Kampus

by James Gunn

  “We know what you're afraid of,” said the one called Frieda.

  Billie slammed the door behind her.

  “All we want is a bite of food and a place to rest,” Gavin said.

  “Well, you can't stay,” Mary-Jo said. “Pa'd kill you. He near killed the last boy came in here looking for a place to stay. Now, you,” she went on, looking at Elaine, “you can stay if you want. Pa won't hurt you, and he might take to you, though you're not much of a woman. Maybe you could be a proper wife to Pa.”

  “Thanks for the invitation,” Elaine said, “but I'll pick my own mate.”

  They looked at her as if she had uttered heresy. Something about the situation was bothering Gavin, something he should have noticed, or something he had noticed and had not understood.

  “Just give us some food, then,” Gavin said, “and we'll be on our way.”

  Mary-Jo looked at the other six women for help, and then looked back at Gavin. “You've been warned,” she said. “Whatever happens...”

  “Is my fault,” Gavin finished. He seated himself at the table, opposite the nursing mother; the infant released the nipple and turned its head to look at him before seeking out the nipple again with moist lips. Gavin picked up a knife and a fork, holding them upright, one in each hand.

  Mary-Jo took a bowl from a stack beside the stove and filled it with something steaming from the kettle. She put the bowl in front of him and then fixed a bowl for Elaine.

  Gavin felt silly sitting there with a knife and a fork. “Is this what all the fuss was about?” he asked. He and his stomach had been thinking of something more substantial, like meat and eggs and potatoes.

  “That's breakfast,” Mary-Jo said. “That's all there is. Eat and git. And you girls better be about your chores.”

  Slowly the other women filed out of the kitchen. Some, in work clothes, left by the back door. Others, in dresses, went through a doorway into the house. All of them looked back at Gavin curiously. He shook his head and covered his oatmeal with sugar and cream. He tasted it. It was hot and good.

  “I don't understand this place,” he said to Mary-Jo.

  “It's Pa's,” she said simply.

  “I know it's a farm—a big farm. Ten miles in any direction, Billie said. And it belongs to your father. But how did he get all that land?”

  “Billie's young. She stretches things. But what there is here used to belong to a lot of people. Right thinkers, Pa said, who put their money together and bought this land and built it up and made it flourish, like God said man should do, and the land was good and the animals brought forth their young, and God's blessing was upon everyone and the work of their hands.”

  “That sounds like some kind of scripture,” Elaine said.

  Mary-Jo continued as if Elaine hadn't spoken. “But gradually the people fell into error. One by one they began drifting away or were driven away by the others because of wrong thoughts or wrong deeds. And the curse of God came upon the land, and people died, and some were killed in arguments. And what was held in common began to be a source of quarrels, and finally all were gone except Pa. Ma died in childbirth after eight daughters, and we were left, Pa and us, to care for all the land and the animals, to make it the way God wanted it to be, and the land prospered again.”

  “And Pa is God,” Gavin said.

  Mary-Jo straightened, frowning. “No, Pa is God's right hand, his spokesman, his prophet.”

  Gavin was halfway to the bottom of his bowl; the edge had been taken from his hunger. “Apparently,” he said to Elaine, “a religious commune was founded here in the early or middle seventies. The religious enthusiasm that supported it in its beginning began to crumble under all the hard work and the human problems of getting along. When the others were driven away or left or died, Pa got it all.”

  “Wasn't that way,” Mary-Jo said.

  “Now he's got a holy kingdom of his own here,” Gavin said, “with his own crew of workers—all daughters—and nobody allowed to leave and no outsiders allowed in to spoil paradise. There's just one thing I don't under—”

  A horse's hooves clopped in the dirt road outside. Mary-Jo looked up, alarmed.

  “You got to go,” she said to Gavin. “He'll come in the front way to put away his gun. Run, now! Git!”

  Her terror was contagious. Gavin himself felt a tremor when she mentioned her father's gun. Something about the situation suggested that, like Abraham, Pa might act without asking questions.

