“Tell you what, don’t do nothing,” Brother Jobe said. “I’ll send Brother Joseph over. He don’t brook no aspersions from the hoity-toity.”
ELEVEN
Brother Jobe gave Robert a brindle mare named Belle to ride out into the county on Friday afternoon. The mare had been rescued the previous Christmastime from the possession of the indigent homesteader and would-be murderer Donald Acker (deceased), who had lacked the means to keep her in feed and was too stupidly proud to ask for help. She was in sorry condition then, but four months in the New Faith stables and paddocks had restored her to health. Robert was not an experienced rider, but Belle was smart and tractable, and being at large in the landscape burgeoning with new life in fine spring weather exhilarated both of them.
He rode out to the north toward Hebron first, to Temple Merton’s orchard and distillery, past men and women laboring in the fields, plowing behind horses and oxen, clearing drainage ditches, coppicing in the hedgerows, burning heaps of bark and woodland trash to spread ashes on the crop rows, and attending to new lambs and calves in the pastures. Some of the smaller holdings were slovenly subsistence farms, where people seemed to be barely hanging on, overworked, scarecrow-thin, ill-clothed, like figures out of a medieval woodcut of the plague years, grubbing around in the soil with hand tools. In the new times, it was hard to go it alone on the land. Places organized for production with many hands were more successful, though there were many ways of organizing the hands.
Robert got to Temple Merton’s house near Summit Lake just before noon. He’d been there more than a few times over the years and he was always thrilled by the beautiful orderliness of the establishment. The proprietor was a formalist, like his father before him, who had built walled gardens, planted an allée of blight-resistant American chestnuts from the road to the front of the house and its dependent barns and workshops, and kept his animals clean. The farm gave the impression that at least one corner of the universe was safe and secure. The housekeeper directed Robert out to the orchards where he found Temple and two other men mulching a stand of pears. They had a load of velvety black compost in a cart pulled by a goat. Without even inquiring about his reason for dropping in, Temple invited Robert to lunch. He chucked his shovel onto the cart and told the others he was taking off for an hour and that they could, too, once they fetched the goat some water.
Temple Merton’s people had fought in the Revolution and then farmed the same four hundred acres afterward going down the generations to Temple’s father, who shifted from dairy to fruit in the 1970s. Temple himself had fled the farm right after high school, gone off to NYU in the theater arts program, and emerged as a highly employable character actor, best known for his role as the carefree Victorian-era poisoner Lamont Circe in the cable TV series Boomtown, which ran for six seasons. Before that, he’d been a regular in the Coen Brothers ensemble, beginning with The Big Lebowski.
The week of the Washington bombing, he managed to drive all the way back to the family homestead from a James Cameron film location in the Sonoran desert outside Tucson in one of the on-set Escalade limousines, which he’d simply commandeered in the confusion. He was already separated from his actress wife, Fannie Dana (the fortune hunter Maggie O’Toole in Boomtown), and left behind all his chattels in Santa Monica, which were blown up nine months later anyway in the Los Angeles bombing. His alcoholic older brother, Jess, occupied the farmhouse back home and had been letting the orchards go to hell for a decade, but the economic collapse finished him psychologically and he lasted less than a year after Temple arrived back home to take charge. He shaped up the place in short order, relearning everything his father had taught him as a boy.
Temple Merton was renowned now in Washington County, New York (and southern Vermont), for his Coot Hill apple brandy that was too fine to be called “jack.” He also raised beef cattle and mixed poultry: turkeys, ducks, chickens. His house was red brick, with a curious Dutch stepped roof, and he’d added several new buildings: quarters for workers, stables, a wagon barn, and a bottling works, forming a handsome courtyard arrangement that reminded Robert of establishments he had seen in Europe years ago. At sixty-seven, Temple was hale and athletic. He employed twenty laborers and a household staff of four. His divorce had never been finalized back in California, so he felt unable to marry again, but he found a girlfriend half his age named Lorraine Moncalvo, esteemed as the finest cook in the county. She’d run a Boston catering company in the old times and published two cookbooks, and literally walked out of that city during the post-crash troubles with little besides a change of clothing and three of her best kitchen knives in a backpack. Temple met her three Septembers ago along the road driving home from Bennington, where he’d traveled with five cases of his brandy to sell. He gave her a ride, of course, on the deadhead trip home. It took mere minutes of conversation for him to discern that she was an extraordinary person, and she wasn’t bad looking either, though she wore many layers of clothing that concealed her figure. She was looking for a situation, she said, as opposed to a job. Temple liked the way she put that. Once she got talking about food up there on the bench seat beside him in cool autumn weather, he told her that she may have found her situation. And so she had. And Temple Merton was a happier man in the new times by far than he had ever been back in Hollywood.
