Bill was older than I was, of course, by more than 20 years. He’d borne the strain of our nation’s birth more than anyone. But he’d carried it so well it almost never showed. He loomed indestructible, unconquerable, a mighty fortress that could and would stand against anything any enemy could hurl against it. Except time.
Governor Kraft’s funeral was Victoria’s first great event. Victoria was his gift to us, and we joined together, each and every citizen, to give back what we could. That didn’t mean just pomp and circumstance, though we didn’t stint on either. But we wanted more than that. We wanted what spoke of Bill Kraft, and we wanted to speak to him, each in his own tongue.
So everyone brought what he had to bring. The great room in the Capitol Building in Augusta where our governor lay in state filled with offerings. Children sent their favorite toy. Farmers sent their best bit of produce. Factories across the country stopped their production to build one, special example of whatever they made, built as well as they could build it, and sent it to Augusta.
Bill Kraft always loved his trains. So that’s how he came home to Waterville for the last time. But that too was an offering from a grateful nation, because all the railroad workers from all over the country came to Maine and laid a new track from Augusta to Waterville, another rail between the rails of the Maine Central, laid on the two-foot gauge. The little two-foot gauge lines that once served Maine had disappeared before Bill’s time, and he’d always regretted missing them. So we gave him one, and he rode home behind a tiny teakettle of a steam engine, pulling a train of old, wooden cars. All along the railway, people from across the nation stood silently to watch him pass by for the final time.
As Chief of the General Staff, there was one thing I insisted on. Bill would have a Marine Corps funeral. I met the train at the Waterville station, dressed in my old United States Marine Corps dress blues. A company of young Victorian Marines was with me. They carried Bill’s coffin from the train, through the vast, silent crowd to a waiting horse-drawn caisson, where I met them. I would have the honor of being the first man to walk behind the caisson for the trip of a couple miles to Bill’s Anglican church and the churchyard where we would bury him.
The Marine body bearers brought his coffin to the hearse, then stopped.
“Put him aboard, men.” I ordered.
“No, sir,” the lance corporal body bearer nearest me said. “He wore a blue uniform too, sir. He’s one of our own. We’ll carry him.”
I looked at him sharply. Bill Kraft was a lot to carry. He looked back at me just as sharply. I could see this was one of those situations where rank didn’t mean anything.
“Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.” I discreetly bumped the lance corporal out of his position and took the weight of the coffin on my own shoulder.
The caisson rolled ahead of us, empty, as we carried our old friend home. At the churchyard, a small group of black farmers was waiting. They’d dug Bill’s grave, by hand, in the rocky Maine soil. That was their gift to him.
The Rector of the Church said the service from the old Book of Common Prayer, the short, stark, English service in which the name of the deceased is never mentioned. The God who numbers the hairs on our heads knows who we are.
Bill’s family had asked me to say a few words at the gravesite. I was the only one they asked, and little as I felt equal to the task, I couldn’t say no. But the governor himself had pointed me toward words better than my own.
“As all those who knew him know, our governor’s great example and hero in life was Dr. Samuel Johnson. So I want to let Dr. Johnson’s friend and biographer, Boswell, speak for me today. His words on the death of Johnson are mine also:
I trust, I shall not be accused of affectation, when I declare, that I find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a ‘Guide, Philosopher, and Friend.’ I shall, therefore, not say one word of my own, but adopt those of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an abrupt felicity, superior to all studied compositions: ‘He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Bill Kraft is dead. Let us go to the next best–there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Bill Kraft.’
That was it, but in Maine, that was enough. We’re not much on words, and the fact that I borrowed somebody else’s was considered to my credit. We Victorians know we are pygmies standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Bill Kraft’s greatest monument was the fact that once he was gone, we discovered we no longer needed him. Life went on just the same. Unhurriedly but steadily, Victoria proceeded back down the road of progress, recovering the past.
The people of Maine still wanted to give our founding governor overt honors. Early in 2055, a petition drive began for a vote to rename Augusta “Kraft.”
I was dead-set against it. So was virtually anyone else who had really known Bill. He wouldn’t have wanted it. It reeked of the latter days of the American republic, with its phony holidays and politicized name changes (in New Orleans, in the 1990s, some worthless orcs even dared to strike George Washington’s name from a school because he owned slaves). Worse, the symbolism was opposite to everything Bill stood for. In German, “Kraft” means power. We had fought to take power away from capitals and politicians and bureaucrats and return it to the countryside, to citizens. Bill Kraft himself had held enormous power, but his had been the power of moral example, not the corrupt and corrupting power of government.
When Bill’s widow came out against the renaming, the proposal died. We did a few more appropriate things in his honor. “Turn back, O Man,” was adopted as Victoria’s national anthem, with a new third verse:
Our land shall be fair, Victoria's people one
Nor till that hour shall God's whole will be done.
Now, even now, once more from earth to sky
Peals forth in joy our old, undaunted cry,
“Our land shall be fair, Victoria's people one!
