“You go on,” Daniel said, his gaze still fastened on McCoy.
“What’s in there?” Teddy asked.
“Someone I thought I knew from when I was away,” Daniel said.
“Are you going to have a glass with him?”
“No,” Daniel said. He did not say that he was going to kill him, which was exactly the objective that had spun itself out in his mind as he sat and watched. “Do me a favor. Fetch my bedroll and things at the livery and bring them to the boat. I’ll be back by-and-by.”
“Well, all right,” Teddy said a little diffidently and made to leave the table.
When Teddy was gone, Daniel rooted in his pockets and found an envelope of the machine-made guitar strings, one of several sets he’d purchased, and took out the third or G-string, sturdy brass-wound steel wire. He made loops at each end and formed rolling hitches around two metal spoons that remained on the table from the meal. He thrust the apparatus into a jacket pocket, keeping his eye on the scene within the barroom. The boy waiter returned and asked if he wanted a cigar, the Red Hook Monarch being the house specialty, he said. Daniel said maybe next time. Meanwhile, the two men palavering with Randall McCoy left him abruptly at the bar, apparently not on the friendliest terms. McCoy remained there slumped on his elbows and calling for two more whiskeys while Daniel watched. The sky above the outdoor dining terrace was filling with stars. McCoy demonstrably slapped some coin on the bar, as if he were angry, and walked toward the front entrance, unsteady on his feet. Daniel waited ten seconds and followed. Mentally, he was back on Channel Island, incandescent with the deadly training he’d received there.
At this hour, Commercial Row was quiet but not deserted. The merchants were just closing up, sweeping the plank sidewalks in front of their establishments. A few stragglers of the day’s business lingered palavering in the feeble lantern light. Here and there a cart boy made his way with a late load, men rolled barrels inside a warehouse, a few wagons plied the carriageway, some loaded and some empty. Daniel caught sight of McCoy, listing from side to side, heading south on the sidewalk. He followed at a respectful distance. Soon the street life petered out altogether, the sidewalk ended, and a darkened zone began where the empty stalls of the farmers’ day market stood between the heart of the waterfront and Slaven’s Hotel at the other end, under a tangle of decrepitating freeway ramps. He and McCoy were the only pedestrians there. Up ahead, a candle lantern hung from Slaven’s disorderly barroom, the type known among boatmen as a gully den. More lights burned within and the chords of a concertina playing a reel in a minor key carried up the street. A pig furtively crossed the street and disappeared in a lot filled with weeds, rubble, and trash. Daniel quickened his step and moved lightly until he was virtually on McCoy’s heels, then spoke his name to the back of his head, which brought McCoy to a lurching stop. He wheeled around almost losing his balance.
“You following me?” McCoy said, peering intently into Daniel’s face. His breath was sour and Daniel noticed that his lower front teeth were missing.
“I guess I am.”
“Whaddaya want?” Then a little flare of recognition. “Say, I know you!”
“Yes you do.”
“Help me out.”
“Springtime, three years ago.”
“Yeah, she comes around every year,” McCoy said. “Look, here she is back again. Thank Gawd for that . . .”
McCoy cackled and wobbled in place, drunker even than Daniel had first supposed.
“The Lockport flight,” Daniel said.
McCoy’s features scrunched together at the center of his face. He canted his head sideways, one way and then the other, peering harder.
“Boil me for a shad,” he muttered. “You! You rascal! Didn’t you make a fine escape, though?”
“I did.”
“That was some trick, you slippery sonofabitch. You know I lost my boat over that business?”
“Is that so?” Daniel said.
“Oh, it ruined me.”
“You deserved it. You were going to sell us into slavery for twenty-five dollars.”
“Wait just a minute,” McCoy protested. “The indenture ain’t slavery.”
“It might as well be. How is it different?”
“Well, if you live through your term, you’re free to go.”
“In other words, you were going to let them try to work us to death.”
