The Postman (6 page)

Out of the light of the tallow lamps, he swiveled to catch a glimpse of his audience. They had loved his earlier acts. But this bastardized, one-man version of Macbeth might have gone over their heads.

An instant after he exited, though, enthusiastic applause began, led by Mrs. Adele Thompson, the leader of this small community. Adults whistled and stamped their feet. Younger citizens clapped awkwardly, those below twenty years of age watching their elders and slapping their hands awkwardly, as if they were taking part in this strange rite for the first time.

Obviously, they had liked his abbreviated version of the
ancient tragedy. Gordon was relieved. To be honest, some parts had been simplified less for brevity than because of his imperfect memory of the original. He had last seen a copy of the play almost a decade ago, and that a half-burned fragment.

Still, the final lines of his soliloquy had been canon. That part about “wind and wrack” he would never forget.

Grinning, Gordon returned to take his bows onstage—a plank-covered garage lift in what had once been the only gas station in the tiny hamlet of Pine View.

Hunger and isolation had driven him to try the hospitality of this mountain village of fenced fields and stout log walls, and the gamble had paid off better than he’d hoped. An exchange of a series of shows for his meals and supplies had tentatively passed by a fair majority of the voting adults, and now the deal seemed settled.

“Bravo! Excellent!” Mrs. Thompson stood in the front row, clapping eagerly. White-haired and bony, but still robust, she turned to encourage the forty-odd others, including small children, to show their appreciation. Gordon did a flourish with one hand, and bowed deeper than before.

Of course his peformance had been pure crap. But he was probably the only person within a hundred miles who had once minored in drama. There were “peasants” once again in America, and like his predecessors in the minstrel trade, Gordon had learned to go for the unsubtle in his shows.

Timing his final bow for the moment before the applause began to fade, Gordon hopped off the stage and began removing his slap-dash costume. He had set firm limits; there would be no encore. His stock was theater, and he meant to keep them hungry for it until it was time to leave.

“Marvelous. Just wonderful!” Mrs. Thompson told him as he joined the villagers, now gathering at a buffet table along the back wall. The older children formed a circle around him, staring in wonderment.

Pine View was quite prosperous, compared with so many of the starvling villages of the plains and mountains.
In some places a good part of a generation was nearly missing due to the devastating effects the Three-Year Winter had had on children. But here he saw several teenagers and young adults, and even a few oldsters who must have been past middle age when the Doom fell.

They must have fought to save everybody
. That pattern had been rarer, but he had seen it, too, here and there.

Everywhere there were traces of those years. Faces pocked from diseases or etched from weariness and war. Two women and a man were amputees and another looked out of one good eye, the other a cloudy mass of cataracts.

He was used to such things—at least on a superficial level. He nodded gratefully to his host.

“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson. I appreciate kind words from a perceptive critic. I’m glad you liked the show.”

“No, no seriously,” the clan leader insisted, as if Gordon had been trying to be modest. “I haven’t been so delighted in years. The Macbeth part at the end there sent shivers up my spine! I only wish I’d watched it on TV back when I had a chance. I didn’t know it was so good!

“And that inspiring speech you gave us earlier, that one of Abraham Lincoln’s … well, you know, we tried to start a school here, in the beginning. But it just didn’t work out. We needed every hand, even the kids’. Now though, well, that speech got me to thinking. We’ve got some old books put away. Maybe now’s the time to give it a try again.”

Gordon nodded politely. He had seen this syndrome before—the best of the dozen or so types of reception he had experienced over the years, but also among the saddest. It always made him feel like a charlatan, when his shows brought out grand, submerged hopes in a few of the decent, older people who remembered better days … hopes that, to his knowledge, had always fallen through before a few weeks or months had passed.

It was as if the seeds of civilization needed more than goodwill and the dreams of aging high school graduates to water them. Gordon often wondered if the right symbol might do the trick—the right
idea
. But he knew his little dramas, however well received, weren’t the key. They might
trigger a beginning, once in a great while, but local enthusiasm always failed soon after. He was no traveling messiah. The legends he offered weren’t the kind of sustenance needed in order to overcome the inertia of a dark age.

