Eutopia - A novel of terrible optimism

by David Nickle

  “They found you standing over a bleeding man with a gun in your hand, son,” said Mr. Harper. “I would not have blamed either of them if they’d put a bullet in you as a matter of precaution. Now tell me, son—why did you bring a firearm to this home? What possessed you?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jason, and saying that, he realized that he was willing to lie to protect Ruth Harper. He was willing to because he had—same as he’d shot that fellow without thinking.

  “I did it,” Ruth blurted. Jason looked at her in amazement.

  She confessed to everything—even going so far as having the certificate brought downstairs from her room. She explained that she had brought the weapon out because she wanted to see how Jack Thistledown’s son could shoot.

  “And as it turned out, he is a remarkable shot,” she said.

  “Jack Thistledown.” Mr. Harper shook his head.

  Then Ruth went at her father on another tack. “That man was deranged, father. He was a Klansman! If Jason—Mr. Thistledown had not fired upon him, Heaven knows what he might have done to us both!”

  Mr. Harper went quiet and thoughtful at that, and although Jason did not know him well he could see the arguments turning in his head. He wondered when it would come to the point where he asked to know what the two of them had been doing back in the orchards.

  Jason regarded Aunt Germaine. She was seated away from them on a high-backed stuffed chair, hands folded in her lap. Light from the tall windows reflected in her glasses, making it difficult to tell where she was looking.

  “Jason,” said Mr. Harper finally, “look at me.”

  Jason looked at him.

  “Dr. Bergstrom thinks that Piotr Nowak will live. So you have not killed a man today, although you might well have. For that, you can be grateful.”

  “I am grateful for that.”

  “And I must tell you that I am grateful you had the presence of mind to use my daughter’s ill-gotten toy to protect her life and honour.”

  Jason nodded.

  “Now I am going to send you home. You and Mrs. Frost both.”

  “Father,” said Ruth, standing up, “Mr. Thistledown should not go back to the same hospital as that brute!”

  “I am not speaking of the hospital,” said Mr. Harper. “I mean to say, it is time that both you and your aunt left Eliada. The steamboat is downriver just now. It returns late tomorrow. On Tuesday, you shall both be on it.”

  Aunt Germaine leaned forward. “I beg your pardon,” she said in a tone that suggested anything but begging.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Frost. You may convey my apologies to New York, if indeed that is your next stop.”

  “You are suggesting that we leave,” she said. “Now.”

  “I am insisting.”

  Aunt Germaine stood, and walked over to Jason. She put a hand on his arm.

  “He rescued your daughter, sir. From, if I may say, a difficulty that is of your making—not his.”

  “Is that so?”

  “The Klan. They were here before us, sir. They injured your Negro days before we arrived.”

  “My Negro.”

  Mr. Harper drew a breath and paused, as if collecting himself.

  “Madame,” he finally continued, “I will not be swayed. Do you not see what danger you are in now? Both of you? Are you not afraid that this fellow’s friends will try to take vengeance?”

  Aunt Germaine took Jason’s arm. “We shall see,” she said. “Come Jason—we are returning to the hospital.”

  Jason stood up, but Mr. Harper shook his head. “I would not recommend that. Ruth is right—the hospital is not safe.”

  “Then what would you recommend?”

  Mr. Harper sighed. “Mrs. Frost, I don’t bear you ill will. You or young Mr. Thistledown. I’d ask that the two of you remain here as our guests for the next two nights. We have spare rooms aplenty, and I think you will find that Harper hospitality exceeds that at the hospital. I do not think that anyone would dare strike here.”

  “We shall send for your things,” said Mrs. Harper in a kindly tone.

  Aunt Germaine was having none of it. “Do not think this makes things right!” she said, so fiercely that Mrs. Harper gasped, Mr. Harper looked away, and Jason felt the blood in his face as he briefly met eyes with Ruth. He recalled as they arrived that Aunt Germaine had not wished to be embarrassed. He wondered now, somewhat nastily, if she even had the wit to be.

