Rick and Mandy’s lives moved from the grinding anxiety of those first weeks in Albany to the settled routines of farm life alien to everything their culture had prepared them for. They slept in a spare bedroom in the Larmons’ big house and became a part of the family. In November, Matt was crushed to death by a falling king post while he and Rick were working on major structural repairs to the horse barn. Things were not the same afterward. Ned tried to suppress his devastation, but a raw, resentful gloom pervaded the household like the odor of a dead animal in the walls. One time, after the older man had more than a few whiskeys, and Rick was helping him up the stairs to bed, Ned muttered the phrase, “Why him and not you?” As the epidemics and attendant hardships winnowed the population that winter, and as houses were abandoned and the county courts and deed registries ceased operations, Rick and Mandy found a vacant house in the village that they could move into. They kept their positions on the Larmon farm but no longer lived there, and that was how their lives had wended in those years until Julian was born.
Now, this winter evening two days before Christmas, Mandy walked up Elbow Street out of Mill Hollow to Main Street, at the urging of her spirit guide, an entity who called himself Caim or Caym (she was not sure how it was spelled because he specifically forbade her to write it or speak his name to anyone else). He took the form in her mind of a big black bird and radiated an overpowering aura of wisdom and authority made visible in shimmering gold pulsations that Mandy saw in the third eye of her fervid imagination. She could not resist the instructions he uttered in a reverberating voice plangent with intimacy, like a lost ancestor speaking to his posterity with a fiery love. “Go to the town and find the people,” the voice urged her.
As Mandy turned onto Main Street she saw lights glowing in the windows of the big storefront on the corner of Van Buren and people coming and going through the door. A light snowfall, the first of the season, was beginning to stick on the sidewalk and the smooth soles of her fleece-lined moccasins slipped against it, causing her to stumble. As the back of Julian’s head bonked the back of Mandy’s head, he started to cry.
“Be still,” she said.
She came up to the new Union Tavern and stared through the window at the crowd within and the bright, merry scene, the burning candles, the holiday swags. Here were the people, she thought.
“Go inside,” Caym said.
She entered into the front barroom where some thirty men and far fewer women stood and milled about with glasses in their hands. Though the thrum of conversation was loud, heads turned at the shrill sound of her crying baby. Some of the turned heads saluted her with a raised glass or a tipped hat. One of them was Dennis Fontana, a hand on the Larmon farm. She knew him from the years before Julian was born, when she worked in the Larmon creamery. He was a gangly, sharp-featured bachelor, twenty-six years old, with a thick sandy beard. He lived in the deconsecrated Methodist church on John Street with three other young single men who had barely known the old times and were still looking for wives from a population stock reduced by repeated visits of epidemic disease and other hardships. He spoke to her but in the commotion of voices she couldn’t understand what he said. Caym told her to nod her head to whatever anyone said. Dennis corkscrewed around to hail Micah the barman and got two more pints of the Mount Tom Golden Cider. He handed one to Mandy, saying, “I bet you can hardly hear what I’m saying, it’s so loud in here.” Mandy nodded.
A gang of four hands from the Deaver farm were singing Christmas carols at the other end of the bar. Mandy tried the cider. It was very sparkly and sweetened with honey and tasted a little like the soda that had been ubiquitous in everyday life years before. She realized at that moment how much she missed soda, zero-calorie Fresca in particular, her favorite. The bubbly cider provoked an awareness of how thirsty she was and she drained the glass. Then she became aware of the warmth spreading inside her. Caym thanked her for it. Dennis pantomimed a look meant to inform her that he was impressed with her drinking prowess. Then he drew a circle with his finger in the air and reached for her glass. He got Micah’s attention and had him refill it. A waitress brought a plate of the establishment’s own tater tots to Dennis, with a little monkey dish of New Faith tomato ketchup to go with them. He extended the plate in Mandy’s direction. Mandy nodded but did not take any. The baby was shrieking even more loudly than when they came in. Dennis held up a tater tot and pointed over Mandy’s shoulder.
