Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  And broils root out the work of masonry,

  Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

  The living record of thy memory.

  —William Shakespeare—Sonnet LV

  Prior to the Revolution, the Chancellors of the University of Montana lived for many years in a modest red brick ranch-style dwelling on the western edge of campus. Jason and Jenny Stockdale had brought that tradition to an end, not out of any desire for ostentation, but because their family of eight children had become too large for the old official residence. Some years before, Stockdale had transferred his and Jenny’s growing brood to a large colonnaded two-story home on Fifth Street, his own property and bought without any university money with an interest-free NVA veteran’s home loan. Their new house had a huge yard, many bedrooms, and there was Toole Park nearby for the children to run and play in. Stockdale then split the old Chancellor’s residence into a double house, and now it was used as quarters for financially strapped married students on scholarships.

  It was a sunny spring morning in May. Jenny Stockdale was 51 years old now but looked not a day over 40; the strands of silver in the honey brown of her hair seemed to sparkle rather than age her. She was clearing the table of the detritus from the huge breakfast she customarily served every day for her husband, the two children who remained at home, and frequent overnight guests, which included Stockdale children and grandchildren as well as visitors on university business and old comrades from both wars.

  The first of the eight Stockdale offspring was Jason Junior, who had arrived a year after Longview. The youngest was daughter Melanie, a pretty girl aged thirteen who resembled her mother at that age, named after the Revolutionary heroine Melanie Young, who Jenny had met once or twice in the NVA before she was killed at the Ravenhill ambush. Melanie Stockdale had just graduated from primary school, and she would be starting as a freshman at Samuel Johnson High School in the fall. Her older brother Whittaker, a tall and good-humored young man who’d been named after Whittaker Chambers in one of his father’s impish moods, was sixteen years old and set to graduate from Sam Johnson in a few days. Like a hundred thousand other young men, he would begin his adult life by entering the National Labor Service in late June. The Republic had eliminated the whole middle school or junior high school concept as unnecessary, as well as the twelfth grade. The legal age of manhood and womanhood in the Republic was sixteen years, and thanks to a superb educational system and a stable, all-white society that taught responsibility and maturity from the cradle, at sixteen the youth of the Northwest were pretty much adults. These young people were living proof: the NAR way worked. America’s way did not; the many states and municipalities in the fragmented remains of the United States had recently been forced to raise the legal voting and drinking and toking age to 25 years. All sexual age of consent laws in the U.S. had been abolished years before as being “impossible to enforce.”

  The two youngest kids were still in the dining room area, along with Chancellor Jason Stockdale and four-year-old Clancy Campbell, who was called Little C., as opposed to his septuagenarian great-grandfather Big C., who still lived in retirement out on Daly Avenue. Jenny dressed Little C. in shorts and a straw sun hat, then dispatched him out into the back yard to play off his breakfast with the dogs. Parents and grandparents in the NAR could do that—send their young children out into the yard and around the neighborhood to play, secure in the knowledge that they would not be seized and abducted by a pervert for sodomy, or murdered by a nigger gang who felt like killing something white that day. Analysts from the Bureau of Race and Resettlement had reported that of the many factors which still drew tens of thousands of white immigrants to run the McCurtain every year in hope of getting into the Northwest Republic, this simple factor of a physically safe environment for children was the most psychologically important. In the mid-21st century, no other land in the world offered Caucasian people protection from casual infanticide by strangers.

  “Not a word on my work assignment yet,” Whittaker was saying.

  “The NLS tries to keep young people close to home, unless they volunteer for a station assignment elsewhere,” said Jason, still reading his morning newspaper, which was another thing the Republic had which no one else did any more. The last physical newspaper in the United States had vanished ten years before, and the last one in Europe only a year ago. “Consistent with the needs of the service and the national economy, of course. Some youngsters want to leave home at sixteen, and some don’t. You can choose to live in the barracks even if you stay in Missoula, you know. Of course, it cuts both ways. Some parents want to boot their sixteen-year-olds out the door.”

