The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  “And of course we’ve started up the town laundry in the old Union-Wayland mill without any formal legal arrangements,” Robert said. “The property was last owned by National Grid as a potential hydro site. I don’t know if they have a beef with us about it, but the electric service has been off for more than a year and there’s a good chance the company no longer exists. We haven’t heard from them.”

  “That’s all very well, but you know this can’t go on indefinitely,” LaBountie said. “People just appropriating land and buildings like some communist revolution happened. This is America! With no property law there’s no property rights. Titles and deeds were invented for a reason. You can bet we’re going to have a mighty mess sorting all this out when things get back to normal—who really owns what and so forth.”

  The room fell stark still. A horse could be heard distantly clip-clopping down Main Street. A chair creaked. Someone’s stomach growled. A breeze from an open window made the candles flicker. LaBountie looked from one board member to another, but all evaded his gaze except Brother Jobe.

  “I got news for you, friend,” Brother Jobe said. “Things ain’t never getting back to normal ever again.”

  “Sure they will,” LaBountie said. “Just wait and watch, you’ll see. The Bilderbergers and their banker amigos are just trying to put the squeeze on us. We’re on to them. Once we get the electric back up they won’t be able to hide so easily.”

  More than one board member rolled his eyes.

  “Tell you what, Jason, we’ll just stand by on all that,” Robbie Furnival said.

  Todd Zucker chuckled.

  Leslie Einhorn passed the tin of cookies around the table. To avoid saying anything, the village trustees kept their mouths busy savoring the oats and hickory nuts in a matrix of honey and butter.

  Finally, Ben Deaver cleared his throat and spoke up. “A hundred ounces of silver is a lot of money to come up with, Robert. I can’t speak for the others but I’m cash poor. I’m feeding the twenty-five families of my employees on what we produce and living on the little that’s left.”

  “How little is it?” LaBountie asked.

  “Are you hectoring me, Jason?” Deaver asked.

  “Just asking.”

  “Well excuse me but it’s none of your goddamn business.”

  “I know these other gentlemen have plenty of surplus for trade.”

  “Well maybe I’m not such a good farmer as they are. I was busy running an airline till you and your Tea-bagger pals ran the country into a ditch, you deluded son of a bitch.”

  “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “Of course I can. I just did. Bilderbergers! It’s too bad there’s no mental ward anymore. You belong in one.”

  “You’ll pay me in hard silver before I ever come back to you again about a sick animal, and you’ll have to beg me too.”

  “You can go to hell. I’ll send over to Bennington for the vet there before I let you work on mine ever again.”

  “I’ll tell him your sheep have got the scrapie.”

  “Well that’d just be a goddamn lie, Jason—”

  Robert rapped on the table with his knife.

  “Gentlemen, can we get back to the matter at hand, please,” he said.

  “Spending public money we don’t have on a business venture we’re not competent to run is the matter at hand,” Jason said.

  “You can shut the fuck up now, Jason—” Loren said.

  “Oh, nice mouth there, Reverend.”

  “—before I kick your ass down the stairs.”

  “Big man!”

  “That’s right. I’m a lot bigger than you are, so mind what I say.”

  “Okay. That’s it,” LaBountie said. “I quit this board. Goddamn thugs and socialists!”

  The others watched the portly veterinarian withdraw from the pool of candlelight and waddle across the big, dim room to the stairwell. They waited until his footfalls on the stairs ended and the oaken door of the main entrance slammed shut.

  “As we were saying,” Robert resumed, and the others around the table burst into tension-relieving laughter.

  “Bilderbergers?” Sam Hutto said. “I haven’t heard that one for a while.”

  Brother Jobe passed his whiskey flask around.

  “Lookit, everybody,” Terry Einhorn said. “I’m about out of sugar, salt, walnuts, peanuts, phosphate, saltpeter, alum, candle wicks, sisal rope, canvas, grommets, and a hundred other things our people need. Do you really want to go without for the rest of the year?”

