Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “I should also mention that I’ve spoken to Sheriff Lomax about your activities,” Alice told her.

  “You called the sheriff on me?” cried Danny, scandalized.

  “No, it was he who came to see your father and me,” said Alice coldly. “He called yesterday and asked if he could come out, and your dad and I sent you and Wade driving out to the south barn to pick up those two bad milking machines so we could speak in your absence. Speaking of absence, Wade, please go to your room. Your grandfather and I want to speak to your sister in private.”

  “About what?” demanded Wade. “About her riding around on both sides of the Road and smooching with Johnny Selkirk? If you guys didn’t know until yesterday, you’re the only ones in the county who didn’t!”

  “Meaning you knew and you didn’t see fit to say anything?” said Elwood from his armchair, his eyes still on his newspod tablet. Wade wisely kept quiet.

  Alice stared at him. “I’m sorry to hear that, Wade, but be that as it may, please go to your room now. I know you’re family but you’re not yet of an age to participate in all the family business.”

  Wade was about to argue, but his grandfather said “Scat!” and Wade scatted.

  Alice resumed, “The sheriff was concerned that your behavior might have wider ramifications than you can possibly understand at your age, Danielle. Sheriff Lomax was certain we didn’t know what you were doing, and I am sorry to say that he was correct. I was going to wait for your father to come home so we could talk to you about this together, but after tonight…” Something struck her. “What did Wade mean about you riding around with that—on both sides of the Road?” she demanded heatedly.

  “Sometimes John drives me over to Basin, yes,” said Danny, amazed at how calm she sounded. “Sometimes I meet him over there and we eat in Shirley’s Diner or we have a sandwich in the Four Deuces.”

  “Dear God in Heaven, that’s Unauthorized Contact and Unauthorized Travel! You could go to prison!” Alice shouted.

  “Mom, nobody cares about those stupid old laws any more!” replied Danny in irritation. “They’re from before I was born, before the war, even! Half the population of Boulder goes Across The Road to buy meat and booze and cigarettes and grass that’s not taxed through the roof! You know that. It’s been like that for years. Nobody cares if I want to go to Basin! It’s only six miles away, not the far side of the moon!”

  “I most certainly care!” Alice shouted, taken aback by her daughter’s open admission. “You’re too young to be in a saloon, especially a saloon over there!”

  “I don’t drink beer or liquor, Mom, and neither does John when we’re together! They don’t just sell booze in the Four Deuces, they’ve got good sandwiches and salads, they have a lot of western Montana Celtic and Southern live music groups on weekends and on weeknights a lot of local musicians come in and play for drinks. And yes, I like some music besides gospel and sacred and inspirational and Country and Western,” Danny added.

  “It’s against the law!” said Alice harshly. “You’re not legally allowed to set foot in anyplace that sells alcohol for another eight years, young lady!”

  “Not in the Republic,” Danny reminded her. “There’s no legal drinking age. In the NAR it’s up to whoever owns a business who he wants in his establishment. If you create a problem the Guards deal with it, but nobody tells anybody else what to do. Well, most of the time not.”

  “It’s not a Republic of anything!” yelled Alice. “It’s a—it’s a no-man’s land of crime and hate and bloodshed! It is part of the devil’s own kingdom on earth!”

  “It is that, Alice, but they call themselves a Republic, and until such time as this country somehow recovers its moral strength and courage and does something about that, so they will continue to do,” her father-in-law said quietly from his chair, still not looking at them. “You need to be realistic, Al. This is too deadly serious to quibble over semantics.”

  “What else has he—Danny, what else are you doing?” asked her mother. She was quiet now, more intense, almost on the edge of hysteria. Danny was tempted for a moment to shout out that she was making wild, passionate love with Johnny Selkirk every chance she could get, just so she could see her mother’s face, but she didn’t. In the first place, it wasn’t true. In the second place, she loved her mother and she couldn’t be that cruel to her. In the third place, she loved her grandfather, but she had always feared him a little, and sensed that he was at least a bit mad on the subject of anything to do with the NAR or the far past, and she frankly didn’t want to see what he would do if she told a lie like that out of spite. Whatever he would do, she knew it wouldn’t be worth it.

