The Postman by David Brin Read Free Book Online Page B

mailman. And my father always left a little glass of whiskey on the fence for him the day before New Year’s. Dad used to tell us that poem, you know, ‘Through sleet, through mud, through war, through blight, through bandits and through darkest night …’ ”
    Gordon choked on a sudden, wayward swallow. He coughed and looked up to see if she was in earnest. A glimmer in his forebrain wanted to dance over the old woman’s accidentally magnificent misremembrance. It was rich.
    The glimmer faded quickly, though, as he bit into the delicious roast fowl. He hadn’t the will to try to figure out what the old woman was driving at.
    “
Our
mailman used to
sing
to us!”
    The speaker, incongruously, was a dark-haired giant with a silver-streaked beard. His eyes seemed to mist as he remembered. “We could hear him coming, on Saturdays when we were home from school, sometimes when he was over a block away.
    “He was black, a lot blacker than Mrs. Howlett, or Jim Horton over there. Man, did he have a nice voice! Guess that’s how he got the job. He brought me all those mail order coins I used to collect. Ringed the doorbell so he could hand ’em to me, personal, with his own hand.”
    His voice was hushed with telescoped awe.
    “Our mailman just whistled when I was little,” said a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face. She sounded a little disappointed.
    “But he
was
real nice. Later, when I was grown up, I came home from work one day and found out the mailman had saved the life of one of my neighbors. Heard him choking and gave hirn mouth-to-mouth until th’ ambulance came.”
    A collective sigh rose from the circle of listeners, as if they were hearing the heroic adventures of a single ancient hero. The children listened in wide-eyed silence as the tales grew more and more embroidered. At least the small part of him still paying attention figured they had to be. Some were simply too far-fetched to be believed.
    Mrs. Howlett touched Gordon’s knee. “Tell us again how you got to be a mailman.”
    Gordon shrugged a little desperately. “I just found the mailman’s fings!” he emphasized around the food in his mouth. The flavors had overcome him, and he felt almost panicky over the way they all
hovered
over him. If the adult villagers wanted to romanticize their memories of men they had once considered lower-class civil servants at best, that was all right. Apparently they associated his performance tonight with the little touches of extroversion they had witnessed in their neighborhood letter carriers, when they had been children. That, too, was okay. They could think anything they damn well pleased, so long as they didn’t interrupt his eating!
    “Ah—” Several of the villagers looked at each other knowingly and nodded, as if Gordon’s answer had had some profound significance. Gordon heard his own words repeated to those on the edges of the circle.
    “He found the mailman’s things … so naturally he became …”
    His answer must have appeased them, somehow, for the crowd thinned as the villagers moved off to take polite turns at the buffet. It wasn’t until much later, on reflection, that he perceived the significance of what had taken place there, under boarded windows and tallow lamps, while he crammed himself near to bursting with good food.

5
     … we have found that our clinic has an abundant supply of disinfectants and pain killers of several varieties. We hear these are in short supply in Bend and in the relocation centers up north. We’re willing to trade some of these—along with a truckload of de-ionizing resin columns that happened to be abandoned here—for one thousand doses of tetracycline, to guard against the bubonic plague outbreak to the east. Perhaps we’d be willing to settle for an active culture of balomycine-producing yeast, instead, if someone could come up and show us how to maintain it.
    Also, we are in desperate need of …
    The Mayor of Gilchrist must have