Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Her religion probably helps,” commented Horakova. “You have to give them their due. I’m not a Christian myself, but once you get rid of the Zionism, it’s not too bad a way to live. For generations past, down to this very day, the fact is that white Christian families in the United States are almost the only ones who still produce multiple children instead of the almost obligatory single child for liberal yuppies, if any. They still offer the best chance a white child has Out There to grow up straight and clean.”

  “If you don’t count teaching those children to worship the most evil people on earth as gods,” added Campbell senior grimly.

  “Yeah, well, there is that,” replied Horakova.

  “You know how they call us all Nazis?” commented Bobby. “Just like we’re not all Nazis, not all Christians worship the Jews.”

  “I wonder if Captain Selkirk is willing to concede that?” asked Campbell. “Jason Stockdale knew him back during the first war, and he told me a few stories about him. Ray does not take kindly to tub-thumpers, apparently. Apparently he was married fairly young and they really messed with the mind of his first wife.”

  “Well, Danielle is still staying out there at the Selkirk spread and she hasn’t asked to move into town,” said Bobby. “From what I hear the old man is treating her with courtesy and respect, which pretty much jibes with what I hear about him, so long as you don’t get on the wrong side of him.”

  “John Selkirk going to marry her?” asked Bob senior. “He ought to, since she put her life on the line for him.”

  “Don’t know,” said Bobby. “Haven’t asked. Not my jurisdiction.”

  * * *

  Danny Tolliver was doing her best to adjust to her new situation in life, although she still had a distinct “through the looking glass” feel about everything. She had heard nothing from her mother and father and nothing from old Elwood, although admittedly they had taken away her phone so they had no way to get in touch unless they wanted to call the Selkirk home, which Danny thought unlikely. Johnny had given her another phone, and she could have called them, but she decided to let it be for a while until she found her feet and decided if she was on the right path or not. Hopefully time would heal the wound somewhat. She knew that in a goldfish bowl like this part of the border, her parents and her brother would know she was all right. Her grandfather probably didn’t care any more. Danny was sure that to old Elwood she was just another spucky traitor now. It saddened her deeply, but she knew there could be no going back.

  Johnny’s mother Christina, a slim and strong woman who had been brought to the Republic from Sweden at age six as a refugee from mandatory Islam which would not allow girls to attend school, took Danny in with a perfunctory hug and put her to work milking and feeding the animals and the people around the ranch when she wasn’t in school, just like the rest of the family teenagers. Danny was perceptive, and she understood that this wasn’t John’s mother being cold to her as an interloper, but Christina’s way of accepting her as a member of the family.

  Everyone assumed that she and John would be getting married in June before Danny went in for her Labor Service stint. The Selkirks gave her a nice room in their sprawling ranch compound, where she discovered first-hand how Northwesters tended to live in large extended families. Back in Boulder she had only one brother and no sister, but she soon realized that here she would have almost a dozen of each in more or less her age group, if one counted Johnny’s brothers and sisters plus assorted cousins and nephews and relations, not to mention all the older people who kept coming in and out all the time, and whom she despaired of ever keeping track of. She had experienced this on her first weekend at the Selkirk spread, when her new sisters and cousins had taken her down to Northwest Butte and gone on a shopping spree, fitting her out with a whole new wardrobe of hats, long dresses with full sleeves, new lace-up shoes that displayed no immodest ankles, and assorted hats.

  She quickly learned that many of the things she had been told about the Northwest Republic from her childhood on weren’t true, although some of them were. For one thing, not everybody walked around carrying guns and shooting each other in fast-draw contests in the street. “Our First Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, just like your Second Amendment used to do before Hillary, but it doesn’t say you have to keep and bear arms,” Johnny explained. “We know we have that right, absolutely and forever, so there’s no need for us to be constantly proving it, and since we’ve got no niggers or spics there’s no criminals to defend ourselves against, most people don’t bother to carry.”

  School was hard in some respects, especially academically, since more often than not she didn’t know half of what the teachers were talking about. But this problem was not unknown to the Northwest school system, which had a lot of practice in absorbing and upgrading ignorant white children who were coming into the country from schools where they had been taught nothing but useless and unmitigated drivel. Danny signed up for every extra tutoring program in school, and found she wasn’t alone; there were several other new immigrant kids at Cataract whose parents had only recently managed to escape the travel regulations and hate laws in their own countries and flee to the Northwest. These included an English girl Danny’s own age, a Finnish boy, and several East Canadians.

  There was also a solemn girl of fifteen named Freda who was still learning English. Her native language was an odd, primitive dialect that puzzled and perturbed the local German-speaking community. Freda was possibly the last survivor of the Germans of Southwest Africa. Her parents were dead, and she had been raised by her great-grandfather Hans, an engineer who had been held captive for years by a Herero warlord in order to keep his electrical equipment and toys running. When the girl had begun to mature at around age twelve, the old man knew what was in store for her, which was to be given to the mulatto Rehoboth Basters, who wanted to maintain their distinctive café-au-lait coloration. A princely bride-price of thirty cattle and twelve rifles had already been agreed upon with the Herero chief.

