"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

chore.
It was not easy on Daniel to be the teacher's son. There was taunting and, on a
few occasions, fights with the class bullies. My own difficulty, teaching him, was in
resisting the natural inclination to favor him—and then resisting the contrary instinct to
be too harsh on him, so that he would not seem to be favored. He was a subtle young
man, though, and clearly understood the tightrope I was walking.
The work was tiring but curative, like diving into a pool whose waters conferred
forgetfulness. Philadelphia was lost in the day-today minutiae of teaching and
administration.
Daniel was a handful, as any boy would be, growing through his teens. His initial
disappointment with Dodge, though, gave way to a kind of worldly status, a big-city
bravado. Few of his classmates knew anything of life except on the plains, and
Philadelphia was much more exotic to them than Dodge City had been to Daniel.
A couple of months into the school year, and after I started teaching Sunday
school, I suddenly realized that I was happier than I had been since college. And more at
peace with myself than I had ever been.
Dodge had a history, but it was basically a Midwestern town, and I was finding
that I liked the people and the life in that part of the country. I won't pretend that I didn't
miss the cultural advantages and sometimes-gay social whirl of Philadelphia, but we did
have plays and concerts in Dodge, and truly exuberant parties.
People didn't lock their doors when they went out. If you were short of money, the
grocer would let you keep track and pay when you could. If anyone were in trouble—
even if he was not particularly liked—his neighbors would join forces to help out.
Part of it must have been shared tribulation. After the hooligans like Bat
Masterson and the Earp brothers moved on, Dodge settled into agriculture, chiefly cattle.
Then the disastrous blizzard of January '86 buried most of the cows in great shoals of
snow, pushing them up against fences, to suffocate and freeze. The next year's drought
took care of most of what was left.
So there was a quiet sense of people tempered by trouble, self-reliant but
interdependent.
Daniel didn't share my comfort. The restlessness that had made him want Dodge
was redirected, in his junior year, to the Yukon, when gold was discovered and thousands
of men went north to make easy fortunes, or so they thought.
I wouldn't let him leave school, hoping that he would wake up and see the value
of a college education (there was even a college of sorts in Dodge at the time). He was a
sullen and dreamy student that last year, but he did stay in school, I think more for my
sake than for his own ambition. A different kind of boy would have run away.
Then in his senior year, '97/'98, the newspapers started calling for Spanish blood,
beating the drum for Cuban independence. In frozen February, the battleship Maine blew
up and sank in Havana Bay. The saber-rattling grew more and more intense. Like most of
his boy classmates, Daniel wanted to put on a uniform and go teach those Spaniards a
thing or two.
Those of us old enough to have had lives shattered by the Civil War—by "Bloody
Kansas," in Dodge—were not so enthusiastic about the adventure. War was declared in
April, and I forbade him to join the army battalion forming up in Topeka.
We had hot arguments about it, his manly blood aboil against my maternal
protectiveness. I had been a mother far longer than he had been a man, though, and I won
temporarily.
In July, he would turn eighteen, and be in charge of his own destiny. "What about
the Yukon?" I said, desperate, preferring that he face blizzards rather than bullets. He