Heaven, Flaxie might have said, though it was surely a more austere and indifferent Heaven than the one she used to imagine. According to the Dominion Reader for Young Persons, from which my mother had liked to quote, Heaven was a New Jerusalem: a City, that is, with many Gates, one by which Presbyterians might enter, another for Baptists, and so forth—but none for Jews or Atheists. [And probably not much more than a mousehole for the Church of Signs , though that codicil was not explicit.]
It occurred to me that I was bound for a different City, however, more substantial if less desirable, and that this glowing intimation of Heaven might be as close to divinity as I was likely to get.
I might have stood there indefinitely, bound up in these thoughts, if Rapture had not snorted, and by that homely noise recalled me to the material world.
9
By the time we sighted Bad Jump, a smudge of soot against the thin line of the railroad, poor Rapture was nearly halt, having turned his hoof in a gopher-hole; and I wasn’t feeling much better, though I was glad we had escaped the attention of One-Leg Willy Bass.
“Be aware that we’re entering a kingdom of larceny,” Sam advised us. “Commerce in these coaling towns is conducted by rougher rules than the ones that prevail in Williams Ford. We’ll have to give up much to get the little we really need, and if the bargain seems unfair, please stifle your objections. In fact speak as little as possible. Keep your hats pulled low, for that matter. Our first stop will be at the stables of a horse-trader, and then, with luck, we’ll board a train.”
Julian might have been the most conspicuous of us, had his hands and face not been grimed with soot, for he was the most fair-skinned. (It isn’t a hard rule that Aristos must be lighter-skinned than the leasing or indentured classes—there are plenty of dark-skinned Aristos, and no shortage of light-skinned laborers—but the tendency is unmistakable. This has to do, I’ve been told, with the way populations were dispersed during the Fall of the Cities in the last century, and how the vagrant urban masses were taken up as corvée labor by propertied interests.) In my case my skin wasn’t a problem, but my vocabulary and manners might be. Sam had turned his old Army jacket inside out, by way of disguise, and this morning he had boiled a pan of water and shaved off his beard—a shocking transformation. With his beard he had always seemed the perfect exemplar of an aged military scholar. Without it he looked dismayingly young and vulnerable. The blade revealed a stern jaw, scratched and bleeding in places, and a wider and more mobile mouth than had ever been perceptible through his whiskers.
(I joked to Julian that this couldn’t be an “evolution,” since it had happened so suddenly; but in Darwinian philosophy, Julian said, such drastic changes were allowed for—they were called “catastrophic.” Thenceforth Julian often made remarks about Sam’s “catastrophic razor,” and described the cuts and scrapes as Sam’s “punctuated equilibrium,” a witticism the significance of which escaped me.) We rode down a gentle slope toward the corrals and stables of the horse-trader. Bad Jump came into closer focus as a conglomeration of board sheds and tin shacks, attached to the general area of the coaling tower like a barnacle on the hull of a ship, and I asked Sam how such a rude town could have come to exist in the midst of the prairie, with no visible agriculture to sustain it.
“It’s a product of the rail fees,” Sam said, “which are fixed by the landed aristocracy of the coastal ports.”
“How can a rail fee create a town, though?”
“A fixed price invites a black market. It means a profit can be taken invisibly by stationmasters and their collaborators in the Rail Trust. Labor refugees, for instance, would never be allowed to buy passage on a respectable passenger car. But there are ‘phantom cars’—freight cars rigged with a few crude amenities—that move about the country almost by stealth, and they can be hired for a price. And where one kind of illicit commerce flourishes, others are inevitably attracted. This trader,” he said, as we passed through an iron gate enclosing an immense property of sheds, stables, and corrals, “deals mainly in stolen horses, for instance. From time to time a Reservist might want to exchange his Federal mount for specie and flee the State by train. No licensed dealer would conduct such a business, but other men are willing to assume the risk of prison or worse, if the price is attractive enough.”
The trade was less brisk in the winter, Sam said, but it didn’t cease entirely. That it did not was evidenced by the trader’s well-populated stables and stock yards, and by the number of hands who worked about the place. We rode up to the main house or office, which was a slightly grander building than the general run of rude shacks in the neighborhood. We were ignored by a score of indifferent stablehands, until an unkempt woman appeared at the door of the house. Sam inquired for the owner, and without speaking a word the woman turned and went inside, and a large and brutish individual returned in her place.
He gave his name as Winslow, but he didn’t offer his hand. Instead he stared at us with a feigned disinterest and asked why we were bothering him on a peaceful Sunday morning.
“Certain items to sell,” said Sam.
“Well, I’m not buying right at the moment.” But Mr. Winslow’s eyes lingered on the Estate horses.
“Perhaps we can talk it over privately,” said Sam; and Mr. Winslow sighed, and made theatrical gestures of impatience and disdain, but finally invited Sam indoors to dicker, while Julian and I stayed with the horses.
We passed the time by surveying our surroundings. The animals in the stables were only cursorily tended, so far as we could judge. I was reluctant to release Rapture into this company, though I had been convinced of the necessity of it. “It’ll come by all right in the long term,” I whispered to my spavined but loyal mount; and I stroked his mane, and pronounced the words as if I believed them.
Beyond the trading post of Mr. Winslow stood the towers of the coaling silo, where the railway tracks bisected the snowy plain. The sight of the tracks excited me a little. I had been once or twice to Connaught , the railhead that served Williams Ford, but I had never been aboard a train. Trains, and the rails and bridges they ran on, had always seemed marvelous to me. I wondered what it would be like to ride one—to feel the miles slip away under me like clouds under the wings of a bird, and to be borne off at flying speed to the fabled cities and harbors of the East.
When Sam emerged from Mr. Winslow’s hovel his expression was grim. He instructed us to dismount and fill our satchels with food from the saddlebags, for everything else had been sold: mounts, saddles, rifles. I protested at this last—wouldn’t we need weapons to protect ourselves? But Sam pointed out that a rifle is a cumbersome object, difficult to disguise, and that none of our fellow travelers would have one. Then Winslow emerged from his cabin and inspected the horses with a critical eye, clucking his tongue at invisible defects; but he couldn’t entirely mask his pleasure at the quality of the Estate-bred mounts.
“And Mr. Winslow has been kind enough to let us sleep in his hayloft tonight,” Sam said. “A train is scheduled to come through tomorrow morning, if it hasn’t been delayed by snow in the mountain passes. With any luck we’ll be on it, though we still have to buy passage.”
I said a final goodbye to Rapture, who rewarded me with a disdainful stare, and tried to fix my mind on the exciting prospect of train travel.
* * *
Sam walked ahead of us toward the crowd of would-be refugees who had camped by the coaling station in anticipation of tomorrow’s train. These landless people circulated among huts and colorful tents, where vendors bartered hot meals, hand weapons, piecemeal salvage, and lucky trinkets. Most of these travelers, vendors and customers alike, were men, but there were a few families among the crowd, including a few children. I asked Sam in a whisper how these people had come to be here.