Robert was quite hungry that day, having forgotten to pack so much as a square of corn bread in his excitement to saddle up. Temple sat him down in the sun-filled dining room. Lorraine, full bodied with loose curly auburn hair and a winning lopsided smile, brought out duck legs preserved in their own fat with beans and cabbage and pickled beets, onion and pepper relishes, and delicate cornmeal pancakes with sour cream. By-and-by, Robert turned to the matter at hand: the need to resume the Albany trade. The couple were interested and receptive, being short of many necessities from grape-stake wire to veterinary supplies. Temple averred that he had always respected Stephen Bullock without particularly liking him, and he gave Robert twenty ounces of silver toward the purchase of a proper boat.
Robert made it to Felix Holyrood’s cider mill eight miles south by four o’clock. Holyrood was desperate for priming sugar, clean copper tubing, tin solder, and other things he was used to sending to Albany for when Bullock was making regular runs there. He gave Robert fourteen ounces of silver coin on a promissory note and sent him home with a bottle of his Normandise bouche brut blush, a particularly fine, dry sparkling cider, which Robert could not help sampling on his return trip to Union Grove in the glow of his successful venture raising additional funds. In fact he was a little high coming down the ridge behind Holyrood’s place when something caught his attention in the distance in the low-slanting late afternoon light.
He saw the smoke of many fires curling up out of a pasture on the east side of Lewis Hill, a mile and a half away. Squinting and shielding his eyes with his left hand, he made out colored patches behind the curls of smoke. His eyesight was not what it used to be. Tents, he supposed. He spied movement among them. People. He’d heard nothing of any encampment on Lewis Hill, which was five miles east of Union Grove. Whoever it was had not been there very long. Possibly they had just arrived that afternoon and made camp. He could only guess at the number of people there, figuring perhaps twenty tents were pitched on the hillside. If there were more than one person per tent, the encampment might have amounted to, say, fifty people, maybe more. He wondered if they were displaced persons, or pilgrims of some sort like the New Faithers had been, or perhaps an organized horde of pickers. Certainly they were not out there for the fun of it with nighttime temperatures still dipping into the thirties. In the years since the collapse, the county had not seen a gang larger than the nine who invaded Bullock’s place back in October. But such a thing wouldn’t be out of the question in these times. If men like Temple Merton and Stephen Bullock could organize many hands to work on their farms, surely some talented criminal could organize a brigade of marauders. He decided not to ride
over there by himself to make inquiries, thinking that if they were not friendly he might be detained. Instead, he corked the bottle of cider, tucked it in his coat, and rode Belle at a brisk trot the rest of the way back to town.
TWELVE
After Robert returned Belle to the stable, he sought out Brother Jobe in his personal quarters in the converted high school, formerly the principal’s office suite. The New Faith honcho sat behind a fine old oak desk composing his sermon for the coming Sunday. He looked up and slid his reading glasses down his button-like nose as Robert was shown in by Brother Boaz.