“Little feller must be hungry,” Dennis said.
Mandy nodded.
Dennis stepped around Mandy and waved the tater tot in front of him. The child stopped shrieking and eyed the offering. Dennis held it in front of the child’s face, allowed him to get a grip on it, and watched him first sniff it and then nibble it. A moment later, the child jammed the rest of the tater tot in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, and smiled broadly with delight. Then he commenced bobbing up and down in his backpack and waving his stubby arms. Mandy turned quickly to face Dennis.
“He likes ’em real well,” Dennis said, and put a tater tot in his own mouth.
Mandy nodded. Julian shrieked again and bobbed violently in his pack.
Dennis circled around to him again and offered another morsel, which the child snatched out of his fingers. He ate it rapidly and made it clear he wanted more. As Dennis Fontana continued to feed tater tots to Julian, Mandy drained her second pint of cider. It was stronger than the manufactured beverages of yesteryear. Soon other people were giving the baby other tidbits: little pieces of cheese, sausage, a meatball, and even some pickle, which made him cough. Dennis held his glass up to Julian’s lips and the baby managed to gulp some, though quite a bit of the cider flowed down his neck and into his clothing.
“That’s enough for you now,” Dennis said and circled back around to Mandy. She was easy on the eyes, he thought. She wore a long patchwork skirt with wild highlights in turquoise and scarlet satin. The backpack straps tugged against the fabric of her ancient wool mackinaw jacket, outlining her figure nicely. Her hair, unwashed for a week, was tucked under a knitted wool cloche, but wisps leaked out appealingly around her neck and forehead. Dennis knew that she was the wife of Rick Stokes, Ned Larmon’s field foreman, and he wondered why she was downtown on her own—though he understood that the opening of the tavern was a special occasion as for years the people of Union Grove had not had any place to congregate in the evening besides the church. “Rick must still be up to the farm, huh?” he said.
Mandy nodded.
The effect of the cider was to make Caym’s voice a bit lower, a bit harder to hear, as if he were speaking to her through a long drainpipe. The warmth of the scene in the tavern had replaced the bleak landscape of her mind with a more pleasing new topography and rich yellow light. Dennis’s lips were moving. Mandy didn’t understand a word he said but she enjoyed his attention. She just kept nodding her head.
Then, she heard Caym say, “Take this man outside.” Mandy didn’t quite understand what this meant but the spirit guide added, “Show him that you are love incarnate.”
A moment later, she reached for Dennis’s hand. It was warm and a little sticky from the cider. She gestured at him with her eyes to come. His uncertainty prompted a half-smile back at her. She jerked her head toward the door. He pointed at himself and raised his eyebrows. She nodded. He made yet another face that signified he was open to suggestions. Still holding his hand she turned and led him through the crowd out of the bar. Outside, snow coated the sidewalks and streets and flakes fell sparsely in the still air. A few dim lights burned upstairs in the buildings of Main Street, but there were no streetlights anymore, with the electricity down for good, and no automobile traffic, with Happy Motoring over forever. The townspeople who were not in the tavern or over at the church now had all gone home. A raucous silence filled the streets.
“Give this man what he wants,” Caym said. “Find a place.”
T
here was an alley between the tavern building and its neighbor, the Sohn Building (1905), where the storefront, once a bridal shop, was empty. Mandy led Dennis by the hand down the alley to a mid-block service courtyard filled with stacks of lumber, old plastic barrels and the new wooden ones that were coming to replace them, snow-covered tarpaulins in turn covering unused extra tables and chairs, and a four-wheeled horse cart empty except for a half inch of snow. Mandy spun Dennis around, reached up, and pulled his face down to hers, kissing him violently. His hands found their way inside her mackinaw jacket. She momentarily pulled herself away from his hungry mouth. His eyes opened stickily, as though he desperately wished to remain in the dreamy realm of unbidden romance. Her dark eyes drilled back at him with a gaze so fierce that it both frightened and excited him. She took off the backpack with baby Julian and leaned it against the tarpaulin-covered furniture. Julian had gone to sleep, his face smeared with ketchup. Mandy climbed into the cart’s cargo bed and lay on her back throwing her colorful skirt up and lifting her knees. Dennis followed avidly and lowered his trousers. He loomed above Mandy. A pair of black wings seemed to spread from behind him and his sharp-nosed face appeared suddenly birdlike as he moved to his exertions. In a little while he subsided, breathless, against her.
