Not This August (2 page)

“Mr. Justin, your feeling is well grounded,” she said emphatically. “The big cities are hellholes because conditions have become absolutely unbearable and still people have to bear them. Did you know New York’s under martial law?”

“No!”

“Yes. The 104th Division and the 33rd Armored Division are in town. They’re needed in El Paso, but they were yanked North to keep New York from going through with a secession election.”

He almost said something stupid (“I didn’t read about it in the
Times
“) but caught himself. She went on: “Of course, I shouldn’t be telling you state secrets, but I’ve noticed at home that a state secret is something known to everybody who makes more than fifty thousand a year and to nobody who makes less. Don’t you feel rich now, Mr. Justin?”

“Filthy rich. Don’t worry, by the way. I won’t pass anything on to anybody.”

“Bless you, I know that! Your mail’s read, your phone’s monitored, and your neighbors are probably itching to collect a bounty on you for turning you in as a D-or-S.” A “D-or-S” was a “disaffected or seditious person”—not quite a criminal and certainly not a full-fledged citizen. He usually found himself making camouflage nets behind barbed wire in Nevada, never fully realizing what had hit him.

“You’re a little rough on my neighbors. Nobody gets turned in around here for shooting off his mouth. It’s still a small corner of America.”

Insanely dangerous to be talking like that to a stranger—insanely dangerous and wildly exhilarating. Sometimes he hiked over to the truck farm of his friends the Bradens, also city exiles, and they had sessions into the small hours that cleared their minds of gripes intolerably accumulated like pus in a boil. Amy Braden’s powerful home brew helped…

Rumble-rumble
, they rolled over the Lehigh’s tracks at the Norton grade crossing; Croley’s store was dead ahead at the end of the short main street. Norton, New York, had a population of about sixty old people and no young ones. Since a few brief years of glory a century and a half ago as a major riverboat town on the Susquehanna it had been running down. But somehow Croley made a store there pay.

She parked neatly and handed him a big sheaf of mail. “Give these to the Great Stone Face,” she said. “I don’t like to look at him.”

“Thanks for the ride,” he said. “And the talk.”

She flashed a smile. “We must do it more often,” and drove away.

Immediately, thinking of his return trip, he canvassed the cars and wagons lined up before Croley’s. When he recognized Gus Feinblatt’s stake wagon drawn by Tony and Phony, the two big geldings, he knew he had it made. Gus was that fantastic rarity, a Jewish farmer, and he lived up the road from Justin.

The store was crowded down to the tip of its ell. Everybody in Norton was there, standing packed in utter silence. Croley’s grim face swiveled toward him as he entered; then the storekeeper nodded at a freezer compartment where he could sit.

Justin wanted to yell: “What is this, a gag?”

Then the radio, high on a shelf, spoke. As it spoke, Justin realized that it had been saying the same thing for possibly half an hour, over and over again, but that people stayed and listened to it over and over again, numbly waiting for somebody to cry “Hoax” or “Get away from that mike you dirty Red” or anything but what it would say.

The radio said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Then the inimitable voice, but weary, deathly weary. “My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with terrible defeat on land and at sea. I have just been advised by General Fraley that he has unconditionally surrendered the Army of the Southwest to Generals Novikov and Feng. General Fraley said the only choice before him was surrender or the annihilation of his troops to the last man by overwhelmingly superior forces. History must judge the wisdom of his choice; here and now I can only say that his capitulation removes the last barrier to the northward advance of the armies of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic.

“My fellow citizens, I must now tell you that for three months the United States has not possessed a fleet in being. It was destroyed in a great air-sea battle off the Azores, a battle whose results it was thought wisest to conceal temporarily.

“We are disarmed. We are defeated.

“I have by now formally communicated the capitulation of the United States of America to the U.S.S.R. and the C.P.R. to our embassy in Switzerland, where it will be handed to the Russian and Chinese embassies.

“As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States I now order all officers and enlisted men and women to cease fire. Maintain discipline, hold your ranks, but offer no opposition to the advance of the invading armies, for resistance would be a futile waste of lives—and an offense for which the invading armies might retaliate tenfold. You will soon be returned to your homes and families in an orderly demobilization. Until then maintain discipline. You were a great fighting force, but you were outnumbered.

