After America Chapter 2
A Novella
Photo by Cavell L. Blood from FreeImages
Read Chapter 1 here.
Occasionally in life, you look up at the sky and the particular way the light strikes a pattern of cloud touches your soul and for an instant you forget your state and you are glad to be alive.
Perhaps it was the surge of dopamine from that first cup of coffee. Perhaps it was a shadow of a memory of childhood Thanksgivings in a place not far from the camp. Perhaps it was simply the fact that I was up and awake and alive and the doubts and despairs of awakening to the first light of the morning had given way to a surge of hope as the sun climbed above the trees. Whatever it was, on this particular morning, as I gazed out of the drafty latrine and noticed the rippled clouds against the blue, I remembered that it was still good to be alive. Even after all that had happened.
The smell brought me back to reality. I glanced about the wooden commode. We kept it reasonably clean, but there was only so much you could do with lye and water. I did my business quickly and got out of there, especially since the temperature inside never rose above freezing this time of year.
I spat on my hands and walked out onto the frozen grass. Winter would set in soon. With luck, it would freeze the mud solid, which would make the camp much more navigable than at present. Today, the late November sun would burn off the frost and thaw the footpaths by midmorning. Perhaps we should have laid boards or logs. Then again, that would have required a great deal of work, and we already had a time of it felling enough trees and chopping up the logs to feed our fires. And besides, this part of Pennsylvania wasn’t too rainy this time of year.
This time of year. Unbidden, wistful memories forced their way into my head. As a child, Thanksgiving had been my favorite holiday. Still is. Perhaps after all this time, I’m still one of those sappy, patriotic suckers, after all. Then again, if I weren’t I probably wouldn’t have been in this damn camp in the first place. But what else do I have to live for at this point?
Thanksgiving had been my favorite holiday even if I’d never had a normal childhood. It let me imagine my parents were still alive and they’d given me brothers and sisters. Sometimes I’d close my eyes on Black Friday and pretend we’d had a hundred people over: cousins and aunts and uncles and friends. Lots of friends.
We did have friends. It wasn’t just my grandparents and me on Thanksgiving Day. Both my grandpa and grandma taught university and every year we used to take in a collection of students who – for various reasons – could not themselves go home for the holiday. Many of them were international students – most of whom loved America and wished to immigrate here. I wonder what they think of it now. If they’re alive that is.
It was always a boisterous time with my grandfather telling grand stories and engaging the students – who had unfortunately and mistakenly assumed there wouldn’t be a class discussion – in wide-ranging dialogues. Most of it went over my head, but some managed to sink in over the years. As a kid, I was mostly there for the turkey and pie and cranberry sauce.
We never did anything for Black Friday. My grandparents were frugal to a fault and I never had much interest in buying-fests. That day seems more anachronistic in hindsight than a big meal to celebrate gratitude.
“Ward,” called Reggie from outside the nearest tent, “are you screwing the pooch?”
He didn’t say screwing the pooch.
He meant to shake me out of whatever reverie I’d entered, as he caught me staring at the tree line, where a mix of bare branches and straggling golden leaves obscured the distant horizon.
“Was lost in thought,” I mumbled. Reggie snorted. “Wanna parliament?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I got extra coffee, too,” he said gesturing at his fire where a kettle boiled.
I lit up the hand-rolled cigarette he gave me. As far as I knew, manufactured cigarettes no longer existed. Maybe in Europe or China.
Reggie handed me a tin can and poured some dubious coffee into it.
“Did you strain this through your damn socks?” I asked.
“The water’s recycled,” he said, “Can’t be too particular these days. Just used it to wring out a couple of shirts, though. Didn’t piss in it if that’s what you’re asking.”
I drank it and smoked the cigarette.
“What’s Her Majesty’s orders today?” asked Reggie.
“Don’t call her that,” I said.
“What? You funny. You got a thing for her?”
I didn’t say anything. Reggie grinned.
