Rating: PG-13
Warning: Mentions death, torture, sex and other End of the World things, though not in a terribly explicit manner.
Disclaimer: If it were mine, they’d still be airing it. And the DVD extras would be mostly Lennie James talking about how awesome everything is.
Summary: Music never dies.
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Tumblin' Down
After it’s all over and they are writing history again, a song becomes popular in the East. It’s an old one, rewritten for the times as happens when people cling to old things for comfort. Almost no one who hums it knows what it means. They sing it in churches, children’s choirs, and there’s talk of adding it to the national opus. In the West, they roll their eyes.
Like the heavenly chariot swinging low, like the rocket’s red glare, like the four calling birds of old, the words are only half the story.
In the West, it was sung quietly at first. Through the hatred of difference and the bitterness of defeat, the pain of brother against sister, it was used as a code. You can break a radio, but when you shoot a child for singing, people stop doing what you tell them to, and every time they bend beneath your whip, they come up with a rock.
Every time the Americans fought one another, someone wrote a song about it. Yankee Doodle, John Brown’s Body, and now this.
And music never dies.
Jake Green fought the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho!
Jake Green fought the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came a’tumblin’ down.
Jake Green never thought he’d get old until Eric died. It was then he realized that getting old was his curse. He would lead them into battle, turning cornfed farmboys into God knows what, and then he would bury them.
After the Texas Decision, the National Government had wanted him in Ohio. Jake had no intention of going anywhere but home. Jericho was deep behind the Blue Line, awash in a sea of ASA supporters and almost entirely dependent on J&R. They were going to need him. He found an ally in the Texan ambassador who had saved them that day in Cheyenne, and soon enough he was back in town.
It got bad. People were hungry, farms were lost and Ravenwood preyed on the weak. Two months in, the ASA began conscripting its citizens into the army, but soon learned the folly of putting a loaded gun in the hands of a Jericho Man. All through the countryside, Jericho became the rallying cry of those who resisted, those who knew the ASA was wrong, and their resistance came at a high price.
Men and women who couldn’t find Jericho on a map lined up to pay it.
Teachers fought the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho!
Teachers fought the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came a’tumblin’ down.
His wife was dead. The word reaches him long after he has given up hope of surviving the war, but not before he starts thinking of the bed he sleeps in as “theirs” instead of “hers”. Heather doesn’t speak to him for two whole days, for once at a loss in the face of a problem she can’t fix, doesn’t want to fix. For his part, he pulls her close in the dark and kisses her with a fervour he hasn’t matched since the day he pulled her out of prison. She stays with him, in spite of the marks on her body from the hell he put her through, he will win this war for her if it means earning back her trust.
They both have nightmares. In his, people starve or get mown down by Ravenwood guns. She won’t talk about hers, but she screams “I don’t know!”, and he knows she dreams of torture. She lies even in her dreaming: she knew everything and gave none of it away. The burns left by the electrodes are hidden by her bra, but sometimes she flinches when he touches her, and neither of them ever forgets. Her nightmares stop in the winter, when the biting cold forces them to sleep even closer. He watches her, haunted by the cold.
Most of their burn ration had been donated to the hospital. Almost all of her furniture had been gone by the time the war started. That first winter, they burn the Jennings and Rall textbooks, starting with the Histories. As the scant pages curled back beneath the licking tongues of flame, he sees her wipe a tear from her eye. He wraps his quilt around her, pulls her close, and whispers a reminder that the Government textbooks, the real ones, are locked up safe in the Town Hall.
He will die of cold, those books untouched, if it will make her smile again.
Hawkins fought the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho!
Hawkins fought the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came a’tumblin’ down.
Jim Hawkins lied almost as often as he told the truth. Allison wasn’t stupid. She knew her father probably wasn’t coming back. So when Jake Green showed up and told the family that Hawkins had gone to Ohio to brief the National Government on what had happened, she used the time her mother spent crying to plan.
Allison was a good shot, but Bonnie Richmond had been a better and it hadn’t served her very well. Hawkins had, however inadvertently, left his daughter one of the only operational computers in the state of Kansas, and a whole host of technical data to teach her how to hack the ASA government system. It was, perhaps, a sign of the times that Beck and Jake barely blinked when a seventeen year old girl showed up at the op centre and started suggesting strike options.
Allison Hawkins became the eyes and ears of Jericho, of the Western Resistance. She coordinated their victories, dealt with their losses; she never fired a shot, but she held all the weapons. And on every hack, every screen, she looked for evidence that her father was alive and fighting too.
But she knew she’d never find any.
Deaf girls fought the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho!
Deaf girls fought the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came a’tumblin’ down.
Trish went to California anyway. She told people she had been a law student, which wasn’t entirely a lie. And everywhere she went, she told the story of Bonnie Richmond.
Bonnie Richmond wasn’t the only person to stand up to Ravenwood, not even close, but her death was viewed as the final tributary in the watershed of undoing. Almost overnight, sign language became the Western Resistance’s language of choice. If Jennings and Rall found it hard to silence speakers and radios, they found it impossible to quiet the already silent hand signals that passed the tale along.
Lip reading proved almost as valuable, a practical supplement to the legend. Few hearing people ever really master the skill, but the deaf on both sides of Blue Line put their abilities to work. In an age where high-tech surveillance couldn’t always be accessed in remote locations, lip reading became a necessity.
And the events that day at the Richmond farm ensured that Jennings and Rall went without.
You can talk about the men of Washington,
Talk about the French Beach’ fall,
But there’s none for me but Jericho
And the battle what tumbled th’walls.
You can fight the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho!
You can fight the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came a’tumblin’ down.
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finis
Gravity_Not_Included, October 16, 2008