“I object!” Owen cried loudly. “Fm appealing this sentence to the Supreme Court.”
Kehli said with distress, “Please hush”
“I won’t hush. I’m not going to stand here like a dummy and let them vote away my brains and my … uh, my crown jewels. I demand to be heard by the Supreme Court!”
Right End asked dryly, “What is a supreme court?”
“It’s the place where you take your appeal when you get a raw deal from the ribbon clerk’s. You’re trying to give me the short end of the stick here, but I refuse to take it. I won’t stand still for it. I demand an appeal. Every citizen in Indiana has the right to appeal.”
“There is no appeal from the decisions of this council,” Wytha declared.
“I’m going to change that right now, Granny. You’ve got a Supreme Court, whether you call it that or not, and I want my case heard there before you start tinkering with anything! I want to present my side. I want to show the court how useful I am. Let’s take it to the top.”
Wytha stared at him in puzzlement. “I do not know what you are babbling about.”
“Who’s the real boss of this city?” Owen asked her. “Who’s the top boss of all the cities, all thirty of them or however many you’ve got? Who has the last word? The Queen Bee, that’s who—she’s the Supreme Court.” Kehli cried out a warning. “Owen Hall!”
“What is a queen bee?” Wytha and Right End asked in unison. They were equally puzzled.
“Why, the Mother, that’s who. The number one Mother, who sits on the throne and owns all these here towns. She’s the Supreme Court around here, and I’m appealing to her. Now then, how can I find her? When can I set up a hearing? We’re going to have justice in the good old American way. Where’s Big Mother?”
City Hall was blanketed in stunned silence.
The guards at the doors were rigid and staring with shock. Hoon goggled. The tall shepherd holding him stiffened to attention and jerked his arm in brutal fashion. Despite her hangover, Paoli turned in her chair to look up at Owen with a startled expression that said he had committed a sacrilege. The judges were on their feet. “What did I say?”
Owen watched without understanding while the three councilwomen thrust their heads together for yet another conference. Their faces were masks of cold fury. The heavy silence in the hall was venomous.
At last Wytha said, “Kehli!” Her voice was sharp.
Kehli waited, not trusting herself to speak.
“Previous instructions concerning the rehabilitation of this male are hereby canceled. We are now agreed that he is to be laid down without delay. At the usual hour this morning you will take the male into the wilderness and put him down in his original place of interment. Further, you will mark the burial place in an appropriate manner for future reference. That grave shall never again be opened and that male shall never again be recovered for service. He is permanently expelled as an enemy of the city.”
Kehli said, “Wytha.....”
Wytha indicated the stack of newly minted caskets lining the side wall. Her index finger jabbed the air. “Take a container with you. This meeting is closed.” Owen Hall blinked at the sudden finality of .it and turned his head to look at his almost-patron.
“That’s murder, Kelly.”
Fourteen
The plain man Is the basic clod
From which we grow the demigod;
And in the average man is curled
The hero stuff that rules the world.
—Sam Walter Foss
Owen Hall’s second day of his new life began with uncertainty, misdoubt. It was a second life, his second time around, and that contributed to the confusion. His second-day look at this new world convinced him it was not the promised land—not the Eden-like garden he had been led to expect. They had robbed him of that.
He had been tried and found wanting, discourteously. They weren’t supposed to do that in Utopia.
The new sun hurt his eyes because he’d been used to the long hours of darkness inside Kehli’s house, the hours before dawn that were lighted only by two candles. The sun was rising with the quick heat of summer, rising into a cloudless sky that surely promised hot and discomforting hours to come. He recognized it as an August sun, but it really shouldn’t be summertime, shouldn’t be the beginning of his second day. An August sun was out of place, as strange as the rolling roadway that now carried him, a prisoner, into the northeast. He was immobile.
His mind insisted that this should be wintertime and there should be ice and snow on the land. He held a clear memory of deep snows everywhere on the prairie, of ice on the highway, a vivid memory of a blizzard blowing around him with snow or sleet stinging his face. He should be in the harsh middle of an Indiana winter, not here in the young morning hours of a summer day surrounded by hostile shepherds who looked on him as a hateful object. Owen stood in a line of five zombie workmen, securely bound to two of them while two others carried his coffin. The fifth man bringing up the rear held a blanket and a basket lunch.
There was a healthy stand of summer grass on the lawns before the row houses and an enormous prairie of grass that began just beyond the rolling road. The prairie seemed to fill all of the new world from one horizon to the other, occupying all of the visible world off the roadway. Lush turf was everywhere, as pastures and croplands had once been everywhere before the subdivisions came; this was clean, green country unspoiled by highways, billboards, and hamburger houses—much as it had been in his youth.
That part of the world could be the promised land.
In the far distance, off there to the east, a stand of timber grew against the horizon, fine trees standing tall before the sun. The day was already so bright that Owen had to squint to see the timber. The grove was as inviting as ever and again it would be pleasantly cool under those trees—cool and inviting later in the day when the sun scorched the town. A place for introspection. Next to fishing, the woods were the best place for thinking and dreaming—the place for living yesterday over again and for plotting tomorrow before it came. He wanted to visit the grove again, to loaf and talk to the friendly squirrel once more. Given the peacefulness of those woods and the inspiration of unfettered freedom, he might eventually puzzle out the riddle of this new world.
