The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  In the aftermath of the death of its Leading Light, the Foxfire Republic formally declared war on the remnant Federal government. The Foxfire army, underequipped and ragtag as it was, had been visibly preparing a siege of Cincinnati on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River for weeks before the assassination of its leader. So a de facto state of war already existed between the two countries. But the Foxfire Republic also had been openly at war for months with the breakaway nation of New Africa (formerly Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) led by the wily and elusive Milton Steptoe, aka Commander Sage. Steptoe’s army not only had chased the Foxfires out of Atlanta, which they had only briefly controlled, but had pushed them back beyond Chattanooga in their home state of Tennessee. Steptoe then put Chattanooga to the torch. In the event, additional Foxfire troops had been rushed from the vicinity of Cincinnati to the outskirts of Chattanooga where 2,900 were taken prisoner and then massacred by Steptoe’s army after the battle of Soddy Daisy in retaliation for the detention camp deaths of thousands of black civilians who had resisted being run off their property in the Foxfire secession.

  One other detail in the broadsheet report about these faraway events did not escape the attention of those who read or heard it: a reward of one hundred ounces of gold had been offered for the life of the suspect Daniel Earle, said to be a businessman of Covington, Kentucky, but more likely an agent of the federal government now at large somewhere in North America, probably in Federal territory. It said he was more than six feet tall with light brown hair. Nothing else was known about him. The small printed picture of Daniel’s supposed face under the headline was a crude woodblock engraving of a conjectural likeness drawn from a recollection of witnesses in Tennessee. It looked no more like Daniel Earle than an old times comic book drawing of Daniel Boone.

  By the time Daniel Earle straggled home on Christmas Eve from his long and arduous journey that started in May back in Ohio, he was a scarecrow of a young man, near death from exhaustion, starvation, disease, and parasites. It became known around town that he’d ventured west along the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes and had endured hardships, including shipwreck in a storm on Lake Erie. But of his doings in Tennessee on behalf of the Federal Service, the only one he had told was his father, Robert, and then just the barest outlines.

  In February, Daniel moved out of his father’s house. In the weeks of his recovery, he had discovered the abandoned office and equipment of the defunct Union News Leader, a “pennysaver” type newspaper in its final incarnation, whose owner and publisher, one Paul Easterling, had frozen to death in his car years earlier trying to make it back from a Christmas visit to his daughter’s home in Medford, Massachusetts, during one of the serial gasoline crises that had paralyzed the nation before the DC bombing put an end to the old times for good. Daniel staked a claim on the Union News Leader. There were many abandoned properties in Union Grove and in the absence of a functioning court system people could and did take casual possession of property in title limbo, as it came to be called. Daniel had seen a number of broadsheet newspapers as he made his way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the Foxfire states and he imagined that this was a business he would like to try his hand at, a good alternative to manual labor on some rich farmer’s land or at a trade such as carpentry, like his father. He had to find a livelihood somehow. In the new times there was no other way.

  Rummaging through decades of accumulated junk in the Union News Leader office on Elbow Street—originally a temperance hall, built in 1883—Daniel found an 1891 Albion nonelectric hand-operated flatbed proof press, along with drawers of movable type and related equipment for typesetting. The discovery helped reanimate him and he became determined to produce a regular broadside for a county starved for news, information, commercial advertising, and public notices. He set about cleaning up and reorganizing the old newspaper office, a massive job in itself. He arranged for Frank Ramsdell, the “salvage wizard” of Battenville, to fabricate a sheet metal woodstove for him. His father gave him three ounces of silver to pay for it and Robbie Furnival gave him three cords of stove wood on a note. He rounded up a few pieces of furniture, a bed, a long plank table, and some chairs and cast-off sofas. A fine oak rolltop desk was hidden behind the junk he cleaned out. His father’s girl, Britney, gave him a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet. It was the first home of his very own.

  Once the place was warm, tidy, and coherently organized, it took Daniel weeks to figure out how all the printing equipment worked. He sought help from the polymath Andrew Pendergast, who had some formal training in letterpress from his college days at the Rhode Island School of Design. Andrew suggested some recipes for a suitable printer’s ink that could be cooked up with materials at hand (linseed oil boiled and then burnt, lampblack, pine tar, and turpentine), and found the book The Practice of Printing, by Ralph W. Polk, for Daniel in the town library, which Andrew ran. Daniel read it backward and forward. He practiced setting type with the composing stick, and mounting the composed lines of type in the form case, and designed a four-column layout that would allow him to cram as much information on a single page as possible in 8-point type. He’d considered attaching a new name to the publication, but he’d found an elegant old engraved end-grain print block of the Union News Leader logo made decades before Paul Easterling’s time as publisher and so he decided to stick with the established name. Besides, he liked the idea of continuity. On fair days near the approach of spring, he went out of the office to collect items of news and gossip, notify local tradesmen of advertising opportunities, and went door-to-door soliciting subscriptions at one silver dime a month. By the vernal equinox, Daniel felt ready to produce a first edition, though he lacked a supply of newsprint paper.

