“Why don’t you get your little parade back across the Virginia line,” MacTierney said, sheltering in the doorway with a shotgun aimed. “Take off those scarves, first. We’ve got some people with puke all over their hands who need some rags to clean up.”
MacTierney had shown flashes of empathy before, but this was the first time I’d seen him seriously jeopardize himself for others.
It would have been easier for him to sit and enjoy his barleywine. The chances of any of the beer garden people taking such a chance over him would require high math to express.
In the confusion, most of the clientele slipped away by river path, road, or footbridge across the Cheat.
“The family wonders why I have need of bodyguards,” Maynes said.
• • •
The White Palace was well named. It served not only as the practical seat of governmental power for the Coal Country; it was also the social center for the wealthier Appalachian Quislings.
Maynes avoided most of the social events at the White Palace, and for the few he did attend, he had no need of me. For those occasions, I worked outside during the arrivals and departures, helping attendees and guests of the palace with their luggage. Because of the duration and difficulty of even short trips thanks to the roads, checkpoints, and so on, for most events about half the attendees remained
a day or two. For my work, I sometimes received a tip in the local coin currency used for small exchanges—usually about enough to buy a cigarette or two, had I been of that habit—or pieces of candy from the more knowledgeable about Gray Ones and their legendary sweet tooth. Sometimes I would be given crayons, I suppose so I could better amuse myself by drawing on the walls of the barn, or slivers of soap, old toothbrushes, and other hygiene odds and ends.
I always went to some effort to keep my skin and fur clean using the shampoos, soaps, brushes, shammies, and other excellent materials available for the riding horses, but I don’t think the gifts were a reproach for my personal habits. I could always find use for stiff new bristles on a toothbrush, in any case. Matter always seems to find a home between my longish—compared to a human, that is—toes.
I never saw more than glimpses of what the guests would do for these parties and events. The White Palace had been a hotel of the old world, so it had cooking and laundry facilities to match. They put me to work in the laundry, washing bedding for the guests. I would wrap a pillowcase around my snout to keep out the boric acid and soap flakes used to clean the bedding and work the huge machines that washed and dried fabric.
As I recall, there were four major social events in the Coal Country important enough for Maynes to circulate, sober and circumspect in his sexual drive for a change.
The first one I witnessed was in the spring, at the beginning of May. Heyday, it was called in the Coal Country, but I’ve heard and seen “May Day” elsewhere. Young women would put flowers in their hair—the older women of distinction simply added them to their hats—and men added them to lapels or wove them together into garlands to wear around their necks. Gifts of flowers from one’s apparel were a way of signaling romantic interest. Strawberries were worked into almost everything. The Maynes family even managed to lay its hands on extraordinary rich blocks of European chocolate ready for melting and dipping. Gifts of chocolate-dipped strawberries often symbolized the beginning of a formal courtship.
At the height of summer, there was the Appalachian Horse Show, a Saturday-to-Saturday gathering the first week of July. Many members of Coal Country society raised horses, for their own pleasure and sometimes transport—though they were the one class wealthy enough to have reliable personal transportation in the form of cars and small trucks.
There would be polo matches and drag hunts during the day and barbecues and pig roasts in the afternoon and evening, with Coal Country society members showing off their horseflesh, apparel, and eligible sons and daughters. Young couples would ride out together. Theatricals, fire-balloons, and concerts filled the night air with cries of excitement, music, and laughter. We Grogs worked with a will handling all the horses.
While informal buying and selling of horses and associated gear would happen throughout the week, celebration would end with a “charity” auction featuring horses and saddles to benefit the New Universal Church and a fund for Injured Miner’s Relief and Retirement.
I helped in one of the drag hunts by acting as a search target, a semiserious game of hide-and-seek between me and roughly two dozen young women and men on horseback. Many of them rode with pistols and even rifles in saddle holsters, which caused me a little worry in case one of them became overzealous when closing in for the “kill.” As it turned out, my worries were groundless.
I’m afraid I did not make for much sport, as I was exhausted from taking care of horseflesh from the predawn until midnight over the course of the week. They brought me to bay against a limestone wall on a steep hillside, dismounting for the kill. Had it been an actual pursuit, I would have risked the climb, but I settled for holding up my hands and being pelted with fruit taken from the remains of their saddlebag lunches. They led me back, loosely tied behind the hunt captain’s horse, to the picnic grounds where I received a round of applause.
By the time it was over and the horses had been packed back into their transports or ridden off the White Palace grounds on a string, the other Grogs and I were so exhausted, we slept for three days.
A second summer party, “Labor Day,” was a holiday carried over from pre-Kurian times. Unlike the Appalachian Horse Show, there were events all over the Coal Country celebrating the day, and Maynes barnstormed the country in his bus, visiting as many picnics and market-fairs as he could fit in. One way or another, almost every family in the Coal Country managed to procure beef for barbecuing or burgers—I suspect the Maynes clan made arrangements for a massive import of cattle, either on the hoof or already cut into sides.
We never saw the White Palace events, being busy in the smaller towns, but I learned they put on an opera or a musical play in the natural amphitheater in the hills.
The Winter Carnival is the longest running, a season of gatherings that stretches from the traditional Thanksgiving time of late November to the New Year. Typically, the White Palace swirled with activity throughout the season with many small parties, culminating in the biggest celebration of the year to welcome the new calendar.
The New Year’s party, unlike the others, was an occasion for the regular workers and small businessmen to attend and even stay as guests of the Maynes family. Maynes showed the most animation at the New Year’s party. He enjoyed mixing with “his people” as he styled them.
The staff, even the Grogs, joined in the celebration. Even the poor cooks had the night off, the celebrants made do with premade soups and wrapped sandwiches and pickled offerings to go with their winter beers, vintage wines, bourbons, and other spirits.
Why this digression? I wished to give an idea of the lifestyle and pursuits of the privileged “Quisling” class, if you will, and also show that society in this part of the Kurian Order was not so sharply divided. Again, there is a natural impulse for diarists of their own life under the Kurians to make the Quislings more evil than most actually were and their own histories free of any taint of collaboration beyond the minimum required for survival. In the Coal Country, the Quislings had, for the most part, good relations with those under them, even admitting them to their most exclusive streets and homes at times.
Now we shall turn to the opening of the great rift that would bring down the Kurian Order in these rugged hills.
• • •
About a quarter of Maynes’s “appointments” never happened. Before his final interview and adjudication of their case, they disappeared into the hills—though on one occasion while I was with him there was a suicide reported.
Maynes reacted nonchalantly to the evidence that information about his schedule was leaking out of the White Palace. “Just as well; didn’t want to talk to that son of a bitch anyway”; “They’ll run him to ground and he’ll be sorry”; or even, “This is a small patch of ground, taller than it is wide. Everybody knows somebody and word gets around.”
From a man who drove around in an armored bus that rattled like a hailstorm when birdshot bounced off it or flaked on the inside where it had absorbed a bullet from a deer rifle, such an attitude showed courage, or perhaps fatalism. The Coal Country was a long, long way away from any organized freehold. The Green Mountain boys were closest and had the best path in, but they were busy in New England and on the Great Lakes. Southern Command was the next closest, but that would have meant a long and difficult trek across Kentucky or Tennessee.