They had no experience, he guessed, at organizing and feeding hundreds of people. It would all go wrong—not enough cooked, or too much, or it would be badly distributed. And when the inevitable screw-ups came, when people got angry, it would be against their own leaders. While the food was being carried into the camp and delivered to the camp committee, the little girl who had been shot was delivered along with her mother to the camp. The bullet had hit the fleshy part of the upper arm, but it hadn’t broken the bone, and the girl was fine now that Dr. Patel had given her some stitches, some painkiller, and a tetanus booster.
The little girl was sleepy with the painkiller and the after-effects of her fright, and her mother carried the girl in her arms as Merle walked her into camp. Omar followed with the bag of Three Musketeers candy that Jedthus had brought him, and waited till the mother was in plain sight of the people gathered around waiting for their meal.
He tipped his hat politely to the mother, and addressed himself to the sleepy little girl. “This is for you,” he said, and handed out the candy. “You be sure to share it with your friends, okay?” The little girl took the candy and looked at it with an air of incomprehension.
“Thank you, Sheriff,” the mother said.
Omar smiled and tipped his hat again. “All in a day’s work, ma’am,” he said.
“Pretty slick, Omar,” Knox said admiringly as Omar left the camp. “You’ve been paying attention, huh?” Omar ignored him and went to his car and turned the air-conditioning on high. He felt like hell.
TWENTY-SEVEN
On Sunday night the 15th inst. the earth shook here so as to shake the fowls off their roosts, and made the houses shake very much, again it shook at sunrise and at 11 o’clock next morning, and at the same time the next day, and about the same time the third day after. Accounts are brought in from the nation that several hunting Indians who were lately on the Missouri have returned, and state that the earthquake was felt very sensibly there, that it shook down trees and many rocks of the mountains, and that everything bore the appearance of an immediate dissolution of the world! —We give this as we got it—it may be correct—but the probability is that it is not.
The President stared at the coffin that softly gleamed in the subdued lighting of the East Room, nestled beneath a huge bouquet between the Eliphalet Andrews portrait of Martha Washington and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of her husband. For a moment, a weird, wild grief struck him, and the President wanted to fling himself onto the coffin and wail and tear his hair. Then, just as suddenly, he was again himself, the President of the United States, standing on the polished floor in the silent solemnity of the Executive Mansion. In the morning, the gates of the White House would be opened and the public would file through the East Room, thousands of people sharing in the ritual of mass mourning. More than the First Lady would be mourned tomorrow. Many thousands had died across the middle of the nation. Some were buried beneath unexcavated rubble; some were buried anonymously in mass graves; and many would never be found.
Tomorrow’s funeral of the First Lady, here in the White House and taking place under the universal eye of television, was only the most public of the funerals for earthquake victims. All those who lost loved ones, or who waited in gnawing uncertainty, would now have a chance to participate in the rite of public mourning. In the public mind, this funeral might come to stand for them all. That was why, over the strong objections of the President’s security detail, the public funeral had to be held in the White House, the tragedy brought fully into the national home.
And—though even Stan Burdett was too tactful to say so—the President was enough of a politician to know that this was something of a public relations bonanza. In the past, the nation had presidents who, as in the cliché, claimed they shared the citizens’ pain. Now the tens of thousands who had lost so much in the quakes knew that the President was one of them. He, too, had lost a loved one in the tragedy. The President expected that his next set of approval ratings would be at an all-time high. He would have prodigious coattails. The Party would stand to gain in the next elections.
The President, however, had not yet made up his mind whether he really cared about this or not.
“Sir?” The Marine colonel who had been put in charge of the funeral arrangements stood by, the subdued lights gleaming on the buttons of his blue full-dress jacket. “Mr. President? Is everything suitable?” The colonel, the President remembered, had been reviewing the arrangements for the funeral, talking all this while. The President hadn’t heard a word.
Well. It probably didn’t matter anyway.
The President cleared a particle of grief that seemed to have lodged in his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s fine.”
The President walked across the gleaming parquet floor to the coffin and laid his hand upon its smooth surface. He made the gesture only because he knew it would have seemed odd if he hadn’t. Whatever was actually in the coffin, the burnt offerings that had been raked from the remains of Air Force Two, bore no resemblance to the woman with whom he had shared his life. For some reason the President found this a comfort. He would have been far more disturbed had he thought of the First Lady—the woman who had shared his life, his career, his bed—lying cold, still, and recognizable, in her familiar blue suit with its familiar corsage, all locked in the mahogany-and-bronze box.
Also because it was expected, he bent his head for a moment, and clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. In reality his mind was pleasantly numb. Whatever of the out-side world intruded on his thoughts, it seemed to come through a layer of cotton wool. Since his wife’s death he had been operating largely on automatic pilot, making decisions in a world that seemed strangely devoid of consequence or purpose. Yet he managed to make decisions. Most of them did not require a lot of thought—most situations had obvious enough answers, and when they didn’t, he was resigned to the fact that decisions taken in an emergency were necessarily taken on the fly, with incomplete information, and that consequences would have to be dealt with as they occurred.
I say come, he thought, and they cometh; I say shove off, and they shoveth. And in the end, the world seems to spin on its axis whether they cometh or not.
He looked up at the tactful sound of a throat being cleared. It was one of his aides, reminding him of the meeting of his foreign policy working group. He finished his prayer—his public, nonexistent prayer, his dumb-show for the peace of mind of the Marine colonel and any other onlookers who wanted the President, in his grief, to behave “normally,” whatever that meant—and as he made his way out he stopped by the colonel to thank him for the care he had taken with his arrangements, and said he would see him tomorrow. Then he walked with his aide down the length of the Jefferson Pavilion to the West Office Wing and the Oval Office.
The foreign policy working group consisted of the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and various representatives from the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce.
For once, the President thought, he was able to attend a meeting without Boris Lipinsky droning on at his elbow.