Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (12 page)

Before I could regain my senses the fight was declared a victory for Mr.

Pugh, who danced in circles, and waved his hat, and hooted like an ape in his triumph.

Sam and Julian helped me to a haybale at the rear of the car, where Sam applied a handkerchief to my bleeding face.

"I let my guard down," I said thickly. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

"On the contrary," Sam said. "Whether you know it or not, you did exactly the right thing. As far as these people are concerned, the haughtiness has been knocked out of you—you're no better or worse than any of them now."

That was a bitter consolation, however, and it provided little comfort as the raucous night roared on.

The reveling stopped at last, once the liquor began to tell on the revelers, who slumped and dozed under the indifferent gaze of the Travel Agents. I was eventually able to sleep, although my injuries, and the cold air keening through the cracks in the car, woke me from time to time.

There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.

But there was an exception to this monotony of sound, and I should have paid greater attention to it. I was dreaming in a disjointed fashion of Williams Ford, and of Flaxie playing by the stream on a summer afternoon, when I felt the Phantom Car lurch to a slow stop.

There followed a clanking and a rumbling, and a silence, and more clanking, until the train started up again. I wondered if I should wake Sam, who was snoring nearby, and tell him about these events. But I was afraid of seeming naive. Sam had ridden trains often before in his career, and this was probably only another coaling stop or a pause in some switching yard where a branch road intersected the main line. The Travel Agents huddling in the glow of the stove seemed unalarmed, so I put the matter out of my mind.

The next day passed as the previous one had, though the men were sullen after their indulgence of the night before, and the smell of sickness hung about the privy hole and interfered with everyone's appetite.

I was still smarting from yesterday's battle. I spent the morning by myself, perched on a haybale and composing a letter to my parents, though the jarring of the railroad car made my handwriting childish.

I worked at it without interruption until Lymon Pugh came and stood in front of me, his legs planted like trees in the scattered straw. I didn't like to see him there—I feared some fresh confrontation—but all he said was, "What are you doing?"

"Writing a letter," I said.

He lifted his hat and smoothed the unruly knot of black hair beneath it.

"Well, then," he said. "A letter."

This wasn't much of a conversation, and I returned my attention to the page.

Lymon Pugh cleared his throat. "Listen here ... do you take back what you said last night?"

I considered my response carefully, for I was not anxious to provoke him into another battle. "I meant no insult by it."

"You called me a thief, though."

"No—you misunderstood me. I only meant to explain my abstinence. The

'thief' is liquor, do you see? I don't drink liquor, because it steals my sensibility."

"Your sensibility!"

"My capacity for reason. It makes me drunk, in other words."

"That's all you were trying to say—that liquor makes you drunk?"

"That's it exactly."

He gave me a scornful look. "Of course liquor makes you drunk! I learned
that
 at an early age. You don't need to tell me anything about it, much less make a riddle of it. What's your name?"

"Adam Hazzard."

"Lymon Pugh," he said, and put out his big scarred hand, which I cautiously shook. "Where are you from, Adam Hazzard?"

"Athabaska."

"Cascadia, me," he said. A true Westerner—Cascadia is as far west as you can go without wetting your feet in the ocean. "What do you call that hat you're wearing?"

"A packle hat." (A packle hat, for readers who haven't seen one, has a disk of stiffened wool or hemp for the crown, attached to a tube of the same fabric, the tube being rolled up to form a brim, tied in place with threads.)

"That's a strange kind of hat," he said, though his own hat, which resembled a sailor's watch- cap picked over by moths, was nothing to brag about.

"I guess it keeps you warm?"

"Warm enough. How did you come by all those scars on your arms?"

"I was a boner," he said; and to my blank expression he added, "In a packing plant, in the Valley—the Willamette Valley. I boned beeves. That was my job—haven't you ever worked in a slaughter house?"

"No; I missed that opportunity, somehow."