“To the civilians of the United States I also say ‘Maintain discipline.’ Your task is the harder, for it must be self-discipline. Keep order. Obey the laws of the land. Respect authority. Make no foolish demonstrations. Comport yourselves so that our conquerors will respect us.

“Beyond that I have no advice to give. The terms of surrender will reach me in due course and will be immediately communicated to you. Until then may God bless you all and stay you in this hour of trial.”

There was a long pause, and the radio said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

“My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with…”

Justin looked around him incredulously and saw that most of them were silently crying.

Along about one o’clock people began to drift dazedly from the store—to their homes in Norton to talk in stunned whispers on the board sidewalk fronting the grocery. Old man Croley turned the radio off when a girl’s voice said between replays of the surrender statement that there would be a new announcement broadcast at 9:00 P.M. for which electric-current restrictions would be temporarily relaxed.

“That’ll be the surrender terms,” Gus Feinblatt said to Justin.

“I guess so. Gus—what do you think?”

There were four thousand years of dark history in Feinblatt’s eyes. “I think the worst is yet to come, Billy.”

“You’ll get your kids back.”

“At such a price. I don’t know whether it’s worth it… Well, life goes on. Mr. Croley?”

The storekeeper looked up. He didn’t say “Yes?” or “What can I do for you?” He never did; he looked and he waited and he never called anybody by name. He wasn’t an old-timer as old-timers went in Norton; he had come ten years ago from a grocery in Minnesota, and had used those ten years well. Justin knew he sold hardware, fencing, coal, fuel oil, fertilizer, feed and seed—in short, everything a farmer needed to earn his living—as well as groceries. Justin suspected that he also ran a small private bank which issued loans at illegal rates of interest. He did know that there were farmers who turned pale when Croley looked speculatively at them, and farm wives who cursed him behind his back. He was sixty-five, childless, and married to an ailing, thin woman who spent most of her time in the apartment above the store.

“Mr. Croley,” Gus said, “I might as well get my feed. My wagon’s outside the storeroom.”

Croley put out his hand and waited. Gus laid twenty-seven dollars in it, and still the hand was out, waiting. “Coupons?” Gus asked wryly.

“You heard him,” Croley said. (After a moment you figured out that “him” was the President, who had said that civilians were to continue as before, maintaining order.) Gus tore ration coupons out of his “F” book and laid them on the money. The hand was withdrawn and Croley stumped outside to unlock the storeroom door and stand by, watching, as Feinblatt and Justin loaded sacks of feed onto the stake wagon. When the last one went
bump
on the bed, he relocked the door, turned, and went back into his grocery.

“Gus,” Justin said, “would you mind waiting a minute? I want to see if Croley happens to have a pump rod for me—and then I’d like to bum a ride home from you.”

“Glad to have your company,” Feinblatt said, politely abstracted.

Croley listened to Justin in silence, reached under his counter, and banged a pump rod down in front of his customer. He snapped: “Twelve-fifty without hardware coupon. Three-fifty with.”

The old skunk knew, of course, that Justin had used up his quarterly allotment of hardware coupons to fix his milker. Justin paid, red-faced with anger, and went out to climb alongside Feinblatt on the wagon. Gus clucked at the horses and they moved off.

Rumble-rumble
over the Lehigh tracks and up Straw Hill Road, with Tony and Phony pulling hard on the stiff grade, the wagon wheels crashing into three years of unfixed chuckholes. Halfway up Feinblatt called “Whoa” and fixed the brake. “Rest ’em a little,” he said to Justin. “All they get’s hay, of course. Feed has to go to the cows. How’s your herd?”

“All right, I guess,” Justin said. “I wonder if I can let ’em go now. You want to buy them? I guess I don’t get drafted for a road gang now if I stop farming.”

“Think again,” Feinblatt said. “My guess is you better stick to exactly what you’ve been doing. Things are going to keep on this way for a while—maybe quite a while. You know about the postal service in the Civil War?”

