Freedom's Light: Short Stories Page 6

  The agent's smirk widened to the grin of a predator. "And how are we supposed to know you're not?" he asked. "You think that because you live out here in this backwater, you don't have to follow any of the rules. Probably none of you even have government-issued credentials, let alone a badge, do you?"

  "If we don't choose to leave this planet, we don't need one," Joey reminded him.

  "Uh-huh," the agent said. "I didn't come here to debate. I intend to carry out my orders. You'd better get out of our way, and let us search the place."

  "For what?" Joey demanded.

  "Like I'm gonna tell a subversive what I'm looking for, just so he can go and hide it. I'm not an idiot."

  Joey continued. "I never said you were. You are required, under the Constitution of the Interplanetary Commonwealth, to show probable cause and obtain a warrant before searching anything." Joey was getting angrier by the second, and Ulysses could feel the fear and rage radiating off the kid just behind him. He wanted to warn Mark off, but he didn't dare take his eyes off these agents, if that was who they really were. He was having trouble believing that the IPF would actually order something like this. But they were here.

  "Really?" the man said in a sing-song, mocking voice.

  "Really," Joey said. "And the warrants are to be served on real paper, not electronically, to prevent forgeries." He held out his hand. "The warrant, please. Now."

  The agent approached him, and the others were arrayed behind him, weapons still at the ready. He stepped right up to the mayor, so close that the rain dripping off his nose landed on Joey Seguin's face. "Looks like you haven't been keeping up with current events, pal. I don't need anything other than orders from the director to authorize me to search this shit-hole."

  Joey drew himself up. "If you have no probable cause, and no warrant, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you and your men to leave. You will not be allowed to search our town."

  "Oh. I see." He grinned again. "That's how it's gonna be, is it?"

  "It is."

  The agent nodded, and took a few steps away from Joey. "You sure you want to say that, man?" the agent asked, his voice almost pleasant. "I mean, look around. I've got a whole crowd of armed IPF agents with me. And what have you got?" He glanced at Ulysses and scoffed. "Some old dude with a blunderbuss? Like that would stop us."

  "It's not our intention to hurt any of you," Joey insisted. "We just want to go on about our own business."

  "Fat chance of that these days, pal," the agent said. He looked over his shoulder at the rest of the agents, and jerked his head towards the town. "Let's get to it, boys."

  Ulysses knew that their options had just dried up.

  "Stop!" Joey ordered, holding up his hands as if that would stop them. "You can't do this!"

  The agent was obviously fed up. He raised his rifle--

  And his head exploded before he could get the shot off.

  The sound of real gunfire echoed through the wet Martian air, and everyone--agents and farmers alike--stared stupidly at Ulysses and the smoking rifle in his hands.

  Apparently, the agents hadn't been expecting any resistance, let alone an old man firing an antique and killing their superior with it. Ulysses took advantage of their confusion, worked the lever action, and aimed the Henry at the next nearest agent.

  Ulysses Kuykendall had just enough time to say, "I will not be ruled by the likes of you," before bright, orange-tinted bolts of light erupted from the agents' rifles and flew through the rain towards him.

  Special Agent David Forbes Carter, Division 7, watched the Interplanetary News Network's coverage of the "uprising" in a small co-op on Mars, and wondered if anyone in the system was stupid enough to believe what they were saying.

  It was pointless to wonder that, he knew. Of course people would believe it; he could see the results in front of him. There were already calls for a stronger police presence on Mars, identity checks, and, from the more extreme elements, martial law.

  David leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. He had been an agent for a long time now, and the "uprising" had all the earmarks of a carefully-prepared piece of propaganda, with only a passing resemblance to the truth.

  He wondered briefly if he could prove that the whole thing had been a setup, but dismissed that overly idealistic thought. Even if it had been a setup, there was no way to stop the results of this madness.

  The terminal in the corner of the room started beeping, announcing an incoming call, and David stood to answer it with a sigh.

