A DISTANT THUNDER
Page 46
Interplanetary E-Mail
Bill To: Marsopolis University Account #452
Govt. Authorized Account Mars Edu. Admin
To: Jared F. Henderson, Ph. D
University of Marsopolis History Dept.
Marsopolis
From: Bertrada M. Schulter, Ph. D
Dear Jared:
Thank you for the kind words and favorable assessment that you have given to the taped interviews I have conducted over the past several weeks with former NVA Volunteer Shane A. Ryan in Dundee, Washington, Northwest American Republic (Earth Homeland). I am glad you received them in good order; sometimes deep space transmission can still be a bit iffy. Although I agree that Mr. Ryan’s language and some of his sexually oriented comments are in many places unsuitable for general publication and broadcast under the Territorial laws governing obscenity, he does indeed have a point when he says early during the sessions that in the time in his youth when the Republic was part of the United States, such negrified language was part of normal conversation. I have been assured by many of the wonderful people I have met here in the Republic that this is the case, and almost everyone remembers one or more foul-mouthed elderly relatives from that time who grew up listening to blacks all around them and so adopted the Ebonic speech patterns and dialect. When it comes down to broadcast time, we do have bleepers we can use.
Now for the bad news. I am afraid the interviews are at an end. It would seem that an old saying still holds true: man proposes and God disposes. I arrived at the Carter Ryan home in Dundee on the morning of August the 30th and went out back to the trailer where old Mr. Shane lived and where we had been doing our stream of consciousness recounting of his life, only to discover that he had suffered a heart attack during the night. He had been found still breathing but in serious condition that morning by his grandson George Lincoln Rockwell Ryan, and he had been taken to Providence Hospital, ironically the same hospital in which he had been born ninety-one years previously. His children and grandchildren had repeatedly asked him to move into a bedroom in one of their large homes of his choosing, where he would be more easily observable and accessible if he had any problems, but Mr. Ryan always refused because he felt somehow that a trailer held symbolic significance to his life. Something to the effect that ZOG had made him trailer trash and so he would end his days in a trailer while laughing at them and treasuring the memory of the Jews he’d whacked. Yes, that sounds like Shane, all right.
So while I was listening to Mr. Ryan ramble, I was sitting there in a battered, hundred-year old single wide mobile home, although very carefully and lovingly restored by the Ryan family for Shane with proper climate control and insulation and every convenience. God, it’s hard to believe human beings originally came from this place! How do they stand it? The air here is far too thick and moist. Even with the air conditioning that Mr. Ryan so courteously cranked up for me to approximate Mars standards when he saw that I was uncomfortable, I felt half choked and drowned, and of course I am way, way too heavy on this planet. My feet always hurt, and every night when I fall into bed I feel like I’ve just done a hundred-mile run from the Rift to Landfall station and back, packing all the old outdoor respiration gear from our childhood on my back.
I went to the hospital immediately. I had become friends with the family who appreciated what I was doing to record their father and grandfather’s experiences. His elder sons Carter and Red and Adam and all the others shook their own graying heads in wonder when I played back the digitals for them. “Jesus, Dr. Schulter!” Carter Ryan told me at one point, “We never had any idea about any of this stuff! I mean, sure, when we were growing up we kids knew that our father and mother were both Volunteers during the revolution. Once a year they put on their Independence medals and they went out to the Old Fighters’ reunion, and that they were usually designated drivers because Mom was a Christian and Pop didn’t drink. But I never knew why Pop didn’t drink. He never talked about his parents and I still don’t think I even know their names. They never talked about the war much, although sometimes Mom or Pop would make some reference to Aunt Rooney or my grandmother Racine, and of course when I was young Pop sat me down and told me about Carter Wingfield, and the heroes of Mariana, Florida, who died fighting for the Confederacy, and why I had to grow up and honor Carter’s name that I bore and the whole Wingfield legacy. But we never knew any of the details. I’m still in a state of shock to learn that my father was married to Rooney once. I wonder why neither he nor Mom ever mentioned anything about that?”
I hazarded a guess from listening to Mr. Ryan. “Your father and your mother grew up in a time when things were very complicated,” I suggested. “Perhaps they thought that complication wasn’t a good thing for children to grow up with, and by the time you were adults it was simply ancient history of no interest to anyone but themselves. Time does heal all wounds, eventually. Perhaps neither of them wanted to open that one. Or perhaps he simply thought it would have been disrespectful to China. But now you know, why don’t you ask him?”
“Maybe I will, once you’re through,” said Carter. “We all think it’s absolutely great you were able to persuade Pop to finally open up and speak out like this. I agree with you, ma’am. His story belongs to this whole nation and it’s something that shouldn’t be lost.”
So I was allowed into Mr. Ryan’s hospital room, and I had the sad honor and painful privilege of being present about noon when his son Carter slipped the old .455 Webley revolver into his father’s still hand and closed his fingers around the butt. The old man breathed his last a few minutes later. “NVA tradition,” Carter explained to me as his father had done before. “A Northwest Volunteer dies with a gun in his hand.” Although I had only known him for a short time, I wept with the family. Shane Ryan was the last generally recognized NVA veteran in Lewis County, Washington. (I think there are about fifty or sixty officially acknowledged NVA Old Fighters left still in the Northwest Republic, all extremely elderly and in poor health, of course.) The Rebel County had lost its last Jerry Reb, and our Folk lost something very precious from our past. I thank God I was able to get most of it onto digital and preserve it forever, and even more proud that the original tabs will be held at our own university archives on Mars.