“Why, good evening, Mr. Mayor,” Brother Jobe began. “I’ve been studying up on Pentecost. You know, the followers of Jesus were frightened in the days after he took leave of his bodily raiment there on the cross. We take it for granted nowadays that we know how that story developed—the resurrection and the start of a church and so forth—but the disciples, they didn’t know nothing at the time, and they were scared. Jesus had wanted to provide for the spiritual fortification of his followers, you see. Now, according to the Nicene Creed, the Holy Ghost was present at the creation of the world and the birth of Jesus and the crucifixion and the resurrection and was lodged also in the hearts of the disciples of Jesus, and he had prayed to the father that this Holy Ghost spirit would be the protection that his disciples needed and would be the very expression of their faith, too, in those parlous days—you following all this, old son?”
“Sort of,” Robert said.
“Well, it don’t matter, I guess. But there you have it. You get some cash money out of them apple knockers?”
“Yes, enough to go ahead and look for a boat in Albany,” Robert said. “But on the way back I noticed there’s some people camping out on Lewis Hill. A pretty sizable bunch. I don’t like how it looks.”
“Campers?” Brother Jobe said. He removed his eyeglasses altogether and rubbed his whole face with both hands. Then he blinked vigorously. “These ain’t campin’ times. People don’t sleep out in the weather ’less they ain’t got nowhere to go, or are out ranging for some purpose.”
“What I thought too.”
“Did you go mingle amongst them?”
“No, I did not. It seemed to me that they might be trouble.”
“Yes, I see what you mean.” He swiveled in his oak chair to gaze out the window. A three-quarter moon was rising over Schoolhouse Hill to the southwest in a lustrous blue green sky the color of a tropical sea. “You better show me on the map where these birds are. I’ll send my rangers over for a look-see.”
THIRTEEN
Mary Beth Ivanhoe, known as the Queen Bee or Precious Mother among the brothers and sisters of the New Faith, lay in bed in her quarters, which was a jewel box–like windowless room at the center and apex of three levels of chambers up in the old high school gymnasium, where she and the young women devoted to her care resided. A cupola at the top of the ceiling let in the first rays of evening moonlight in a room otherwise lighted with a few candles. Mary Beth was the group’s epileptic clairvoyant spirit guide. She’d been grievously injured by a speeding Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of the Hunter’s Ridge Mall, outside Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2006, when a boy of sixteen with the laces of his Kobe Bryant Nikes untied managed to jam his loose right shoe between the gas pedal and the floor panel in such a way that the throttle opened to the maximum and stuck. The Jeep accelerated rapidly down the loading lane and was going sixty-three miles an hour when Mary Beth happened to back out of her space in its path to get perfectly T-boned on the driver’s side of her Toyota Celica. She was in a coma for weeks and was altogether a different person when she came out of it.
Though she was afflicted with horrific seizures and many other chronic disorders, Mary Beth’s massive injuries had also endowed her with extraordinary mental abilities to view events at both a geographical and temporal remove, which allowed her to guide the New Faith people out of the tumult of Dixieland ultimately to the group’s “New Jerusalem” in Union Grove, New York. Her health had declined markedly over the preceding year, especially after she gave birth to quadruplets the previous fall. The pregnancy itself had been a matter of intense and mysterious wonder, regarded by the sisters and brothers as a miracle.
Following the brief visit of Robert Earle and his report of strangers encamped on Lewis Hill, Brother Jobe laid aside his unfinished sermon on the Pentecost and hurried to Mary Beth’s chamber. At the door, intricately figured with a hexagonal honeycomb pattern executed in marquetry of stained hardwoods, he heard the sound of shape note singing, a musical form derived from the group’s place of origin in the southern mountains. This so-called sacred harp music had a shrill and somber beauty to it. Behind the door, eight female voices sang the traditional hymn “Idumea” in a minor key. Brother Jobe knew the song full well and hearing its lyrics in a four-part harmony chilled him.
And am I born to die
To lay this body down
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown
A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary regions of the dead
Where all things are forgot
The door was heavy but so exquisitely balanced that it opened soundlessly and it took more than a moment for the women to discover Brother Jobe standing there. Their voices stopped in sequence until the contralto Sister Zuruiah finished the verse alone. All faces turned to him expectantly.
“You done that real nicely, sisters,” he said. “Could you give us a moment?”
