A History of the Future (44 page)

“That, you, ma’am?” he said.

“’Course it is, Private,” she said. “You think I got imposters on the payroll?”

“No, ma’am.”

“This here’s one of my intelligence officers, Lieutenant Jones. We got a meeting down in town. It’s classified business, need to know, and all like that. You follow me, soldier?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We’ll be back in a couple hours. You never saw us. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and went to swing the gate open.

When they were out of the compound, Loving Morrow directed their way on back roads around the south side of town so they wouldn’t have to go through any checkpoints. The roads were rough there. When they got onto the Lewisburg Pike, he reached for the whiskey bottle. Loving Morrow threw back her head and laughed heartily.

“What’s so funny, ma’am?” Daniel said.

“I’se just thinking you shouldn’t drink when you drive, but then I realized hey, there iddn’t another damn car running in the whole state of Tennessee tonight, least as far as I know, so it iddn’t like you’re gonna crash into anybody out here.”

“I’m doing all right, aren’t I?”

“You doing just fine, baby,” she said, and put her hand on his thigh and squeezed it.

As she did that, and the whiskey made a warm spot in his belly, he remembered what he was about to do and he shuddered.

“You cold, sugar?”

“A little.”

“We can just turn up the heat.”

Shortly, she told him to slow down and then directed him to turn down the gravel road that led to her cabin. When they got there, she lit some candles while Daniel made a little tepee of kindling in the fireplace and leaned some split logs against it. Loving Morrow came to him and sat down on a plush polyester bearskin rug in front of the hearth. When the fire was going and Daniel stood up, she got on her knees, seized his trousers at the hip, and rotated him around.

“Didn’t I tell you I had a nice special surprise for you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, here she comes. Git that monster out now.”

Daniel hesitated so she went for his belt herself.

“Wait,” he said, and put a hand on hers.

“Is something wrong, sugar?”

“Yes,” he said, and he fell down on his knees so they were face-to-face.

“Tell me, baby.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?” she said, putting a palm to his cheek.

He shook his head and began to weep. But before Loving Morrow could utter another word, he reached out and seized her by the shoulders, flipped her around violently, and got her in a choke hold, as he was trained to do, with one forearm against the front of her neck and the other pressing against the back of her head. She bucked and kicked and one of her faux leopardskin flats flew off her foot and bounced off a near wall. Her strength surprised him. But in less than half a minute she slumped in his arms as her forebrain went dark, and he continued to hold her in that position for several minutes more, rocking as he wept into her fragrant hair, until he was confident that the life had gone out of her. Finally, he released her and let her body drop on the rug beside him. Her head made a dull thunk against the hardwood floor under the rug. He remained there on his knees, tears streaming down his face while watching her for any sign of life. When he saw a few fugitive twitches in her arms and legs, he pulled up her V-neck sweater and pressed his ear against her sternum between the breasts he had lately been kissing. He listened there for a long time and heard no sound of a heartbeat. When he raised his head, he noticed that her eyes remained open and glassy. Her mouth, too, was open in a manner he had seen before in different circumstances, with some gobbets of yellow-white foam at the sides.

Unable to look back one last time, he left her on the rug and briskly left the cabin. The cool night air slammed his senses as he went back to the car and turned the key as he’d seen her do. The sound of the engine echoed the feeling of the life pulsing through his own body. It took him more than a minute to figure out how to turn the headlights on. Being unacquainted with the reverse gear, he executed a tight circle on the grass between the cabin and the river, wiping the tears from his face with his sleeves as he did. Once he was poised to leave the little gravel lane that led to the road, he struggled to engage the higher functions of his brain to decide exactly what to do. He concluded right away that he shouldn’t try to escape in the car because that would be the first thing they would be looking for, not to mention the condition of the roads beyond Franklin and the lack of any more fuel out there. But he knew it would be equally foolish to try to escape on foot, as he had considered in previous mental rehearsals of this moment. Instead, he decided to risk going back into town to get the things he needed and escape on horseback.

He drove back to the checkpoint on the Lewisburg Pike. To his surprise, the soldier on duty simply waved him through. He remembered that the car’s windows did not permit people outside from seeing who was within, and it occurred to him that anyone traveling in an automobile would have to be an important government figure. Once inside town, he traversed the quietest streets, making his way toward the rooming house on Fair Street. On Acton, he turned down the alley of one of the grain warehouses he had visited on inspections, killed the engine, and left the car there. He walked the few blocks to his lodging house on Fair Street, collected what he needed, put on two extra shirts, and went to the livery on South Margin Street where he boarded Ike.

A boy of fourteen working the night hours there, a simpleton named Hootie Ray Blount, who would be hanged a week later, let Daniel saddle up Ike and sold him a five-pound sack of whole oats for his journey.

“Where are you goin’ at this hour, mister?” he asked.

“Chattanooga,” Daniel said, just because it had been on his mind.

“What’s there?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why you going there?”

“Just business.”

“Watch out for robbers on your way.”

“I will,” Daniel said, and tipped the boy a silver dime on his way out.

With adrenaline making the blood pound in his temples, he carefully walked Ike across town, through the very center where the shops on Main were closed and things were quiet except for the Yancey Hotel, where a string band was playing a jolly tune called “Duck River” that was one of his father’s favorites back home and it only prompted him to realize how far from home he was. He made for one of the lesser town gates on the Del Rio Pike at the west end of town, hoping to confound his pursuers as to the direction he was headed in.

At the gate, manned by three enlisted men who had been playing cards in their shed, the electric lights flickered out for the night just as he walked up on Ike. There were groans of consternation as the soldiers flung down their cards and two of them went to light candles while the third came out to talk to Daniel.

