The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

  One of them was something in England beginning, growing, spreading, shaking everything that had established castles and manor houses to be the way of life forever and forever. It wanted a new way, and it was ugly, threatening and inevitable.

  “Is he? Then fetch him here,” the Lord said, and then watched the way Henry Adams came, the slow, reluctant spring of his steps, the back that stood like a ramrod held it, the dark, broad, sullen face, the close-cropped hair, banged at the top of the forehead. The sun shone over the wooded and lovely park and over the treeless hills beyond, but the, Lord shivered as if he was cold. The Lord tried to recall how he had not noticed this man before, being that he was born and brought up on the place, and then the Lord realized that there was much he had not noticed before this chill wind began to blow through England.

  Then the man stood before him, and the Lord said,

  “What do you do?”

  “I plough the land,” was the slow, high-pitched nasal response.

  “With no more courtesy than that?”

  The man’s dark eyes probed with neither courtesy nor fear.

  “Have you no other address for your Lord?”

  “I know of one Lord,” the farmer answered stolidly, unemotionally, “and he walketh by mine side.”

  “What?”

  “He walketh by mine side in everlasting glory,” the farmer repeated stolidly, the words contrasting oddly with his stone-like attitude.

  “What does the clod mean?” the Lord addressed the overseer.

  “He denies you and quotes book.”

  “He denies me?”

  “That is what he means, my Lord.”

  “You deny me?” the Lord asked. “Am I not your liege?”

  “Nay,” the farmer said simply.

  “And how many lashes to make you say yea instead of nay?”

  “I’ll take no lashes unless they are ordered me in court,” the farmer answered, unperturbed.

  “You are a proud man, and maybe too proud for a sod.”

  “I am a humble man,” the farmer countered, “and I will bear no lashes unless they are ordered me in court.”

  “They will be ordered you,” the Lord replied.

  Twelve days later, he sat as magistrate and summoned Henry Adams before him. As a justice of the peace, the Lord felt inspired by the notion that a simple sequence of punishment would not only silence this stiff-necked man but might very well put down the whole curse of Puritanism that was sweeping the countryside, and might particularly influence a nearby squire, another of “God’s chosen people,” who affected homespun dress, close-cropped hair, and a constant castigation of the Lord’s morals and way of life. Whereby, the ruler of St. David heard three witnesses against Adams:

  “I saw him poach.”

  “He cut a hare and I found the entrails.”

  “His wife cooked up the stew, which I heard from Miller, which he heard from Cooper.”

  It was flimsy evidence at best, and the, dark face of Henry Adams clouded over with rage. “What have you to say?” the Justice asked him, and he answered, “They lie.”

  “I think you be too stiff-necked in your words and too imprudent,” the Lord said. “You and your kind have a new way of making the lie out of anything that does not come from you. Soon you will want the whole of England.”

  “I have done nothing in crime,” Henry Adams said. “I am a God-fearing man and I keep God’s law. I do not poach; am I some dirty thief that you tell me I poach with the testimony of pimps and hirelings?”

  “They only do their tithing,” the Lord said patiently, since he could well afford to be patient.

  “Their cursed tithing,” Henry Adams said, “that has made out of all our folk a community of informers and Iscariots. What kind of fires do you stoke?” he cried, raising his voice.

  “Enough,” the Lord said. “I have been patient enough.” He prided himself as a lawyer, which he was not, even to the extent of the ordinary squire. “I could put distraint or escheat upon you, but I give you lashes instead. I give you thirty lashes to make you humble. Then thank God your ears remain.”

  So the ancestor was given thirty lashes, and with a bleeding, lacerated back returned to his stone cottage, his wife, his nine children and his worldly goods. But from that day on he was different, and it got about that he had met with a number of other yoemen and even a squire—all of them of that peculiar persuasion that was yet neither church nor movement, but a way of life and a hatred, puritanism, that took fire as its weapon and the Lord God as its ally. They had no secrets because the system of tithing or informing, long established, brought all news to whoever was master. But they had something that was more potent than secrets; they had a fierce and righteous conviction that the old way was over and done with and that the future belonged to them. And slowly but insistently they were gathering their forces to take hold of the future.

