Audiobook 017 – Overview of Hagerty’s History

Chapter 1 The Break His television is on before the coffee is ready, which is the first mistake.

Martin Cray stands in his kitchen in Ashgrove, Illinois, on the morning of the nation's 250th birthday, watching a split screen.

On the left side of the screen, tall ships move through Boston Harbor under a sky the color of a recruiting poster.

On the right side, a river of black moves through Tehran.

Millions of people, the crawl says.

The camera pulls back until the mourners stop being people and become a current, a dark water flooding the avenues, and somewhere in that current, carried on shoulders, is the coffin of a man the United States killed at his desk.

without warning that is the phrase the pentagon spokesman used though he used it as a boast the strike achieved total surprise martin has been turning the phrase over since tuesday night the way the tongue returns to a broken tooth total surprise an eighty seven year old man at his desk in the small hours and half a world away a young officer in an air-conditioned trailer and between them nothing but the doctrine that says we may The anchors on the left side of the screen are wearing flag pins and talking about the fireworks barge.

The anchors do not see what is on the right side of the screen.

That is the arrangement, Martin thinks.

That has always been the arrangement.

The screen is split so that we don't have to be.

He turns the television off and the kitchen is quiet, except for the coffee maker finishing its work.

Through the window over the sink he can see the Henderson's flag already out, and past it, at the end of Locust Street, the sawhorses going up for the parade.

In two hours, he is expected on the reviewing stand in front of the courthouse, where ever since Ed Wallace's stroke, Martin Krieg, who taught American history at Ashgrove High School for four decades, has read the Declaration of Independence aloud to his town.

He knows the document the way a priest knows the mass.

He does not need the laminated copy the Chamber of Commerce keeps in the gazebo.

and standing in his kitchen on the morning of july fourth twenty twenty six with the coffee going cold in the pot martin realizes that this is precisely the problem he knows it too well the parade forms up at ten ashgrove does the two hundred fiftieth the way it did the two hundredth which martin also attended a young teacher then with his first classroom barely broken in fire trucks with their chrome blinding in the sun the high school band playing the same sousa march it played when some of these grandparents marched in it shriners in their little cars a float from the methodist church with children dressed as founders a boy of nine in a cotton-wool wig sweating under the cocked hat waving a cardboard quill Martin walks along Main Street toward the courthouse, and people call his name.

Mr. Cree.

He taught most of this town.

He taught the mayor, who was a C student with a good heart, and he taught the woman who runs the diner, and he taught two of the police officers working the barricades, and in a sense, he thinks, moving through the smell of grilled bratwurst and sunscreen, he taught about the Fourth of July parade itself.

Every certainty on these faces is a certainty he graded homework about.

For forty years he stood at the front of a classroom in this town and handed down the American story, and the story was beautiful, and the story was load-bearing, but he never once asked what the load was that the story was holding up.

Doris von Kutsche from the library catches his elbow near the reviewing stand.

She has the laminated declaration in a canvas tote bag with a picture of a cat on it.

Big one this year, she says.