“Jason Thistledown!” she shouted, waving the horseshoes above her head as she drew up to him.
“Thank you ever so for inviting me to your party Miss Harper,” said Jason, parroting what his Aunt Germaine had told him to say when greeting his hostess. He originally was not intending to follow her advice—the way Aunt Germaine had said to say it seemed prissy and girlish and he was sure it would make him out a fool.
But no one laughed. Ruth gave a little curtsy, and she smiled in a sly way at him—the sort of way that made Jason feel that he was in on the joke, not the butt of it. The smile also washed away, at least for the moment, that memory of a tiny face like hers but not, grinning with sharp little teeth and a perverse shine in the bead-sized eye. Jason felt himself exhale, and set about figuring a greeting for Louise Butler, who stood clutching her cider to her breast and looking stricken.
Ruth set the horseshoes on the ground and stepped lightly to the table, where she lifted the pitcher and began filling a glass. “Cider, Jason?”
“Of course you remember Louise.”
“Good afternoon,” said Jason. Louise finally smiled properly.
“It’s still morning,” said Louise. “But good day, sir.”
Ruth handed the glass to Jason, then set the pitcher down. Jason took a deep swallow of the cider. It was thick and a little tart, and burned his throat.
“Too strong for you?” she asked.
“I like it fine. Like drinking a pie.” Jason took another sip. “This is quite a party your pa puts on.”
“The first of many,” said Ruth. “Father feels celebration is essential to maintaining community. This summer, he’ll have a hundred.”
Jason laughed. “He’ll run out of Sundays,” he said, and Ruth said, “He’ll just send to New York for more.”
Louise interjected: “Do you play at horseshoes, Jason?”
“I do,” said Jason. He drained the rest of his glass of cider and set it on the table.
Horseshoes was a game that Jason played quite some with his ma. When he was small, she’d driven an old rail spike into the dirt behind the house. On summer evenings after supper, the two of them would sometimes haul out a rusted stack of horseshoes and toss them over that spike until the last of daylight had bled off. The Harpers’ horseshoe set was nothing like that—the horseshoes had not a speck of rust on them, and not one of them had ever borne the weight of an actual horse.
They played four games of it before the call to lunch, and Jason won three of them without even thinking. The last one, he started thinking—and that did it. He threw one horseshoe wild, and another dropped halfway between him and the spike. Louise took that game, and at the end of it, Jason found he had to sit.
“Why Jason—what is the matter? I’ve not seen you this pale since I accused you of being the son of a gunfighter!” said Ruth.
Jason shook his head. “Nothing.”
A single vertical line formed on Ruth’s brow. “Well,” she said, “I doubt that. What have you been up to since we parted ways at the dock?”
Jason might have told it—told Ruth everything of that night, from the creature at the window to the Juke at the back of it, from the sad fate of Maryanne Leonard to the less certain fate of Dr. Andrew Waggoner—his game of cat and mouse with the murderous Dr. Bergstrom in days subsequent—were it not for the exquisite timing of Garrison Harper. He stood at the top of the rise, his coat in his arm and the sleeves of his shirt rolled past the elbow—a huge grin on his face and the breeze teasing a long dark forelock like a torn strand of flag.
“Children!” he shouted. “Dinner! Hop to it please—plenty of time for horseshoes later!”
And then Ruth Harper stood, and between finger and thumb, she took hold of his little finger on his right hand, and by that lifted him to his feet.
“We are summoned, Mr. Thistledown,” she said. “Best we do not tarry. The guests shall become restless.”
“Quite a crowd, isn’t it?” said Ruth. “Have you ever seen that many people at once, Jason?”
“Sure,” said Jason, although he could swear there were twice as many as there were before they started playing at horseshoes.
“Ever seen so many so fine?” she asked.
Jason looked—but try as he might, he couldn’t figure what she was talking about. Were they fine? Finer than others? Mr. Harper seemed to like them—he was striding on ahead, into the midst of a group of men who had the hard look of lumberjacks, bellowing his welcome at them.
And with that, they headed down the hill and into the midst of Garrison Harper’s picnic, and as they jostled through the crowd, Jason thought Ruth was right. He hadn’t seen a bunch of folk like this before—and the number of them didn’t have anything to do with it. This place was supposed to be a Utopia—something like Heaven on earth, designed to fit with some grand idea that Mr. Harper had come upon. And as he wandered through the crowds of people with Ruth and Louise, making their way towards the food, it dawned on Jason that as much as his aunt had talked on about free medical care and good working conditions in the mill, he had never fully fathomed exactly what that idea was.
But as he was moving among these folk, he thought he might be getting a better inkling. They were tall—not one of them who was an adult was any shorter than Jason. They seemed pretty strong too. And as to the ladies? They were lean and comely, in the main—good matches for the men they accompanied. And Jason had spent some time with Aunt Germaine and knew of the infirmities that she looked for doing her work—there was no sign he could tell of idiocy or lunacy in their faces; nothing of the mongrel or the degenerate.
In fact, one might wonder just what profit Aunt Germaine and the Eugenics Records Office might find spending time here. Aunt Germaine told him that they were looking for the bottom ten percent of the world.
And here—at least judging by the strong arms and the clean brows—Jason figured there wouldn’t be anyone in that bottom percentage. And then another thought came to him—a recollection not of the quarantine, but of that other awful place, Cracked Wheel. Those days he and his aunt had hid out in the town offices, and she’d told him what was what about Dr. Charles Davenport and the ERO.
Why not look for the top ten percent? he’d asked her.
Why not indeed? That’d been her answer. Jason wondered now if he asked Garrison Harper the same question, he’d say anything different.
The sun had passed its height by the time Jason had himself a plate full of some of the finest food he’d tasted, but he had lost sight of Ruth. He spotted Louise Butler, though, at a long table half-full of folk, so went and asked if he might join her. She smiled and said he might, so he set his plate down, put a leg over the bench and asked her a bit about herself. She was more conversational on her own, but only a little, and Jason still had to draw it out of her.
Where was she from again now?—Evanston, Illinois, thank you. What business were her folks in?—Dry goods, Mr. Thistledown. And she and Ruth Harper attended school together?—Yes thank you. In Chicago?—Not far from Chicago. That is correct. Did she ever read the Bulfinch’s at that school of hers?
“The—Bulfinch’s? I am sorry, Mr. Thistledown. I’m not familiar with that text.”
“Mythology,” said Jason. “The Greeks and such.”
“Oh,” she said. “The Greeks. I’ve tried to read some of Homer. Not my cup of tea.”
Jason took a mouthful of mashed potatoes soaked in butter. He swallowed and set down his fork. “You figure where Miss Harper’s got to?”