“Disgusting whore,” Caym said.
“What?” Mandy said.
“I didn’t say anything. You’re lovely.”
“I’m a whore.”
“I have some money.”
“No!”
“Silver money.”
At that moment, a back door to the tavern’s kitchen opened and out stepped Brother Enos, sixteen, one of the helpers in the kitchen, a bucket swinging from his arm. He waddled down three steps, lifted a square of plywood off a plastic barrel, and deposited a load of kitchen scraps among what would be tomorrow’s breakfast for the New Faith pigs. Returning to the kitchen door, Brother Enos with a sideward glance noticed Dennis and Mandy across the way in the cargo bed of the cart. Dennis was propped on one arm staring right at him. Mandy tried to turn her face away. Brother Enos did not linger. He waddled back through the door with his bucket more rapidly than he emerged.
“Stupid, filthy girl!” Caym said. His voice was now like a loudspeaker inside her head. “Insect! Worthless piece of shit! Go home! Now!”
Mandy struggled to draw her legs out from under Dennis.
“Wait,” he whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Go home now or I will kill this man,” Caym said.
Dennis unpinned her. She swung herself awkwardly out of the cart bed, hoisted the baby onto her back again, and hurried out of the courtyard through the alley, tears streaking her face. Propped up on one arm in the cart’s cargo bed, snowflakes alighting on his hair and woolly beard, Dennis watched her exit the alley. Every dozen steps Mandy broke into a run. Julian started crying again, too, as he bounced up and down on her back. Mandy just happened to be across Main Street from Einhorn’s store when the baby threw up and the warm vomit flowed down the back of her mackinaw jacket. Mandy stopped in her tracks, groaned, and struggled to squirm the backpack around so she could seize Julian.
“Don’t you just hate him?” Caym said.
Raging now, Mandy managed to hoist Julian up by his armpits and shook him violently several times, hissing, “Goddamn you!” through clenched teeth. The baby shrieked once sharply and then went silent. Across the street, Buddy Haseltine, the child-man who did chores in Einhorn’s store and lived in the back room, watched Mandy from the wicker chair on the porch where he had been counting snowflakes. He’d gotten to one hundred and two.
“I just hate you!” Mandy said and shook Julian twice more on the words “just” and “hate,” but he was silent now. Buddy Haseltine, swaddled in wool clothing, had been balancing on the rear legs of the wicker chair with his own stumpy legs up on the porch rail, but he now let the chair down as he leaned forward to watch and it clattered audibly on the porch floor. Mandy glanced over at Buddy as she stuffed Julian back into the ash-splint pack. Buddy’s face was disposed in its usual way, mouth open and tongue protruding slightly like a small pink animal that lived in a cave, but his eyes appeared to register the scene.
“He’s fine,” Mandy said. “See?” She hoisted the pack as if to show, then slid the rig onto her back again, aimed a broad false smile at Buddy, and hurried away in the direction of Mill Hollow.
Four
Stephen Bullock, owner of the great five-thousand-acre farm (or “plantation,” as some called it) four miles west of Union Grove, where the Battenkill River emptied into the mighty Hudson, was a personality of byzantine complexity, of hard edges and melting sentiment, comfortable with reality but eager to improve upon it, a visionary, a dreamer. More than anyone in Washington County, perhaps, he actually enjoyed these new times better than the old—back when the juice of modernity ran through everything like God’s own adrenaline. He was much less nervous these days.