  §

  The picnic carried on long into the evening but Jason stayed clear of it. He had a good view from the bedroom the servants had put him up in. It was an attic room, but pretty fine for that: the bed was wider than the hospital bed that Jason slept in, and softer too. And there was a little window that cut out from the eaves, and a place where a fellow could sit and look out. It was also advantageous, in that the room was a floor up and a wing away from the quarters where they’d placed Aunt Germaine.

  He had only two visitors during the day.

  Sam Green stopped in about four in the afternoon. Outside, some fellows had gotten with their instruments—one with a guitar, another with a fiddle, and another fellow with a harmonica—and started to play a tune together. Sam Green knocked twice on the door before letting himself in. Jason nodded welcome.

  “You ever learn to dance, Mr. Thistledown?” said Sam, bending his head to look out the window over Jason’s shoulder.

  “Not much call for it,” said Jason.

  “Are you sure about that? Nothing a young lady likes better’n a fellow who’s quick on a two-step.”

  “Mayhap I should learn that then.”

  Sam tilted his head. “Mayhap,” he said.

  Jason slid out of the window. “How is he?” he asked.

  “He?”

  “Fellow I shot,” said Jason.

  “Oh,” said Sam, “you’re interested. That’s something. Wouldn’t have thought that of a Thistledown boy. Particularly one as you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Sam smiled and set down in the window where Jason had been. “You shot a man today. You shot him right, just where you needed, to take him down but not kill him. And then you held him—kept that gun on him steady until my men could show up.”

  “Wasn’t much else to do.”

  “Well you did the right thing—exactly the right thing—and that is something most fellows would not have been able to. I know because I’ve seen how most fellows get when they start to shooting. Some of them keep shooting, doing all sorts of harm and you got to calm them down or shoot ’em to make ’em stop. Others—well, they shoot the once and miss, and then start shaking so bad they can’t do it again and they get themselves shot often as not as well.

  “And then there’s another sort. Like you.”

  “Like me.”

  “Ice in your veins, boy. I could tell the minute I showed up, and looked you in the eye.”

  “What did you see?”

  “What I’ve seen in your pa’s eyes.” Sam was nodding slowly as he looked at Jason, and things got quiet. Jason did not take the bait.

  “You going to tell me how that fellow’s doing?” he said. “The one I shot so well?”

  Sam smiled and chuckled deep in his chest. “He’ll be fine soon as the doctor sobers up enough to work on him. Then I will talk to him. We found some other sheets in the orchard—dropped, like their owners heard the gunshots, dropped the costumes and bolted—not far off. Did you happen to hear or see anyone else?”

  “No. Just him.”

  Sam nodded. “Figured you’d say if you had. That wasn’t what I came here for, though.”

  “What did you come for?”

  “Tell you thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks for keeping that matter between us. And thanks for taking care of Ruth. That was a near thing.”

  “Well, you are welcome sir,” said Jason.

  “And son,” he said as he pushed himself off the windowsill and headed for the door, “you might want to take my advice and learn that two-ste
p. More reliable way to impress a young lady than shooting folks with a borrowed six-gun, you want my opinion.”

  §

  The second visitor was a mystery—just a knock at the door, and a wax-sealed envelope slipped beneath it. By the time Jason opened the door, the footsteps were going down the stairs.

  So Jason opened the seal and pulled out two folded sheets of paper and an empty, unaddressed envelope. One sheet was blank, one was full of fine handwriting. He did not have to look to the signature at the bottom to know who it was from.

  §

  Jason read the letter from Ruth Harper twice before he could put pen to paper and make up a reply. Lord, but the girl was verbose. She used up not one but four sentences describing how much she liked being kissed by him and kissing him back. She felt less kindly toward her father, and she took three more sentences to say how awful he was for making Jason leave town so fast. She was also cross with Miss Louise Butler (although on this she did not elaborate), which was why she had imposed upon Harris, one of the servants, to deliver her letter instead. He would be by later in the evening, to collect any reply that Jason might wish to write, which was what the blank sheet of paper and empty envelope were for. She apologized for not sending along a stick of wax, but it would not have fit under the door.

