SUNRISE AT COFFIN ROCK
by Raymond K. Paden
Thomas sat alone on the cold
stone, shivering slightly in the chilly
pre-dawn air of this April morning. The
flashlight was turned off, resting beside him
on the bare granite of Coffin Rock, and
involuntarily he strained his eyes in the
gray non-light of the false dawn, trying to
make out the shapes of the trees, and the
mountains across the river. Below, he could
hear the chuckling of the water as it crossed
the polished stones. How many times had he
fished there, his grandfather beside him?
He tried to shrug away the
memories, but why else had he come here
except to remember? Perhaps to escape the
inevitable confrontation with his mother. She
would have to be told sooner or later, but
Thomas infinitely preferred later.
"Mom, I've been expelled from the
university," he said aloud in a
conversational tone. Some small night animal,
startled by the sudden sound, scurried away
to the right. "I know this means you won't
get that upgrade to C-3, and they'll probably
turn you down for that surgery now. Gee, Mom,
I'm sorry." It sounded so stupid. "Why?" she
would ask. "How?"
How could he explain that? The
endless arguments. The whispered warnings.
The subtle threats. Dennis had told him to
expect this. Dennis had lost his parents back
in the First Purge back in 2004, and his
bitter hatred of the State's iron rule had
failed to ruin him only because of his unique
and accomplished abilities as an actor. Only
with Thomas did he open up. Only with Thomas
did he relate the things he had learned while
in the Youth Re-education Camp near
Charleston. Thomas shuddered.
It was his own fault, he knew. He
should have kept his mouth shut like Dennis
told him. All of his friends had come and
shook his hand and pounded him on the back.
"That's telling them, Adams!" they said. But
their voices were hushed and they glanced
over their shoulders as they congratulated
him. And later, when the "volunteers" of the
Green Ribbon Squad kicked his ass all over
the shower room, they had stood by in nervous
silence, their faces turned away, their eyes
averted, and their tremulous voices
silent.
He sighed. Could he blame them?
He'd been afraid too, when the squad walked
up and surrounded him, and if he could have
taken back those proud words he would have.
Anyone is afraid when they can't fight back,
he'd discovered. So they taught him a lesson,
and he had expected it to end there. But then
yesterday had come the call to Dr. Morton's
office, and the brief hearing that had ended
his career at the university. "Thomas,"
Morton had intoned, "You owe everything to
the State." Thomas snorted.
The light was growing now. He
could see the pale, rain-washed granite in
the grayness as if it glowed. Coffin Rock was
now a knob, a raised promontory that jutted
up from a wide, unbroken arm of the
mountain's stony roots, its cover of soil
pushed away. There were deep gouges scraped
across the surface of the rock where the
backhoe had tried, vainly, to force the
mountain to reveal its secrets. He was too
old to cry now, but Thomas Adams closed his
eyes tightly as he relived those moments that
had forever changed his life.
The shouts and angry accusations
as the agents found no secret arms cache
still seemed to ring in his ears. They had
threatened him with arrest, and once he had
thought the government agent named Goodwin
would actually strike him. At last, though,
they accepted defeat and turned down the
mountain, following the gashed trail of the
backhoe as it rumbled ahead through the
woods.
At home, he had found his mother
and father standing, ashen faced, in the
doorway.
"They took your grandpa," his
father said in disbelief. Just after you
left, they put him in a van and took him."
"But they said they wouldn't!" Thomas had
shouted. He ran across the yard to the old
man's cottage. The door was standing open and
he wandered from room to room, calling for
the grandfather he would never see alive
again.
It was his heart, they said. Two
days after they had taken him, someone called
and tersely announced that the old man had
died at the indigent clinic a few hours after
his arrest. "Sorry," the faceless voice had
muttered. Thomas had wept at the funeral, but
it was only in later years that he had come
to understand the greatest tragedy of that
day: that the old man had died alone, knowing
that his own grandson had betrayed him.
That grandson was Thomas Adams,
and he was now too old to cry but in the
growing light of the cold mountain dawn, he
did anyway.
Thomas was certain that his
father's decertification six months later was
due to the debacle in the forest. As much as
anyone did these days, they had "owned" their
home, but the Certification Board would still
have evicted them except for the intervention
of Cousin Lou, who worked for the State
Supervisor. As it was, they lost all
privileges and, when his father came down
with pneumonia the next autumn, medical
treatment was denied. He had died three days
after the first anniversary of Grandpa's
death.
Thomas had been sure that he would
be turned down at the University, but once
again his cousin had intervened and a slot
had "opened" for him. But now that's
finished, he reflected. He would be unable to
obtain any certification other than manual
laborer. "Why didn't I keep my mouth shut?"
he asked the morning stillness. In a tree
behind him, a mockingbird began to sing its
ageless song, and as if in answer, the forest
below began to twitter and chirp with the
voices of other birds, greeting the new
day.
No, what he had said had been the
truth and nothing could change that. The
State was wrong. It was evil. It was
unnatural for men to be slaves of their
government, always skulking, always holding
their tongues lest they anger The State. But
there is no "State," Thomas considered. There
are only evil men, holding power over other
men. And anyone who speaks out, who dares to
challenge that power, is crushed.