Being the only establishment in the district with a small working hydroelectric installation, Bullock even enjoyed some of the residual comforts of the bygone age. He could play recorded music on a stereo system and run a washing machine. He could enjoy electric lights in his house—though replacement bulbs had become almost impossible to find anymore and they were something he was just not equipped to manufacture on the premises, unlike saddlery, distilled spirits, smoked hams, or the linen sailcloth he used on his own trading sloop, which went to and fro to Albany weekly to buy whatever goods might still be had from the outside world.
Bullock’s farm ran on a different model than the farms of Ned Larmon, Ben Deaver, Carl Weibel, Todd Zucker, and Bill Schmidt, the other successful big landholders. These men had refitted their formerly modern operations on a mid-nineteenth-century basis, employing hired labor who lived in the nearby town and who reported for work every day as for any job. Bullock’s system was more like a seventeenth-century Hudson River Dutch patroonship, with feudal overtones. (His distant ancestor Joost van Druton, or Drooton, was granted just such a colossal holding of sixty-seven square miles, in the vicinity of Kinderhook, in 1648). Bullock’s people, as he called his workers and their families, lived on Bullock’s own property. Their relationship to Bullock and the land was more an entire way of life than a job. He’d allowed them to construct a village of their own and given them the materials to build with. Bullock didn’t care for religion, so there was no church, but he’d provided a community center building for his people that looked like a church, to be used for common meals, festivals, dances, weddings, funerals, and services of their own devising. It also contained a commissary or small retail operation where his people could purchase the goods that his trade boat brought in from receding precincts of the troubled wider world. His people called the building the grange, because it resembled a grange hall of yore, with tall stately windows, a grand front door dignified with pilasters and a fanlight, and a graceful cupola with a small dome painted in yellow ocher. A graveyard occupied a half acre beside it where, over recent years, victims of the Mexican flu, the encephalitis, and the general decline of advanced medicine were deposited to begin their journeys to the infinite.
The living, who numbered sixty-three adults, had traded their allegiance to Bullock in exchange for food, security, purposeful work, and a sense of community on his property. Against the background of a society that had lost its bearings so completely, the future, for many of these people, seemed something worse than a broken promise—a dreadful, certain swindle. Bullock afforded his people not only shelter from a terrible storm of history but a practical faith in the continuation of an ordered existence, the prospect of remaining civilized. These were men and women who had had regular lives around the region and regular vocations: pharmacists, car dealers, bureaucrats, insurance reps, who had been left high and dry by the mighty changes sweeping the land.
This evening, two days before C
hristmas, Bullock would attend the annual holiday ball, or levee, for his people at the grange. It was not so different from the Saturday night dances held throughout the year, except that the outside public of Union Grove was not invited. This traditional Christmas levee—in its seventh season—would be limited strictly to the greater Bullock farm family, his people. As usual, he intended to supply plenty of the farm’s own champagne-style “bright” cider, hams, fowls, and roasts with all the trimmings, a very large, grand cake constructed to resemble a Yule log, made by Union Grove’s master baker Danny Russo, with ice cream churned on the premises, cookies, puddings, and other sweets for the twenty-two children of his people, and the distribution of gifts from the goods acquired over the preceding year in trade for the prodigious outputs of his farm, which derived, of course, from his people’s labor.
But first there was a disagreeable matter to dispose of: the possible expulsion of one of his people, a very rare occurrence. He had asked Travis Berkey to report to the library in his house, the old manse, as they called it, at six o’clock in the evening. Bullock was already dressed for the levee in his customary riding trousers, shiny high black leather riding boots, a long green velvet frock coat, and a holly berry red satin vest within. He wore his long white hair in a tidy queue this evening. The large bookshelf-lined library contained an eight-foot-long map table covered with charts and drawings of Bullock’s ongoing projects—the sorghum mill, an expansion of the cement works, a contraption for sifting large batches of compost—as well as Bullock’s regular desk. A forty-watt bulb burned in the banker’s lamp there leaving the rest of the room shrouded in dimness.
A History of the Future Page 3
