drama. There were “peasants” once again in America, and like his predecessors in the minstrel trade, Gordon had learned to go for the unsubtle in his shows.
Timing his final bow for the moment before the applause began to fade, Gordon hopped off the stage and began removing his slap-dash costume. He had set firm limits; there would be no encore. His stock was theater, and he meant to keep them hungry for it until it was time to leave.
“Marvelous. Just wonderful!” Mrs. Thompson told him as he joined the villagers, now gathering at a buffet table along the back wall. The older children formed a circle around him, staring in wonderment.
Pine View was quite prosperous, compared with so many of the starvling villages of the plains and mountains.In some places a good part of a generation was nearly missing due to the devastating effects the Three-Year Winter had had on children. But here he saw several teenagers and young adults, and even a few oldsters who must have been past middle age when the Doom fell.
They must have fought to save everybody
. That pattern had been rarer, but he had seen it, too, here and there.
Everywhere there were traces of those years. Faces pocked from diseases or etched from weariness and war. Two women and a man were amputees and another looked out of one good eye, the other a cloudy mass of cataracts.
He was used to such things—at least on a superficial level. He nodded gratefully to his host.
“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson. I appreciate kind words from a perceptive critic. I’m glad you liked the show.”
“No, no seriously,” the clan leader insisted, as if Gordon had been trying to be modest. “I haven’t been so delighted in years. The Macbeth part at the end there sent shivers up my spine! I only wish I’d watched it on TV back when I had a chance. I didn’t know it was so good!
“And that inspiring speech you gave us earlier, that one of Abraham Lincoln’s … well, you know, we tried to start a school here, in the beginning. But it just didn’t work out. We needed every hand, even the kids’. Now though, well, that speech got me to thinking. We’ve got some old books put away. Maybe now’s the time to give it a try again.”
Gordon nodded politely. He had seen this syndrome before—the best of the dozen or so types of reception he had experienced over the years, but also among the saddest. It always made him feel like a charlatan, when his shows brought out grand, submerged hopes in a few of the decent, older people who remembered better days … hopes that, to his knowledge, had always fallen through before a few weeks or months had passed.
It was as if the seeds of civilization needed more than goodwill and the dreams of aging high school graduates to water them. Gordon often wondered if the right symbol might do the trick—the right
idea
. But he knew his little dramas, however well received, weren’t the key. They mighttrigger a beginning, once in a great while, but local enthusiasm always failed soon after. He was no traveling messiah. The legends he offered weren’t the kind of sustenance needed in order to overcome the inertia of a dark age.
The world turns, and soon the last of the old generation will be gone. Scattered tribes will rule the continent. Perhaps in a thousand years the adventure will begin again. Meanwhile …
Gordon was spared hearing more of Mrs. Thompson’s sadly unlikely plans. The crowd squeezed out a small, silver-haired, black woman, wiry and leather skinned, who seized Gordon’s arm in a friendly, viselike grip.
“Now Adele,” she said to the clan matriarch, “Mister Krantz hasn’t had a bite since noontime. I think, if we want him able to perform tomorrow night, we’d better feed him. Right?” She squeezed his right arm and obviously thought him undernourished—an impression he was loathe to alter, with the aroma of food wafting his way.
Mrs. Thompson gave the other woman a look of patient indulgence. “Of