  "Yeah?"

  "Did you see the news?" the caller asked.

  He nodded. "How could I not?"

  There was only silence on the other end.

  Finally, David admitted: "You were right. It's already started. And I'll be damned if I know how to stop it now."

  Special Agent David Forbes Carter will return in Phoenix, by Lori Janeski. Coming Soon.

  About Lori Janeski

  A proud citizen of the Lone Star State, Lori Janeski wonders why the rest of the country can’t be more Texan, why the the rest of the world isn’t more Polish, and what planet Yankees originally came from. A graduate of Christendom College, she has strong views on the liturgy, movies, Texan sports teams, the Final Fantasy franchise, and the proper way to cook pierogi.

  In addition to blogging about those and other topics, she spends her time playing the organ, writing about space detectives and Apache legends (not necessarily at the same time), and searching for the perfect salsa.

  LoriJaneskiAuthor

  www.littlesquirrelbooks.com

  The Birthday Party

  Daniella Bova

  Adela Dorothea Davis Sheets

  August 12, 1964

  I became a widow five years ago, at the age of forty-eight. My husband, Calvin, had stomach ulcers and died of perforation, leaving me to finish raising our youngest boy. Four of my five children have married, and are raising young’uns of their own. They’re all under six years old, innocent of the hatred that burns against the negroes in the South, where I was born and raised. My children take me back each summer to visit my momma, who is also a widow.

  My youngest boy is a High School Junior. Sometimes he stays out late. I don’t question him; I read all the newspapers, and I somehow know that he will be going to war.

  My children visit every Sunday, bringing their young’uns along. They call me Granny, and climb on my lap every chance they get. They squabble and play in my yard, while their daddies talk about the trouble in Southeast Asia.

  After supper on weeknights, I watch Walter Cronkite. This summer the news has been bad all around.

  Back in June, three Northern boys and a colored boy disappeared in Mississippi. Their bodies were found a few days later. And about a week ago, something happened in Vietnam, a country I know little about. American ships were fired upon, which likely means we will be at war before long. My boy will do his part for our country, and I know he will be gone from me unless these troubles end quickly.

  On top of this heartache, there’s more bad news from Mississippi. The bodies of those boys were found on August 4, and their killers were identified as Klansmen. As of now, no arrests have been made.

  My mind, in my concern about my boy, has somehow brought to mind another war. My worries over what’s happening to the colored folks, who only want the rights they were born with, makes me recall another summer, back when I was twelve, living on my daddy’s farm in North Carolina.

  Daddy was a tobacco farmer and a deputy sheriff. Mom still lives on the farm, which is up in the hills of Ashe County, about an hour north of West Jefferson, the county seat.

  Daddy, being a lawman, spent a good amount of time in Jefferson when I was a child. There’s only one or two smaller towns in the whole county. The rest is nothing but mountains that stretch to Tennessee and Virginia and beyond.

  I can’t talk to Mom about that summer. She was distraught over the death of my brother, and not herself at all. Even Daddy didn’t
speak of it again, after I went to the birthday party.

  So rather than tell one of my kids, who have their own struggles, I’m going to write it all down. Maybe writing will ease my mind.

  It doesn’t matter where it’s happening, or when, or for what reason. Decency is decency. And hate is hate.

  I’ll start with school.

  That summer of 1923, school run from June through August, and was held in a little one-room schoolhouse two miles away from our farm. I walked to school alone, except for some little’uns and Charlie Davis, a distant cousin. But by late July, Charlie had stopped going to school. All the boys except for the young’uns had left. There was too much work in the fields for them to leave their daddies’ farms.

  When the boys stopped coming I was sad, because my brother, Worth, had done the same thing before he died. He always got most of his schooling in the wintertime. And last summer, after a month in the schoolroom, he quit to work with Daddy.

  Worth was a hard working boy. When Daddy could spare him, he hired himself out to the neighbors. Last August he died of a heatstroke, while working on a threshing crew. He was only thirteen.