  The ancestor was a stubborn, stiff-necked man who was driven by what some would call perverseness and others a fanatical inability to compromise with the principles he had come to live with. The Lord God had put weapons in his hands with which to defy authority, level aristocracy and drive out whatever devils Rome might send. That his whole world was changing, that a new era of commerce and industry was being born, and that the forces within this new way were powerful beyond resistance the ancestor did not know. He was a vessel in which the wrath of God dwelled, and he was not minded to inquire as to how he had become that vessel. What he was, he was; what would come would come.

  His wife might have suffered, his children too; be that as it may be. We don’t know what his wife, Edith, suffered or if she did, but only that she was the daughter of another farmer, dead by this time, whose name was Squire, and that he had given her away without the maritagium. That was a marriage fee that was already archaic, a purchase price to the liege instead of the right of the first night, which had been fought down long past. But when the ruler of St. David heard that meetings were being held by those whose close-cropped hair was already giving them the name of Roundheads, he called before him once again the stiff-necked farmer Henry Adams. By now, it was a vendetta which he was compelled to pursue, and by now, in the mind of the ancestor, who read one book over and over until he knew almost every word of it by heart, this Lord of the Manor was indeed and literally Pharaoh. As Moses had come before, Pharaoh, so did he come before the Lord’s court.

  “Pay me the maritagium, which is long overdue,” the Lord said.

  “It is not mine to pay or any man’s to pay. What manner of free men are we to pay a fee to take a lass to wife. She has born me nine children and now you come to me for the fee.”

  “I am not disposed to argue that point. Is your back healed?”

  “It will never heal,” Henry Adams answered.

  “All flesh heals,” the Lord smiled.

  “It was not the flesh that was seared but my immortal soul.”

  “And how would your immortal soul feel about distraint?”

  The farmer said nothing but his black eyes never wavered from their keen, unblinking scrutiny of this man who was persecuting him. To repeated demands that he pay a fee long outlawed, he kept silence, and then he went home. But that same evening, the Lord’s men came, and they picked the farm clean. This was distraint. They took his stock and his feed and his crop and his tools and even his dogs. They took the furniture from his home and the clothes from his small wardrobe. They took the pewter dishes and the copper pots. In other words, they took everything except the clothes off the backs of the man, the woman and the nine children; and they left behind them varying degrees of grief except in the man Henry Adams.

  So does Pharaoh serve those who are stiff-necked, but God has his own way of serving Pharaoh. Adams called his family around him and said to them,

  “We will go away out of this place, but first there is something I must do. All of you set out now for Squire Aldrich’s place, and he will shelter you until I join you, and that will be before
morning.” It was ten miles across the moors to the farm of this squire, who was a leader of the Puritan people thereabouts; but the family knew better than to argue with the father when he spoke like that, and they did as he told them to do.

  They went in tears and sorrow, weeping as the children of Israel had once wept when they left behind them the fair and goodly land of Goshen and fared forth into the wilderness to face they knew not what; but the man who was left behind moved through his empty house with dry eyes. What the Lord of the manor had taken away in distraint were but things, and what were things for a man to weep over? Aloud he said, as he stalked through the empty house and the lifeless barnyard,

  “The Lord God is my rock and my salvation, and I shall not be afraid. I shall not fear. Naked and with only my two hands I came into this world, and naked I am now, with only my two hands, yet they serve the Lord God of hosts, in his righteous anger.”

  And indeed he felt such cold and righteous anger as would not be unbecoming the fierce and just God he served. He looked at a pigpen from which the pigs were gone, at a chicken coop from which the chickens were taken. Contemplatively, he examined a sheep fold that was bare of sheep, a stall bare of horse. All was gone; all was bare by distraint. Well, he had his own manner of distraint, and he thought of it aloud, since at this moment he felt compelled to share his bitter reflections with the only being he acknowledged as his superior.

