Brother Jobe remained humped over at his desk.
“Git Boaz, Zuriel, Shiloh, and Eben down here,” he muttered, without raising his head, referring to four of the most mature and reliable brothers. “Fit ’em out with sidearms. We got to see about something right away.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“That’d be Mr. Glen Ethan Greengrass, the author of all this mischief and tragedy.”
SIXTY-FOUR
Daniel was cleaning up the dishes, half dead on his feet, half drunk, when he heard somebody else at the door, rapping timidly. He considered pretending he was not there but nobody in these new times would leave a home or a workplace without extinguishing any live flames and a candle still burned on the table. So, with his heart in his gut, he went to see who was at his door. It was Karen Grolsch. A smile ignited on her face at seeing him.
“I heard you were back,” she said.
Daniel was shocked to realize he’d all but forgotten about her in the rush of events and was startled to see how radiant she was.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Uh, yes, I’m okay,” he said.
“Can I come in for a moment.”
“Uh, yes, please come in.”
He threw the door all the way open. She smelled of soap and lilac as she stepped past him. She was tall, only a few inches shorter than him, but lithe, sprightly in a light blue summer frock and a thin cardigan sweater, her movements like music in their liquidity. He watched her eyes take in the big room with all its printing equipment and the contrasting domestic areas, the sitting area, the kitchen, the bed—two worlds in one place.
“I’ve been drinking some,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
“We were on the river for two days. Out in the sun. Long days.”
“Yes, I heard. You got that boat.”
“We did,” he said. “We brought back a nice boat.”
“I’ve been busy while you were away,” she said. She carried a canvas tote and pulled out bundled sheafs of papers covered with handwriting. She began laying them out on his kitchen table. “This is my interview with Mr. Bullock—”
“How did you manage to do that?”
“I just went over there and asked to see him.”
“You’re brave.”
“He was gracious. He talked to me for an hour in his study and gave me whiskey. This other report is about the speech that the visiting Mr. Greengrass, founder of the Berkshire Republic, made from the window of his hotel room while you were gone. I transcribed it the best I could, but it didn’t make much sense. I got a lot of comments from the villagers. They didn’t get it, either, so it wasn’t just me. This other one is a report on the robbery that took place today at Einhorn’s store.”
“I heard about it.”
“Yes. It’s all here.”
“You have been busy,” he said. “Are you still the duck boss at Weibel’s?”
“Quack quack,” she said. “That means yes.”
“I’m impressed,” he said.
“I told you I would take this seriously. Maybe now we can put out a newspaper.”
He looked down at the packets of papers neatly arrayed on the table before him, then back at Karen, and said, “Yes, yes, I believe we can.”
She saw something darken his features. He rocked on his heels. He put his hand to his mouth as if his insides were rebelling.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are you sick?”
He tried to look away.
“Tell me,” she said.
Gasping for air, he told her.
SIXTY-FIVE
Loren had been sitting beside his son Evan in the room behind the doctor’s surgery when the men from the village defense team brought in the wounded and the dead. The place had been exceptionally quiet up to that point, just a sweet spring evening with the sounds of new life bourgeoning outside the window: night birds, insects. Loren had been reading Huckleberry Finn to Evan by candlelight. The young man remained unconscious but did not show any gross signs of infection or fever. His brow was dry. From time to time he sighed or shifted slightly in bed. Then the others came from the battlefield about an hour or so after nightfall and the old carriage house turned clinic erupted in a commotion of cries, weeping, prayer, groans, and shouted orders, as the dead were laid out, the wounded were sorted, and the laboratory prepared once again for surgery. Loren left Evan and offered his assistance. Three New Faith women arrived claiming to have nursing experience and set to tasks at once. The doctor and his wife and son donned their scrubs, arrayed their instruments, and fired the autoclave. The candle stands and mirrors were deployed along with fresh linens, grain alcohol antiseptic, opium suppositories, cloth dressings, and bottles of intravenous fluids. And then the surgeries commenced.
They would be at it until sunrise. In the event, the doctor was able to save three of the seven wounded, including a seven-year-old girl who survived the amputation below the knee of her shattered leg. A teen with a head wound died as soon they brought him to the table. Others did not survive their blood loss, trauma, and shock during arduous ordeals under the knife. Loren, who was physically large and strong, was given the task of holding down the patients on the table, as the opium anesthetic did not render the patients completely unconscious, lest the dose kill them outright. Their agonies could be heard over much of the east side of the village, and people began to venture from their homes and collect on the street before the doctor’s establishment to see what was going on. Among those who had ventured down from the Congregational Church’s parish house was Jane Ann Holder, who was enlisted at once in helping to care for the surviving children in a new postoperative ward set up in the infirmary on the second floor above the surgery, unaware that her own son lay in the ground-floor back room recuperating from his own ordeal.
