He said that it gave him “line of sight to the world.” Eventually, five antenna masts were scattered around the house. The largest was his “moon bounce,”
perched atop a sixty-foot tower. There were also dipole and sloper antennas stretched as far as eighty-eight yards from the house, in several directions.
Edgar used a pair of hydraulic rams to lift the water to the house. They were very inefficient, but reliable. The twenty-five gallons a minute at the spring yielded only five gallons a minute at the house.
Thirteen months after the Federals invaded the Palouse Hills region, Edgar was the recipient of a package that he hadn’t expected. A knock on his door at 11 p.m. woke him from a sound sleep. Edgar put on his robe and slippers and picked up his Belgian Browning twelve-gauge shotgun. He was about to snap on the 24 VDC porch light, when he heard a muffled but familiar voice through the door, “Edgar, it’s me,Vern. Leave the light off! I need to ask you a favor!You’ve got to hide this package.” Edgar drew back the heavy bars that he had built for the top, middle, and bottom of the door. He opened the door warily, and asked, “What’s so important you have to come here in the middle of the night?” He could see his neighbor in the dim moonlight. There was a woman with him. They were silent. Edgar motioned inward with his hand, and said, “Well, come on in.”
Vern and the woman crept in, groping in the dark front hall. After Edgar had rebolted the door, he lit a big “triple wick” candle and carried it to the kitchen.Vern and the unfamiliar woman followed him. They sat around the table, with the candle between them, lighting their faces.
It was then that Edgar could see that the woman was emaciated. She appeared to be around sixty year old, with graying hair. Her eyes were sunken, and the skin around her jaw seemed taut. She also looked frightened. She kept glancing at Vern.Vern spoke in a jumble. “I’ve just gotta ask your help. This is Maggie. She escaped from the Federal camp down at Gowen Field, three weeks ago. Folks have been shuttlin’ her north, here into rebel-controlled land.
I can’t keep her. I can barely feed my own family. I figured that since you were alone, and that because you eat good, that, well, you know….”
Edgar raised his hand to signalVern to stop his chatter, and then asked, “Can you cook, Maggie?”
She nodded.
“Can you mend clothes?”
She nodded again.
“Do you know how to shoot?”
She nodded again.
“Can you speak, Maggie?”
She laughed, and answered, “Of course I can speak!”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty.”
“How is your strength?You look something terrible thin.”
“I’ve lost a lot of weight, but I still have my strength. Will you hide me here?”
Without a pause, Edgar answered assuredly, “Certainly, ma’am. Nobody bothers me here. The Federals have never noticed me. Even if they did, they’d think I was an eccentric old hermit. Come to think of it, I am an eccentric old hermit. I suppose some day they’ll come looking, to confiscate my radios. But in the meantime, since I’m so far off the county road, nobody is going to notice that there’s somebody else living here.” Maggie beamed and said quietly,
“God bless you.”
Vern stood up and made his goodbyes, thanking Edgar Rhodes repeatedly, and giving Maggie a hug. As Edgar shook his hand,Vern said, “Now you take good care of this little gal, Edgar.” He turned and disappeared into the darkness.
Edgar made Maggie a batch of scrambled eggs before bed. He apologized for not having any coffee or tea. As he walked her down the hall to the guest bedroom, he said, “You can tell me all about your adventures in the morning.”
The next morning, Edgar went looking on the front porch, where he expected to find Maggie’s luggage. There was none. She had only the clothes on her back. They consisted of a long and tattered gray dress, a pair of filthy tennis shoes with no socks, and an oversized man’s forest green trench coat.
Over a breakfast of eggs, flat bread and honey, and slices of cheese, Maggie told her story. “We lived in Payette. My husband had died five years before the stock market crash, so I went to live with my daughter and her family. Three weeks after the troops and the UN administrators arrived, they came for our whole family: my daughter, my son-in-law, their two children, and me. Both my daughter Julie and my son-in-law Mark were with the resistance. They were trying to organize groups in the neighborhood for sabotage. One of our neighbors must have informed on us.
“They surrounded the house at 6 o’clock in the morning. Must have been forty of them. They said that they’d burn us out if we didn’t come out with our hands up. They dragged Julie and Mark away in handcuffs. They took Mark’s guns and CB radio as ‘evidence.’ They gave me, and the children, just five minutes to pack a few clothes, while they stood there with Kalashnikovs pointed at us. Then they searched me again, and they took everything that I had packed in the suitcases and the duffel bag and scattered it across the yard, looking for ‘contraband.’ They laughed and kicked me while I was picking it all back up and trying to repack it.
“When Mark shouted at them, the soldiers threatened to kill him. Finally, after I had most of the clothes picked up, they threw the bags up into the back of a big canvas-topped Army truck, and handcuffed me next to Julie and Mark.
They even handcuffed the kids. We were all connected to a big heavy chain—it looked like a big boat anchor chain, running lengthwise down the middle of the truck bed. It was welded down at both ends.
“They stopped and picked up another family later the same day, the Weinsteins. By the time they had them loaded in the truck, Mrs. Weinstein was having a nervous breakdown. To her, it was the Holocaust all over again. They had lost great grandparents and several great aunts and great uncles in the Nazi years in Germany. Seeing it happen all over again was just too much for her.
“We were nearly fifteen hours in that truck, without a drop of water. They only stopped once to let us relieve ourselves, and we had to do that in full view of everyone. They did what they called ‘double locking’ the handcuffs, so that they wouldn’t tighten up, but even still they left horrible red marks. Poor Mark lost some of the circulation in his left hand, but the guards wouldn’t do anything about it. When they finally took the cuffs off of him, his hand was all puffed up. He must have had permanent nerve damage in that hand.
“Gowen was a horrible place. We were put in a barracks with eleven other families. There were fifty-nine of us in that barracks, at first. We had one large pot, and we had to do all of our cooking in that, as best we could. There was a weekly ration of spuds. And once in a while, there would be some beans, or bread, or wheat. But there was never enough. Once in a blue moon we’d get some rotten lettuce or cabbage.
“We never got a trial. There was never even any mention of it. And when we asked about appealing our confinement, or asked when we would be released, they just laughed at us. Most of the adults were expected to work. Some of it was just make-work. Others worked in the sweatshops. At Gowen, the big industry was boots. Julie was one of the boot makers. She worked eleven hours a day, with fifteen minutes for lunch. If she didn’t do her quota of stitching, she was beaten.
“They came most every day, to take away one or two people for interrogation. It was usually the men. They came back, usually a day or two later, looking ghastly. Sometimes they couldn’t walk. They were usually bleeding. Sometimes they were bleeding out of the rectum from being kicked so much. They often talked about the torture: beatings, whippings, electric cattle prods. Oh, and the bruises, so many bruises! I thank the Lord that I never got picked up for interrogation. I don’t think that I could have survived it.