Thus I entered the Easton house, that Temple of Story, which enclosed a cheerful din, and where the air was rich with the odors created by good food and perhaps less good children. After a brief interval, during which three of those same children stared at me with relentless interest, Mr. Easton’s daughter returned down a flight of stairs, dodging wheeled toys and other impediments, and invited me up to her father’s study. “He would be happy to meet you. Go on in, Mr. Hazzard,” she said, indicating the open door. “Don’t be shy!”
Charles Curtis Easton was inside. I recognized him instantly from the portrait which was embossed on the backs of all his books. He sat at a crowded desk, under a bright window dappled with ailanthus shade, the very picture of a working writer. He wasn’t a young man. His hair was snowy white, and it had retreated from his forehead and taken up a defensive position at the back of his skull. He wore a full beard, also white; and his eyes, which were embedded in networks of amiable wrinkles, gazed out from under ivory brows. He wasn’t fat, exactly, but he had the physique of a man who works sitting down and dines to his own satisfaction.
“Come in, Mr. Hazzard,” he said, glancing at the card his daughter had given him. “I’m always happy to meet a young writer. The Adventures of Captain Commongold: that was yours, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, pleased that he had heard of it.
“A fine book, although the punctuation was somewhat eccentric. And you have a new one?”
It was in my hand. I had brought an inscribed copy as a gift. Stammering out my purpose, I passed it over.
“A Western Boy at Sea,” he read, examining the boards. “And it has an Octopus in it!”
“Well, no … the Octopus was the illustrator’s conceit.”
“Oh? Too bad. But the sword and the pistol?”
“They make several appearances.” My embarrassment was almost painful. Why hadn’t I put an Octopus in the story? It wouldn’t have been hard to do. I ought to have thought of it in advance.
“That’s fine,” said Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, concealing any disappointment he might have felt. He put the book aside. “Sit down. You met my daughter? And my grandchildren?”
I fitted myself into an upholstered chair. “We weren’t fully introduced, but they seem very nice.”
He beamed at this modest compliment. “Tell me about yourself, then, Mr. Hazzard. You don’t appear to be one of the high Eupatridians—no insult intended—and yet you’re associated with the current President, isn’t that right?”
I told him as briefly as possible about my origins in the boreal west and about the unexpected events that had led to my residing on the Palace grounds. I told him how much his work had meant to me when I was a young lease-boy eager for books, and how I remained loyal to his writing and frequently recommended it to others. He accepted the praise gracefully, and asked more questions about the war, and Labrador, and such topics. He seemed genuinely interested in my answers; and by the time half an hour had passed we were “old friends.”
But it was not my intention just to flatter him, much as he may have deserved the flattery. Before long I mentioned Julian Comstock’s interest in the theater, and his intention of developing a movie script on a subject close to his heart.
“That’s an unusual ambition for a President,” Mr. Easton observed.
“It is, sir; but Julian is an unusual President. His love of cinema is genuine and earnest. He’s hit a snag, though, which his storytelling skills can’t surmount.” I went on to describe in general The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin.
“Darwin and biological evolution are difficult topics to dramatize,” Mr. Easton said, “and isn’t he worried that the result won’t receive the Dominion’s approval? Very religious persons aren’t keen on Mr. Charles Darwin, if I remember my lessons.”
“You remember them correctly. Julian is no admirer of the worldly power of the Dominion, however, and he intends to overrule their objections in this case.”
“Can he do such a thing?”
“He says he can. But the problem is with the script. It won’t spring to life the way he wants it to. He asked my advice, but I’m only a beginning writer. I thought—of course I don’t mean to presume on your generosity—”
“I wouldn’t ordinarily look at a novice’s screen-play. A commission from a sitting President of the United States is a different matter, however. I’ve worked on a few cinematic translations of my own stories in the past. I suppose I could examine President Comstock’s material, and offer some advice, if it’s wanted.”
“It’s very much wanted, sir, and I’m sure Julian will be grateful for anything you can tell him, as will I.”
“Have you brought the script?”
“Yes,” I said, drawing the folded pages out of my vest pocket. “Handwritten, I’m afraid,” for I saw that Mr. Easton owned a typewriter even more sleek than the machine I had obtained from Theodore Dornwood, “but Julian’s cursive is legible, mostly.”
“I’d like to read it. Will you wait downstairs while I do so?”
“You mean to read it right now, sir?”
“If you’ll oblige me.”
I assured him I would. Then I went downstairs and spoke for a while with his daughter, who was named Mrs. Robson. She shared the house with her father while her husband was up in Quebec City commanding a regiment. During this conversation Mrs. Robson’s four children (if I counted correctly) bounded through the room at irregular intervals, shouting for attention and wiping their noses on things. Whenever they passed I favored them with a smile, though they mainly grimaced in return, or emitted disrespectful noises.
Then Mr. Easton himself came hobbling down the stairs, a cane in one hand and Charles Darwin in the other. His age had made him slightly infirm, and Mrs. Robson hurried to his side and scolded him for attempting the staircase without help.