“You two looked pretty sturdy,” McCoy retorted and giggled. “Hey, it wasn’t personal. Just business.”
“I see,” Daniel said. “And what business are you up to now?”
“I do a li’l this, a li’l that. I miss the canal. The lovely, easy life.”
“It was a lovely,” Daniel agreed. “Who were those men you were bickering with at the Oyster House?”
“Them? Oh, I work for them sometimes.”
“Doing what?”
“You don’t want to know,” McCoy said darkly. “You had a friend along. Younger. What was he called?”
“Evan.”
“Yes! Evan! A lively boy! Oh, we got on well, him and me. What happened to him?”
“Dead.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Lost in a storm on Lake Erie. Washed overboard.”
“Sorry to hear that. She’s bad when she’s angry, Lake Erie is. Shallow, you know. That wind whips her right up, quick and fierce. Come on, le’s have a drink—”
“What happened to Farnum?”
“Huh?”
“The super at Lockport.”
“What happened!” McCoy echoed, with an edge of manic hilarity. “Well, you shot him, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did. Did he live?”
“’Course not. He was dead before sundown. I forgot your name.”
“Daniel.”
McCoy’s rheumy eyes opened wide. The concertina music emanating from Slaven’s barroom segued into a merry, frenetic jig, “The Stool of Repentance.”
“Daniel,” he said. “Hold on now. You were in the paper a while ago. I saw the item. Why, there’s a pretty price on you. Am I right?”
“That’s correct,” Daniel said, reaching into his pocket.
“And not just for shooting whatsisface. What else was it you done? I forget.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“It was big as I recall. ’Course it matters.”
“Not for our purposes.”
“What purpose is that?” McCoy said.
“To answer one question.”
“Being what?”
“How would you sum up your life.”
“Sum up my life?”
“Yes. In a few sentences,” Daniel said.
“Hmph. You really wanna know?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, here goes.” McCoy burped. “Grew up rough. Survived the troubles. Prospered on the Erie. Was beloved by my mules. Lost it all. Drank too much. And here we are. Why do you ask?”
“Because it’s over now,” Daniel said, and in a swift, deft motion he whipped the guitar string garrote over Randall McCoy’s head and, pulling the spoon handles, tightened the apparatus around McCoy’s throat, at the same time dragging McCoy on his boot heels by main force into a darkened empty market vendor’s stall a few yards away.
“This is personal,” Daniel whispered in his ear.
McCoy bucked and thrashed violently, but he was not as strong as he once was, and in a few minutes it was over. Daniel left him there under a plank table, knowing that the hogs would be back.
He left the scene at once, the frenetic jig from Slaven’s gully den gaining in speed and violence as he departed. Walking casually toward the heart of Commercial Row, he felt the peculiar sensation of returning to himself after being not entirely present for an interval. The training still resided inside him like
a sinister tenant dwelling in the attic of the house that was his psyche.
THIRTY-SIX
Beginning at sunrise, frantic with worry, Robert searched for Britney in the obvious places, though he was mystified as to how or why she would remove Sarah’s body, or where she might take it, or what she might do with it wherever she took it. He had a look, first, in the family barn around the corner, where he discovered that Cinnamon the cow was in distress from not being milked for more than two days. He took care of her, dumping two whole pails of warm milk in the sand and leaving a third steaming in the chicken run. Anyway, Britney was not there, nor had anyone seen her at the New Faith compound, nor anyone along Main Street, including at Einhorn’s store. He hiked a little way out of town to the rusted steel railroad bridge that crossed the Battenkill at the place along the river where Britney liked to gather wilds and there was no sign of her there. He peeked inside the ruins of the Kmart on his way back to town. Weeds were growing in there in places where sunshine came through the partially caved-in roof. He went to Daniel’s print shop, knowing that his son was out of town, and knocked on the padlocked door there. Nothing. He tried the Congregational church. Nobody there, not even Loren. He trudged over to the Schmidt farm, then the Deaver farm on Pumpkin Hill, and then across town to the Weibel farm on the back side of Schoolhouse Hill. No one had seen Britney. It occurred to him that she might have just walked away from Union Grove altogether in a fog of despair, with no particular destination in mind, just walked away in torment and misery until she dropped, or got sick, or met roughnecks on the road, or encountered a dangerous animal, a catamount, a bear, a pack of wolves—of which, he was cognizant, there were plenty around these days. Or, he began to wonder, perhaps she had lit out with some destination in mind—Glens Falls? Bennington?—to deliberately start life over once again. But what about Sarah?