“Okay, Her Highness, then,” he said.
“You know that General Radboud issues the orders when it comes to strategy and tactics. And our Congress-in-Exile, for whatever they’re worth right now, is supposed to be calling the real shots. If we ever get out of this mess and rebuild the country the way we talk high and mighty about, we’ve got to show them a little more respect. Otherwise, it’ll never work.”
“Okay, but if we voted tomorrow, she’d be Madam President-in-Exile.”
“As she has explicitly asked us not to do. You know the plan. We don’t get a president until we can rebuild something resembling an actual government. You know, with real courts, not this military-justice-in-camp stuff. Our Congress has only got twenty members right now.”
“Yeah, and she’s the Colonel and she makes all the real decisions around here. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, Margaret has a vision for how we might actually do what we’ve said we’re here for. And she’s the only one with any real ideas for doing it. And we’re not out here freezing and dying just to play pretend. We can’t just sit around this camp with our thumbs up our asses and give lip service to freedom and democracy.”
Reggie spat. “Yeah,” he said, “I know. I agree with ya. Sometime I wonder what the hell I’m doing out here. But there isn’t anything else to live for now is there?”
“You got that right.”
“Anyway, my original question. What are the orders?”
“No word. We’re still holding here and I think General Radboud and Margaret…”
“You know, you’re the only one who calls her that. At least the only one who gets away with it.”
“We were friends before all this.”
“I know. Still. It’s funny.”
“Fine. Colonel Westfall. She and the General and the members of Congress – all twenty of them – are in discussions as to our next moves. No word yet on where we will go next. If I had to guess, we’re wintering here. It makes sense. We can dig in and gather our strength for a push back towards Washington in the spring. The Baltimore Nationalists won’t bother us until then anyway.”
“Yeah. That would be ironic. Did you hear? I heard that we’re near Valley Forge. You know, where George Washington…”
“Yes. Yes, we are. Where he and the Continental Army wintered during the Revolutionary War. Yes. Fitting, I suppose.”
“You could say that. Anyway, I got to be getting over to my post. I’m on sentry duty in twenty minutes.”
We parted ways and I walked on through the camp, my thoughts on American history and on my childhood and on Thanksgiving in a jumbled muddle of morning mental haze. I’d never known my parents. My grandfather could be bit cryptic about them. Said they’d been taken from this world before their time. I knew that they’d loved me and had wanted the best for me. I didn’t know my mother’s side of the family, just my father’s.
My grandfather used to say fate would come for me some day. Never knew what he meant by that, but I always figured he was a bit morbid. Fatalism did plague my life, though perhaps cause and effect were reversed and I approached life with fatalism because that is what I had been taught to do. When my grandparents died, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense that I was alone in the world. They passed soon after America began to split up. It was a momentous and portentous time. Life certainly did seem determined by vast and inscrutable forces beyond my control. But maybe everyone who lives through upheaval feels that way.
I also remember feeling instinctively that it was better for them to die than to live through all that happened in the intervening years. Their city – my city, the city I grew up in, Chicago – is a bombed-out wreck. At least it was spared the fates of so many other cities: St. Louis, Cincinnati, Orlando, San Juan, Seattle, Oakland, and others. Nuclear craters now. If future readers wonder why we all went back to smoking during the war years, it’s because there was enough radiation in the land that nobody figured there was a point trying to avoid cancer anymore. More fatalism, I guess.
But I only truly knew what my grandfather had meant when I first set eyes on Margaret. I was in a bar in D.C. (this was in the middle of the crackup – I was 18 and my grandparents had just died – we still weren’t sure what was going on and, in some corners, we tried to pretend life could have some semblance of the old normalcy). She walked in and sat down next to me at the bar – without looking at me – and ordered a drink and I knew my life would never be the same again.