  “I’ll stick around here, if it’s okay with you,” said Whit with a smile. “How much will you rent me my room for?”

  “Yes, with that first paycheck comes responsibility,” agreed Jason judiciously. “Hmm, what do you think his room is worth, Jen? Fifty Cs a month?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Jenny briskly, coming in from the kitchen, out the back door of which she had just shooed little Clancy. “We’re not going to charge our son rent in his own home while he does his national service. He’ll be leaving home soon enough when he goes into the Luftwaffe.”

  “Well, what would you like to do, Whit?” asked Jason.

  “I aced all my aptitude tests, especially the aircraft mechanics and engineering exams, which means that logically I should be put out to apprentice at the airport or the government motor pool, or hired out to a private contractor doing aerospace research for our new moon colony. I’d like something that will help me get into the Air Academy with a technical major after my first year in the Luftwaffe, because that’s the fast track to space training, which means they’ll probably stick me on some kind of shovel detail,” said Whittaker with rueful humor. “I don’t mind digging in the dirt, but if that’s what I’ll be doing, I’m hoping that Ally can get me assigned out at Lost Creek, since you won’t help.”

  “No can do,” explained Jason patiently, yet again. “I told you, I cannot be seen to be intervening in my son’s Labor Service commitment or trying to get you any special favors or assignments. I didn’t for any of my other kids and I won’t do it for Mel, so don’t feel bad. That’s the beginning of corruption, and it’s wrong. Not to mention that NVA veteran or not, in my position as university chancellor, if the Party got wind of it I’d have the Control Commission on my neck. Senior Party people have to be above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife.”

  “Ally says she’s willing to have a word with the district administrator, and she’s a Party member,” Whit told him.

  “Yes, well, nobody’s going to say anything to Allura, since if it weren’t for her mother none of us would be here and the entire nation owes her one big favor, but it’s still the thin edge of the wedge,” grumbled Jason, frowning. Like most older people grown ever more conservative as the years went by, he had his doubts about the younger generation and was seriously concerned they would end up screwing the pooch. There was little reason for this view in the Republic. The Northwest was raising a new generation of white men and women of a kind that had not been seen on the planet for two hundred years, but ageing revolutionary vets who remembered the bad old days were never quite convinced they would never come again, and so they were still prone to paranoia.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in archaeology, Whit,” said Jenny.

  “Well, not so much, but it would be a lot more interesting and fun than driving a garbage truck or planting seedlings a hundred miles out in the woods someplace,” said her son.

  “That’s what the Labor Service is for,” his father reminded him. “Someone in society has to do the manual labor. No matter how many robots we make and how well they function, there will always be jobs that can only be done by a man with a pick and a shovel and a strong back. Under ZOG they brought in millions of Mexicans and other Third Worlders to do the work that white people, especially white males, had become too weak an
d lazy and unfocused to do. One of the things that nearly destroyed our race in those days was our unwillingness to get our hands dirty, literally. White men didn’t want to stoop and dig and heft and tote and sweat and work out under the hot sun.”

  “And white women didn’t want to change diapers or stay home and raise their own children,” put in Jenny. “They wanted to wear yuppie Power Womyn suits and work in cubicles and have these wonderful fulfilling careers like they saw on television and heard about on Oprah. So Americans farmed both tasks out to mud people, letting in more and more of them until they almost drowned us.”

  “What’s a yuppie?” asked Whittaker.

  “What’s an Oprah?” asked Melanie.

  “Nothing important,” Jenny told them. “Just some silly words for silly people, from a very sick and silly time.”

  “Why would any woman not want to care for her own children?” asked Melanie curiously. “I just can’t imagine that.”

  “It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to care for the children, they didn’t want to bring them into the world at all,” Jenny told her.

