Martin Luther King.”
So there we had it—the ever-growing ball of American paranoia, the ball of string a hundred miles in diameter, with the unsolved assassination of John F. Kennedy at its core.
“You mention the Rockefellers,” said the farmer. “If you ask me, they don’t know any more’n I do about who’s really running things, what’s really going on.”
• • •
Ketchum asked him why these nameless, invisible forces would want to depopulate Midland City—and then maybe Terre Haute and Schenectady after that.
“Slavery!” was the farmer’s prompt reply.
“I beg your pardon?” said Ketchum.
“They aim to bring slavery back,” said the farmer. He wouldn’t tell us his name, for fear of reprisals, but I had a hunch he was an Osterman. There were several Ostermans with farms out around Sacred Miracle Cave.
“They never gave up on it,” he said. “The Civil War wasn’t going to make any difference in the long run, as far as they were concerned. Sooner or later, they knew in their hearts, we’d get back to owning slaves.”
Ketchum said jocularly that he could understand the desirability of a slave economy, especially in view of all the trouble so many American industries were having with foreign competition. “But I fail to see the connection between slaves and empty cities,” he said.
“What we figure,” said the farmer: “These slaves aren’t going to be Americans. They’re going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that, where there’s such terrible poverty and overpopulation. They’re going to need housing. What’s cheaper—to use what we’ve already got, or to build new?”
He let us think that over for a moment, and then he added, “And guess what? You’ve seen that fence with the watchtowers. Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?”
• • •
Ketchum said he certain wished he knew who these sinister forces were.
“I’ll make a wild guess,” said the farmer, “and you’re going to laugh at it, because the people I’ll name want to be laughed at until it’s too late. They don’t want anybody worrying about whether they’re taking over the country from top to bottom—until it’s too late.”
This was his wild guess: “The Ku Klux Klan.”
• • •
My own guess is that the American Government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about, where people weren’t doing all that much with their Uves anyhow, where businesses were going under or moving away. The Government couldn’t test a bomb on a foreign city, after all, without running the risk of starting World War Three.
There is even a chance that Fred T. Barry, with all his contacts high in the military, could have named Midland City as the ideal place to test a neutron bomb.
• • •
At the end of our third day in Midland City, Felix became tearful and risked the displeasure of Captain Julian Pefko by asking him if we could please, on the way to the main gate, have our purple school bus make a slight detour past Calvary Cemetery, so we could visit our parents’ grave.
For all his rough and ready manners, Pefko, like so many professional soldiers, turned out to have an almond macaroon for a heart. He agreed.
• • •
Almond macaroons: Preheat an oven to three hundred degrees, and work one cup of confectioners’ sugar into a cup of almond paste with your fingertips. Add three egg whites, a dash of salt, and a half teaspoon of vanilla.
Fit unglazed paper onto a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Force the almond paste mixture through a round pastry tube, so that uniform gobs, nicely spaced, drop onto the glazed paper. Sprinkle with granulated sugar.
Bake about twenty minutes. Tip: Put the sheet of macaroons on a damp cloth, paper side down. This will make it easier to loosen the cookies from the paper.
Cool.
• • •
Calvary Cemetery has never been any comfort to me, so I almost stayed in the purple school bus. But then, after all the others had got out, I got out, too—to stretch my legs. I strolled into the old part of the cemetery, which had been all filled up, by and large, before I was born. I stationed myself at the foot of the most imposing monument in the bone orchard, a sixty-two-foot gray marble obelisk with a stone football on top. It celebrated George Hick-man Bannister, a seventeen-year-old whose peephole was closed while he