by E. E. Knight
There was the profane keeping a discreet distance from the sacred. A little ways away from the rest of the camp some enterprising prostitutes had set up their tents under a sign advertising gentlemen's entertainments, though their camp looked quiet for the moment.
Union Rock would be difficult to miss. It dominated the campsite like an unevenly risen bread loaf. A drum circle in tie-dyed shirts played, and passed around a joint, in its shade while a trio of barefoot girls festooned with beads danced.
There were any number of tourists walking around the rocks or climbing the more accessible parts. Valentine read an old pre-2022 landmark that mentioned this prominence as a popular stop on the westward-traveling Oregon Trail, which visitors often climbed to carve their names.
Someone had been hard at work since. A little path wound around the rock, traveled by families helping their children sound out the letters carved into the rock.
It was rather like a picture gallery, but the frames were shadow boxes, carved a forefinger's depth into the rock. Expertly crafted metal plaques were set into the boxes. Valentine moved down the line, reading with a little tingle running up his spine. The Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord's Prayer, the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, portraits of presidents and the postman Franklin, the Gettysburg Address, and an inaugural speech by Kennedy.
It wasn't limited to politicians. Valentine saw a young man busy making a rubbing of Shakespeare's Hamlet quartos, and Irving Berlin had sheets of music. Robert Frost had a poem about some woods on a snowy evening, and Valentine recognized O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi" in its terse perfection. Someone went to a lot of trouble to reproduce Whistler's Mother and a study of a troubled-looking Lincoln in bronze plate.
Above the gallery, in letters big and deep enough to be read from hundreds of feet away, some crammed between others, some in a single line and others in a block of text, there in a glorious hodgepodge stood phrases freshly whitewashed so they might even be read under a bright moon. In fact, the work continued—Valentine saw limber and energetic young boys and girls among the rocks with paint and brushes, cleaning and recoating so the words might gleam under the fireworks. Too many for Valentine to take in all at once, he had to move from quote to quote with care.
"WE MUST HANG TOGETHER OR WE SHALL SURELY HANG SEPARATELY." "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH." "I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT." "A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND...." "THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF." "WE SHALL FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES AND IN THE FIELDS...." "NO MAN IS AN ISLAND...." "EVIL CAN NEVER SURVIVE, THOUGH IT MAY SEEM TO TRIUMPH. IT IS ONLY A QUESTION OF PATIENCE AND ENDURANCE." "I HAVE A DREAM THAT MY FOUR LITTLE CHILDREN WILL ONE DAY LIVE IN A NATION WHERE THEY WILL NOT BE JUDGED BY THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN BUT BY THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER." "DOUBT NOT YOURSELVES, ONLY THE LIES OF TYRANTS WHO HOLD BUT A PROMISE IN ONE HAND AND A WHIP IN THE OTHER." "NO POWER FROM OUR POOR EARTH OR ANY OTHER WORLD CAN STRIKE DOWN THE GOLDEN LADDER BETWEEN YOUR SOUL AND GOD, WHO IS RIGHTLY CALLED THE ALMIGHTY." "OUR GREAT TEST HAS COME. WE MELTED IN THE HEAT OF DARKNESS AND DISASTER, BUT SHALL REFORM, AN AMALGAM GATHERED IN THE SWORD MOLD, HARDENED LIKE STEEL HAMMERED FROM THE FURNACE."
Valentine circled the rock twice, but kept returning to the Gettysburg Address. Its handful of words renewed him like the free ice water being passed out by the young "scouts" collecting valuables for the extension of the monument.
He had a single gold coin left. He palmed it and tossed it in the old plastic bleach jug as he accepted a hard plastic cup filled from the ice jug. "Please return for reuse," a childish hand had scrawled on the cup's side.
LeHavre was right. He'd made the struggle personal. It wasn't about this or that Kurian, or even some general's ego or his career. Even his family. They were all just caught in the whirlwind, a contest of life and liberty versus tyranny akin to those the men and women who had spoken the words described, even if the stakes were higher.
The Cause wasn't found in Southern Command; it wasn't the Cascades, or even this little band of July Fourth partyers. It was behind barbed wire, in the shadow of the Kurian Towers, in ugly little killing bottles like the Bellevue gardens. In a revolt in the Appalachians, led by a familiar-sounding Golden One.
That's where he'd be too.
He let the clean, cool water pass through his lips and wash him like the baptisms the firebrand preacher was even now attending to at the creek, and read again:
... that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Biography
E.E. Knight graduated from Northern Illinois University with a double major in history and political science, and then worked a number of jobs that had nothing to do with history or political science. He resides in Chicago and maintains a highly interactive website for the series at vampjac.com.
