"You mean to read it right now, sir?"

"If you'll oblige me."

I assured him I would. Then I went downstairs and spoke for a while with his daughter, who was named Mrs. Robson. She shared the house with her father while her husband was up in Quebec City commanding a regiment. During this conversation Mrs. Robson's four children (if I counted correctly) bounded through the room at irregular intervals, shouting for attention and wiping their noses on things. Whenever they passed I favored them with a smile, though they mainly grimaced in return, or emitted disrespectful noises.

Then Mr. Easton himself came hobbling down the stairs, a cane in one hand and Charles Darwin in the other. His age had made him slightly infirm, and Mrs. Robson hurried to his side and scolded him for attempting the staircase without help.

"Don't fuss," he told his daughter. "I'm on Presidential business. Mr. Hazzard, your evaluation of your friend's work was exactly correct. It's obviously sincere and well-researched, but it lacks certain elements indispensable to any truly successful cinematic production."

"What elements are those?" I asked.

"Songs," he said decisively. "And a villain. And, ideally, pirates."

I was eager to communicate this news to Julian-that the famous writer Mr. Charles Curtis Easton had agreed to help him develop his script-but there was a telegram waiting for me when I came home to Calyxa.

I had not received a telegram before. I was alarmed when I saw it, and guessed in advance that it contained bad news.

That intuition was correct. The telegram was from Williams Ford. It had been sent by my mother.

Dear Adam, it said. Your father gravely ill. Snakebit. Come if you can.

I made the arrangements at once, and secured a ticket on an express train; but he died before I reached Athabaska.

* There are several such accounts in print, by various authors. Some of these are quite accurate, and others have received the Dominion Stamp of Approval.

We had named the child Flaxie in honor of my lost sister, but also because of her crop of fine wheat-colored hair. By the time she reached her first birthday Flaxie had lost that baby hair, and wore an ebony crown just as lush and tightly-curled as her mother's. We kept the name, however, despite the apparent contradiction.

5.

The train rolled over half of America that Fourth of July, it seemed to me, past small towns thriving and many abandoned, past vast Estates worked by shirtless indentured men, past countless Tips and Tills and ruins, into a sunset that burned like slow coal on the horizon, and on into the prairie night. There were no fireworks that evening, though there was some impromptu merrymaking in the dinner car-I didn't join in. I was asleep by moonrise. Late the next day the train entered the State of Athabaska, its border marked by a landscape of enormous pits where the Secular Ancients had once strained the tarry earth for oil. I saw the ruins of a Machine the size of a Cathedral, its rusted treadwork embedded in scabs of calcified mud. Wherever there was open water, geese and crows flocked up to salute the passing train.

Julian had wired the Duncan-Crowley Estate to tell them I was coming. That presented a social difficulty to the Aristos there. Seen from one angle, I was a recreant lease-boy of no account come home to visit his illiterate father's grave; from another, I was the scribe and confidant of the new President, the nearest thing to an emissary from the Executive Power that Williams Ford was ever likely to receive. The Duncans and the Crowleys, whose fortune was all in Ohio farmland and Nevada mines, and whose New York connections were tenuous, had resolved their dilemma by sending Ben Kreel to meet me. He came down to Connaught in the Estate's best rig, drawn by two high-stepping horses.

The train had arrived with the dawn. I hadn't slept well; but Ben Kreel was an early riser by habit, and he shook my hand as cheerfully as the occasion permitted. "Adam Hazzard! Or should I call you Colonel Hazzard?"

He had not changed much, though I had new eyes (it seemed) to see him with. He was still bluff, stout, red-cheeked, and utterly in control of himself. "I'm out of the Army now-plain Adam will do," I said.

"Not so plain as when you left us," he said. "We all thought you and Julian must have been running from conscription. But you distinguished yourselves in battle-and in other ways-didn't you?"

"What a person runs run from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope."

"And you're an Author now, and speak like one."

"I don't mean to put on any airs, sir."

"A justified pride is never out of place. Very sorry about your father."

"Thank you, sir."

"The Estate physician did what he could; but it was a bad bite, and your father wasn't a young man."

The carriage moved away from the clutter and noise of the train depot, past wood-frame hostels and the many bar-rooms and hemp-dens my mother used to call "the curse of Connaught," onto the pressed-earth road leading north to Williams Ford. It was a warm and windless morning, and the rising sun picked out the peaks of the distant mountains. Devil's Paint-Brush grew in colorful thickets along the verge of the road, and the sparsely-wooded land gave out its old familiar summer odors.

"The Duncans and the Crowleys," Ben Kreel said, "are prepared to welcome you to town, and no doubt would have put on some sort of public reception if the circumstances were less unhappy. As it is, they've set aside a room for you in one of the Great Houses."

"I thank them kindly; but I was never uncomfortable in my mother's house, and I expect she would like me to stay there, and that's what I mean to do."

"Probably that's wise," Ben Kreel said, with something that might have been a suppressed sigh of relief.

When at last we came through the fields where the indentured men worked, into the low rolling hills near the River Pine, and reached the outskirts of Williams Ford, I mentioned that the Independence Day fireworks must have been extravagant this year.

