Half Past Midnight (21 page)

Nodding, I smiled at her. “Thanks for the pep talk, coach.”

“Any time, kid. Now, go get back in the game.”

I kissed her lightly and headed back to the forge, where I could hear the whoosh of a bellows forcing air across the coals and the steady pounding of Mark’s hammer on hot iron as he and Brad continued to work. I rounded the corner of the barn and watched the two of them for a moment. Debra was right. Things weren’t all gloom and doom.

Mark, while still a quiet man, was no longer the solemn, taciturn giant who never spoke to anyone. After a year with us, he had finally opened up enough to begin to mingle and had married Jennifer Yarley, a young Mormon girl. They moved into the old Kindley house down the road and had recently announced that Jenny was pregnant. Brad had moved into another nearby home and built himself a smaller forge that he used to pound out more intricate projects in his spare time. I had taught him about making knives, and he showed a particular interest in Damascus steel. Because of my own interest in knife-making, I had always kept several books and articles on the subject as part of my “survival library,” and I let him read everything I had. Making Damascus required time and finesse, folding and layering different types of steel into patterns that both strengthened the blade and pleased the eye. It was something I had never had the patience for. He began to experiment on his own and was soon producing blades that were works of art I would never be able to match.

Each morning shortly after sunrise, he and Mark came to stoke the forge, or both forges if we needed them on that particular day, and prepared for the day’s projects, while I taught the morning’s self-defense classes.

Everyone kept us pretty busy repairing hand tools and pounding out nails. Nails! I got so tired of making nails! Everyone had to have nails by the hundreds. We spent nearly half of each working day with some aspect of making nails, melting scrap iron into billets, roughing out various sizes, driving roughed nails through sizing holes in the homemade anvils, then trimming and tipping them into finished product.

I would be the first to admit that much of the problem stemmed from the fact that I really didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. I had made the forge with the idea that knives would soon become a much sought after item. I figured that with a little help, I could soon be producing viable barter goods. But I soon found that though a smith was definitely in demand, knives alone wouldn’t keep me going.

George Winstedt, the local carpenter, came to me as soon as he heard about my forge and requested five hundred nails. No big deal, I thought. I worked out a method for making nails from scrap metal and had his nails in a few days.

Until that time, I simply hadn’t realized how much we needed nails. Anyone making repairs on a house or barn, anyone building… well, anything, soon discovered how much they needed them. It wasn’t long before they found out where to get them. Therefore, Mark, Brad, and I stayed very busy making them.

We repaired or reshaped garden tools. We made more nails. I actually learned to shoe a horse, and that wasn’t nearly as easy as they made it seem on those old westerns. We made still more nails. We also made meat cleavers, rotisserie skewers, horseshoes, axe heads, and other items for trading at the local market.

And of course, we made more nails.

But it wasn’t all like that. Some of the projects were enjoyable. The work I truly enjoyed came gradually. It derived from the attrition of brass cartridges for bullets. As they disappeared, more and more people began inquiring about knives, skinning knives for the hunters, as well as simple utility and butcher knives for the populace in general. Then the real fun began.

My students were the first to begin ordering combat knives and daggers. It was only logical, as the Kali that I taught was a molding of empty-handed, knife, and stick combat techniques, and I constantly surprised them with impromptu demonstrations of what I called
iai
knife techniques.
Iai
was the Japanese art of the sword quick draw. When I cocked my leg back for a side kick and magically had a knife in hand from a hidden sheath on my leg, they were usually quite impressed. I used these tricks to stress some of my personal philosophies.

“Never let yourself be taken by surprise,” I told them on one particular occasion. “Just because an opponent appears to be unarmed does not mean he
is
unarmed.”

I scanned their faces. “If you go into a situation expecting that the worst will happen, and you prepare yourself beforehand, then you deny your opponent the split-second of surprise he may be counting on. This, in turn, may give you the advantage since, when you don’t react the way he expects, he’ll have to readjust his actions to the new situation, which takes approximately half a second. Plan your attack with this in mind, and you might walk away from a fight that would ordinarily kill you.”

