Farnham's Freehold (11 page)

“In a pig’s eye. Barbie? Make a fourth?”

“Delighted!”

The cut paired Joe with Karen and gave him the deal. He riffled the cards. “Now to stack a Mississippi Heart Hand!”

“Watch him, Barbie.”

“Want a side bet, Daddy?”

“What have you to offer?”

“Well—My fair young body?”

“Flabby.”

“Why, you utterly utter! I’m not flabby, I’m just deliciously padded. Well, how about my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor?”

“Against what?”

“A diamond bracelet?”

Barbara was surprised to see how badly Hugh played, miscounting and even revoking. She realized that he was groggy with fatigue—why, the poor darling! Somebody was going to have to clamp down on him, too. Or he would kill himself trying to carry the whole load.

Forty minutes later Hugh wrote an I.O.U. for one diamond bracelet, then they got ready for bed. Hugh was pleased to see that Joe undressed completely and got into the lower bunk, as he had been told to. Duke stretched out on the floor, bare. The room was hot; the mass cooled slowly and air no longer circulated with the manhole cover in place, despite the vents in the tank room. Hugh made a note that he must devise a bear proof—and cat proof—grille in place of the cover. Later, later—

He took the camp lamp into the tank room.

Someone had put the books back on shelves but some were open to dry; he fluffed these, hoped for the best.

The last books in the world—

So it seemed.

He felt sudden grief that abstract knowledge of deaths of millions had not given him. Somehow, the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. Book burners—to rape a defenseless friendly book.

Books had always been his best friends. In a hundred public libraries they had taught him. From a thousand newsstands they had warmed his loneliness. He suddenly felt that if he had not been able to save some books, it would hardly be worthwhile to live.

Most of his collection was functional:
The Encyclopedia Britannica
—Grace had thought the space should be used for a television receiver “because they might be hard to buy afterwards.” He had grudged its bulkiness, too, but it was the most compact assemblage of knowledge on the market. “Che” Guevera’s
War of the Guerillas
—thank God he wasn’t going to need that! Nor those next to it: “Yank” Leivy’s manual on resistance fighting, Griffith’s Translation of Mao Tse-tung’s
On Guerilla Warfare
, Tom Wintringham’s
New Ways of War,
the new TR on special operations—forget ’em! Ain’t a-gonna study war no more!

The Boy Scout Handbook
, Eshbach’s
Mechanical Engineering
,
The Radio Repairman’s Guide,
Outdoor Life’s
Hunting and Fishing, Edible Fungi and How to Know Them, Home Life in the Colonial Days, Your Log Cabin, Chimneys and Fireplaces, The Hobo’s Cook Book, Medicine Without a Doctor, Five Acres and Independence, Russian Self-Taught
and English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries,
The Complete Herbalist,
the survival manuals of the Navy Bureau of Weapons, The Air Force’s
Survival Techniques, The Practical Carpenter
—all sound books, of the brown and useful sort.

The Oxford Book of English Verse, A Treasury of American Poetry,
Hoyle’s Book of Games,
Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, a different Burton’s
Thousand Nights and a Night,
the good old
Odyssey
with the Wyeth illustrations, Kipling’s
Collected Verse
, and his
Just So Stories
, a one-volume Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, The Bible,
Mathematical Recreations and Essays, Thus Spake Zarathustra,
T. S. Eliot’s
The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,
Robert Frost’s
Verse, Men Against the Sea
—

He wished that he had found time to stock the list of fiction he had started. He wished that he had fetched down his works of Mark Twain regardless of space. He wished—

Too late, too late. This was it. All that was left of a mighty civilization. “
The cloud-capped towers
—”

He jerked awake and found that he had fallen asleep standing up. Why had he come in here? Something important. Oh, yes! Tanning leather—Leather? Barbara was barefooted, Barbara must have moccasins. Better try the
Britannica
. Or that
Colonial Days
volume.

No, thank God, you didn’t have to use salt! Find some oak trees. Better yet, have Barbara find them; it would make her feel useful. Find something that only Joe could do, too; make the poor little bastard feel appreciated. Loved. Remember to—

He stumbled back into the main room, looked at the upper bunk and knew that he couldn’t make it. He lay down on the blanket they had played cards on and fell instantly asleep.