The world turns, and soon the last of the old generation will be gone. Scattered tribes will rule the continent. Perhaps in a thousand years the adventure will begin again. Meanwhile …

Gordon was spared hearing more of Mrs. Thompson’s sadly unlikely plans. The crowd squeezed out a small, silver-haired, black woman, wiry and leather skinned, who seized Gordon’s arm in a friendly, viselike grip.

“Now Adele,” she said to the clan matriarch, “Mister Krantz hasn’t had a bite since noontime. I think, if we want him able to perform tomorrow night, we’d better feed him. Right?” She squeezed his right arm and obviously thought him undernourished—an impression he was loathe to alter, with the aroma of food wafting his way.

Mrs. Thompson gave the other woman a look of patient indulgence. “Of course, Patricia,” she said. “I’ll speak with you more about this, later, Mr. Krantz, after Mrs. Howlett has fattened you up a bit.” Her smile and her glittering eyes held a touch of intelligent irony, and Gordon found himself reevaluating Adele Thompson. She certainly was nobody’s fool.

Mrs. Howlett propelled him through the crowd. Gordon smiled and nodded as hands came out to touch his sleeve. Wide eyes followed his every movement.

Hunger must make me a better actor. I’ve never had an audience react quite like this before. I wish I knew exactly what it was I did that made them feel this way
.

One of those watching him from behind the long buffet table was a young woman barely taller than Mrs. Howlett, with deep, almond eyes and hair blacker than Gordon remembered ever seeing before. Twice, she turned to gently slap the hand of a child who tried to help himself before the honored guest. Each time the girl quickly looked back at Gordon and smiled.

Beside her, a tall, burly young man stroked his reddish
beard and gave Gordon a strange look—as if his eyes were filled with some desperate resignation. Gordon had only a moment to assimilate the two as Mrs. Howlett pulled him over in front of the pretty brunette.

“Abby,” she said, “let’s have a little bit of everything on a plate for Mr. Krantz. Then he can make up his mind what he wants seconds of. I baked the blueberry pie, Mr. Krantz.”

Dizzily, Gordon made a note to have two helpings of the blueberry. It was hard to concentrate on diplomacy, though. He hadn’t seen or smelled anything like this in years. The odors distracted him from the disconcerting looks and touching hands.

There was a large, spit-turned, stuffed turkey. A huge, steaming bowl of boiled potatoes, dollied up with beer-soaked jerky, carrots, and onions, was the second course. Down the table Gordon saw apple cobbler and an opened barrel of dried apple flakes.
I must cozen a supply of those, before I leave
.

Skipping further inventory, he eagerly held out his plate. Abby kept watching him as she took it.

The big, frowning redhead suddenly muttered something indecipherable and reached out to grab Gordon’s right hand in both of his own. Gordon flinched, but the taciturn fellow would not let go until he answered the grip and shook hands firmly.

The man muttered something too low to follow, nodded, and let go. He bent to kiss the brunette quickly and then stalked off, eyes downcast.

Gordon blinked.
Did I just miss something?
It felt as if some sort of event had just occurred, and had gone completely over his head.

“That was Michael, Abby’s husband,” Mrs. Howlett said. “He’s got to go and relieve Edward at the trap string. But he wanted to stay to see your show, first. When he was little he so used to love to watch TV shows.…”

Steam from the plate rose to his face, making Gordon quite dizzy with hunger. Abby blushed and smiled when he thanked her. Mrs. Howlett pulled him over to take a seat on
a pile of old tires. “You’ll get to talk to Abby, later,” the black woman went on. “Now, you eat. Enjoy yourself.”

Gordon did not need to be encouraged. He dug in while people looked on curiously and Mrs. Howlett rattled on.

“Good, isn’t it? You just sit and eat and pay us no mind.

“And when you’re all full and you’re ready to talk again, I think we’d all like to hear, one more time, how you got to be a mailman.”