A week after that particular class, a group of bandits attacked one of the outlying homes. They were fought off, but at the cost of one Rejas citizen and nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition.

Seeing the possible end of the ammunition supply in sight, everyone wanted throwing knives and hideaways for backups. Then came the natural progression to swords and machetes. Finally, we were making arrowheads and crossbow bolts, spears, pole arms, and nearly any other hand-held weapon imaginable. My kind of toys.

They were crude at first, but functional. As our skills at the forge got better, so too did the quality of the products we made.

There were several more encounters with wandering bands of raiders in the next few months, and no one downplayed the necessity of self-defense. Firearms hadn’t disappeared, but bullets became increasingly valuable as more casings were lost in the field, damaged in accidents, or otherwise rendered unusable. Many people in town had presses and dies for reloading, but they had long since run out of extra casings and required the spent brass to be brought to them.

No one had access to the machinery necessary to manufacture precision parts, such as bullets. Even if we had, we didn’t have a reliable power source with which to run said machinery. Until we got the power station up and running, precision machining was a pipedream.

I had mixed feelings on that. As an experienced machinist, I yearned for precision manufacturing to reenter our lives. Automotive parts, gun parts, parts for wells and gas pumps, hundreds of little things that everyone had once taken for granted, all required tighter tolerances than we could presently hold. So I longed for the old conveniences along with everyone else. On the other hand, I was certain that once the call went out for machinists, I would end up drafted into wearing yet another hat, and there weren’t nearly enough hours in the day as it was.

Since I’d been clued in by Zachary, I began to notice how much time Megan spent with Eric’s son. Apart from occasional smiles and lingering touches in class, she and Andrew kept their romance pretty subdued. I noticed that the two of them often disappeared together after classes, though, and Megan often didn’t show up at home for a few hours afterward. I knew it was getting serious when she started referring to Eric as “Pops.” Andrew seemed a nice enough young man, and a fair student, but it bothered me that I had barely even noticed him until my ten-year-old son pointed out his relationship to my daughter. Then, one morning, Andrew asked to see me privately.

“Mr. Dawcett?” He seemed nervous as he pulled me aside after class. “Could I speak to you for a minute?”

“Sure, what can I do for you?”

“Well, um, I was wondering if I could… I mean…” He took a deep breath and held it a second before he practically exploded. “Mr. Dawcett, I’d like to ask your permission to court your daughter with the intention of marrying her and the assurance that my intentions are fully honorable, and I’d like you to know I would always treat her right, and I’d never do anything to hurt her, of course, I probably couldn’t hurt her even if I wanted to, but I’d never want to, sir, and I’d do my best to make sure she always had whatever she needed as long as it’s within my power, and I’d never do anything to disrespect you or her, and I swear I’d treat her right. Did I already say that? Oh, yeah, but it’s true, and I’d be truly grateful if you could see your way clear to give me your consent to court her.”

By the time Andrew blurted all that out,
I
was out of breath. I didn’t know whether to laugh at his nervousness, thank him for respecting me enough to ask my permission, or to try to get him to loosen up a little. For a few seconds, I simply stared at him in surprise.

He licked his lips nervously, shifting from foot to foot, and I finally realized that if I didn’t say something soon, the poor boy was likely to implode.

“You want my permission to date, er, court Megan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if I understood all that, you intend to marry her if she’ll have you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What would you do if I said no?”

The poor boy’s mouth fell open. “Sir?”

“What if I tell you I don’t want you to see my daughter, and I forbid you from ever coming around here again?”

“But… you can’t, I mea… you wouldn’t, would you? Sir?”

I simply stared at him.

“But we love each other!”

Still, I remained silent.