The women picked up plates, a tray of uneaten food, a wash basin, towels, and other sundries and exited the chamber in a swirl of coordinated activity. When the door clicked shut, Brother Jobe dragged a chair closer to the bed. The room was extraordinarily warm—Mary Beth demanded it that way—and mingled odors of cloying sweetness and decay hung thickly in the air.
“What all is going on?” Mary Beth asked in a phlegmy, reedy voice. “I was enjoying that.”
“They’ll come back, dear. Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax. They was easing my pain. Who all are you, anyways? I can’t hardly see no more.”
“It’s me, Precious Mother. Lyle,” Brother Jobe said, going by the old times given name she knew him by, Lyle Beecham Wilsey. “You all right?”
“Of course not. I’m done for. What do you think they’s singing about?”
“Why, you look a durn sight better than I seen you in years, slimmed right down and all like you done.”
It was true. Mary Beth had weighed in at well over three hundred pounds around Christmastime and had shed a hundred fourteen pounds since. She was no longer virtually entombed in the folds and wattles of her own flesh and was beginning to somewhat resemble the ordinary Carolina girl she had once been, the girl who had worked in an Old Navy store at a Raleigh shopping mall, dated athletic young men, and vacationed at Rodanthe on the Outer Banks in her stepmother’s time-share. But now she could hardly eat a thing, and her cells were starved, and the synergies of progressive organ malfunction as a result of her injuries were hastening her toward a definite mortal completion. She remained sentient enough to know it. For a while, Brother Jobe didn’t speak but dabbed at his eyes with handkerchief and sniffled.
“I could send down for some pie,” he said, “if that would make you feel better.”
“I’m done eatin’.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m awful weary of this life is all,” she said.
“Want me to git the doc in here?”
“I don’t never want to see no doctor again. Sumbitches treated me like a goldurned science project, and look what I come to.” Her breathing sounded labored. Brother Jobe felt the veil of denial fall away in his own mind as he watched her battered body heave and shudder under the bedsheet. The yellow turban she wore to conceal her hairlessness glowe
d like a lamp in the meager candlelight.
“I don’t know what we gonna do if you leave us, dear,” he said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be up yonder with you-know-who and my kin,” she gasped as a rogue pain shot up the back of her neck like the jab of a pithing needle. Brother Jobe cringed in sympathy. “I expect you-all gonna run around like chickens with no heads for a while,” she added. “By-and-by you’ll be all right. I known for some time there’s a gal out there fixing to replace me.”
“Who?”
“It ain’t clear. Some new blood, I think. Say, what all’d you barge in on me for anyways? Surely not just to pass the time of day in idle chitchat. I was at peace with that there sing-along.”
Well, Mary Beth, I was wondering if you got any of that far-seein’ mojo left.”
“I ain’t hardly tried in a while, I been so weary.”
“I’d be obliged if you give it a go.”
“What’s up?”
“That man Mr. Earle, the mayor here, saw some strange doings out east of town. Folks camping on a hillside, he said. Put your mind to what that might be about.”
Mary Beth squeezed her eyes and emitted a set of grunts and groans expressing tremendous interior effort. Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.
“Ain’t no use,” she said with a final rasp. “I’m drawing blanks. I don’t see nothin’ but bare planting fields and livestock. Wait!”
“I’m here, dear.”
“Green grass,” she muttered.
“Well, it is springtime—”
“Naw, this green grass ain’t about that. It’s green but it’s dead.”
“Huh? Pardon me, but that sounds like a riddle—”
“Aw, I ain’t tuned in right. It’s all a muddle. Something about green grass is all. Oh, dear Jesus!”
With that utterance Mary Beth jerked back so hard the headboard of her bed hit the wall. Her body spasmed, her eyes rolled up under the lids, her mouth clenched, and her lips retracted displaying only a partial array of teeth. Whitish foam began to run out of her nose and mouth. Brother Jobe stolidly waited it out, knowing that there was nothing he could do to arrest her seizure. She emerged from the fugue state panting. Brother Jobe found a rag on a washstand and wiped the spittle from her face as her chest heaved.
The Harrows of Spring Page 7