If you’ve never experienced that kind of love, you won’t understand what I’m talking about. This wasn’t love at first sight. It was simply the instantaneous knowledge that my life had altered and that I was no longer in control. I had no choice in the matter. I never did. From that day, I would live for her and die for her and it was the clearest bit of self-knowledge I have ever had.
The voice inside my head told me that I would love that woman until the day I died and that I would never love or know any woman but her. (I’m not schizophrenic. I mean my interior monologue, my inner narrator. You have one too. Maybe you call it your conscience.)
She did not talk to me that night, nor did she acknowledge my presence. We did not see each other for a year, by which time the world we’d both loved was gone.
“Sergeant Fingal!”
Margaret had a fascinating ability to sneak up on a person without their hearing. Sometimes it felt like she could just appear wherever she wanted to, silent until she cleared her throat and announced her presence. Even for those men who weren’t in love with her, her voice commanded instant attention. I glanced round.
“Sergeant Fingal, you missed this morning’s high-command meeting.”
I didn’t salute. I could never salute her, and besides, we’d decided it was safer not to throw salutes around in case of snipers.
“Colonel. I wasn’t aware that my presence was required. I thought those meetings were above my pay grade.” As if we were paid.
“From now on, I want you at my side at every high-command meeting. You can consider that a standing order.”
This was music to my ears, but I didn’t let on. Instead, I nodded and said, “Of course.” I knew I wouldn’t have to ask what I’d missed today. If she’d wanted me there this morning, she would fill me in.
“Walk with me so I can brief you,” she said, marching in the direction of our flagpole. I was headed there anyway. Anyone in the camp not on sentry duty was.
I fell into step beside her and let myself relax in her presence. She began to speak in rapid, clipped sentences, telling me exactly what I needed to know and only what I needed to know. At this point, I was used to her taking charge. After the collapse of Washington, most people inside-of or outside-of government had no clue what to do next. She had been a mid-level staffer on the Hill, but she was one of the only people who’d kept her head. When congressmen were fleeing and senators were being assassinated or declaring themselves dukes, she gathered the few remaining who had any devotion to the Constitution, the rule of law, and America’s founding ideals.
Few indeed. Much of Washington had by that time devolved into a clown theater for actors who merely wanted a platform to perform upon. But she gathered the few remaining patriots (patriots to what remained to be seen, but patriots nonetheless) and rallied anyone who would listen to her to our banner. She led us out of the city. Thus began a years-long period of ranging around the wilds of Maryland and Virginia, losing followers and gaining followers, eventually replacing our Congress-in-Exile whole cloth (most of the original members died). We fought skirmishes and pitched battles with various duchies and militias and terrorist organizations and nationalist movements and separatist movements and groups whose ken I could neither fathom nor discern.
The one constant during all that time was Colonel Westfall’s leadership. While she eschewed both generalship and a seat in our Congress, she did make most of the hard decisions. And she kept us together after the siege of Richmond, where we lost nearly three quarters of our party to bullets, starvation, disease, and hypothermia.
As we approached the parade ground, where our flagpole stood, I fought the urge to grab my superior officer by her hand. As far as I knew, my love was still unrequited. I think she understood a little of my devotion. She knew that I’d follow her anywhere at least. But I was discreet about my true feelings – or so I thought. And she never showed any sign of any affection above the level of friendship.
She finished briefing me as we marched up to the pole and assumed our positions: me at the head of the non-coms and her standing next to General Radboud and the flagpole. Two drummers beat out a tattoo and our bugler played The Star-Spangled Banner. Even after all that had happened, it still brought tears to my eyes. I guess I’m sentimental like that.
Two men raised our flag. We still saluted the Stars and Stripes, maybe the only thousand people left in North America who did so. In the scramble for territory following the breakup, it might seem surprising that there was no similar scramble in the contest for names. All the rebels seeking to found their own autarkies also wanted the pleasure of naming them something new (usually after themselves). Which left our ragtag band the only ones who wanted the old name. We called ourselves the Americans. What else did you expect?
Read Chapter 3.