"They were," Ben Kreel said. "A peddler brought in a handful of Chinese rockets from Seattle for the event. Blue Fire-Wheels and some very colorful Salamanders ... how did you know?"

"The air still smells of gunpowder," I said. It was a sensitivity I had picked up in the war.

I won't dwell on the details of my grief. The reader understands the delicacy of these painful emotions.*

I put in a brief appearance at the Estate, for the sake of politeness, and I was politely received by the Duncans and the Crowleys, but I didn't stay long. It was more important for me to see my mother. I passed the stables on the way from the Estate to the lease-holds, and I was tempted to find out whether my old tormentors still worked there, and whether my new rank had made them afraid of me; but that was a petty urge, not worth indulging.

The cottage where I had grown up stood just where I had left it. The creek behind it still ran dappled and cheerful toward the Pine, and my sister Flaxie's grave was where it had always been, modestly marked. But there was another grave beside it now, a fresh one, with a white wooden cross above it on which my father's name had been burned. Though he was illiterate, he had learned to recognize his written name and could even produce a plausible signature-he would be able to read his own gravepost, I supposed, if his ghost sat up and craned its neck.

Graves are best visited by sunlight. The warm July weather was soothing, and the bird sounds and the faint chuckling of the creek made the idea of death more bearable. I hated to think of next year's snows weighing down this fresh-turned sod, or the January winds blowing over it. But my father was next to Flaxie now, so she wouldn't be alone; and I didn't suppose the dead suffered very badly from the cold. The dead are immune to seasonal discomforts-there is at least that much of Heaven in the world.

My mother saw me standing by the grave and came out from the back door of the cottage. She took me by the arm, wordlessly. Then we went indoors and wept together.

I stayed five days. My mother was in a fragile condition, both because of her grief and because of her age. Her eyes were poor now, and she was no longer useful to the Aristos as a seamstress; but because she was of the leasing class, and had served faithfully all her life, she continued to receive chits with which to buy food at the lease-store, and she would not be forced out of her home.

Her eyesight had not dimmed so much that she wasn't eager to see a copy of A Western Boy at Sea, and of course I had brought one for her. She handled it with exaggerated care, smiling a little; then she put it on a high shelf next to The Adventures of Captain Commongold, which I had also sent her. She would read it, she said, chapter by chapter, in the afternoons, when the light and her eyes were at their best.

I told her that I couldn't have written either of these books if she had not been so determined about teaching me to read-teaching me the love of reading, that is, and not just the names of the letters, as most lease-boys were taught on Sundays.

"I learned to read from my own mother," she said. "And she learned from her mother before her, all the way back to the Secular Ancients, according to family legend. There was a school-teacher in our family, long ago. Perhaps another writer, too-who knows? Your father's greatest shame was his illiteracy. He felt it deeply, though he didn't show it."

"You could have taught him the art of it."

"I offered to. He wouldn't try. Too old and set for that, he always said. I expect he was afraid of failing."

"I taught a man to read," I said, "when I was in the Army." That made her smile again.

She was keen for news about Calyxa and the baby. By a fortunate coincidence Julian had arranged to have a photograph of us taken shortly before Independence Day, and I showed it off. Here was Calyxa in a chair, her coiled hair shining. Flaxie sat in her lap, slightly lopsided, baby dress askew, goggling at the camera. I stood behind the chair with one hand on Calyxa's shoulder.

"She has a forceful look," my mother observed, "your Calyxa. Good strong legs. The baby is pretty. My eyes aren't what they used to be, but I can still spot a pretty baby, and that's one."

"Your grand-daughter," I said.

"Yes. And she'll learn to read, too, won't she? When she's ready?"

"No doubt of it," I said.

Eventually we talked about my father's death-not just the fact but the circumstances of it. I asked whether he had been bitten during a Signs service.

"There aren't any services of that kind anymore, Adam. Church of Signs was never popular except among a few of the indentured, and not long after you left the Duncans and Crowleys decided it was a 'cult,' and ought to be suppressed. Ben Kreel began preaching against the sect, and the most enthusiastic members of the congregation were sold off or sent away. Your father was the only lease-man among them, so he stayed; but there was no congregation to preach to anymore."

"But he kept the snakes." I had seen them in their cages out back, writhing unpleasantly.

"They were pets to him. He couldn't bear to stop feeding them, or destroy them any other way, and it wouldn't have been safe to set them loose. I'm not sure I can bring myself to kill them, either. Although I despise them." She said this was a vehemence that startled me. "I do despise them very much. I always have. I loved your father dearly. But I never loved those snakes. They haven't been fed since he died. Something has to be done about them."

We didn't discuss the matter any further. That night, however, after she had served a modest stew and dumplings and gone to bed, I left the house very quietly, and went out to the cages.

A bright moon hung above the distant mountains. It cast a steady pale light on my father's family of Massasauga Rattlers. The serpents were in a bitter mood, no doubt from hunger. There was a slashing impatience in their motions. Nor would they have been milked of their venom recently. (This was something my father used to do secretly, before services, especially if he thought children might participate in the handling. He would stretch a bit of thin leather over the mouth of an old jar, and let the serpents bite it. It took the poison out of them for a period of time. That was his own private apostasy, I suppose-an insurance policy against any momentary lapse of attention on the part of higher powers.) The snakes were aware of my presence. They twined and curled restlessly, and I imagined I could feel a cold fury in their blank and bloodless eyes.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him-human faith or divine patience.