Feinblatt was the local Civil War fanatic; every community seemed to have one. They spent vacations touring the battlefields ecstatically, comparing the ground with the maps. They had particular heroes among the generals and they loved to guess at what would have happened if this successful raid had failed, if that disastrous skirmish had been a triumph.

“Lincoln called for volunteers,” Gus Feinblatt said impressively. “Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. The war was on. And yet for
months
there was no interruption of the U. S. mail between the two countries. Inertia, you call it. So maybe even if there isn’t any war left to fight now, maybe even if the Reds kick the President and Congress out of Underground, D. C., there will still be people on the state and local level to enforce drafting you for labor if you quit farming.” He released the brake and clucked to the horses. The bay geldings strained up the hill again.

“I guess you’re right,” Justin said reluctantly. “Things won’t be squared away for a long while. I guess after things get settled, they replace government people with Reds, if they can find enough.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Wait and see what happens to that snake Croley then! If ever there was anybody who qualified in the Commie book as a dirty capitalist exploiter it’s our buddy down in Norton.”

Feinblatt shrugged. “He made his bed. When I think my boys were fighting for
him
—!” He spat over the side of the wagon, his face flushed.

“What do you hear from them?” Justin hastily asked. He had stopped one in Korea, but was guiltily aware that there was a keener agony of war that he had never known—the father’s agony.

“Card from Daniel last week. Infantry replacement training center in Montana. He was just finishing his basic. We worked out a kind of code, so I know he was hoping they wouldn’t ship him South as a rifleman, but he thought they might. He was bucking for 75-millimeter recoilless gunner. It would have kept him on ice for another two weeks. From David not a word since he joined the 270th at El Paso. I don’t know, Billy. I just don’t know. It’s over, sure, they’ll come back maybe, but I don’t know…”

There was little more talk from then on. “Here’s where I get off,” Justin said at last. “My best to Leah.” He swung down at his mailbox and limped down the steep hill to his house. May be able to get some decent shoes after things settle down, he thought bitterly. That’ll be something.

It still did not seem real.

Obviously things were badly disorganized somewhere. The house lights kept going on and off; the phone rang his number now and then, but when he answered there was only the open-circuit hum of a broken line. He couldn’t call anybody himself. He had a useless electric clock on the mantel which told him that the electric service was going badly off the beam. He timed the second hand with his watch and discovered that the alternating current delivered to his house was wobbling between 30 and 120 cycles per second instead of flowing at an even 60 per. A bomb at Niagara? Fighting for a power substation somewhere? Engineers quitting their posts in despair?

But the Eastern Milkshed Administration truck had picked up his milk cans while he was gone. He herded his cows into the barn, belatedly washed the milker and pails, and relieved their full udders once more. God alone knew whether the milk would ever reach (cholera-ridden?) New York City, but the mail would go through, the EMA truck driver would report him if there were no cans to pick up, and the administrative machinery of a nation which was no longer alive would grind him through the gears into a road-mending crew whether it mattered a damn or not.

Once during the afternoon somebody goofed at the local radio station, which was rebroadcasting the message of capitulation. A woman’s voice screamed hysterically: “Rally, Americans! Fight the godless Reds! Fight them in the streets, from behind bushes, house to house—” And then, whoever she was, somebody dragged her away from the mike and said wearily: “We regret the interruption of our service due to circumstances beyond our control.” Then, again: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

“My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with a—”

The current went off again, this time for an hour.

There was a calm, slow knock on the door. Through the kitchen window Justin recognized Mister, sometimes The Reverend Mister Sparhawk. Sparhawk happened to be the last man on Earth whom he wanted to see at the moment. He also happened to be a man practically impossible to insult, completely impervious to hints, maddeningly certain of his righteousness.

Justin sighed and opened the door. “Come on in,” he told the lean old man. “Just, for God’s sake, don’t talk. Find something to eat and go away.” He opened his breadbox and retreated into the living room hoping he wouldn’t be pursued. Sparhawk was a ref, an Englishman. Justin was sick of refs, and so was everybody. The refs from the Baltic, the Balkans, Germany, France, England, Latin America—he vaguely felt that they ought to have stayed in their countries and been exterminated instead of bothering Americans. English refs were the least obnoxious, they didn’t
jabber
, but Sparhawk—