  “But if nobody has any babies, then how will the human race go on existing?” asked Melanie. “I mean, us, of course, not niggers and gooks.”

  “How could any race of people want their own kind to die out?” asked Whit in puzzlement. “I never did get that. Okay, yeah, we got History and Moral Philosophy classes at Sam Johnson, you have to in order to graduate, so I know all the standard explanations, but I still can’t wrap my mind around what it must have been like actually to live on a daily basis in a society where your own people wanted you dead, and wanted to die themselves and hand over the world to monkeys. How could anyone hate themselves that bad? It’s insane!”

  “You got it, son,” agreed his father. “It was just that. Literally insane. They were cuckoo for cocoa puffs.”

  “What’s a cocoa puff?” asked Melanie.

  “Just another word from the Dark Time, now meaningless,” said Jason.

  “Yeah, Dad, you always say that, and you never explain what those words did mean!” complained his daughter. “You guys remember those days. You could probably do a lot better teaching the H&MP course than Mr. Ballard.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Jason. “Paul Ballard was too young for the NVA, but I happen to know he had a sterling combat record during the Seven Weeks, he’s a first class citizen and a Party member, and I consider him eminently qualified to teach H&MP.”

  “But he doesn’t actually remember anything before the Revolution himself. He was three years old on the day Coeur d’Alene went up. I know you guys don’t like to talk about it, but why not?” persisted Whittaker. “You talk about the Dark Time like it was ancient history, and I suppose since it all happened before Mel and me were born, to us it is ancient history, but we’re talking less than forty years since the Sixteen Days in Coeur d’Alene. How can you explain an entire race of people deciding that it not only deserved to die, but bringing in whole other races of savages to kill them and then worshipping their own destroyers like gods? At least that sounds like what happened, from what I learned in school and what I’ve read for myself.”

  “Not a bad description of it,” agreed Jason with a nod.

  “Is it?” asked Whittaker. “I wouldn’t know, but you guys would. You actually saw it happen. Mr. Ballard didn’t.”

  “We don’t talk much about the Dark Time because nothing we could say about it is very nice,” explained Jenny. “We always took the same attitude with you two kids that we took with your brothers and sisters, and that was that your father and I spent our own youth doing horrible things so that you would never have to understand why we did them.”

  “You know the old saying about those who can’t remember the mistakes of the past being doomed to repeat them?” asked Whittaker.

  “Yes, dear, but today we have created a whole new society specifically designed to avoid repeating those mistakes, so you won’t have to worry about it,” replied Jenny.

  “You might say we’ve tried to build an idiot-proofed society,” said Jason. “There have only been two such attempts made in history, one in Germany in the last century which the kikes were able to destroy, and now here in the Northwest, which the Jews keep trying to destroy but haven’t succeeded yet.”

  “So what was it really like?” persisted Whittaker. “Back then?”

  “I can’t imagine going to school with those things,” said Melanie. “I’ve never seen a real nigger, only in pictures.”

  “Lucky you! That was kind of the idea behind the Revolution, sweetie, so you wouldn’t ever have to see one.” said Jenny.

  “What do they smell like?” asked Melanie, curious.

  “About like you’d expect from their pictures,” said Jason. “Why do you want to know, anyway, son? It’s not like your mom and I have any really big secrets you can’t learn in school or in the Montana War Museum. What do you think we’ve left out? All your lives you’ve seen your mother and me in our uniforms and marching with the Old Fighters in the parade every Independence Day. You know we were Volunteers, and then we were in the Battle of Portland, and then during the Seven Weeks War I was on General Drones’ staff and spent most of my time riding around in a Heep doing basic housekeeping jobs and keeping A.J. from being buried alive in pieces of paper so he could fight the war. I wasn’t any big hero, although in point of fact you know some real ones.”

  “Who?” asked Whittaker.