"The beeves come along a line on hooks, and the boner cuts the muscle from the bone. You have to work close and fast, for a dozen other men are doing the same job on all sides of you, and the overseer brooks no slacking. But it gets hot in the boning room, and on wet days the air fogs, and the blood slicks your grip, so the knife is bound to go wrong sooner or later. Nobody lasts too long in that trade. Blood poisoning takes 'em, or they whittle themselves down so far they can't hold a haft any longer."

Ben Kreel, back in Williams Ford, had occasionally lectured us about the evils of Wage Labor, as opposed to the system of Leasing and Private Indenture. He might have cited this as an example, had he ever ventured near a packing plant in the Willamette Valley. "I suppose that's why you left?"

"Yes; but it pains me," Lymon Pugh said.

"The job, or the leaving of it?"

"I supported my mother there. I might have stayed, but I hear the packing industry out east has boomed just recently. My idea was to get a bigger wage and send part of it home."

"That seems sensible enough, though your fingers might be whittled off as quickly in New York as in Cascadia."

"I might get better work than boning, with luck. Canning, say, or even overseeing. But I had to leave in a hurry, is what galls me. I had an argument with the shift boss, which left him with a broken rib, and he would have had me arrested if I hadn't collected what I found in his pockets and bought passage east. I didn't have time to tell my plans to my mother—for all I know she thinks I'm dead." He shuffled his feet. "Though I guess I could write her a letter."

"Yes; you should—that's exactly what you should do."

"Except but that I can't write."

I told him he wasn't alone in that regard, and that it was nothing to be ashamed of; but he wasn't consoled. He shuffled his feet again and said, "Unless I can get a person to write it out for me."

Now I understood his object in approaching me, and it seemed a reasonable enough request—better than risking another controversy, anyhow. So I offered to take his dictation; and Lymon Pugh grinned hugely, and insisted on shaking my hand again—a habit he ought to refrain from, I told him, for his grip almost crushed my fingers, and made it difficult for me to grasp the pencil.

Then the obligation of actually composing his thoughts fell upon him, and he stomped about for a few minutes, muttering to himself.

"Just say what you'd say if your mother was here in front of you," I suggested.

"That's no help—if she was here, I wouldn't need to write a letter."

"Well, then, make any beginning you want. You might start with
DearMother,
 for example."

He liked that idea, and repeated the phrase several times, and I made a show of writing it on a fresh page in my notebook, and he looked at the marks with admiration. Then he frowned again. "No, it's no good. A letter won't work. My mother can't read, any more than I can."

"Well, in that case ... do you know anyone who
can
 read? A cousin, a friend of the family?"

"No. Except the man who runs the company store.
He
 can read—I've seen him lettering signs—and he was always friendly enough when we came in."

"Does he have a name?"

"Mr. Harking."

"Then we can ask him to carry the message to your mother on your behalf. I'll cross out
Dear Mother
, and write in
Dear Mr. Harking
—"

"No, sir!" Lymon Pugh exclaimed.

"What?"

"That would be an impertinence, if not something worse! I never called him 'dear' in my life, and I don't propose to begin now!"

"It's just a salutation."

"Call it whatever you want—maybe that's how they do things in Athabaska—but in the Valley a man don't call the grocer 'dear'—it's not suitable!"

"Look," I said, "this project is poorly thought-out. Why don't you consider what you want Mr. Harking to say to your mother on your behalf—sleep on the question—and in the morning we'll start again: how about that?"

"I hate to postpone it," he said, "but—well, it feels like the train's stopping anyhow. Are we in New York already, do you suppose, or is it just another watering hole?"

Neither, as it turned out. The Travel Agents stood up briskly and hoisted their rifles. They shouted the train awake, and when the passengers were all standing and blinking the foremost of the two men called out, "You two!

Crack that door."

Lymon Pugh and I unbolted the long door and slid it open. What we saw outside was no coaling station. Instead we faced a crowd of uniformed soldiers, and beyond them a sea of tents, and an open space in which men marched to orders, counting cadences.

"A soldier camp!" Lymon Pugh exclaimed.

