It was a large and luxurious room, like a hotel lobby, with carpets and wicker chairs, and potted palms, and a bar at the back end, and at least a hundred people in finery with drinks in hand. The noise was not quite so intense up there, though the roar of the engines was now competing with a voice on the loudspeaker making commentary on the action of the race. The Leading Light was making her way around the big room, stopping to chat with these favored subjects of her realm, leaning in close to listen to their remarks and tributes, mindful of giving them her touch, laying her hand on a shoulder or another hand to establish intimacy, sometimes on a cheek, nodding and smiling at what they had to say. She conducted herself like someone keenly aware of her own physical magnetism. Her white gown was cinched at the waist emphasizing the abundance of her flesh. Her bosom shifted visibly within as though she were filled with gelatin. I watched her closely with the most extreme fascination, trying to imagine how my assignment might develop. You couldn’t fail to see how hard she worked at her role, the dedication she brought to it. She gave some attention to everybody. Hector Tillman was in the room. He ignored me completely and likewise me him. He had his own somewhat smaller orbit of persons around him, like a smaller sun with its own planets.
I obtained a sweet whiskey drink called a julep, suggested by the bar man who had a pitcher of them at hand, and watched Ms. Morrow work the assembled admirers. Waiters wove through the crowd with trays of tidbits: fried things, ham biscuits, cheese nuggets, sugary nut squares—I tried them all. They left me queasy. I began to notice some things about the salon and the people in it. It was a little shabbier than my first impression registered. The potted palms were plastic and soiled with a film of greasy dust. The wicker chairs were all flimsy plastic, too, made in the old times, I’m sure. The carpets were threadbare and stained. The VIP men and women elite of the Foxfire government tended uniformly to plumpness, as though they ate too much and moved about too little, with sallow skin, dull-looking eyes, and careworn creases on their faces. Close up, their clothing was not so well made, and not always very clean. It reminded me of the costumes we wore back in the Union Grove theatricals. Some of them gave off a bad odor of people not used to bathing, or in a state of never-ending terror that produced a stink of anxiety. Not a few of them were visibly drunk. Of the women present, none of them was a match for Loving Morrow in appearance, or even close, nor did I spot one close to my own age. I was feeling the effects of that julep myself when Loving Morrow finally came around to my side of the big room and stepped up to me. She had an undeniable power of presence.
“Have I seen you ’round here before, young man?” she says, with an interesting lopsided smile. She wore a great deal of cosmetic decoration about her eyes, to make them look bigger and more dramatic, I suppose, but there was no denying she had a naturally beautiful face.
I’m like, “No, ma’am. I’m new here in town.”
She’s like, “Where from then?”
I tell her Covington up in Kentucky and a little of my legend and when I’m done she puts her hand on my upper arm and squeezes it.
She goes, “That’s across the O-hio from Cincinnati, iddn’ it?”
I’m like, “Yes, ma’am.” Her eyes are working me up and down, like I was a perfectly fried chicken thigh and she hasn’t had her lunch yet. She asks my name and I tell her.
“How come you’re not in the army, Daniel,” she says. “You know we have a big initiative about to get going up thataway.”
“I don’t know about that, ma’am,” I tell her. “I’m here to serve.”
She goes, “I think you’ll serve just fine. Where you working at, darling?”
“Logistics Commission.”
“Is that so?” She leans in to whisper to one of her army attendants, a dark-haired sergeant with a single eyebrow that makes him look like a cookie jar. He takes out a pad of foolscap and writes something down. Then she turns her attention back to me. “You one of Mr. Bodrew’s boys, then?”
“Yes, I guess I am, ma’am.”
“Oh, well, that’s important work, all right, moving materials and commodities and whatnot. You know I’m a very hands-on executive. I like to check up on the commission work from time to time. Maybe you could consult with me on it sometime. She slides her hand down my arm to my hand, gives it a squeeze. Her hand is smooth, dry, and warm. She stands so close I can feel heat pulsating off her. Then she steps back as though to take me in more fully before moving on in her clockwise transit of the room.
