“What about your father?”
“Out of the picture since I was three. I couldn’t tell you what he was like, except loud.”
“Where have you been living?”
“The old place on Southside. There’s no fireplace or stove in it. It was colder inside than out.”
“There are plenty of empty houses around town.”
“I didn’t have the means to get cordwood anyhow.”
A clock in a distant room chimed twelve times. It had a muted velvety tone.
“Merry Christmas, Jack.”
“Merry Christmas to you, sir.”
Eighteen
He was a shadow of a man, a ghost, clothed in shroudlike shreds with a ragged blanket roll slung over one shoulder, stealing across a haunted landscape. He had lost count of the days as he trekked from the deep interior of the continent toward home, passing through an autumn season of glorious color and bright days to the frozen, dim sepia vistas and endless nights of the northeastern early winter. Comfort was a distant memory. For weeks, he had known nothing but pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and loneliness. He subsisted on things stolen: the gleanings of harvested cornfields, turnips and potatoes purloined from root cellars, chickens, not always cooked, small wild animals, whatever the roadsides and forests grudged up. Though he had once eagerly met and consorted with strangers in his two years of adventuring, he now avoided them because in his current condition he looked like trouble coming, and others looked like trouble to him. The wool balaclava he pulled down over his face in the cold gave him an outward demeanor of alien menace, but he was too sick and weak to defend himself against people who might rush to judgment about who or what he was.
What kept Daniel Earle alive was a repository of sense memories that he played and replayed in his mind as he staggered across the landscape: fragments of places, vignettes, sights, smells, and sounds that connected to his deepest emotional center. One particular sense scene he returned to constantly was the image of a small barn, like a carriage house, with a loading door up in the hayloft. It was always spring there, with a welcoming pool of sunlight in the forecourt. That’s all. It was not any place he remembered out of his own history, and he didn’t connect it with any particular beloved person, but it spoke to him in deeply resonant tones suggesting that someday he would come home to it. Another fragmentary scene was of a shopfront window of many small panes, from the inside, a warm and well-lighted refuge, looking out on a street gathered in winter twilight. He didn’t know why it meant so much to him, but when he called it forth from the vaults of his imagination it stirred things deep within him and produced a sense of profound contentment that allowed him to keep swinging one foot in front of the other.
Throughout his day and its gathering night, which he did not know to be that of Christmas Eve, he passed through increasingly familiar landscapes. He had skirted New York’s capital city, Albany, to the north, thinking all big cities to be dangerous traps now, and wended through the broken, desolate suburbs across the Mohawk River, an unresolved countryside of abandoned tract housing, scraps of woodland, scavenged malls and strip malls, highways without cars, and scarecrow people scuttling around the ruins of it all in the cold with arms full of sticks for their fires. In and about this terrain of failed modernity lay country roads that had never been developed, as the old term went for farmland waiting to be paved over, and the visible traces of the farms that preceded the suburbs still stood represented by barns with sagging roofs and see-through walls and silos shrouded in Virginia creeper. He had slept in such a barn for a few hours the previous night in a place called Rexford, a former dormitory town for General Electric executives from Schenectady back in the mid-twentieth century, now a liminal zone where the suburban expansion of the old times came to a dead stop with the shattered economy. The population there had been reduced so severely that even good farmland in the vicinity lay fallow and unused, with sumacs sprouting equally in the former cornfields as they did in the parking lots.
In the gray twilight of Christmas Eve, Daniel trudged east and made it to the town of Mechanicville for his first sight of the Hudson River in two years. Coming upon the beautiful familiar river in light so dim he could barely make out the far shore eight hundred feet away, charged his flagging spirit like a glimpse of redemption. As he stood there on the river road looking north at the rusty steel-truss railroad bridge, the fine drizzle that had started in the afternoon turned to snow. Mechanicville itself was a decrepit spectacle of forsaken overbuilt highway junctions, skeletal hamburger shacks, ugly and mostly empty houses clad in tattered, disintegrating vinyl, and factories inactive since the 1970s now overgrown with mature trees. Daniel knew from his travels through post-collapse America that many towns proved themselves unable to recover from the economic trauma and everything that followed, while a few others did better. In the decades previous, Mechanicville had become a county welfare sink where the unfortunate great-grandchildren of earnest factory workers lived on government handouts in purposeless anomie. These people were among the first to go in hard times, and the towns went with them.
On this cold, damp Christmas Eve, the straggling inhabitants of Mechanicville stayed shuttered inside their mean dwellings with few signs of the holiday on display, and none of the old electric kind. A putrid pall hung over the place as of burning garbage and rotting meat. Daniel did not happen to pass by the block between Spring and South Streets where twelve houses had burned to ground two nights earlier, killing five people, whose bodies remained among the smoldering ruins—the sort of event, so emblematic of the times, unnoticed by outsiders, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest that nobody hears. He was relieved when he left the town behind and followed Route 4, the river road north through countryside little scarred by the suburban fiasco because it was so far from anything that mattered.
