“Meeting will come to order,” the mayor rasped in a two-pack-a-day voice. Rob wondered how his habit was holding up. Tobacco had as much trouble getting here as everything else did. McCann went on, “First order of business is a little talk by Jim Farrell. He’s come a ways to call, so it seems only fair to let him speak his piece.”
Rob snorted under his breath. Nor was his the only amused or dubious voice rising to the heavens-or at least to the rafters. The next little talk from Farrell would be the first. He was a retired professor of Greek and Roman history who’d moved back to Maine after teaching for a million years at SUNY Albany. He was used to speaking in front of other people, in other words. And he was a man of strong opinions, and far from shy about letting the world know what they were.
Not long before the eruption, he’d run for Congress up here as a Republican. He’d got trounced. Dick Barber had helped run his campaign, and still grumbled about the way it turned out. The winner, a lawyer with an expensive haircut (Farrell’s words), was down in Washington, where it was. . well, warmer, anyhow.
Maybe he was doing what he could for his district. You never could tell. What he could do, in this ravaged, ravished country, seemed vanishingly small. Farrell, who’d stayed behind, was the biggest cheese north and west of the Interstate.
The other difference was, the lawyer knew bureaucracy and politics and policy. When the Federal government touched this part of Maine only while the roads were open, and when they hadn’t been open much this year, he became a cipher. Jim Farrell knew useful things, like which root vegetables had the shortest growing seasons and how to salt trout or make sauerkraut. He knew, and he talked. Oh, yes-he talked. And talked and talked some more.
He got to his feet now. Instead of the more common stocking cap, he wore a snap-brim fedora. His pearl-gray topcoat was of a cut reckoned elegant when FDR decided we had nothing to fear but fear itself: some years before he was born, in other words. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t so old as that. He was a dandy with antique tastes.
He had a ruddy Irish face with a pointed nose and bushy eyebrows. The first time Rob met him, the winter before, he’d been reminded of a smaller version of John Madden, but only till Farrell opened his mouth. Madden had a mouth full of gravel. Jim Farrell’s baritone was a very different instrument. He spoke in sentences that parsed and paragraphs where the sentences followed logically, one upon another. That should have ruled out a successful political career for him, and as a matter of fact it had-till the supervolcano erupted.
“Here we are again,” he said as he took McCann’s place at the pulpit. “Here we are again, all right, in this, the second winter of our discontent. The first one was pretty easy, as these things go. We chopped down the trees that stood closest, and we shot the nearest and stupidest moose.”
People chuckled. It wasn’t that Farrell was saying anything that wasn’t so. They’d done exactly that the winter before. They’d got by with it, too, until things thawed out enough to remind the wider world for a little while that they were there.
“I’m serious,” Farrell insisted, “or as serious as I’m likely to get, anyhow. I’m serious, and the situation is liable to turn critical. If we don’t want to end up burning down our houses to keep warm and eating long pig so we don’t starve, we’d better do some planning first.”
Rob wondered how many of the men and women in the crowd understood what long pig was. Sitting next to him, Justin quirked an eyebrow, so he got it. Well, Justin knew all kinds of weird things. Knowing weird things was his specialty, maybe even more than playing guitar. And Dick Barber also grinned out of one side of his mouth. But he too was a man of parts, even if not all of them worked all the time. And he would have heard more from Farrell than anybody. For most of these folks, though, long pig would be caviar to the general. Then Rob wondered how many people here knew about caviar to the general. And then he quit worrying about crap like that and listened to Farrell some more.
“-got to organize and share what we can gather,” the retired history prof was saying. “If we don’t hang together, you can be sure we will hang separately.”
That was Ben Franklin. Before Rob could even start to wonder how many people in the church knew that much, somebody called, “I thought you were a Republican, not a goddamn Commie!”
Farrell beamed. He loved hecklers, mostly because he loved demolishing them. Before Mayor McCann could gavel the loudmouth out of order, Farrell waved for him not to bother. “Right this minute, I think Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are a little too cold themselves to worry about Maine north of the Interstate.” He got his laugh. Having got it, he went on, “At least, I don’t think North Korea has a rocket that will reach all the way to such a dangerous place as Guilford.”
That won him another one. “Washington doesn’t worry about us, either. We’ve seen that. And I am a Republican, so I say that’s a good thing more often than not. I don’t want Big Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”
He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.
“What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.
“You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.
“None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obvious here, doesn’t it?”
Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit-the bully pulpit, Rob thought-either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.
After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”
“Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”
That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.