GOOD DEEDS / PART TWO

A short story

Joseph, the good peasant, was named after his grandfather, who was the first informal “mayor” of the region and his remembrance was still vivid, despite all those years that had passed since his death. He was most remembered for his inborn trait of discerning right from wrong, while his whole life attitude was kind of exemplary, as well.
Young Joseph was righteous too, but now he was facing a big perplexity. He had inherited a book from his father which, as he understood, was written by his grandfather. It was supposed to create him no problem and it only meant to be a tool of guidance. The book was entitled “SON” and it was referring to the Story Of Noland.
The first Joseph had written how he had found himself there, how smoothly his family had integrated in the local community and how unexpectedly soon everybody had forgotten that they weren’t autochthons.
The book revealed to the youngest Joseph his true origin and the reason his forefathers had come to the Noland. He was overwhelmed by surprise to find out so suddenly all that information and the thing that shocked him the most and couldn’t comprehend the purpose of it, was why his grandfather had written down all that and why he, as well as his father had never mentioned the truth.
The “SON” was kind of a journal about the first days of the Hill by the arrival of old Joseph. He had written that this place was as usual as every other place in this planet but he had the vision to turn it into something special. This wasn’t because of a selfish aspiration of creating something big but he was thinking of that place before even getting there. He had heard of it and he had discerned its potentiality of getting improved.
He had chosen that specific Hill maybe because of the fact that it was so close to the big Cities but simultaneously so distant in a different way. It was an isolated region with few residents and despite it’s prosperity in natural resources, people who leaved around it, always considered it as an indifferent, neutral place where it must be really boring to live in. The first Joseph had saw it from the other way around, I mean, he thought of it as a safe place to stay in difficult times, and when time demanded it, there were no second thoughts but moving there.
Joseph read in the book that his grandfather had gone to the Hill when a strange pandemic had burst out all over the place. That time of course, weren’t disposable the appropriate means to specify its cause, so this was making even more difficult to find the suitable treatment. Some said that this which was killing people within a day from their infection was a primitive virus that was preserved all those years in the vast expanse of Antarctic, beneath the ices, and that after that enormously long time it had “woken up”. Others said that it had passed to people from the sick sheep and others more outrageous believed that it was the evil. Until nowadays no one can say for sure what was that, which claimed so many lives.
As death was around in every corner and people were inexplicably dying one after the other, bedlam prevailed. Everyone was feeling helpless and was trying to face it as possibly could. Some immoral even took advantage of this situation and found the occasion to speculate, by selling fake drugs as effective to desperate people, who could buy anything in their hopelessness. They were swearing that they were giving them the miraculous cure.
That time and as Joseph was feeling that danger was getting closer and closer, he took his family and decided to go to Noland before something bad happen to them. When he got there he found more shocking than the disease itself that no other foreigners had looked for shelter in that Hill. He hoped that maybe because of its social and geographical segregation from the rest of the world, that space could still be intact. And he was right. The lack of transactions with foreigners kept Noland clean. Of course Joseph was quite worried that the fortified shelter he had chosen to emigrate could get vanished, as had happened with some Cities. There were, indeed, a couple of deaths that startled Nolands, but because of their ignorance of what was really going on outside their little paradise they never got mad and things never got out of hand. Joseph had believed that the deaths had probably nothing to do with the pandemic but he surrealistically thought that if there was an antidote, it could possibly be…coolness.
Back to young Joseph, he was feeling awkwardly as a result of what he was reading and he felt obliged to tell the whole truth to the rest. They deserved to know about his true origin, the pandemic which destroyed tones of population and chiefly about Noland, which used to be as common as any other place before the arrival of his ancestors and that after that, it went under differentiation. Maybe it had become better but they had to have the knowledge that years ago it used to be different.
He went to the central square of Noland which was a bit far from his farm and when he got there he stroke the bell twice. Nolands in their first meeting in that exact square two generations ago had decided that one stroke would mean gathering for “decision making congregation” but two strokes would mean “emergency congregation”. The double sound had never been heard before and even though it was just two plain ring bells it echoed terrifying. He bet that everybody should be in great wonder that moment and it didn’t take much to see that all of them, one by one or in groups, started showing up after a minute or two…