by David Nickle
Both places, right then, that he missed, with a soaring and unreachable ache.
19 - The Rite of Spring
Nowhere on the invitation sent from Ruth Harper to Jason Thistledown could Aunt Germaine find the words . . . and Mrs. Germaine Frost; and as the hours and days passed, no second notice arrived at the Eugenics Records Office in the Eliada hospital. But that did not dissuade her. When Jason awoke Sunday morning, his Aunt Germaine was dressed and ready to go, sitting impatiently in the antechamber to their rooms in the hospital, sour as old milk.
“We are going to worship,” she said simply as he buttoned his shirt. “Then to the Harper estate. Comb your hair, Nephew.”
He knew better than to argue. Aunt Germaine was as reasonable as sweating dynamite these days. For a time he thought it was because she disapproved of Miss Ruth Harper, but as the hours and days wore on, he realized it was a deeper trouble. She was offended, more deeply than he would have thought possible, that her name had been omitted from the invitation.
They went to the only church in Eliada. It was called Saint Cyprian’s, at the end of a row of workmen’s houses, along the road to the Harper estate. The service was underway when they got inside. Jason looked over the slumped backs of the worshippers to see the priest going on in Latin the way they did in this church. He and Aunt Germaine slid into a pew near the door, earning a couple of dirty looks for their troubles. Jason felt his heart twist, but not from that. He happened to spy Sam Green, decked out in a black suit, bowler hat nowhere to be seen, bent forward in fervent prayer. During the whole long service, he did not look over once and Jason was fine with that. It wasn’t as though he didn’t appreciate Sam Green’s help directed through him to Dr. Waggoner; he simply thought that conversations with the Pinkerton man came at too steep a price.
By the time the service was done it was nearly the noon hour and time for the picnic. It was turning into a good day; the sun was beating down and it was warm enough to walk without a jacket.
The road went a quarter mile before it led them to the gate, cut nearly straight through the rows on rows of blossoming apple trees that made up the Harpers’ orchards. Some of those trees were pretty tall, Jason thought, to have been planted when the Harpers were supposed to have come here ten years back. He wondered who was here before that, with the leisure to plant apple in fine old rows.
Surely it was not the same folk with the leisure to build a house like Mr. Harper’s. That place was something. It was huge—bigger than any two barns combined that Jason had ever seen—in the same class as the sawmill or the hospital.
The house was laid out like a horseshoe, made of cut stone near the ground, square-cut log higher up. Jason counted six stone chimneys, climbing high above the steep-peaked roofs. How many rooms could you put in a place like that? How many kin?
How many servants?
This would have been a sore point with his mama. She had unkindly views on the keeping of servants. A woman ought not live larger than she can sweep in a day, she would say. Every servant she used brought her that many steps further from looking after herself in a pinch.
It was hard to tell how many servants it took to run the estate by the time they’d made it through the gate. The grounds were filled with people.
“Looks like the whole town’s here,” said Jason, and instantly regretted it as Aunt Germaine spared him a severe look.
They walked in silence to the crowd of folk that were gathered on the lawn to the north of the house. The guests fanned out across the lawn, some sitting on blankets they’d brought, others standing and watching. A couple Jason recognized from the mill, but it was hard to tell on account of the lack of grime on their shirts and sawdust in their hair. They all stood quiet, listening to the moustachioed fellow in their midst, propped on something so he was a head higher than the tallest. Although it was sunny out, he was hatless, and his dark hair blew over a high forehead as he spoke.
“Our host,” said Germaine dryly, and nodded when Jason breathed: “Garrison Harper.”
Harper grinned as he spoke, and raised up his arms. “Rites of spring!” he shouted. “This is one of the things we’ve lost, in this new world of ours. We move through the seasons, one after another—and how do we mark them? Places on a calendar? The inching of the Earth ’round the Sun? Well not here. Not in Eliada!”
At that, a few voices shouted the name: “Eliada!” and like an echo in a canyon, more caught the gist and threw it back. Harper clapped and beamed.