  Jason did reply, but not to any of what she had written, other than to say that he had liked kissing Ruth Harper fine too and hoped they might do so again before he left.

  On the final points of her letter he was more specific:

  You are welcome for saving your life, although I should thank you for loading the gun or else I would be dead. I am sorry you lost your Colt.

  I do not want to go to the quarantine again without a gun at least. But I will meet you at the place you wrote in your letter this night and we can talk about it.

  And then he set the pencil down and thought for a moment and wrote:

  I am terrified of this too but you were terrified of kissing so I will be brave like you.

  He thought about changing that sentence—it was not at all as pretty as the sentences that Ruth had set down in her long letter, and it was not made any prettier by his awful handwriting. And there was that other question—one that he should have an answer to by now. So he wrote his name at the bottom, folded up the note paper, slipped it into the envelope, and settled down to wait for the servant’s return.

  §

  Jason kept Ruth’s letter and read it over a couple of times more. His eye kept moving to that single question—the one that he could not figure.

  She wrote: I cannot yet fathom why you asked him that question: “Who sent you to murder Dr. Waggoner?” I have been beside myself with wondering—how you would have thought this fellow had gone to murder Dr. Waggoner? Will you not tell me, Jason my darling? Is there another piece to this mystery you have kept from me?

  And what of his answer, Jason? What of that? What is this “old man” of whom he speaks? Is it Dr. Bergstrom? That creature you described in the quarantine? Some other man? Do you know? Pray write me & say!

  Jason read the letter over and over, until the hour struck three, and it was time. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and with a shaking breath, slipped out through the door and padded down the corridor.

  How in tarnation was he supposed to know who the old man was anyhow? All he knew was what Nowak had said, lying in his own quickening blood and spitting through the pain:

  “The Oracle is on the march. She deliver God.

  “She deliver God.”

  21 - The “Germe de grotte”

  “You are ever punctual, Mr. Thistledown,” Ruth said.

  Jason didn’t see her, but he felt a warm hand on his arm as soon as he stepped through the doorway of the cider house. She drew him further along, and the door swung shut. In the dark now, Jason leaned over to where he thought the voice came from with another kiss in mind.

  Fortunately, Ruth Harper was deft enough to move aside, so when Louise Butler struck a match and held it to a candle, they stood blinking in the flickering light a respectable distance from one another. Louise granted Jason a bare smile and set the candle on a wooden shelf behind her, and gave Ruth a look of ambiguous meaning. Jason nodded a how-do-you-do and Ruth let go of his arm.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Ruth’s voice was taut as a banjo string. “Louise has elected to join us.”

  “Pleased to see you again,” said Jason. Then to Ruth: “You sure you want to go to this place?”

  “Soon enough,” she said. “But not right away.”

  Jason’s eyes narrowed. “We have only a little while to sunrise. You want to figure out a mystery, we best be on our way.”

  “On your way where?” said Louise. “I thought—”

  “Yes,” said Ruth quickly. “There’s work to be done here first. Jason, why don’t you sit down a moment.”

  Jason looked around. They were alongside the curve of a huge wooden barrel that he guessed was for pressing apples. There was a bench along the wall underneath where the candle was. As he looked around, he saw a dark shape on the plank floor. He squinted and stepped closer.

  “That’s my aunt’s bag,” he said, bending down to touch the handle.

  “Indeed it is,” said Ruth.

  “Ruth stole it,” added Louise.

  Ruth scoffed: “Oh, hardly.”

  “She ordered the help to bring it to her,” said Louise. “They wouldn’t bring the guns though.”

  Jason looked at Ruth. She wore a pair of dark trousers and high laced boots, her blouse concealed underneath a small woollen jacket, and in the light, Jason might almost have thought he was kneeling beside a fellow.

  “We will give it back,” said Ruth. “After we’ve given it a proper search. I trust that won’t present a problem?”

