Miranda

Once I had met Morgan and seen for myself what Cathy was dealing with I decided to forget about the kiss that she had given me and to soften my treatment of her. We returned to being close almost immediately, following the quick passing of some residual awkwardness. Lisa and I talked at length in bed the night that we’d met Morgan, about what a strange choice Cathy had made in choosing to date someone to whom she was clearly very much a secondary priority and who valued his life so cheaply that he placed himself in mortal danger on a regular basis. Lisa explained to me that what she had observed about Cathy was that she was attracted to people who were sympathy cases, like us. The kiss that she’d given me when we’d been swimming in the borehole, which she’d told me was out of curiosity, I understood to have been brought on by something more, a need to have someone close to her that could be an ever-present source of intimacy the way her boyfriend couldn’t. Gaining these insights about her, I couldn’t continue keeping her at a distance the way I had been. There was also the matter of the visits we made to the hospital. Cathy’s mother Kristin, who said that my violin playing was well beyond my years, had come to greatly look forward to our visits, I suspected partly because she was happy to see that her daughter had made some friends.

There was still so much about this world that we didn’t know. Living in Huntingdale we were getting very little exposure to the world and our understanding of the people here—their behaviours, customs and values—was still very limited. There was only so much I could learn from watching movies and TV shows, and while the theme of casual relationships was something I encountered regularly on TV shows like the 1990’s classic Friends I couldn’t imagine myself or anyone from Prospera being so casual about physical relationships. Our Prospera values had served us well thus far but we had a long way to go to fully assimilate ourselves to this world, and we may yet have to learn to adapt to a completely different world from the one we were currently living in. Mattis’s troop surge had us worrying everyday about what the consequences would be should his troops overwhelm the Canadian military and the #OI fighters. Frank’s prediction was that nothing but horror and carnage would ensue. Every evening when he said grace before dinner he prayed for a swift end to the war that would leave as many unharmed as possible. We could hear the foreboding in his voice every time he prayed; sometimes his pleas were so visceral that I would silently pray with him. The few times I prayed with Frank an undeniable feeling of calm was present within me, as I’m sure was the case when everybody prayed. The existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God may have been highly implausible but there was nothing dubious about the acts of kindness that Frank and the sisters were performing, leading me to think that religion was perhaps not the most absurd thing in the world. I couldn’t share what I was thinking with Hannah; despite all of the work that she was doing with Sister Bernadette, Hannah’s knowledge of the many atrocities committed in the name of religion throughout history that she’d acquired from her mother made it impossible for her to be anything but sceptical of it. Lisa was much more malleable to the idea of faith due to the admiration she had for Sister Audrey. We talked about faith a lot, just the two of us. Lisa was adamant that she couldn’t become a person of faith but she told me not to be afraid to explore whatever interested me, no longer were we in Prospera where going against what was expected of us was a reason to be afraid. I took her advice and on Sunday morning I attended church with Frank, who was happy to have me along. To my surprise Hannah didn’t say anything about my decision to attend church, probably she had too many of her own things to focus on, like her pregnancy.

In church I followed Frank’s lead on when to stand up, when to sit and when to kneel; not being familiar with any of the words I didn’t pray or sing hymns with everybody else when they did. The priest, Father McKibbon, used his sermon to talk about the new troop levels announced by Mattis and called on his parishioners not to give in to fear and to be unsparing in their compassion and generosity to those that had been affected by the war, which he described as a test of their faith and of their humanity. A collection box was passed around, the receipts from which would go toward helping the refugees. Frank gave me a twenty dollar note to place in the basket, which, when it got to us, was full of money, all of it notes; people had given generously just like Father McKibbon had asked them to. Out of curiosity I followed Frank to the front of the pews to receive communion and got away with it by mimicking what I had seen done by those that had gone before me. The wafer that represented the Body of Christ was dry but strangely tasty; when I drank the Blood of Christ I got my first taste of alcohol, which was astringent and burnt my throat a little on the way down. After the service everybody gathered outside the church and talked amongst themselves in a convivial atmosphere. Frank and I did the same. He introduced me to everybody who came to talk with him and they were all nothing but kind. They couldn’t say enough about what a wonderful person Frank was and how much they admired him for all that he was doing. They were happy to hear that Kristin was finally back at home and they were looking forward to seeing her back at church soon and they were happy to be meeting me, one of the refugees that Frank had taken into his own home. One of the people that came to talk to Frank was Marjorie, the church choir director, who, upon hearing from Frank that I played the violin, asked me if I’d like to join the church music program, to which I responded that it was something I would need to think about.

Overall I enjoyed my first visit to church. The consciousness of the parishioners of the plight of those impacted by the war was heartening and the atmosphere outside the church after the service was filled with warmth. At home the only one who was curious about my visit to church was Lisa.

“How was it?” She asked me when I returned to the cottage.

“It was fun, actually, very interesting.”

“Are you going to go again?”

“I think I might; the mood among everybody was very positive, I’ve never felt that before.”

“Maybe I’ll come with you next time, see what you’re talking about for myself.”