  “I will wipe this land like dirt from my feet,” he said, “for it is a cursed and lousy land. I will go away to the wilderness where others went before. Better in the wilderness with the savages than in this cursed land.”

  But first there was that which the distraint had failed to unearth, and from the corner of the barnyard, Henry Adams dug up a clay pot which contained forty golden crowns. Protest and prudence went hand in hand; lightening will strike from the heavens, but only a fool expects gold from the same source.

  Then, with the money tucked securely away under his belt, Henry Adams set about to do that which had to be done, and by the time he was high on the moor, cutting over to Squire Aldrich’s place, all of the sky behind him in the direction of the great manor house was lit with a ruddy glow. Thus, his heart eased by justice, his soul lightened by a fair vengeance, he trudged along to reclaim his flesh and blood.

  Even from the Aldrich place, the great fire at St. David’s was visible. Not the manor house, but all of the barns, cotes, bins, silos, pens and stacks were a burnt offering; and the Squire said, with a grave face,

  “I know not what devil you have raised, Henry, but you go away and I am left here to put it down.”

  “I do not go from fear but from hatred of this place and this land.”

  “Then go tonight,” the Squire said, “before the chase starts. I hate this Lord of St. David as much as you do, but I have no stomach for burning and destroying.”

  “Was I to bear what he did in silence?”

  “There are other ways,” the Squire muttered.

  “I knew of no other ways,” said the ancestor, “but if you want me to go, I will go.”

  “I will give you a wagon and a driver to bear you and your family to the sea, and I will lend you money.”

  “I want no money,” Henry Adams said stiffly, with little enough grace. “I thank you for your hospitality and for the wagon, I will pay. I will take me and mine and go to a seacoast town—and then to a place where, things are different from here.”

  And that night the ancestor went, with his wife and his nine children—on the long, long journey to the place called America.

  The Vision of Henry J. Baxter

  “THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT,” MR. BAXTER SAID TO HIS wife, Clarise, at dinner that night, “the Russians have the H bomb.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” his wife answered calmly, raising her voice just a little to span the expanse of mahogany table that lay between them.

  “I’m afraid you have to believe it, my dear,” Mr. Baxter said gravely. “I was talking to Somerville out at the plant—he’s heading up that new atomic project we’ve undertaken for Washington, and there’s a cool ten million in it if there’s a penny—anyway, I was talking to him, and he says there’s no doubt about it, they have it, and he should know, my dear.”

  “But it’s impossible, Henry,” his wife smiled, helping herself to the buttered peas that the butler was holding at her side. “I do like buttered peas. I think there’s no vegetable quite so delicious. Do you know that the Thompsons have a new West Indian houseman. They brought him back from Kingston. They’re right when they say you can’t find help in this country any longer. Not competent help. He has the most charming accent. It’s impossible, Henry.”

  “What is impossible?” Mr. Baxter frowned.

  “That the Russians should have the H bomb. They’re just savages. It’s like saying that those blacks who have been causing such trouble for the planters in that place—oh, what is that place I mean, Henry?”

  “Kenya?”

  “Yes, Kenya. It’s like saying that those awful people have the H bomb. Only last week Mr. Eugene Lyons lectured about Russia at the women’s club—really, Henry, it would do you good to listen to our lectures once in a while—and he certainly did not paint a picture of a place where they would have the H bomb. Why they don’t even have shoes, and the whole nation walks around practically barefoot, and Mr. Lyons should know, since he’s spent his whole life studying what’s wrong with Russia.”

  “Nevertheless,” Mr. Baxter said doggedly, “they have the damned H bomb.”

  “Then they must have stolen it. It shows what comes of having atom spies all over the place, even in the White House when that Mr. Truman was there.”

