Ward Moore

“ OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS
A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat. ”

“ Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldnt exist, once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells founded Haggershaven? Could another Barbara devise a means to reach that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot. I simply cannot.
Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please God, make it didnt happen.” ”

“ Catty’s artistry with the needle made a revolution. Not only did she patch and mend and alter; she designed and made clothes, conveying some of her enthusiasm to the other women. The haven was better and more handsomely clad and a great deal of money was saved. Only Barbara refused to have her silk trousers and jackets made at home.
It was not entirely easy to adjust to the new Catty, the busy, efficient, selfreliant creature. Her expressive voice could be enchanting even when she was speaking nonsense—and Catty rarely spoke nonsense. ”

“ Barbara was upset, more than I thought warranted. “Oh, Ace, how could you be so foolish? We darent be anything but spectators, as unseen as possible.”
“Why? Ive a notion to court my grandmother and wind up as my own grandfather.”
“Don’t be stupid. The faintest indication of our presence, the slightest impingement on the past, may change the whole course of events. We have no way of knowing what actions have no consequences—if there can be any. Goodness knows what your idiocy with the egg has done. It’s absolutely essential not to betray ourselves in any way. ”

“ I was saved from having to mask my emotions by the arrival of her father, Ace, and Midbin. Thomas Haggerwells began tensely, “Barbara, Ace tells me you intend to try out this—this machine on yourself. I can’t believe you would be so foolhardy.” Midbin didnt wait for her to reply. I thought with something of a shock, Midbin has gotten old; I never noticed it. “Listen to me. There’s no point now in saying part of your mind realizes the impossibility of this demonstration and that it’s willing for you to annihilate yourself in the attempt and so escape from conflicts which have no resolution. ”

“ By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the past take care of itself,” I muttered.
“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”
“Catty, I can’t.”
The conversation made me nervous and fidgetty. It also made me remember much I preferred to let fade: the Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit pesetas.... All the evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did nothing, literally nothing, all his life, then he might be free of culpability. ”

“ When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.” ”

“ The girl may still be undergoing the agony of repressing her screams; the holdup, the murders, are not in the past for her, but the present. They are taking place in a long drawn out instant of time which may never end during her life. And if this is so, is it any wonder she is unable to relax, to let down her guard long enough to realize that the present is present and the crisis is past? ”

“ Tell me, Hodge—you Whig or Populist?” The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why ... Populist, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of the discussions that used to go on among the men around the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property, Protection, Permanent Population’ —what does it mean to me?” “Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own factories here and don’t want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent Population—cheap native labor. Build up a prosperous employing class.” ”

“ Barbara Haggerwells drew away with anger and loathing on her face. “No,” she refused sharply. “No, nothing!” She turned to me. “I must be going. I’ll leave you to entertain your friend.”
“Oh, I’ll go,” said Little Aggie cheerfully, “no need to get in an uproar. Bye-bye.”
I was frankly puzzled; the puritanical reaction didnt seem consistent. I would have expected condescending amusement, disdainful tolerance or even haughty annoyance, but not this furious aversion. “I’m sorry Little Aggie bothered you. She’s really not a wicked character and she does have a hard time getting along.” ”

“ To him, as I never could to Tirzah, I talked of my hopes and dreams; he listened patiently and did not seem to think them foolish or impossible of accomplishment. I do not minimize what Tyss did for me by saying that without Enfandin I would have taken much less profit from the books my employer gave me access to.
I was drawn to him more and more; I’m not sure why he interested himself in me, unless there was a reason in the remark he made once: “Ay, we are alike, you and I. The books, always the books. And for themselves, not to become rich or famous like sensible people. Are we not foolish? ”

“ Certainly my meager background and scraps of reading would not persuade the men and women of the haven; I could only hope they might divine some promise in me. Against this hope I put Barbara’s enmity, a hostility now exacerbated by rage at Oliver Midbin for daring to devote to another, particularly another woman, the attention which had been her due, and the very technique used for her. ”

“ Connecting the trip of the Escobars—“attached to the Spanish legation”—with the counterfeit pesetas was pure fantasy. But what is logic? I could not argue myself into reasonableness. I could not quench my feeling of responsibility with ridicule nor convincingly charge myself with perverse conceit in magnifying my trivial errands into accountability for all that flowed from the Grand Army—for much which might have flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep because they feel guilty. It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt which keeps them awake. ”

“ The possibilities are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace doesnt understand, and I tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action may begin a series of disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Make your trip as a ghost.” “Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.” ”