  “Go on,” Elaine said. “Run! I'll be right behind you, but you can run faster than I can, and he won't hurt me.”

  Still Gavin hesitated. He heard the front door open. A deep voice, like the voice of a prophet, announced with Olympian satisfaction, “I think I got a couple of the little demons this time.”

  Gavin ran. He ran through the back door and the screen door, expecting to hear it slam shut like a rifle shot behind him, but Elaine must have been there to ease it closed, and Gavin ran down the road, now much brighter in the onrushing dawn. He looked back as he neared the barn and saw Elaine running from the house as he fell over an outstretched foot and landed face-down on the straw in front of the barn door.

  Gavin rolled over and looked up at Billie. “Why did you do that? I thought you kept urging me to get away if your father returned. Well, he's back.”

  “I know,” she said, frowning, and reached down a hand to pull him to his feet, and then into the protection of the barn. “Take me with you.”

  “I can't do that,” Gavin protested. “Your father would never stop following me. Besides, why do you want to leave? Your sisters are here, and your father.”

  “That's why,” she said. “Pa's been hinting lately that I'm old enough to come to him in the night, the way my sisters do.”

  “The old bastard! That's what was bothering me. All the children. And he's the only male around...”

  Billie stood up straight. “I don't want him to service me, no matter what the others say about God's will. If you can't take me with you, least you can do that for me. I'd rather you'd service me than Pa.” She turned around and leaned forward over a milking stanchion, throwing her skirt up over her back as she did, and exposed her long slender legs and appealing milky buttocks. “I think if you did it he wouldn't have nothing to do with me.”

  “Except kill me,” Gavin muttered, “and maybe you.” He stepped forward to pull Billie upright and toward him as her skirt fell about her calves. “Anyway, that's not the way people do it. Not like animals. There's ... uh, affection ... and ... uh, sometimes love ... and, uh, caresses, kisses ... and, uh, mutual respect ... that brings men and women ... uh, face-to-face...”

  “Show me!” Billie said eagerly.

  “What is this talent you have, Gavin,” Elaine said, leaning against the frame of the barn door, shaking her head, “for inducing females to throw themselves at you, legs parted?”

  “This poor girl has a problem,” Gavin said. “She's the victim of isolation and a tyrannical, incestuous father.”

  “I could feel sorrier for her,” Elaine said, “if that tyrannical father were not close behind me. It looks to me like you've got the problem. One of the sisters must have told Pa.”

  Gavin's hands dropped from Billie's shoulders as if they were weighted. “Where, where?” he asked. He leaped to the door.

  Striding down the dirt road from the house as if he disdained a faster pace came a tall, lean patriarch of a man, long hair floating behind, gray beard waving in front, and between them a face like an avenging sword. He held a shotgun in his right hand. He held it easily. Underneath his patched overalls and jeans jacket, Gavin thought, were lean old muscles toughened by hard labor and long days.

  Gavin had the uneasy feeling that the god this zealot worshiped was a god of wrath and vengeance, and occasionally the prophet confused himself with the deity.

  “Don't go out there,” Billie said. “Pall shoot you down like a scared rabbit if you run from him.”

  Gavin felt like a sca
red rabbit. He turned and ran the length of the barn toward a door at the far end. Dust from hay and straw rose in the air, sparkling in the first rays of the morning sun streaming into the barn. But as he neared the far door, his feet slowed, and he stopped, turned, and walked back toward them.

  “Don't be a fool,” Elaine said. “Get out while there's time.”

  “Go on, mister,” Billie said. “Pa's no talker.”

  “What about you?” Gavin said to Elaine. “What about Billie?”

  “We'll be all right,” Elaine said. “Come on. I'll go with you. I just didn't want to slow you down.”

  “No,” Gavin said. “I'm not going to run from the incestuous old bastard.”

  But even as he said the words, the mad prophet was in the doorway, the shotgun was at his shoulder, and it exploded with a big coughing sound and a whistling of shot. Gavin stood, frozen in mid-stride, waiting for bits of metal to shred his flesh, and nothing happened. The muzzle of the gun was pointed toward the ceiling; Elaine had pushed the barrel.