“Late to be setting out, ain’t it,” he said.

“I got word my ma up and died over to Dickson,” Daniel said. “They’re putting her in the ground tomorrow.”

“Oh? For true? Well, sorry to hear that. Go on, then. And praise her.”

“Praise her,” Daniel said.

At that, he rode out of the capital of the Foxfire Republic, never to return.

He rode all night and the next morning in a rapture of grief and adrenaline and finally slept in the woods the second night. He shared the raw oats with Ike and found some apples along the way. It wasn’t until he got halfway across Kentucky that he dared to stop at a little store for provisions in the Appalachian foothills village of Irvine. The store carried a newspaper out of Lexington and the latest copy was dated two days before he completed his mission, nor did he hear any chatter thereabouts about the murder of Loving Morrow, so he concluded that he still rode ahead of the news.

Luck continued to be with Daniel when, ten days after his deed, and seeking to avoid any bridges over the Ohio River, he managed to find a tractably ignorant ferryman in the village of Greenup who conveyed him and his horse over to the federal side for a little silver. Once in the state of Ohio he was able to put up at proper inns and buy meals in public taverns, and by that time the news of the assassination of Loving Morrow in the Foxfire capital was headlined in the occasional broadsheet he encountered. Though he was mentioned by name as the assassin, and described physically in words, no drawing of him circulated with the news. Nor did Daniel reveal his identity once he was safely back on federal terrain. Whatever anyone else thought of the deed—and there was considerable rejoicing over it—it was not something Daniel was proud of, and he didn’t want to be known as the author of it. Rather, he traveled north, in increasingly cold weather, with the trees bare and the farm fields laid up for winter, raveled in shame, remorse, and confusion, wondering what sort of monster he was. His imagination was tortured as well by thoughts about the fate of Hector “Barefoot” Tillman. Without really weighing the matter directly, he reached the decision not to return to the seat of the federal government at New Columbia, Michigan.

What he wanted to do was hide from the world, indeed, hide from himself, and that was how he applied to join the community led by the Zen millenarian Usher Redfield in northeastern Ohio, a kind of secular monastery of men—no women—dedicated to the contemplative life, gardening, the preservation of literature, and the repurposing of useful items from the old times. He remained there through the winter, sleeping in an unheated cell, working in the shops and barns, and sitting in silent meditation for hours each day. He never spoke of his true identity or his mission to Tennessee or of the affairs of the nations of North America. By April of the following year he had sorted out his experience sufficiently to begin longing for home. And in May, when it was finally warm enough to endure the uncertainties of a long journey, he left the community on Ike with the belongings he had arrived with, including a purse of silver and the military pistol he had carried all the way down to Franklin, Tennessee, and back. These things were all taken from him by a band of thieves in Warren, Pennsylvania, who beat him senseless and left him for dead, the first of many vicissitudes and privations he endured on his eventually successful long trek home.

These memories of his months out in the American heartland occupied Daniel Earle in his bedroom as the first sunlight of the new year brightened the frosted window, and then he finally slept.

F
IFTY-TWO

Brother Jobe and his rangers were given a fine New Year’s Day breakfast of eggs, fried salt ham (brought by Blake Harmon), sautéed apples, corn pudding, and rose hip tea at the table of Barbara Maglie in the dell below Lloyds Hill in the rural township of Hebron, New York. As his men prepared their animals for departure, Brother Jobe met privately in the little library room with Mandy Stokes. She was still in her traveling clothes: men’s trousers and linen shirt but with a turquoise silk kerchief around her neck that her hostess gave her the night before to wear at the table.

“Did you sleep okay, ma’am?”

She nodded her head.

“Something has changed,” she said softly.

Sunlight streamed into the room through lace curtains behind her. Her face was bright, the dark circles under her eyes were gone.

“This lady here has an uncommon heart and a way with troubled spirits,” Brother Jobe said. “You going to stay with her for a while, maybe a long while, and then, when you’re ready, you will be rebirthed out into the world. You don’t never have to go back to Union Grove.”

Her eyes searched the room, the walls, the ceiling as though to capture the fugitive essence of the matter.

“Do you think I can ever forgive myself?” she finally said.

“The day will come when all your memories of that place and what happened there will feel like somebody else’s story, and you can leave it all behind. That will be the greater truth of it, anyway, for you will be a different person then.”

“Am I safe here?”

“I believe you are in good hands.”

Mandy’s eyes narrowed, her mouth trembled, and she stammered a moment.

“W-w-why did you do it?” she asked.

“Justice and mercy, ma’am. What’s the world without it? I may be back around from time to time to say hello. The lady of the house is a special friend. You mind what she has to teach you.”

Mandy threw her arms around Brother Jobe’s casklike body and said, “Thank you.”

Minutes later, having made all his farewells, Brother Jobe mounted Atlas and reined the big mule up the drive past the barn and the frozen garden to the road. Seth and Elam followed on their horses. Six inches of pristine white powder covered it and sleeves of snow clung to the tree branches overhead in the breezeless air. Clouds were beginning to move in again and Elam’s aching right shoulder, which had caught a piece of shrapnel in the Holy Land years back and never lied about the weather, told him they were going to get more snow. They had determined to take a different, more roundabout route home, around Cossayuna Lake, than the one they came up on and they expected their tracks to be covered both coming and going.

“I had the craziest dreams last night,” Seth said as they walked south. “That fine lady was all amongst them. And stranger yet, it seems I was all amongst her.”