Friday April 24th
So here’s the final part of the story of “The Piper”
You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
I turned towards the voice.
We looked at each other in silence.
The voice belonged to a youngish man – late twenties, maybe early thirties – with short cropped hair and a wild, young man’s beard. Soft, brown eyes looked at me steadily out of a face that clearly spent a lot of time outdoors. A substantial backpack lay on the ground next to him.
“Water?” offered the youngish man.
I nodded.
He reached down to his pack and passed me a large metal bottle. The water was tepid, but welcome for all that.
“I’ve been watching you,” said the youngish man as I drank.
“For how long?”
“A few days now. You’re not from here, are you?”
“No, I’m from back east. And you?”
“I was born here.”
He looked me over carefully.
“You take photographs?” he asked, nodding to my camera bag.
I nodded back.
“For business or pleasure?”
“Both, business mainly.”
I decided to offer him a bit more.
“I used to shoot documentaries, but business dried up, so now I shoot photographs.”
He nodded silently.
“And you?”
He looked at me, his soft brown eyes hardening a little.
“What do you do for a living?” I prompted.
“I survive.”
“On the streets?”
“In the country mostly. It’s easier. People round here…”
His voice tailed away into a shrug.
I waited.
“So what do you do with your photos?”
“If I’m lucky, they get published – along with whatever I write to go with them.”
“People or places?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you photograph mostly people or places?”
“People mostly – and the places they live.”
We eyed each other in silence.
“Why did you come down to the river today?”
“Not quite sure. I wanted to see how the town looked from down here – maybe get a different perspective on things.”
“And how does Hamblin look from down here?”
“Young.”
He looked at me steadily. Nothing showed on his face, but I could feel him reaching into me, testing me.
Then he moved abruptly. Turning away from me, he picked up his pack and hoisted it onto his shoulders. He turned back towards me.
“So do you want to take my photo?”
“Sure.”
“Come on then, let’s find somewhere cooler that doesn’t stink so much.”
I followed the young man as he climbed up the river bank onto the bridge then headed out of town towards the low hills that lay to the south of Hamblin.
After about twenty minutes he turned off the road and headed into the woods. It was much cooler in the deep shade of the trees. The air smelt green.
We continued to climb then suddenly we were at the edge of the woods, looking out over the countryside. The young man slipped off his pack and sat down looking out towards the town, laid out beneath us.
“Looks pretty normal from here, doesn’t it?” He spoke with an educated accent, with just a faint hint of the local, midwest drawl.
“OK if I get my notebook out?” I asked.
“Don’t you want to take the photo first?”
“Can’t do that until I’ve heard your story.”
The young man nodded.
“See that big, low white building over there? That’s a pharmaceutical lab, biggest employer in town. Independent outfit, run by an old, local family, the Pfeiffers – smart people, but sharp.
“When the virus was getting closer to us, old man Pfeiffer went to see the Mayor and put a proposition to him. If the town council paid his lab a million dollars he would use Hamblin to test the vaccine they had developed. Everybody in town would get a free shot. If the vaccine worked, then the council would have to pay Pfeiffer labs another four million.
“The Mayor agreed straight-off. Everybody in town got a jab. It worked. Not a single person in Hamblin got sick. Nobody died from the virus.
“But when old man Pfeiffer went to see the Mayor to get the rest of his money, the Mayor refused to pay. He said the lab would make a fortune from the vaccine now that it was proven. He said it was Pfeiffer who should be paying the council for letting him use the town as a test bed.
“Old man Pfeiffer was furious. He threatened to close down his lab and move it elsewhere, taking all the jobs with it. The Mayor just laughed at him and called his bluff. He reckoned Pfeiffer couldn’t afford to shut down and relocate. Now they had a proven vaccine, they needed to get it out onto the market as fast as possible.
“The folk in town generally agreed. People are pretty tight with their cash round here.”
The young man fell silent, apparently lost in some memory.
“So what happened?” I prompted.
“For a while nothing much. Then the old people started dying. They’d go to sleep one night and the next morning they’d be found dead in their beds. It happened real fast. Within a week there was nobody over 60 left in town.”
“So that why when I walk about town…”
“You get some pretty strange looks right?”
I nodded.
“People blamed Pfeiffer, but they couldn’t prove anything. The doctors said the old folk were all dying of natural causes.”
“It’s been like that for years now. Hamblin is a town without old people. Sometime after your 60th birthday you go to sleep and don’t wake up.”
“My God, what’s that like?”
“What’s it like? It’s hell, that’s what it’s like. Nobody talks about it, but the heart has been ripped out of the place. Everybody just lives in the here and now. There’s no…”
The young man looked at me searching for the word that eluded him.
“Wisdom?” I suggested.
“Yeah, right – that’s it,” he said. “There’s no wisdom.”
Crossing Corona Country 