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"In a moment," Rudi replied, made a last adjustment to the lie of his plaid, and walked out.
Di
Rudi's nose told him what awaited the humans just before his eyes could.
Now, don't be drooling down your plaid, Rudi Mackenzie, he told himself. You must do the Clan credit among strangers!
A cold roast suckling pig lay at one end of the long table in brown-glazed glory on a slab of carved oak, with an apple in its mouth; a sirloin of beef rested at the other, pink at the center where a thin slice had been shaved away. Between them were breads and hot biscuits and yellow butter, salads of greens and cherry tomatoes and onions and peppers and radishes dressed with oil and vinegar, potato salad with its creamy whiteness flecked with bits of red, deviled hard-boiled eggs with their yolks replaced by minced ham forcemeat, platters of fresh boiled asparagus, cauliflower and eggplant baked with cheese, sauteed mushrooms, glazed carrots…
Well, so much for being afraid we'd impose, Rudi thought, and wrenched his attention away for the introduction to his host's wife, Alexandra, and his daughter-in-law, Cecilia.
"Padre, will you do the honors?" Abel Heuisink said to Ignatius; from the crucifixes, Rudi assumed the family were Catholics.
They all bowed their heads, and then the pagans murmured their own graces, which got them startled glances.
Mrs. Alexandra Heuisink must have been around twenty at the Change; in her early forties she was still very attractive, in a full-figured way which her cotton dress showed to advantage, and it was obvious where Jack had gotten his reddish brown hair. Jack's wife, Cecilia, was dark-haired and quietly pretty with very pale blue eyes; her children were apparently too young to sit at table. Besides the married daughter off towards Dubuque, the other children were Jack's twelve-year-old younger brother, George, agog for the travelers' tales, and sisters, Andrea and Dorothy, quiet and grave at first with so many strangers present; they were about two years apart, alike enough with their russet ponytails to be twins at first glance.
Rudi gave them an account of the buffalo hunt with the Sioux, and got wide-eyed wonder; Virginia Kane told a story of Coyote Old Man, and got a laugh.
"I wish I'd been with you!" George burst out, when he'd heard a bit more of the band's passage.
His father gave him a stern glance, and his elder brother an exasperated one; obviously having run away to soldier in a free company himself undermined any prospective words of wisdom to a youngster with his head fermenting full of romantic yeast. Rudi gri
Time to deflate his enthusiasm a wee bit, he thought. No danger of doing it too much, not with a spirited lad like him. Heroing is something fate and duty inflict on you, boyo, not a grand game you seek out for the fun of it.
"Not while we were holed up in that cave, and my sister"-he nodded towards Mary-"and I were like to die."
"Did it hurt?" the boy asked with ghoulish enthusiasm; no normal lad that age really believed in agony and death.
I did, Rudi thought. But then, I met them earlier than most. Aloud he went on with malice aforethought:
"It wasn't that so much, as not being able to go to the latrine by myself, and having to be swaddled and cleaned like a baby."
The two younger girls made disgusted faces, and George looked as if he'd like to; he also went thoughtful for a while.
" This hurt," Mary added, tapping her eye patch. "But that wasn't as bad as knowing I'd never get it back."
Jack winked at Rudi behind his sibling's back, and the two elder Heuisinks gave him slight, silent, grateful nods.
He didn't let conversation interrupt his eating more than he had to until well into the meal. It concluded with apple and cherry pies and ice cream with walnuts, and then the children were sent off; Cecilia shepherded them away. The two blond maidservants cleared the table, and everyone moved to softer chairs around a low settee where they set out a pear brandy much better than the indifferent wine which had accompanied the meal, and real coffee in an old-looking silver service and bone-china cups.
"Thank you, Francine, Marian," Alexandra Heuisink said. "That'll be all."
The girls looked a little startled, but went. Alex went on to the group:
"They're perfectly trustworthy, but what you don't know, you can't blab."
Abel nodded: "I'm not in as good odor with the current Bossman as I was with his father."
"Dad's head of the Progressives," Jack explained, nibbling a biscuit. "He's the Vakis' Friend-sorry, Dad, but that's the word people use. Anthony Heasleroad's a Ruralist."
"Anthony Heasleroad is a Heasleroadist first, last and always," his mother said, as she poured the coffee. "And his father was a strong-arm artist who got into office by what amounted to a coup d'etat. And murder, in my opinion."
"We did what had to be done, 'Zandra," her husband said. "I know your father was a good man-"
"-who had a convenient accident," she replied. "He was also the legitimate Governor, and he wouldn't have tried to make the position hereditary."
"Yeah. But he would have let us be swamped instead of closing the Mississippi bridges. We certainly couldn't afford a civil war then, things were too close to the edge. We all saw what happened in Illinois. And we don't want one now."
"Maybe Tom Heasleroad was a necessary evil, but damned if I can see why Tony's necessary at all."
"He's got the State Police and the Ruralist Party on his side, Mom," Jack pointed out. "It's necessary not to get sent to the mines for sedition and violating the Emergency Legislation."
"True," his father said. He turned to the travelers. "Sorry, but if you're going East, some of this local politics is relevant."
"Some of it sounds unpleasantly familiar," Fred Thurston said. Virginia Kane nodded beside him.
"Do have some coffee. We get a little these days," Mrs. Heuisink said, taking some knitting out from a basket beneath her chair. "Just recently."
"The coffee's the only thing we've had that didn't come from Victrix Farm, apart from some of the spices," her husband said proudly, relaxing from the tension of a moment before.
"It's a fine estate, sir," Rudi said. "I've come all the way from the Pacific Coast and haven't seen better, and few to equal it. Though of course it must have been finer still, before the Change."
"You folks still use farm for the holding a man who works the soil cultivates, don't you?" Abel Heuisink said.
"Yes. Well, we Mackenzies say croft; they say farm in Corvallis and the Bearkiller territory and virgate in the Portland Protective Association."
Abel Heuisink smiled a little sourly. "Before the Change, Victrix Farm actually was just a farm in that sense of the word, though a pretty big one-a lot more of it was cultivated, too. Cash grain, mostly. My family and six or seven men handled it all with some contract work now and then, and I could have done with fewer if I hadn't bred show stock as a hobby. Then it turned into a refugee camp. And now it's more like a town than a lot of Iowa towns were, back then."
Rudi nodded wisely; he knew that folk had been thin on the ground outside the cities before the Change.
It seems u
"All that machinery," he said. "With so few hands to eat the produce, it must have been a gold mine!"