  It was about that time that he was visited in the office one rainy night by a delegation consisting of his father, Robert Earle, Loren Holder, the Congregational Church minister (and his father’s best friend), and Brother Jobe of the New Faith brotherhood. In one corner of the office, Daniel had set up the old sofas and a battered club chair around his woodstove. When the three visitors stepped in, Daniel had been engaged in the never-ending task of sorting boxes of old odd-lot pied type into their proper upper and lower case drawers.

  “We saw the light burning,” Robert explained. The light was a single beeswax candle.

  “Dang,” Brother Jobe said, taking in the big old room with its fourteen-foot-high ceiling, tall arched windows, and small proscenium stage at the far end where temperance crusaders had inveighed against whiskey in another, different America. “Ain’t this a grand place.”

  Robert found the first proofs of specimen layouts that Daniel had run off on various odd scraps of paper with the Albion press.

  “Looks like you’re getting the hang of this,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’ve had some help,” Daniel said. “But before I can really get started, I need to get a supply of proper newsprint paper.”

  “You might have to go to Albany to find that,” Loren said.

  The small talk ceased.

  “Come on over and set down, son,” Brother Jobe said.

  Daniel could not fail to notice the grave demeanor of the three men. He ran a little turpentine on a rag over his fingertips to get the ink off and joined them over by the stove with the candle. Brother Jobe drew his flask out of his coat and put it on the wooden crate that served as a table in front of the sofa.

  “Try some,” he said.

  Daniel hesitated, then went for it. Loren took a turn. Robert pulled a packet of paper out of his inside coat pocket, unfolded it to a single sheet, and passed it to his son. It was an edition of the Kingston Pilot, dated March 28. An item in the lower right column was circled and some words underlined. The headline read, REWARD FOR FOXFIRE ASSASSIN. The story named Daniel Earle in the second paragraph.

  Daniel took it all in and then looked up at the men without speaking. His face seemed red in the candlelight.

 
; “Interesting,” he said at length.

  “Inneresting?” Brother Jobe said. “That all? It don’t concern you?”

  Daniel shrugged his shoulders and tried to look away but Brother Jobe captured him in his gaze. Brother Jobe was not just an adept hypnotist. He had an aptitude for preternatural empathy that allowed him to enter the interior lives of others, like an explorer crossing the frontier into an uncharted territory. It was not an ability he could account for, or even explain to himself. But he had learned to be comfortable with his gift. Daniel’s mind was as transparent to him now as a glass of spring water.

  “I’m advising you to take more’n a passing interest in this,” Brother Jobe said.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of coincidence,” Daniel said. “Or a mistake.”

  Brother Jobe noticed how Daniel’s leg was jiggling.

  “Young man, I’m amongst your thoughts even as we speak,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?” Daniel glanced at his father and then at Loren.

  Robert, too, had some prior acquaintence with Brother Jobe’s strange talents.

  “You can trust him,” Robert said.

  Loren just raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you read minds, sir?” Daniel asked.

  “I have a sympathetic susceptibility,” Brother Jobe said. “It don’t really matter what you call it.”

  “What did you tell them?” Daniel asked his father.

  “That you were in Tennessee,” Robert said. “That something happened down there.”

  “Son, your name’s in the papers now,” Brother Jobe said. “Probably in papers all around the states.”

  Daniel left his seat, stalked across the room, and stood by his composing table in a pool of darkness with his arms crossed.

  “A hundred ounces. That’s a hell of a lot of gold these days,” Loren said. “Why the hell did you use your real name down there?”

  Daniel sighed. It pained him almost physically to talk about what he had done, but he found that he could not resist.

  “They figured I’d be less likely to slip up if anyone asked who I was, my name, my background,” he said. “But I had a cover story too, a legend, they called it in the service.”

  “Did it occur to you that something like this might happen?” Loren said.

  “I wasn’t thinking so clearly at the time.”

  “Maybe they didn’t expect you to get out of there alive,” Robert said.

  “Getting out was a big part of the training.”

  “Anyway, for all these Foxfire people knew, Daniel Earle might have been an alias,” Loren said.

  Nobody spoke for a long moment. Robert reached for the flask.

  “The thing is,” Brother Jobe spoke across the room to Daniel, “now that you’re about to start this here publication, it would be prudent to keep your name out of it.”

  “Everybody in town knows that it’s my paper,” Daniel said.

  “Maybe so,” Robert said. “But people outside of town don’t know that. They don’t even know you live here or who you are. You see how these news sheets get carried far and wide. You can’t advertise yourself as editor and publisher of this thing right there in the paper the way it’s usually done.”

  “The masthead, it’s called,” Daniel said.

  “Just leave it out. Use the space for an ad or something.”

