JEFFERSON’S ROAD: THE SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE
© Michael J. Scott, 2010
All Rights Reserved
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Jefferson’s Road: The Spirit of Resistance
Copyright © 2010 by Michael J. Scott
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Praise for The Spirit of Resistance:
Michael Scott's masterfully written novel explores what could be the very real, very private thoughts of angry American citizens... and what would happen if those citizens acted on their thoughts. Chillingly realistic; frightfully feasible.
- Linda Yezak, Give the Lady a Ride
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A well-crafted, captivating thriller. Illuminating, thought-provoking narrative. Well placed twists. Inventive plot. Surefooted, accomplished writing. An impressive read.
- Alan Chaput, Savannah Passion
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Well-written, well-researched book! I highly recommend it!
- Jaffy, Amazon Kindle Reader
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I wondered if DHS was scanning my computer and creating a dossier with my name on it as I read! I'm truly looking forward towards the next installment.
- Name mysteriously withheld...
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A deeply layered and well thought out story. This is going to be one of those 'buckle yourself in for ride' kind of books.
- Missy Fleming, Mark of Eternity
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A most intriguing and complex storyline. A pleasure to read.
- Andrew Burans, The Reluctant Warrior: The Beginning
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Exciting book, always running at a fast pace.
- Neville Kent, The Secrets Of The Forest
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One
“It’s evil.”
“It’s the lesser of two evils.”
“It’s still evil. You can’t fight evil with evil. You know that.”
“So what are we supposed to do, Peter? Nothing? Sit around and wait for something good to drop out of the sky?”
I pulled away from the window and sat on the ledge. Martin glanced up from the easy chair, one leg draped lazily over the armrest. In his blue jeans and T-shirt he looked harmless enough. Not weak, though. Definitely not weak. Martin’s arms were knotted muscles from four years in the Marines, two of them fighting terrorists overseas. He smiled broadly, if only to keep me from mistaking his tone. He wasn’t mad at me. He was just mad.
His eyes. His eyes were dangerous. And I strongly suspected he would move this conversation from the theoretical to the practical if I lost the argument.
I had to try harder. “It’s not that you wait for something to ‘drop out of the sky.’ It’s that you wait for God to act. And you trust that He will. It’s called faith.”
He kept smiling and turned away, picking up the half-empty bottle of Killian’s on the end table. He’d already ridden my case for not buying American beer. I pointed out that it was still bottled in New Jersey, but he just shook his head. It was his way of saying I didn’t get it.
“You ever heard of a Deus Ex Machina?” he said.
“God out of the machine.”
“That’s what playwright’s relied on when they wrote themselves into a corner.”
“Yeah, I know what it is.”
“The gods would just show up at the end, rising up from a trap door in the stage and make everything all right. Modern writers don’t use it anymore. Hell, you couldn’t even get a book or play or movie considered if you took that approach.”
“Is this about my writing career?” I hastily tried to change the subject. He was backing me into just such a corner where that kind of theophany would’ve proved useful. “‘Cause I’ve still got a real good shot at finding an agent.”
“You know why writers don’t use that technique anymore?”
He wasn’t going for it. I’d hoped the beer would’ve kicked in and helped him jump the tracks onto a new line of thinking. Commenting on my thin chances of making it as a writer was one of Martin’s favorite subjects. At least it felt that way, sometimes. “My little brother,” he’d say. “World famous author. Oh wait, you’re not! How many books have you written now? Five? How many have you had published? Zero. What’s Einstein’s definition of insanity?” To keep doing the same thing and expect different results.
Any moment now, I hoped he’d start. Instead, he said again, “Why don’t they use that technique?”
It was not a rhetorical question, and I knew it. His tone demanded an answer. “‘Cause it ain’t realistic,” I mumbled.
“It ain’t realistic. I am not against faith. I carried a King James Bible with me every time I went into combat. Right here.” He patted his chest. “Wore it over my heart just in case something tore through the Kevlar. And if that bullet wasn’t stopped by my Bible, then at least it would carry its words and embed them in my heart. I can’t think of a better way to die than that.”
I nodded. “You’ve told me.” At least a hundred times.
“I am not against faith. But I am against using faith as an excuse for non-action, as a cover for cowardice.”
“That’s not fair. Just ‘cause I didn’t sign up—”
“I didn’t say that. I ain’t talking about you going in the service. It’s an all-volunteer military. You wanted to pursue your writing career,” he derided. “Can’t do that when you’re getting shot at, can you?”
