Grantville Gazette - Volume V (13 page)

"After the end of the current semester, Carol will be working for the state government. Tony Adducci has asked her to take a job at the Department of Economic Resources. Aura Lee works for the Grantville/Ring of Fire local government, so you might want to think, too, which level of government you'd rather have Idelette studying while she is with us."

Juliann, who was still standing, looked down and interrupted Inez. "I've never had a thing against Aura Lee, mind you, since that's the question Mr. Cavriani came to get answered. I don't have a thing in common with her, but nothing against her. She must have had a dozen chances, in all those years between when Joe started going out with her and she finally married him, when she could have done something that would have broke his heart and spirit. But she never did. So I'm not going to hear anyone say a word against her."

"All those years?" Cavriani asked.

Juliann switched her gaze to him. "They were already eyeing each other before Joe went into the army after he finished his junior year. Back before Grantville had this big consolidated high school. That was 1973 and she was sixteen, then. They saw each other whenever he came back and they wrote back and forth. I know that because when he got out of the army, he had a box with five years' worth of letters from Aura Lee saved up in it. Which makes me sort of think that it would have been when he was home on leave the summer of '74 that they got to the point of 'gone fishin',' instead of just 'a wishin'.' If you take my meaning. He even managed to get leave and come back to take her to her senior prom. That was '76; they cut it so close that Dennis picked him up at midnight after the prom itself was over to take him to Fairmont to catch the bus back and her father came later and picked her up from the after-prom party."

"Knowing that she had attended with Joe?" Inez asked.

"There ain't no flies on Willie Ray Hudson, Inez." Juliann picked up her root beer. "There wasn't nothing sneaky about it. I know they saw each other as regular as possible all the time she was at WVU. He got out of the army in '79. The army was the best deal anyone could have imagined for Joe. He came out with his high school diploma plus all sorts of certifications, including fire fighting. He was in transportation the whole time. Then he got the GI bill to take a technical course. She graduated in '80, right in time to land in the middle of the storm about her sister Debbie seeing Chad Jenkins and then getting married to Chad Jenkins. Which she ducked out on by getting a job in Charleston and not coming back to Grantville."

Juliann took another sip. "I guess you could put it this way. I don't think they got married because they were having a kid. Not a case of, 'you can't fool Mother Nature.' I think they decided that the time had come to have kids if they wanted them at all, so they got married once Mother Nature decided to pick up the option they gave her, so to speak."

It didn't take Leopold Cavriani long to sort through the implications of that rather convoluted statement. He still found the marriage customs of the up-timers somewhat confusing, as in this apparent case of fidelity precedent to matrimony for a period of nearly a decade and a half—not unique by any means, he knew—whereas others entered into formal matrimony and then dissolved it with quite dizzying speed. Not to mention the concept that in the up-time world, children had been regarded as an . . . optional . . . aspect of marital relations rather than their essential purpose.

"I've never had a thing against Aura Lee," Juliann repeated. "Especially not since they named their girl for me instead of for Vera Hudson."

Even though Juliann's voice was raspy from years of chain-smoking, the cream in it could have been skimmed, whipped, and spread on top of strawberry shortcake, Inez Wiley thought.

"You do not know of Barbarossa?" Count August von Sommersburg looked at the secretary of the treasury of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and blinked. The story of Barbarossa was well known. "Even the encyclopedias of the up-timers recall the emperor who is said to be sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain in northern Thuringia, not far from my own lands."

"I don't doubt that they do," Tony Adducci said. "I've just never happened to come across him myself. My wife Denise might have, or my sister Bernadette. They have more education than I do."

Leopold Cavriani looked at him, thinking that the man was extremely intelligent, although he had little formal education compared to several other of the SoTF officials, with only two years of what the up-timers called "college." This did not bother Leopold, since he had no university training at all, himself. The Cavrianis sent only those family members who appeared to be in need of a somewhat more sheltered life into the academic world.

