“They’re going to have a parade tomorrow,” said the Wobbly who was most able to speak.
“Oh dear,” said Vera.
“I hate fucking parades,” said Charles. He looked up. “I mean, I always have. Regardless of any bombing.”
“They’re going to kill us at the end of the parade,” said a man who hadn’t yet spoken.
“Nobody’s going to kill anybody,” Charles said. “I work for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety.”
“We’re going to go back to the hall,” said Vera, “and make it comfortable again, and we’re going to watch the parade go by. That’s all we have to do. Sit back and say, “There goes a parade.” If we can see it’s just a parade, then all we have to do is watch it. We don’t have to fight them, we don’t have to hate them, we don’t have to fear them.” Then perhaps she betrayed the coil of panic that had just begun to turn in her stomach, along with the swiftly growing, metamorphosing foetus. “Not one fucking little bit do we have to be afraid of these shit-sucking bullies.” She caught herself and pulled herself back. “There’s nothing they can take away from us. We give it all gladly because we are not afraid of anything.”
Which of course was the moment they realized they were very afraid. The serene and undivided self was divided again. It took so little: some angry talk, some shoving and pushing, jail cells, phone calls that made both speaker and spoken-to feel as if the attenuation they felt was about to become terrifying, thoughts of killing and being killed. of course they felt they’d forced their way into a dangerous place thinking like the fools they truly were that a dangerous place was where they could best bring their serene and undivided self to bear. Images of the carnage in San Francisco played in loops in their imagination.
Then, strangely, during the course of this communal, unspoken confession, the daredevils found themselves feeling serene and undivided again. Perhaps something truly good might after all be accomplished. By the fearless ones, the ones who refused the Devil admittance.
They walked together to the hall and cleaned it up to the extent that they could. A fire was started in the Franklin stove that heated the two rooms, and bread and cheese were eaten around the stove. The town, counter to expectations, grew livelier. Someone came by and asked them what they were doing. Charles said he worked for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, which had come to the conclusion that a functioning IWW office was temporarily necessary. Wobblies, he said, had changed their minds and were all in favor of war now, so everybody had to work together. In this bubble he felt free and happy with these odd little lies. Gas lamps came on, a number of saloons did ominously brisk trade. A man with piercing blue eyes and a red puffy face sat down on a broken chair on the sidewalk outside the hall. Its one good leg wobbled, then snapped. The man held his quart bottle of whiskey high as he fell. Pushing the chair out of his way, he slid his back up against the storefront wall so that his head was visible at the bottom of the window. He sighed with pleasure, then began checking his pockets for something he did not find. Lurching to his feet, he dashed off, leaving the bottle on the sidewalk. Charles went outside, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve, and drank a long drink. Then he came in with the bottle and everyone drank from it. After a while, Vera got up with some difficulty and excused herself, saying she was tired. Charles’s happiness became bolder in its expression as he contemplated the cause of his true love’s fatigue, his sense of freedom more able to withstand attack. So much so that he welcomed it. He became quickly so bold and fierce in the defense of his bold serene freedom that he failed to note it when he slipped away from it again, when he realized that what he wanted was to stomp the shit out of the big man and his little men.
Just like that is it lost. The small good act, the idea of it, the serene contentment and true freedom inhering in it, is lost in the roar of the fire. The brain becomes white hot. The servant of the brain can no longer see around the flames in his eyes. The inferno’s fuel is mistakenly assumed to be bravery when it is in fact fear. The Devil stands there as if he had been there all along. Vera pushed a bench against the wall in the back room and lay down on it.
“‘I’m tired of you being tired,’” said Charles quietly. He was fixing himself. He continued to drink until the bottle was empty, the others quickly succumbing to the effect of alcohol on their shredded nerves. They assumed foetal positions in corners and were asleep instantly, in the way that people do whose nerves had taken more than they could stand.
Charles stood at the big window.
He went outside.
It might have been a carnival scene he entered. Men women children, couples, young lovers, families strolled and gawked at the ordinary street life of their snug town after dark. For every drunk there was a child eating ice cream. Groups of children darted and toddled about. Gangs of boys huddled, some of them perhaps nearly as old as himself, but seeming freckled and stupid even as they took on the air of important men discussing investment opportunities — only to dissolve in loud sneering honks of laughter. It was hard to say what was going on; sometimes people would look at him with menacing hostility and sometimes they would not. He even thought he saw a few guilelessly friendly winks and smiles and waves. What he thought was a firecracker went off not too far away. Then another and another. Then as if in a dream a horse stepped heavily against him and he fell to his knees. He looked up in the garish darkness but saw only the great head of the horse dropping swiftly toward him, and he rolled away. He must have taken a blow to the head as well because he was dopey. Where was Amelia? he wondered. Why could she not control her horse? He got to his feet awkwardly and wondered for the length of time it takes lightning to strike what his sister — now that he knew she was not there — was doing at that moment. He ached for her, because surely she was lost. He felt very heavy, as if knowledge had been dropped like a millstone around his neck: the firecrackers he knew now were guns, and the parade had begun, in torchlight.
He could see one of the Wobblies standing at the window, but now with a Winchester deer rifle, and he scrambled back into the hall, heart slamming in his throat.
“People will kill you,” he told the man conversationally, “if you upset the kind of fear they’re used to with another, no matter how persuasively you speak of its guaranteed safety features.”
All of the men had weapons; only Vera had disdained arming. The Wobbly at the window set the rifle down on a chair and went to whisper something to Vera. Charles took up the rifle, a.30–30 lever action exactly like one he’d grown up with on the ranch. They were easy to use and he was good at it, like he was good in all things. “Scholar,” he said, “soldier, statesman, musician, belletrist. And say, that’s funny: I say ‘musician,’ and I realize how badly I’ve let my musicianship lapse. I think I’ll begin to compose. Vera, do you remember, did you ever know, about those five strange notes I heard in the park that day before the earthquake? They were a question.”
The shouting from the street was astonishingly loud, he thought, nearly deafening, and then he heard a clear sharp crack and turned to see one of the Wobblies in the midst of a comic walk across a kind of stage, then fall hilariously over.
“We are not going to shoot anyone,” Vera was saying over and over and then she was screaming it through the open door and smashed windows. Bullets smashed glass and cracked through the walls.