  “You’ve met a lot of our friends from that earlier time in our lives who did a lot more than we did, including President Morgan, and General Randall and his wife Erica, and General Drones, on down to old Pete the caretaker down at Sam Johnson High. And from the Seven Weeks, you know your Uncle Tommy who won the Iron Cross with his dad, and your Uncle Bob, who was offered Iron but is a genuinely modest man as well as a brave one, so he turned it down. Plus Jace and Katie are old enough to remember going on that long camping trip with your mom during the Seven Weeks, although Annabel doesn’t remember anything since she was just a baby.”

  “Jace and Katie used to talk about the long summer at the lake and the funny noises coming from the sky, yeah,” confirmed Whit. “Although it didn’t make much sense to Mel and me growing up.”

  “We thought ZOG was this big monster,” said Melanie.

  “It was, honey. Anyway, I need to get going,” said Jason, rising from the table and folding his newspaper. “Bob and Tom want to meet with me about something concerning the Lost Creek excavation. You’re out with the Pioneers this weekend, right, Whit?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Whittaker. “Three days camp up at Glacier Lake. I don’t see why they won’t let us go right into the service for four years instead of two, or at least do it first. This way I’ll forget all my military training by the time I get into the Luftwaffe.”

  “Because there are ditches to be dug and there’s garbage to be hauled and there’s fruit to be picked, and we seem to have mislaid all our Mexicans,” said Jason. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, son. You’ve got four years of service ahead of you, and then the world will be your oyster. College or trade or technical school or whatever’s right for you, or if you’ve still got nothing but space between your ears, outer space that is, you can go to the Air Academy if that’s still what you want, and become a Lunatic if you like, although we do hope you can stay closer to home.”

  “I think our lunar pioneers prefer to be called Selenites, Dad,” Whittaker reminded him.

  “I know what I said. Anybody who wants to live for years on end in an air-conditioned coffin has got a few screws loose, and besides, your mother and I want to try to get every one of you back here every Christmas if possible.”

  “But what about your responsibilities here on earth?” asked Melanie. “Once you’re out of the army in four years you can also get your housing loan and buy a place for you and Susan and your prom baby.”

  “What are you, still seven years old?” said Whittaker, s
cowling at her.

  Jason frowned. “That would be Susan… ?”

  “Purdue,” said Jenny. “You know her, Jace, we’ve had her over for dinner a few times. She’s in Whit’s graduating class.”

  “And we have a prom baby coming?” Jason asked.

  “Hardly, since prom isn’t until weekend after next!” said Whittaker.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” said Jason with a nod. “Here we do ours a couple of weeks after graduation, not a couple of months before. I keep forgetting.”

  “When did you guys have your proms?” asked Melanie.

  “We didn’t,” said her father. “I was banned from mine for racism, and your mother was on the bounce with the NVA at sweet seventeen. Not that I could have taken your mother to mine, anyway, since I’m older than she is. We weren’t even in Hellgate High together.”

  “In what?” asked Melanie, laughing.

  “Swear to God, that’s what Samuel Johnson High School used to be called!” he father assured her. “It was a gate of hell, too. Anyway, Whit, if that’s the way the wind is blowing with you and this Purdue girl, you and I need to have a word beforehand, and probably I need to speak to the girl’s parents as well. Not that I can see anyone having any objection to you or our family, unless—her people weren’t Unionists during the first war, were they?”

  “I don’t know, I never asked,” said Whittaker in exasperation. “It hasn’t seemed important. It was long ago, no offense, Dad.”

  “None taken, son,” said Jason with a smile. “To kids your age it was long ago, and that’s the way I hope it stays, which is one reason I never sat my children down and told you a string of horror stories that would just give you nightmares to no good purpose. But getting back to this young lady, if her family is Christian and they don’t approve on religious grounds, then I would expect both of you to respect their wishes. If you don’t want to marry the girl, then look elsewhere. If you’re too busy, your mother and I can start looking for you.”

  “Hire a matchmaker?” suggested Melanie mischievously.