  “He’s right,” Todd Zucker said. “We can’t shut ourselves off from trade with the outside world. And we don’t have to.”

  “Who is going to crew this boat, exactly?” Ned Larmon asked.

  “It doesn’t take navigational skills to run the river to Albany and back,” Robert said. “Bullock ran with a crew of four.”

  “Well, my bunch is good for fifty ounces toward purchase,” Brother Jobe declared. “I can’t spare any hands to sail it, but surely y’all can locate some town men looking for gainful employment off field and farm, and maybe a little adventure to boot.”

  “Motion to vote on proposal to raise enough silver to purchase a cargo boat,” Loren said.

  “And volunteers to build a crib dock on the river,” Terry said.

  “In favor?” Robert asked. “Against.”

  The vote in favor was unanimous.

  NINE

  Sarah Watling, daughter of Britney Blieveldt and Shawn Watling (deceased), had skills and responsibilities that would have seemed impossible for an eight-year-old back in the old times. She knew, for instance, all the steps to making a splint basket from a black ash log. She could slaughter, pluck, and butcher a chicken, and then roast it perfectly. One night a week she was required to cook the family dinner and it was her job to make corn bread every other day. She could sew well enough to make her own skirts and trousers. She could knit a pair of socks. And it was also her task to milk Cinnamon, the family cow.

  Cinnamon lived in the barn on Salem Street that once had belonged to Sarah’s grandparents Denny and Marge Watling, Britney’s in-laws (also deceased). The accompanying house burned down the previous spring. Only the foundation remained, with blackberries now beginning to creep over the dry-laid fieldstones. The barn behind it, built in 1889, had replaced an even earlier, cruder structure erected by a veteran of the Revolutionary War, one Dyer Goodsell, partner in the town’s first flax mill. It was Sarah’s favorite place because she felt it truly belonged to her. It came down through her father’s family and she was the one who spent the most time there, mostly alone. Sarah loved the forecourt with its old mossy marble pavement, and the Dutch door with its diamond-shaped windowpanes, and the old dark wood of the interior. The floor was made of chestnut planks four inches thick when they were new. She loved the animal fragrance that seemed to carry the memory of every horse and cow that ever lived there.

  The back of the barn opened up to a third-of-an-acre fenced paddock that had once been a shady lawn in Denny and Marge’s day, scene of barbecues and children playing ringolevio in the summer twilight. Most of the big maples had since been cut down for firewood and to allow the grass to grow better in the paddock for Cinnamon to graze on. Evenings, Cinnamon also got some hay, which was stored in the loft.

  Robert had made considerable improvements to the building in the year that Sarah and Britney came to dwell with him. He replaced the sill atop the stone foundation on the north side of the structure. He rebuilt the milking stall, replaced the stall gate and the rolling door to the paddock, and removed decades of miscellaneous clutter from the unused stalls and the loft. He put a salvaged three-sash diamond-paned window (to match the one in the door) in the milking stall now that the electricity appeared to be out for good. It admitted more daylight and made milking and caretaking much easier.

>   Robert had tricked out one of the other three stalls as a chicken coop, with a small hatch door to an exterior pen covered in salvaged chicken wire to keep the skunks and opossums out. They generally kept four laying hens there along with as many as twenty meat birds, which Britney and Sarah raised for trade as well as for their own table. The barn was on the village water system, gravity fed from a reservoir on the shoulder of Pumpkin Hill. It was the gift that kept on giving, though the purification system no longer operated and had to be bypassed.

  Cinnamon was a 950-pound, fawn-brown, five-year-old Jersey cow. On her diet, she gave about two gallons of milk a day. She had been “freshened”—bred to produce offspring—sixteen months ago and was still milking reliably. Her calf had been weaned and sold. Sarah was told not to name the calf because Robert and Britney did not want her to become too attached to it. But she named it Cleo after a friend who died in the encephalitis epidemic, and it was hard on Sarah when they sold her. They didn’t have the means or the need to keep two cows, and good livestock was in short supply these years directly after the collapse of the old economy.

