Chapter III
Someone shook him awake. He pushed the hand away. The hand gripped his shoulders and shook him harder. "Lay off, you'll dislodge my brains," he muttered.
"Mr. Potter, you have to get up, they're coming for you," Fletch's voice begged.
Potter opened his eyes. Fletch helped him up in the dark and helped him to dress. Malloy stood near the window watching, a pistol in his hands. He looked at Fletch, who nodded to him; Malloy slid along the wall, out of sight of the window and crept out of the room.
"Who's coming for me? What's all this for?" Potter demanded as Fletch helped him into his chair.
"The North American National Socialists," Fletch said, wheeling him out into the dark hallway.
"The what? Oh, don't bother me with talk about politics; it's too late. Is this your idea of a joke?"
"No, this is serious. If we don't get you out of here and up to the cave on Mt. Bedford, they'll hang you."
"They can't hang me! I'll have them expatriated. If they want to follow German politics, they can go to Germany."
"That's just it," said a voice in the dark hallway. A searchlight beacon swept in through the window.
"Who's there?" Potter demanded.
Joseph hobbled out of the dark into the brief light. "This is what I've been trying to tell you: the Nazionalsozialistamerikanischarbeiternpartei or the NSAAP, National Socialist American Workers' Party has a lot more strength than you've bargained for. It's all over the American People's Watchman, their official organ: the New York province has to put down the capitalist of possible Jewish descent Henry F. Potter, allegedly Herschel Fischer or Herschel Pincus. You'll either have to hide until this blows over or we'll have a mob in here hanging you from the alder tree outside."
"How do you know all this?" Potter demanded.
"I have a few…friends who have access to inside information," Joseph said, smiling humorlessly.
They hurried out into the snowy night. A cold wind blew across the hilltop on which the house stood; a barbed wire-topped stone fence surrounded the yard. Searchlights posted on the corner posts swung in slow circles, lighting up the yard. Fletch and Joseph lifted Potter's chair into the back of the car. Joseph got in beside him sitting on the floorboards. Once they shut the doors, Malloy backed the car down the drive; a gate at the end of the drive opened slowly. They pulled out onto the road. Malloy swung the car around and onto the road to Mt. Bedford.
"I passed through the center of Pottersville on the way over—" Joseph started to say.
"Pottersville? Never heard of it." Potter snapped.
"Sir, you renamed the town fifteen years ago, after you saved it from turning into a ghost town in the Depression, don't you remember?" Fletch piped up.
"I did no such thing! George Bailey took this town away from me."
"Who?" Fletch demanded.
"We might have awakened him too suddenly, he must be dreaming still," Joseph said.
They rode in silence along the valley road. Their track gradually rose as it climbed up the back of a hill. At one point, Potter looked out over the valley and saw rows and rows of gleaming lights and the garish flash of neon signs.
"That's Pottersville," he said.
"That is your greatest accomplishment," Joseph said.
Malloy groaned. "When thurnin' a wee town into a pitiable copy awf a city is a grait accomplishment, then man is close to desthroyin' his own soul."
"Oh be quiet and drive," Fletch muttered. "Them Nazis will hear us."
"How can we have Nazis in America? We conquered Germany and Japan," Potter demanded.
"George Bailey wasn't there to save his wee brother Harry from an icy grave, an' so Harry wasn't there to save the soldier-boys and their thransport in the Narth Atlantic. America fell to Jarminny a year ago; now them Nazis have worked a horrible wonder on the wee folk in the small towns, thurnin' 'um against all that roight an' decent. Man 'll embraice any idée, however insane that presenths isself, what seems better 'n the horror he knows."
As he spoke, they rounded the crest of the hill and the
"Shut you mouth!" Potter demanded. "Wait, you said George Bailey's name; do you know him?"
"Know him?" Malloy snorted, half humorously, half painfully. "He'd be the best man in this thown if he'd been born."
"How do you know these things?"
"I know because I'm an angel."
"We'll all be angels if you don't step on it," Fletch groused. Malloy stamped on the accelerator. They sped down the hill and swept up the next rise. They rounded another turn. Potter thought he saw the black shadow of a man crouching under a snow-covered bush, a man with a machine gun. Potter huddled himself in his chair. Malloy groaned and made the sign of the Cross.
They climbed a steep slope, the car vibrating every nut and bolt in the frame as Malloy tried to shift to a lower gear. They pulled off the road. Malloy stopped the car and killed the motor. He and Fletch climbed out of the front and ran to open the back door. They half carried, half dragged Potter into the bushes at the roadside. Potter thought he saw Joseph's fedora go flying off as he scuttled to keep up with them.
"The cave's just ahead," Malloy said. "I put some supplies there." Fletch let go of Potter's chair, pulled a small flashlight out of his coat pocket, and ran ahead to part the bushes. He uncovered the mouth of a small cave. They crawled inside.
"We can hide out in here," Malloy said. "We'll be safe."
"Not unless you have company," Joseph said very loudly.
Light suddenly filled the small enclosure. A group of twenty armed men surrounded them from all sides, men from Bedford Falls or whatever they called it now. Potter recognized most by their faces, if not by their names. Bert the cop stood over him with a torch in one hand and a machine gun in the other. A silver death's head grinned on the peak of his black military cap and a red armband bearing a crooked black cross encircled his left arm. All the others wore exactly the same armbands
"Well, looky here! The Jewish capitalist himself!" he cried. "Thought you could hide from us, eh Mr. Potter, or is it Reb Pincus?" The others laughed like hyenas. They closed in on Potter. They tore him from his chair and flung him to the ground; they stomped on him, grinding heavy boot heels into his face and back.
They lifted him up by the remains of his hair. Pain tore through his scalp.
"Joseph, do something!" he screamed to the lean young man who stood idly by, watching, the others' coats piled at his feet.