“Don’t fuss,” he told his daughter. “I’m on Presidential business. Mr. Hazzard, your evaluation of your friend’s work was exactly correct. It’s obviously sincere and well-researched, but it lacks certain elements indispensable to any truly successful cinematic production.”
“What elements are those?” I asked.
“Songs,” he said decisively. “And a villain. And, ideally, pirates.”
I was eager to communicate this news to Julian—that the famous writer Mr. Charles Curtis Easton had agreed to help him develop his script—but there was a telegram waiting for me when I came home to Calyxa.
I had not received a telegram before. I was alarmed when I saw it, and guessed in advance that it contained bad news.
That intuition was correct. The telegram was from Williams Ford. It had been sent by my mother.
Dear Adam, it said. Your father gravely ill. Snakebit. Come if you can.
I made the arrangements at once, and secured a ticket on an express train; but he died before I reached Athabaska.
* There are several such accounts in print, by various authors. Some of these are quite accurate, and others have received the Dominion Stamp of Approval.
† We had named the child Flaxie in honor of my lost sister, but also because of her crop of fine wheat-colored hair. By the time she reached her first birthday Flaxie had lost that baby hair, and wore an ebony crown just as lush and tightly-curled as her mother’s. We kept the name, however, despite the apparent contradiction.
5
The train rolled over half of America that Fourth of July, it seemed to me, past small towns thriving and many abandoned, past vast Estates worked by shirtless indentured men, past countless Tips and Tills and ruins, into a sunset that burned like slow coal on the horizon, and on into the prairie night. There were no fireworks that evening, though there was some impromptu merrymaking in the dinner car—I didn’t join in. I was asleep by moonrise. Late the next day the train entered the State of Athabaska, its border marked by a landscape of enormous pits where the Secular Ancients had once strained the tarry earth for oil. I saw the rui
ns of a Machine the size of a Cathedral, its rusted treadwork embedded in scabs of calcified mud. Wherever there was open water, geese and crows flocked up to salute the passing train.
Julian had wired the Duncan-Crowley Estate to tell them I was coming. That presented a social difficulty to the Aristos there. Seen from one angle, I was a recreant lease-boy of no account come home to visit his illiterate father’s grave; from another, I was the scribe and confidant of the new President, the nearest thing to an emissary from the Executive Power that Williams Ford was ever likely to receive. The Duncans and the Crowleys, whose fortune was all in Ohio farmland and Nevada mines, and whose New York connections were tenuous, had resolved their dilemma by sending Ben Kreel to meet me. He came down to Connaught in the Estate’s best rig, drawn by two high-stepping horses.
The train had arrived with the dawn. I hadn’t slept well; but Ben Kreel was an early riser by habit, and he shook my hand as cheerfully as the occasion permitted. “Adam Hazzard! Or should I call you Colonel Hazzard?”
He had not changed much, though I had new eyes (it seemed) to see him with. He was still bluff, stout, red-cheeked, and utterly in control of himself. “I’m out of the Army now—plain Adam will do,” I said.
“Not so plain as when you left us,” he said. “We all thought you and Julian must have been running from conscription. But you distinguished yourselves in battle—and in other ways—didn’t you?”
“What a person runs run from and what a person runs to aren’t always as different as we hope.”
“And you’re an Author now, and speak like one.”
“I don’t mean to put on any airs, sir.”
“A justified pride is never out of place. Very sorry about your father.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Estate physician did what he could; but it was a bad bite, and your father wasn’t a young man.”
The carriage moved away from the clutter and noise of the train depot, past wood-frame hostels and the many bar-rooms and hemp-dens my mother used to call “the curse of Connaught,” onto the pressed-earth road leading north to Williams Ford. It was a warm and windless morning, and the rising sun picked out the peaks of the distant mountains. Devil’s Paint-Brush grew in colorful thickets along the verge of the road, and the sparsely-wooded land gave out its old familiar summer odors.
“The Duncans and the Crowleys,” Ben Kreel said, “are prepared to welcome you to town, and no doubt would have put on some sort of public reception if the circumstances were less unhappy. As it is, they’ve set aside a room for you in one of the Great Houses.”
“I thank them kindly; but I was never uncomfortable in my mother’s house, and I expect she would like me to stay there, and that’s what I mean to do.”
“Probably that’s wise,” Ben Kreel said, with something that might have been a suppressed sigh of relief.
When at last we came through the fields where the indentured men worked, into the low rolling hills near the River Pine, and reached the outskirts of Williams Ford, I mentioned that the Independence Day fireworks must have been extravagant this year.
“They were,” Ben Kreel said. “A peddler brought in a handful of Chinese rockets from Seattle for the event. Blue Fire-Wheels and some very colorful Salamanders … how did you know?”
“The air still smells of gunpowder,” I said. It was a sensitivity I had picked up in the war.
