“I’m off home,” Steve said, sulking. “You coming, Hank?”
“I’m going back to my place. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Tom wants a town meeting at the church tomorrow night,” Carmen told us. “Did you know?”
None of us did, and we agreed to try to get together before the meeting, and read another chapter.
“What’s the meeting about?” Steve asked.
“San Diego,” said Carmen.
Steve stopped walking away.
“Tom’ll bring up the question of helping the San Diegans fight the Japanese,” I said. “I told you about that.”
“I’ll be there,” Steve assured us sternly, and with that he was off. I helped Kathryn scrape the new loaves off the trays, and took one home to Pa, gnawing at one end of it and wondering how many days it would take to fly across the sea.
12
Usually our big meetings were held in Carmen’s church, but this time she and Tom had been nagging every person in the valley to come—Tom had even gone into the back country to roust Odd Roger—so the church, which was a narrow barnlike building in the Eggloffs’ pasture, wasn’t going to be quite big enough, and we were meeting at the bathhouse. Pa and I got there early and helped Tom start the fire. As I carried in wood I had to dodge Odd Roger, who was inspecting the floor and walls for grubs, one of his favorite foods. Tom shook his head as he eyed Roger. “I don’t know if it was worth the trouble dragging him here.” Tom seemed less excited about the meeting than I’d expected him to be, and unusually quiet. I myself was really hopping around; tonight we were going to join the resistance, and become part of America again, at long last.
Outside the evening sky was streaked with mare’s tail clouds still catching some light, and a stiff wind blew onshore. People talked and laughed as they approached the bathhouse, and I saw lanterns sparking here and there through the trees. Across the Simpsons’ potato patch their dogs were begging with pathetic howls to join us. Steve and all his brothers and sisters arrived, and we sat down on the tarps. “So I saw that the shark had his big mouth open and was about to swallow me,” Steve was telling them, “and I stuck my oar between his jaws so he couldn’t bite me. But I had to hang on to the oar to keep from being sucked down whole, and I was running out of air too. I had to figure something out.”
Then John and Mrs. Nicolin rounded the bend in the river path, and their kids got inside quick. Marvin and Jo Hamish ambled across the bridge, Jo in a white shift that billowed away from her quickening belly. I remembered the conversation at the ovens, and wondered what she had growing in her this time. And then people were coming from everywhere, descending on the bathhouse from every direction. A gaggle of Simpson and Mendez kids appeared around the side of the grain barrows, leading their fathers, who conferred heads together as they walked. Rafael and Mando and Doc came down the hill across the river, and behind them were Add and Melissa Shanks. I waved at Melissa and she waved back, her black hair flying downwind. A bit later Carmen and Nat Eggloff trooped out of the woods, carrying a heavy lantern between them and arguing, while Manuel Reyes and his family hurried behind them to stay in the lantern light. It sounded like a swap meet was crammed into the bathhouse, and when the Marianis arrived I thought we might have more than a capacity crowd. But it was cold outside, so Rafael took over and sat everyone down: the men against the walls, the little kids in their mothers’ laps, our gang in one of the empty bathing tubs. When we were done the whole population of the valley was packed in like fish in a box, ready to go to market. Lanterns were hung on the walls and some big logs in the fire caught, and the room blazed like it never did during baths. The chattering was so loud off the sheet metal roof that the babies started to shriek and cry, and the rest of us were nearly as excited, because we never got together in such a way except for Christmas and the rare valley meeting.
Tom moved about the room slowly, talking with folks he hadn’t seen in a while. He called the meeting to order as he went, but the visiting continued despite his announcements, and others had begun to circulate and argue behind him. Lots of people had nothing but questions, however, and when Marvin said to Tom, “So what’s this all about?” the question was repeated, and the room grew quieter.
“All right,” Tom said hoarsely. He started to tell them about our trip to San Diego. Sitting on the tub edge I looked around at all the faces. It seemed like an awful long time since Lee and Jennings had walked into this same room out of the rain, to tell us of their new train line. So much had happened to me since then that it didn’t seem possible a few weeks could hold it all. I felt like a different person than the one who had listened to Lee and Jennings tell their tales; but I didn’t know exactly how. It was just a feeling, a discomfort, or an ignorance—as if I had to learn everything over again.
The way Tom told it, the San Diegans kept looking to be fools or wastrels, no better than scavengers. So I had to interrupt him from time to time and add my opinion of it—tell them all about the electric batteries and generators, and the broken radio, and the bookmaker, and Mayor Danforth. We were arguing in front of everybody, but I thought they needed to know my side, because Tom was against the southerners. He disagreed with me sharply when I went on about the Mayor. “He lives in style, Henry, because he’s got a gang of men doing nothing but help him run things, that’s all. That’s what gives him the power to send men off east to contact other towns.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But tell them what they found out east.”
Tom nodded and addressed the others. “He claims that his men have been as far as Utah, and that all the inland towns are banded together in a thing called the American resistance. The resistance, they say, wants to unify America again.”
That hushed everyone. From the wall near the door John Nicolin broke the silence. “So?”
“So,” Tom continued, “he wants us to do our part in this great plan, by helping the San Diegans fight the Japanese on Catalina.” He told them about our conference with the Mayor. “Now we know why dead Orientals have been washing onto our beach. But apparently they haven’t stopped trying to land, and now the San Diegans want our help getting rid of them for good.”
“What exactly do they mean by help?” asked Mrs. Mariani.
“Well…” Tom hesitated, and Doc cut in:
“It means they’d want our rivermouth as an anchorage to base attacks from.”
At the same time Recovery Simpson, Del and Rebel’s pa, said, “It means we’d finally have the guns and manpower to do something about being guarded like we are.”
Both of these opinions got a response from others, and the discussion split into a lot of little arguments. I kept my mouth shut, and tried to listen and find out who was thinking what. I could see that even a group as small as ours could be divided into even smaller groups. Recovery Simpson and old man Mendez led the families who did the bulk of their work in the back country, hunting or trapping or sheep herding; Nat and Manuel and the shepherds were quick to follow Simpson’s lead, usually. Then there were the farmers; everyone did a little of that, but Kathryn directed all the women who grew the big crops. Nicolin’s fishing operation was the third big group, including all the Nicolins, the Hamishes, Rafael and me; and lastly there were the folks who didn’t fit into any one group, like Tom, and Doc, and my pa, and Addison, and Odd Roger. These groupings were false in a way, in that everyone did a bit of everything. But for a while I thought I noticed something; I thought that the hunters, whose work was already like fighting, were going for the resistance, while the farmers, who needed things to be the same from year to year (and who were mostly women anyway), were going against it. That made sense to me, and I bet to myself that the way Nicolin went would decide the issue; but then all around me I saw that there were as many exceptions to my pattern as there were examples of it, and I lost the momentary feeling that I understood what was happening.