(con't...)
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 wouId actually strike him. At last, though, they had accepted defeat and turned down the mountain, following the gashed trail of the back-hoe 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 de-certification 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.