“I don’t know if you’d like it but you should go at least once, to see what it’s like.”

Cathy had lent me a black dress with white flowers on it to wear to church along with a pair of heeled shoes. I went into mine and Lisa’s room to change out of them so that I could give them back to her, passing the closed door of Kevin and Hannah’s room on my way. They liked to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday mornings, as did Lisa and I before that Sunday. The news about Hannah’s pregnancy had brought about a number of changes, almost none of them positive. Frank’s attitude toward Hannah had changed; he didn’t think it was right for a young girl like her to be getting pregnant, he told me as much on the drive home from church, and he made no secret of his displeasure. Cathy’s response to this was to say to us “Now you know what I’ve been going through my whole life”. She and Hannah became closer during this period of frigidity between Hannah and Frank, which none of us expected to be permanent with everything that Hannah had done for the farm. There had been a change in her relationship with Kevin as well. They were both unsure of their ability to raise a child in a world that was still very much alien to them, in a country that could very soon be under the control of the belligerent Americans. They spent a lot of time in their room together with the door closed, quietly talking through their predicament.

Of course weighing on all of our minds more than anything else was the greater troop levels that the US would be sending into Canada. It would only be a short matter of time before the results of Mattis’s new strategy became known to us. We followed the news closely for days, waiting for information about any new developments in the war. Before long we had our answer. One month later stories were being reported on the news about the Canadian forces on the Alberta-Montana border falling back under immense pressure from US forces. Shortly after the new offensive began Mattis addressed a joint session of Congress and hailed the fighting spirit of the country’s troops. Canadian towns, fearful of fragmentium drone strikes, refused to accommodate Canadian troops and allowed US military personnel and vehicles to pass through them unobstructed. All across the southern parts of the country there was widespread capitulation; the US army’s march through Canada was inexorable and soon Mattis got what he had ostensibly invaded Canada for: oil started flowing into the United States from Alberta via the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, bringing relief to a country that had been struggling with fuel shortages for almost two decades. The #OI members were furious about the capitulation by their fellow Canadian citizens. ‘Is this what we’ve been fighting and dying for? So that you could just give up?’ was their message to their fellow Canadians in more than one online video posting. The group decided that the best way to rouse their fellow Canadians for the fight that they were facing was to start posting videos of recent successful attacks on their website. Unfortunately, the group didn’t have many successes to tout. As part of his revamped strategy, Mattis had ordered for stronger defences of military bases, oil infrastructure, oil transports and all military convoys. #OI fighters tried their best but they were now up against too much hardware. In every engagement with US troops the #OI fighters were all killed, further depleting the morale of the nation.

Miraculously, Morgan was not one of the #OI fighters that had been killed in the series of failed attacks that the group had undertaken in the wake of the US’s strong push northwards. He made contact with Cathy days after we had been learning of the losses that #OI had been suffering. From what we were able to hear from Cathy’s side of the phone call it was clear that he wasn’t prepared to admit that the situation had turned against #OI to the extent that it was futile for them to continue.

“Are you okay?...Where are you?...Are you safe there?...Is anybody with you?...Do you know how worried I’ve been? Why didn’t you contact me sooner?...You’re not planning on doing any more attacks are you?...Don’t say that! Things have gotten too dangerous! Why don’t you just come back to Huntingdale? You can stay with us, my father won’t mind so long as you’re no longer part of that group…No, Morgan, please just listen to me…Morgan!”

“He hung up on me,” she turned to us in the living room and said.

“What did he say?” Lisa asked.

“He said that if I think he’d give up so easily then I don’t know him at all.”

Cathy was in a great deal of distress following her phone call with Morgan. We did what we could to help her, but outside of finding Morgan wherever he was and bringing him to the farm there was very little we could do. The danger that he was in was unlike any that he’d been in before. The Americans were showing no mercy to #OI members; they had been the greatest thorn in Mattis’s side. Any that weren’t killed in conflict were captured and executed. Taking a page out of the group’s own playbook, the executions were filmed and the videos posted online. Those videos were our only way of knowing if Morgan was okay; as horrible as they were we had to watch them all. The executions that we watched were performed using a variety of methods: some were shot, some were hanged, some were decapitated.

For Hannah, who would soon be bringing a child into this world, the videos were too much. Everything about the human race that in Prospera they tried their utmost to keep out of the village was running rampant because of this stupid war. The Americans were being bullies, Morgan was being irrational, the rest of the world was being cowardly; nowhere that we looked did we see hope.

Having gone with Frank to church every week since my first visit with him, I abruptly stopped going with no plans to return. I couldn’t accept the idea that everything that was happening was all a part of some grand holy plan that one day we would all be able to make sense of; I found such an explanation overly simple and downright stupid. What kind of idiotic plan called for thousands to die, for thousands to lose family members, for Hannah to endure dangerous levels of stress when she was pregnant?

The effect that all of the news about the American’s advance was having on Hannah was terrible. She tried her best to hide it from us but the increasing amount of physical discomfort that she was experiencing was obvious to us all; we just hoped that she and the baby weren’t in any serious danger.