Project Purple

14 - The Governor

The Cowleech died during the night, and now all the women, and some of the men, demanded a discontinuance of the entire project.

Like it was that easy.

"This is no simulation-Someone has died," the Preacher said at the emergency free man's meeting that night in the Chapel.

The Governor knew that the women and the servant, Badger, were clustered under the open window, and on the other side of the door, straining to hear their words, and he pretended, along with the other free men, to speak in confidence. What was he going to do? - Coerce the others to wear earplugs? Force them down to the river so the upper class free men could talk in private?

What it came down to was that none of them really knew what things were supposed to be like in the year 1613.

"Tis an uncouth existence," the Governor said, toking from his pipe, "Of that we all know."

Governor Wallace O-Keefe had been, in the early days, secretly giddy the organizers had entrusted ultimate responsibility of the colonial project to him. He knew it wouldn't be an easy task-taking thirteen modern Americans all the way back to the seventeenth century. But as the hard months wore on, the realization came over him that he was inadequate at the position; it demanded much more than he was capable of giving.

"I'm just too laid-back for this," he confessed into his diary cam.

Chicken-hearted my have been a better term.

Even the younger teachers in the university history department called him 'Wally the Worm'. Wallace had been painted long ago as too weak-kneed to ever chair the entire department.

And it hurt.

Wallace wanted to be head of the history department more than anything else in his life. But he was finally persuaded to use his yearlong sabbatical to get far away from things, to forget about the sordid eye gouging of academia.

"People got dirty, people starved, they got hurt, they died."

The men nodded; they knew that.

Wallace was near fifty, of charitable girth, and with tangled grey hair. His movements were slow and patient, and his countenance was that of the good teacher; he knew how to say things in ways that could be immediately understood. And he was patient, even with those slow to catch on to the mindset of what constituted acceptable ideas, or behavior, in early America.

He knew others were alarmed by this tolerance for deviancy, considering it a serious flaw for a magistrate in a harsh era that had little mercy for those who didn't follow the rules.

"So what if I'm punished for ditching Chapel? I was exploring - And you can't tell me that the colonials never explored the land."

Such went the Goatwench's appeals, to which his standard reply went something like, "One must attend the Sabbath."

Scarlet Letters as castigation, and the recent four-hour stint in the pillory appeared to do little to reel her in-Her attitude was just as insubordinate as before, and she still refused to wear her headwear.

Wallace sensed as early as May that they were headed for real trouble-Their ominously isolated location was, with the exception of occasional jet contrails high in the sky, absolutely void of human activity anywhere around them. They had absolutely no connection with the outside; it was like they had been forgotten.

And where was their team leader? What would happen if they ran out of food? - They were going through their supply at a faster pace than had initially been figured; that was a cold, indisputable equation.