  This summer we had a new teacher, Miss Cordelia Hart. Miss Cordelia was different from what we were used to, being that she had gone to teacher’s college in Asheville before coming back to Jefferson, where she was raised. According to Daddy, Miss Cordelia had kin in these parts. She was a member of our meeting, and boarded with the preacher and his wife.

  She come to school every morning in her own car, a Model T like ours, wearing city-clothes. Miss Cordelia was a sight on the eyes. Her pretty hats, shoes, stockings and dresses were all so smart that she looked like one of the fashion illustrations in the Ladies Home Journal. Miss Cordelia subscribed to the magazine, and let us girls look at the latest copy during recess. All her dresses were calf-length, in what we called the modern style, unlike Mom’s. Mom still wore old-fashioned housedresses, and her go-to-meeting clothes were made years before, when women wore shirtwaists and ankle-length skirts. She had made do with them all the years since, and wasn’t yet ready to modernize.

  Miss Cordelia taught all eight grades the same lessons: reading, writing and arithmetic, spelling, a little geography, and history. The little’uns brought primers from home, and shared with children who had none.

  We bigger kids brought to school whatever books we had, and shared with our neighbor. Daddy had managed books for Worth and me every year, but only reading and arithmetic books. The teacher taught history and geography from his or her own books and maps.

  After the boys were gone, there were only twenty kids left, and Miss Cordelia, having more time, began teaching us about the American Revolution. None of us had learned much about it. The teachers always started history with Columbus, and the school term would end around the time of the French and Indian War.

  And so it was in 1923. But in mid-July, Miss Cordelia stopped teaching about the French and English fighting in the wilderness, and began to speak of the men who had founded America.

  The young’uns would listen to stories about Benjamin Franklin, and then be set to writing about him on their slates. The very youngest were asked to go to the blackboard and draw pictures of what they heard.

  We older girls listened, too, but shortly thereafter, Miss Cordelia assigned the seventh and eighth grade girls the task of memorizing the Declaration of Independence. In two weeks they would be called upon to stand and recite from memory.

  We sixth graders were to memorize a poem, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. In addition to these lessons, all the girls in grades five through eight were to study the reasons for the Revolution, and learn about key battles in the war.

  Miss Cordelia had six history books, and she decided that we older girls could share them, each of us taking turns carrying a book home so we could study in the evenings. Everything would have been fine, except for Mattie Jackson.

  Mattie was a new girl, age fourteen. Her granddaddy lived away up in the hills, five miles from the schoolhouse. He had an old Dodge touring car, and his hired man drove Mattie to and from school every day. When I asked Daddy about Mattie, I was told that her father wasn’t able to keep a home because of some trouble, and had sent his daughter to live with her grand-pappy back in the spring.

  That summer, Mattie Jackson showed herself to be the meanest girl I had ever known. When Miss Cordelia handed out the history books, Mattie was first in line. She snatched a book off the teacher’s desk, held it to her chest and said: “I’m not sharin’ with Celia. I don’t want to catch no cooties. With a face like that, she surely must have bugs.”

  Mattie’s friends laughed right out loud, and ran to their desks to share the book with her.

  The rest of us felt terrible for Celia, a girl who lived back in the hills. Celia had what my momma called a harelip. She was so shy that she barely talked at recess. She walked to school barefoot, wearing dresses made of bleached flour sacks that reminded me of pure white snow. She had two pinafores, and her blonde hair was always clean and braided.

  Celia’s seat was directly behind the desk where Myrtle Taylor sat with me, so I hurried to invite her to share with us. But it was too late. Celia was frozen in her seat, her face red with shame and her violet eyes miserable. She was plainly mortified that anyone would think she had bugs, even Mattie, who teased her without mercy.

  Miss Cordelia went right to Celia, and took her aside. Mattie paid no more attention, as Celia was spoken to with kindness, and told that she could borrow Miss Cordelia’s very own history book. Then she was dismissed for the day.

