"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

was a country estate (obviously, since we were in Athabaska, far from the eastern seats of power),
owned by two influential New York mercantile families, who maintained their villa not only as a source of
income but as a kind of resort, safely distant (several days' journey by train) from the intrigues and
pestilences of city life. It was inhabited—ruled, I might say—not only by the Duncan and Crowley
patriarchs but by a whole legion of cousins, nephews, relations by marriage, high-born friends, and
distinguished guests in search of clean air and rural views. Our corner of Athabaska was blessed with a
benign climate and pleasant scenery, according to the season, and these things attract idle aristos the way
strong butter attracts flies.

It remains unrecorded whether the town existed before the Estate or vice versa; but certainly the town
depended on the Estate for its prosperity. In Williams Ford there were essentially three classes: the
Owners, or aristos; below them the leasing class, who worked as smiths, carpenters, coopers, overseers,
gardeners, beekeepers, etc., and whose leases were repaid in service; and finally the indentured laborers,
who worked as field hands, inhabited rude shacks along the west bank of the Pine, and received no
compensation beyond bad food and worse lodging.
 My family occupied an ambivalent place in this hierarchy. My mother was a seamstress. She worked
at the Estate as had her parents before her. My father, however, had arrived in Williams Ford as a
transient, and his marriage to my mother had been controversial. He had "married a lease," as the saying
has it, and had been taken on as a stable hand at the Estate in lieu of a dowry. The law allowed such
unions, but popular opinion frowned on it. We had few friends of our own class, my mother's blood
relations had since died (perhaps of embarrassment), and as a child I was often mocked and derided for
my father's low origins.

On top of that was the issue of our religion. We were—because my father was—Church of Signs. In
those days, every Christian church in America was required to have the formal approval of the Board of
Registrars of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. (In popular parlance, "The Church of the Dominion,"
but this was a misnomer, since every church is a Dominion Church if it is recognized by the Board.
Dominion Episcopal, Dominion Presbyterian, Dominion Baptist—even the Catholic Church of America
since it renounced its fealty to the Roman Pope in 2112—all are included under the Dominionist
umbrella, since the purpose of the Dominion is not to be a church but to certify churches. In America we
are entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it is a genuine Christian
congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect. The Board exists to make that distinction. Also
to collect fees and tithes to further its important work.)

We were, as I said, Church of Signs, which was a marginal denomination, shunned by the leasing
class, recognized but not fully endorsed by the Dominion, and popular mostly with illiterate indentured
workers, among whom my father had been raised. Our faith took for its master text that passage in Mark
which proclaims, "In my Name they will cast out devils, and speak in new tongues; they will handle
serpents, and if they drink poison they will not be sickened by it." We were snake-handlers, in other
words, and famous beyond our modest numbers for it. Our congregation consisted of a dozen
farmhands, mostly transients lately arrived from the southern states. My father was its deacon (though we
did not use that name), and we kept snakes, for ritual purposes, in wire cages on our back acre, next to
the outbuilding. This practice contributed very little to our social standing.

That had been the situation of our family when Julian Comstock arrived as a guest of the Duncan and
Crowley families, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, and when Julian and I met by coincidence while
hunting.

At that time I had been apprenticed to my father, who had risen to the rank of an overseer at the
Estate's lavish and extensive stables. My father loved animals, especially horses. Unfortunately I was not