Gordon looked up at the eager faces above him. He hurriedly took a swig of beer to chase down the too-hot potatoes.

“I’m just a traveler,” he said around a half-full mouth while lifting a turkey drumstick. “It’s not much of a story how I got the bag and clothes.”

He didn’t care whether they stared, or touched, or talked at him, so long as they let him eat!

Mrs. Howlett watched him for a few moments. Then, unable to hold back, she started in again. “You know, when I was a little girl we used to give milk and cookies to the mailman. And my father always left a little glass of whiskey on the fence for him the day before New Year’s. Dad used to tell us that poem, you know, ‘Through sleet, through mud, through war, through blight, through bandits and through darkest night …’ ”

Gordon choked on a sudden, wayward swallow. He coughed and looked up to see if she was in earnest. A glimmer in his forebrain wanted to dance over the old woman’s accidentally magnificent misremembrance. It was rich.

The glimmer faded quickly, though, as he bit into the delicious roast fowl. He hadn’t the will to try to figure out what the old woman was driving at.

“
Our
mailman used to
sing
to us!”

The speaker, incongruously, was a dark-haired giant with a silver-streaked beard. His eyes seemed to mist as he remembered. “We could hear him coming, on Saturdays when we were home from school, sometimes when he was over a block away.

“He was black, a lot blacker than Mrs. Howlett, or Jim Horton over there. Man, did he have a nice voice! Guess that’s how he got the job. He brought me all those mail order coins I used to collect. Ringed the doorbell so he could hand ’em to me, personal, with his own hand.”

His voice was hushed with telescoped awe.

“Our mailman just whistled when I was little,” said a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face. She sounded a little disappointed.

“But he
was
real nice. Later, when I was grown up, I came home from work one day and found out the mailman had saved the life of one of my neighbors. Heard him choking and gave hirn mouth-to-mouth until th’ ambulance came.”

A collective sigh rose from the circle of listeners, as if they were hearing the heroic adventures of a single ancient hero. The children listened in wide-eyed silence as the tales grew more and more embroidered. At least the small part of him still paying attention figured they had to be. Some were simply too far-fetched to be believed.

Mrs. Howlett touched Gordon’s knee. “Tell us again how you got to be a mailman.”

Gordon shrugged a little desperately. “I just found the mailman’s fings!” he emphasized around the food in his mouth. The flavors had overcome him, and he felt almost panicky over the way they all
hovered
over him. If the adult villagers wanted to romanticize their memories of men they had once considered lower-class civil servants at best, that was all right. Apparently they associated his performance tonight with the little touches of extroversion they had witnessed in their neighborhood letter carriers, when they had been children. That, too, was okay. They could think anything they damn well pleased, so long as they didn’t interrupt his eating!

“Ah—” Several of the villagers looked at each other knowingly and nodded, as if Gordon’s answer had had some profound significance. Gordon heard his own words repeated to those on the edges of the circle.

“He found the mailman’s things … so naturally he became …”

His answer must have appeased them, somehow, for the crowd thinned as the villagers moved off to take polite turns at the buffet. It wasn’t until much later, on reflection, that he perceived the significance of what had taken place there, under boarded windows and tallow lamps, while he crammed himself near to bursting with good food.

The Mayor of Gilchrist must have been a strong-willed man to have persuaded his local emergency committee to offer such a trade. Hoarding, however illogical and uncooperative, was a major contributor to the collapse. It astonished Gordon that there still had been people with this much good sense during the first two years of the Chaos.

He rubbed his eyes. Reading wasn’t easy by the light of a pair of homemade candles. But he found it difficult getting to sleep on the soft mattress, and damn if he’d sleep on the floor after so long dreaming of such a bed, in just such a room!

He had been a little sick, earlier. All that food and homebrewed
ale had almost taken him over the line from delirious happiness to utter misery. Somehow, he had teetered along the boundary for several hours of blurrily remembered celebration before at last stumbling into the room they had prepared for him.