It was definitely not the happy kingdom promised by Pastor Coulson, as the pastor himself must surely know by now, but it could be an offbeat version of the fiery place that preachers often reserved for backsliders. That gauzy golden land in the sky wasn’t likely to have drab row houses, moving roads predicted by magazine writers, and tall domineering females intent on his destruction. They encircled Owen and the dull-eyed workmen, riding the road with him to the place of departure. None were smiling.
Owen Hall thought them a rum bunch.
The road was filling with men—males who behaved like sleepwalkers or dummies, males who displayed all the energy and animation of anemic zombies. They traveled singly or in pairs, but there was no fraternization between them, no gossiping of last night’s conquest or defeat, no retelling of yesterday’s baseball scores. No one spoke of Rogers Hornsby’s lifetime record of 2,259 games, no one cracked a sniggering joke about Betty Grable’s legs, no one of them talked to his fellow even though the fellow was alongside elbow to elbow, cheek by jowl. The workmen were models of inert bodies, rebuilt to serve their captors.
An old cemetery came into view. It was more than merely old, it was ancient—a place long abandoned to the wilderness. The marble monuments and the smaller stones had tumbled over in neglect, fallen to the vandals of time and wind, while weeds and tall grasses grew everywhere in an attempt to obliterate the few remaining traces of the stones. Bases and pedestals were already lost to the weeds and their presence had to be guessed at. Owen knew the cemetery lacked a decent fishing hole.
Kehli gave an order and the workmen left the road and jumped down into the weedy grass. Owen jumped with them because he had no other choice—either he jumped or he’d be dragged
down head over heels when the two lead men quit,the road. The bonds between them were taut.
The pair carrying the new coffin came down heavily behind Owen and, lastly, the fellow toting Kehli’s lunch and the pink blanket. They assembled in single file on the path beaten between the city and the distant cemetery. Kehli spoke again and the troupe moved off.
Owen turned his head to look behind.
A full dozen wardens were lined up along the lawns on the inner side of the roadway to watch him go, Paoli amongst them. Their faces were hard and unfriendly. He would have blown a farewell kiss to Paoli if his hands had been free and would have thumbed his nose at the others. A pity none would know the meaning of the gesture.
Owen glanced at the coffin to make certain the zombies were handling it with the proper care and faced forward to study the nape of Kehli’s neck. He thought it a lovely neck, one that invited caressing.
Persuading Kehli to use the coffin to carry a payload to the cemetery hadn’t been as difficult as he’d expected. His two backpacks had been resting against the rear wall of her apartment when he was returned there under guard after the trial, and Owen counted that a blessing.
He’d said, “Kelly, I want to take these with me.”
She looked from the sacks to Owen. “I do not understand.”
“I have to take these to the graveyard tomorrow—I mean today. It’s important.”
“Are the artifacts meaningful to you?”
He nodded vigorously. “Cupcake, old ancient people like me wouldn’t dream of going to the graveyard without them. It would rile my honorable ancestors.”
Kehli hesitated, eyeing the rucksacks and then the shepherds standing guard at both doors. No one offered an objection, and she gave her consent. Owen had stored the supplies in the coffin, closed the lid, and stood by to await the arrival of the native bearers.
The prairie seemed empty of life other than for the plodding troupe—well, other than for Owen and Kehli. The workmen were suspect. There were no cattle visible, no livestock of any kind, and nary a sign of a plow. The sod of the prairie had not been turned for a small eternity to judge by the overgrowth on every side. Owen wondered again if he was looking at buffalo grass. His grandfather had told him that the prairies were once covered by buffalo grass before the sodbusters cut it up or burned it off to make room for their settlements.
“Kelly?”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Kelly, I sure as shooting made people mad back there at the council meeting. What did I say wrong?”
She walked on for a length of time before answering. Her voice was low and Owen strained to hear.
“You voiced a grievous blasphemy in speaking of the Mother. You were disrespectful—you demanded to see her and speak to her.”
“I just wanted to appeal to a higher court,” Owen protested. “Doesn’t she have the last word?”
“No one demands an audience with Mother—no one sees her unless she first consents to an audience. Males are not permitted in her presence and certainly may not speak to her or about her. You desecrated her name, Owen Hall.”
“You and I talked about her yesterday right here on the trail.”
“I regret that. If I had not spoken of her you would have no knowledge, and you would not be in this position.”
He kept his gaze on the back of her neck. “I’m sorry about that, Kelly. I’m truly sorry and I apologize to you.
I meant no disrespect to the lady—I was only trying to get justice.”
Kehli’s head was bowed. After a while she said, “I believe you, Owen Hall, and thank you for the apology. The matter cannot be undone now.”
“Murder,” Owen said again. “You’ve been ordered to commit murder. That upset you last night when we talked about the skull—that guy who was bushwhacked.”
“I am very distressed. It has not happened before.”