  “I—I looked through it at Cracked Wheel,” said Jason. “She was pretty upset when she caught me.”

  “Yes. Well, Mr. Thistledown, why would she be upset if she had nothing to hide? I have been considering the tale you told me about your sad adventures at Cracked Wheel—and the more I considered it, the less sense I could make of it. Consider the fabulous coincidence: a terrible sickness strikes your community, and in its aftermath—this long-lost relation arrives to spirit you off to . . . here! Where she consorts with that awful Dr. Bergstrom, who subjects you . . .”

  “Subjects him to what?” said Louise.

  “Well my point,” said Ruth hastily, “is that your Aunt Germaine, if that is who she is, seems a most sinister presence.”

  “All right, Miss Harper, Miss Butler,” he said. “Let’s have a good look inside and see what we can see.”

  §

  Jason had hauled that bag across hundreds of miles it seemed, since the winter’s end. As they pried open the clasp and began their inventory, he was amazed with himself that he had found so little when he looked inside it the first time—and that he had failed to take a second look during the rest of the journey. Was he that afraid of inciting his Aunt Germaine’s displeasure?

  Ruth felt no such compunction. She wasted no time in pulling out Germaine’s box of eugenical index cards, removing one after another and reading the contents out loud in an unflattering impersonation of Aunt Germaine’s overly precise east coast diction. Louise looked at some cards too, but more quietly—her brow creased as she tried to decipher the numeric code.

  Jason helped her: “Epilepsy,” he said. “That’s the fainting sickness. Congenital criminal. That’s—that’s folks born bad.”

  Ruth gave him a light slap on the thigh at that. “You’ve already explored these then,” she said, and dug further. After pulling out some garments and a small ivory box that contained small amounts of cosmetics, she reached to the bottom, and looked at her hand in the bag and then at the floor.

  “There is,” she said, “another compartment in this bag. Between the bottom and the floor, there is a good four or five inches.”

  “Let me see,” said Jason. Ruth lea
ned away from the bag and Jason took her place. He felt the bottom of the bag. He tapped at it.

  “Sounds hollow,” he said, and ran his finger around the edge as Ruth smirked and Louise, in spite of herself, moved in closer.

  “A secret compartment,” Louise whispered.

  “Not much of a secret,” said Jason as his finger stopped at what felt like another clasp. He twisted it, then when the bottom wouldn’t budge moved to the other side of the bag and found another. He pulled the bottom out, and set it on the floorboard. Ruth stood and brought the candle down from its shelf.

  Jason peered into the compartment. There were two things there: a sheaf of paper bound in string, and a small wooden rack, perhaps ten inches long and five wide. It had two circular holes cut in it. One was empty. The other held a small, earthenware jug fired with a reddish glaze. Its top was sealed with deep red wax that drooled down its edges. As Jason lifted it carefully from the bag, he could see no writing or seal on it to say what might be inside. Whatever was inside shifted when he turned the jug upside down to look on its bottom.

  He set it down on the floor between himself and Louise, while Ruth busied herself untying the string on the papers.

  “Careful,” said Jason, “to remember how she tied that up. We got to put it all back.”

  “Quite,” said Ruth. She set the string back on the bag and began to leaf through the papers. Many of them, though not all, were in envelopes that had been neatly cut. Ruth squinted at these.

  “Do you know of an M. Dulac?”she asked.

  “No,” said Jason.

  “Well,” said Ruth, pulling a sheet of paper from one of the envelopes, “your aunt appears to. Ooo-la-la, he is a Frenchman.”

  “Let me see that,” said Louise, and snatched letter and envelope from Ruth’s hands. “Remember I sat alongside you in French Grammar classes.” Then to Jason: “She is hopeless at it.”

  “You are not much better,” said Ruth, as Louise squinted.

  “Well, I am versed enough in World Geography, to know that M. Dulac is no Frenchman.” She held up the envelope, and pointed to the return address. “He is writing from Africa—the Belgian Congo. That means that he is Belgian.”