The Maine Central Railroad inaugurated a crack, all-first-class Boston to Portland express named the “Governor Kraft,” with beautiful wooden parlor cars all painted white like the New Haven’s old “Merchants’ Limited.” Despite electrification of the railroad, it was pulled by a high-stepping Atlantic steam engine, the pride of the Alco works. That was a tribute Bill would have loved.
But the nation’s finest gift to Bill Kraft came about in a strange way.
Cleaning up a culture takes some time, especially when it has trashed itself to the degree America’s had. In the 2050’s, we still had some dark and dusty corners where spiders lurked. One was the ancient hag who still styled herself the Episcopal Bishop of Maine, Ms. Cloaca Devlin.
Few institutions had degraded themselves more in the final decades of the American republic than the Episcopal Church. A pillar of propriety and comfortably stuffy rectitude as late as the 1950s, many a young bride was advised by her aunt to join the Episcopal Church wherever she settled, because she would meet all the best people in town. But it had sought to become trendy and ended up looking like an aging whore. It abandoned Cranmer’s timeless prose for a Book of Common Prayer that read like yesterday’s newspaper. It attempted to make priests and even bishops of women, which was impossible: there can be no such thing as a Christian priestess. It worshipped the “racism, sexism, homophobia” trinity of cultural Marxism in place of the Holy Trinity, priested open homosexuals, censored ancient well-loved hymns, and generally licked Satan’s boots every way it could. People left the church in droves, but their loss meant nothing to the ideologues in charge. They harkened only to their Dark Lord’s commandment, “Fleece my sheep.”
That was history. With help from bishops and missionaries from Anglican churches in Africa and India, which had remained orthodox, the Episcopal Church returned to Christianity and its old ways. The neo-pagan clergy gone, the pews filled up again, and the sonorous language of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the Ki
ng James Bible again instructed Sunday mornings.
Still, Ms. Devlin remained. She had only a tiny band of eccentric followers, aging apostates like herself. It would have been easy enough to wait a few more years until Hell claimed its own. But we Victorians were again a serious people who did our duty.
In January, 2055, the real Episcopal bishop of Maine, the Right Reverend Michael Seabury, brought formal charges of heresy against Ms. Devlin. An ecclesiastical court convened that spring and to everyone’s surprise the false bishop appeared in her own defense. Or to be more precise, her own offense. On the witness stand, she denounced the Trinity as “phallocentric,” consistently referred to God as “she,” pronounced the writers of the Gospels “dead white males,” said St. Paul was a “self-hating gay” and finally announced that for many years she had worshipped Astarte, not Christ. That, no one doubted.
There could be no doubt about the verdict, either. She was guilty as sin. The church, ever merciful, offered Ms. Devlin the opportunity to recant and be received as a penitent. Her answer was to spit in Bishop Seabury’s face.
Then the ecclesiastical court did something unexpected. It voted that Ms. Devlin be turned over to the secular arm, and burned.
In Augusta, the decision was quickly made that burning a heretic required the consent of the people. A referendum was duly proposed, to take place in August. The people of Maine would have most of the summer to discuss the proposal down at the town store.
Discussion there was, aplenty. Some folks felt a burning would just give the bishopess unwanted attention. Others wondered whether the whole thing was a publicity stunt by the Episcopal Church, looking for new members. They needn’t have worried about that. I recalled the comment of an elderly lady parishioner to the Rector of my church after he gave a sermon on evangelism. At the door she said, “But Father, all the people who want to be Episcopalians already are.” Down at the store in Hartland, most of the men scoffed at the whole business. “Who the hell cares what some woman says about religion anyway?” seemed to be the general view.
But Maine’s women did care. Ms. Devlin represented everything horrible women had done to themselves since feminists became cultural Marxists. She was an embarrassment and ladies do not like to be embarrassed. They wanted to make an example of her, and they worked on their menfolk.
Just before the referendum, the good Bishop Seabury made a final effort to save the bishopess from herself. All she had to do, he announced, was formally renounce Christianity. She had already said she worshipped a different god, or goddess. If she would just say was not a Christian, she could be bishopess or high priestess or a goddess herself for that matter in whatever cult she chose. The Episcopal Church would then be happy to recommend exile rather than flames. Her reply was that she didn’t have to believe in God in order to be a bishop in the Episcopal Church. That had been true in the early 21st century. But it was true no longer.
On August 15, when the vote was taken, a solid 65 percent of the voters of Maine said yes to an auto-da-fe. Bishop Seabury requested the event be postponed as long as possible, in hope Cloaca would change her heart. Alas, by that point, she had none.
The governor waited as long as he decently could without compromising the voice of the people. When it was clear there would be no repenting by Ms. Devlin, the event was set for September 14, at just after noon.
I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved that at last, after so many years of humiliation, civilization had recovered its nerve. The governor was prepared to light the pyre himself. But the day before, Bill Kraft’s widow asked if she might have that right, as a representative of Maine’s women. The governor agreed.
It was a perfect New England summer day, the sky blue, the air clear, temperature in the low 70s without a trace of humidity. A good day to die, I thought, even for a servant of Satan. The stake had been set in the ground the evening before, right out on the statehouse lawn, and at 11:30 a horse-drawn paddy wagon brought the self-proclaimed bishopess from her cell in the old town jail. She had asked to be allowed to wear her ecclesiastical robes, and with the consent of Bishop Seabury, the state agreed. After all, it was precisely because she insisted she was a bishop of the Episcopal Church that she was being burned.