“Never in all your history—you said that at the supper table. Well, now civilization is coming to the city, cupcake.” He stared at her neck and bowed head. “I have the honor of being the first man to be killed around here, and you have the honor of being the first killer. I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
She made no answer.
“It’ll be my second time,” Owen mused. “I was killed the first time back there in Indiana, but not by a man or a woman. A train hit me.”
The enormity of the prairie excited his sense of wonder a second time, just as the sight of it had done yesterday. A vast and unending sea of grass except for the timber and adjoining cemetery. Quite literally the grass stretched” from one horizon to the other without a visible break— without a house, barn, silo, or gasoline station. The great prairie was empty of roads, rail trackage, billboards, or telegraph poles; it revealed neither humans, horses, cattle, barking dogs, or the furrows of a plow. There were no windmills. Thousands of lush empty acres filled the world to the farthest reaches of his sight, a world that Kehli and her kind called a wilderness. There were no junkyards. The whole world seemed empty but for the town behind him and the few people on the trail with him, and that enormous vacuity stirred his imagination. They reached the ancient cemetery.
Kehli stopped and gave an order in a low voice. The workmen obediently halted and bunched up behind her, awaiting the next instructions. They may have followed this same routine every day for the past five or ten years, yet they wouldn’t pick up a shovel and turn a load of dirt until they were told to do so.
Owen asked, “Which one was my grave?”
She glanced at him and then indicated an excavation several feet away, next beyond the pit he had entered to reclaim the topaz ring. It lacked a headstone.
“Somebody was kind of chintzy,” he observed. “Unless, of course, the mice carried it away.”
Kehli gave another order and the two workmen carrying the coffin placed it on the ground and picked up their shovels. The fifth man carried the lunch basket and the blanket to the tree line and then waited there in the shade because he hadn’t been instructed to return. The first pair in line, stoutly roped to Owen, did nothing but look at Kehli’s pink uniform.
She faced Owen with irresolution.
“Now?” he asked.
“It is supposed to be now.”
“You’ll need all your courage, Kelly. It ain’t easy.”
“I am deeply troubled by the thought, Owen Hall.” “You’ll be more troubled by the act. How do you figure on doing it?”
She removed a short length of rope from her pocket. Owen said, “Civilization had that too—we called it garroting. It won’t be neat and easy cupcake. A man who is garroted kicks and struggles a lot, so take care I don’t boot you in the stomach. Protect your stomach.” He looked up into her unhappy face. “There’s an easier and quicker way if you’ve got the guts for it.”
The troubled woman only looked at him, unable to put her question into words.
“Open the coffin and look in my rucksacks there. You’ll find a knife in one of the packs, a very good knife with a blade maybe six inches long. It’s quality stuff— I made it myself.”
He watched while Kehli obeyed his instructions but was quickly surprised to see her go directly to the proper pack and retrieve the better knife without having to search for it. She turned and held it up for his inspection.
“That’s the one, and you knew it was there. You’ve already gone through my packs, cupcake.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “You didn’t report all that to the council, but you knew what I was going to do with it— with them.”
“I did not wish to increase your troubles, Owen Hall.” “Thank you again, cupcake. Bring the knife here.”
Kehli approached him slowly and with apprehension. “If my hands were free I’d show you where to stick it,” Owen said. “Come closer, you’ve got to touch me. Now put one finger on my ribs—here—and feel for the soft spot in between the ribs.” He looked down at her unwilling hand. “No, not there, you’re too low. Bring your finger up higher. T
here, now you’ve got it. My heart is there, Kehli.” He looked up into her face and* read the despair in the soft brown eyes that had earlier captivated him. “The technique is to lay the point of the knife in that spot between my ribs and drive it in hard and fast with the heel of your other hand. Hard and fast, Kelly. That way, no kicking, no struggling, and you don’t get booted in the stomach, because I won’t have time to feel it.”
She snatched her finger away and backed off.
“Why are you saying this? Why are you aiding me?” “I’m trying to make it easier on me,” Owen said honestly, “and make it easier on you, too.”
“I do not understand you again!”
“I said last night at the supper table that I was falling in love, Kelly. Today rye done fell. I am in love and a man in love does funny things. I’m trying to make this easier for you. That knife is better than garroting.”
The woman stood without moving in the hot summer sun and stared at him, searching his face and his eyes for any nuance or reservation not present in his words.
She said, “It is forbidden for a woman to form an emotional attachment for a recovery, a male.”
“It ain’t forbidden for a male to form one for a female —and if it was, I’d ignore that law too.” He tried to wave his hands toward the distant town but only succeeded in yanking the rope tying him to the patient zombie ahead. “You know what I think of them and their rules. All that stuff is for the birds, cupcake. When you fall in love you’re in love and there ain’t nothing else you can do about it, rules or no rules. It’s done .”
She bent forward to peer into his eyes.
“My equilibrium is the same as yesterday, cupcake.” “I think you are speaking the truth, Owen Hall.”
“I am. You can count on it.”
“You are speaking the truth about an emotional attachment.”
Ressurection Days Page 20