  “I’m not having sex or carnal relations or whatever you want to call it, Mom,” Danny said with dignity. “John knows that I’m a Christian and he respects that. That’s why he doesn’t drink around me. Besides, if he did seduce me or anything, his own family would be just as angry with him as you guys would. It’s low behavior for men as well as women Over There. I have to be honest, from what I’ve seen they’re a lot more successful at getting men to restrain themselves in their country than we are in ours!”

  “This is true,” admitted old Elwood, finally looking up at them. “One way they do it is by legalized dueling, so any young man Over There who leads a young lady astray and declines to marry her afterward is likely to find himself looking down the barrel of a flintlock pistol in the hands of the girl’s father or brother. Those soft lead balls can rip a man’s jaw off his face at twenty paces. That’s if they want to be all formal about it. If not, the irate relatives may just face the naughty boy down in the street and play fast draw, and as long as it’s some semblance of a fair fight, the cops will just come along and haul away the bodies. Your favored eateries are situated in a land where murder is for all intents and purposes legal. That doesn’t bother you, Danny? No, really, I’m curious.”

  “John doesn’t carry a gun over on his side!” expostulated Danny. “It’s not necessary over there! Nobody’s gonna try and shoot him over there!”

  “So he carries one when he’s over here?” asked Elwood. “Danny, do you also know that he’s a criminal? That he and his brothers regularly smuggle contraband goods from this country into the—over onto his side of the Road?”

  “Yes, I know,” said Danny steadily. “He just came back from a run today. He told me all about it. He said it was mostly medicine and stuff people need to survive over there, but they can’t get because of the sanctions.”

  “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” asked Elwood. Danny’s mother was quietly sobbing.

  “So what now, Mom?” she asked. “You and Dad gonna kick me out of the house for being sinful?”

  “Don’t be stupid, child,” said Elwood irritably.

  “I am very seriously considering sending you to complete your education at the church’s school in Fargo, North Dakota,” said her mother.

  “You can’t do that, Mom!” screamed Danielle in horror.

  “I can and I very well might do that very thing! Your father and I together, of course, if it looks to be the only way of curtailing this out-of-control behavior. I don’t care what kind of anarchy goes on in that annex of hell Over The Road, Danielle, here you are still a minor until you are twenty-four, and we can do whatever we feel is in your best interests. Fallbrook Academy has an excellent scholastic record and it might just be the best thing for you in any circumstances,” her mother told her grimly.

  “How does Wendell feel about losing a milking hand?” asked Elwood. “He’s the boss now, Alice, and he is also Danny’s father, but I still have a say in what goes on around the ranch, since I was the one who made and ran it until I deeded it over to him. We’d have to hire somebody, and with that and Danny’s tuition and board at Fallbrook it would stretch our finances mighty thin. You know darned well this little girl works like a cart horse around this place. We’ve never had any complaints about that. Hell, we’ve never had any complaints at all abo
ut the child until she went off on this little treason tear of late.”

  “Then what do you suggest we do about her, Father T?” asked Alice.

  “Let me take a crack at her,” suggested Elwood.

  “I’m standing right here, you know!” yelled Danny.

  “Then stand there and shut up!” snapped the old man. “You have lost the right to speak or think or do anything around here, young lady. You clearly have no idea at all just how bad this thing you’re doing is, Danielle. I mean it, girl, this isn’t just some sixteen-year-old wild child shit!”

  “Language, please, Father Tolliver!” interrupted Alice. He ignored her.

  “Okay, this may be partly my fault, for not assisting in your upbringing as I should have done. Your father and your mother are too young to remember the first time, the Trouble itself. They were just barely born. True, they’re old enough so they can remember the time when the sky lit up, and the tanks rolled Across The Road, and when Boulder was full of nothing but Nazi gray and camouflage…”

  “They’re not all Nazis!” protested Danny.

