A History of the Future

by Kunstler, James Howard

  Seized by this transport of ambition and inspiration, he hurried over to his father’s workshop in the purple twilight. There he found his father with Tom Allison seated beside the woodstove enjoying whiskeys to celebrate their decision to form a partnership to build a coach and begin a service for passengers, freight, and mail around Washington County. Tom stood up at the sight of Daniel, whom he had watched grow up during all these years of change, hardship, and loss, and was stunned to see him suddenly as a full-grown man.

  “Is that really you?” Tom asked.

  The question quite stunned Daniel as he apprehended for the first time in more than a year that he had managed to come home not just to his town and his people but to himself.

  “Yes, Tom,” he said. “It’s me.”

  Fifty-five

  Some time after darkness fell, Travis Berkey ventured into the new Union Tavern in the center of town. He had spent the whole day freezing on his way to one farm after another, seeking a position, and nobody would have him. He began to wonder if Mr. Bullock had put out some kind of bad word on him, and when he got to the Schmidt farm late in the day and was told there were no positions, he asked straight out whether Mr. Bullock had sent any notice around to put a curse on him.

  “You didn’t tell me you worked for Bullock,” Mr. Schmidt’s crew chief Orrie Carrol said.

  “Well, I did,” Berkey said.

  “When was that?”

  “Uh, some time ago.”

  “There’s no word on you from Bullock that I know of. But why didn’t you say you worked for him?”

  “We didn’t get along so well, the squire and me.”

  Carrol regarded Berkey just slightly askance for a moment, taking in all the crookedness of his wiry body.

  “I’m not sure you’re an honest fellow,” Carrol said, “and that’s why we have nothing for you here.”

  Berkey trudged back to town in the gathering gloom and saw the lights of the tavern aglow through the falling snow. He had three silver dimes in his pocket, all the money that he had left. He thought about his predicament in the world, toted up the pluses and minuses, and decided to go inside and take whatever little last pleasures he could find in this life before throwing himself in the river.

  There were a dozen men at the bar, some with wives and girls, all of them farm laborers on light winter duty. The place was still cheerfully decorated with leftover balsam sprigs and holiday swags. Most of all, it was warm inside. Berkey had to stand for ten minutes by the woodstove in the front of the establishment before his lips could move freely enough to order a drink at the bar.

  “What’s the strongest beer or cider you got?”

  “We’ve got a Buskirk Crosseye porter that kicks like a horse,” said Brother Micah.

  “I’ll take it,” Berkey said. He sat at the bar and took in all the fine furnishings of the place, the carved wood back bar with its arrayed bottles of distilled spirits and cider barrels, the glowing candles in their stands and the six-light chandelier overhead, the thrum of conversation and laughter. At first he regarded it all with the suspicion and disdain of the perennial outsider, but before long the active ingredient of the smoky-sweet porter made it into his bloodstream and he began to take a more charitable view of his surroundings. He recognized some of the people at the bar from around town over the years, but he was not acquainted enough with any of them to call them friends. So he sat at the corner of the bar drinking quietly and slowly, at two pints to the silver dime, for some time. By and by he asked Brother Micah if he could run a tab and the bartender, with a slight hesitation, said okay. He ordered a plate of meatballs with gravy sauce, cheese toast, and the special dessert, which was apple fritters with whipped cream, and ceased to feel painfully hungry for the first time in days.

  After seven o’clock more people came into the tavern, townsmen and tradesmen. Eric Laudermilk, Dan Mullinex, and Charles Pettie came by with their instruments (guitar, clarinet, bass fiddle) and set up to play some old-times-style jazz music. Berkey was working on his ninth pint when he overheard a conversation down the bar between Doug Sweetland and Robbie Furnival in which the latter happened to remark favorably on Stephen Bullock’s methods for organizing agricultural production in the new times, and Travis Berkey took exception to any complimentary talk about his old boss and his methods and started arguing loudly, and rather incoherently, back at the other two, who regarded the obviously drunken Berkey with increasing amazement, until Berkey started actually shrieking, cursing, and throwing swings at them. Robbie, who worked hard in the woods at lumbering and was very strong, was about to disassemble Berkey when the front door to the tavern opened and in walked Brother Jobe and his rangers.