  This evening, Sarah entered the barn on the Salem Street side and passed through the churchlike interior to the sliding door and the paddock. Cinnamon looked up, seemed to be glad to see her, and began walking toward the barn. Cinnamon knew that it was time to be milked and was eager to feel more comfortable. Sarah gave the chickens some cracked corn while she waited.

  Cinnamon came directly to her stall and turned around facing a manger where Sarah had placed a flake of hay. She put a halter on Cinnamon’s head and clipped the end of the lead line to an iron ring on a nearby post. Then she filled a plastic pail at the standing faucet in the aisle outside the stall and wiped down Cinnamon’s udder with a wet rag, which got specks of manure off and massaged the teats to let the milk down. Next, she squirted each teat twice onto the floor to get any old liquid out of the way. Her three-legged stool was made by Robert, with a heart-shaped seat. Her milking bucket was stainless steel, with a lid, the sort of thing that might never be manufactured again. Cinnamon was an exceptionally calm and gentle cow and cooperated with every step of the procedure. While Sarah milked, squeezing the teats alternately with both hands, she sang a song that Robert had been teaching her called “The Blackest Crow,” a traditional Appalachian ballad in a minor key that was sad and beautiful and grown-up sounding. She sang her harmony part as a shaft of low evening sunlight beamed through the window into the stall.

  The blackest crow that ever flew would surely turn to white

  If ever I prove false to you bright day will turn to night

  Bright day will turn to night my love, the elements will mourn

  If ever I prove false to you the seas will rage and burn

  Sarah could tell when Cinnamon was empty from the hash mark inside the pail and the shape and heft of the udder. She clipped the cover on the pail, took off Cinnamon’s halter, and that was that. With new spring grass up, Sarah knew that Cinnamon would want to go back out to her paddock for a while in the remaining light and wander back inside when it was full dark. They went their separate ways. As she stepped toward the door on the Salem Street side, Sarah misstepped and her left foot jammed up against the doorsill, sending a jag of pain up through her leg. She knew at once it was more than a stubbed toe. She was able to set the pail down without the lid popping off, and that was more immediately important to her than the injury. She limped outside, sat down in the early weeds, and tried to take her moccasin off but it would not come off. Lifting her lower leg close to her face, she saw a round metallic button at the tip of her shoe. She touched it and it seemed rigidly fixed to the meaty part of her foot between her big and second toe. Understanding instinctively what it meant, and without thinking the matter through any further, she pulled on the metallic button and drew out a brown five-penny, 1¾-inch box nail, manufactured in Elyria, Ohio, in 1957. The slightly bent nail had lain loose in the space between two floorboards for decades. Though she hyperventilated and shed some tears drawing it out the wound did not really hurt much afterward. She angrily tossed the nail into the street and removed her moccasin and sock. The tiny hole barely bled at all. Mostly, Sarah was afraid of getting in trouble, specifically of not being allowed back in the barn by herself. So she dried her eyes, put her shoe back on, got up off the ground, picked up her pail, and hurried home so her mama could make some fresh cheese out of the milk, as planned.

  TEN

  Robert Earle, Loren Holder, and Brother Jobe met for breakfast in the town laundry in which they were all business partners. The venture was a great success in its second month of operation. They employed four townspeople in the old repurposed Union-Wayland mill building on the river, charging ten cents (in pre-1965 silver coin) for ten pounds of laundry, the problem being that nickels and pennies did not circulate, not being silver. Customers who brought in less than ten pounds could carry over their credit in cents to the next load. Accounts were recorded in a ledger. The three partners were surprised that the number of customers did not level off in the first month, but continued growing as farm people out in the county heard about it and began to bring their wash in on trading days.

