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Pilgrimage of Grace

Written by Virginia DeMarce

^{(You can buy a Cora's coffee mug and more at the 1632 Cafe Press Store.)}

“They’re not taking what happened in Suhl last January out on Johnny Lee’s family because they can’t. His dad’s been dead for thirty years. His mother wasn’t from around here to start with and she moved back to Ohio after a while. Mary Fern–that’s his sister, you probably never met her–married one of the Collins boys after she graduated from college and last I heard, they were living in Michigan. You could ask Sandra, I suppose, or Gayleen or Robyn or Samantha, where Ricky and Mary Fern were living, but I don’t see what good it would do. It wouldn’t bring her back to Grantville to take some of the heat off Kamala.”

Cora Ennis plopped five cups of coffee down on the table at the City Hall Café and Coffee House, which had only had “and Coffee House” added since the Nasi family had succeeded in importing coffee beans, while she talked. Before the Ring of Fire, it had been a plain sandwich shop. “But anyway, I think it’s a shame. Johnny Lee Horton wasn’t the most popular teacher at the high school. Maybe he was the least popular one, but he wasn’t the worst one. He made the kids learn the stuff, and he commuted to Fairmont State for years to get his master’s in math education, all at his own expense. If you ask me, they should have left him at the school teaching. But they wanted to assign him to Greg Ferrara’s ‘Manhattan Project’ and that meant he had to go into the army, and they couldn’t get along, Greg and Johnny Lee, which anyone who knew the two of them could have told Mike Stearns ahead of time.”

“Cora,” Ned Paxton started a little reproachfully.

The interruption wasn’t enough to stop her. “But by then he was in the army and the army, even our little army that we’ve put together since the Ring of Fire, is like that story they taught us in school about the kid who stuck his hand in a jar and picked up so many marbles he couldn’t get it out again, but was too stubborn to let go of some of them and his hand rotted off or some such. I knew there was a moral to that story. Maybe that’s why it was in the book in the first place. So instead of discharging Johnny Lee, Frank Jackson sent him off to Suhl to pretend to be a soldier, which certainly wasn’t any of Kamala’s doing.”

She turned her head toward P.H. Johnson. “And that’s what I was talking about to start with, Henry. I know you covered up what those boys were doing to Shaun at the pool on Memorial Day weekend. Don’t blame you for wanting to avoid publicity. No point in making a bad situation worse. They were just kids themselves, and at least you and your JROTC put a stop to that.” Cora wiped a little coffee that she had spilled on her hand off on the towel she was wearing as an apron.

Victor Saluzzo picked up the pitcher of milk and poured until his cup was thoroughly whitened. “I got here late. Can you go back to the beginning?”

Cora tossed her head. “I’ve got other tables to serve. The rest of them can tell you. Let Henry do it.” She stalked off.

Saluzzo raised his eyebrows, looking at P.H. Johnson. “There’s another brush fire?”

Before Johnson could answer, Kyle Fleming shook his head. “No more than there’s been for the last six months. We’ve been getting an earful from Cora this afternoon because Anse Hatfield was Henry’s son-in-law and I’m chairman of the math department, I guess. Though once Johnny Lee quit to work on development, he wasn’t my responsibility any longer, and I hardly know his wife. She’s a nurse, not a teacher. Lori says that she’s pleasant enough, but she must be around twenty years younger than we are, Lori and I. It’s not as if we ever socialized with them, and she never had anything in common with Karyn Sue.”

Saluzzo nodded in agreement. Kyle and Lori Fleming’s only child had barely scraped through high school. They hadn’t even tried sending the girl to college. Not that that it kept her from being a loving daughter and a devoted wife and mother. Or a good aide at Heather Beckworth’s day care center. Karyn Sue was just a little . . . dim . . . and everyone who had ever taught her knew it. Even in Lake Wobegon, Karyn Sue wouldn’t have managed to be “above average.”

He thought for a moment. “Kamala was in the class between John and Joe. They’d have known her, if they hadn’t been left up-time. Kay’s three or four years too old; Jim and Vicki are way too young.”

Leota Grover picked up her cup. “Our kids were too young for us to really get to know her, too. Susan was the same year as her little brother Jimmy. Plus, they’re both up-time, like John and Joe. Kamala wasn’t a problem student, though. Far from it. Finished high school; worked her way through college, got married, had a couple of kids. No problems, aside from the fact that her family resented a little bit that she went all the way through college. RN to Celina’s CNA. Well, they resented a lot that Johnny Lee made a big deal about having a master’s degree. He sure was a blowhard. That’s hardly something we can dispose of, though.”