When she completed the circuit, she headed for the stairway and left the salon with her retinue. After she was gone, few in the room paid attention to the race. They continued drinking heavily and then long tables groaning with grilled meats and other treats were set out for them. I didn’t want to become familiar with any of them. The roaring engines outside perfectly matched the gale of emotion inside of me as all the theoreticals of my mission resolved into real flesh and blood. Even as I left the salon, I could still feel the heat between us. My call was not long in coming after that fateful encounter.
Daniel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and then stared emptily across the table at his father as though utterly depleted. A pallid gloom had settled over him. He looked like someone not just grown out of boyhood but disfigured inside by experience since then. It made Robert uncomfortable to see him that way, all the innocence drained out of him, the dreadful untold conclusion of his tale oppressing him like a judgment.
“I expect I’ll learn what happened?” Robert said.
“Yes,” Daniel said, “by and by you will.”
Robert craned his head around and glanced at the front of the Union Tavern barroom. Winter darkness filled the big window. Night had fallen here in Union Grove. The barroom had filled up with workmen and laborers. Someone began plinking a mandolin, a jaunty tune in a minor key with a sad edge called “The Wren.” It was still a novelty for such a place of warm conviviality as the tavern to exist in the village, Robert thought, and such a contrast to the chilling tribulations of a nation consuming itself in hatred, poverty, violence, and death.
F
ORTY-THREE
It was dark when the doctor finished cleaning and stitching up the outer layers of the three knife wounds in Jack Harron’s thoracic cavity. Donald Acker’s blade had missed Jack’s heart but neatly sectioned part of the lower right lobe of his lung. The eighth right rib was broken by another thrust and the doctor had to repair a nick in the inferior mesenteric vein. The doctor placed a drain tube in the pleural space of the right lung. Jack was resting comfortably in the doctor’s surgical suite in the clinic building, formerly a carriage barn behind the doctor’s house. Donald Acker’s remains occupied a wooden table in the cold, damp, and dark of Dr. Copeland’s nearby springhouse, sometimes recruited for use as a morgue. Jeanette, the doctor’s wife, swabbed Jack’s sutures and the drain tube exit with alcohol.
Harry Melzer, Ben Deaver’s houseman, had been taken home to Pumpkin Hill with superficial wounds and a sprained shoulder.
Andrew Pendergast and Ben Deaver waited in the doctor’s office next door to the surgical suite. The office was a large room filled with interesting artifacts of medicine and natural history as well as some comfortable furniture and a wood-burning stove. On the cabinet behind Deaver’s head, a rampant stuffed porcupine surveyed the scene with dead eyes. The two men had taken up the doctor’s offer to enjoy some of his pear brandy while he worked on Jack Harron and they waited. They had already covered the questions pertaining to Acker, his feckless attempt at farming, his misfortune, the horse he had kept starved in the barn, and his grievance over being turned in for it.
“Disagreeable as he was,” Ben Deaver said, “I felt sorry for him.”
“Why didn’t you just ask him to work for you?” Andrew said.
“Oh, I did, more than once. He wouldn’t. Said he wasn’t cut out to be a peasant. When he put it that way, it got me thinking. To be honest, I’m still not used to how this is all working out in these times,” Deaver said. The brandy had made him garrulous. “In the old times, at the airline, I had a lot of employees. But they got good wages, benefits. The corporate structure took care of it all. Now, it’s gotten all personal. There’s no human resources office doing payroll. I’m basically cash poor. I’ve got the house and the furnishings and the operations, and my animals, but that’s all sunk costs, a lot of it paid for when there was still paper money circulating. Now, we don’t have enough hard silver revenue coming in to pay these people properly in the old sense of money wages. They know it, I know it, but it is what it is. They get some coin and most of their food and some goods. Also on the plus side for them, there’s no taxes these days and no mortgage payments, no car payments, no gasoline to pay for day in and day out. I like to think that the benefits balance out for us and them. But it’s a different social structure now, real different, and I imagine over time the lines between us will just grow sharper, and that’s troubling. We couldn’t run our household without help now, with the electric down, no machines, no vacuum cleaner, no washer and dryer. Now everything has to be done by hand. In the old times, we had a housekeeper who came every other day. It was enough. Everything seemed to run itself. Now it seems we need all these . . . servants. I’m uneasy with it.”