I glared at him. He sipped his beer, bemused. Then all levity left his eyes. “I am asking you to consider for a moment whether or not God isn’t waiting for someone to step up and take action. Like Edmund Burke said. ‘All that is required for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.’”
“It wasn’t Edmund Burke.”
“Well, who was it?”
I shrugged. “No one really knows. It’s always been attributed to Burke, but no one knows for sure.”
“So he might’ve said it. So what? The question is: are you still gonna do nothing? Are you still gonna wait for your Deus Ex Machina? Or are you finally gonna say ‘enough is enough’, and pick up a weapon to defend what’s right?”
“I’m not saying we should do nothing.”
He stood up and faced me, one hand on his belt, the other holding his beer. Beneath his Cincinnati Reds ball cap, cold blue eyes took my measure, as if weighing whether or not I was even worthy of his time. I felt like our entire relationship hung in the balance. I shivered.
He spoke quietly and firmly. “Then what should we do?”
I tried to meet his eyes, but found I could not. I needed a different tack. “Marty, we have elections in this country.” He sneered and walked away, presumably for another beer. “Free and fair elections,” I called to his back. “We’re supposed to be a go
vernment of the people, by the people, for the people.” He came back into the room with two beers. He handed one to me.
“The people have spoken,” I said. “Just because we don’t like the results doesn’t mean we have the right to force them to choose otherwise. Freedom to choose must mean the freedom to choose wrong.”
He sat back down, this time on the armrest. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and uncapped his beer. “Ever hear that governments rule by consent of the governed?”
“John Locke.”
“That means that every government is chosen.” He put ‘chosen’ in quotes with his fingers. “Hitler was chosen by the people. They elected a tyrant. Lenin was chosen, if only in the sense that the Russian people were sheep, and they chose to let him oppress them. King George was chosen, or at least until we decided to choose differently, and took up arms against our oppressor.” He kept emphasizing ‘chosen.’
“The American people are sheep, Peter. Just dumb sheep! They’ll follow anyone who promises to keep them warm and well-fed. This man we’ve elected is a Marxist. He can’t support and defend the Constitution, ‘cause he doesn’t believe in what the Constitution says. He doesn’t believe in the rights of man. He doesn’t believe in the right to life, ‘cause he kills unborn babies. He doesn’t believe in the right to liberty, ‘cause he wants to take our guns away, which is our very source and protection of that liberty. And he doesn’t believe in the right to property, ‘cause he wants to redistribute the wealth, instead of letting hard-working Americans keep what they earn.”
He rose from the chair and came over close, leaning into me, his eyes searching. I could smell the beer heavy on his breath. “Do you remember what Dad made us memorize?”
“Jefferson.” I shrank from the word, from him.
“He knew this day would come. I’ve thought about this over and over again. I can’t tell you how many times—when they were shooting at me over there—and I’d get back, and I’d hear what those liberals were saying over here. His letter to William Smith.”
“I know it, Marty.”
He quoted it anyway, measuring the words in his tone, making them his own. “‘God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well-informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.’” He beat the windowsill with his open palm, accenting his point. “‘The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’”
I sighed and pushed away from him, ducking under his outstretched arm. “I-I don’t know. Assassinating the President? How are we supposed to pull that off?”
He smiled. Satisfied. I realized then that he’d won the argument. The questions were no longer theoretical. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Just leave that to me.”
I swallowed the beer, and felt numb.
Two
I went to the back porch while Martin made a phone call. Sitting on the railing that overlooked the woods, I trained my eyes through the maze of trees and browning leaves, staring through the exposed underbrush, hoping to catch sight of a buck or doe. At almost anytime of the year they could be seen wandering through the woods, their noses probing the ground, large ears perked for any sound. Sometimes a breath of wind would carry our scent from the house in their direction, and they would lift their noses, sniffing the air, then turn with a muted bark and flee farther into the woods, white tails bobbing into nothingness.
There were no deer I could see at this time of day. Not that it mattered. It wouldn’t be deer season for another week and a half anyway. Only the bow hunters would be out now. The sun shone citrine near the horizon, casting beams through the crown of trees and throwing a golden hue through the woods. Daylight savings had ended just a few days before, edging the darkness an hour closer in the name of preserving sunlight for a populace who no longer farmed, who mostly slept in. Last night’s election ended late in the evening, with giddy newscasters declaring victory for the Democratic candidate long before even half the precincts had reported results.
It made no difference who won. This year’s election season offered Americans a choice between two candidates whose policies were virtually indistinguishable. It didn’t matter if the winner was a Democrat or a Republican— either one would edge us closer toward big government socialism and further away from the early vision of the founding fathers. As Martin often said, “Would you like to get hit by a red Mack truck, or a blue Mack truck?”