Grace did not get up for breakfast. The girls quietly fed them, then stayed in to clean up. Duke went hunting, carrying a forty-five and a hunting bow. It was his choice; arrows could be recovered or replaced, bullets were gone forever. Duke tried a few flights and decided that his shoulder was okay.

He checked watches and set out, with an understanding that a smoky fire would be built to home on if he was not back by three.

Hugh told the girls to take outdoors any book not bone-dry, then broke out pick and shovel and started leveling their house. Joe tried to join him; Hugh vetoed it.

“Look, Joe, there are a thousand things to do. Do them. But no heavy work.”

“Such as what, Hugh?”

“Uh, correct the inventories. Give Duke a hand by starring everything that can’t be replaced. In the course of that you’ll think of things; write them down. Look up how to make soap and candles. Check both dosimeters. Strap on a gun and keep your eyes open—and see that those girls don’t go outside without guns. Hell, figure out a way to get plumbing and running water, with no pipe and no lead and no water closets and no portland cement.”

“How in the world could you do that?”

“Somebody did it the first time. And tell this bushy-tailed sidewalk superintendent that I need no help.”

“Okay. Come here, Doc! Come, come, come!”

“And Joe. Speaking of bathrooms, you might offer to stand guard for the girls while they bathe. You don’t have to look.”

“All right, I’ll offer. But I’ll tell them you suggested it. I don’t want them to think—”

“Look, Joe. They are a couple of clean, wholesome, evil-minded American girls. Say what you please, they will still believe you are sneaking a peek. It’s part of their credo that they are so fatally irresistible that a man just has to. So don’t be too convincing; you’ll hurt their feelings.”

“I get it. I guess.” Joe went away, Hugh started digging, while reflecting that he had never missed a chance, given opportunity without loss of face—but that incorrigible Sunday school lad probably would not sneak a peek at Lady Godiva. A good lad—no imagination but utterly dependable. Shame to have been so rough on him last night—

Very quickly Hugh knew what his worst oversight had been: no wheelbarrow.

He had dug only a little before reaching this new appreciation. Digging by muscle power was bad but carrying it away in buckets was an affront to good sense.

So he carried and thought about how to build a wheel—with no metal, no heating tools, no machine shop, no foundry, no—

Now wait! He had steel bottles. There was strap iron in the bunks and soft iron in the periscope housing. Charcoal he could make and a bellows was simply an animal skin and some branches. Whittle a nozzle. Any damfool who couldn’t own a wheel with all that at his disposal deserved to lift and carry.

He had ten thousand trees, didn’t he? Finland didn’t have a damn thing but trees. Yet Finland was the finest little country in the world.

“Doc, get out from under my feet!” If Finland was still there—Wherever the world was—

Maybe the girls would like a Finnish bath. Down where they could plunge in afterwards and squeal and feel good. Poor kids, they would never see a beauty parlor; maybe a
sauna
would be a “moral equivalent.” Grace might like it. Sweat off that blubber, get her slender again. What a beauty she had been!

Barbara showed up, with a shovel. “Where did you get that? And what do you think you’re going to do?”

“It’s the one Duke was using. I’m going to dig.”

“In bare feet? You’re cra—Hey, you’re wearing shoes!”

“Joe’s. The jeans are his, too. The shirt is Karen’s. Where shall I dig?”

“Just beyond me, here. Any boulder over five hundred pounds, ask for help. Where’s Karen?”

“Bathing. I decided to stink worse and bathe later.”

“When you like. Don’t try to stick on this job all day. You can’t.”

“I like working with you, Hugh. Almost as much as—” She let it hang.

“As playing bridge?”

“As playing bridge as your partner. Yes, you could mention that. Too.”

“Barbie girl.”

He found that just digging was fun. Gave the mind a rest and the muscles a workout. Happy making. Hadn’t tried it for much too long.

Barbara had been digging an hour when Mrs. Farnham came around a corner. Barbara said, “Good morning,” added a shovelful to a bucket, picked both up half filled, and disappeared around the other corner.