Jason stopped and craned his neck to look around, and when he looked back down he saw that Aunt Germaine had moved on through the crowd. He didn’t hasten to follow—it was, to be truthful, a relief to be out of her sight.
“Some of you are new members of this community,” said Mr. Harper from his podium. “A month, two, or three, no matter. You’ve bent your back to labour through a cold and hard winter; perhaps you’ve been to see the doctors at the hospital. But you may well have asked yourself: what makes this place so fine? Where is this great community you sought when you travelled so far from family and home? Well I can only say—look around you—to the man next to you, and the one next to him.”
Jason looked to his side, his eye caught by a bright flash of red. Two men stood there. One caught Jason’s eye. Smiled.
“He,” said Mr. Harper, “is Eliada.”
Wider and wider, his teeth sharp points beneath his lips.
In the distance, Garrison Harper was on to something else—something about the ties that bind, the height of civilization.
Jason scarcely heard it. Icy sweat broke out on Jason’s brow, and he could feel an awful crawling at the base of his spine. For that instant, he was back in the quarantine, looking at that tiny, leering face. Striking at it. Running. His hand itched where he’d cut it on a scalpel, and as he looked at this fellow he also looked into the tall, skeletal Juke’s eyes at the back of the quarantine and could not look away.
Finally, it was a touch at his elbow that drew him back. The man looked away, and smiled at someone else. The spell was broken. The touch at his elbow was from an older man, dressed better than most. He was one of those servants, Jason guessed.
“Mr. Thistledown?” he asked, and Jason nodded. “Miss Harper is awaiting your company. Perhaps best to join her?”
§
The fellow did not speak again, but led him to the top of a rise to the north of the main party. Downslope was a cleared-out area that edged on the orchards. Not far off was a barn. There, a small group of people milled together. From the crowd, an iron horseshoe flew out, and as it clattered against a spike sticking out of the ground, a girl squealed. Jason waved at them, and started down.
They were near a little iron table, topped with tall glasses and a pitcher of apple cider. Miss Louise Butler was there, sipping her cider in a light blue frock and looking well, Jason thought, compared to how she seemed on the river boat; and also there was Ruth Harper—dressed as outlandishly as Jason had ever seen on a girl, wearing very baggy pants of a deep green tied near the ankle, and a white shirt like a man’s. She was beaming.
“Jason Thistledown!” she shouted, waving the horseshoes above her head as she drew up to him.
“Thank you ever so for inviting me to your party Miss Harper,” said Jason, parroting what his Aunt Germaine had told him to say when greeting his hostess. He originally was not intending to follow her advice—the way Aunt Germaine had said to say it seemed prissy and girlish and he was sure it would make him out a fool.
But no one laughed. Ruth gave a little curtsy, and she smiled in a sly way at him—the sort of way that made Jason feel that he was in on the joke, not the butt of it. The smile also washed away, at least for the moment, that memory of a tiny face like hers but not, grinning with sharp little teeth and a perverse shine in the bead-sized eye. Jason felt himself exhale, and set about figuring a greeting for Louise Butler, who stood clutching her cider to her breast and looking stricken.
Ruth set the horsesh
oes on the ground and stepped lightly to the table, where she lifted the pitcher and began filling a glass. “Cider, Jason?”
“Of course you remember Louise.”
“Good afternoon,” said Jason. Louise finally smiled properly.
“It’s still morning,” said Louise. “But good day, sir.”
Ruth handed the glass to Jason, then set the pitcher down. Jason took a deep swallow of the cider. It was thick and a little tart, and burned his throat.
“Too strong for you?” she asked.
“I like it fine. Like drinking a pie.” Jason took another sip. “This is quite a party your pa puts on.”
“The first of many,” said Ruth. “Father feels celebration is essential to maintaining community. This summer, he’ll have a hundred.”
Jason laughed. “He’ll run out of Sundays,” he said, and Ruth said, “He’ll just send to New York for more.”
Louise interjected: “Do you play at horseshoes, Jason?”
“I do,” said Jason. He drained the rest of his glass of cider and set it on the table.