  Gavin ran toward the old man. As he ran, the old man swung around to knock Elaine away from him. She sprawled on the straw-littered floor. The old man swung back toward Gavin, pulling the trigger as the weapon came to bear, and Gavin threw himself at the old man's legs. He heard the gun cough again and the shot whistle again, and then felt the impact of his body against the old man's legs. The legs yielded, and Gavin found himself rolling over the old man's body as it hit the floor, grabbing for the shotgun, clutching the hot barrel, clinging to it even as it burned his hand, tearing it away from the old man, feeling something break as it came free, rolling to his feet with the gun in his hand, turning it toward the old man.

  The mad prophet was just as mad without his gun. He pulled himself up tall as he got to his feet. His index finger dangled crookedly from his right hand, but he disdained to nurse it or even notice anything wrong with it. “Shoot, debaucher, lecher, whoremaster.”

  “Don't call me names,” Gavin said, “you incestuous pig!”

  “You despoil my land by standing on it,” the old man said. “Just as you would despoil my daughters. Now, kill me so that you can begin your devil's work!”

  Elaine tugged at Gavin's arm. “Come on. Let's get out of here. We just came in for a bite of food,” she said to the old man.

  “Are you his slut?” he asked her.

  “We can't just let this bastard go on committing unspeakable sins by night and justifying them by day,” Gavin said indignantly.

  “Who appointed us his judges?” Elaine said. “His daughters are the only ones injured, and they have ample opportunity to combine against him or to slip away if they wished.”

  “My daughters are good, obedient girls,” the old man said.

  “He has them terrified, brainwashed,” Gavin said. “To them he's not only a father, with all his paternal authority, but the head of their religion, with all the sanction of God behind his edicts.”

  “You will be punished by the hand of God the just, the unforgiving,” the old man thundered. “You will be pursued across a blasted land by vengeful furies, tormented by whips of fire, tortured by poisoned pitchforks, until your soul screams for mercy and your flesh shrivels upon the bone and your tongue blackens in your head and your—”

  “Look how Billie feels about him!” Gavin said. “This would be a better world if I removed this dirty old man from it.”

  But as he said “dirty old man,” something hit the back of his head. Even as he staggered to his knees, he was aware of the ridiculous “bonk” it made. He dropped the shotgun and clutched his head with the pain. “Billie!” he said, and then, “Billie?”

  The old man grabbed the gun almost as it fell, and Billie stepped out from behind Gavin, holding her milking bucket tightly in her hand. “He's my Pa,” she said simply.

  Gavin shook his head gingerly against the pain. “God!” he said.

  “Right!” the old man shouted. “God has condemned you, and now you will die, infidel! Satanist! Unbeliever!” But he couldn't pull the trigger with his broken finger, and while he was struggling to fit another finger into the trigger guard and get his broken finger out of it, a crash came from the distance, the sound of metal and splintering wood, and a thunder of engine exhausts and blaring horns.

  The old man whirled at this new invasion of his kingdom. Gavin grabbed the shotgun and ripped it away. Swinging the gun by its stock, he smashed the barrel against me door frame, bending it beyond any possibility of use. The sounds grew louder. Gavin stepped out of the barn, holding his head stiffly so that it didn't jiggle. He tried to watch the old man out of the corner of his eye.

  But the old man had moved faster than Gavin, and stood a little in front, staring with holy horror at the sacrilege approaching. It was a procession of trucks and automobiles and motorcycles, all internal-combustion models, thundering and creaking and tearing the ground with their tires, leaving a trail of dust and dark, billowing exhaust.

  Men and women leaned from the windows of the cars or over the edges of the trucks, waving, calling out with words that could not be heard over the noise of the caravan. They were dressed in jeans and blouses, or jeans jackets or uniform coats, with headbands or scarves or cowboy hats over their long hair.

  The motorcycles, most of them with two riders, made crazy circles or figure eights around and through the caravan.

