by Tom Miller
“It was remarkable, what you did,” Dr. Synge said. “To go back out, injured, alone, into the night, and pull out three wounded.”
“I did my job,” I said. “I did what I had to.”
“No, you don’t understand, Robert. Most of our county philosophers couldn’t have done that. Even back in—well, I served in the Philippines, in ’99. I’ll tell you, three-quarters of Rescue and Evac couldn’t have managed it solo. You would have won the White Ribbon.”
That was the US Sigilry Corps’ highest decoration for valor. She couldn’t have paid me a more extravagant compliment.
And it boiled up within me.
“If I had my choice of any job in the world—” I began.
If I said it out loud, she would laugh me right back to Guille’s Run.
“Would I have any chance to fly for the Corps?” I asked her. “In R&E? As a man?”
Dr. Synge took a sheet of flat black smoke from her pocket and flipped it between her fingers, weaving it into a checkerboard pattern then unweaving it.
“You’d be the first one,” she said. “They’d put you through hell. Why would you ever want that?”
“They have the best fliers in the world. They save lives instead of taking them. And it sounds stupid, but all my heroes growing up were R&E—Lt. Col. Rodgers, Hatcher and Jimenez, and . . .”
“And your mother?”
I blushed and turned away. “Yeah.”
Synge smiled. “After the other night, I think you get to be one of hers. Not that Emmaline would ever admit it.”
“Lord, no.”
“Have you told her you want to join?”
“About a thousand times when I was a kid. You can imagine how she reacted. She always said it would be impossible.”
Synge shook her head. “It would be hard for R&E to put a man in the field with a wing of forty women, I won’t argue that. But maybe not impossible. The Corps has always prided itself on taking sigilrists based on their skill, not their background. Half their women are dirt-poor or foreign or colored. Hell, your mama was nothing but a little half-starved Ozark girl with red clay still between her toes when she signed up in ’71. Or so I’ve heard.”
I laughed at that. “Did you know her then?”
“No, I didn’t join until ’98, right out of college. I was a proper Presbyterian young lady from a fancy part of Cleveland. I got to Manila and my platoon had a Negro as a lieutenant, two Italians, and a Mexican. You should have seen the look on my face—impossible. They all turned out to be better smokecarvers than me. I changed my tune in a hurry.”
She seemed amused by the idea. “So why not a male, too?”
• • •
Gallatin County’s sheriff joined us. He was a fat, amiable little man by the name of Lew Hansen. An old friend of Mother’s—when he did searches by air for lost ranchers or outlaws hiding in the countryside, he preferred Ma to be the philosopher who carried him.
“Young Boober, good to see you awake!” Sheriff Hansen said, reaching over to shake my hand.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
Hansen sat beside Dr. Synge. He was the sort of fellow you could more easily picture with a slice of plum cake in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other, carrying on at the social hall.
“There’s no other way to say it,” Hansen told me. “You saw a hell of an evil thing night before last. Four murders and an arson.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I already talked to your mom. Heard her account. I’ve been out there myself, looked the Kleins’ place over. But I wonder if you could tell me what happened as you recall it.”
I described for him at what time we’d arrived, the state of the house and the outbuildings, the position of the dead and the wounded.
“So, I think it might have been the Trenchers,” I concluded.
Hansen and Synge shared a look.
“Well, yes,” Sheriff Hansen said. “I’d say it’s about the most clear-cut—”
Then he stopped and pushed his glasses up his nose.
“So, Boober, your mom . . .” he said. “Has she told you much about what she did the last time the Trenchers rose up? During the Disturbances? Who she did it with?”