I picked at the peeling paint on the railing. The bright yellow finish had corroded long ago, leaving the mottled gray of weathered wood exposed to the elements. Dad wouldn’t have liked to see his house falling into such disrepair. He left the place to Martin and me in his will five years ago, along with the diminishing remains of a $250,000 life insurance policy. Taxes claimed most of the money, but what was left was enough to live on for a time while I pursued my writing career.
There was probably enough left to fix up the place if we wanted to sell it—though I doubted either of us could stomach the thought. Martin and I had both been born in the house. Mom died giving birth to me. Dad followed twenty years after—like he was waiting for his sons to grow up and stand on their own before joining his bride in heaven.
It was the only home we’d ever known.
All told, we owned twelve acres just off Route 104 in the town of Ontario, Wayne County, New York. Around us, most of the farms had either sold out to developers who’d left the land vacant in the housing market crash of ’07 and ’08, or were apple orchards contracted to local firms that employed migrant workers during the harvest.
Our land had never been built into a farm—at least, not anytime during the past fifty to a hundred years that I could tell. There was an old stone wall that ran along the northern edge of the property. Some barbed wire was caught up and buried in with the stones, now rusting into dust while the farmland it once guarded had long ago surrendered to the woods and deer. We used our land mainly for hunting and harvesting firewood for heat during the winters. A portion to the east of our house had been cleared and was well suited to a garden, but neither of us had the inclination to work it, and it was overgrown with brush and weeds. Episodically, I would grab a rake or a hoe and tear into the brush, threatening to bring back the garden Mom or Dad had worked so hard to scratch from the earth. It was an idle threat, and the thorn bushes and weeds seemed to know it.
Writing doesn’t provide much physical outlet, and on those days when the stress of addressing the world’s problems through the pen grew too tiresome, or when the words refused to cooperate, I would come out to the garden and thrash about, fulminating conquest. Later, after the effort exhausted me, I would retire to the porch and drink a cold one, congratulating myself on the garden’s progress.
But nothing ever got planted. The weeds returned, often with a vengeance, and I would go back to my rants and constipated complaints.
Martin never said much during these times. He’d just shake his head and wait for something to get done. He seemed to know it was a pointless effort. My own way of letting off steam.
I looked at my hands. The calluses from my last foray into farming had faded back into smooth skin. I felt very much like picking up the shovel or hoe and going at it again, but the thought of tearing my palms in a futile expression was dissuasive.
And it wouldn’t do a thing to relieve the pressure I now felt.
Something had happened to Martin. I looked back at the house, watching him talk on the phone to Jerry Knapp, our mutual best friend an
d fellow miscreant. Jerry lived on the outskirts of Webster. His father owned a gun shop, which Jerry pretty much ran for him and expected to inherit when the old man died. No doubt the conversation involved the guns. Martin was animated, waving one arm angrily in the air while the other crushed the phone to his ear. He’d only been back from the war for nine months, having taken some shrapnel from a roadside bomb outside of Tikrit. Most of the wound was in his right shoulder, though he could still handle a gun and do most things he enjoyed. But sometimes it pained him. They’d gotten most of the fragments out, but a few pieces were embedded so deep it was deemed too risky to bother.
When he first returned from the war he was quiet. I learned quickly not to ask him about the bomb or his experiences there. Sometimes he’d open up, and spill some disconnected anecdote about rebuilding a school or helping a little girl find her parents. Most times, he was silent, answering questions monosyllabically when he said anything at all
During baseball season, he brightened up considerably, even though the Reds had absolutely no chance of making it to the playoffs this year. But toward the end his countenance grew darker, his diatribes more pointed. The election season had him on edge, and with each new revelation about the leftist leanings of either candidate, he’d only grown angrier and more frustrated. Now he was completely over the wall.
In a way, I suppose it was my fault. I’d made the mistake of trying to talk him out of it, instead of simply nodding my head and listening agreeably. “Man, what do you keep griping for?” I’d said. “It’s not like there’s anything we can do about it.”
He’d closed his mouth then, perhaps rightly concluding I’d heard enough and didn’t want to listen anymore. But as he’d grabbed his coat and stalked off into the night he’d muttered, “Somebody ought to do something.” That was two days ago. Yesterday, after completing our civic duty by casting ballots that didn’t matter, wouldn’t make a dent in the electoral tally from New York—weighed down as we were by the liberal leanings of the Big Apple to the southeast—he’d stopped the car outside the polling place, turned to me and said, “Just theoretically, suppose somebody did do something. What do you think would happen?”
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