SIXTY-SIX
Brother Jobe and four of his men marched across town from the New Faith headquarters directly to the new hotel in the center of Main Street. Even downtown they could hear the commotion up at the doctor’s, a sound cloud of anguish. Inside, Brother Jonah sat behind the desk, as usual. The bar was closed this night, because Brother Micah, the tavern manager, had turned out for the village defense force. Jonah had been trying to read another Clive Cussler adventure novel, Valhalla Rising, but was unable to concentrate owing to the distant screams and howls abroad on the night air, even after he’d closed the windows in the front room.
“What all’s going on out there, sir?” he asked when Brother Jobe and the men marched in. “Sounds like banshees and goblins on the loose.”
“It’s just some people got hurt in a skirmish,” Brother Jobe said. “Is that Mr. Greengrass yet up in his room?”
“His boys come down now and then,” Jonah said, “but I ain’t seen the man himself since he come in. I think he might be ill, sir.”
“Yeah, so they say. We gonna personally examine the sumbitch. Come on, let’s go.”
The New Faith men lit a candle and followed Brother Jobe upstairs to the door of the Greengrass room. Their polite knock on the door was answered by a surly retort, “What do you want?”
“We want to speak to Mr. Greengrass.”
“He’s very sick.”
“That’s what you said before.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“No, things have changed. Open the door or we gonna bust it down.”
Brother Jobe and his men waited. Eben and Zuriel hoisted their pistols from their waistbands. Brother Jobe nodded to Shiloh and Boaz, who threw themselves against the door and shattered the jamb. The door flew open. Inside, two hulking young men saw the brandished pistols in the mix of candlelight and the moonlight streaming through the window. Every surface of the room was occupied by empty plates and glasses from the meals they’d ordered up. A hand of playing cards lay on
a tea table arrayed in the gin rummy way, with the wheelchair as one of the seats there.
“Git over in that corner by that chiffonier,” Brother Jobe told them. They shuffled past the card table to the designated spot. “This place stinks like a hog pen.”
“What’s all that screaming out there?” one of the young men asked timidly. In the old times, he might have been a linebacker on the high school team but he had the soft, unformed face of a child and the voice of a choirboy.
“That’s the sound of you-all’s youngsters all shot up,” Brother Jobe said.
“Who shot them?” the other young man asked.
“Just shut up,” Brother Jobe said, then called across the room: “Mr. Greengrass, can you hear me?”
“He’s sick—”
“You keep saying. And didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
“Leave him alone!”
Shiloh smacked the boy upside the head with the flat of his hand.
Brother Jobe approached the bed warily. Glen Ethan Greengrass lay inert on the bed. He was not tucked within the bedsheets but rather lay on top of the undisturbed blankets with a thin white-tufted bedspread pulled up to his shoulders. He appeared to be wearing clothing under the bedspread. Brother Jobe leaned closer with his candle. Greengrass’s face was sunken and shriveled. In the meager light the concavities beneath his cheekbones were so deep they looked like excavations. The skin was like old parchment. His hair was unnaturally dark and full and carefully combed. The lips were shrunken back to such an extreme that the face appeared to be deviously grinning.
“Don’t touch him!”
Shiloh smacked the boy again.
“Didn’t he tell you shut up?”
“What are you?” Brother Jobe muttered, reaching out to draw down the bedspread, which he then flung aside, revealing the full shrunken figure in a tattered old business suit several sizes too large, the tips of bony fingers like claws on a bird of prey, and shiny black shoes on its feet that looked several sizes too large. An odor as of rot overlaid with disinfectant spirits rose off the figure. Brother Jobe turned to look back at its two young guardians. “What is this? Some kind of puppet?”
One of them gaped with his mouth open. The other tried to look away as if frightened or ashamed. Neither replied.
Brother Jobe slid his left hand under Glen Ethan Greengrass’s head. As he attempted to lift it, the full, dark hair fell away all of a piece, revealing an incision that circumscribed the skull. Brother Jobe slid his left hand farther down under the figure’s shoulders and his right hand under its hips and lifted it up in both hands. The figure was as stiff as a four-foot length of two-by-six lumber and didn’t weigh as much as that. Brother Jobe looked down on the thing in his hands with disgust and amazement. He turned so that his men could behold it. As he did, its head drooped backward and, with a slight tearing sound, came loose and fell off the body and onto the floor, where it bounced once. Grains of sawdust and wood chips fell from the aperature that had been his neck.
“I be dog,” Brother Jobe said, “if Glen Ethan Greengrass ain’t a ding-dang mummy!”
His two young guardians let out howls that drowned the screams of the dying children emanating from four blocks to the east. One fell to his knees and began to throw up.