By midafternoon Robert himself had entered a fog of exhausted despair, partially induced by walking more than twelve miles all day without eating anything. He returned home to rest for a little while, found a pot of bean and potato soup in the meat safe, where the mice could not get at it, and devoured all of it cold. He couldn’t help himself after that but fell asleep on the living room sofa amid the splinters of Sarah’s shattered violin. And when he woke up it was with a vivid intuition, the residue of a dream, that he had missed looking in the most obvious place he should have gone to first: the childhood home up the North Road out of town where Britney had told him more than a few times she’d spent the happiest years of her life. So he pulled himself together and left the house again and hiked past the New Faith compound on the North Road out of town. Sure enough in a little while he came upon the handsome old white farmhouse all crowded around by sumacs, lilacs, box elders, and climbing vines, with its scorched addition and the yard filled with early spring wildflowers, the mustard cress, pink cranesbill, and subtle wild red columbine. The afternoon was windless, the temperature a perfect 70 degrees, and the landscape utterly silent except for the chatter of songbirds. As he stood in the empty road before the house, he noticed his chore wagon parked in the weeds and it was as if a great weight slid off his shoulders.
He stole in through the broken kitchen door, off all but one of its hinges, and entered. He paused to listen, hearing nothing, then crept stealthily toward the front rooms and it did not take him long to find Britney lying in the window seat wrapped in a blanket with her daughter’s corpse. Britney was spooned up against the body with her long pale hair falling over the edge of the seat. She did not acknowledge Robert’s presence. He was not altogether sure for a few moments that she was alive, but the room was filled with light and watching closely he soon observed the blanket rise and fall with her breathing.
“Brit,” he said gently.
She did not reply. He stepped closer carefully. He wanted to lie down next to her and spoon against her in grief, but there was no room left in the window seat, so he squatted beside her and then slid his legs out so he could sit on the floor right next to her. He ventured to reach up and touch her and she allowed him to, and soon he was stroking the side of her neck by her ear, and rubbing the warm hollow between her neck and her shoulder, and after a little while Britney started to shudder soundlessly in tears, and Robert rose to his knees and buried his face in that familiar soft, warm, fragrant hollow between her neck and shoulder, saying, “Oh, Britney, I love you so much.” He didn’t repeat himself, but eventually her small hand swung out from under the blanket seeming to search and reach, and he took it and squeezed it and said, “I’m here. We’re all here. Together.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Karen Grolsch got leave from Carl Weibel, a kind and understanding employer, to take a half day at the poultry barns for personal reasons. She had not taken a sick day all year and he considered her a good and valued worker. She had done such an excellent job as duck boss that Weibel was the chief supplier of cured duck sausage and preserved duck (bottled in its own fat) in Washington County. She walked back to town in lovely weather just after noon, changed into clean trousers and sturdy shoes, and set off on foot for Stephen Bullock’s plantation, intent on talking to him about his quarrel with the town, the results to be published, she hoped, in the newspaper.