  Miss Cordelia looked daggers at Mattie, and ordered her to stand in the corner. She was told never to say such a thing about a classmate again, on pain of expulsion.

  For the rest of the afternoon, we looked at Miss Cordelia’s map of Lexington Massachusetts. All the while Mattie was snickering from the corner. When school was dismissed, she run out the door with the history book, got in the car, and rode away.

  I walked home, wondering again about Celia’s poor mouth, and how anyone could be as mean as Mattie. As soon as I went in the house, I ran to my room and changed out of my school dress. Then I joined Mom in the kitchen.

  She was getting supper ready, and sat snapping beans next to baby Clydie, who was ten months old. I played with Clydie for a minute, before getting to work peeling potatoes.

  I had mentioned Celia at home before, but today was the worst I’d ever seen her treated. Mom shook her head when she heard that Celia was still being teased.

  “Hit ain’t the young’un’s fault. She was born that a-way. Why don’t you invite her for supper?”

  “I already have. I try to play with her at recess, but she never will play. She cain’t speak clearly. I believe she’s ashamed. And today Mattie shamed her in front of the whole class. That Mattie Jackson is mean as a cornered rat. I never thought to see such meanness.”

  Mom’s mouth pinched, and her fingers went to flying through the beans. After a minute, she spoke.

  “Adela, you have got to learn some things. Not everybody follows the Lord.”

  “But Mattie goes to church. I heard her a-braggin’ that she gets to ride in the car every Sunday.”

  “That don’t matter. Now, are you done? I want you to go to your room and open your bible to the Gospel of Mark. Go to chapter 4, verse 24, and study on it.”

  So I went to the little room I shared with Clydie and got my bible. The verse was printed in red.

  And he said unto them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you: and unto you that hear shall more be given.

  I studied on it like Mom told me, and vowed to take heed. I would never tease another because of the way they looked. In doing so, I might be spared such a thing happening to me. I thought about Mattie and shivered, wondering what her measure would be if she kept teasing poor Celia.

  Over the next two weeks, we older girls couldn’t wait for the three Rs to be finished, so w
e could commence studying about the war.

  Miss Cordelia taught us about the Boston Tea Party. We also learned about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross, and other important people.

  All the while, we were memorizing the pieces we were to speak. We would be graded on our memory and ability to recite, all except for Celia. Miss Cordelia was letting her speak her piece in private.

  Finally, the day for the recitation came. It was a Friday, and Mom let me wear my Sunday dress. I had memorized The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere until I knew each word by heart, and when my name was called I marched to the teacher’s platform and recited without making one mistake.

  Everyone clapped, even Celia, who had already recited that morning. Miss Cordelia smiled as she dismissed me to my desk, and I thought to myself that I would be getting an A.

  After Myrtle, Alice, and Mary Jane were finished, it was the bigger girls’ turn to recite the Declaration. As I was listening to Lottie Ward, a seventh grader who was the only girl to recite without a mistake, I didn’t blame those colonials for fighting a war against Mad King George. His list of crimes was too much for any man to put up with.

  That was a wonderful day, until time came for Mattie to speak. She was last to be called upon, and when her turn came she stood on the platform and smirked at us. Miss Cordelia told her to begin, and what Mattie did next would shock a snake.

  This is what she said: “I showed my granddaddy the book, and when I told him I had to learn about this-here war, he told me to pay the lessons no mind. Granddaddy said we ain’t got no bizzness a-studying that war, fought way off in the flatlands so long ago. He said I didn’t have to learn it, and that the only war Miss Cordelia should be teachin’ is the War of Northern Aggression.” Then, without being dismissed, she put her nose in the air and went back to her desk.

  You could have heard a pin drop. Mattie sat a-staring out the window, as the rest of us waited in silence. Finally, Miss Cordelia rose from her desk.