  Elwood stood up and nailed his granddaughter to the floor with a glance from a face of pure rage and burning eyes she had never seen before. “Did I not just tell you to shut the hell up? You’re speaking of things you know not one damned thing about. I know who and what those people are. You do not. I was there. You were not. Do you read me, little girl? Now you’re going to go to bed, and tomorrow you and me are going to do the morning milking together. You will make us both breakfast, and then I am going to take you for a ride, and I am going to show you things you should never have to see and I am going to speak to you of things you should never have had to hear. Like I said, this may be down to me, because I should have spoken before this. I will make this one effort to get through to you, child, and if I cannot, if you will not or cannot understand what you have done, then you can go to hell. In fact, you most assuredly will.”

  * * *

  About seven o’clock the next morning, Danny and her grandfather were riding in one of the family pickup trucks down an old back road to the north of the family ranch. The two-lane blacktop highway was over a hundred years old and narrow, more a tired light graytop now, and the asphalt was crumbling badly. Jefferson County was constantly short of funds for road maintenance, the state of Montana was notoriously stingy, and no one could remember the last time anyone had seen a federal highway dollar. It was a glorious summer morning. The bright sun had been up for some time, but the morning was still cool from the night before. The sky was deep blue and the golden grass that rolled along the valley floor glowed, while the smell of the pine trees on the ridges and clustering hills invaded even the cab of the pickup.

  Old Elwood was driving. Earlier in the morning he and Danny had only exchanged a few words during the robot-assisted milking and their early breakfast. Now the old man began to speak. “Honey, I honest to God don’t know what to do about this. If I asked, I’m sure you’d either tell me you love this man, a great and immortal love for all the ages like no young girl ever experienced, like none of us would ever have heard that before, or else you’d say you’re grown up and it’s just plain none of my business or your parents’ business who you spend your time with. That’s not quite true, because at sixteen, yes, it is still our business, and I’m not just talking about the law. No, you’re not grown up, you’re just at that bad time in life when you think you are but you ain’t, and that’s how kids get in trouble more often than not. But I’m not asking about you and this Selkirk fellow, because I just plain don’t want to hear it. Try to understand, Danny, this isn’t about you and him, it’s about you. You can’t do this, but you don’t understand that. Somehow, I have to show you why it’s wrong, and I’m not sure I’m gonna be going about this right, but it’s all I can do. I think the Jewish people back in the last century had the right idea when they demanded that the Holocaust never be forgotten, and that children in school needed to be educated about the past, starting at a very young age.”

  “We do get history class at school, Grandpa,” said Danny. “We do learn about the Trouble and about the Seven Weeks War, and Mr. Makepeace and Ms. Harding remember the time when Jefferson County was occupied by Northwest troops, and sometimes they tell us some of their personal experiences. Grandpa, I grew up not ten miles from the border. I know how it got there. I know what happened back then.”

  Somewhat to her surprise, her grandfather didn’t get angry. “No, honey, the fact is you don’t,” he told her. “Learning dates and facts in school isn’t the same thing as actually knowing. You have to have lived through it, and I don’t mean sitting on the sidelines back east somewhere reading news websites, either. Yes, I know that sounds like the sum of a dozen clichés, but what can I tell you? It’s pretty much a given that the young never really listen to the old. That’s true of every generation of people everywhere, and it has been for thousands of years. I don’t know why your parents and me would expect it to be different for us. But somehow, in this one case, I have to change that. You’re sixteen years old, so of course you think you know it all. I knew it all myself when I was your age. Sometimes that’s even kind of cute, but this isn’t cute and it’s not a phase. You have to do a major course correction, sweetie, and you have to do it now, and all your folks and I can do is hope and pray that somehow we were able to give you enough—oh, moral infrastructure I guess you’d call it, over the past sixteen years so you’ll make the right choice. God, I hope we did, and somewhere in you, you’ve got what you need to make the right decision now.”