I won’t dwell on the details of my grief. The reader understands the delicacy of these painful emotions.*
I put in a brief appearance at the Estate, for the sake of politeness, and I was politely received by the Duncans and the Crowleys, but I didn’t stay long. It was more important for me to see my mother. I passed the stables on the way from the Estate to the lease-holds, and I was tempted to find out whether my old tormentors still worked there, and whether my new rank had made them afraid of me; but that was a petty urge, not worth indulging.
The cottage where I had grown up stood just where I had left it. The creek behind it still ran dappled and cheerful toward the Pine, and my sister Flaxie’s grave was where it had always been, modestly marked. But there was another grave beside it now, a fresh one, with a white wooden cross above it on which my father’s name had been burned. Though he was illiterate, he had learned to recognize his written name and could even produce a plausible signature—he would be able to read his own gravepost, I supposed, if his ghost sat up and craned its neck.
Graves are best visited by sunlight. The warm July weather was soothing, and the bird sounds and the faint chuckling of the creek made the idea of death more bearable. I hated to think of next year’s snows weighing down this fresh-turned sod, or the January winds blowing over it. But my father was next to Flaxie now, so she wouldn’t be alone; and I didn’t suppose the dead suffered very badly from the cold. The dead are immune to seasonal discomforts—there is at least that much of Heaven in the world.
My mother saw me standing by the grave and came out from the back door of the cottage. She took me by the arm, wordlessly. Then we went indoors and wept together.
I stayed five days. My mother was in a fragile condition, both because of her grief and because of her age. Her eyes were poor now, and she was no longer useful to the Aristos as a seamstress; but because she was of the leasing class, and had served faithfully all her life, she continued to receive chits with which to buy food at the lease-store, and she would not be forced out of her home.
Her eyesight had not dimmed so much that she wasn’t eager to see a copy of A Western Boy at Sea, and of course I had brought one for her. She handled it with exaggerated care, smiling a little; then she put it on a high shelf next to The Adventures of Captain Commongold, which I had also sent her. She would read it, she said, chapter by chapter, in the afternoons, when the light and her eyes were at their best.
I told her that I couldn’t have written either of these books if she had not been so determined about teaching me to read—teaching me the love of reading, that is, and not just the names of the letters, as most lease-boys were taught on Sundays.
“I learned to read from my own mother,” she said. “And she learned from her mother before her, all the way back to the Secular Ancients, according to family legend. There was a school-teacher in our family, long ago. Perhaps another writer, too—who knows? Your father’s greatest shame was his illiteracy. He felt it deeply, though he didn’t show it.”
“You could have taught him the art of it.”
“I offered to. He wouldn’t try. Too old and set for that, he always said. I expect he was afraid of failing.”
“I taught a man to read,” I said, “when I was in the Army.” That made her smile again.
She was keen for news about Calyxa and the baby. By a fortunate coincidence Julian had arranged to have a photograph of us taken shortly before Independence Day, and I showed it off. Here was Calyxa in a chair, her coiled hair shining. Flaxie sat in her lap, slightly lopsided, baby dress askew, goggling at the camera. I stood behind the chair with one hand on Calyxa’s shoulder.
“She has a forceful look,” my mother observed, “your Calyxa. Good strong legs. The baby is pretty. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I can still spot a pretty baby, and that’s one.”
“Your grand-daughter,” I said.
“Yes. And she’ll learn to read, too, won’t she? When she’s ready?”
“No doubt of it,” I said.
Eventually we talked about my father’s death—not just the fact but the circumstances of it. I asked whether he had been bitten during a Signs service.
“There aren’t any services of that kind anymore, Adam. Church of Signs was never popular except among a few of the indentured, and not long after you left the Duncans and Crowleys decided it was a ‘cult,’ and ought to be suppressed. Ben Kreel began preaching against the sect, and the most enthusiastic members of the congregation were sold off or sent away. Your father was the only lease-man among them, so he stayed; but there was no congregati
on to preach to anymore.”
“But he kept the snakes.” I had seen them in their cages out back, writhing unpleasantly.
“They were pets to him. He couldn’t bear to stop feeding them, or destroy them any other way, and it wouldn’t have been safe to set them loose. I’m not sure I can bring myself to kill them, either. Although I despise them.” She said this was a vehemence that startled me. “I do despise them very much. I always have. I loved your father dearly. But I never loved those snakes. They haven’t been fed since he died. Something has to be done about them.”
We didn’t discuss the matter any further. That night, however, after she had served a modest stew and dumplings and gone to bed, I left the house very quietly, and went out to the cages.
A bright moon hung above the distant mountains. It cast a steady pale light on my father’s family of Massasauga Rattlers. The serpents were in a bitter mood, no doubt from hunger. There was a slashing impatience in their motions. Nor would they have been milked of their venom recently. (This was something my father used to do secretly, before services, especially if he thought children might participate in the handling. He would stretch a bit of thin leather over the mouth of an old jar, and let the serpents bite it. It took the poison out of them for a period of time. That was his own private apostasy, I suppose—an insurance policy against any momentary lapse of attention on the part of higher powers.) The snakes were aware of my presence. They twined and curled restlessly, and I imagined I could feel a cold fury in their blank and bloodless eyes.
A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.