He retreated inside his imagination as he trudged up the empty road in the falling snow, with the river always on his right, though not always visible through the intervening woods cloaked in darkness. He did not know the time, but in fact it was 8:30 p.m. when he walked out of Mechanicville. Just then the music circle and the choir and the members of the Union Grove Congregational Church—his father, Robert Earle, among them—had concluded their Christmas Eve lessons and carols and retired to the communal banquet that followed, unaware of the lone figure miles away struggling toward them in the darkness. Daniel had consumed countless feasts in his mind in recent weeks as he traversed the landscape, sick and wretched. Sometimes they included manufactured things he remembered from early childhood but which no longer existed: the cheesy corn fantasy puffs of yore, factory-made cakes with creamy white centers, soda pops in every color from orange to brown to an unearthly phosphorescent chemical green, Mars bars, hamburgers on sesame seed buns, ramen noodles, corn dogs, egg rolls, pizza, marshmallow and chocolate Easter eggs, jelly donuts, ice cream studded with fragments of cookies or toffee or sugared nuts or an ingenious elastic confection called gummy bears. At other moments he conjured up massive roasts and haunches of red meat, corn slathered in butter, sauerkraut and sausages, potatoes in bubbling cheese, buckwheat pancakes saturated in butter and syrup, Indian pudding, the simpler foods of the new time, his time.
By and by he came on the town called Starkville, where he would finally cross to the east side of the Hudson River over a disintegrating steel and concrete highway bridge and enter Washington County. Coming upon it, his heart wanted to soar but all it could manage was a dull sense of warmth rising out of a cold hollow vacancy at the center of himself that had been there for some time. Starkville, once a factory village of five mills that manufactured things such as wallpaper and cardboard boxes and had a population of two thousand in the 1970s, when the mills last operated, was now a ghost settlement of fewer than a hundred souls, many of them engaged in fishing on the river and then smoking and pickling the pike and sturgeon that had come back in such spectacular numbers
when the industrial age ebbed. Daniel had kept company in the months before he left home to see what was left of America with a prankish and pretty sixteen-year-old red-haired girl there named Kerry McKinney, walking the five miles from Union Grove in all weathers to see her. He had met her at the harvest ball in nearby Easton the previous fall where she step-danced on the plank stage in a flouncy turquoise dress and orange tights that matched her flaming hair. Her father owned the only going retail concern in what remained of Starkville, a general merchandise and grocery that got all its dry goods from Bullock, who got them from Albany on his boat. Then one Saturday around Easter, Daniel made the journey to Starkville only to learn that Kerry had died of cholera two days earlier, along with one of her three brothers. Daniel had seen plenty of death in that time of plagues, epidemics, and afflictions, including the deaths of his mother and sister. But this one provoked him to leave home to see if there was any place left in America where death and failure didn’t rule. He never found that place, though he saw a lot of things that opened his young eyes in places that were not like home.
By midnight, when Christmas Eve was turning into the holy day itself, Daniel slogged through three inches of accumulating snow up State Route 29, past the abandoned house with the word “GIFTS” painted in capital letters on its roof. In the old times, a woman had sold poorly made items of decor to tourists called “leaf peepers” who flocked north to behold the fall colors. The building stood among an ambiguous assortment of car dealerships and food dispensaries that had once marked the ragged edge of town. Now only pieces of the buildings stood since the windows were blown out, the flat roofs had collapsed, and the trusses and sashes had all been removed in the Great Collection of salvaged metal that had preceded the disastrous war in the Holy Land. The snow-filled parking lots were devoid of cars.
As Daniel drew closer to the old center of Union Grove, he felt as helpless as a swimmer caught in a powerful current, the pawn of tremendous natural forces that seemed determined to defeat him, and to do it with malicious humor just as he neared his long-sought goal. He had not eaten anything since that morning, pieces of a mushy, deliquescing, half-rotten pumpkin he found in the dooryard garden of a house in Rexford with the front door banging in the winter breeze, suggesting the people who lived there were dead or gone. He had been staggering forward on bodily reserves for so long he took for granted that they would keep him going forever, and now he was astounded to find himself utterly depleted. As he paused in his frozen footsteps, panting slightly and dizzy, he thought he could make out the white steeple of the Congregational Church above the rooftops of the town’s darkened houses, like an arrow in the night pointing at the cold distant spaces of a baffling universe. He could barely lift his legs high enough above the accumulating snow to swing them forward toward the heart of Main Street and its familiar buildings. Instead of jubilation, a strange and exorbitant pain lodged in his chest like a big reamer hollowing him out, as though he were an apple being cored. His last coherent thought was how funny it would be if he dropped dead a hundred feet shy of his destination and the falling snow buried him so that his body would not be discovered until spring.
Nineteen
Robert rose up through the depths of sleep thinking that something was banging on the house in the wind, a loose shutter, a section of fallen roof gutter. Soon, he apprehended that it might be someone at the door downstairs. Oddly his next thought was that it was Christmas and he couldn’t help imagining an old fat man in a red suit trimmed with white fur attempting to enter the house by the front door because the old chimney was blocked up with stovepipe. Robert’s sudden motion sitting up in bed woke Britney. The only working clock in the house was downstairs.