All the while Shane spoke, despite his crude expletives and long digressions into economics and everything else, I understood that I owed an immense debt to this cranky, half-senile, foul-mouthed old man, who admitted to at least a dozen murders. I owed him my very existence, and the existence of my beloved children, because had he and the men and women of his generation not done what they did, not only would there be no white people on Mars, there would be no people on Mars, and there would be no white people anywhere. Period. End of story. There would be only this one world and it would be nothing but mud. Thirty-five Mars years ago, seventy earth years, an incredible and inexplicable miracle occurred. In this one remote corner of the Earth, a small band of white men and women suddenly awoke from a poisoned sleep and found within themselves the courage to secure the existence of their people and a future for white children. All it took was a sword and some guts behind it, as Shane would have said.
Now because of what they did, you and I and all three hundred thousand of us on Mars, and all two hundred million of us in the Homeland on our home world, and the fifty thousand on Luna, and the pioneers on Ganymede and the men and women whom I have just heard have finally made a live landing on Venus...we’re alive! And if our birthrates are anything to go by, the Aryan shall never perish from the face of the cosmos. The Jews still scheme and sometimes they hurt us, hurt us badly, but they’ll never get us all now, because at least a few of us have escaped to other worlds. All because of this old coot who sat in front of me leaning on his cane and droning on with his memories of things incredibly wonderful and unspeakably horrible.
We don’t have much history yet on Mars, and with any luck we will never will have much of the kind that Shane Ryan described. With God’s help
and old man Shane’s we’ve left most of the bad behind us. We’re going to find out what it’s like to have a whole world to ourselves, just white people with no Jews, and so far it’s shaping up pretty darned wonderful. But what we have, we will have because a young woodchuck kid named Shane Ryan and a few others sat in cars on dark, wet Northwest nights on rainy streets, waiting for someone to step out and be shot down on the asphalt. Or waiting for something to go boom. Or waiting to beat another human being with clubs. Waiting to do something terrible so that something good might come for people and children they never would see. People like you and me, Jared.
Now I know why I came to the vocation of history. The connection must be maintained. The generations of the future must know these things, and thanks to technology we don’t have to rely on words inked on parchment with quills. We can see and we can hear. A hundred generations on Mars and on Earth as well will hear Shane Ryan’s words now. He will speak to the future he gave his youth for. I’m not sure about this, but in a very strange and magnificent and sad and glorious way, I think I saw our father die in that hospital room, Jared. Because Shane Ryan and his comrades made me, and you. They made our world possible, in every sense of the word. They made us, Jared.
Enough. I’m getting maudlin. I’m going to Shane’s funeral tomorrow and then my grant is up and it’s off to Centralia Spaceport and the shuttle, then a four months’ voyage through the black and I will see old Dusty Red looming up in the vision screen, and then you and I will stand together on the mezzanine of the Great Dome and watch Phobos and Deimos race over our heads, and since I’m not a teetotaller like old man Ryan I might even be persuaded to share a bottle of hydroponic scuppernong champagne with you.
And if you ask me yet again, who knows? I might even marry you.
Yours,
Bertie
Later-Just got back from the funeral, and I need to start packing for the spaceport. How odd to know that I will almost certainly never see Earth again, the ancestral home of our race. Well, we have the future to look to now.
There were no more NVA veterans left to provide the firing party for old man Ryan’s funeral, so the SS did the honors. He was buried with the Tricolor on his coffin, and I was rather surprised to see that there was a whole sort of Wingfield family plot in the Veterans’ Cemetery. They were all there to keep him company, Carter and Racine and John Hunt and John Bell and Adam and a memorial to Leah whose remains were never found, and the assorted wives and children including Shane’s son in the Kriegsmarine who went down on the Corvallis. Shane was buried between the two sisters he had married, China on the one side and Rooney on the other. On his stone were chiseled the words that summed up the man’s life. Well, that’s what epitaphs are supposed to do, right?
Shane Alan Ryan-Northwest Volunteer.
He didn’t walk away.
About the Author
H. A. Covington lives in western Washington and is the author of thirteen books. A Distant Thunder is the second novel of Mr. Covington’s Northwest trilogy, the first being The Hill of the Ravens, also available from AuthorHouse.
Table of Contents
A Distant Thunder
Contents
Author’s Note
A Distant Thunder
Glossary of Northwest Acronyms and Terms
The Turning Wheels
The Turning Wheels
Bringing Down Burger King
Bringing Down Burger King
Woodchuck Kid
Woodchuck Kid
The Rising of the Moon
The Rising of the Moon
Last of an Ancient Breed
Last Of An Ancient Breed
Going’ Cross The Mountain
Going’ Cross The Mountain
The Valiant
The Valiant
A Warrior For The Working Day
A Warrior For The Working Day
About the Author
Table of Contents
A Distant Thunder
Contents
Author’s Note
A Distant Thunder
Glossary of Northwest Acronyms and Terms
The Turning Wheels
The Turning Wheels
Bringing Down Burger King
Bringing Down Burger King
Woodchuck Kid
Woodchuck Kid
The Rising of the Moon
The Rising of the Moon
Last of an Ancient Breed
Last Of An Ancient Breed
Going’ Cross The Mountain
Going’ Cross The Mountain
The Valiant
The Valiant
A Warrior For The Working Day
A Warrior For The Working Day
About the Author