They did not even want to talk to me, or to each Other, for that matter. They were strangers, it turned out. They had simply happened to arrive at the same time – each one on an urgent mission.
They went into other rooms, and found my Sancho Panza, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, who was making a lunch of Navy hardtack and canned smoked oysters, and some other things he’d found. And Carlos brought them back to me, and convinced them that I was indeed the President of what he called, in all sincerity, “the most powerful country in the world.”
Carlos was a really stupid man.
The frontiersman had a letter for me – from the widow in Urbana, Illinois, who had been visited a few years before by Chinese. I had been too busy ever to find out what the Chinese had been after out there.
“Dear Dr. Swain,” it began –
“I am an undistinguished person, a piano teacher, who is remarkable only for having been married to a very great physicist, to have had a beautiful son by him, and after his death, to have been visited by a delegation of very small Chinese, one of whom said his father had known you. His father’s name was ‘Fu Manchu.’
“It was the Chinese who told me about the astonishing discovery my husband, Dr. Felix Baurite-13 von Peterswald, made just before he died. My son, who is incidentally a Daffodil-11, like yourself, and I have kept this discovery a secret ever since, because the light it throws on the situation of human beings in the Universe is very demoralizing, to say the least. It has to do with the true nature of what awaits us all after death. What awaits us, Dr. Swain, is tedious in the extreme.
“I can’t bring myself to call it ‘Heaven’ or ‘Our Just Reward,’ or any of those sweet things. All I can call it is what my husband came to call it, and what you will call it, too, after you have investigated it, which is ‘The Turkey Farm.’
“In short, Dr. Swain, my husband discovered a way to talk to dead people on The Turkey Farm. He never taught the technique to me or my son, or to anybody. But the Chinese, who apparently have spies everywhere, somehow found out about it. They came to study his journals and to see what was left of his apparatus.
“After they had figured it out, they were nice enough to explain to my son and me how we might do the gruesome trick, if we wished to. They themselves were disappointed with the discovery. It was new to them, they said, but could be ‘interesting only to participants in what is left of Western Civilization,’ whatever that means.
“I am entrusting this letter to a friend who hopes to join a large settlement of his artificial relatives, the Berylliums, in Maryland, which is very near you.
“I address you as ‘Dr. Swain’ rather than ‘Mr. President,’ because this letter has nothing to do with the national interest. It is a highly personal letter, informing you that we have spoken to your dead sister Eliza many times on my husband’s apparatus. She says that it is of the utmost importance that you come here in order that she may converse directly with you.
“We eagerly await your visit. Please do not be insulted by the behavior of my son and your brother, David DafFodil-11 von Peterswald, who cannot prevent himself from speaking obscenities and making insulting gestures at even the most inappropriate moments. He is a victim of Tourette’s Disease.
“Your faithful servant,
“Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald.”
Hi ho
Chapter 41
I I was deeply moved, despite tri-benzo-Deportamil.
I stared out at the frontiersman’s sweaty horse, which was grazing in the high grass of the White House lawn. And then I turned to the messenger himself. “How came you by this message?” I said.
He told me that he had accidentally shot a man, apparently Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald’s friend, the Beryllium, on the border between Tennessee and West Virginia. He had mistaken him for an hereditary enemy.
“I thought he was Newton McCoy,” he said.
He tried to nurse his innocent victim back to health, but he died of gangrene. But, before he died, the Beryllium made him promise as a Christian to deliver a letter he had himself sworn to hand over to the President of the United States.
I asked him his name.
“Byron Hatfield,” he said.
“What is your Government-issue middle name?” I said.
“We never paid no mind to that,” he replied.
It turned out that he belonged to one of the few genuine extended families of blood relatives in the country, which had been at perpetual war with another such family since 1882.
“We never was big for them new-fangled middle names,” he said.
The frontiersman and I were seated on spindly golden ballroom chairs which had supposedly been bought for the White House by Jacqueline Kennedy so long ago. The pilot was similarly supported, alertly awaiting his turn to speak. I glanced at the name-plate over the breast pocket of the pilot. It said this:
C A P T. B E R N A R D O ‘ H A R E
“Captain,” I said, “you’re another one who doesn’t seem to go in for the new-fangled middle names.” I noticed, too, that he was much too old to be only a captain, even if there had still been such a thing. He was in fact almost sixty.
I concluded that he was a lunatic who had found the costume somewhere. I supposed that he had become so elated and addled by his new appearance, that nothing would do but that he show himself off to his President.
The truth was, though, that he was perfectly sane. He had been stationed for the past eleven years in the bottom of a secret, underground silo in Rock Creek Park. I had never heard of the silo before.
But there was a Presidential helicopter concealed in it, along with thousands of gallons of absolutely priceless gasoline.
He had come out at last, in violation of his orders, he said, to find out “what on Earth was going on.”
I had to laugh.
“Is the helicopter still ready to fly?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, it is,” he said. He had been maintaining it single-handedly for the past two years. His mechanics had wandered off one-by-one.
“Young man,” I said, “I’m going to give you a medal for this.” I took a button from my own tattered lapel, and I pinned it to his.
It said this, of course:
[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words “Lonesome No More!”]
Chapter 42
THE frontiersman refused a similar
decoration. He asked for food, instead – to sustain him on his long trip back to his native mountains.
We gave him what we had, which was all the hardtack and canned smoked oysters his saddlebags would hold.
Yes, and Captain Bernard O’Hare and Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio and I took off from the silo on the following dawn. It was a day of such salubrious gravity, that our helicopter expended no more energy than would have an airborne milkweed seed.
As we fluttered over the White House, I waved to it.
“Goodbye,” I said.
My plan was to fly first to Indianapolis, which had become densely populated with Daffodils. They had been flocking there from everywhere.
We would leave Carlos there, to be cared for by his artificial relatives during his sunset years. I was glad to be getting rid of him. He bored me to tears.
We would go next to Urbana, I told Captain O’Hare – and then to my childhood home in Vermont.
“After that,” I promised, “the helicopter is yours, Captain. You can fly like a bird wherever you wish. But you’re going to have a rotten time of it, if you don’t give yourself a good middle name.”
“You’re the President,” he said. “You give me a name.”
“I dub thee ‘Eagle-1,’ ” I said.
He was awfully pleased. He loved the medal, too.
Yes, and I still had a little tri-benzo-Deportamil left, and I was so delighted to be going simply anywhere, after having been cooped up in Washington, D.C. so long, that I heard myself singing for the first time in years.
I remember the song I sang, too. It was one Eliza and I used to sing a lot in secret, back when we were still believed to be idiots. We would sing it where nobody could hear us – in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
And I think now that I will teach it to Melody and Isadore at my birthday party. It is such a good song for them to sing when they set out for new adventures on the Island of Death.
It goes like this:
“Oh, we’re off to see the Wizard,