“He’s on a coin now?”
“A new coin for a new year. And plenty of them, I imagine. The Mint must be working overtime to pay for the war effort.” Julian directed my attention to the obverse of the Dollar, on which was written DEKLAN COMSTOCK POTUS, [President of the United States] and the year 2173, with a representation of two Clasped Hands, signifying the concord of the Armies of the East and West, alongside the stamp of the Boston Mint, and the ambiguous but vaguely threatening legend NOW AND FOREVER.
“Let me see that,” Sam said, and on examining the coin he remarked, “Yes, that’s him, a flattering-enough likeness. He could drill holes in wood with that nose of his. It was Bryce who got all the looks in the family.”
Here we approached territory which I had not dared to explore―that is, the subject of Julian’s family. But I was not a stable-boy right at the moment, and Julian was not an Aristo. We were both soldiers, and would so remain, at least for the duration of our involuntary enlistment. So I dared to ask, “What was your father like, Julian? Did you know him well before he died?”
Sam and Julian exchanged glances.
“I knew him well enough,” Julian said in a softer voice. “I was but eight years old when he died, and he went to war two years before that. To be honest, Adam, he’s more an impression in my mind than a solid memory. He was always kind to me. He never condescended to me, though I was a child, and he was patient enough to explain what I didn’t understand.”
“And your mother?”
To my surprise it was Sam who answered. “Emily Baines Comstock is as fine a woman as you’ll ever meet,” he declared, “and perhaps you will meet her, someday. She’s exactly the kind of woman a man like Bryce Comstock deserved to have at his side, and she loved him dearly, and was inconsolable for a long time after his death. Emily’s more than just beautiful―she’s clever and resourceful.” And here he reddened, and cleared his throat.
“Does she live in the Executive Palace?” I asked.
“There’s a cottage reserved for her on the Palace grounds,” said Sam, “but she keeps a row-house in Manhattan where she prefers to stay. Emily doesn’t care for the rivalries and jealousies of the high-born. She’s happier with artists, actors, scholars―that type of person, from whom she has little to fear.”
“My mother’s a cultured woman,” Julian added, “and doesn’t care to be in the presence of Deklan Conqueror, who is as ignorant as he is villainous.”
That was how Julian had come to be raised in Manhattan, which was where he had seen so many plays and movies, and spoken with Philosophers, and picked up his heretical ideas. “But you must have met your uncle face-to-face,” I said.
“Too often. After my father’s death it was all I could do to restrain myself from calling him a murderer. Oh, those holiday dinners at the Executive Palace! You have no idea, Adam. My mother and I pressed in with Deklan and his crowd of sycophants, while the craven agents of the Dominion blessed his every whim and impulse. We were on display, I think―Deklan’s way of announcing that he could command the loyalty even of his murdered brother’s widow and son. We were powerless against him. He could have snuffed us out at any time. He tolerated my mother because she was a woman, and me because I was a child, and both of us because we were a perverse emblem of his supposed generosity.”
I had touched a hostility that ran deep in Julian, and the edge in his voice was impossible to ignore. The way he spoke of those Palace dinners, and the clergy who presided at them, made me wonder if this humiliation might be the ultimate source of his apostasy. But such speculation was not useful, and I dropped the subject because it made Julian so conspicuously unhappy.
“There!” Sam said. “Do you hear that?”
It was the sound of a train whistle wind-borne over the thawing prairie―not the Caribou-Horn Train that had brought us here from Bad Jump but an Army train, which we would board first thing in the morning, and which would carry us to the battle-front in the East.
“Pack away those Comstock dollars,” Sam said, “or you’ll have nothing to spend on women and liquor by the time we get to Montreal.”
I blushed at his joke, and tried to laugh, though there was more truth in it, ultimately, than I like to admit.
2
The social atmosphere aboard the troop train to Montreal differed in instructive ways from that aboard the Phantom Car. Months had passed since we left Bad Jump, and those of us who had been strangers then had since become, if not friends, at least confederates―intimately known to one another, for better or worse. If we were afraid of the war to which we were being delivered, we kept that tender feeling to ourselves. We sang a great deal, to maintain high spirits, and I was not the prude and child I once had been, and I joined in on the less obscene choruses of Those Two-Dollar Shoes Hurt My Feet. Not because vulgarity had become especially desirable, but because merriment is an antidote to dread.
I noticed, too, how the soldiers often appealed to “Julian Commongold” for an opinion or a verdict in some dispute, and accepted his judgment as settled law. This despite Julian’s evident youth, unsuccessfully disguised by his sparse yellow beard. It was as if he carried around with him an invisible but perceptible aura of authority, which perhaps was what Sam had called “the Comstock in him.” It manifested in his square-set shoulders, his careful grooming, and the easy way he wore the blue-and-yellow uniform of the Infantry. But it was a comradely authority, too, coexistent with his confident sense of himself and the evident pleasure he took in socializing even with those beneath his original station in life. He smiled often, and it was a smile only the most truculent among us could fail to give back.
The train carried us out of the prairie and into a land of forest and lakes. Rain beat down steadily most of the day, but it made no difference to us, for we were inside a fully-equipped passenger car, with protection from the weather. This was train travel as I had always imagined it. I sat at a window watching raindrops glide sideways as we passed in and out of cavernous pine forests and followed the smoky shore of a great gray lake. To the pagans of ancient Rome, Julian once told me, the Easter season had represented Death and Rebirth. Certainly there was no lack of Rebirth in the countryside through which we passed. Ferns unrolled in shady glens, the sodden limbs of trees were budding afresh, and cattails poked through ponded winter marshes. And there was Death, too, if you looked for it, in the occasional ruins we passed―not just old settled basements, as in Lundsford, but whole stone buildings, mossy-green, and once or twice the remains of entire towns, slouching brick boxes that shed raindrops as we rattled past them at thirty miles to the hour. Crows nested in those old buildings, and their eaves were crowned with chalky dung, and the only visitors were the local deer, or an occasional wolf or bear, as might be.
I gazed on many more such overgrown ruins until night fell. It was wholly dark when we approached the outskirts of Montreal, where campfires smoldered in the rainy distance. We heard an occasional growl of thunder (or perhaps it was cannonade), and it was at this point that the singing stopped, and a wary silence replaced it, and we fell into less pleasant reveries about the future and what it might hold for us.