The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  The warm air was gravid with the scent of lilac. The hardy bushes planted in the early settlers’ dooryards still grew where no trace of the original dwelling remained, poignant reminders of fleeting human endeavor along the furrows of history. Farther down off the ridge, in the distance, where the Hudson bottomlands made for rich loamy soils with few rocks, farm laborers could be seen driving oxen and plow horses in fields that had the texture of fine dark brown fur. On three occasions along the way that morning they passed others going about their business. One was a scrawny boy of twelve driving a herd of flop-eared Nubian goats to better pasture up the road. He stopped and watched the four horsemen blankly, in tight-lipped terror that they would take one of his animals and roast it for lunch. Another was an old woman with a brace of six slaughtered partridges tied by their feet to either end of a pole that she carried across her shoulder. She could not have weighed a hundred pounds herself, had wild frizzy white hair, and wore an old-times coat of bright red plastic meant to look like patent leather, with an incongruous number of zippered pockets and one sewn-on belt too many. She marched past them with her chin thrust out, ignoring the men as though they were ghosts.

  “You must be a deadeye shot, ma’am,” the voluble Seth called after her, but the woman didn’t even turn her head.

  “I think she snared them,” Elam said. “She ain’t carrying a firearm.”

  The last was a grown man of forty-five who drove a cart filled with seed potatoes behind a spindly gray pony.

  “No money, no money,” he said extra loudly as he approached, assuming that the four were freeboot bandits.

  “We’re men of Jesus,” Seth said.

  “What . . . ?”

  “Do you know the Lord, sir?”

  “Is this the new style in robbery?”

  “I tell you, we’re foursquare and upright,” Seth rejoined. “When we talk to God, he answers back. We’re in his service, and he’s at ours.”

  “He’s a harsh employer, to my mind,” the man said.

  “He’s love incarnate, my friend,” Seth replied. “Lookit how your wagon box doth o’erflow in spuds. That’s his doing.”

  “So you say. Almost killed myself diggin’ them. Once upon a time I sat behind a desk in a comfortable chair you could adjust sixteen different ways, with a coffee machine right at hand, and a girl outside the door who took all my calls. Our office handled half the fire and casualty between Albany and Glens Falls. Now look what I’m reduced to.”

  “You could just as well say you been elevated.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That whole old-times way of life was false. You know that.”

  “I don’t see it that way at all,” the man rejoined rather vehemently. “If you are in communication with the alleged deity, please tell him we’ve had enough punishment.”

  “Okay, then. Go your way, sir, and God bless.”

  Shaking his head in puzzlement, the potato cart driver flicked his reins until the pony stepped lively.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Britney remained in the dead child’s room all night with the door shut. Twice between midnight and sunrise, Robert knocked on the door asking to be allowed in, and both times Britney shrieked at him to go away. So early that same morning, as his son Daniel and three others rode south out of town along the Route 40 ridge, Robert slipped away to the parish house of the Congregational Church, where Loren lived with his wife, Jane Ann, and the four orphaned boys they had adopted the previous fall. Robert knew it was Loren’s habit to rise early, before the boys, who were all under ten, turned the kitchen into a rowdy playroom. Indeed a little after daybreak Robert found his friend firing the big cookstove preparing to make tea and work in peace on his sermon for the coming Sunday. Robert took a seat at the big farmhouse table and sat wordlessly and hollow-eyed for a long time, and Loren did not press him, knowing that Robert would open up when he felt able.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to lose her,” Robert said eventually. Loren was startled for a moment, wondering if Robert meant the child, who he knew was already dead, and whether he was in his right mind. He placed a mug before Robert and slid the teapot closer along with the honey jar. The tea was a mixture of lemon balm and rose hips.

  “Nothing’s harder than losing a child,” Loren said. Both of them had lost one before, of course: Robert a daughter, Loren a son.

