“How’s that Grand Wizard for spin?” the President asked. “How’s that for the new party line?”
“That’s vile,” Stan said. “That’s beyond putrid.”
“I bet the Klan gets a thousand recruits in the next week,” the President said. He sipped his coffee. It had gone cold, and he put the cup down.
Stan looked at him. “People say I’m cynical,” he said.
“Human evil is bottomless,” the President said. “I suppose we can hope that the same can be said of good, but in my job I don’t deal with good very often.” He looked at Stan, and amusement tugged at his lips. “Do you think if I went to Purgatory Parish, or whatever the place is called, and made a speech eulogizing Omar Paxton and calling for race war, that I couldn’t get a war started?” Stan looked horrified. “Sir!” he said. “You can’t be serious!”
“No point in it.” The President shrugged. “The experiment’s already been tried, in Bosnia and Rwanda.” He looked at Stan again. “It wouldn’t be hard, though. Plenty of people in rural areas would listen. Their way of life’s been destroyed, and not just by the earthquake. Fifty years ago the U.S. government decided there were too many farmers on the land. Programs were put into place. Congress passed laws. And rural America was wiped out! The farmers—the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth, the yeoman that Thomas Jefferson hoped would guarantee the independence and virtue of the republic—they were all nudged off their own land. Now almost all American agriculture is controlled by a few companies, and folks who work on the land are tenant farmers plowing the land their fathers once owned.”
“Why shouldn’t they be angry?” the President asked. “Why shouldn’t they look for someone to blame?” He pointed at the blank television screen. “Sheriff Paxton and that Reverend Dingdong Frankland there, they’re the only people helping the rural poor understand what’s happened to them. Their answers are violent and insane and based on a delusional understanding of how the world works, but at least they have answers. The only answer the government has for those people is, ‘Hey, you’re redundant, you should have abandoned the land and gone to work in a factory years ago.’ No wonder those people start joining apocalyptic cults. To them, the end of the world isn’t a strange idea. The Apocalypse already happened to them! Their whole world was destroyed.”
The President laughed. “And now those poor countryfied bastards have been hit again. Agribusiness won’t be hurt by the quakes, not for long—Congress will make sure that almost all the relief money will go to the big agricultural conglomerates, just the way they’ve done for fifty years—but all the small businesses, and the family farmers, and the small entrepreneurs will be kept living under canvas for months, and when they come out they’ll find out that all their dreams will have been repossessed. Then the next generation of Franklands and Paxtons will tell them who to blame, and then we’ll have a heavily armed rural proletariat—the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth—all lynching all the wrong people, the way they’ve always done.”
The President fell silent. Stan looked at him for a long moment. The President shrugged. “Don’t blame me, Stan,” he said. “I didn’t do it. It all happened practically before I was born.”
“Yes, sir,” Stan said.
The President looked at his friend. “It’s the American way,” he said. “We don’t respect our fathers, we don’t overthrow them, we don’t bury them. We just forget. It’s not like there was a hidden conspiracy to destroy rural America—it was all in the open. All the documents, all the policies, all the legislation… it was all public. People could have read all about it if they’d wanted. But they forgot. The earthquakes of 1811 weren’t a secret, either—people could have read about them if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t know the history. They forgot their fathers. That’s what Americans do—we think about the present, and often about the future, but never about the past. Our fathers have always been dead to us. We just forget.”
The President rose, put his hand on Stan’s shoulder. “Our job is to help them. That’s why I have to go to Vicksburg and make a speech that will help everyone put all this to bed… to help them forget. If no one remembers Omar Paxton in twenty years, then we’ll have done our job.”
He straightened, then walked to his chair behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk. “Better get busy, Stan,” he said. “And don’t forget to have Marcus call General Jessica, get her political career started.” Stan rose slowly from the sofa, took a few steps, then hesitated. “I can’t decide,” he said. The President took his seat behind the massive desk. “Decide what, Stan?” he said. Stan looked at him blankly. “I can’t decide if you’re crazy or not,” he said. The President gazed at the papers in front of him. “I’m doing my job, Stan. And if I stop doing my job, I have lots of bright young folks like you to tell me.”
Stan licked his lips. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“It’s much easier when you don’t care. Really it is.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You should try it sometime.”
Stan left the Oval Office in silence. The President frowned at his paperwork for a moment, and then his glance rose to the photograph of the First Lady that sat on a corner of the broad desk. A knife of grief suddenly twisted in his heart, a pain so pure and exquisite that it took his breath away. For a moment tears spilled down his face.
Then the moment passed, and all was tranquil again. It was much better this way, the President thought as he wiped his face. Much, much better.
Jason could breathe again. This was the good news.
The bad news was that his journey was over. When he left the Army-run refugee camp near Vicksburg, it would be to join his family, his father in California or his aunt in New York State. He would return to a human environment that was in its essence intact, that nestled in comfortable dominion over Nature, a world that had not been destroyed and ravaged and remade, like the Mississippi Delta. Like himself. The world to which he would be called seemed alien and strange, its comforts false, its reassurance suspect. It seemed to him that the life of the refugee was somehow more genuine than any other form of existence. It seemed to him now that, whether he knew it or not, he had always been a refugee, thrown like a chip into the Mississippi, carried by accident and destiny down its broad, brown expanse. It seemed to him that everyone was a refugee, if they only knew it.
The deputy’s bullet had broken three ribs and burrowed a long, erratic path along the large muscles of his back. Neither the bullet nor the broken ribs had punctured a lung—his breathlessness was a result of a wrecked rib cage and trauma, not internal hemorrhage. Once he’d had his ribs strapped he was able to breathe again—strange how a tight bandage permitted breath rather than restricted it. Drugs had eased the pain and swelling of his torn back muscles.
The presence of Arlette had healed him faster than any drug. The breath he drew from her lips was sweeter than any air he had known. With his ribs strapped, he could walk with Arlette about the encampment, along the lanes between the ruler-straight Army tents where refugees lived with their families.
Now that the journey was over, Arlette wore her birthday presents all the time. Diamonds glittered in her ears, in the little golden lily in the hollow of her throat. And in her pocket she carried her grandfather’s watch.