Skipping further inventory, he eagerly held out his plate. Abby kept watching him as she took it.
The big, frowning redhead suddenly muttered something indecipherable and reached out to grab Gordon’s right hand in both of his own. Gordon flinched, but the taciturn fellow would not let go until he answered the grip and shook hands firmly.
The man muttered something too low to follow, nodded, and let go. He bent to kiss the brunette quickly and then stalked off, eyes downcast.
Gordon blinked. Did I just miss something? It felt as if some sort of event had just occurred, and had gone completely over his head.
“That was Michael, Abby’s husband,” Mrs. Howlett said. “He’s got to go and relieve Edward at the trap string. But he wanted to stay to see your show, first. When he was little he so used to love to watch TV shows…”
Steam from the plate rose to his face, making Gordon quite dizzy with hunger. Abby blushed and smiled when he thanked her. Mrs. Howlett pulled him over to take a seat on a pile of old tires. “You’ll get to talk to Abby, later,” the black woman went on. “Now, you eat. Enjoy yourself.”
Gordon did not need to be encouraged. He dug in while people looked on curiously and Mrs. Hewlett rattled on.
“Good, isn’t it? You just sit and eat and pay us no mind.
“And when you’re all full and you’re ready to talk again, I think we’d all like to hear, one more time, how you got to be a mailman.”
Gordon looked up at the eager faces above him. He hurriedly took a swig of beer to chase down the too-hot potatoes,
“I’m just a traveler,” he said around a half-full mouth while lifting a turkey drumstick. “It’s not much of a story how I got the bag and clothes.”
He didn’t care whether they stared, or touched, or talked at him, so long as they let him eat!
Mrs. Howlett watched him for a few moments. Then, unable to hold back, she started in again. “You know, when I was a little girl we used to give milk and cookies to the mailman. And my father always left a little glass of whiskey on the fence for him the day before New Year’s. Dad used to tell us that poem, you know, ‘Through sleet, through mud, through war, through blight, through bandits and through darkest night …’”
Gordon choked on a sudden, wayward swallow. He coughed and looked up to see if she was in earnest. A glimmer in his forebrain wanted to dance over the old woman’s accidentally magnificent misremembrance. It was rich.
The glimmer faded quickly, though, as he bit into the delicious roast fowl. He hadn’t the will to try to figure out what the old woman was driving at.
“Our mailman used to sing to us!”
The speaker, incongruously, was a dark-haired giant with a silver-streaked beard. His eyes seemed to mist as he remembered. “We could hear him coming, on Saturdays when we were home from school, sometimes when he was over a block away.
“He was black, a lot blacker than Mrs. Hewlett, or Jim Horton over there. Man, did he have a nice voice! Guess that’s how he got the job. He brought me all those mail order coins I used to collect. Ringed the doorbell so he could hand ‘em to me, personal, with his own hand.”
His voice was hushed with telescoped awe.
“Our mailman just whistled when I was little,” said a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face. She sounded a little disappointed.
“But he was real nice. Later, when I was grown up, I came home from work one day and found out the mailman had saved the life of one of my neighbors. Heard him choking and gave him mouth-to-mouth until th’ ambulance came.”
A collective sigh, rose from the circle of listeners, as if they were hearing the heroic adventures of a single ancient hero. The children listened in wide-eyed silence as the tales grew more and more embroidered. At least the small part of him still paying attention figured they had to be. Some were simply too far-fetched to be believed.
Mrs. Hewlett touched Gordon’s knee. “Tell us again how you got to be a mailman.”
Gordon shrugged a little desperately. “I just found the mailman’s fings!” he emphasized around the food in his mouth. The flavors had overcome him, and he felt almost panicky over the way they all hovered over him. If the adult villagers wanted to romanticize their memories of men they had once considered lower-class civil servants at best, that was all right. Apparently they associated his performance tonight with the little touches of extroversion they had witnessed in their neighborhood letter carriers, when they had been children. That, too, was okay. They could think anything they damn well pleased, so long as they didn’t interrupt his eating!
“Ah—” Several of the villagers looked at each other knowingly and nodded, as if Gordon’s answer had had some profound significance. Gordon heard his own words repeated to those on the edges of the circle.
“He found the mailman’s things… so naturally he became…”
His answer must have appeased them, somehow, for the crowd thinned as the villagers moved off to take polite turns at the buffet. It wasn’t until much later, on reflection, that he perceived the significance of what had taken place there, under boarded windows and tallow lamps, while he crammed himself near to bursting with good food.
5
… we have found that our clinic has an abundant supply of disinfectants and pain killers of several varieties. We hear these are in short supply in Bend and in the relocation centers up north. We’re willing to trade some of these — along with a truckload of de-ionizing resin columns that happened to be abandoned here — for one thousand doses of tetracycline, to guard against the bubonic plague outbreak to the east. Perhaps we’d be willing to settle for an active culture of balomycine-producing yeast, instead, if someone could come up and show us how to maintain it.
Also, we are in desperate need of …
The Mayor of Gilchrist must have been a strong-willed man to have persuaded his local emergency committee to offer such a trade. Hoarding, however illogical and uncooperative, was a major contributor to the collapse. It astonished Gordon that there still had been people with this much good sense during the first two years of the Chaos.
He rubbed his eyes. Reading wasn’t easy by the light of a pair of homemade candles. But he found it difficult getting to sleep on the soft mattress, and damn if he’d sleep on the floor after so long dreaming of such a bed, in just such a room!
He had been a little sick, earlier. All that food and home-brewed ale had almost taken him over the line from delirious happiness to utter misery. Somehow, he had teetered along the boundary for several hours of blurrily remembered celebration before at last stumbling into the room they had prepared for him.
There had been a toothbrush waiting on his nightstand, and an iron tub filled with hot water.
And soap! In the bath his stomach had settled, and a warm, clean glow spread over his skin.
Gordon smiled when he saw that his postman’s uniform had been cleaned and pressed. It lay on a nearby chair; the rips and tears he had crudely patched were now neatly sewn.
He could not fault the people of this tiny hamlet for neglecting his one remaining longing… something he had gone without too long to even think about. Enough. This was almost Paradise.
As he lay in a sated haze between a pair of elderly but clean sheets, waiting leisurely for sleep to come, he read a piece of correspondence between two long-dead men.
The Mayor of Gilchrist went on:
We are having extreme difficulty with local gangs of “Survivalists.” Fortunately, these infestations of egotists are mostly too paranoid to band together. They’re as much trouble to each other as to us, I suppose. Still, they are becoming a real problem.