  An open jeep led the procession. An older man stood in the back of the jeep holding on to a roll bar fastened to the sides of the jeep, like a general on parade. He, too, was dressed in jeans, and long, gray hair streamed back from a craggy face.

  “Gypsies!” Elaine said.

  “White Indians!” Gavin said.

  But he thought he could hear the Professor saying, “No, these are the centaurs invading the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, bursting in upon the traditional ceremonies, only to be driven back by a stern Apollo, the guardian of the orthodox culture. The clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life. The centaurs and civilization. Dionysus and Apollo.”

  The jeep stopped in front of the little group at the entrance to the barn, skidding a little, and the other vehicles pulled up behind, some of them slipping off the dirt road onto the grass or banging into the vehicle in front.

  When the confusion had subsided, the man standing in the jeep called out in the mellow voice, of a singer, one hand flung dramatically into the air, “Welcome! Welcome to the Freedom Train! Welcome all to the cultural revolution! Welcome to the glory of Consciousness Three!”

  Gavin gaped at the crazy procession, unable to think of anything to say, but the old man stood up straight and said, “Get off of my land, you satanists, spoilers!” His hands clenched and unclenched as if they were longing for a gun to hold in them.

  “We come to invite all who wish to ride upon the Freedom Train to join us in our parade into a glorious future of sensitivity and love and right thinking!”

  “Take these strangers,” the old man said, indicating Gavin and Elaine. “They're your kind, shiftless and destructive, living off other people's hard work.”

  “We come,” the leader of the caravan said, unheeding, “to share the bounty of the earth, which belongs to all men.”

  “We need nothing from you,” the old man said. “We do our own work here and ask nobody's help and accept nobody's aid.”

  “You misunderstand me, sir,” the leader said cheerfully, as his followers began to pour out of their vehicles behind him and spread out through the barn and other outbuildings and toward the farmhouse itself. “We come to share the bounty that has been deposited here.”

  The old man looked scornful. “No one deposited anything here. What we have we wrested from a stubborn land. When I came, this land was arid and barren, and I watered it with my sweat and fertilized it with my labor. It is strange that the earth does not deposit any bounty where you live.”

  The leader of the caravan must have been about the same age as the patriarch, but he acted younger, as if avoiding everyth
ing but pleasure had kept him from aging. He shrugged pleasantly and said, “Your god works in strange and mysterious ways his wonders to perform, and it little behooves us to question why he should make one place bloom and not another.”

  “I know you,” the old man said, his eyes glittering madly. “You are the children who burn my fences and my buildings to see the pretty blaze, only you have grown up to become plunderers as well as destroyers.”

  The men and women who had tumbled out of the cars and trucks were returning now, their arms laden with sacks of grain and flour, and boxes of vegetables and fruit. They led pigs and cows and steers, putting them all in the trucks, which miraculously sprouted ramps as if it had all happened before.

  The old man narrowed his eyes in pain at the sight and then turned to the looters and tried to wrestle their spoils from them. But they ignored him or pushed him away, and the old man finally turned and began to stride off toward the house.

  “Stop him!” the leader of the caravan called out. “He's probably got guns at the house.”

  “He has,” Gavin said, speaking at last.

  The leader gave him a cool look of appraisal.

  One of the looters tripped the old man as he passed. Others, their hands free, fell on him and tied his hands together, and then his feet. He sat in the middle of the road cursing the leader and everyone who passed.

  The trucks were almost full. “Who goes with us on the Freedom Train?” the leader asked.

  “Where are you heading?” Gavin asked.

  “South. To Cockaigne. Where no one has to work or do anything else he doesn't want to do.”

  Gavin looked at Elaine. She shrugged. “What's involved?” Gavin asked.

  “Nothing at all,” the leader said. “If there were any obligations, it would not be Cockaigne.”

  “We're going south,” Gavin said.

  The leader motioned to his jeep. Gavin helped Elaine into the front seat and got into the back with the leader.

  “And how about you, little lady?” the leader said to Billie.

  Billie took a look at her father shouting in the dust and said, “I'll go too.” She climbed into one of the cars behind. She still clung to her bucket.