--- Osbie Z, cont'd ---

My saccharines, my dears: son, nieces, nephew, you all know the words of the first prayer we pray? It goes:

Glory to our Lady! And to the Twelve from whose number she is derived. She is the dancer under Lune, she is the one who walked the path of the arrow to its end. She is the first to know the names of all the beasts between the firmaments, she is the never-have-knelt and never-have-wed.

When our people were born from the mud, bitter and shaking and afraid, when the tooth and the claw ruled the Earth, and the first men begged heaven for mercy, our Lady took up her crown and her name.

Glory! Diana the Huntress! She who is subjugation of wild things, the straightest line to aim, and marchioness of the borders. She is our most holy, our saint called Independence.

Grace of the Twelve be upon us. Twelve thrones, rods, crowns, and names!

You were with us from the beginning and we did not deserve you. Bless us, and have mercy on us, until the day you are raised up again from the dead to restore the world of men and we might finally be free.

And then some people add a short bit about you-know-who (which, you know, take it or leave it I’m not about to judge, all I’m saying is I ain’t ever seen him on the TV, that’s all). And we finish by saying: Amen.

The name of the first Twelfth to die was Smith. We don’t know him very well, not much what he was like, or the breadth of his dominion, nor his secret titles, and not even the right prayers to honor him – to this day and twenty years of our speculations, I’ve got not even a whit of a clue how it happened. No, it’s the road-people who wander the Endless Interstate that make their living ’cross his side of the Argument. They tell us that Smith was one of the oldest of the Twelve, and he governed fire and metal. That’s why they call themselves Los Chromañeros, ‘the people of chrome’: in his honor. And they keep his mysteries tightly just the same way we have inherited the grace of our Lady.

On that night of the First Calamity, I slept on a cot inside of a Masonic lodge. I suppose that doesn’t mean much to anyone now, just a cool little ‘factoid’ for us old folks. The fraternity had opened its doors to shelter a few of us students, as long as we swore to never tell anyone what we saw inside.

Which is silly, by the way. Mostly it was a few big pretentious books, cigar smoke-stains, some charity things, and a nudie calendar in the bathroom. Big hoopla over nothing, let me tell you hwhat.

By morning, the apparatus of American rescue was out in full force. Roads were moving, wrecks were cleared, and our boys in overalls had set the winch and wrench against the very death of the fired piston: the national guard and the corps of engineers, and private enterprise were all mobilized and then some. Our heroes posed for us on every screen what glowed, stained up with grease and brake fluid and we cheered for them on all the avenues of media which was despairing the night prior. I made it home safe to my parents and we held each other and laughed and called it a vacation. There on day two, hot dang. Hot dang. It looked like we were winning.

What? Sorry, right. Boys and girls in overalls. Thank you Su-Hope.

My father lost his job on the third day. They called it a furlough, which means temporary, but his office could not recover from the disruption of national industry. He waited many long nights by the telephone, waiting for a return that wasn’t coming, and I could swear that was put the first white into his hair. Within two weeks, the government had wrote and signed the Guarding Robustness and Integrity in Transportation act, because all politicians are fools for grinding initials into catchphrases. Every road we had but the biggest was confined to be single file, every garage was opening a roadside service shack to haul and maintenance a stall the very moment it happened. Repair and ruin were matched at pace, and the boys in my class were starting to dream loudly of making mechanic their trade.

So, on the day my school reopened, I made my way riding unhappily on top of a second-hand bicycle, and I resumed my life with some unladylike language I hope you may forgive me for.

The first food shortage was chicken. Then our fruits began to stack up withered instead of ripe in the grocery. The price of cabbage shot up like a rocket, and I was coming to an intimacy with the taste of rice with which I could not ever before have imagined. If I was to explain the problem, I guess we were the victims of our own cleverness. We had this great big system for taking food out from the farms, to ship it around in giant boxy trucks that went a thousand miles a day all over. People had come to rely on it, figured we could all move wherever we wanted, live wherever we wanted. We stacked ourselves on top of each other in our cities by the thousands without even a stalk of corn grown in a hundred miles. That was just the way it was.

I wish I’d have offered my mom, or asked my dad to plant a garden then. Right then, right at the start.

The Feds were slow to declare the food emergency. At that point… well at that point they were doing something with the military I think. Something vicious. Something they weren’t being honest about. Maybe something necessary, I don’t know and can’t say. Wasn’t my place.

By November, some crazy, wonderful maniac out in Montana (or some such) had decided he’d seen enough of the suffering of his fellows. Man was a cattle rancher, and a character. Foulest mouth I’ve ever heard, and if I understand it, practically a wanted criminal half the time. Yet all the same, he organized a seven state operation, a whole army of other farmers and ranchers, practically. They put together the largest cattle drive ever seen on the continent, world too, maybe – set it up to move a million head from the middle west all the way out towards the hungry coasts.

That yahoo steamrolled over three Governors, outfoxed the 4th infantry, and probably saved a million people from starving that winter. He was on the news scandalizing us every night for a month too, but you know what you won’t believe? For the life of me, I can’t even remember his name. Ain’t that wild.

So. That was basically the start of the first Bitter Winter. The big B W numero uno. It didn’t even snow a lot that year. Some cold wind. Light flurries. But food was so expensive, it was so very expensive. I only thank my lucky stars that our family – well we never had it as bad as some. There was canned food, and bulk rice, and our neighbor once sold us a haunch off a deer he shot. No, we never had it close as bad as some.

Anyways, ah, we managed. And by late December, my dad had a job again. The U.S. of A. had announced the establishment of its first National Cycle Corps, for post, parcel and delivery. Our lockjaw world was starting to move again. That was the good news. The bad news was: guess how many bikes la casa Zugravescu had? From that day on, everywhere I went I had to walk.