Brother Jobe turned to gaze down at the shrunken remnant of a former person in his hands and said, “My thoughts exactly.” Then he heaved the body clean out the open window in a forceful arc that made it appear, for a moment, as if it might take flight. But gravity intervened and it landed in the street with a faint thud. Finally, Brother Jobe picked the head and the wig up off the floor and stuffed them in a pillowcase.
“Take these two gomers back and put ’em in with the others,” he told Shiloh and the men.
SIXTY-SEVEN
As he made his way home on horseback across the village from Daniel’s quarters, Robert heard the commotion at the doctor’s place and then saw the people on the street and stopped to ask what it was about. Charles Pettie of the church music circle was one of the several dozen neighbors on the east end of the village who had gathered there. They carried candle lanterns as in a vigil.
“What happened?” Robert asked him.
“Weren’t you in on this?” Charles said. “They got up a militia, you know.”
“No, I had to go out in the county and see about the mischief there.”
“I would have gone with them but for my bad knees,” Charles said. “The Berkies fired on our people. Some children got hurt. More than a few. Dear God . . .”
Robert asked him to hold on to Mookie while he went inside. The doctor’s waiting room had been turned into a triage unit where the New Faith nurses were trying to comfort and console those awaiting surgery. Among the men acting as orderlies, moving the patients in and out, was Tom Allison, the former college dean who ran the livery now. Robert went over to him.
“It’s going to get around that we killed a bunch of kids,” Tom said. “I hope you’re prepared.”
“I don’t even know what happened,” Robert said.
Tom laid out what had gone down in the hayfield.
“They fired on us,” Tom said. “After that, well . . .”
Robert attempted to comprehend the scene.
“We’re good people,” Tom insisted. “We are.”
“I know,” Robert said.
“I’ve got to go,” Tom said. “They need me now.”
Robert realized that in the close quarters of the chaotic scene he would only be in the way, so he went back down the driveway and spoke briefly as mayor to the gathered townspeople to convey what he’d learned of the situation. He saw no point to remaining out there among them and he rode the horse back to the New Faith stables. None of the brothers was on duty there when he came in. Enough moonlight entered through the cupola so he could see what he was doing. He took off Mookie’s tack, put him in a stall, found some oats in the grain room for him and a fat flake of hay, and brought him a bucket of water. Then he walked the rest of the way home to the house on Linden Street. It was upwind of the doctor’s place and the cries of the wounded and dying were so faint as to be barely audible. When he stepped inside he discovered Britney sitting on the sofa in the front parlor.
“You’re sitting in the dark,” he said, realizing it was a self-evident and stupid observation.
“The moon’s full tonight,” she said.
“Well, that’s true.”
“I was alone all day.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be here. We’ve had a sort of emergency.”
“What sort?”
Robert realized she had virtually no idea what else had been going on for days. He didn’t want to spell out the terrible result: children dead and dying.
“Trouble outside of town. I had to ride around the county all day.”
“Are we being invaded?”
Robert hesitated. “Just some bandits,” he said.
“I thought I heard screaming far away. Is someone having a baby across town?”
“No. The doctor’s working on some people who are hurt.”
“Anyone we know?”
“No. Just the bandits.”
Britney nodded.
“Can I sit with you?” Robert asked.
“Yes.”
He slid in beside her. He could feel her warmth through the flannel bathrobe and the sweater on top of it.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’ll never get over this,” she said.
“I know.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Well, I lost a wife and a daughter,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “Forgive me. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”
“Did you ever get over it?” she
asked.
“No,” Robert said. “But I found you.”
She turned to him.
“Let’s make a child,” she said. “You and me.”
“We’ve been together a year, you know, and you haven’t gotten pregnant.”
“I know when I’m ovulating. I can feel it. I’ve been extremely careful all these months. I didn’t want to tell you.”
He reached over and touched her cheek, pulled some of her long hair away from her face, and tucked it behind her ear.
“Do you know what a vasectomy is?” Robert said.
Britney nodded. Then, suddenly, her tears ran as if a faucet had just been turned.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” she said and twisted herself way from him pressing against the back of the sofa.
Robert let her cry herself out. He tried to rub her neck and shoulders but she batted him away. Finally, she turned back around, looking forward. Not saying anything, just struggling with her sadness.
“I have an idea,” Robert said.
She was sniffling and it took her a while to heave a big sigh and say, “What’s your idea?”
“You could get pregnant by . . . other means.”
Her eyes widened as if he’d said something crazy.
“Haven’t you heard?” she said. “There are no more fertility clinics.”
“I mean somebody else could do it.”
“You want another man to get me pregnant?”
The Harrows of Spring Page 27
