Rejean Houle walked in through the front door, backing Vera up step by step as he did so.
He was aiming his revolver at her.
He said, “My orders are first her, then you,” but when he fired, it was with a smaller pistol in the other hand and his target was one of the four remaining Wobblies, the one who had made the first and biggest mistake and stepped toward him.
When Houle saw that he’d shot the Wobbly dead, he paused, as if irked. This was the second mistake: pausing as if he wanted to explain things to Charles and Vera. One of the three remaining Wobblies shot him. A man nobody knew came in through the front door, shot the Wobbly who’d just shot Houle, then backed out the door and disappeared.
“I’ll go out there and surrender,” said one of the two remaining Wobblies, the one who’d done the talking in the hotel room, and out he went. As soon as he’d firmly placed his feet and raised his arms over his head, he was shot dead.
It had happened that quickly. Charles found himself wishing, vividly and explicitly and with a kind of calm, that he could see the big man, the slightly less big man, and the man who looked like Paul Bunyan, because he felt he knew these men somehow, having seen them before, and therefore had relationships with them, accounts, so to speak, that he might now draw upon. But three different men standing in front of him turned as one, almost like dancehall girls, and set themselves upon him. He cried out that they had it all wrong, they had it all wrong, “No, no, no!” he wailed like an ordinary coward, but they got him down and beat him until he was quite thoroughly listless, incapable of reflexive violence, not to speak of philosophy, at which point they carried him — or rather supported him as if he were a fallen comrade who could walk but who didn’t care in the least where he was headed — to a railway car on an old siding around which weeds were growing. Inside the stinking black hole were five other men: three merchants with ties to the NPL who had only just been deposited there; and two Wobblies too weak and miserable to speak: they had been there for something like a month, so near and yet so far, when their friends had thought them flown or dead. Then Charles and the lone remaining Wobbly were rolled into the car, followed by a bruised and bleeding Vera. They lay there through the night and half of the next day. Reeling and nauseous in the glare and heat of noon, they were taken back to the intersection of the town’s main streets, where a gauntlet had been formed and a public spectacle was in progress. They were all tied with hands behind backs and led by leashes through the gauntlet, in which they were struck, mainly with leather knouts and canes, by otherwise thoroughly decent people, people, some of them, unused to beating so that their slaps were awkward and didn’t hurt us as much as they probably did them. They were called “niggers” and “Jews.” At the worst it was a whipping and a flaying rather than a clubbing. At the end of the gauntlet they came to an American flag and a table on which an open Bible fluttered its pages. This town was prepared for war.
The flag billowed and collapsed, billowed and collapsed in the mild breeze. Charles could smell the mothballs in which it had been stored. The cover of the topmost Bible lifted slightly and fell closed again. “The goddamned Jew merchants” who had called “this plague of foreigners and radicals” down upon the town, were forced to kiss the flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then — he could not believe his weak squinting eyes, it was as if he were suddenly watching a touring company melodrama — kiss the hand of the big man and beg him — and through him, they were assured, the town — for mercy. When this was done, they were told that they had made atonement and that the town was pleased. They were asked to consider conversion to Christianity, given cheap little Bibles, then set free. The crowd began to move back to the railroad car, hounding the Jews back to their establishments along the way. Go on, go on, business as usual tomorrow, they were told laughingly. Charles wanted Father to catch a bit of this show sometime. At the railroad car, the two Wobblies were, in a surprise move, shot in the head. Those heads were then hacked off and placed on poles on either side of Paul Bunyan. As if they were giving a mighty god credit, he thought in the quiet little space he had found for himself in his mind, far from the organs of sight and sound and speech, the progenitors of action, the casus belli he half-felt he could never again trust, as if they were decorations for an important holiday. Which in effect they were.
Then the big man said, “Now we come to the mysterious ones. The young man from a proud and prosperous family, who won’t defend his country, who merely pretends to be a person we all depend on in a time of war, is merely a coward. He shall therefore be tarred and feathered. The man, who insists on an identity we know to be false, who wishes to breed mystery and so confound and poison the minds of our citizens, he shall be castrated so as to make the fulfillment of his wish impossible. The woman, who was sworn she will not bear the children of fighting men and patriots, will nevertheless find herself full of their seed.”
But someone was whispering in the big man’s ear and the big man was smiling, smiling, then frowning, then smiling, then waving off the rape and torture.
Vera awoke on a couch in a gazebo. She had fallen into the kind of thick and troubling sleep that afternoons sometimes provide. Her head lay in Charles’s lap. He was reading Plato. Some tall red pines stood around the gazebo, and a two-track path led from the door past a stable and assorted red and white outbuildings. She rolled away and stood unsteadily, then pushed through the light screen door of the gazebo. Charles got up and followed her along the path until it came to a fence and a stile, near a large rock that bore a copper plaque eulogizing a beloved dog who had once romped happily there. Beyond the fence lay a meadow of foxtail barley and hawkweed, the reddish orange flowers like a great dusty glaze on the grass, nearly as far as they could see, to a distant woods arcing along the horizon, a tuft of dark-green but arid-looking trees. The light was harsh beyond the stand of pines, and they regretted leaving the shady cool gazebo. Remote from all tyrannies, Vera thought again, then said aloud, not particularly to Charles. It was somehow the phrase she had dragged up from sleep. “But not so remote that I. that I what? All solutions, she thought, as if reciting something she had dreamt, taken too far, become tyrannies. Good becomes evil, and not a necessary, therefore better, evil, but one as evil as the evil one set out to vanquish. clothed in suits of principle. Chain-principle,” she said giddily, as they made their way back to the gazebo, pulling the screen door open and hearing it bang behind them, hearing flies hit the screen and bounce away and hit it again, droning. “Conclusion? One must remain remote from all solutions as well.” Oh yes, yes, they had indeed suffered the horrors that had been threatened, but it had all been theater, the horror was the threat, a bit of melodrama to scare and edify good citizens of Rome, Vera kept thinking, of Rome, good citizens of Rome, to promote right thinking by demonstrating the consequences of wrong thinking, and because realism was all the rage, Charles had only appeared to have had his balls cut off and burned with tar, Vera had only appeared to have been repeatedly raped — and those boys had authentically, Belasco-style, only appeared to have been shot in their heads. No one believed that the boys with bullets in their heads would repent — Charles had thumbed through Montaigne and come up with a lovely quotation — they were shot in their heads because it was the only way to make the rest of the act seem real. But Vera was confused: it did not seem real. Not at all. Decidedly unreal. And if the point was to scare and correct. there too she was confused, because she no longer had a good working understanding of what it meant to be frightened, or more to the point, how one acted when one was reasonably frightened. The obvious responses, to run away or to lash out, were all well and good, but how was one to choose? Was it supposed to be instinctive? Vera begged to differ: it was not. Where was home? And what was one to do if one had no home?