She had been to Bullock’s place once before, at a levee a year ago to celebrate the rescue of his boatmen from Dan Curry’s hostage racket in Albany. That had been a sultry summer evening of the purest festivity, unalloyed even by religious ceremony, and virtually everyone in town had been invited, though perhaps only a hundred or so actually came. Bullock himself was in fine form that night, such a striking figure with his splendid clothes, tall boots, long silver hair, and clean-shaven face, like a heroic figure in a fine painting from the nation’s founding days. There was music and dancing and tables groaning with things to eat—old-times treats of meat and sausages in buns and little cornmeal crackers that the older people called taco chips and endless drafts of cider and beer—and swags of magical electric lights from tree to tree, and music amplified through loudspeakers, because Mr. Bullock was able to make his own electricity. Karen had gotten rather drunk herself and allowed a young man named Bruce (surname unknown to her), who worked on Bullock’s orchard crew, to kiss her and fondle her breasts in the hayloft of the great barn while the band played the beautiful “Two Rivers Waltz” for the dancers down below. So her memory of Bullock’s world was, on the whole, tinged with enchantment and she marveled that so much had changed in relations between Bullock and the town since then.
She had plenty of time on the way there to rehearse her introduction and review the questions she had for him. She had no appointment—a bygone formality in a world without phones or mail—but hoped for perhaps a quarter hour of his time. The journey was about four miles on foot, an hour and half at her moderate pace. Karen was aware that she had hardly ever in her life traveled any distance alone, apart from her daily trip to the farm. She had gone to other levees, holiday festivals, and dances out of town, to Battenville, Salem, and the great farm estates around the county, but never alone, always with friends, and usually in a cart or wagon. She was aware also that possible danger lurked along the lonely road outside the safety of the village. Mountain lions, or catamounts, were so brazen now that they sometimes ventured into village streets in broad daylight. And then there were those human predators reputed to roam the countryside looking for opportunity. She had never met a bandit, though she did not doubt they existed in more than rumor. So this spring day, in perfect weather, she marched along in confidence enjoying the feel of her own healthy, young body and her happy aspiration to be become more than just the duck boss at Weibel’s farm.
She rambled past the intersection where the car dealers had battled for supremacy of annual sales, their vacant parking lots now miniature forests of poplar and sumac, the showrooms empty shells. The sight of these ruins and the monumental waste they represented made her momentarily angry. She knew that the people running things in the ol
d times understood that their way of life was a dead end, and she could even imagine that they were so locked into their systems and habits that they were more or less trapped. What she couldn’t grasp was their utter failure even to imagine another plan. So they took it as far as it would go and then just let it all crash. She remembered riding in cars, but they were all gone by the time she was seven years old, and then incrementally so were all the other things that had made life so comfortable. Yet she didn’t especially miss it. She was used to the new ways and the new times, and ordinarily she didn’t suffer from how it was now.
Along the River Road, Karen came to a slow water eddy along the Hudson where five New Faith brothers under the direction of Shiloh, the engineer, were building crib docks in preparation for the arrival of the new town boat. Brother Shiloh, a broad man of sharp angles, recognized her from town and she said she was out gathering the news for the soon-to-be-published newspaper, and so he gave her a little tour of the works. Shiloh’s men were building log cribs—six-foot-square boxes like little cabins, joined together with half-inch iron pipe through auger holes, each box then filled with rocks, laid out in a line from shore, to be decked over with cedar planks coming down from Hokely’s sawmill. The men had gotten two parallel sets of cribs in so far and hoped to have four altogether in place before the boat arrived, creating a slot protected from the current and the wind on two sides.
Karen scribbled notes as Shiloh showed her around and explained everything in his lilting Carolina accent. The new sights and sounds excited her tremendously: the smell of the skinned logs and the fishy overtone of the river, the afternoon sunshine, the bright little breeze off the water, the men working in the sun, in and out of the water, with their shirts off and muscles rippling. Mostly what excited her was the change of scene. It was so refreshing to be somewhere other than Mr. Weibel’s poultry barns, or even at home. She told Shiloh that she was going to interview Mr. Bullock.
The Harrows of Spring Page 18