Finally, Andrew straightened his shoulders. “Mr. Dawcett, Megan and I have spoken about this a few times. We know how we feel about each other, and we both know that we want to continue seeing each other, and we felt you and Mrs. Dawcett deserved to know. But with all due respect, sir, if you were to tell me I couldn’t see her anymore,” he paused and swallowed nervously, “well, I guess I’d end up sneaking around behind your back. I ain’t saying it’s right, but I don’t think I can just stop seeing her. It’s like I said, I love her.”

I raised my hand to rub my chin, and nearly laughed aloud when he flinched at my movement. “Well, Andrew, if you’re determined to see her no matter what I say, then I guess I’d better not forbid you, huh?” I grinned at his dumbfounded expression.

“Hell, son! You don’t think I’m going to try and tell that girl she can’t see you, do you? She’d probably hurt the both of us!”

Andrew shook his head as he finally realized he’d been had. “Yes, sir, I guess she probably would.”

“Just one thing, Andrew.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If you’re planning to marry Megan, I think you’d better learn to stand a little stronger for what you believe in.”

“Pardon me?”

“If you never planned to stop seeing my daughter, you didn’t have to pretend you needed my permission to see her. You’re both adults. I appreciate you wanting to let me and Mrs. Dawcett know, and I definitely approve of your motives, but it would have been just as good if you’d simply told me your intentions as a matter of respect, rather than go through all the rigmarole of pretending that anything I had to say would make a bit of difference in the matter.”

Embarrassed, the young man nodded. “Yes, sir. I see what you mean.”

“And you’re really going to have to learn to stand on your own two feet if you plan on marrying a headstrong woman like my daughter. It’s one thing to love her; it’s another to let her walk all over you. She’ll never respect you if you do that.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that it’s a little different talking to you, sir.”

I grinned. “Why don’t you drop all the ’sir’ stuff?” I stuck out my hand. “Just call me Leeland. If you’re planning to marry my daughter, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other.”

Chapter 11
* * August 14 / Year 3 * *

Lune obscurcie aux profondex tenebres,
Son frere passe de couleur ferrugine:
Le grand caché long temps soubs les tenebres,
Tiendra fer dans la playe sanguine.

The moon is obscured in deep gloom,
his brother becomes bright red in color.
The great one hidden for a long time in the shadows
will hold the blade in the bloody wound.

Nostradamus –
Century 1, Quatrain 84

Rejas was nudged onto the path to war on August fourteenth, though at the time, we were unaware of where we were headed. For me, it began as I lectured a group of my students on knife fighting and personal philosophy.

“So what makes this stuff you teach any different than the old taekwondo I took when I was a kid?” René Herrera had started classes a year ago after her husband had been killed during a skirmish with a band of looters. A fierce, determined woman, her attitude sometimes bordered on belligerence. Her fighting style was aggressive, but effective. In René’s particular case, I was less concerned with her fighting techniques than with her mental and emotional self-control. So when she asked a seemingly insolent question, I usually chose to ignore the tone and address the question itself.

In this instance, I had a ready answer since I had often been asked the same thing when I spoke with prospective students back in Houston. “It’s a different way of looking at things. Let me ask you something. If a rattlesnake attacks you, what do you do?”

“Get out of the way”

“And if you can’t? Say, if your back is to a wall, and there’s just no place to run. Then what would you do?”

“I guess I’d try to kill the snake.”

“All right. So what if you were back against that same wall, and you were being attacked by a mouse?”

She chuckled. “What?”

I repeated, “You’re in the same corner, nowhere to run, but this time it’s a mouse coming after you.”

“I think I’d probably wet myself laughing!” Many of the others laughed, too. I smiled with them as I paced.

“Why? What’s the difference? Why are you more worried about the snake than the mouse?” I turned back to René. “I know it seems silly, but there is a point to this.”

The young woman looked at me like I was crazy. “’Cause the snake is poisonous?” Her uncertainty made it seem as if she was asking a question.

“So what if I tell you that the snake isn’t poisonous, and the mouse is? Then which one are you more worried about?”