Horseshoes was a game that Jason played quite some with his ma. When he was small, she’d driven an old rail spike into the dirt behind the house. On summer evenings after supper, the two of them would sometimes haul out a rusted stack of horseshoes and toss them over that spike until the last of daylight had bled off. The Harpers’ horseshoe set was nothing like that—the horseshoes had not a speck of rust on them, and not one of them had ever borne the weight of an actual horse.
They played four games of it before the call to lunch, and Jason won three of them without even thinking. The last one, he started thinking—and that did it. He threw one horseshoe wild, and another dropped halfway between him and the spike. Louise took that game, and at the end of it, Jason found he had to sit.
“Why Jason—what is the matter? I’ve not seen you this pale since I accused you of being the son of a gunfighter!” said Ruth.
Jason shook his head. “Nothing.”
A single vertical line formed on Ruth’s brow. “Well,” she said, “I doubt that. What have you been up to since we parted ways at the dock?”
Jason might have told it—told Ruth everything of that night, from the creature at the window to the Juke at the back of it, from the sad fate of Maryanne Leonard to the less certain fate of Dr. Andrew Waggoner—his game of cat and mouse with the murderous Dr. Bergstrom in days subsequent—were it not for the exquisite timing of Garrison Harper. He stood at the top of the rise, his coat in his arm and the sleeves of his shirt rolled past the elbow—a huge grin on his face and the breeze teasing a long dark forelock like a torn strand of flag.
“Children!” he shouted. “Dinner! Hop to it please—plenty of time for horseshoes later!”
And then Ruth Harper stood, and between finger and thumb, she took hold of his little finger on his right hand, and by that lifted him to his feet.
“We are summoned, Mr. Thistledown,” she said. “Best we do not tarry. The guests shall become restless.”
§
“Quite a crowd, isn’t it?” said Ruth. “Have you ever seen that many people at once, Jason?”
“Sure,” said Jason, although he could swear there were twice as many as there were before they started playing at horseshoes.
“Ever seen so many so fine?” she asked.
Jason looked—but try as he might, he couldn’t figure what she was talking about. Were they fine? Finer than others? Mr. Harper seemed to like them—he was striding on ahead, into the midst of a group of men who had the hard look of lumberjacks, bellowing his welcome at them.
And with that, they headed down the hill and into the midst of Garrison Harper’s picnic, and as they jostled through the crowd, Jason thought Ruth was right. He hadn’t seen a bunch of folk like this before—and the number of them didn’t have anything to do with it. This place was supposed to be a Utopia—something like Heaven on earth, designed to fit with some grand idea that Mr. Harper had come upon. And as he wandered through the crowds of people with Ruth and Louise, making their way towards the food, it dawned on Jason that as much as his aunt had talked on about free medical care and good working conditions in the mill, he had never fully fathomed exactly what that idea was.
But as he was moving among these folk, he thought he might be getting a better inkling. They were tall—not one of them who was an adult was any shorter than Jason. They seemed pretty strong too. And as to the ladies? They were lean and comely, in the main—good matches for the men they accompanied. And Jason had spent some time with Aunt Germaine and knew of the infirmities that she looked for doing her work—there was no sign he could tell of idiocy or lunacy in their faces; nothing of the mongrel or the degenerate.
In fact, one might wonder just what profit Aunt Germaine and the Eugenics Records Office might find spending time here. Aunt Germaine told him that they were looking for the bottom ten percent of the world.
And here—at least judging by the strong arms and the clean brows—Jason figured there wouldn’t be anyone in that bottom percentage. And then another thought came to him—a recollection not of the quarantine, but of that other awful place, Cracked Wheel. Those days he and his aunt had hid out in the town offices, and she’d told him what was what about Dr. Charles Davenport and the ERO.
Why not look for the top ten percent? he’d asked her.
Why not indeed? That’d been her answer. Jason wondered now if he asked Garrison Harper the same question, he’d say anything different.
