Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical fellow with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting—if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man… and Stu supposed that with Hugh’s sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem, he made a better marshal than Stu himself ever would have been.
“I know you’ve been offered a spot on the committee,” Fran was saying hesitantly.
“I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn’t you?”
Fran looked relieved. “Well…”
“I got the idea they’d be just as happy if I turned it down. I’m the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there’s no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?”
“I think he’ll be old enough to travel by June,” she said. “And I’d like to wait until Lucy has her baby.”
There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of the plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy’s would be the first. She was due on June 14.
“What would you think about leaving on July first?” he asked.
Fran’s face lit up. “You will! You want to?”
“Sure.”
“You’re not just saying that to please me?”
“No,” he said. “Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some.”
She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Maybe it will just be a vacation,” she said. “Or maybe… maybe we’ll really like it.” She looked at him timidly. “Maybe we’ll want to stay.”
He nodded. “Maybe so.” But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.
He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy’s nose.
“Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch pregnant again?”
She smiled. “There are books. We can both read them. We can’t live our lives afraid, can we?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over… we can learn to make them again. When it comes to getting sick and dying…” She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. “That’s going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?” He nodded. “And Shirley Hammett?”
“Yes.” Shirley had died of a stroke in February.
Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. “I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want.”
“All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right.”
“I love you, East Texas.”
“That goes back to you, ma’am.”
Peter had begun to cry again.
“Let’s go see what’s wrong with the emperor,” she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.
“He tried to crawl and bumped his nose,” Lucy said, handing Peter to Fran. “Poor baby.”
“Poor baby,” Fran agreed, and put Peter on her shoulder. He laid his head familiarly against her neck, looked at Stu, and smiled. Stu smiled back.
“Peek, baby,” he said, and Peter laughed.
Lucy looked from Fran to Stu and back to Fran again. “You’re going, aren’t you? You talked him into it.”
“I guess she did,” Stu said. “We’ll stick around long enough to see which flavor you get, though.”
“I’m glad,” Lucy said.
From far off, a bell began to clang in strong musical notes which seemed to beat themselves into the day.
“Lunch,” Lucy said, getting up. She patted her gigantic belly. “Hear that, junior? We’re going to eat. Ow, don’t kick, I’m going.”
Stu and Fran got up, too. “Here, you take the boy,” Fran said.
Peter had gone to sleep. The three of them walked up the hill to Sunrise Amphitheater together.
They sat on the porch as the sun went down and watched Peter as he crawled enthusiastically through the dust of the yard. Stu was in a chair with a caned seat; the caning had been belled downward by years of use. Sitting at his left was Fran, in the rocker. In the yard, to Peter’s left, the doughnut-shaped shadow of the tire swing printed its depthless image on the ground in the day’s kind last light.
“She lived here a long time, didn’t she?” Fran asked softly.
“Long and long,” Stu agreed, and pointed at Peter. “He’s gettin all dirty.”
“There’s water. She had a hand-pump. All it takes is priming. All the conveniences, Stuart.”
He nodded and said no more. He lit his pipe, taking long puffs. Peter turned around to make sure they were still there.
“Hi, baby,” Stu said, and waved.
Peter fell over. He got back up on his hands and knees and began to creep around in a large circle again. Standing at the end of the dirt road that cut through the wild corn was a small Winnebago camper with a winch attachment on the front. They were sticking to secondary roads, but the winch had still come in handy again and again.
“Are you lonely?” Fran asked.
“No. I may be, in time.”
“Scared about the baby?” She patted her stomach, which was still perfectly flat.
“Nope.”
“It’s going to put a scab on Pete’s nose.”
“It’ll fall off. And Lucy had
“I saw them. Seeing’s believing, they say. When do you think we’ll be in Maine, Stu?”
He shrugged. “Near the end of July. In plenty of time to start getting ready for winter, anyhow. You worried?”
“Nope,” she said, mocking him. She stood up. “Look at him, he’s getting
“Told you.”
He watched her go down the porch steps and gather up the baby. He sat there, where Mother Abagail had sat often and long, and thought about the life that was ahead of them. He thought it would be all right. In time they would have to go back to Boulder, if only so their children could meet others their own age and court and marry and make more children. Or perhaps part of Boulder would come to them. There had been people who had questioned their plans closely, almost cross-examining them… but the look in their eyes had been one of longing rather than contempt or anger. Stu and Fran weren’t the only ones with a touch of the wanderlust, apparently. Harry Dunbarton, the former spectacles salesman, had talked about Minnesota. And Mark Zellman had spoken of Hawaii, of all places. Learning how to fly a plane and going to Hawaii.
“Mark, you’d kill yourself!” Fran had scolded indignantly.
Mark had only smiled slyly and said, “Look who’s talkin, Frannie.”
And Stan Nogotny had begun to talk thoughtfully about going south, perhaps stopping at Acapulco for a few years, then maybe going on down to Peru. “I tell you what, Stu,” he said. “All these people make me nervous as a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. I don’t know one person in a dozen anymore. People lock their houses at night… don’t look at me that way, it’s a
It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Stu thought, watching Fran pump water, if the Free Zone did fall apart. Glen Bateman would think so, he was quite sure. Its purpose has been served, Glen would say. Best to disband before —