  Hans had fled with his great-granddaughter into the Namib desert in one of the last of the warlord’s functioning bakkies or pickup trucks, and they had made it into the arid Orange Free State where one of the scattered Afrikaner farm families who still survived in South Africa had taken them in. After enough adventures to write a book about, the two of them had been smuggled into the Republic, only to have the old man die in his first Northwest winter. Hans was ninety-two years old, yet having lived all his life in Africa he had never seen snow before. One afternoon Freda found him sitting in an armchair by the window in their Bureau of Race and Resettlement immigrants’ apartment, his eyes staring out into a falling white curtain. The old man’s last sight on earth was something he had known only from books and from the stories of the old people in his childhood who still had some memory of the Fatherland. In that sense, he had indeed Come Home.

  Freda was adopted by a local German couple, and was just getting started at Cataract, a year late. She had a lot of catching up to do, but not as much as one might think. Old Hans had taught her how to read and write himself when she was a child, and tutored her in everything from history to outdated electrical circuitry, almost all of it from memory. The Herero would not let him have any of the crumbling books that were occasionally found in the ruins of white homes and buildings, for they feared these were the magical source of the white man’s power, which of course they were.

  Danny had been worried about making friends at Cataract High School, and afraid that she wouldn’t be accepted by her new fellow students. She had grown from childhood believing that these people she now lived among were evil monsters, and she was pragmatic enough to understand that these young men and women had almost certainly been raised to think the same thing about her and her family. To her surprise, she found she needn’t have worried. Despite the increased population over the past four decades, Jefferson County, Montana, on the American side and what had once been Jefferson County on the other side
of Interstate 15 were still two parts of a small rural community, and no border could stop the gossip and rumor and general yak-yak that spread faster than a prairie fire. The fact was that Danny and Johnny’s forbidden romance had been the hottest topic of conversation for months in both Jefferson High on the American side, and Cataract High on the NAR side, where John was an alumnus. Most of Danny’s former classmates, except for a few close friends like Sherry Applewhite, had thought she was crazy, or a traitor, or both. Danny found that the Northwest girls seemed to be romantics who thought it was super-cool that she had snagged the most handsome young man in the southern Border District sector, from a land-rich prominent local family with a proud revolutionary history, and a dashing blockade runner at that.

  She also had to admit that she liked Cataract High school a lot better than she had ever liked Jefferson. She found that wearing a school uniform was an improvement; it removed differences between the poorer kids and the better-off ones and imparted a feeling of unity and belonging that adolescents needed. “That’s another thing about the Labor Service,” John told her. “Yeah, you get a lot of kids moaning and complaining about it, but it’s something we all know from our childhood we’re just going to have to do, and we all understand why it has to be done. One thing we can all be sure about: everybody has to do it. There is no class system in this country, and national service is one way we make sure it stays that way. No rich kids slithering out of it; everybody has to get his or her hands dirty for a year or two. As long as it’s fair and nobody cheats the system, it’s okay. Just think of it as having a guaranteed job when you get out of high school. Plus you may find you like it. It’s not just ditch-digging and garbage-hauling and apple-picking, you can get all kinds of training in engineering, plumbing and electrical work, and science jobs and hotel management, and the NLS even has a cordon bleu cooking academy for training chefs. They’ll get you into technical college or university courses. Some kids go into the Labor Service at seventeen, they find something they’re good at, and after the army they go right back in and stick with it all their lives.”

  “I don’t know really what I want to be yet,” confessed Danny. “I just always figured I’d stay on the ranch and help Mom and Dad. I thought about being a vet.”

  “UM’s got a School of Veterinary Medicine,” John told her. “Right down the road, in Missoula. Once you do your Labor Service, you can do a year in pre-vet or some kind of science-related course like that, not sure exactly how it works, but the idea is to see if you’ve got the chops for it. Then you have to pass an entrance exam, and if you pass it you’re in. I think it’s three years to get your Doctor of Doggies or whatever.”

  “D.V.M. Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. That’s what they call it back home, I mean over on the other side.”

  “Here too, I think,” said Johnny. “Plus, when you complete your national service you’ll be a third-class citizen, with one vote. If you did want to do a voluntary two years in the NDF afterward, that will put you about half-way to second-class, with two votes. I’m shooting for second-class now myself, but as a civilian I have to wait until I’m twenty-five, unless I do something really great like saving the President’s life or getting qualified as a space pilot, something like that. It takes most people until about age forty-five or so to get their first-class ticket, with three votes.”

  “I thought I could get second and first class by having lots of babies?” said Danny mischievously.

  “Yeah, you can,” agreed John. “Second-class anyway, on the birth of the third child. You get your third-class when you complete your national service, because you’ve earned it by showing responsibility and giving something to the Republic, so the Republic gives you something back, that one basic vote. After that it makes sense to give older people with more life experience more say in the government of the country, as well as certain people like mothers who have a real stake in what happens in society. Not like you guys, giving any ape with two arms and two legs and a nappy head the same vote you give a surgeon or a physicist.” He grinned at her. “Of course, if you really want to go for an early first, you could always apply to join the Party.”