  “Clarise,” Mr. Baxter said grimly, “people like you and I are going to have to re-think this business from beginning to end. They didn’t steal it. They had the damned bomb first.”

  Usually, Mr. Baxter had no trouble sleeping, but this night he rested poorly. He had a dream about being atomized, and it hurt even after he had dissolved into the constituent energies of his being. He became a pain-filled cluster of neutrons, and he awakened with a film of sweat all over him. Mr. Baxter was only fifty-three years old, and not long ago his doctor had gone over him from head to toes, and had informed him that all things considered, there was no reason why he didn’t have thirty good years ahead of him. “And I’m damned well going to,” Mr. Baxter announced aggressively into the dark silence of his bedroom.

  Mr. Baxter liked to think of himself as an active captain of industry, and he had nothing but contempt for rentiers, dilettantes and playboys who were content to bounce or wobble through life while they lived on their incomes. It was his pride that he went to his plant five days a week except for two months of vacation each year, and that he had gone to it five days a week for some twenty years now; and he could point with the same pride to results. His father had left him an ancient, dilapidated plant which employed some five hundred men and existed with a profit that never passed a million a year and often enough shrunk to almost nothing. The plant he drove to this morning covered twenty-six acres and employed seven thousand men, and for the year 1954, each share had paid eleven dollars and twenty-two cents. Let General Motors match that.

  Mr. Baxter sat down at his desk, glanced at his mail, flicked the switch that opened the intercom to his secretary, and told her to send Mr. Somerville to him as soon as Mr. Somerville could come, which meant immediately.

  Mr. Somerville was a ten thousand dollar a year man with three children, and he wore loose tweeds, black horn-rimmed glasses and a worried look. If he weren’t a scientist, he would be earning twenty-five thousand a year in his managerial capacity, but Bob Herman, Mr. Baxter’s personnel director did not believe in spoiling scientists and was of the opinion that even at ten thousand a year they got out of hand, and since Mr. Baxter shared his deep distrust of intellectuals and since Somerville was constitutionally unable to assert himself—the more so now that the word scientist h
ad become practically synonymous with subversive—his wages remained stationary, regardless of his position. He, entered Mr. Baxter’s sumptuous office with a look of apology, and at Mr. Baxter’s nod, seated himself in front of the desk, facing Mr. Baxter.

  “Had a bad night, Somerville,” Mr. Baxter began, “thinking about that damn bomb. It’s Mrs. Baxter’s opinion that they haven’t got it. Shrewd woman, Mrs. Baxter. Not on the surface, but women have an instinct about things.”

  “Not about this, I’m afraid,” Mr. Somerville said apologetically.

  “What?”

  “I mean, sir, that there’s no doubt about them having a hydrogen bomb.” From the expression on Mr. Somerville’s face, one would think that he had personally handed the bomb over to the Russians. “I mean, sir, that there’s no room for doubt in these matters. You see, Mr. Baxter, it’s not a question of information or intelligence or spies or anything of that sort. We derive our information from instruments. The instruments can’t lie.”

  “But Senator Howland says the whole thing’s commie propaganda and that the Russians couldn’t make the bomb in fifty years.”

  Mr. Somerville sat silent; he didn’t want to put his disagreement with Senator Howland on the record.

  “But you’re convinced?”

  “I’m afraid every scientist working in atomics is convinced, Mr. Baxter. Even the president is convinced, I hear.”

  “I wonder what it does to his game?”

  “Sir?”

  “His golf game, Somerville. Old Harrison at Consolidated lives for golf. Plays almost every day, and plays a pretty good game too. He tells me he picked up eleven strokes since this H bomb business started.”

  “It’s quite provoking, sir.”

  “Provoking puts it mildly. It’s a god damned blunder that someone ought to pay for. Well, what’s done is done. Is this bomb all they say it is, Somerville?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mr. Somerville admitted sadly. “If one were dropped properly in Connecticut, let us say, it’s fallout would destroy every living thing in the entire state.”