“Can he do such a thing?”
“He says he can. But the problem is with the script. It won’t spring to life the way he wants it to. He asked my advice, but I’m only a beginning writer. I thought—of course I don’t mean to presume on your generosity—”
“I wouldn’t ordinarily look at a novice’s screen-play. A commission from a sitting President of the United States is a different matter, however. I’ve worked on a few cinematic translations of my own stories in the past. I suppose I could examine President Comstock’s material, and offer some advice, if it’s wanted.”
“It’s very much wanted, sir, and I’m sure Julian will be grateful for anything you can tell him, as will I.”
“Have you brought the script?”
“Yes,” I said, drawing the folded pages out of my vest pocket. “Handwritten, I’m afraid,” for I saw that Mr. Easton owned a typewriter even more sleek than the machine I had obtained from Theodore Dornwood, “but Julian’s cursive is legible, mostly.”
“I’d like to read it. Will you wait downstairs while I do so?”
“You mean to read it right now, sir?”
“If you’ll oblige me.”
I assured him I would. Then I went downstairs and spoke for a while with his daughter, who was named Mrs. Robson. She shared the house with her father while her husband was up in Quebec City commanding a regiment. During this conversation Mrs. Robson’s four children (if I counted correctly) bounded through the room at irregular intervals, shouting for attention and wiping their noses on things. Whenever they passed I favored them with a smile, though they mainly grimaced in return, or emitted disrespectful noises.
Then Mr. Easton himself came hobbling down the stairs, a cane in one hand and Charles Darwin in the other. His age had made him slightly infirm, and Mrs. Robson hurried to his side and scolded him for attempting the staircase without help.
“Don’t fuss,” he told his daughter. “I’m on Presidential business. Mr. Hazzard, your evaluation of your friend’s work was exactly correct. It’s obviously sincere and well-researched, but it lacks certain elements indispensable to any truly successful cinematic production.”
“What elements are those?” I asked.
“Songs,” he said decisively. “And a villain. And, ideally, pirates.”
* * *
I was eager to communicate this news to Julian—that the famous writer Mr. Charles Curtis Easton had agreed to help him develop his script—but there was a telegram waiting for me when I came home to Calyxa.
I had not received a telegram before. I was alarmed when I saw it, and guessed in advance that it contained bad news.
That intuition was correct. The telegram was from Williams Ford. It had been sent by my mother.
Dear Adam, it said.
Your father gravely ill. Snakebit. Come if you can.
I made the arrangements at once, and secured a ticket on an express train; but he died before I reached Athabaska.
5
The train rolled over half of America that Fourth of July, it seemed to me, past small towns thriving and many abandoned, past vast Estates worked by shirtless indentured men, past countless Tips and Tills and ruins, into a sunset that burned like slow coal on the horizon, and on into the prairie night. There were no fireworks that evening, though there was some impromptu merrymaking in the dinner car—I didn’t join in. I was asleep by moonrise. Late the next day the train entered the State of Athabaska, its border marked by a landscape of enormous pits where the Secular Ancients had once strained the tarry earth for oil. I saw the ruins of a Machine the size of a Cathedral, its rusted treadwork embedded in scabs of calcified mud. Wherever there was open water, geese and crows flocked up to salute the passing train.
Julian had wired the Duncan-Crowley Estate to tell them I was coming. That presented a social difficulty to the Aristos there. Seen from one angle, I was a recreant lease-boy of no account come home to visit his illiterate father’s grave; from another, I was the scribe and confidant of the new President, the nearest thing to an emissary from the Executive Power that Williams Ford was ever likely to receive. The Duncans and the Crowleys, whose fortune was all in Ohio farmland and Nevada mines, and whose New York connections were tenuous, had resolved their dilemma by sending Ben Kreel to meet me. He came down to Connaught in the Estate’s best rig, drawn by two high-stepping horses.
The train had arrived with the dawn. I hadn’t slept well; but Ben Kreel was an early riser by habit, and he shook my hand as cheerfully as the occasion permitted. “Adam Hazzard! Or should I call you Colonel Hazzard?”
He had not changed much, though I had new eyes (it seemed) to see him with. He was still bluff, stout, red-cheeked, and utterly in control of himself. “I’m out of the Army now—plain Adam will do,” I said.
“Not so plain as when you left us,” he said. “We all thought you and Julian must have been running from conscription. But you distinguished yourselves in battle—and in other ways—didn’t you?”
“What a person runs run from and what a person runs to aren’t always as different as we hope.”
“And you’re an Author now, and speak like one.”
“I don’t mean to put on any airs, sir.”
“A justified pride is never out of place. Very sorry about your father.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Estate physician did what he could; but it was a bad bite, and your father wasn’t a young man.”
The carriage moved away from the clutter and noise of the train depot, past wood-frame hostels and the many bar-rooms and hemp-dens my mother used to call “the curse of Connaught,” onto the pressed-earth road leading north to Williams Ford. It was a warm and windless morning, and the rising sun picked out the peaks of the distant mountains. Devil’s Paint-Brush grew in colorful thickets along the verge of the road, and the sparsely-wooded land gave out its old familiar summer odors.
“The Duncans and the Crowleys,” Ben Kreel said, “are prepared to welcome you to town, and no doubt would have put on some sort of public reception if the circumstances were less unhappy. As it is, they’ve set aside a room for you in one of the Great Houses.”
“I thank them kindly; but I was never uncomfortable in my mother’s house, and I expect she would like me to stay there, and that’s what I mean to do.”
“Probably that’s wise,” Ben Kreel said, with something that might have been a suppressed sigh of relief.
When at last we came through the fields where the indentured men worked, into the low rolling hills near the River Pine, and reached the outskirts of Williams Ford, I mentioned that the Independence Day fireworks must have been extravagant this year.
“They were,” Ben Kreel said. “A peddler brought in a handful of Chinese rockets from Seattle for the event. Blue Fire-Wheels and some very colorful Salamanders… how did you know?”
“The air still smells of gunpowder,” I said. It was a sensitivity I had picked up in the war.
* * *
I won’t dwell on the details of my grief. The reader understands the delicacy of these painful emotions. [Or if the reader doesn’t understand it right now, he will before very long. That’s the contract Life makes with Nature and Time; and we’re all bound by it, though none of us consented to the bargain.]
I put in a brief appearance at the Estate, for the sake of politeness, and I was politely received by the Duncans and the Crowleys, but I didn’t stay long. It was more important for me to see my mother. I passed the stables on the way from the Estate to the lease-holds, and I was tempted to find out whether my old tormentors still worked there, and whether my new rank had made them afraid of me; but that was a petty urge, not worth indulging.