Growing up, that had been a delicate topic, even with family friends. It was common knowledge that Ma had fought in the smoldering conflicts between the Trenchers and ordinary philosophers, called the First and Second Disturbances—or the Trencher Wars, if you were feeling provocative. In 1891 and then again in 1901, the Trenchers had embarked on campaigns of intimidation and assassination, killing prominent sigilrists across Missouri and Kansas. Mother had joined several of the philosophical “societies for mutual aid and defense” that had opposed them. They’d named themselves the Jayhawks and had had no compunction about retaliating with violence of their own. It had been a dangerous time to be an outspoken Trencher. A masked flying woman might pluck you off the street in broad daylight, castrate you, and hang you naked by your ankles from the steeple of the highest church in town. With or without a bullet in your head.
As children, Angela and I had whispered about that sort of thing after bedtime. Whether Mother had been responsible for any of those “liquidations.” Whether she was a killer. But we knew never to talk about it in polite company.
“Oh, everyone says she was involved some,” I said.
“You recall anything from, say, 1904?” Hansen asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I would have been five years old. Things got a little hot, I guess. Ma moved Angela and me down to St. Louis for a few months with a friend of hers—Aunt Nelson, we called her, though I don’t think she was anyone’s aunt. Ma was gone for a week or two at a time, doing I don’t know what. Fighting, I’d suppose.”
“You’d be right,” said Dr. Synge.
“Then your ma would come back to the Nelson place in the middle of the night,” Sheriff Hansen said. “And you’d sit in her lap while everyone drank coffee and went over maps. You measured distances for us—Emmaline’s little navigator.”
“Oh my God!” I said. “Were the two of you there?”
“As a lawman, Lew shouldn’t answer that,” Dr. Synge said. “But I can say that I was there. So was Mrs. Klein. About half the women who are Montana county philosophers now were, too. You ever run into Mrs. Yzerman in Missoula or Mrs. O’Malley in Butte, they could tell you some stories.”
I’d met them both several times. They’d struck me as pleasant, unexceptional women.
“But, yes, Robert you’re right,” said Sheriff Hansen. “Evelyn Klein shot and her body hanged and burned doesn’t leave any doubt. It’s classic Trencher methods.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “There aren’t any Trenchers in Montana.”
I imagined Trenchers as most young people of my generation did: a lot of rabid, vicious old men. The first Trenchers had taken their name from the Confederate soldiers who’d survived the Battle of Petersburg, Virginia, the ones who’d crawled out of the trenches, blind and with their lungs already starting to scar, the skin sloughing from their faces and hands—the Brotherhood of the Trenches. Many of them had lived for decades afterward and had become outspoken advocates for removing sigilry from warfare. Some of the Northerners who’d endured attacks by Wainwright’s Legion had joined them.
But Trencherism had gradually spilled over into trying to keep philosophy out of everyday life. They’d admitted as members all kinds of men who hated common sigilry: farmhands forced out of work by the gangs of women brought over from Poland and Romania to do agricultural philosophy; railroad men who’d lost their jobs when the National Transporter Chain opened; men who thought the country had been emasculated when Lincoln gave the vote to women by executive order in ’64 and who longed for a return to a world in which the weaker sex knew their place. Those newer ones could be harder to spot. A few of my classmates in high school had inclined in that direction, not that they’d usually dared talk about it around me.
“
We have Trenchers aplenty in Montana,” Dr. Synge said. “They don’t build meetinghouses and put a sign out front. But they’re here.”
“It’s more like religious enthusiasm for some of them,” Hansen said. “You’ve got Maxwell Gannet sitting in Boston, preaching that Jesus weeps every time a philosopher draws a sigil. Go back to the good old days of self-reliance and work in the traditional ways. No electricity, no sigilry. Don’t send your children to school; educate them at home. Don’t educate your daughters at all beyond keeping house.”
I recognized the last bit. “Yeah,” I said. “Those are the ones that call themselves the Hand of the Righteous. A bunch of them built a settlement near here a few years back.”
“Yessir,” said Hansen. “Down in the Hillcock Valley. It’s a neat, clean little village that just keeps growing. Some of them are from out of state, some are local converts. Eleven hundred of them now. So, I’ll put it to you, Robert—you’ve always been good with a map—what else is close to Hillcock?”
