A History of the Future (32 page)

F
ORTY-TWO

Robert and Daniel Earle slid into a booth in the back room of the new Union Tavern. Brother Micah was polishing glasses behind the bar where some idle farmhands passed the winter midday nursing glasses of cider. The only other patrons that lunch hour were two young men from Bennington, Vermont, twenty-three miles to the east, who occupied another booth in the back, having just that morning delivered to Brother Jobe’s chief engineer, Brother Shiloh, a belt and roller assembly manufactured in one of the first small factories started anywhere post-collapse in the struggling region. Their factory turned out equipment for water-powered machinery and was destined to run the washers and mangles in the Union Grove Community Laundry.

A New Faith sister took Robert and Daniel’s order: soup (bean and cabbage with ham) and two variety plates with corn bread. Robert did not generally like to drink alcohol during the day. He ordered rose hip tea; Daniel asked for cider, Holyrood’s Frosty Jack.

“So you were on that schooner . . .” Robert said, filling his mug from the steaming teapot.

Daniel’s Story: Summer, Channel Island

We sailed up to the place where the federals had set up their new capital on Lake Huron, stopping only in Detroit, which had endured repeated typhoid fever epidemics that left it little more than a trading post on the river between the lakes—so odd to behold, with the skeletons of the huge old factories standing mute at Wyandotte and River Rouge and then, farther up, the decrepitating glass skyscrapers of the old city center, where ospreys now roosted. There were hardly any signs of life along the riverfront. I didn’t have any duties and spent much of the next two days on deck watching the shoreline or, once we got out into it, Lake Huron in all its moods. We passed some other sailing vessels, apparently transporting cargoes of goods. It made me sad for what I’d lost: Evan, the
Kerry McKinney,
and the freedom of being on our own. I had several sessions with a navy doctor who put me through a battery of tests and interviews to determine my mental disposition, I believe. I had supper twice in the officers’ mess along with Ms. Estridge, her two civilian subalterns in the Service, the captain of
The Great Northern
and his officers. The chatter was all of our strained relations with Canada.

The town of New Columbia was alive with construction when we docked there, rising out of the detritus of an old-times town, a place of no significance. What startled me upon landing there was the sound of electric tools, the whine of circular saws. The first thing that the government did was set up two electric wind turbines on Channel Island, a half mile out in the lake, and run cables to the mainland. The electric power was intermittent; it didn’t work when the wind wasn’t blowing. There weren’t sufficient batteries to store the power, so sometimes workers could use power tools and other times you heard the slower rhythmic sound of hand saws. Same with electric lights. Sometimes they just didn’t work but it sure was nice when they did.

They weren’t trying to reconstruct Washington, DC, in this new place. They were aware of things being lost for good and of the country being something other than what it used to be. The scale of the new stuff was very modest. To me it was like a frontier village. Harvey Albright had a philosophy that the new government should relinquish any pretense of imitating what had been destroyed. He had disdain for the overblown conceited beliefs of the old system, especially the idea of American exceptionalism that got the nation in so much trouble. The new capitol building under construction was a modest redbrick structure, smaller than a high school, with no dome and two very austere chambers for the House and the Senate. Few representatives or senators even showed up when I was there. What little there was of government ran out of the president’s office and the headquarters of the Service. There were no cabinet secretaries and no agencies, just a few dozen men and women around Harvey Albright.

All of them actually lived and worked on Channel Island. They had begun constructing stone revetments around the shore to defend it, perhaps from the Canadians, if they couldn’t come to terms. The president lived and worked in a former coast guard station on the side of the island that faced out into Lake Huron toward Canada, protected by a battery of artillery. They did call it the White House, though. The building was painted white. Many of Albright’s inner circle of advisors and assistants lived in the station too. Other government people of lesser status occupied a four-story wooden hotel built hastily on the side of the island facing the town on the mainland. Ms. Estridge and the Service had their own precinct in woods behind the president’s house. It had been a summer colony for rich people from Detroit back in the heyday of the old times. She had a house in a piney glade near the shore, very private and secluded from the other things in the compound. It had been built a hundred years ago by a lubricant tycoon, I learned.

The Service was the residue of the State Department and the intelligence agencies. It was never clear to me exactly what assets it still controlled. At least twice a week all the personnel on Channel Island were asked to attend gatherings in a building called the Commons, which was a pavilion with a ballroom and quarters for visiting dignitaries next to the White House. This was done to keep up morale, as far as I could tell. The government was very insecure. It had little real control over anything. Most of the visitors who came in the weeks when I was there were from Canada. President Albright was negotiating with the province of Ontario to unite with his government. That was the reason behind Ms. Estridge’s journey on the schooner
The Great Northern
when I was plucked out of Lake Erie, not any “port inspections,” as she told me.

I spent the first night and day on Channel Island in a kind of navy lab where I was run through more tests. They wanted to know just about everything I ever did or thought or felt since I was a baby. They badgered me, trying to find my limits. I think on at least one occasion I was given drugs. I was not told what for. It was “classified.” The next afternoon, an ensign brought me to Ms. Estridge’s house, where I was assigned quarters. It was a very grand place. He left me on a stone terrace. You could see the lake through the pines, flickering evening light playing through. She stepped out on the terrace, looking different than when we were on the ship. Her hair was down. She was dressed in a blue velvet gown. She took my breath away.

“You’re working for me now,” she says, clipping on an earring, very businesslike in contrast to her costume.

“What are my duties?”