Adducci, an UMWA man, had become widely respected since the Ring of Fire for his reading into economic issues—partly, as he said himself, courtesy of his librarian wife's research skills. He had run for election under the Fourth of July Party right away in 1631 and was surprised when Mike Stearns picked him for secretary of the treasury of the NUS, now the SoTF. One son in the army, two sons still dependent upon him, and—Cavriani smiled—a daughter whose arrival two months before had bemused her parents more than a little. Baby Rosemary was twenty-one years younger than Tony, Jr.

Since the Ring of Fire, Adducci had been diligently reading up on the financial material that his wife and sister loaded on him and complaining with some humor that the Chinese word for strife was two women in the household. For three of those years, his statement that if a daughter was added, he might as well resign like the original secretary of treasury had been considered a joke by his colleagues.

"By those writers and dreamers who have had a vision of a
Germania
greater than the thousand squabbling principalities of the Holy Roman Empire," Cavriani said, "Emperor Frederick Barbarossa has been considered greater than Charlemagne in some ways. If he had not been betrayed by Henry the Lion, he might have been greater in all ways. Historians say that he died as an old man during the Third Crusade, drowned while crossing a river in Asia Minor. His body was never found."

"Then what's he doing in Thuringia?" Adducci asked.

"German folklore says that he never died at all," Cavriani answered. "That he, with his heroes, is there in the bowels of the Kyffhäuser, under the ruins of the Hohenstaufen castle. That in the hour of Germany's direst need, he will reappear in all his one-time power and glory."

"Sort of like King Arthur." Tony got up to refill their coffee cups.

"Supposedly," Count August said rather ruefully, "all of this is no idle fancy. It is said that once upon a time a peasant entered into the great cavern on the south side of the mountain and saw the emperor sleeping there in a magnificent room. He was sitting in an ivory chair at a marble table. His red beard had grown right through the table. There is another story of a piper who played for him, to entertain him during his centuries of sleep, and received a hat full of gold as a reward. Or other musicians who were rewarded with poplar branches that turned into solid gold as they walked home. About every century, it is said, a living person has been admitted into the presence of the sleeping emperor."

"Was this because he was interested in current events?" Adducci asked rather drily.

"It is said that each time he asked three questions. 'Are the ravens still flying over the mountain? Are the dead trees still overhanging the cliff ? Has the old woman awakened ?' Each time, the visitor answered, 'Yes, Yes, and No.' Each time, Barbarossa replied, "Then I shall have to sleep another hundred years."

"What did each question mean?"

"The ravens led him to battle. So if they were still at his mountain, there was no battle he needed to fight. The dead trees would blossom when it was time for him to come forth. Those who study the lore of the ancients believe that the old woman was the giant druidess who confronted Drusus and prophesied that the Romans would come to disaster, who was too old to follow Widukind's retreat, so he buried her under a pile of stones with the words, 'She will come back.' Come back to prophesy disaster to the enemies of the Germans, of course."

"I think I've got it," Tony Adducci said. "Frederick Barbarossa is for you guys here in Thuringia what Jock Yablonski was for us in the United Mine Workers back in West Virginia."

Count August blinked in turn.

"Here," Tony said. "Let me tell you about Jock."

He'd tell him about Jock, Tony thought to himself. He just wished that he didn't have to tell him about Tony Boyle at the same time. Sommersburg had found that history of the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City that Melissa Mailey stuck into the books designed to teach him about the American political system a lot too inspirational already.

"His name was Jablonski, really, but he spelled it with a 'Y' so people wouldn't pronounce it wrong. Joseph Jablonski. Jock Yablonski."

Tony got up. He talked better when he was standing up, walking back and forth. "Jock was born in Pittsburgh—that was in Pennsylvania, the state just north of West Virginia. As far as geography went, it was all part of the Appalachian highlands, all part of the great coal fields. He went into the mines as a boy. His father was killed in a mine explosion. He moved up through the business side of the union. When he was only twenty-four years old, he was elected to represent fifteen thousand miners on District Five's executive board. That board made union policy. He was active in UMWA politics for nearly forty years. John L. Lewis, the greatest of the UMWA presidents, called him his right-hand man. Lewis said, 'Whenever I have trouble in the coal fields, I need him.'"