  It was also evident just walking about town these fresh spring days that the people of Union Grove were looking better, taking more of an interest in their appearance. As their off-the-rack, mail-order casual clothing from the old times wore out, they began to sport some of the apparel sold in Brother Jobe’s “haberdash” on Main Street, where garments sewn in the New Faith workshops were sold, simple cotton shirts, canvas and wool trousers and coats, skirts and jumpers for women. Likewise, in the New Faith barbershop, where the gloomy but skillful Brother Judah presided, some townsmen said good-bye to their beards, so that altogether the denizens of Union Grove, both New Faith and regular, were looking more like one unified people in manner and costume. The Reverend Loren Holder now went in for a shave twice a week, while Robert Earle still wore a full beard but trimmed it in the manner of General U. S. Grant. Brother Jobe, of course, was shaved daily at headquarters by his factotum Brother Boaz.

  Brother Jobe had been waiting for the other two in the office down at the laundry for a little while. He came early, enjoying the look, smell, and feel of a successful new enterprise. At eight o’clock the operation with its wood-fired furnace, copper wash kettles, and water-powered machinery was just getting under way for the day. The office was already so warm Brother Jobe took off his black frock coat. Sister Miriam had packed a basket for him with a thermos of “coffee”—brewed from roasted barley and chickory root, with plenty of cream and honey—and generous squares of breakfast pudding for three—cornmeal mush baked with cheese, onions, and flecks of New Faith ham. Robert and Loren arrived a little after eight. After pleasantries, the men settled into the comfortable seating with their mugs and rations.

  “How come you didn’t tell me the squire done pinned some poor sumbitch to a tree down on the River Road like a ding-danged luna moth in the natural history museum?” Brother Jobe commenced the meeting.

  Loren looked up from his steaming beverage with his eyebrows hoisted. “Say, what?” he said.

  “Some poor, lone picker,” Robert explained to Loren, who hadn’t heard. “Bullock says they caught him trying to steal a horse. He nailed him to a tree clear through his forehead.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” Loren said. “Why didn’t you tell the trustees?”

  “Things are complicated enough right now,” Robert said.

  “That ole boy is off the reservation,” Brother Jobe said. “Of course, you can’t feel sorry for a fellow that’d steal a horse, but these public displays of barbarism and cruelty gonna demoralize folks for miles around.”

  “I can’t talk to him anymore,” Robert said. “I tried the other day when Terry and I went over there.”

  “Why don’t you go see Mr. Bullock, Reverend Holder, in your clerical capacity?” Br
other Jobe said. “Appeal to the better angels of his nature.”

  “He’s an atheist,” Loren said.

  “He don’t have to believe for you to read him the riot act. Someone’s got to get through to his moral sense, if he’s still got any left.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to say to the bastard.”

  “Seems to me you’re the man for that job,” Robert said to Brother Jobe.

  “I’m liable to hurt him if he sasses me like the last time we were alone together in a room,” Brother Jobe said and puffed out his cheeks in frustration. The others studied their breakfast, letting the subject pass. “Anyways, Mr. Einhorn proposes to send his boy to Albany along with your boy, and I can lend two of my rangers to accompany them there, with horses, and some small arms in case of any monkey business, and with some luck they’ll bring a boat back. They better leave soon, though. Mr. Einhorn says things are getting a little desperate amongst the town folk, so many being common laborers and of small means. Speaking for my own outfit, we put aside plenty of cornmeal, potatoes, smoked meats, and a few other things, but we’re nearly out of sugar, salt, cotton duck, and like that, and I hope to fetch me some ding-dang real coffee up from Albany, if there’s any to be got. My men can leave on Sunday with our fifty ounces of silver and whatever you-all can scare up.”

  “I’m up to thirty-two ounces soliciting my people,” Robert said. “If you lend me a mount, I’ll ride out to Holyrood’s cider mill and over to Temple Merton’s farm at Coot Hill tomorrow. They’re men of means.”

  “They must be anxious to get some of their poteen to market, too, if that’ll inspire them,” Brother Jobe said. “By the way, I’m fixing to officially reopen my tavern on Saturday night. We’ll be putting on the dog. You tell folks that. Mebbe it’ll take their minds off their empty larders for a little while.”

  “I’ll hit up my congregation for last-minute contributions,” Loren said. “Hey, did we decide what to do about Bullock?”