She walked with some dignity to the stake, through a hushed crowd. There, she was bound to it, and faggots were piled at her feet. Bishop Seabury walked forward and spoke to her, pleading earnestly that she either repent or renounce her claim to be a Christian. Either would save her life, and the former her soul as well. Again, she spit in his face.
Then Mrs. Kraft came forward. Behind her walked a policeman carrying a lighted torch. She turned and faced the crowd.
“I am sorry my husband cannot be here today to do what I am about to do,” she said. “It is something he would have done joyfully. Not because he hated this woman. She isn’t worth hating. He certainly hated what she represents, as should we all.
“But that isn’t what would have made him happy to light this pyre. He said often enough in my hearing, to me and to many others, that no society, no civilization can survive that is not willing to die and to kill for what it believes. Somehow, in the early 21st century, our civilization lost that willingness. Because it lost it, it almost died itself. Now, we have it back. That is what the Recovery really is, a Recovery of the will to survive as a people and a culture. Somehow, I think Bill knows what we are doing here today, and he’s very proud of all of us.”
Neither I nor others had realized until that point that the burning of the bishopess was the best memorial we could offer to Bill Kraft. But Mrs. Kraft was right. I could see him looking down and smiling, with all the company of heaven rejoicing.
That said, Mrs. Kraft took the torch from the police officer, turned, and tossed it into the pile of faggots. The sticks were fresh pine wood, and they quickly blazed up in a tower of flame reaching well above the head of madam bishopess.
Exactly how Cloaca Devlin reacted to the flames neither I nor anyone else could tell. But the host of demons she carried within her took them badly. I doubt it was the temperature, given where they came from. Perhaps it was the fact that this particular variety of fire, fire consuming a heretic judged by the Church and burned by a Christian state, had left them untouched for so many centuries. Its sudden return must have come as an awful shock.
In any case, they howled. The shrieks, moans, cries, and curses in tongues unknown to men or angels rose to the heavens. There, they were heard as sweet music, no doubt. To the mortals on the Maine statehouse lawn that September day they left no uncertainty. Ms. Devlin and her ilk had been shit straight out of the bowels of Hell.
The demons fled for more familiar fires, and the business was soon over. The Albigensians always claimed flames were the best way to go. The crowd dispersed before one o’clock, satisfied with a deed and a bishopess well done. The whole affair was, as Ms. Devlin herself might have said, liberating.
As I made my way through the multitude back toward my office, I heard a familiar voice I couldn’t quite place. “Captain Rumford! Captain Rumford!” I turned and looked, but didn’t see anyone I could connect with the voice. Then, hurrying along, I saw a form and visage from times past. It was none other than Father Dimitri!
I hurried over to meet the good priest. Though we had not seen each other in years, I knew he was a mere monk no longer, but Procurator of the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg. “Good heavens, Father, what brings you here?”
“Good Heaven indeed brings me here,” Father Dimitri replied, laughing. “This is a great day for Christendom. Both my Tsar and myself rejoice in your nation’s recovery of firm faith. What you had the courage to do here today repays all our investment in you.”
“Are you saying this was the burning of the mortgage?”
“Exactly. Well put. And I wanted to be here with you to celebrate.”
“I can’t think of a more welcome surprise guest. Come on over to Stavka with me
and we’ll open a bottle,” I invited.
“I hope you are free for dinner at our embassy tonight. No caviar, I promise.” Father Dimitri replied. “But plenty of vodka.”
“It’s a deal.”
On the walk over to my headquarters, we caught up on each other’s lives. Father Dimitri asked me rather pointedly if I were still unmarried. When I told him Bellona was still my only betrothed, he smiled. I began to suspect there were more to his visit than celebrating an auto-da-fe.
Father Dimitri entered the General Staff building as a conquering hero. I’d sent a Marine running ahead to bay our arrival, and the younger officers and NCOs were clustered at the door, eager to meet a man who had played a key role in our short history as a nation. I led the mob into an empty classroom – our headquarters was in an old school building, which I had chosen because a competent general staff is a school – where our distinguished guest patiently took questions and told stories for more than two hours. I was pleased to hear that most of the questions revolved around Russia’s strategy in helping the N.C. and how she arrived at it. We had not repeated Germany’s error of halting the education of general staff officers at the operational level of war.
Then the good priest and I adjourned to my spare office for a bottle of my own cider and some talk about the future. Russian newspapers and military journals put a happy face on the endless war with Islam, but I detected whitewash.
“The problem, John, is that Christendom is everywhere on the defensive,” Father Dimitri lamented. “Russia is holding the limes from the Black Sea to Vladivostok, as she always has. It is an endless drain on us, but our people are patient and know how to suffer. Every Russian understands what our fate would be if that line were breeched. It will not fail. But alone, we cannot do more, and wars are not won simply by holding lines.”
“What does Christendom need to take the offensive?”
Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War Page 50