Grace Farnham said, “Well! I wondered where you were hiding. I was left quite alone. Do you realize that?” She was in the clothes she had slept in. Her features looked puffy.

“You were allowed to sleep, dear.”

“It isn’t pleasant to wake up in a strange place alone. I’m not accustomed to it.”

“Grace, you weren’t being slighted. You were being pampered.”

“Is that what you call it? Then we’ll say no more about it, do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“Really?” She seemed to brace herself, then said bleakly, “Perhaps you can stop long enough to tell me where you have hidden my liquor.
My liquor
. My share. I wouldn’t think of touching yours—after the way you’ve treated me! In front of servants and strangers, may I add?”

“Grace, you must see Duke.”

“
What do you mean?
”

“Duke is in charge of liquor. I don’t know where he put it.”

“
You’re lying!
”

“Grace, I haven’t lied to you in twenty-seven years.”

“
Oh!
You brutal, brutal man!”

“Perhaps. But I’m not lying and the next time you say I am, it will go hard with you.”

“
Where’s Duke?
He won’t let you talk to me that way! He told me so, he promised me!”

“Duke has gone hunting. He hopes to be back by three.”

She stared, then rushed back around the corner. Barbara reappeared, picked up her shovel. They went on working.

Hugh said, “I’m sorry you were exposed to that.”

“To what?”

“Unless you were at least a hundred yards away, you know what.”

“Hugh, it’s none of my business.”

“Under these conditions, anything is everybody’s business. You have formed a bad opinion of Grace.”

“Hugh, I would not dream of being critical of your wife.”

“You have opinions. But I want you to have one in depth. Visualize her as she was, oh, twenty-five years ago. Think of Karen.”

“She would have looked like Karen.”

“Yes. But Karen has never had responsibility. Grace had and took it well. I was an enlisted man; I wasn’t commissioned until after Pearl Harbor. Her people were what is known as ‘good family.’ Not anxious to have their daughter marry a penniless enlisted man.”

“I suppose not.”

“Nevertheless, she did. Barbara, have you any notion what it was to be the wife of a junior enlisted man in those days? With no money? Grace’s parents wanted her to come home—but would not send her a cent as long as she stuck with me. She stuck.”

“Good for Grace.”

“Yes. She had no preparation for living in one room and sharing a bath down the hall, nor for waiting in Navy outpatient clinics. For making a dollar go twice as far as it should. For staying alone while I was at sea. Young and pretty and in Norfolk, she could have found excitement. She found a job instead—in a laundry, sorting dirty clothes. And whenever I was home she was bright and cheerful and uncomplaining.

“Alexander was born the next year—”

“‘Alexander’?”

“Duke. Named for his maternal grandpappy; I didn’t get a vote. Her parents were anxious to make up once they had a grandson; they were even willing to accept me. Grace stayed cool and never accepted a cent—back to work with our landlady minding the baby in weeks.

“Those years were the roughest. I went up fast and money wasn’t such a problem. The War came and I was bucked from chief to j.g. and ended as a lieutenant commander in Seabees. In 1946 I had to choose between going back to chief or becoming a civilian. With Grace’s backing, I got out. So I was on the beach with no job, a wife, a son in grammar school, a three-year-old daughter, living in a trailer, prices high and going higher. We had some war bonds.

“That was the second rough period. I took a stab at contracting, lost our savings, went to work for a water company. We didn’t starve, but scraped icebox and dishrag soup were on the menu. Barbara, she stood it like a trouper—a hardworking den mother, a pillar of the PTA, and always cheerful.

“I was a construction boss before long and presently I tried contracting again. This time it clicked. I built a house on spec and a shoestring, sold it before it was finished and built two more at once. We’ve never been broke since.”

Hugh Farnham looked puzzled. “That was when she started to slip. When she started having help. When we kept liquor in the house. We didn’t quarrel—we never did save over the fact that I tried to raise Duke fairly strictly and Grace couldn’t bear to have the boy touched.

“But that was when it started, when I started making money. She isn’t built to stand prosperity. Grace has always stood up to adversity magnificently. This is the first time she hasn’t. I still think she will.”

“Of course she will, Hugh.”