"John L. Lewis?" Cavriani asked.

"You can find him in all the encyclopedias if you look. He was famous," Tony shrugged off the interruption. "There wasn't any real democracy in electing the UMWA presidents. When Lewis died, an old man, one of the vice-presidents, stepped into the office, and he appointed Tony Boyle as vice-president, who succeeded in turn. Boyle was no militant—didn't confront the owners on safety issues, for example. He actually opposed the extension of benefits for black lung disease—coal miners' pneumoconiosis—by the Pennsylvania legislature, and was furious when Yablonski went over his head to get it passed. Called it insubordination. Boyle was also a manipulator—turned the districts into trusteeships, which meant that the membership wouldn't be allowed to vote for their district officers any more. He'd appoint them."

"I take it," Count August said, "that democracy was not universally appreciated up-time. Not even in your West Virginia."

Tony Adducci smiled grimly "You take it right. It's funny in a way. Just like you have your Barbarossa right here in Thuringia, the crisis in the conflict between Boyle and Yablonski came to a head right near Grantville. You've maybe heard people singing the song about the 'Mannington Mine Disaster.' It was at Farmington, right beyond the border of the Ring of Fire, heading east past the high school. There was a big explosion in Consolidation Coal Company's number-nine mine. Ninety-nine miners were inside; only thirteen managed to escape right away. They got eight more out later. That left the rest of them to die underground. Seventy-eight men."

He continued to pace. "It was a disaster, but it wasn't a surprise. Safety people had known for a long time that cold weather increased the danger of methane. But there weren't any special warnings; they didn't follow the federal safety regulations, either. Boyle didn't show up until more than two days later. All dressed up, with a rose in his lapel. He didn't say anything about the safety violations; he didn't speak with the families of the victims; just went back to his office in Washington, D.C. Even praised Consolidation. After fifteen more explosions, the company sealed off the mine to cut the fires off. With the men still down there."

"This, I take it, was not a popular move," Cavriani commented.

"According to Jock's son Ken, Jock said, 'But that sonovabitch Boyle. With those people dead in the mine, how could that bastard stand up and praise the company's safety record the way he did?' And Jock decided run against Boyle in the next election."

Adducci slammed his fist down on the table. "Boyle had control of the machine. Jock lost. But Tony wasn't satisfied with that. He set some goons from District Nineteen to get rid of Jock. Three months later, about, Ken wondered why his father hadn't shown up for the Inauguration Day events. He went to the house and found his father dead. And his mother and sister. Brutal. Jock had five gun shells pumped into him; his wife Margaret two; his daughter Charlotte two. They were shot in their beds. Blood all over their beds."

"Somehow," Count August commented, "most of your books about American politics do not seem to include episodes such as this."

"Of course they gloss over them, especially the school texts. That's why it's up to us to remember. What's that quote? 'People who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.' In short, then," Tony Adducci summed up, "Jock Yablonski led the fight against corruption in the UMWA. He fought against Tony Boyle and his machine. He didn't go away just because he was dead. A couple of months after he was murdered, people organized the Miners for Democracy. It tried to accomplish reform from inside the organization. Also worked to improve mine safety conditions. To get better health benefits for all miners.

"Three years later, a federal judge overturned Boyle's election on the grounds of massive vote fraud. The court ordered a new election. MFD ran a slate and won. It wasn't all over like magic, then. There was vote fraud again in District Thirty-One a year later. It was five years before Boyle was convicted of arranging the murders. As they say, 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'"

"It is," Count August said, "a truly magnificent mythos. Worthy indeed of comparison with Barbarossa. I had not realized that you had such."

"Myth?" Tony was shocked. "I was eight years old when Boyle's thugs shot Jock Yablonski. My daddy had taken me to lots of his rallies." He reached out across the table, extending his arm and turning his hand upwards so that the count could see his palm. "I've shaken his hand. There's a snapshot at home, somewhere, showing me doing it. I was just a little kid, four or five years old, maybe. But I shook Jock Yablonski's hand myself."