“Yup, and I’m not the only one. Mabel at the post office said there were notices for 113 with the overnight post from Asheville.”
“You sure of that—113?”
“Yes, Daddy.” There was now a slight touch of a scared girl in her voice. “I ran up here to tell you. A crowd is already gathering at the post office, and they are definitely not happy.”
He took that in, stood up, and went out the door to the next room where the town’s telephone operator was on duty.
“Jim, would you patch me in to Mabel?” he asked, and then he returned to his office and picked up his old-style phone.
A retro 1930s telephone switchboard, taken from the local museum down on State Street, had been rigged up in the town hall. “Long distance,” as it was once called, now meant a call to Asheville to the west and Old Fort to the east, though there was talk that Morganton, forty miles off, had managed to pull together enough copper wire to run a line to them. His phone jangled a ring familiar from his childhood, and he picked it up.
“United States Post Office. Mabel Parsons speaking.”
He smiled. She held to the old rituals even though she was the only one who ever worked at the post office, which, beyond its old traditional service, had become something of the town center for news and gossip.
“John Matherson here. How you doing, Mabel? Your husband feeling better?”
“He stabilized out yesterday afternoon, John; thanks for pushing through that request for antibiotics. We really owe you one.”
“Sure, Mabel. The kids at the college are starting to turn out a surplus in their chemistry lab, so no problem.”
“So why are you calling, John? Certainly not to check on George’s health.”
He could sense the challenge in her voice. Mabel was not someone to mince words with.
“Okay, Mabel. My daughter Elizabeth just walked up here from your office with this draft notice thing. Said a whole bunch of them came in with the Asheville mail delivery. What the hell is going on?”
“I sorted through 113 of them, John. You know I’m not supposed to discuss other people’s mail. Old post office pledge and all that. But, yup, I’m sticking them in the mailboxes right now. I think it’s okay to tell you that it looks like half the notices are for kids still living up at the college; the rest are from town who are being called into this ANR thing.”
“I’ll be right down,” John replied and hung up without waiting for a reply. Again he glanced toward his daughter. He was supposed to be the arbitrator and leader for the entire community, but at that moment, regardless of his overall responsibilities and long years of training and service in the military, the issue in his heart was about his daughter, his one remaining child, a mother herself. It was about his blood, his child, the way any parent would react.
He rubbed the stubble on his chin. It was Saturday morning. Tonight, his wife, Makala, would shave him with an old-fashioned straight razor, an art he had never mastered. Perhaps it was her years as a senior nurse in a cardiology unit that gave her confidence with a blade. Throw-away safety razors were indeed a thing of the past.
After a long night of watch duty, he felt grubby and unkempt, and beyond that, his jaw ached from the damned tooth that had started troubling him the month before. Makala had at last talked him into enduring a dreaded visit to the town dentist later and then a bath in the creek and a good shave afterward, followed by relaxation on his day off from duty. But all that had to wait as he looked at Elizabeth.
“Come on, kiddo, let’s get going.”
“Can I drive, Daddy?” Elizabeth asked as they left his office, holding out her hand and offering a smile, the sight of which warmed his heart. A touch of the old days of a teenage daughter conning a father with a smile as she requested the family car.
The 1958 Edsel, once the proud possession of his mother-in-law, had become the highly recognizable official car for John Matherson. It was increasingly a source of guilt, as well. Having moved to Montreat after his home was destroyed during the battle with the Posse, he now lived two and a half miles from the town office. At times, especially on beautiful spring and autumn days, he enjoyed the walk. After all, there was a time when for anything less than several miles, everyone walked until the advent of the auto. But more than once while he took his time walking to the town hall, taking an hour each way, something serious that needed his immediate attention had transpired. So after much official wrangling and arguing, the town council insisted he accept a ration of five gallons of gasoline a week, enough for seventy-five miles.
There was still a reserve of a couple thousand gallons in the underground tank for city vehicles, carefully doled out. As for gas taken from abandoned cars, it was increasingly useless, breaking down over time, though the town’s Volkswagen man, Jim Bartlett, claimed he was developing a formula to make that fuel useable.
Having the Edsel strictly for business use was a luxury that still hit his guilt nerve, and whenever he did see someone walking in or out of town, he’d pull over to give a lift to assuage that guilt.
“We’re walking, Elizabeth. It is exactly half a block from here to the post office.” He set off with a long-legged stride befitting his six-foot-five frame, glad to breathe in the morning air after a long night’s watch in the town hall. While heading out, he told Jim where he would be and asked him to tell Reverend Black, who was coming on duty, that the night had passed quietly for once.
There had been rumors that the Mount Mitchell border reivers were again prowling along the northern edge of his community. The Stepp families, who lived up along the edge of the towering mountains, were complaining constantly about missing chickens and hogs… though of course they were mum about their moonshining operations and surreptitious trading with those same reivers that at times degenerated into violence. At times, he didn’t know if he should be blaming the Stepps rather than the outsiders. But at least this night had passed without incident or vendetta raids.
Leaving the parking lot of the town hall complex of administrative offices, fire department, and police station behind, John and Elizabeth crossed State Street, which had once been a main thoroughfare. The ice storm of the winter before had finally taken down the darkened traffic light. The bank across the street, long abandoned, had burned the year before, the once-prosperous building now an empty shell. The chamber of commerce and visitors’ center for tourists on the other corner ironically was still intact, though the thousands of brochures advertising local attractions had of course been looted out for basic fundamental use. A roll of the original material that the brochures had replaced was worth far more than its weight in silver or the standard medium of exchange—ammunition. It was yet another one of those things hardly anyone thought to stockpile before things went down.
As soon as they crossed the street, he regretted the decision to come down here. About 150 years earlier, the village post office was the community gathering place, fitting a Norman Rockwellish image of the potbellied stove, the local village philosophers and rubes gathered within trading gossip and news, waiting for the morning mail and news from afar over a game of checkers.
Mabel had taken her job to heart; she had been assistant postmistress. For a year, she had little if anything to do, but once the army had for a short time set up headquarters in Asheville, a trickle of mail had indeed started to come in, increasing in flow until, thrice weekly, an actual courier had come from the “big city.”
Delighted to be back to work, Mabel—with the help of her husband, George—had installed a woodstove in the foyer, set out a couple of checkerboards and a chess set, and did a thriving entrepreneurial business on the side with her fresh-baked corn bread that she brought in every morning, as well as herbal teas from various roots and sprouts. John decided to just turn a blind eye to the fact that her special medicinal corn bread for those who needed medication for pain management had been illegal in most states, except Colorado, prior to the Day.