They were led into a refrigerated studio by whispery production assistants, miked, foreheads blotted dry of sweat by the makeup lady-not that it was possible to sweat in these subarctic temperatures.
Waddowes arrived, preceded by a flutter of aides with earphones. He was all smiles, looking like a fifty-five-year-old altar boy who’d just had a swig from the sacramental wine cruet in the sacristy. Cass smiled back, trying not to overdo it for fear her grin would freeze in place.
Five, four, three…Trumpets volunteered, kettledrums beat their somber, self-important tattoo.
“Economic calamity…,” the host intoned over montage footage of depressed-looking traders on the floor of the stock exchange. “Retiring Baby Boomers trigger a Social Security crisis”-gray-haired sixty-somethings in golf carts, fleeing one of Cass’s mobs-“and angry youths saying they’re not going to pay for it anymore.…?Foreign banks refusing to go on financing America ’s debt-” Segue to a shot of Japanese currency speculators shaking their heads furiously. “Have we-finally-reached the tipping point that some are now calling ‘Boomsday’? Our guests on this week’s Greet the Press…”
Terry had been right. The OMB director treated Cass like an unwelcome bug that had splattered on Uncle Sam’s vast windshield and simply needed to be wiped away, if possible without going to the trouble of pulling the vehicle over to the side of the road.
Cass patiently and courteously countered that her generation was quite open to hearing another solution, as long as it emancipated them from having to pay the bill for the excesses of the prior ones. He announced that the White House was boldly “considering” appointing a “blue-ribbon presidential commission” to “study the problem.” Cass-still polite-suggested that this was akin to being on a runaway train and appointing a commission among the passengers to “study the problem that they were about to drive off a cliff.” That being the case, the OMB director sniffed with all his Harvard hauteur, he hardly expected a “callow PR person” to understand the complexities of a highly engineered locomotive. After all, so many moving parts…It went on like this until Gideon Payne, impatient of being left out of the fight, came out swinging.
“May I-might I-interject?”
“Please,” Waddowes said.
“Ms. Devine is ironically named. Because her scheme to kill off America ’s most sacred resource-her respected elders-is nothing short of demonic.”
“At least”-Cassandra smiled-“I’d be willing to give my mother a choice whether she lives or dies.”
Across the country, fifteen million viewers gasped.
Chapter 14
Cass’s assault on Gideon Payne put her back on the nation’s front pages, not that she had been off them for long. It also put Gideon Payne’s past back in the present, not that anyone had quite forgotten it. It was a matter of some delicacy.
Gideon’s great-great-great-grandfather had, indeed, been the Confederate sharpshooter who put a.55-caliber miniй ball into Randy’s great-great-great-uncle at Spotsylvania in 1864. For this conspicuous bit of marksmanship-General Sedgwick was one of the better Union generals and a favorite of Grant’s-Gideon’s ancestor was given an engraved gold watch and $100.
After the war, he used the money to buy a hundred acres of timberland in Alabama and an old sawmill. (Cheap, in 1865.) He worked hard, prospered, and handed it over to his sons, and within half a century the family business owned tens of thousands of acres of timber forest in the South and saw and paper mills. At one time, all the Scrabble tiles, tongue suppressors, and Popsicle sticks in the United States were made from Payne pine. They also made inexpensive coffins.
Gideon’s father was a kindly, rotund man who preferred to sit on the front porch and drink mint juleps rather than busy himself overly in the family business. He loved Gideon, who was born corpulent and remained so, and would dangle him endlessly on his knee and make up stories about mythical ancestors who, like the real ancestor, had performed heroic deeds on battlefields. His wife, Gideon’s mother, Cassiopeia Idalia Clampp-she could hardly wait to marry and get rid of the name-was very different in nature from her husband: tall, slender, fine-looking, and angry. (“Born angry,” her father used to say, “and she’ll probably die angry.”) Her own family fortunes dwindling, and determined not to live a life of poverty, she met her future husband one day at the Colonial Cup in Camden, South Carolina, and determined to marry him. It is not especially hard to seduce an amiable, rotund, and feckless pleasure seeker. All you have to do is lead him to the lotus patch and then to the altar while the poor beast is still in a daze. This she did with efficiency and in due course provided him an heir in the form of Gideon and a few perfunctory sisters.
She had hoped for a son in the traditional southern mold, which is to say Yankee-hating, manly, attractive, good on the back of a horse, and reasonably sober. Gideon possessed none of these qualities, except for the last. His favorite children’s book was Ferdinand the Bull, the story of the Spanish bull who didn’t want to fight in the ring and preferred to sit in a field all by himself smelling flowers. His great joy, oddly, for one of his generation (and wealth), was reading the Bible, a pastime that took root one day at age five, when his father, nestling him on his lap, read him from Judges 6, chapter 11.
“And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was”-Gideon would giggle at his father’s rendition of the oddly emphasized verbs in the King James version-“in Ophrah…Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites.”
Gideon was hooked. But then it is pleasant to find your own name in a book that everyone in the world owns.
His father died when he was twelve. When the bereft child asked his rather dry-eyed mother what had caused his papa’s death-it was a heart attack-his mother replied, “Eating and drinking and not getting off that porch.” This was delivered with an icy stare, the implication being that her son was somehow complicit in his death. And that was the end of Elysium for young Gideon.
A few weeks later, she handed him a rifle and said, “It’s about time you killed something.” Gideon was horrified. He was sent off whimpering with one of the plantation hands with instructions not to come back without a kill.
The hand, an old colored man-as they were called then-took pity on the poor boy and shot a possum. He proudly told the evidently suspicious Cassiopeia that her son had by his very own self shot the creature off the highest limb of a sparkleberry tree by the creek.
For weeks afterward, Cassiopeia referred to her son at the dinner table, in front of guests, as “our own little Lee Harvey Oswald.” Shortly thereafter, Gideon was sent off to a military academy in Mississippi, where his physique and temperament were not in step with those of the young savages. His torments were great. He was dangled from windows, had his head immersed in toilet bowls. His knowledge of the Bible made him a figure of ridicule and earned him the nickname “Preacher Boy.” One day he escaped. It could not have been called a heroic attempt inasmuch as he was found shortly, tucking into an enormous ice-cream sundae at a soda fountain in town. But he refused, absolutely, to return to what he called “that place of desolation.” Cassiopeia really had no choice but to take him back. Still, she was determined to make a man of him.
To that end, she sent him to work the night shift at the Payne paper mill on the Coosoomahatchie River. In those pre-environmentalist days, paper mills emitted a noxious stink redolent of rotten eggs, sulfur, and vomit. The very thought of toiling away in this mephitic inferno appalled Gideon. He begged for reprieve. Cassiopeia would have none of it.