I was not a faithful man by most definitions. I wasn't a devotee of the Church of Signs, and I had never adopted its doctrines as my own. Nevertheless I lifted the latch and opened the door of the nearest cage. I didn't wear gloves or any such protection. My hands and arms were exposed and vulnerable. I reached inside.

I had entered some wordless principality of grief and anger. There was no logic to the act, only the memory of the advice my father had given me, years ago, when I watched him feed living mice to his snakes while dodging their strikes and lunges. It shouldn't be necessary to kill a serpent, he said, in the ordinary course of things, if you know what you're doing. But unexpected events happen. Perhaps a stray viper threatens some innocent man or animal. Then you have to be decisive. You have to be quick. Don't fear the creature, Adam. Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.

And that is what I did-repetitively, mechanically-until a dozen serpentine corpses lay stiffening at my feet.

Then I turned back to my familiar old home, and went to the bed that had comforted me through many winters, and slept for hours without dreaming.

In the morning the wire cages were bright with beads of dew, and the carcasses I had left behind were gone-some hungry animal had carried them off, I supposed.

The day before I left Williams Ford I asked my mother whether she believed in God, and Heaven, and Angels, and that sort of thing.

It was a bold question, and it took her by surprise. "That's not the sort of thing a polite person ought to ask," she said, "outside of church."

"Perhaps not; but it's the kind of question Julian Comstock enjoys asking, almost every chance he can get."

"And it gets him in trouble, I expect?"

"Often enough."

"You can take a lesson from that. And you know the answer, in any case. Haven't I read to you from the Dominion books, and told you all the stories in the Bible?"

"As a parent to a child. Not as one adult to another."

"You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes-you'll see."

"I'm sure you're right. Do you, though? Believe in God, I mean?"

She looked at me as if to gauge my earnestness. "I believe in all sorts of things," she said, "though I don't necessarily understand them. I believe in the moon and the stars, though I can't tell you what they're made of, or where they come from. I suppose God falls into that category-real enough to be felt from time to time, but mysterious in His nature, and often confusing."

"That's a subtle answer."

"I wish I had a better one."

"What about Heaven, though? Do you think we go to Heaven when we die?"

"Heaven is generally regarded as having strict admission requirements, though no two faiths agree on the details. I don't know. I expect it's like China-a place everyone acknowledges as real, but which few ever visit."

"There are Chinamen in New York City," I volunteered. "And a great many Egyptians, besides."

"But hardly any angels, I expect."

"Next to none."

That was as much Theology as she would tolerate, so we dropped the subject, and spent our last day together discussing more cheerful matters; and in the morning I said goodbye to her, and left Williams Ford behind me for the second and last time.

"In your many travels since we last met," Ben Kreel said to me as we drove back down the Wire Road to Connaught, "did you ever get as far as Colorado Springs?"

"No, sir," I said. It was another sunlit day. The telegraph wires hummed in a warm breeze. The train that would take me away from my childhood home and all its memories was due in just three hours. "Mostly I was in various parts of Labrador, well north and east of Colorado."

"I've been to Colorado Springs five times," Ben Kreel said, "for ecclesiastical training. It isn't at all like the pictures in the Dominion readers. You know what I mean-the Dominion Academy is all they show, with its white pillars, and those big paintings of the Fall of the Cities."

"It's very impressive, and worth a photograph."

"Certainly it is; but Colorado Springs is more than just the Academy, and so is the Dominion."

"I'm sure they are, sir."

"Colorado Springs is a town full of pious, prosperous men and women who are loyal to the Union and to their faith; and the Dominion isn't strictly a building, nor even an organization, but an idea. A very bold and ambitious idea, an idea about taking the battered and imperfect world we live in and making it over fresh and new-making a Heavenly Kingdom of it, pure enough that the angels themselves wouldn't be reluctant to tread there."

Unlike Manhattan, I thought to myself. "It seems as if we're a long way from that. We haven't taken Labrador yet, much less the world."

"It's a chore for more than one lifetime. But we can't commune directly with Heaven until we perfect the world, and we can't perfect the world until we perfect ourselves. That's the job of the Dominion, Adam: to make us all more perfect. It's a stern duty, but it arises out of the common instincts of charity and good will. Those who chafe under it are generally too attached to some imperfection of their own, which they love with a sinful stubbornness."

"Yes, sir, that's as you used to tell us at holiday services."

"I'm pleased you remember. Our enemy is anyone who rebels against God-perhaps you remember that aphorism, too."

"I do."

"What form do you suppose that rebellion generally takes, Adam?"

"Sin," I guessed.

"Sin, yes, certainly, and plenty of that to go around. But most sin only sabotages the sinner. Some sin is more insidious, and aims directly at impeding the Dominion in its work."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean." Though I had my suspicions.

"Don't you? When you were in the Army, did your regiment have a Dominion officer in it?"