  “No. Nothing’s harder,” Robert agreed. He broke down and cried for a time. Loren did not try to intervene with psychobabble. He just abided with Robert and drank his own tea. The birds were really going at it out the window in the spring sunshine, their numbers greatly increasing in the new times as the load of chemical poisons in their world fell away to nothing. Eventually, Robert subsided into sniffles and then, gazing out the window, began singing almost inaudibly a sad blues tune he learned years ago when he played in a band with three fraternity brothers.

  “What was that?” Loren asked.

  “Skip James. ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,’” Robert said and poured himself some of the tea. “The thing is, we have to bury Sarah now.”

  “I know. Let me take care of the arrangements.”

  “Okay,” Robert said. His mouth was twitching again. “I don’t think I can bear losing Britney too.”

  “Well, you don’t know—”

  “The way she’s acting.”

  “It’s got to be the worst moment in her life.”

  “It’s worse than when Shawn died, I’m sure,” Robert said, referring to Britney’s husband, gunned down the previous summer. “They weren’t getting along. Did you know that?”

  “No. They never came to me for counsel.”

  “He was a pretty angry young guy,” Robert said. “That whole last year, she said, he was romancing one of the dairy girls at the Schmidt farm. Britney can be a rough customer herself sometimes. She’s a tough girl. Hardheaded. But she’s been wonderful to live with. I’ve really loved her. And Sarah was a terrific kid. We were a family.” Robert began trembling again.

  Voices and thumpings became audible from above. The children were awake. They would be down soon with Jane Ann, creating their breakfast circus.

  “I’d better go,” Robert said.

  “I’ll come over to your place a little later this morning,” Loren said, “and try to talk to her about making funeral arrangements.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Earlier, Britney heard Robert leave the house and, when she was sure he was gone, she carried Sarah’s body downstairs, swaddled in a blanket, and placed it, with a long-handled shovel, in the chore cart Robert had built to convey his tools to the job site of any particular day. When she left the house on Linden Street, the eastern sky was streaked with pink and some lingering stars remained visible west of the zenith. She was well past the edge of town before the birds started singing in earnest.

  A half hour up the North Road, pulling the wagon with a rope lead, she arrived at a house where she had lived between the ages of six and ten, before her father lost his job as a sales rep for the Holland and Vesey paper company in Glens Falls, two years after H & V was taken over by a so-called leveraged buyout firm, loaded up with superfluous debt, stripped of its remaining assets, and left for dead. Britney’s father had worked there since before she was born and took his own life after another two years of fruitless search for employment led to his landing on the federal disability trash heap with a faked lumbar spondylolisthesis claim that humiliated him. In the process, the family lost their wonderful house.

  It was a vernacular farmhouse with a fanlight in the gable end of the attic and a front porch big enough to use as an outdoor living room in the summertime. It was built in 1819 by a descendant of Revolutionary War patriot Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys. The original four-hundred-acre farm property had been subdivided, and the house was not in great shape when her family lived there, having last b
een renovated in the 1980s, but she remembered it with a searing, primal nostalgia. The rooms of the house were proportioned and arranged with superb fittedness to human psychology—they felt good to be in—and to the patterns of daily life. The parlor featured deep window seats where a nine-year-old girl could read or just daydream on a rainy afternoon. The big kitchen had its original fireplace with iron cranes for holding stew pots and a little bake oven on the side. The family ran two woodstoves in wintertime, consuming six full cords a season, and Britney remembered always being physically comfortable there, sometimes even too warm while blizzards howled outside. An old disused springhouse was her “fort,” and there was a pond where she hunted tadpoles and turtles, and far behind the house lay pastures as broad as the Serengeti with other people’s cows that Britney could pretend were giraffes and elephants, and behind these were upland woods full of mystery that seemed to go on forever. Her years there were the happiest of her life.