  They had made a wrong turn on the east side of Cossayuna Lake, where the snow was falling especially hard and deep, which had delayed their return to town. They barely shook the snow off their hats when the altercation at the bar broke out. Seth and Elam rushed over to restrain Berkey before Robbie could take him apart. Brother Jobe limped over on his half-frostbitten feet. Brother Micah put a glass of Tiplady rye whiskey in his hand as he swung around to see who the rangers were grappling with.

  “You again!” Brother Jobe said.

  “Well, goddamn you too,” Travis Berkey sputtered, before throwing up a gutfull of meatballs, cheese toast, apple fritters, and Buskirk Crosseye porter all over the front of Brother Jobe’s blanket coat.

  “Get him out of here,” Brother Jobe told the other brothers as he looked up from the stinking mess that dripped off his chest.

  Seth and Elam trundled Berkey to the door and heaved him out of it in an impressive arcing flight that ended with a sickening thud as his body met the concrete underlying the accumulated snow. He lay on the sidewalk for a while before the cold got to him and then he got up, staggered back to the tavern entrance, and banged on the front door hollering for his coat. It was shortly tossed out the door at his feet. Berkey walked the streets of Union Grove for hours after that, sobering up and trying to work up the nerve to go throw himself into the Battenkill. But as the effects of alcohol wore off, his feelings shifted more and more from the loathing of himself and his hopeless lot in life to an aggressive fury at Brother Jobe and the New Faith brotherhood.

  He returned to the Union Tavern via the alley off Main Street that led to the rear of the establishment and snuck into the kitchen after it had closed down at nine o’clock and the sisters who worked in it were all gone. He hid there, munching on sausages, ham, pickles, corn bread, and other items he found in the cabinets and the meat safe. When the last customers left the front room around eleven, and Brother Micah closed up for the night, and he heard the key turn in the front door lock with a clunk, Berkey ventured out of the kitchen to the delightful situation of having the whole place to himself. He found some matches and lit a candle and commenced sampling all the various whiskeys arrayed on the back bar—the Battenville blend, the Eagle Bridge corn, the Shushan what-have-you, the Tiplady rye, the Rupert Road tawny double malt, the Mount Tom silver lightning, the Duell Hollow fare-thee-well sour mash, the Ashgrove three-grain blend—until he was quite drunk again. Under the influence of all that, he arrived at the splendid idea of burning the place down. He fetched a generous scoop of embers from the woodstove in the little tending shovel and heaped them onto the shelf of the back bar. Then he tossed some kindling splints and stove billets on that until, by and by, the beautiful carved cabinetry of the back bar was well engaged and fingers of flame reached higher and higher up the shelves and bottles started exploding, which only intensified the fire. He kept pounding down the whiskey, wielding a bottle in each hand, while he admired the progress of his work, and then his brain chemistry crossed a boundary, the room started spinning, and Travis Berkey went down onto the hard floor. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness forever was the beautiful filigree of smoke twisting and curling beneath the pressed tin c
eiling in the hot barroom air.

  Fifty-six

  Earlier that same evening, the doctor had helped transport Jack Harron from his bed in the doctor’s infirmary back home to his room at Andrew Pendergast’s fine house on Cottage Street. Jack was recovering nicely from the wounds he had sustained in the attack by Donald Acker. He slept through the early evening and Andrew came in later to check on him before turning in himself. He brought in a painting he’d done in May of the Hudson Valley observed from Stark’s Knob, an ancient volcanic plug of rock that afforded a view north up the river clear up to Buck Mountain above Glens Falls and to the blue Adirondacks beyond.

  “I thought I might hang this on the wall for you,” Andrew said, setting his candle holder down on the chest of drawers. “It’ll give you something to look at while you’re still in bed.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Jack said. “It’s . . . beautiful. Is it around here?”

  “Yes, just up past Mr. Bullock’s place on the river. We’ll go there in the spring. I like to paint it in all its moods.”

  “I’d like that,” Jack said. “How long until I’m allowed to get up and around?”

  “A few more days, I think. The doctor said he’ll be coming over to check on you.”

  “I’d like to get back to work,” Jack said.

