found time to note his brother’s clumsiness before he said, “You couldn’t have seen his hand—or anything except the top of his rump, for that matter.”
Geoffrey’s seventeen-year-old face was secretly amused. “I just figured, if I was Alice, where would I keep my hands? Simple.”
Cot could feel the challenge to his pre-eminence as the family’s fighting man gathering thickly about him.
“Very good,” he said bitingly. “You have an instinct for combat. Now, suppose that had been a defective cartridge—bad enough to tumble the bullet to the right and kill your brother. What then?”
“I hand-loaded those cases myself. Think I’m fool enough to trust that ham-handed would-be gunsmith at the store?” Geoffrey was impregnable. Cot felt his temper beginning to escape the clutch of his strained will.
“If you’re so good, why don’t you go off and join the Militia?”
Geoffrey took the insult without an expression on his face. “Think I’ll stick around,” he said calmly. “You’re going to need help—if old man Holland ever catches you on those moonlight strolls of yours.”
Cot could feel the sudden rush of blood pushing at the backs of his eyes. “What did you say?” The words drove out of his throat with low deadliness.
“You heard me.” Geoffrey turned away, put a bullet to either side of the thrashing Mister, and one above and below. Mister’s training broke completely, and he sprang out of the grass and began to run, shouts choking his throat. “A rabbit,” Geoffrey spat contemptuously. “Just pure rabbit. Me, I’ve got Uncle Jim’s blood, but that Alice, he’s strictly Mother.” He fired again and snapped the heel off Alister’s shoe. As Alister stumbled to the ground, Cot’s open palm smashed against the side of Geoffrey’s face.
Geoffrey took two sideward steps and stopped, his eyes wide with shock. The rifle hung limply from his hands. He had several years to grow before he would raise it instinctively.
“You’ll never mention that relative’s name again!” Cot said thickly. “Not to me, and not to anyone else. What’s more, you’ll consider it a breach of Integrity if anyone speaks of him in your presence. Is that understood? And as for your fantasies about myself and Mr. Holland, if you mention that again, you’ll learn that there is such a thing as a breach of Integrity between brothers!” But he knew that anything he might say now was as much of an admission as a shouted confession. He could feel the night’s sickness seeping through his system again, turning his muscles into limp rags and sending the blood pounding through his ears.
Geoffrey narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled into a half-sneer.
“For a guy that hates armies and soldiers, you sure think you can act like a Senior Sergeant,” he said bitterly. He turned around and began to stride away, then stopped and looked back. “And I’d drop you before you got the lead out of your pants,” he added.
Geoffrey knows, echoed through his mind. Geoffrey knows, and Mr. Holland found me out. How many others? Like a sickening refrain, the thoughts tumbled over and over in his skull as he swung down the road with rapid and clumsy strides. The usual coordination of all the muscles in his lithe body had been destroyed by the added shock of what he had learned on the practice terrain.
He pictured Geoffrey, watching from a window and snickering as he crawled down the ditch. He seemed to hear Mr. Holland’s dry chuckle. Over the last three years, how many others of his neighbors had seen him? As he thought of it, it seemed incredible that pure chance had not ensured that the entire countryside was aware of his disgraceful actions.
But he could not run from it. It was not the way a man faced situations. The thing to do was to go to the club and watch the faces of the men as they looked at him. As they greeted him, there would be a little hidden demon of scorn in their eyes to be looked for.
The carbine’s butt slapped his thigh as he climbed the club steps.
He could not be sure he had found it. As he looked down at the newly refilled mug of rum, he understood this with considerable clarity. He could not deny that a strange sort of perverse desire to see what was not really there might have put an imagined edge on the twinkle in Winter’s eyes, the undercurrent of mirth that always accented Olsen’s voice. If Lundy Hollis sneered a bit more than usual, it probably meant nothing more than that the man had discovered some new quality in himself that made him better than his fellows. But probably, probably, and nothing certain. Neither affirmation nor denial.
Cot’s hand closed around the mug, and he scalded his throat with the drink. The remembered visions of Barbara were attaining a greater precision with every swallow.
“Hello, boy.”
Oh, my God! he thought. He’d forgotten that Holland was a member of the club. But, of course, he was, though Cot couldn’t understand how the old man managed to be kept in. He watched Mr. Holland slip into the seat opposite his, and wondered how many chuckles had accompanied the man’s retelling of last night’s events.
“How do you do, sir,” he managed to say, remembering to maintain the necessary civilities.
“Don’t mind if I work on my liquor at the same table with you, do you?”
Cot shook his head. “It’s my pleasure, sir.”
The chuckle came that Cot had been waiting for. “Say, boy, even with a few slugs in you, you don’t forget to tack on those fancy parts of speech, do you?” Mr. Holland chuckled again.
“Guess I got a little mad at you last night,” he went on. “Sorry about that. Everybody’s got a right to live the way they want to.”
Cot stared silently into his mug. The clarity that had begun to emerge from the rum was unaccountably gone, as though the very touch of Holland’s presence was enough to plunge him headlong back into the mental chaos that had strangled his thinking through the night and most of the day. He was no longer sure that Mr. Holland had not kept the story to himself; he was no longer sure that Geoffrey had done more than make a shrewd guess …He was no longer sure.
“Look, boy…”
And the realization came that, for the first time since he had known him, Mr. Holland was as much unsure of his ground as he. He looked up, and saw the slow light of uncertainty in the man’s glance.
“Yes, sir?”
“Boy—I don’t know. I tried to talk to you last night, but I guess we were both kind of steamed up. Think you’ll feel more like listening tonight? Particularly if I’m careful about picking my words?”
“Certainly, sir.” That, at least, was common courtesy.
“Well, look—I was a friend of your Uncle Jim’s.”
Cot bristled. “Sir, I—” He stopped. In a sense, he was obligated to Mr. Holland. If he didn’t say it now, it would have to be said later. “Sorry, sir. Please go on.”
Mr. Holland nodded. “We campaigned with Berendtsen together, sure. That doesn’t sit too well with some people around here. But it’s true, and there’s lots of people who remember it, so there’s nothing wrong with my saying it.”
Something that was half reflex twisted Cot’s mouth at the mention of the AU, but he kept silent.
“How else was Ted going to get a central government started among a bunch of forted-up farmers and lone-wolf nomads? Beat ’em individually at checkers? We needed a government—and fast, before we ran out of cartridges for the guns and went back to spears and arrows.”
“They didn’t have to do it the way they did it,” Cot said bitterly.
Mr. Holland sighed. “Devil they didn’t. And, besides, how do you know exactly how it was done? Were you there?”
“My mother and father were. My mother remembers very well,” Cot shot back.
“Yeah,” Mr. Holland said dryly. “Your father was there. And your mother was always good at remembering. Does she remember how your father came to be here in the first place?”
Cot frowned for a moment at the obscure reference to his father. “She remembers. She also remembers my uncle’s leading the group that wiped out her family.”
Holland smiled cryptically. “Funny, the way things change in people’s memories,” he murmured. He went on more loudly. “The way I heard it, her folks were from Pennsylvania. What were they doing, holding down Jersey land?” He leaned forward. “Look, son, it wasn’t anybody’s land. Her folks could have kept it, if they hadn’t been too
