He put his arm protectively around Makala’s shoulder and walked with her out of the chapel into what was proving to be a glorious early May morning, the date symbolically chosen since it was exactly three years ago that the Day had struck them all. And now, phoenixlike, the school was again stirring to life.
Following old tradition, John gathered with the other faculty at the base of the stairs to shake hands with the students leaving and heading to class. Mixed in were members of the community. Maury was still a bit ungainly with crutches as Forrest helped him down the steps. Maury’s leg wound had become infected; Makala had struggled with it for over a month before finally conceding it had gone gangrenous and amputating it.
As he was helped down the steps by Forrest, who had become a dedicated friend to Maury during his long months of recovery, the two together reminded John of old photographs of Civil War veterans minus a limb helping each other along, sharing a bond that someone who had not been through their fiery trial could never understand.
Most of the students who shook John’s hand were “the survivors” as they called themselves, their features hard, wiry, hands gnarled from an early spring of putting in crops. Most had already put in several hours of labor in the fields before returning to campus. Until the harvest was in, there would be but three hours of class a day near noontime and then back out later in the day to resume work.
His daughter Elizabeth was mixed in with the crowd. Now the mother of two, she was not attending classes but had come for the ceremony honoring all those who had fallen with the reading of the names of all students, staff, and faculty who had given the last full measure of devotion. As “Lee Robinson, killed in action, Gettysburg,” was read off, John saw her lean in closer to her husband, Seth, Lee’s son, who bowed his head as she held him close. For John, the fact that his comrade’s son was registered in his class filled him with happiness and poignant memories as well. In a long-ago time, Lee would visit his class as a Civil War reenactor to talk about the equipment, uniform, and life of the troops. Seth, even as a ten-year-old, would proudly attend wearing a uniform handmade by his loving mother. He looked so much like his father and would forever be a reminder of one of the closest of friends.
John saw a man coming down the stairs who but a few years ago must have been full of the vigor of life, but on this day looked broken. He had arrived on campus only the day before. He was one of several dozen parents who across the months since the onset of a relative semblance of peace had made the journey to discover the fate of a son or daughter sent to this quiet, peaceful campus before the coming of the Day.
“We want you to stay with us for several days,” John said as he grasped the man’s hand. “There is so much to share with you about Grace, to tell you all that she meant to us, all that she did.”
John’s voice filled up. He had once thought of himself as being so stoic, able to contain his emotions, only letting them release when alone. Perhaps it was Jennifer that broke that in him. He had lost Jennifer; this man had lost Grace.
Grace’s father smiled but offered no reply either way. “I think I’ll go and sit with my girl for a while,” he whispered and then continued on. John watched the man walk down across the front lawn of the campus for the long trek to the military cemetery at the edge of town. John had taken him there the day before and was touched to see that someone was still thoughtfully putting flowers on her grave, suspecting it was Kevin, who had taken her loss in such a way that it was obvious that he had been deeply in love with her.
“You’ll be late, Professor,” Makala announced, and John looked over at her, smiled, kissed her lightly, bent over to kiss Jennie, who stretched up to him with chubby arms for a “smoochie” and laughed as he mussed her hair, blond like her mother’s.
He left his family and started on the short walk to his classroom. Then, as he so often used to, he stepped into a tiny octagon-shaped building just ten feet across, three of its eight sides open to face on to the bubbling creek that flowed down through the middle of the campus. It was the campus “Prayer Porch,” a favorite place where he used to often come to sit, to listen to the creek tumbling by, at times to pray, at times to just soak up a moment of peace and solitude before the start of a class.
The walls were covered in graffiti, without exception all of them touching, a brief quote of scripture, a “Thank you, God,” a heart with initials in it, but so many now “RIP, my love,” “I miss you, sweetheart,” and “I’ll see you in heaven.”
Several hundred names were written on the walls in long, orderly rows, the names of all those from the college who had died in the war.
Too many, far too many.
He sat in silence, looking at them. As years would pass, as it did with all wars, the pain would lessen, the aura and legends would grow as was so with nearly all wars, and memory of the names would drift into history.
The issues of this war were still in doubt. The day of the reopening of the school had been chosen because of all that was symbolized by this day in May, three years to the day since the start of the war.
Some things that John had said to the man who this day would be sworn in as a duly elected president must have stuck, and though John did not remember it, the new president did. That there was a final day and what John had learned was to be the theme of his inaugural address to be delivered at the hallowed resting place of Gettysburg. That the war had reached its final day. Perhaps it was just rhetoric. Half the country was still occupied by foreign powers.
As for those who once ruled from Bluemont, some had indeed met their fate at the hands of angry mobs that eventually stormed the facility while their “Praetorian Guard” had shown the wisdom of standing aside, in the same way the original Praetorians would do at times with an unpopular emperor when a mob stormed the imperial compound.
Many, though, had managed to disappear, John musing that such was often the case with people like that, a few cropping up as far away as South America and Africa, though one such nation thinking it would be a friendly gesture publicly hanged several of them.
Within Site R, there had actually been a standoff for several weeks between the guards and dwellers in what was actually known as Section Alpha and the troops under Colonel Bentley. The guards of that section finally agreed to disarm and for those within to face the same fate as the rest of the dwellers of Site R.