jews of Wall Street bring down the dollar money system with their thievings, their necromancies, their black arts, and their sharp practice? What we saw in those dark days at the endgame of the old times was nothing other than the ritual murder of our economy. Yessir! They drained the value out of it as surely as they drank the blood of our forefathers and it was the same ritual murder that tried to destroy our way of life, which we strive to preserve here in your Foxfire capital city. Who tried to cut off the oil?”

“The Pharisee Jews!” the crowd bellows.

“Who tried to cut off the electric?” Loving Morrow yells.

“Pharisee Jews!”

“Who set the nigger up in arms against us?”

“Pharisee Jews!”

“Who took the cars away?”

“Pharisee Jews!”

“That is the God’s truth, my dear, sweet, blessed precious angels. But we still got ’em and here they come, Foxfire angels, here they are!”

It’s like a signal. Heavy rumbling starts up at the far end of the speedway. The crowd is going wild. A section of the fence at the far end rolls away, opening up like a gate, and automobiles start pouring through the gate onto the oval track. These cars are painted in wild, hot colors: flaming yellow, orange, red with big numbers on them and the names of people or places or things painted wherever there isn’t a number: “Lowes,” and “Wix,” and “Kobalt,” and “Moog.” Perhaps those were the names of pilots or the owners. I don’t know. There were eight of them altogether. I haven’t seen so many cars running since I was a small child. These cars jockey into a double-line formation and begin to circle the track on parade. The crowd is delirious at the sight of them. Loving Morrow is not quite finished, though. She puts out her arms again and galvanizes the crowd’s attention back from the purring, smoking cars.

“My precious angels! The future belongs to you, not to the mutts and rascals! You are the highest embodiment of Foxfire faith and principle! Time and time again, the appeal must be made to renew the struggle. And so I say, Foxfire today, Foxfire tomorrow, Foxfire forever! Y’all have a nice day!”

The crowd takes up the chant, “Foxfire, Foxfire, Foxfire,” as their Leading Light throws her arms around herself, as if in an embrace of them all, and soaks in the rabid love of her followers.

She remained out there on her pulpit a very long time, until you sensed that the people were running out of energy to keep up the display of affection and worship. Anyway, by this time the racing cars had all assembled at a starting point below the grandstand, their engines winding, ringing, and sputtering. A fat man handed Loving Morrow a green flag on a stick. She waved it left and right and the race cars jumped off their marks with their engines screaming. Out in the infield horses reared. One got loose among the crowd with a wagon behind it, knocking several people down before being brought under control. The cars reached their racing speed in the first lap around the oval and so began an event that was punishing on my nerves with its violence of noise and stink of burnt oil. I struggled through the crowd to the inside of the grandstand to get away from it. Foxfire soldiers were posted at frequent intervals around the interior, with its fried-food stands and beverage stations and vague stink of urine. I showed my VIP card to a lieutenant and he directed me to a stairway that led to the so-called salon where the dignitaries were all gathered. Two more soldiers at the door examined my card and patted down my body before admitting me.