§
The sun had passed its height by the time Jason had himself a plate full of some of the finest food he’d tasted, but he had lost sight of Ruth. He spotted Louise Butler, though, at a long table half-full of folk, so went and asked if he might join her. She smiled and said he might, so he set his plate down, put a leg over the bench and asked her a bit about herself. She was more conversational on her own, but only a little, and Jason still had to draw it out of her.
Where was she from again now?—Evanston, Illinois, thank you. What business were her folks in?—Dry goods, Mr. Thistledown. And she and Ruth Harper attended school together?—Yes thank you. In Chicago?—Not far from Chicago. That is correct. Did she ever read the Bulfinch’s at that school of hers?
“The—Bulfinch’s? I am sorry, Mr. Thistledown. I’m not familiar with that text.”
“Mythology,” said Jason. “The Greeks and such.”
“Oh,” she said. “The Greeks. I’ve tried to read some of Homer. Not my cup of tea.”
Jason took a mouthful of mashed potatoes soaked in butter. He swallowed and set down his fork. “You figure where Miss Harper’s got to?”
“No doubt avoiding that man’s speech,” said Louise.
“Beg your pardon?” asked Jason. He followed the tines of Louise’s fork where she indicated, and added, “Oh.”
Nils Bergstrom had arrived. He wore a light summer jacket and a hunting cap, and he’d climbed onto a table in the middle of the crowd. He wavered on his feet, and Louise commented disapprovingly: “He looks drunk.”
Bergstrom might have been drunk, but if so, he wasn’t drunk in the way that Jason understood a man could get: first too familiar, filled with great love, which could change in an instant to a fountain of murderous rage. Bergstrom seemed to move too easily, his arms swung too slowly.
If he spoke, Jason might have been able to tell from that. For drunk men in Jason’s experience couldn’t quite say anything without stumbling and slurring. But it wasn’t speech that came from Nils Bergstrom’s open mouth.
“Is he whistling?” whispered Louise, and Jason shook his head.
“Mouth’s wide open. Maybe it’s some of those folk.”
Jason pointed now, at a couple of men at a table nearer Bergstrom, who were standing up now and swaying as well. Jason could hear the tuneless whistling and soon placed it. His eyes flickered shut, and he stood in the quarantine, before a great pair of barn-board doors—doors that were shut for now, but from whic
h a terrible light might emerge. . . .
The whistling stopped.
“Is that your aunt?” said Louise, and Jason opened his eyes.
“It is,” he said.
Germaine Frost took Bergstrom by the arm, and helped him down from the table. Bergstrom shook his head as she patted his shoulder, and led him back toward the house.
“It would seem that she saved the day,” said Louise.
With shaking hand, Jason lifted his fork and dug into his mashed potatoes. They were like paste in his mouth, but he made himself swallow them. A fellow could see spectres in all sorts of places, even hear them, in a woodsman’s whistle.
“Why don’t you tell me about the Harpers?” he said finally, and Louise laughed.
“What an excellent idea,” she said.
§
“Well,” said Ruth Harper some time later. “Aren’t you two a pair?”
Jason looked up. Ruth stood behind and between the two of them. She held a dark wooden box under one arm and rested her other hand on Louise’s shoulder. Louise started at her school friend’s touch, like she’d been accused of something.
“Oh yes,” said Jason. “I have been learning all sorts of things about the Harpers from Miss Butler.”
“Have you now?” Ruth gave Louise a light slap on her shoulder. Jason winked at Louise—shocking her, and shocking himself a little bit. Seeing Dr. Bergstrom finally, in full inebriation seemed to have stoked Jason’s confidence. Maybe past what was reasonable.
If that were so, Jason had no problem with it. A few minutes ago, as the table was clearing and the other guests went off to join games that Mr. Harper had organized nearby, the notion had alighted on Jason: he was taking pleasure at the picnic. His aunt, the doctor—his dead mama’s ghost—the horror in the quarantine—all of that was tucked away. This was more pleasure than he had ever expected to see.
“For instance,” said Jason, but before he could continue Ruth interrupted.
“You can tell me everything another time,” she said. “For now—I’ve something I want to show you. Come.”
