Empire Day

by James Philip

  Isaac had no doubt believed it was all about his son’s little squaw up north; the respectable folks down in King’s County had no truck with Indian girls and although the ordinances about the free movement of former slaves had been promulgated over a hundred and fifty years ago most blacks knew better than to move into the respectable middle-class settlements of ‘the Island’.

  Abe had been weird about that; as if he honestly believed there was something wrong with segregation and the ethnic purity requirement for colonial civil service and local authority jobs. Heck, even Isaac had tried to talk to him about the damage just being seen with a Mohawk girl in Albany was doing to his future prospects. Everybody understood a boy sometimes went with a native or a black harlot, that was usually accepted provided he did not brag about it in polite company.

  But marriage…

  “He’s good,” the man at her side grunted. “You’ve got to wonder what sort of a man can keep the sort of secrets he must have in his head from his own wife?”

  Sarah felt the heat rise in her face, she turned bristling in offence.

  Colonel Matthew Harrison raised a hand in apology.

  “Don’t you start getting het up at me Sarah Arnold, I didn’t mean anything by that and you ought to know that by now.” He had had reservations, a lot of them, about recruiting his goddaughter into the service. Truth be told there were moments he still felt a little guilty about it. That said, Sarah had taken to the work like a duck to water. She was a natural, sometimes he swore she could change her colours, chameleon-like, at the drop of a hat. “Just you remember I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a chipmunk!”

  She was still frowning at him.

  The old man tried to be emollient.

  “Isaac Fielding has fooled everybody for thirty years, indoctrinated his kids so well they see a CSS agent coming a mile away. You stuck at it, how were we to know the man doesn’t even talk in his sleep?”

  Sarah’s frown faded.

  “I still don’t get what they’re,” she waved at the window, “trying to achieve, Colonel?”

  “If Isaac Fielding was going to give himself away he’d have done it by now. So, what do you think they’re doing?”

  “That book you mean?”

  The old man nodded, ran his right forefinger across his moustache.

  Recognition dawned in Sarah’s face.

  “Get him to read enough of it and then we can splice the tape any which way into a confession?”

  “Yeah, if need be.”

  Chapter 7

  Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York

  They had first come to the island in the middle of the Mohawk River south of the ruined settlement of Fort Johnson as seven-year old kids with their parents but not returned again until last summer. In the fourteen-year interval nothing had changed except, maybe, them and the world they now saw around them.

  Kate had met him when he jumped down from the train yesterday morning – almost bent double under the two big sea bags he had brought from Albany – at the old deserted logging halt at Amsterdam. Even this close to the Colony’s capital, Albany – little more than thirty miles as the crow might fly – the countryside was still verdant, much of it first growth, forested wilderness and he had probably been the first passenger to disembark at Amsterdam, a ghost town ever since logging and mining rights in this part of Montgomery County were returned to the Iroquois Nation twenty years ago, for several weeks. There were a lot of folk in Albany who still hated that even though, election after election, they voted the same racist Christian fundamentalists back onto the Colony’s Legislative Council who had mandated ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, as the more extreme Lutheran sects insisted on calling the policy.

  The tribes of the Iroquois Nation – nobody used the word ‘confederacy’ these days because that was a pejorative white man’s classification – did not care for the reasons why. Cultural and economic detachment from the colonists, who were still viewed after hundreds of years as little better than opportunistic interlopers in the Nation’s ancestral hunting grounds, had suited the peoples of the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora tribes ‘just dandy’, enabling local chiefs and councils of elders to preserve the old ways, and to police and guard their own lands. Of course, young people exposed to the temptations of the colonial world outside the tribal lands by radio and television, dreaming of a life not dominated by the apparent tedium of the traditional hunter-gathering lifestyle, wanting to enjoy and experience all the benefits – no matter how illusory – of modern industrial and urban society, still drifted to the towns and cities of the south, or crossed the St Lawrence River into the northern lands where native Americans lived in relative harmony side by side with the European occupiers.

  Kate had looked at the bags and frowned her ‘all men are idiots’ smile before she threw her arms around Abraham Lincoln Fielding’s neck.

  ‘If we put all that stuff in the canoe it will sink!’

  This she declared breathlessly when, eventually, they got past the excitement of seeing each other again for the first time since Easter. That was when they had hatched their ‘Empire Day weekend plan’.

  ‘We’ll have to make two trips,’ Abe shrugged.

  They had forgotten something.

  He bent his face down to hers and they rubbed noses; just like the way they had, innocently as kids for all those years before they discovered that growing up, especially puberty, had a lot to be said for it.

  Presently, they kissed.

  Unhurriedly, breathlessly.

  In Albany dating a Mohawk girl was well, impossible. Most of the whites automatically assumed a woman with a dusky skin was a prostitute or a maid, after dark a male member of the nation was liable to be rousted by the police or worse, brutally attacked by local bully boys. So, unlike other students taking his ‘gal for a walk’ down main street, or going to the cinema or more nefariously, taking her to a down town hotel where clients customarily booked a room by the hour, had never been an option. Moreover, everybody had heard about the college authorities and the police intercepting letters and hounding ‘Indian-lovers’ like him; so, inevitably, they had resorted to corresponding via friends, and occasionally trying to talk on the phone. Kate would wait in the tribal office next to her village’s one telephone; Abe would go to a public call box and attempt to persuade a reluctant switchboard operator at the city exchange to put the call through. In the second half of the twentieth century it was beyond bizarre but that was what life was like in the great twin-colony of New York-Long Island!