  “I have to put the office address somewhere on it so people can come in if they want to advertise or want me to do a print job.”

  “Okay, put the office address on it somewhere, but leave your name out of it.”

  “They have to ask for somebody.”

  “Make up some other name,” Robert said.

  Daniel rolled his eyes and snorted.

  “Pen names are an old tradition in journalism,” Loren said. “James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers under the name Publius.”

  “Mark Twain done it too, didn’t he?” Brother Jobe said. “Who was a bigger draw in letters than Mark Twain? See, I don’t even remember his real name.”

  “Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” Daniel said.

  “That’s right,” Brother Jobe said. “A fine appellation. It’s got music in it, don’t it? And he give it up? Was the law after him or something?”

  “No, he was just crafting a persona for himself,” Loren said.

  “How’s that?” Brother Jobe said.

  “Inventing a comic character for himself to play,” Loren said.

  “There you go,” Brother Jobe said to Daniel. “You could do the same.”

  “I’m not funny,” Daniel said. “And I’m not trying to be some made-up character.”

  “Look, if you run a newspaper, you’re going to be a public figure,” Robert said. “You must understand that.”

  Daniel heaved a sigh. He’d been in the shop since just after daybreak. He returned to the woodstove and the others.

  “All right. I’ll do what you say. How does I. P. Daley sound?”

  “Kind of made up,” Loren said.

  “Put a little more thought into it,” Robert said. “You can do better.”

  “Can I have some more of this?” Daniel asked, reaching for the flask.

  “Have at her,” Brother Jobe said. “Maybe it’ll get some funny going for you.”

  “Where I’ve been and what I’ve done wasn’t funny,” Daniel said, and everyone retreated into themselves again for a while.

  “The thing is, anybody who tried to collect that reward would have to go all the way down to Tennessee to get it, wouldn’t they?” Loren said, eventually.

  “That’s true,” Brother Jobe said. “Any jackass could turn up there and claim he done you in.”

  Brother Jobe looked up and discovered Robert and Loren scowling at him.

  “Just saying,” Brother Jobe explained. “I don’t see how anyone might prove it, though. Anyways, the news, such as it is, travels slow and there ain’t no regular mails in most places, so my advice to you, young man, is to keep well to the background in this here endeavor of yours. Maybe after a year or two it’ll blow over.”

  Robert lingered in the office after Loren and Brother Jobe departed.

  “Hey, apart from all that,” Robert said, “I’m proud of you for pulling this together. You did a great job in here. It’s a fine place to work.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel said. “Do you happen to know if there are any more copies of that Kingston paper around?”

  “That’s the only one I’ve seen around here,” Robert said.

  Daniel picked up the sheet lying on the sofa and studied it for a moment. “It’s a good print job, I’ll say that. Nice paper. Hope I can do as well.” He crushed it into a wad, opened the door to the woodstove, and laid it on the glowing embers within where it flared for a few moments and lit up that part of the big room dramatically. They both watched for a little while and then Daniel turned to his father. “I’m not proud of what I did,” he said. “It makes me sick to even think about it.”

  “I know,” Robert said.

  FOUR

  That was some weeks before the evening that Britney was assaulted on the railroad tracks by the bear. There was nothing else she could do but walk home, cold, wet, and barefoot, with her recovered basket of wild gatherings.

  Darkness had just overcome the last glimmers of daylight when she arrived home. Robert had been teaching her daughter Sarah how to play the tune “Hollow Poplar” on the fiddle. She was learning quickly and had developed a nice shuffle rhythm with her bow. Britney walked glassy-eyed through the front door to the kitchen in the back of the house, put her basket on the counter there and the fly rod in the corner by the back door, and stripped off all her damp clothes, which she placed on a warming rack near the woodstove. Robert and Sarah watched, and then followed her progress as Britney came back into the front room,
all without a saying a word, and went up the stairs.

  “Mama’s naked,” Sarah whispered.

  “I know. It’s okay,” Robert said, though he suspected something was very wrong. He was torn between staying with Sarah and following Britney upstairs. But before he could resolve that quandary Britney came back down in a bathrobe. She went directly into the kitchen and stuffed more billets in the cookstove.

  “I made corn bread, Mama,” Sarah called in from the front. It was the child’s duty to make corn bread every other day. Britney did not reply.

  Robert watched Britney begin to go about her tasks in the kitchen as if nobody else was in the house. There was something oddly mechanical about her movements, he thought. He put his violin on the table among the candlesticks and sheet music and rose out of his seat to go to her. She had just set a big iron pan on the stove when he came behind her and put his arms around her. As he did, she began to shriek and then she slipped through Robert’s arms onto the floor in a heap.

  He picked her up, bundled her in his arms, and carried her over to the sofa in front, where she came back to herself sobbing and racking. After he brought her some whiskey, she was able to tell what had happened to her. The tale rendered him speechless.

  “Does that mean we can’t go back to the river, Mama?” Sarah asked.