  Abruptly, Elwood pulled off to the side of the road. “This is it,” he said. “Get out here.” They both got out of the truck. There seemed nothing unusual or significant about this empty stretch of highway; it was just around the bend from a low pine-covered hill. Along the east side of the road ran a low wash or ditch which had been excavated and maintained by decades of road crews along the lower stretches as an emergency channel during flash floods, so the waters would not suddenly surge over the roadway and strand motorists, or wash them away. “Come here,” said Elwood, beckoning to his granddaughter to follow him. He limped off the side of the road and pulled himself up a small rise, leaning heavily on his cane, and they looked down into a wide, rocky ditch, completely dry at this time of the year. There was silence except for the stir of a soft breeze and the whirring of crickets in the grass. “There. That’s the place.”

  “What place, Grandpa?” asked Danny.

  “A place of the kind I could show you a couple of dozen of, on both sides of the Road,” Elwood told her. “Remember, in those days Jefferson County was easily twice the size it is now, with half of it on the west side of Interstate 15, as it was called in those days. I suppose in those history classes you mentioned and maybe from listening to old coots my age talk, you’ll know that when I was your age, fifty years ago, back before the Trouble started, Jefferson County was not only bigger than it is now but there were a lot more people, people of all races, including a lot of people from Mexico and Central America. Mostly they came here as migrant laborers, and after a while some of them stayed on. We even had street signs and store signs in Spanish. Yeah, they could be irritating, not speaking English even when they knew how and trying to get the rest of us to learn Spanish, and yeah, they liked their drugs, and they lied to get on welfare, and all the rest of it. They weren’t perfect. No race of people is. But they never took anything we didn’t give them for the sake of their labor. That was the trade-off. They worked cheap, and everybody looked the other way when they stole to make up for it. But they worked hard, like white people wouldn’t do any more, and they made farming and ranching possible on a lot bigger scale. Sometimes the only way a farmer or rancher could keep his head above water was to hire Latino illegals. White women had started to have their own careers by then, or actually most of ’em just had jobs, but we always said careers to be polite, and they pretty much stopped having babies. After a few years there just we
ren’t enough white people left who wanted to do the kind of hard work the Mexicans did, and so they became necessary to the economy and a normal part of everyday life.

  “But there were always those who refused to accept them, who wanted to live in a past that was over and done, and who responded with bigotry and hate,” the old man went on. “That’s why the old government passed laws against hatecrime and hatespeech, and for a long time that took care of the problem and made the racist and resentful whiteboys shut the hell up and keep their evil thoughts to themselves. But then the national security agencies screwed up, and they didn’t nip that fat old bastard in Washington and his computer in the bud, like they should have done. One day people finally started listening to him, and then all of a sudden we had the goddamned Party everywhere, even here in Jefferson County, and then Coeur d’Alene went up. I was still in Iran when that happened. Well, I’m sure you learned all the names and dates and bare facts in school.”

  “Yes, I did.” Danny hesitated. She had never before heard her grandfather say even this much about the old days, and she was fascinated, but she didn’t want to upset him and make him angry, because she wanted him to keep on talking. “Uh, Grandpa, you know they tell that story a little different Over The Road.”

  “I’m sure they do,” replied the old man dryly. “Anyway, when I got out of the military shortly after that Coeur d’Alene mess and came home, things weren’t all that bad in Jefferson County yet, but already the sheriff’s department had a PATU going. That’s Police Anti-Terrorist Unit. I joined right away because if I did so within ninety days of my army discharge, I got to keep my full military pay as well as get a deputy sheriff’s salary. I lived with my folks, until they had to leave when it got too dangerous because of what I was doing, and after that I lived in the bunkhouse at the station. I saved every penny of my pay I could and that’s how I got the down payment for our land where your dad and your uncles and aunts and you kids as well were born and raised. Better yet, I got to keep my full medical benefits and health insurance, for me and my family, and in those days that was a big thing, even more important than the money. It wasn’t like today when we can go down to see Doctor King at the clinic for twenty-five New American Dollars a visit plus the cost of whatever medicine he gives you; in those days if you had a family member who got sick or hurt up bad, or you did, you could lose your house and everything you owned. Then you got sent to the government doctors who were all brown-colored Third World people who didn’t speak English and who didn’t have real medical degrees.”