“When things ran on automatic, a lot of people had no jobs and no purpose.” Andrew said. “People need a place and a purpose. We have an obligation to provide that now. It’s probably the best we can do.”
“The way things are going, this won’t be a democracy anymore.”
Andrew had to laugh. “Democracy?” he said. “We don’t even have a government, as far as I know.”
“Pretty soon, those of us with property that’s been maintained and improved and kept productive will have to go the way Bullock does—straight-up feudal. This thing of ours is going Middle Ages. Who knows, maybe knighthood will come back into flower. Where did you find this boy Jack?”
“Right on Van Buren Street on a winter night,” Andrew said. “He was drunk and in a bad state of mind, failing in every way. He turned up in my parlor later that night. Just snuck in while I was out rehearsing the Christmas program over at the church. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Did he try to hurt you?”
“Well, no, he asked for help. He asked me to fix him.”
“Like he was a piece of broken equipment?”
“In so many words, yes.”
“And how did you accomplish that?”
“I gave him a lot of chores to do in a structured life. I provided him with some basic comforts. I trusted him. I introduced him to the idea of improving himself. I think he began to see the advantage in all that.”
“He can improve himself all he likes,” Deaver said. “But he’s not likely to change his social or economic status. He’s a servant now.”
“Maybe people can find contentment just being where they are, as long as they’re treated fairly. What’s wrong with being a good and faithful servant?”
“Not everyone will go along with the program,” Deaver said. “Just saying. Frankly, Christmas night when we first saw him, we thought he was your new boyfriend.”
“Well, that’s just not the case, Ben,” Andrew said.
“Excuse me for going there. It’s been a strange day and I’ve got a buzz on. I owe that young man for saving my life. I don’t know how I can repay him for that.”
“Throw a levee in his honor. I’ll bring my musicians over.”
“Well,” Ben Deaver said. “That’s an idea.”
In the adjoining room, Jack lay sedated with morphine that the doctor had extracted laboriously by reflux, filtration, and distillation from opium grown under contract by farmer Bill Schmidt. The doctor, by urgent necessity and limited means, was developing new skills as a chemist. Jack was not exactly asleep but floating in a plane of existence where all the sensory discomforts of the physical body were gloriously absent and he enjoyed a crystalline mental clarity that simplified everything. He was aware of having engaged in a deadly battle and prevailing. The entity he had vanquished somehow seemed related to a previous iteration of himself, something violent, empty, and foul. Out of this battle he, Jack Harron, was being reborn into something new and entirely different, something clean, filled with purpose, untroubled. Under the influence of the drug, his thoughts came in images and sensory impressions. All of these were of places of comfort and things of satisfaction: the kitchen at his new home with its copper pots, baskets of apples and squashes, things simmering on the stove, roasted birds, hanging bouquets of herbs; the joy of splitting kindling with a sharp ax in the cold knowing you would shortly be back in the warm; the movement of his limbs walking in good boots while word clouds of history and art floated around the perimeter of his attention; a warm parlor with yellow walls full of light on a winter’s day; the smell of paint and turpentine. What changed for him was just this: his energies no longer went into opposing the world. Something had allowed him to go where the world was tending to go, allowing him to ride with it. All he had to do was remain in service to that flow of things the way a person of religious faith put himself in service to God. He watched the doctor roll down his sleeves and put on a cardigan sweater. He didn’t comprehend what the doctor said to him, but he was content to let it be. He felt safe and protected and filled with gratitude. The woman drew another wool blanket over him and moved a candle stand to a marble-topped chest beside the bed. Jack’s eyes followed the flickering shadows on the wall as the doctor and his wife left the room.