use; pornography in movies, on television, and inside popular magazines; promiscuity; homosexuality; personal and corporate greed; political corruption; and misbehaving children. The symptoms were stark and clear—but not the cause. Today, Florence thought the blame could be unequivocally assigned to taking prayer out of public schools. But for her part, Violet feared the problem might be more complicated.
Violet had thought a lot about the national erosion of morals and the difficulty of assessing it. First, she could admit that she and others often regretted getting old. Mourning the passing of their youth made them jealous of young people and resentful of all the things young people do. Consequently, she and other old people inclined to remember themselves in childhood not as children but as miniature adults and their parents as patron saints of irreproachable stature. They did not recollect ever stepping outside the margins and viewed willfulness in modern children as a sign of emerging pathology.
Even when the tendency to edit memories was taken into consideration, however there still remained firm differences between the present and past. And from a moral point of view those differences could only be seen as skydiving from grace. The family, for instance, had been nearly torn apart, and as the nation was nothing but a large number of families, the nation had itself fractured. Despite rising incomes and larger homes, old people were routinely discarded into nursing homes to die from institutional cleanliness. Professionalism had replaced real compassion, and nothing made Violet angrier than families that did not act like families. Selfishness was something she could not abide.
At sixty-six, Violet was well acquainted with duty. She had outlived two husbands, caring for both through their last gasping minutes. Later, because of the nursing skills she had acquired, it seemed appropriate for her grandmother, and then her mother, to move in with her. Still later, at the request of her father, she had moved back to Words to care for Olivia.
That was eleven years ago, and during those years she had had plenty of opportunity to witness the nation’s calamitous decline.
Since she had no children of her own, other people’s children remained the focus of Violet’s historical assessment. Children were the meter of change, and an indication of cultural decline could be found in the prodigious resources and effort now required to raise them. It was apparently impossible that families had ever lived in drafty houses filled to the rafters with unplanned offspring. Now, radio and television programs routinely featured experts guiding parents through the minefields of having children. Books, brochures, and videos apprised grandparents of their august responsibilities. Elementary and secondary schools, which in Violet’s youth were rickety wooden buildings in vacant fields, had mushroomed into hospital-sized compounds with squadrons of specialists skilled in interacting with another squadron of state and federal departments, lawyers, accountants, psychologists, medical consultants, testing agencies, welfare workers, and law enforcement officers. Clearly, mere living had become so complicated that these intervening bureaus were actually needed to prepare children for getting older. And to argue, as some did, that as a result of this deathless regimentation young people were now better prepared, well, it simply wasn’t true. The size of the current prison population was one of many facts militating against this wishful notion.
The wrong people were winning. Those who were completely without morals were now in control. Decent homes were under siege and every ounce of vigilance was required to protect them.
SCHEDULED VIOLENCE
GRAHM SHOTWELL WAS MAKING A BOMB IN THE SHED BESIDE THE barn while his wife and two children slept in the farmhouse. His dog, Gladys—curled up yet wide awake—lay on the floor next to the kerosene heater, and Boxer the family cat sat on the sill staring out of the smudged window into a barnyard lit by the blue-green light from a gibbous moon. An old tube radio crackled and spit in the corner, occasionally emitting music from The Gospel Hour. A single hooded bulb cast a cone of yellow light onto the workbench.
Grahm set a foot-long section of pipe into the vise, locked it in place, and selected a three- inch die from the collection his father had bought at a neighbor’s auction a generation ago. Inserting the die into the ratchet handle, he made threads in both pipe ends, applying a fresh supply of cutting oil after each several turns. Slow work, but the metal yielded to the strength in his arms in a satisfying way. When he was finished he wiped the metal shavings and oil from the threads and with a loose-jawed wrench screwed an iron cap on one end until he could turn it no more. He drilled a small hole in the middle of a second iron cap. Seated at the table, he poured used bolts, screws, and nuts into the pipe until it was approximately one-third full. These would act as shrapnel, which he separated from the rest of the interior with a small, clean rag.
From a green tin Grahm poured black and gray powder into a paper funnel, the shiny, slick particles sliding over each other and cascading into the pipe’s open throat until it was filled within an inch of the top. The mounded surface shimmered like live hair. With wire cutters, Grahm snipped off several feet of orange dynamite fuse from a spool hanging on the wall and clamped the pipe into an upright position in the vise. After screwing on the second iron cap, he inserted one end of the stiff, coiled wire through the drilled hole until he was sure it nestled safely within the black heart of the powder. To keep the fuse from moving, he applied a generous glob of epoxy, forming a collar where the fuse entered the pipe. With a single turn of the vise, the Promise of Just Vengeance was freed, and Grahm held it before him for several minutes in the yellow light, contemplating the scheduled violence contained in the heavy, mute, smooth, compact form. He then put it in the corner of the shed under a rumpled tarp, extinguished the kerosene heater, silenced the radio, turned off the light, and opened the shed door. The dog scrambled to her feet and bolted through the narrow opening, nearly toppling Grahm in her race to be first outdoors.
A fine mist had developed in the air, drifting through the moonlight, settling like breath on the grass. Grahm walked to the barn, through the milk house, and into the darkened interior.
Not wanting to turn on the light, he carefully made his way along the north wall as his Holsteins slept, chewed, groaned, and switched their ropy tails. Lulled by the nocturnal peace of the animals, he sat for several minutes on a bale of straw near the freshening cow he had come to check on. Because she was not breathing heavily, the flesh around her pin bone was still soft, and she was standing calmly, he thought her calf would not try to come out until sometime tomorrow. He listened to animal sounds in the darkness and thought about crawling under the covers with his wife, her body warm, smooth, and pliant from sleep. He tried to imagine her welcoming him, eager for touch, but his imagination failed.
MOTTLED SUNLIGHT
THE TELEPHONE RANG AS GAIL SHOTWELL WAS RINSING SHAMPOO from her short, curly blond hair. “Drat,” she sputtered, invoking a childhood curse she had never managed to purge from her adult vocabulary. She had no intention of leaving the steaming shower, but the ringing nagged at her warm, watery comfort.
Rinsed, she stepped from the stall and pulled a blue towel from the wooden rack. Several jars of cream, liquid soap, and perfume fell from the overcrowded ledge and clattered horribly into the porcelain sink.
“Drat.”
Dried and seeing better, she opened a hole in the foggy mirror, fluffed out her hair, returned the jars to their earlier congestion on the shelf, and brushed her teeth.
On the way downstairs, she inspected her home disapprovingly. So far, she was turning out to be a mediocre home owner. Her parents, well, her father, to be more accurate, had given her the little house on the edge of Words two years ago as a way of saying that Grahm and Cora were getting the farm—all of it—so obviously her subconscious harbored some unresolved feelings about keeping it clean. Still, she was glad to have it, even in its unkempt and unrepaired state. Most of the people she worked with at the plastic factory rented, even couples who both worked.
How nice it would be, she thought, to have someone steal into your house in the middle of the night and straighten everything up, the Snow White Silent Night Maid Service. Perhaps this was the origin of many fairy tales—storytellers wanting their houses cleaned up by unobtrusive, unpaid workers.
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