  “That’s a good sign,” Andrew said and smiled. “Is there something else you need before I go upstairs? Are you hungry?”

  “No,” Jack said. “But . . . oh, I dunno.”

  “What?”

  “You think you might read something to me?”

  Andrew was a little surprised to hear that.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Just a little while.”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “Anything in particular?”

  “You pick it,” Jack said. “You’ll know.”

  “Okay.”

  Andrew went to the big front parlor where he had encountered Jack Harron on Christmas Eve and thought he was about to be murdered. The memory stopped him for a few moments, but then he searched the bookshelves until he found what he wanted, one of the favorite books of his boyhood: Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He went back through the kitchen with the book and a ladderback chair, which he set down beside the table where the candle burned.

  “What’s it about?” Jack said when Andrew held up the cover.

  “A rat and a mole and a badger and a toad who mess around in boats down by a little stream in the English countryside.”

  “They all get along, all those different animals?” Jack said.

  “They’re all friends,” Andrew said. “It’s a book about friendship.”

  He cleared his throat. “The River Bank,” he began, reading the title of chapter one. “The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home . . .”

  Fifty-seven

  Brother Jobe and dozens of brothers and sisters from the New Faith compound, along with more than a hundred townspeople, stood mutely before the smoldering ruins of the Union Tavern on the corner of Van Buren and Main Streets. All that remained was the three-story brick shell with its marble lintels and decorations. The volunteers had tried to save it, but it was not the kind of thing that a bucket brigade could avail to stop, especially at this time of year with the temperature below freezing. The generous alley had prevented the fire from spreading catastrophically down the other buildings along Main Street. The heavy snow, which amounted to ten inches by morning, had helped to dampen the blaze once the wooden joists and floors had been consumed and the interior finally collapsed. The ruin gave off a powerful stink. The charred skeleton of Travis Berkey inside would not be discovered for a week, when work commenced to clear away the ashes and debris.

  As people began to peel away from the crowd in the deep morning cold to return to their homes, Stephen Bullock and three of his men rode up Main Street and tied their horses to the hitching posts along the block north of Van Buren where the barbershop and the New Faith haberdash still stood unburnt. Bullock, swaddled in fur, eventually made his way to Brother Jobe’s side.

  “We could smell it all the way over to the Hudson,” Bullock said. “I’m not responsible, in case you’re wondering.”

  Brother Jobe cut him a venomous glance and said nothing in reply. They stood quietly a while longer until a last lingering second-floor beam dropped into the rubble with an impressive crash.

  “I don’t suppose you have insurance,” Bullock said.

  “I got forty-six highly motivated skilled men with good tools,” Brother Jobe eventually said, without looking at Bullock. “That’s my insurance. And by the way, if you thought that was funny, it ain’t.”

  “What’s really not funny is you let your prisoner escape.”

  “You’re right, squire. That wasn’t no joke neither.”

  “She was in your charge.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Are you going to search for her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I could press charges against you for this.”

  “Try it.” This time Brother Jobe turned and looked over at Bullock with the full force of his withering gaze. In a matter of seconds Bullock developed a breathtaking headache. Robert Earle, mayor of Union Grove, had just come over to offer some words of commiseration to Brother Jobe and have a few words with Stephen Bullock when Bullock turned away, looking greenish, and elbowed his way back through the remaining crowd to rejoin his men and the horses.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Robert said.

  “Oh, he’s just broke up cuz he never got to set foot inside the place,” Brother Jobe said. “To enjoy all its comforts and marvels. Poor man just works too hard.”

  “Well, this is sure an awful loss,” Robert said. “It was just starting to bring some life back into this town. I’m real sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, old son,” Brother Jobe said. “We gonna rebuild the sumbitch and I’m going to put up a proper hotel on the lot next to it where people can stay when they come here to buy my ding-dang mules.” The idea arrived full-blown in his awareness with a dispatch that impressed even Brother Jobe himself at the hidden synchronous powers of Providence. “Always think positive, my friend. And if it don’t come right away, just wait a little while.”

  And that is how the holiday season ended in Union Grove, Washington County, New York, in the year that concerns us, which is yet to come in the history of the future.

  [Fluffer Nutter]