“The Kleins lived three miles from there,” I said.
“Exactly. So, the other night was not one of the great mysteries to me. I got a few deputies and we had Mrs. Yzerman and her girls fly us out to Hillcock. On the ground, the men were running for cover like we were the angels of the Second Coming. I didn’t even have my shotgun out yet and the ones who did it had given themselves up. Ten of them. All just boys. Sixteen or seventeen years old.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said.
“It’s sad as hell,” Hansen said. “Because four counts of murder? And Hap Wilhelm as the circuit judge who’ll hear the case? Better for them if the Angel of Death had come. They’re as good as hanged.”
“Max Gannet was already preaching on it in Boston,” Synge said. “He called them martyrs for the cause. Said they’ll see heaven for what they’ve done.”
“That whole settlement’s going to be up in arms,” I said.
“It’s going to be a long summer, all right,” Sheriff Hansen agreed. “It’s going to be bad on both sides.”
• • •
It was a lot to ponder—Trenchers and dead philosophers and orphans and vigilantes. And that a woman as smart as Synge thought I might be material for the Corps. That was the part I couldn’t get out of my mind. The Corps. Rescue and Evacuation. R&E.
But, of course, Mother, too.
Ma came in to see me after Synge and Hansen had finished. She had her right arm in a sling and she walked gingerly, taking care not to upset her broken ribs. She looked at me, opened her mouth, shut it, and sat down in the chair beside my bed. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was going to apologize and didn’t know how. Instead, she just looked me up and down as though she barely knew me.
“Would you care for a couple hands of jiggery?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
She took a deck of playing cards from her workbag and then realized she couldn’t shuffle with only one good arm. She pushed the deck across the bedside table to me.
It seemed to me that the order of the universe had been upset.
I had seen my mother, whom I’d considered invincible, the veteran of four wars and a thousand night landings, an incomparable artist and technician, smashed against the ground. No less upsetting was that I’d been the one to save her. Boober Weekes: famous all over Yellowstone County for neat penmanship and pretty hands, stubborn, persistent, a perfectly good sigilrist for a man, but nothing special. Nothing compared to his sisters or his mother. Just a male philosopher. Emmaline’s son.
“I’m glad you were with me, Rob,” Ma said. “There’s not too many who could have done what you . . .” She trailed off and picked up her cards. “Well, you’re not quite ordinary, are you?”
And I was right back to thinking about R&E. All through the afternoon, as I lost one game of cards after another. As I forced more banana slices down my gullet. As I sat up in the night, unable to sleep.
R&E had been the subject of a thousand bedtime stories. The finest fliers in the world, saving lives instead of taking them. Lt. Col. Rodgers and Capt. Jimenez and Mrs. Hatcher. And Maj. Weekes. I’d wanted it as long as I could remember.
Some boys can fly.
I won’t say I swore to four dead philosophers and one orphan and a rag doll that I’d be the first one to do it. But I swore to just about everything else I could think of.
Sigilwoman Robert A. Weekes. Was it really so absurd?
6
APRIL–AUGUST 1917
Some have asked what business a male has leading a legion of sigilrists. To them I reply, was not Jesus Christ himself a philosopher? Did he not hover above the waves? Did he not have philosophy by which he fed the masses, raised the dead, and preserved himself for three days in a state indistinguishable from death? Tell me why I ought not follow the example of my Lord and Savior.
Galen Wainwright, Confessions of a Confederate Smokecarver, 1875
MY MANIA HADN’T YET faded when Angela returned the next morning. I wanted to tell her all about trying to join R&E, but she got the first word in.
“We need to talk about Mother,” Angela said. “We can’t let her stay on as a county philosopher. She’s going to end up dead.”
“Now, Angie,” I replied, “that seems like an overreaction.”
“No, it’s not! She screwed up the other night and she’s not admitting it. When you told me about how you found her—front passenger latched tight on one side, but swinging loose on the other, with the strap wrapped around Ma’s arm—I knew it could only be one thing.”