If only there was a way to fight
back!
Thomas shifted on the stone,
hanging his feet off the downhill side. His
feet had almost touched the grass that day,
but now, although his legs were certainly
longer, it was at least ten inches to the
scarred rock surface below. As he kicked his
heels back and forth, he could almost hear
his grandfather speaking to him from long
ago...
"One day, America will come to her
senses. Our men will need those guns and
they'll be ready. We cleaned them and sealed
them up good; they'll last for years. Maybe
it won't be in your lifetime, Thomas. Maybe
one day you'll be sitting here with your son
or grandson. Tell him about me, boy. Tell him
about the way I said America used to be.
"You see the way this stone
points?" the old man was saying. "You follow
that line one hundred feet..." Thomas' heels
were suddenly still. For many minutes he did
not move, playing those words over and over
in his mind. "...Follow that line..."
What hidden place in his brain had
concealed those words all of these years? How
could the threats have failed to dislodge it?
He stood upon shaky legs and climbed down
from Coffin Rock. In his mind's eye, he could
see the old man pointing and he walked down
the hill and through a clinging briar patch,
counting off the paces. The round stone did
seem solidly buried, but he scratched around
near the base and found that the rock ended
just an inch or so below the surface. "One
man with a good bar can lift it," Grandfather
had said. Thomas forced his fingers beneath
the stone and, with all the strength in his
21-year-old body, he lifted. The stone came
up, and he slid it off to one side. Cool air
drifted up from the dark opening in the
mountain. Thomas looked to the right where
the scars of the State's frustration ended,
only 15 or 20 feet away. They had been that
close.
He squatted and stared into the
darkness and then remembered his flashlight.
In a moment, he was back with it, probing
into the darkness with the yellow beam. There
was a small patch of moisture just inside,
but then the tunnel climbed upwards toward
the ridge. On hands and knees, he entered.
It was uncomfortably close for the
first 20 feet or so, then the cavern opened
up around him. The men who had built this
place, he saw, had taken a natural crevice in
the granite rock, sealed it with masses of
poured concrete, and then covered it with
earth. The main chamber was bigger than the
living room of a house, and they had left an
opening up near the peak of the vaulted roof
where fresh air and a faint, filtered light
entered.
Wooden boxes and crates were
stacked everywhere on concrete blocks, up off
the floor, stenciled with legends like,
RIFLE, CAL. 30 M1, 9MM PARA., M193 BALL, 7.62
X 39MM, and 5.56MM. He pushed between them
and crawled to the wall where he found
cardboard boxes wrapped with plastic
sheeting. They were imprinted with strange
names like CCI, OLIN, WW748, BULLSEYE, and RL
550B. He did not know what the crates and
boxes contained, and was afraid to break the
seals, but near the center of the room he
found a plastic-wrapped carton labeled OPEN
THIS FIRST. With his penknife, he slit the
heavy plastic wrapping.
It contained books, he saw with
some disappointment. But he studied the
titles and found that they were manuals on
weapons and how to repair them, how to clean
them, how to fire them, and ammunition ...
how to store it, and how to reload it. And
here was something unusual: A History of the
United States. He lifted it from the carton
and crawled back to the open air. Leaning
against a stone, he tore open the heavy vinyl
bag that enclosed the book and began to read
at random, flipping the pages every few
moments. On each page, something new met his
eye, contradicting everything he had ever
been taught.
Freedom is not won, he learned, by
proud words and declaration. He remembered a
quotation taught at the University: "Blood
alone moves the wheels of history." An
Italian dictator named Mussolini had said
that, but now he read of a man named Patrick
Henry who said, "The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants." Mao was required
reading at the University, too, and he now
recalled that this man -- called a "hero" by
the State -- had once said "Political power
comes out of the barrel of a gun."
Freedom is never granted; it is
won. Won by men who are willing to die,
willing to lose everything so that others may
have the greatest possession of all:
liberty.
Mentally, he began to list those
he could trust. Men who had been arrested for
speaking out. Women whose husbands had been
arrested and never returned. Friends who had
been denied certification because of their
fathers' military records. The countryside
seethed with anger and frustration. These
were people who longed to be free, but who
had no means to resist ... until now.
Thomas laid the book aside and
then worked the stone back into position,
carefully placing leaves and moss around the
base to hide any evidence that it had been
disturbed. He tucked the book under his arm
and started for home with the rays of the
rising sun warming his back. He imagined his
grandfather's touch in the heat. A forgiving
touch.
A
long, hard struggle was coming, and he knew
with a certainty that defied explanation that
he would not live to see the day America
would once again be free. His blood, and that
of many patriots and tyrants would be
spilled, but perhaps America's tree of
Liberty would live and flourish again.
There is a long line stretching
through the history of this world: a line of
those who valued freedom more than their
lives. Thomas Adams now took his place at the
end of that column as he determined that he
would have liberty, or death. He would be in
good company.
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N-E-X-T - P-A-G-E
P-R-E-V-I-O-U-S - P-A-G-E