“ I knew why the face of the Southron captain had been so familiar. Familiar beyond any of the better known warriors on either side. I had indeed known that face intimately; seen those features enraged or sneering. The nose, the mouth, the eyes, the expression were Barbara Haggerwells’. The man dead in the peach orchard was the man whose portrait hung in the library of Haggershaven, its founder, Herbert Haggerwells. Captain Haggerwells—never to become a major now, or buy this farm. Never to marry a local girl or beget Barbara’s great grandfather. ”

“ The planting done, Midbin began the use of a new technique, showing her drawings of successive stages of the holdup, again nagging and pumping me for details to sharpen their accuracy. Her reactions pleased him immensely, for she responded to the first ones with nods and the throaty sounds we recognized as understanding or agreement. The scenes of the assault itself, of the shooting of the coachman, the flight of the footman, and her own concealment in the cornfield evoked whimpers, while the brutal depiction of the Escobars’ murder made her cower and cover her eyes. ”

“ Is our small human understanding the ultimate measuring stick and guide? But of course this is not the answer. The answer is that all—time, space, matter—all is illusion. All but the good God Himself. Nothing is real but Him. We are creatures of His fancy, figments of His imagination....” “Then where does free will come in?”
“As a gift, naturally. Or supernaturally. How else? The greatest gift and the greatest responsibility.”
I can’t say I was entirely satisfied with his exposition, though it was certainly more to my taste than Tyss’s. ”

“ Not by mechanistic forces, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.
And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, René Enfandin. Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking, What is truth? was blind. But you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge? That is the only question.
Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. ”

“ Among the fellows was an Oliver Midbin, a student of what he chose to call the new and revolutionary science of Emotional Pathology. Tall and thin, with an incongruous little potbelly like an enlarged and far-slipped adamsapple, he pounced on me as a ready-made and captive audience for his theories.
“Now this case of pseudo-aphonia—” “He means the dumb girl,” explained Ace, aside.
“Nonsense. Dumbness is not even the statement of a symptom, but a very imperfect description. Pseudo-aphonia. Purely of an emotional nature. ”

“ The countryside through which the tracks ran, between fields and pastures or down the center of main streets, should have been the industrial heart of a country bustling and vigorous. Instead one saw potentialities denied, projects withered, poverty and dilapidation.
We crossed the Susquehanna on an old, old stone bridge that made one think of Meade’s valiant men, bloodily bandaged many of them, somnambulistically marching northward, helpless and hopeless after the Confederate triumph at Gettysburg, their only thought to escape Jeb Stuart’s pursuing cavalry. ”

“ All my life is here.”
“Well, so is mine.”
“Ah, dear Hodge; it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”
“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was in a miracle—usually translated as a winning number in the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a luxury my mother and father couldnt afford.” “Perhaps not; but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have said applies to Enfandin.” ”

“ She came close, as close as she had in the bookstore, and I felt my breath quicken. “I think you do. Why do you avoid me? And call me ‘Miss Haggerwells’ in that prim tone? Do I look so old and ugly and forbidding?”
This, I thought, is going to hurt Ace. Poor Ace, befuddled by a Jezebel; why can’t he attach himself to a nice quiet girl who won’t tear him in pieces every time she follows her inclinations?
I smoothed the mare’s side for the last time and put down the currycomb.
“I think you are the most exciting woman Ive ever met, Barbara,” I said. ”

“ Only an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the Harlem River.
When one did, the jolting, jouncing and shaking inevitably broke or disconnected one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the traveler broke down near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith. ”

“ This formality finished, he spoke rapidly to Catalina in Spanish. She shook her head and looked confused. “Tell him I can hardly understand, Hodge; ask him to speak in English, please.”
The diplomat looked furious. Midbin explained hastily that the shock which had caused her muteness had not entirely worn off. Unquestionably she would recover her full memory in time, but for the present there were still areas of forgetfulness. Her native language was part of the past, he went on, happy with a new audience, and the past was something to be pushed away since it contained the terrible moment. ”

“ As an inverted substitute for the merciful amnesia which ought to have erased my memory as well as my biography? (I have written to Wappinger Falls; there are no records of any Hodgins family, or of Backmakers. Does this mean the forces I set in motion destroyed Private Hodgins as well as Captain Haggerwells? Or only that the Hodginses and Backmakers settled elsewhere? In either case I am like Adam—in this world—a special, parentless creation.) There is no one close enough to care, or intimate enough to accept my word in the face of all reason. ”