  “Oh, God, my grandfather would drop dead of an apoplectic seizure!” said Danny, making a face. “And my father and mother would drop right beside him. I’m not really interested in politics, though. Politics is what got us into all this mess to begin with, and don’t worry, I know better than to say anything like that at the dinner table with your grandfather around!”

  “Mmmm, yeah, maybe springing a thought like that on him off the cuff isn’t such a hot idea,” agreed Johnny with a nod. “But you know, Danny, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you were to try and get Pop off alone and sit down with him and talk to him. Yeah, he can be cantankerous and opinionated and a pain in the keester, I guess like most old people are, but he’s earned the right. He’s a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary hero, and he’s one of the reasons you and I are even here at all.”

  Johnny went on. “You know, after independence Pop could have been one of the big shots if he’d wanted to. He knew them all back then, all the big names, Red Morehouse and Corby Morgan and Winston Wayne, just about anybody who ever was somebody in the Party or the NVA. He met the Old Man himself a few times, and he even knew Melanie Young when she was still in Montana—bet you didn’t know she was born just down the road here in Walkerville? That was before she had to go on the bounce, and ended up with Tom Murdock out on the coast. After Longview, the new government practically begged all the old hands to stay on and take on major political and administrative roles, but some like Pop weren’t having any. They’d done what they had to do, and now they were going back to pick up what was left of their lives and get on with living, and Pop was one of those. He came back to this place, and the only thing he ever asked of the Republic in return for his service was the return of the deed to this ranch that the Jew bank had foreclosed on. Which he got, and then he got on with life, with one major interruption for the Seven Weeks War. Look, Danny, you’ve already started taking History and Moral Philosophy class at Cataract…”

  “Yeah, that’s the one I have to pass,” she said.

  “Yup. No grades, only a pass or fail. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with anything Mr. Nixon says. You can argue with him all you want. Hell, he likes kids to argue with him!”

  “I’ve already noticed,” said Danny dryly.

  “But before you graduate, your H&MP teacher has to certify to the school and the state that you have at least some basic understanding of how our country came to be, and why, and how things are in the world. You don’t have to agree with any of it, but you have to know it, basically so if you screw up you don’t have any excuse. What I’m saying, though, is if you want to do more than just pass the course, Danny, if you really want to understand, then you couldn’t find anyone better to tell you how things really were than Pop.”

  “Johnny, a month or so ago my grandfather drove me all over the American part of Jefferson County, showing me all these places where really bad stuff happened during the Trouble—sorry, I mean the War of Independence,” Danny corrected herself. “Murders and bombings and ambushes, and some of them were really bad. At least he made it sound that way, and he says your grandfather was responsible for some of it.”

  “He was probably responsible for most of it,” said Johnny with a chuckle. “And he won’t deny it. Why don’t you ask him about it?”

  So Danny did. She found old man Selkirk in his private den in the ranch house after supper, sitting in his armchair reading The Way We Live Now by the 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope. “People really read a lot of books over here,” she began tentatively. “Not like at home, I mean over on my side of the Road. I mean, I know this is my side of the Road now…”

  Selkirk chuckled. “I know what you mean, Danielle. Our television signs off around midnight, with the national anthem, and we’ve only got four channels anyway. One channel for news and p
olitics and current affairs, one entertainment channel, one educational channel, and one privately owned channel so we can let people breathe and experiment and sometimes let off steam a bit. Any more than that gets unhealthy, and the tube starts replacing reality in people’s minds. Like a lot of things, TV can serve a useful purpose, but only in moderation. Our people should always have something better to do than stare into a stupid electronic screen.” He held up the book. “Bet you didn’t know that most of the major literary figures of the Nineteenth and a good bit of the Twentieth centuries were anti-Jewish? This is a good example. The villain of the piece is a Jew swindler named Melmotte, who’s one of the slimiest hebes in all literature.”

  “I never even heard of Trollop,” said Danny, shaking her head.

  “That’s Troll-ope, and no, I suppose you haven’t,” said old Selkirk, shaking his head with a sigh. “What America has done to generations of young white people is criminal and unforgivable. You have no idea where you’ve been or where you come from, so how the hell can anyone expect you to know where you should be going?”

  “My grandpa told me where I come from,” said Danny. “He told me what happened back then, when he was a deputy and you were a spucky…” She had blurted the word out through careless habit, and she slapped her hand over her mouth in sudden fear. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean to say…”

  “I’ve heard the word, Danielle,” the old man said with a chuckle. “Never was quite sure what it meant. I think some Jew disc jockey in Seattle made it up. They also used to call us goots, which I think is a corruption of the word gook from Vietnam days, but I’m not sure who came up with that one, either. Usually it was just terrorist. Or racist terrorist, or racist murderers, or Nazi psychopaths, or murdering racist fascist Nazi terrorist psychopaths, or some other combination of any of those. They never really had much imagination when it came to us. I guess we freaked them out too much. On the other hand, did you know the English language has over a hundred different terms for ‘nigger’?”