"I already am," he said calmly. "You wonder how I came to know about the planned lynching? I wrote that article. I called these true men of New Nordia to cleanse this land of the subhuman and the nonhuman who would enslave the Anglo-Saxons and Nordics who colonized this land. And that includes you, Mr. Potter—or Reb Pincus." He reached into the breast of his trench coat and took out a folded legal document. "Oh, and thanks for the inheritance, even though the American Reich will have to reach across your corpse to get to it."
"You gossoons will have to reach over my dead body!" Malloy roared. He broke loose from the two guards that held him and tore Potter from their grasp. They lunged after him and tried to pin the both of them, but he wiggled free and ran from the cave, carrying Potter as if he were a child. Machine gun fire and gunshots broke out over them. Bullets whizzed past them, clipping Malloy's clothes. Malloy fled through the trees and bushes, taking a cross-country route back to the house.
They reached it only to find it in flames. Malloy hunkered down in the bushes in back of the yard, covering Potter who lay flat on the ground.
"You see, sorr, George Bailey saved a lot more than this town or his brother: he saved you from yourself, even when you never knew. You might own plenty o' property, but where is that going to go when you die?"
"Gable inherits it, though I just might disinherit him for this!"
"But what will happen to it when he dies?"
"He'll leave it all to the Nazis, unless he squanders it first!"
"No, he won't be able to do much with it either. He'll die before he can father children and that money will be lost before anyone can do anything with it. See, you've been bankin' on the wrang riches. What good are metal coins that rust and paper cash that deflates and inflates as fast as the bills are printed and wear to smithereens a' fore y' can do much with 'um?"
"They can buy a lot of power, not that you'd know how to go about it."
"No, I'm afraid I don't. Where I come from, it's easier fawr a camel loaded with people on 'is back an' the spices and silks o' the East loaded in packs beside 'um to pass through a wee narrow gate than it is for a rich man loaded down wit' money and the caires an' woes it causes to enter."
"And what part of Ireland is that?"
"No part o' Eire, but 'tis the real thing o' which Eire is but a pale reflection—"
Potter swung his fist toward the Irishman's head. "Confound you and your chatter! Answer me in no more than five words!"
"I'll give ye one word then: Heaven."
Potter looked up at the Irishman. "Then where are your wings?!" he sneered
Malloy smiled. "If I'd warn them, they'd have been catchin' awn everything and we'd oll be thrippin' awn 'um."
"If you're an angel, then why can't you change all this?"
"I'm not God: only He can change men's harts, but awnly when they let Him, awnly when they give their harts into His merciful hands and let Him do His work wit' 'um. Trouble is, you've put yer hart in the last place a human hart should be: in yer safe deposit boxes an' vaults an' stocks an' bonds."
"How else is a man supposed to get by in this world?"
"True, but that's awnly fawr this wurld. It won't get you even into the door in the next."
"So, God would send me to hell just because I'm rich. Your God can have His Heaven if He wants to fill it with these idle poor and miserable failures like George Bailey."
"If that is as ye want it, so shall it be given ye. But I don't think the real Henry F. Potter would want that. Why did ye keep yer awld home?"
"Because it's cheaper to maintain. No use wasting money on a mansion when a frame house will do just the same."
"No, you know as well as I why ye kept it."
Images passed through Potter's mind, vague half-forgotten shadows of things past, nothing major except things like the geranium plants in tin cans on the kitchen window sill, his mother hanging clothes in the backyard, his baby sister Hester and he playing under the oak tree before… He fought back the huge shadow he saw looming over him.
"What happened to that boy that used to romp wit' his wee sister?" Malloy asked.
"His father half-broke his back with a strap when he was only ten, so he ran away at sixteen to work the coal mines in Pennsylvania, only he'd been weakened so badly he couldn't swing a pick for long. But they found I could add figures in the office better than the lot of them. I lived low and saved, invested. By the time I was twenty-one, I part owned the company, Owned it and a dozen mines before I was thirty. Palsy struck me then, so I came back here…to where?"
"Only to yer roots. There's still time to rebuild yer soul, but ye have to choose to do that. God doesn't force a man to walk a path he thinks he doesn't like. The question is: does a man know he's chosen the right path?
"Take your friend George Bailey—"
"He's no friend of mine! You know as well as I the man hates the air I breathe."
"No man could have so good a man for an enemy. Thank god that you do: other men would never have spared you for what you've down to him.
"Despite this, he has far greater things than you. He has a loving, lovely wife like a star brightening his home, he has four lovely wee children who run to meet him when he comes home from work in the evenin's. He has a home that's a home, not just a house, but a refuge from the sthorms o' life, which he and his wife made a home with their own love and their own hands. Almost every man and woman in this town knows him by face an' firsth name; even the dogs smile an' wag their thails when they see him. Perhaps he lost his faither, but he sthill has his maither an' his brother who owes his life to him, and his uncle. He's kept the family business aloive despite all you've done to thear it down. It's because of good folk like him that the Lord lets this old earth keep thurnin' when He might will to desthroy it on account o' cruel folk loike you."
"So what are you saying, angel? I'm supposed to stoop down and become like that?!"
"No, yer supposed to sthoop daine an' be the Henry Pother ye were meant to be. Ye may not have thaime to have the everlasting goods Bailey has, but ye can at least get yer sawl in arder a' fore yer called t' the foinal balancin'."
Malloy sat up on his haunches; his form suddenly shimmered and vanished. Potter reached out to him. "Please, tell me what I have to do!"
Snow began to fall over him, rapidly covering him. The cold ground beneath Potter's back grew softer and warmer as everything grew lighter…
And he realized he still lay in his bed in his own room, the sunlight streaming in through the curtains Fletch had just opened…