“What?” she said.
“Stay here,” Robert whispered. He swung out of bed in an economic arc of motion and groped for his trousers in the dark.
“Be careful,” Britney whispered back.
The knocking from the front door was weak but persistent, more like a small animal working away at something than a human being signaling its presence. He approached the front door warily and tried to steal a glimpse out each sidelight but couldn’t see much beside a humped shape in the darkness. The knocking came in no particular pattern except a cluster of several raps, then a pause, then more. If anything, it communicated defeat.
“Who’s there?” he said, speaking to the door.
The reply from outside was a low muffled sound like the groan of a bear, incomprehensible and sinister. Bears were not infrequent visitors in town. The winter thaws of recent years had interrupted their hibernation pattern. But there was little trash to attract them. The people of Union Grove did not generate anything near the volumes of garbage as in the old days; little food was wasted, and scraps were collected for pigs and chickens. The rest was burned or reused in some way. The bears would molest chicken houses, sheep, and goats, though. The absence of cars for many years made the bears bolder and to get places they commonly used roads and village streets that they had avoided in the old times. Anyway, Robert thought, nobody ever heard of bears rapping on the front door to a house out of politeness. It occurred to him that it was a drunken human being, someone who had gotten hammered on Christmas Eve and could not figure out which house was his. It happened before, the preceding New Year’s Eve when Donny Willits, the “hard cheese boss” at Schroeder’s creamery, made a commotion at his doorstep insisting that it was his home, so Robert let him sleep on the sofa even though Donny’s house was a hundred and fifty feet down Linden Street.
An umbrella stand beside the door held several walking sticks that his father had used in the last year of his life when he’d come to stay with Robert after the war in the Holy Land was lost and things began unraveling badly in the country. Robert seized a stout ash cane with a brass handle in the shape of a serpent’s head. He saw a blur out of the corner of his eye in weak light: Britney on the stairway wearing a cotton nightdress. He gestured to her to go back but she only retreated up one stair. Meanwhile, the rapping at the door had stopped.
Robert crouched down and cocked back the walking stick, feeling the weight of the business end and tensing to strike. He pressed his ear to the door for a moment but could hear nothing. Thinking not to alert whoever or whatever might be on the other side of what he was about to do, Robert reached for the doorknob, silently turned the lock button, then the knob itself, and jerked the door open. Pressure against it from the outside accelerated the door’s inward arc and the knob smacked Robert on his forehead, knocking him backward. A large blob-shaped thing fell inside over the threshold and pitched sprawling onto the rug, where it came to rest, inert. Britney gave out a choked little shriek. Cold air rushed into the room.
Robert righted himself and shook the pain out of his head. Britney hurried the rest of the way downstairs to the kitchen and lit a candle there, returning quickly to the front parlor. The heap on the floor was a man clad in odious shreds of clothing, sprawled on his face, with snow still humped on his shoulders. His hands looked like stumps under windings of filthy rags. The soles of his lace-up boots had partially separated from the uppers. Robert and Britney could see his torso rise and fall slightly in the candlelight. He was still breathing. Robert prodded the man’s side with his cane. It produced no response.
“He’s out of it,” Robert said.
“What do you want to do?” Britney said.
“I’ll pull his feet out of the way. Go shut the door.” Robert pulled the body forward. It remained inert. “Come, help me roll him over.”
“I’ll do it,” Britney said. “You stay back so you can whack him if he wakes up and gets violent.”
Britney, petite but compact and strong, found a point of leverage and tipped the body over in a deft motion.
“God, he stinks,” she said before recoiling at the sight of the wool balaclava the intruder wore, like the homicidal murderer in so many movie melodramas of the old t
imes.
As frightful as the wool mask was, a different unbid thought formed in Robert’s mind, the thought that he’d dared not think until this moment. With trembling hand and with his heart fluttering in his chest, he grabbed the top of the balaclava and yanked it off. Britney stepped closer with the candle. Robert gaped at the face below with hollow cheeks under its months-long growth of yellow beard, pores blackened with grease and soot, and swollen, bloody chapped lips. He looked up at Britney.
“It’s my boy,” Robert said, his eyes brimming with emotion. “It’s Daniel.”
Twenty
Robert pulled on his boots and coat and ran five blocks to Dr. Copeland’s house. The doctor appeared at the door tucking his shirt into his trousers and carrying his boots. He was accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night, knowing that it meant some kind of medical emergency. He let Robert into the kitchen, lit a candle, and pulled on his boots after asking what the matter was. Robert explained. The doctor grabbed a leather bag off the pew bench beside the kitchen door and the two of them hurried back over in snow that was now six inches deep.
When they entered the house, Britney had arrayed a battery of candles around the front parlor and was finishing the job of cutting Daniel’s fetid clothing off him. She had removed his boots as well. Meanwhile, her daughter Sarah had come downstairs and Britney had put her to work lighting fires in the main woodstove and the kitchen cookstove, setting a large pot of water on it to warm up.
A History of the Future Page 9
