Alas, Babylon

“I’m not sure how we’d go about it. Last I heard the courthouse in San Marco wasn’t operating. For a while it was an emergency shelter like our school. I don’t know what they use it for now but certainly not for issuing marriage licenses. And the county clerk has disappeared. I heard in the park that he took his family and started for an uncontaminated zone in Georgia where he used to live.”

Without moving her head she said, “Randy, under martial law, can’t you make your own rules?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose so.” “Well, make one.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I certainly am. It may be an old-fashioned, Before-The-Day attitude but if I’m going to have children I’d like to be married.” “Children! Are you going to have a baby?” Thought of the difficulties, dangers, and complexities of having a baby, under their present circumstances, appalled him.

“I don’t know. I can’t say that I am, but then again I can’t say that I’m not, can I? I would like to marry you tomorrow before you go off chasing highwaymen.” She turned on her side, to face him. “It isn’t really convention. It is only that I love you very much, and that if anything happened-I don’t have any bad premonitions, dear, but you and I know that a bad thing could happen-well, if anything happened I would want the child to have your name. You’d want that too, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Randy said, “I would want that very much. I’m not going to put the truck on the road until late in the afternoon that’s when the highwaymen took Dan-so there’ll be time.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “It’ll be nice to marry on Easter Sunday.”

He took her hands and drew her up and held her. Over her shoulder he saw a pair of green eyes and a dark snout sliding downstream past the edge of the dock. It was spring and the gators were out of their holes. He had heard somewhere that the Seminoles ate Bator meat. Cut their tails into steaks. It was a source of meat that should be investigated. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking about food at this time but he was hungry again.

Chapter 11

Elizabeth McGovern and Randolph Bragg were married at noon that Easter Sunday. The bride wore the same white silk dress she had worn to the sunrise service in Marines Park. She was unsteady on high heels, for she had not worn heels since The Day.

The groom wore his Class A uniform with the bold patch of the First Cavalry Division on his arm and the ribbons of the Korean War and Bronze Star on his chest, along with the blue badge of the combat infantryman. He wore the uniform not because of the wedding but because it was required in the radioed orders to reservists assuming active duty, such as ambushing and killing highwaymen, which he presently intended to do.

The bride was given away by her father, W. Foxworth McGovern, the retired Cleveland manufacturer. Bill McGovern, who had been helping Malachai cut gun ports in the thin steel sides and rear doors of the grocery truck, wore greasy dungarees. A chisel had slipped and one of his hands was bleeding.

The best man was Doctor Daniel Gunn. He was clad in a tent sized, striped bathrobe. Grinning through his red beard, his head bandaged, a square gauze patch covering his right eye, he looked like a turbaned Mediterranean pirate.

Among the guests was Rear Admiral Samuel P. Hazzard (USN, retired) who wore khaki shorts, a khaki hunting vest bulging with buckshot shells, and during the ceremony held his gold braided cap across his stomach.

The matron-of-honor was Mrs. Helen Bragg, the presumed widow of Colonel Mark Bragg. She furnished the wedding ring, stripping it from her own finger.

The ceremony was held in the high-ceilinged parlor of the Bragg house. The marriage was performed by the Reverend Clarence Henry, pastor emeritus of the Afro-Repose Baptist Church.

Randy was certain it was perfectly legal. It was performed under his Order No. 4, written that morning in Sam Hazzard’s house.

Malachai and Bill McGovern had been working on the truck, and Randy was breakfasting with Dan Gunn, when the women and children returned from Marines Park. The services had been wonderful, they said, but the news they brought was terrible. During the night highwaymen had raided the isolated home of Jim Hickey, the beekeeper, on the Pasco Creek Road. They had killed Jim and his wife. The two children had walked to Fort Repose and found their aunt’s home. Whether it was the same band that had beaten Dan Gunn was uncertain. The Hickey children were inarticulate and hysterical with fear and shock.

Randy, raging for immediate retaliation, had raced to the Admiral’s house with the news. The Admiral’s experience in meeting the unpredictable and brutish pranks of war had saved them from premature or imprudent action. “Wasn’t this sort of thing exactly what we expected?” Sam Hazzard asked.

“I suppose so, but dammit.”