Mercy Street(37)

He rolled through Hagerstown just before dawn. The streets were deserted. His target was a tract of state land outside Cumberland. When possible, he preferred to work in darkness.

The installation went smoothly. In Maryland the snow had melted. A few crusts hung on at the margins, but the ground was soft and moist.

He finished just as the sun was rising. There was another tract he had his eye on, along State Road 36. According to the public records database, the land was privately owned, a delicate matter. He believed, ardently, in the sanctity of ownership. He would not knowingly violate a citizen’s property rights, even in the service of good.

The site was in a field gone fallow. It had not been plowed in many years. The owner lived across the street, in a sturdy brick house with a deep front porch, set far back from the road.

He parked in the driveway and rang the doorbell. The wide grassy yard was studded with lawn ornaments—garden gnomes, oversized plastic mushrooms, a miniature wishing well cast in cement. An old lady in a housecoat opened the door.

“Good morning, ma’am. Are you a Christian?” His speech was a little mushy. He was trying not to move his mouth.

“I am.” She hugged her robe around her, studying him—a barrel-chested man in what he thought of as his sign-planting uniform: blue jeans, denim shirt, orange hunting vest. “Why do you ask?”

“My name is Victor Prine, and I believe in the sacredness of all life. With your permission, I’d like to put one of my signs on your property.”

The old lady looked confused. “What kind of a sign?”

“Let me show you. I have a couple in my truck.”

She followed him outside. In the driveway he lowered his tailgate and peeled back the tarp. On top of the stack was one of his favorites, a dark silhouette of a pregnant woman. Only her womb and its contents were rendered in color—a chubby pink infant, blond-haired and blue-eyed. The lettering was bright pink, all caps. IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE.

“Oh my,” she said. In the clear morning light she looked very old, one eye milky with cataract. “The baby is darling. Is he waving?”

“That’s right,” he said.

She seemed at a loss for words.

“I have other ones,” he said, moving it aside. The three remaining signs were identical. He had a dozen more at home, stacked in the hayloft of his stepbrother’s barn. The caption read AMERICAN CARNAGE.

“Good heavens,” she said. “What on earth am I looking at?”

“I took that photo myself. It’s a dumpster behind an abortion mill in San Antonio.” He had said this so many times that it had become true; he could nearly remember taking the photo, despite having cribbed it from a pro-life website he viewed as a competitor. The deception didn’t trouble him. He could have taken the photo. No one could prove he hadn’t.

“Get off my property,” the old lady said.

HE’D BEEN PLANTING SIGNS FOR HALF HIS LIFE. IN HIS THIRTY years as a long-haul trucker, he’d placed them in national parks, on grazing lands, and once, in the oil fields of Williston, North Dakota. SAVE GOD’S PRE-BORN CHILDREN. He’d posted a photo of that one on his website—a pump jack bobbing behind it, dipping its head to sip the earth like some exotic waterfowl.

In the West, the land was anyone’s. There were literally millions of acres of land with no owner to speak of. The degenerate federal government had no authority, legal or moral, to own anything, in Victor’s firm view. He’d explained his position at length to a county sheriff outside Laramie, who’d threatened to cite him for trespassing and defacing public property.

All he’d done was plant a sign.

That was how he thought of it: each sign was like planting a seed in the ground. It pleased him to think of all the people who’d seen them, year after year, the young mothers moved to spare their babies. It was humbling to think how, in a split second, a life could be saved.

Later he saw the flaw in his reasoning. How many pregnant females were driving across the empty western states, the great thunderous trucking routes of North America? In the average two-week hitch, he saw no women at all, never mind pregnant ones.

The sheriff in Wyoming did not cite him. He stood and watched while Victor took down the sign.

In those years he lived everywhere, he lived nowhere. Every couple weeks he’d stop off at his stepbrother’s in Pennsylvania, where he slept and did laundry and saw no one. Except for hunting and occasional trips to the lumberyard, his waking hours were spent in Randy’s barn, lifting weights and painting more signs.

He crisscrossed the country and listened to talk radio—a show out of Kalispell, Montana, hosted by a man named Doug Straight. Listening, he began to understand the world. The voice on the radio was the voice of adulthood, the bearer of hard truths. Doug Straight didn’t pretend that the world was fair or generous. The America he spoke of was a place Victor recognized, the tough neighborhood where he himself was raised.

There was something in the air in those years. The news was full of cryptic signals, random happenings that seemed to be building toward something. The European states lining up in a shadowy alliance, a New World Order emerging. Race riots in Los Angeles; in Idaho, a Christian family gunned down on their own sovereign land. In Texas, a faith community of women and children, executed in cold blood—immolated by the federal government, at taxpayer expense.