“It’s not her family that’s the problem,” Fleming said. “Except, I guess, that their attitude isn’t helping.”

“Super-patriots, according to Cora,” Ned Paxton said. “The rest of the Dunns. Jimmy’s in the army and Jerry Hilton feels guilty that because he’s an operator at the waste water plant, he’s ‘essential’ and wasn’t included when Mike Stearns made his call for ‘every able-bodied man who can be spared.’”

Saluzzo looked across the table. “What was Cora talking about, Henry? In regard to Memorial Day?”

P.H. Johnson banged his cane on the floor. “You know what happened in Suhl back in January. Horton was there as the NUS military liaison to the Swedish garrison that wasn't quite supposed to be in the city. The Swedes had put it there before Suhl joined the NUS, with ‘protracted’ negotiations for its removal. What that meant was that it was still there, months after it should have been gone. What Pat, my son, said to Anse about him was that Horton was dumber than Bruno Felder, the Germany captain of the mercenaries who made up the Swedish garrison, and a hothead. But not lazy, which was actually too bad, considering the way things were there. He was constantly quarreling with the locals, especially with the Suhl militia captain, and usually over things that didn’t really matter.

“Ivarsson, the Swedish lieutenant who went along, told Anse that the Swedes hadn’t authorized Felder’s actions. In confidence, Anse told me that Ivarsson promised that the Swedes would stand aside, whatever he and Noelle Murphy did under the extraordinary powers that Stearns had sent with her, and wouldn’t think of criticizing after the fact. And they haven’t.

“Horton got involved, along with that Pomeranian captain von Dantz who had been attached to Anse's group by the Swedish commander in Grantville. They wanted to make a fancy statement by attacking the gun makers who were trading with the enemy. Noelle said they had to defend the gun manufacturers because there aren’t actually laws against it in this day and age. And, hell, my son Pat is a partner with one of the gun makers who were doing it. So Horton and von Dantz and Felder’s mercenaries attacked. Anse and his posse and the gun makers and their Jaeger fought back. Horton got himself killed in the street fight. Yelling that he was the ‘ranking American’ in Suhl and saying that maybe Noelle’s papers were forged.”

He decided not to include something else that Anse had told him. That Anse had specifically told one of Blumroder’s Jaeger that if shooting started, he wanted Horton dead. Right here and now, that would be a complicating factor. He thought the only people who knew that were Anse and the Jaeger, Noelle Murphy, Frank Jackson, Mike Stearns, and himself. And he wasn’t supposed to know.

“Well, the army decided to present the incident in Suhl as a mutiny against duly constituted authority, so that’s how it went into the papers here. Nobody’s ever told Kamala anything different, as far as I know, and all she’s done is sort of try to hunker down and keep on doing her job. That Memorial Day thing. Friday afternoon, I had my JROTC out drilling on the field by the community center when we saw some activity over by the pool. They’d filled it, but it wasn’t going to open until Sunday. I thought it was just a bunch of kids and figured I’d let it go when we heard somebody yelling for help. When we got over there, seven or eight boys from the middle school had Shaun Horton–the kid’s only six years old, for God’s sake–stripped down to his underwear and were trying to make him ‘walk the plank’ off the high diving board into the pool. Jeering about mutineers and how to treat them. Too many pirate movies.”

He nodded at Ned Paxton. “We handled it though the school, and have all the boys in summer school on disciplinary probation, with supervised community service. Ned, Archie Clinter, me, and the families. The boys involved are going to know better than to try any stunt like it again. I told my JROTC group to keep their mouths shut, but I guess someone has said something, since Cora knows. And once Cora knows something, the whole town does.”

“The kids know,” Kyle Fleming said. “The kids at the middle school, at least. Karyn Sue’s boy told me about it a couple of weeks ago. He’s in the same class as a couple of the offenders. Eleven- and twelve-year-olds.”

Paxton sipped his coffee. “I wasn’t happy with that, but as far as I know, it was the worst. There’s nothing else going on that the police could do anything about. Little jabs about Johnny Lee. Mouth darts tossed toward Kamala at work at the extended care center. Toward the kids in school and out of school.”

“Especially out of school, now,” Leota Grover said. “And a lot of it’s still in that middle school age group. Cora’s all riled up because Shae’s quit Girl Scouts. She’s thirteen and has been in since she was a Brownie. She was going to be the Brownie leader’s assistant next fall, but a couple of the mothers objected. Bad influence on the kiddies to have a traitor’s daughter in a position of responsibility. You know the drill.”

Victor nodded. “Evangeline Walker said something to Viola. Lolly Aossey is really upset about Shae. She’s been preaching that ‘Be a sister to every Girl Scout’ is ...