It had crossed my mind as well.
“The strap didn’t break,” Angela said, “the buckle didn’t give way. She must have been adjusting her harness in the air and pulled the emergency release tab by mistake.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “The very first thing she taught me about flying a stasied passenger was—”
“Don’t pull your release tab by mistake,” Angela finished. “But if you do, pull both sides to dump your passenger. Otherwise everyone is going down together. Boober, she messed up bad and then she panicked. She made two mistakes so basic that any nine-year-old hoverer could have told her what went wrong.”
“How could that happen?” I asked.
“She ran ten emergency calls during the day. Then she got woken up in the middle of the night, hauled your heavy-as-rocks carcass out past Bozeman, and picked up four hundred pounds of passenger. In terrible weather. She was exhausted.”
“So what?” I said. “It was an accident. It could have happened to anybody.”
“This is too many times now! You remember in January when she was lifting roof joists for that barn and lost power? She dropped twenty feet and crushed that carpenter’s leg. Then right after that she had a hard landing with six hundred pounds of apples outside the general store. And the chest cold she caught after she ditched in the water while she was dredging the Hanover Banks. And—”
“There’s always been accidents,” I said. “Even when she was young. She talks about them all the time. She’s a sharper flier now than ever.”
“It’s not her flying, Boober,” said Angela. “It’s pure, dumb, brute strength. She’s sixty years old. Her body can’t take it.”
I fluffed one of my pillows and set it under my head. “So, she’s supposed to retire?”
“Yes! The State Office should have demanded it by now, but they’re short experienced fliers with the war on. She asked them about probationary credentials for you again—after everything you did the other night, whether they’d let you come on as her apprentice.”
“I heard,” I said. The State Board had laughed so hard at the notion that they’d woken the neighbors.
“They’re idiots,” Angela said. “You’d be perfect. And Ma always wanted that job to stay in the family.”
I had two half sisters besides Angela. Vivian was my middle big sister, fourteen years older than me; she’d been as much substitute mother to me as sister, before getting mar
ried and moving to Washington State. Susan, my eldest half sister, was six years older than Viv and lived in Texas, where she had children and a grandchild of her own.
“Sure,” I said, “but neither Sue nor Viv is moving back to Guille’s Run so they can run emergency calls for thirty dollars a month plus commissions. And you’re in New York.”
Angela was twisting at one of the buttons on her sweater as if she would rip it off.
“It was supposed to be me!” she snarled. “The good daughter. Ma offered it to me again this morning—she wants me to come back. Take over as Yellowstone County CP from her.”
“Lord,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“When I left, I thought she was going to take a couple apprentices, not try to do everything herself! She took ten emergency calls in one day. Nobody can do that much alone! Ten calls. If I’d been here . . .”
“Angela—it’s not your fault.”
She buried her head in my shoulder.
“I could do it,” she sobbed, “but I don’t want to do it. I want a featherbed, and good martinis, and tickets to the theater, and lace curtains. I do not want to wake up in the night to some farmer pounding on my door. I don’t want the wind, the cold, or the rain. I don’t want to smell like cow shit at three in the morning because I have to rescue cattle in a blizzard. I am not coming back! I don’t care how badly it disappoints her.”
I held her and let her cry a minute. Growing up, the positions had always been reversed.
“Angie,” I whispered. “Ma’s so goddamn proud of you. Every errand in town, she won’t shut up about the Upper East Side and Forty-Second Street and the Astors. She’s put in for subscriptions to all sorts of fashionable catalogues and wants to discuss the latest progressive women’s undergarments with me. We own six volumes of classical music for the phonograph, not because either of us likes it, but because it was recorded at Carnegie Hall.”
She laughed through her tears. “Sorry.”
“We never listen to it. But Angela, in all seriousness, she couldn’t be prouder or happier for you.”
Angela took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. “Would it kill her to tell me that?”