“We have a mission for you.”

“Does that mean I have to go somewhere?”

“Yes, you’ll see more of the country, just like you wanted to.”

“What is the purpose of this mission?”

“It’s . . . a special assignment. You’ll understand what it entails when you go through the training.”

The Service was very big on testing and training. Of course, they couldn’t train you for everything.

So it started. She went to the Commons that night in her gown. Harvey Albright hated slovenliness. It was a big part of our country’s decline, he said. So things were quite formal there. I began my training the next day. It was extremely rigorous, both physically and mentally. They had people who knew how to do things you would never learn in a normal life in normal times. Ways to hurt people. Ways to deceive people. Ways to get through an unfriendly country. Ways to survive. The mission was revealed to me in slow stages, like the petals of a flower blossoming over a period of days, a black rose. My destination was Tennessee. I knew that was the heart of the Foxfire Republic.

Looking back, I think the purpose of quartering me in Ms. Estridge’s house was to excite me, to light a particular flame of desire in me, to make me a little crazy in preparation for what would happen in Tennessee. There were moments when I wondered if she was toying with me. The house was full of her perfume. Once, she came back from a diplomatic dinner with the Canadians and stood in the doorway of my room in a distant wing of the house asking about my girlfriends back home. I think she’d had quite a bit to drink. She told me to call her Valerie. She made a V with her fingers to emphasize it and then peered at me through the notch between her fingers as if she were aiming a rifle. She told me her husband was killed in a food riot in St. Paul the year before. He was a major in what was called the Home Guard. Someone pitched a television out a fourth-story window onto the street he was standing on and it broke his head open. She missed him terribly, she said. It was nice to have a man in the house, she said, meaning me. She said I was a very handsome young man and that it would surely help me on my mission.

I thought something might happen between us that night, but she went only so far with her suggestive behavior and no further and I didn’t dare make a move. She waxed philosophical, standing there in the doorway, in the candlelight, beautifully dressed in one of her gowns. These were completely abnormal times, she said, but they would stay that way, things would never be normal again. She said she was worried about what they were sending me off to do and she started to cry a little. Not sobbing or carrying on. Just some tears and a sniffle. I almost reached out to her. But she turned and left abruptly. I listened to her pad down the stairs and then the door shut, and I lay awake for hours thinking, wishing she might come back.

I was there, on Channel Island, for about a month. The trainers toughened me up. I think they got pretty deep inside my mind. They worked hard on me. Things changed inside of me. Subtle things. The way I saw the world. My feelings. The mission I was being prepared for took on more of a reality than where I was, except for the reality of Valerie Estridge, which continued to torment me with irresolvable tension.

The government kept a launch at the island dock with four oarsmen, which was rowed back and forth to town every hour, and I went over on a few occasions to look at the construction and walk the few streets, just to get out of the suffocating conditions on the island for a while. I was encouraged to come to gatherings in the Commons, where I got to see just about all that was left of the U.S. government in one big room—smart, ambitious people in midlife who were thrilled at having survived a wrenching transition and clearly enjoyed their roles in the strange new order of things. I was given a lieutenant’s uniform to wear, though I wan’t commissioned. It was very formal, pretty grand there, like a ball in a fairy tale, with Harvey Albright as Prince Charming. The pavilion itself was very beautiful, with a vaulted ceiling, fireplaces big enough to walk into, and a view west toward New Columbia. The late summer sun would be setting over the new construction just as the ball picked up momentum and people loosened up. They did a lot of drinking on Channel Island. They were a very high-strung bunch, those government people. The food was outstanding. Groaning buffet tables of beef and Great Lakes salmon and cheeses, plenty of wheat bread. Everything was coming into season and Michigan was overflowing with produce like a cornucopia. There was music and formal dancing in lines with complicated figures. Valerie Estridge was not the only attractive female there. On one occasion I met a girl who worked in the Office of Correspondence, as it was called. She was a lovely dancer. Her name was Sienna, dark-haired, delicate, with a low throaty voice, obviously smart, a Chicago girl. All I did was sit at her table chatting for half an hour after dancing and the next day a navy special ops guy met me on the path from the training building to the commissary and said if I ever talked to her again he would rip me a new asshole. I don’t think he realized that I had been taught some of the same tricks he knew, and for a moment I was tempted to try some of my training on him, but I just let it pass.

The day came in August when I was told to prepare to leave Channel Island for my mission. They meant prepare mentally because I had gotten pretty comfortable there and now things were about to change again. To my surprise, Ms. Estridge came in around eight that evening with President Albright himself. It was twilight, beautiful reflections off the lake playing on the ceiling. I was in her library, lying on the sofa reading a big book about the First World War full of pictures of the slaughter of the trenches. I had been in the Commons many times when the president was there but had never spoken to him. He was a solid, rather blocky man of fifty-two, built like a wrestler, clean-shaven, which was the federal style, with brown hair that he wore to his shoulder. He was a very avid rider and wore tall boots with buff trousers and a black double-breasted tunic with a flap collar partly opened. He even smelled a little like horse sweat. He had an obvious air of authority, like some other people I’d met since setting out from home. I could see Albright’s security detail through the window, down by the rhododendron plantings, three soldiers dismounted, holding the reins of their horses.

Ms. Estridge poured two glasses of brandy. I was standing now and the president gestured for me to resume sitting. He took a seat directly across the low coffee table from me in a plush chair and leaned in with his forearms on his knees. She stayed in the background standing by the fireplace.