The Travel Agent directed us to climb down from the Phantom Car, and the other passengers followed behind. I waited with the milling crowd in the sunlight until I could sidle closer to Sam and Julian.

"Are we caught?" I whispered.

"Not caught," Sam said in disgust, "just sold. The Trust took our money and sold us to recruiters, a double sale. I should have guessed something was up when the ticket-seller at Bad Jump inquired so closely about your ages. I was foolish," he said bitterly, "and now we're in the infantry, or will be soon enough, and bound for Labrador by summer."

I wanted to question him more closely, but a man in sergeant's stripes formed us up into two lines and marched us off to be deloused.

Happy is the bride that the sun shines on,
And blessed is the corpse that the rain rains on.
—Saxon proverb

Here begins that portion of the narrative with which my readers may already be somewhat familiar, that is, the passage of Julian Comstock into the person of Julian Conqueror; but that transformation, and its consequences, have been so often misrepresented that even a scholar of Recent History may be surprised by the story as I saw and experienced it—and by my part in it, for that matter.

Certainly Julian was no Conqueror as we arrived at the mustering camp, though he soon enough ceased to be a Comstock.

"Give a false name," Sam told Julian when, as a part of a line of sullen men from the Phantom Car, we approached a tent in which Army physicians waited to examine us and Army clerks stood ready to enter us into the rolls.

"Do that, and we'll be safe from the inquiries of your uncle—if not 'safe' in any other sense of the word."

"What name should I give?"

Sam shrugged. "Anything that appeals to you. 'Smith' is a pop u lar choice."

(Though I couldn't picture Julian as a Smith, a Jones, a Wilson, or any of those penny-a-bushel names: they didn't just suit him, somehow.) I asked Sam if it would be all right for me to continue as Adam Hazzard, and Sam said he supposed so, much to my relief. My family name may not have been aristocratic, but my father would have been ashamed if I had altered it.

But before we were set down on paper we had to be evaluated by the medical faculty: two bald men whose stained cotton smocks might once have been white, who listened to our hearts, and thumped our backs, and generally made quick work of their observations—though they did turn away seven men.
¹⁷

I don't know what happened to the rejected men. I believe they were put back aboard the Phantom Car, perhaps to be abandoned at some switching station along the main line, and probably robbed in the pro cess.

Sam himself was the object of considerable scrutiny because of his age.

He told the examining physician he was thirty-two; but we were required to disrobe, and Sam's body betrayed the lie in its wrinkled and leathery flesh. But he was also strong, and lean, and sound of breath; and after only a little discussion the doctors gave him their approval. Julian and I were ushered through more quickly.

Then we were made to line up beside a trench into which we dropped our familiar clothing, retaining only a few possessions in satchels or "ditty-bags" provided by the Quartermaster, while a scrawny recruit doused our naked bodies with yellow powder from a bucket—an insecticide, intended to kill lice, fleas, and other vermin.

The dust was noxious, and it coated our hair, our skin, our throats, and our lungs. It burned our eyes so badly that we were soon weeping as helplessly as infants, and we coughed and gagged like consumptive patients in the final stages of that disorder. We were nearly murdered by it, in other words; and I suppose even the lice among us must have been badly incon ve nienced, though at the end of a week they had rallied and staged a come-back.

As soon as we had recovered our breath we were lined up in front of a Company Clerk, who marked our names on a list of inductees. Sam gave his name as Sam Samson, which drew a skeptical look. I registered as Adam Hazzard, and pronounced my name proudly despite the fact that I was shivering, and clad mainly in a coating of insecticidal dust. Then Julian stepped up. He was still dizzy under the influence of the yellow powder, and when asked his name he began, "Julian, Julian Com—" at which point Sam delivered a kick to his shins. "
Commongold,
" Julian finished, adding a little cough.

It was a striking pseudonym, I thought, and entirely appropriate: Julian Commongold, gilded in lice powder and abandoned among the common folk; but a noble name for all that, rich with dignity. "It suits you," I whispered.