  Now she pulled the cart onto the property and up the weed-choked driveway and stopped to regard the place. It was a ruin. Squatters, tramps, or pickers had managed to burn the place half down. An early-twentieth-century addition on the south side of the original building looked, strangely, like a roasted hunk of meat, a standing rib roast, say, with ugly brown-black char streaks feathering up from the windows to where the roof had collapsed in on itself. Part of the old main house was scorched, too, but something had stopped the damage there—two days of heavy autumn rain, in fact. The yard was crowded with sumacs and box elders that encroached on the windows and Virginia creeper grew up the broken remnants of the old rose trellis.

  The dimensions inside were a little smaller than she remembered. The arrangement of rooms propelled her to a place that was not so much back in time as out of time. Unlike other junk-filled abandoned properties around the county, where families had been wiped out in one of the epidemics, or fled hastily in fear of being marooned with no gasoline, or harassed by pickers, her family’s old place was utterly empty. Not any scraps of furniture remained, and everything made of metal had been scavenged, right down to the 1925 hot water radiators and the lighting fixtures. The emptiness comforted her, as though the place had been readied for her to reoccupy it. Part of the old plaster ceiling in the front parlor had come down in chunks on the hardwood floor. The window seats were still there, of course.

  Britney carried Sarah’s body inside and made a little cushion with the blanket in a window-seat nook for the two of them to abide for a while—Britney had no idea how long. Her thoughts were as far as could be from any temporal practicalities. All she knew was that she wanted to be with her daughter and that this was a good place where nobody was liable to interrupt their simply being.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  That same morning, Brother Jobe dispatched his second in command, Joseph, to parley with Stephen Bullock about the impositions upon the local folk proposed by Mr. Buddy Goodfriend of the Berkshire People’s Republic, and the possibility of mutual aid between Bullock’s people and those in town in the face of it. Brother Jobe could have gone to see Bullock himself but there was so much ill feeling between them that he was afraid it would get in the way of any useful discussion. On the other hand, Bullock owed a debt of gratitude to Brother Joseph, who, the previous summer, had led the mission to rescue Bullock’s trade boat crew when they were held hostage by the political boss of Albany, a notorious gangster named Dan Curry. All four boatmen were returned safely to Bullock’s plantation, and Dan Curry was shot in the head for his exertions.

  Joseph was glad to get away from the New Faith headquarters for a while. Such were his multiple and manifold duties day to day that he’d barely been out of Union Grove all year, apart from the journey to Albany. Often he didn’t leave the New Faith compound for a week at a time. Along with Seth and Elam, he was a veteran of the military fiasco in the Holy Land but, unlike them, he’d been an officer there. Brother Jobe tended to defer tactical questions to Joseph, as he had during the difficult months of harassment in their previous (unsuccessful) settlement attempt outside Rising Sun, Pennsylvania. There they were beset by waves of refugees from Washington, DC, in the aftermath of the bombing that made the city uninhabitable, and from Baltimore and Philadelphia, too, when services and supply chains broke down there. Gangs had organized quickly in the face of these hardships and fanned out into the loamy Pennsylvania countryside to seize what means of survival they could. Joseph’s son Aaron had died at the age of sixteen in the defense of the group’s leased farm at Rising Sun and the New Faith had lost eleven others of their number before they decided to abandon the place and head north, far from the suffering cities.

  Joseph rode a big roan gelding named Buck down into the Hudson Valley, where he turned onto the River Road and shortly came across the remains of the hapless picker Stephen Bullock had nailed to a black locust tree two weeks earlier. What remained of him now was considerably less than what Robert Earle and Terry Einhorn had first come across: just the upper portion of the thoracic cavity, half of one arm, and the head, of course, still secured in place by a landscape spike. The rest had been gnawed away by every sort of scavenger in the neighborhood from turkey vultures to coyotes to ’possums to blowflies. The sight of it brought Joseph back to the atrocities he’d seen in the Holy Land, and even with the temperature pushing above 60 degrees it sent a shiver through him. Also in the intervening days, Bullock had added a painted sign nailed to the tree above the corpse:

  I was a thief like you

  Pass by, stranger, and live

  Brother Joseph could see the practical advantage of such a display, unappetizing as it might be. Over the past year he’d come to admire Bullock’s operation, his vast holdings (more than four thousand acres), his exemplary projects (the sorghum mill, the cement works, the hydroelectric installation), the many workshops and barns, the excellence of his livestock, the village he’d assembled for his people on the property, the well-maintained mansion built by his ancestors. But he could not acquire a taste for the man himself, his imperious manner, despotic sway, and Yankee arrogance. It was men like Bullock, Joseph thought, who had brought about the ruination of his own land and people in Carolina generations earlier in the War Between the States.

  He also could not fail to notice how poorly defended the plantation was as he walked Buck up the driveway. Anyone, like himself, could ride in. There was not so much as a gate. No guard was posted. When he got to the turnaround at the head of the drive, the stable boy Eddie Flake limped out of the barn and directed him to look for Bullock up the hill in a distant region of the property. Joseph rode on up.

  There, at the edge of a three-acre field that he intended to plow for sorghum, Bullock and four other men puzzled over a utility tractor that had been refitted with a four-cylinder long-block Ford engine modified to 100 percent ethanol fuel. It was a pet project for Bullock, who maintained a deep romantic attachment to the power machinery of his youth. Apparently, the tractor had been able to cut two long passes in the field before it quit. Now, the engine would run only a minute at a time before sputtering out. Brother Joseph hailed Bullock from a distance of a hundred yards and rode up toward him. Bullock strode away from his men in the field and met Joseph on the road.

  “Morning, sir,” Joseph said, lifting his straw hat. “I bring you greetings from the New Faith and my boss, Brother Jobe.”

  Bullock, dressed in beautifully tailored buff riding trousers, shiny black boots, and a loose-fitted cotton blouse, looked to Brother Joseph like the second coming of George Washington. Bullock’s mouth was even set firmly in a way similar to the familiar portraits of the founding father with his famously annoying dentures. Bullock held Buck’s bridle while Joseph dismounted. Both were large men, but Joseph stood two inches taller than Bullock. He let go of the bridle with Joseph on the ground.

  “If this is more business with the law,” Bullock said, “tell your boss I resigned as magistrate and that’s final.”
/>   “No sir, it’s something else entirely. Is that the old Ford 5000 you got there?”

  “Yes it is,” Bullock said. “The 1980 model.”

  Joseph whistled, as in admiration of it.

  “Wow. That’s going back some,” he said.

  “I guess you noticed, they’re not making them anymore.”

  Joseph let the snark pass. “What you running her on?” he asked.

  “Grain spirits,” Bullock said and glanced over at his crew. One of them worked the crank magneto that had been grafted to the engine in place of a suitable battery, which was unavailable now. The engine came to life briefly but then sputtered out with a feeble exhalation of white smoke from its upright exhaust pipe.

  “You aim to plow with that?” Joseph asked.

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “We like mules.”

  “So your people keep telling me,” Bullock said. “We’ve still got one foot in modern times over here.”

  “Well, the thing is, sir, how many acres of corn you got to sow to make the mash for your fuel, not to mention all the man-hours and additional trouble for fermentation and distillation, et cetera. You’d be altogether better off cropping animal feeds, don’t you think?”

  “I like machines for field work.”

  The men got the engine running again but it died just as quickly, with another smoky belch.

  “Have you checked for vapor lock?” Joseph asked.

  “We’re still experimenting with the line feed. Alcohol’s tricky.”

  “I’d go with the smaller diameter, it was my science project,” Joseph said. “But I suppose it could be the coil. Not like you can send down to the auto parts store for a new one these days, though.”

  Bullock scowled. Meanwhile, one of his men cranked the magneto again and the engine started and stopped as before. A workman came over to where Bullock and Joseph talked.