  ‘Have you been waiting very long?’ Abe had asked.

  ‘An hour, maybe.’

  People said Kate – Tekonwenaharake – looked ‘very Indian’, very pure-bred, her bloodline visibly undiluted by the European invasion.

  Even good people said a lot of crass things these days.

  Whenever Abe looked into her dark brown eyes, gazed wondrously at her oval face, her slightly turned up nose, framed by a mane of jet black hair he was simply…entranced. She moved with a ballet dancer’s lithe athleticism and when she was in his arms he was lost in her musky, pine-freshness, wholly transported out of the other reality of his life.

  Involuntarily they both cocked their ears to the sky, alerted by the distant thrumming of an aero engine. The skies of the Iroquois Nation were unregulated, an oversight the authorities had allowed to go unamended because it meant ‘decent’ – that is, white – people were not troubled by the increasing overflights of the ever more powerful and noisy flying machines of private citizens and the military.

  ‘Alex and I flew over this way last weekend,’ Abe said.

  Alexander, Abe’s eldest brother did not really approve of Kate but he had always been a complete gentleman about it, not so William, his other big brother. ‘Bill’ was a prick. Much though she hated to say ill of any of Abe’s relations, Bill was a prick, there was no other word to describe him.

  ‘The m
ilitary are scrapping or selling off all their old aircraft. Alex got hold of a Bristol Model V – a two-man biplane fighter – that flies like a bird with all the guns and bomb racks taken off it.’

  Alex had learned to fly when he was an officer cadet, done his time down in the borderlands of the South West and got a job as the secretary-training instructor at the Albany Flying Club. Supposedly, veterans like him were liable to a recall at any time after eighteen months in civilian life. Kate could not imagine that the thought worried Abe’s brother in the least.

  Alex had been teaching his little brother to fly the last time Kate had seen Abe. At that time Alex had given Abe a dozen flying lessons and while he had allowed him to land ‘the kite’ when they got back from one ‘jaunt’ over Mohawk country Alex had told him he was not ready to ‘go solo’ yet.

  ‘I went solo for the first time about a month ago,’ Abe reported.

  Kate kissed him until they both came up for air.

  ‘Is it really like flying like a bird?’ She asked.

  ‘No, well, sort of, mostly it’s very windy and noisy!’

  He burned to tell her how much fun it was to be in the air; and how bad he felt about lying to his brother about his – their – plans. Alex said he was a ‘natural pilot’ and had promised to ‘get you properly qualified this summer’.

  But all that would have to wait.

  Kate laughed and for a moment, buried her face in the man’s chest. There followed a short debate about why one of the two bags would be too heavy for her to carry on her own.

  ‘Rone,’ she declared, impatiently.

  Spouse…

  In the end he slung one bag over his shoulder and grabbed unavailingly at the end of the second bag as she hefted it effortlessly onto her back.

  The Mohawk River had been in a somnolent mood as they had ferried the tools and bedding Kate had brought and the bags, the one containing a tent, the other clothes, tinned food, a small stove and two gas bottles, across to the island. Deep inside the trees they had spent most of the afternoon setting up their camp.

  He had sat his final exams a fortnight ago. He knew he had breezed through the week of examinations after successfully completing that spring’s trial practice term at the three-year old Queen Eleanor General Hospital Medical School.

  He still felt a little guilty about going through the motions applying for – and being provisionally accepted for – a two–year post-doctoral degree course in the QE’s already world-renowned Infectious Disease Control Centre facility at Churchill College. If things were other than they were in his colony, the world ought to be his and Kate’s oyster. But things were what they were and there was no future for them together in the twin-colony.

  They awakened that morning to birdsong and the rustling of leaves in the breeze, warm in each other’s arms. There were still a few bears, wolves and no doubt wolverines in the forests of the Iroquois Nation. Not so many as in olden times although populations of species hunted almost to extinction by the white man had recently showed signs of recovery. Some of the older warriors spoke of mountain lions roaming the banks of the Mohawk but a few pug marks in the mud apart that was wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Kate had brought an ancient Lee Enfield rifle, one of those old pieces so popular in movies about the last Indian wars which fired a forty-five slug with middling accuracy up to about fifty or sixty yards.

  Yesterday afternoon they had walked the island for about half-an-hour, satisfying themselves that nothing likely to eat or attack them was lurking, or had been in the vicinity lately. Prosaically, they were really only concerned in case draft dodgers or illicit hunters had holed up on their hideaway.

  After they had coupled nakedly they had talked. They always talked in bed together, made love again, and talked some more. They had a lot of catching up to do, and stroking, kissing, tickling and just plain enjoying each other’s bodies.

  “Alex tried to talk me into flying down to Jamaica Bay to take a look-see at the fleet,” Abe confessed. He had never worried about being a Lincoln until his mother had died, afterwards he had always written his name Abraham Lincoln Fielding.

  Lincoln in England was where his mother’s family had come from originally; that was in the post-rebellion influx of ‘common folk’ from the old country offered free passage and a share of the ‘free land’ expropriated from the families of the traitors of 1776.

  His mother had attempted to bring up her children as non-conformists. She had had no truck with the Puritan wing of Lutheran Church and believed that Getrennte Entwicklung was an abomination. What little faith Abe had ever had in a Christian God had died with her; for no merciful omnipresent, all-powerful saviour could possibly have allowed his gentle, clever, funny, patient mother to die that way after months of agony, the victim of an incurable, bone-eating cancer.

  No, if there was a God and he was to be found in anything then it was in the natural world, in the forests and lakes of the virgin ancestral lands of the Iroquois Nation. Only the native peoples still retained their connection to and wonder for the marvels of the land in which they lived.

  “I think my arm’s gone dead,” Abe murmured.

  Kate rolled onto his chest, giggled and snuggled close as the pins and needles danced and burned up and down his right arm.

  “Rone,” she whispered fondly.

  Under tribal law – by rite and custom – they had been by Kate’s father’s consent man and wife these last three years.

  “Wife,” he sighed, holding her tight.

  “I wish we could stay here like this forever…”

  Chapter 8

  East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island

  I am not quite sure when it dawned on me that I was being strung along – taken for an idiot, basically – by the good cop-bad cop, old-young, uncle-niece, ruthless-sanguine double act. I was not any kind of expert in Police or Colonial Security Service interrogation or prisoner handling protocols - I assumed I was thirty years out of date - but ‘Lieutenant Adams’ and ‘Detective Inspector Danson’ literally had no idea what they were doing.

  I had not been cautioned.

  Thinking about it, the desk sergeant had been going through the motions last night rather than nailing down every dot and crossing every ‘t’. The whole thing had a staged feel about it. Okay, my door had been knocked down in the middle of the night, I was not sure how I was going to explain how that fitted in with the ‘being strung along’ theory that was forming in my mind; but that apart, things just felt wrong.

  I remembered Sarah screaming and cussing, then breaking down in floods of tears; she had never struck me as that kind of woman. I could imagine her squaring up to a cop and giving as good as she got, kicking and spitting as she was being dragged away. Just not going to pieces like that. Heck, she had been the one who had always worn the trousers in our ‘marriage’. Well, when she was around; when you worked for the Colony School Inspection Board you travelled a lot…

  “Carry on reading from page one hundred and seven, Professor,’ Lieutenant Adams demanded, pointing at the book on the desk before him.

  Two Hundred Lost Years. And on the frontispiece sub-titled, I had thought at the time, cleverly, ‘What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time!’

  It was never meant to be a polemic.

  The whole thing was just an amusing satirical project; if the Lieutenant Governor of New York had refrained from using his powers of censorship to ban the bloody book it would never have attracted such a cult readership on the East Coast back in the day.

  Written by: Anonymous.

  Anonymous had become a Son of Liberty a couple of years later but I had had nothing to do with that.

  I had destroyed all the drafts, my notes.

  I had never even told Rachel about the book.

  Over the years I had come across dusty copies of the damned thing in antiquarian bookshops, and nearly fainted with horror and pride when I found a copy of it i
n Abe’s bedroom bookcase five or six years back. Since the 1940s the book had morphed from the dangerously seditious to the whimsically irrelevant; and yet now it was being brandished, albeit metaphorically, in my face like an accusation of high treason!

  I turned the book around and pushed it towards my interrogators.

  “Read it yourself,” I suggested.

  The way the man and the woman exchanged glances told me they were suddenly off script.

  I sat back and folded my arms across my chest.

  I confess I was beginning to feel a little bit silly.

  “Do you deny that you are the author of ‘Two Hundred Lost Years, Professor?’ The man who called himself Danson asked before he remembered he was not supposed to ask that question.

  I thought his sidekick was going to kick him under the table for a moment. She tried to recover the situation.

  “Your son is in a lot of trouble, Professor…”

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  They had played me for a sucker and I had not disappointed!

  No fool like an old fool, and all that.

  I looked over my shoulder at the mirror on the wall behind me, rose to my feet and went over to it.

  “Sit down, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams pleaded but she was out of character now and clearly a little afraid that she really was in a room with a dangerous enemy of the colonies.

  I ignored her.

  I knocked on the glass.

  Rap-a-tap-tap!

  It was weird how I had travelled from terrified hare in the headlights of an approaching car, stunned and meekly quiescent to irritated, straight to just plain pissed off in less than ten seconds flat once I had finally got my brain in gear.

  Rap-a-tap-tap!

  “Interview suspended!”

  I recognised the voice which broke from speakers hidden behind the panels of the room’s suspended ceiling. I recognised it even though it had lost the edge of youth, mellowed a degree. That Virginian drawl had lived with me over the years and deep down I had always known it would haunt me forever.