The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  “I know you want another child.”

  “But it wouldn’t be your child.”

  “What if the other man was Daniel?”

  This time her face expressed a collapse of all hope.

  “That would never work,” she said.

  “It would be partially mine,” he said.

  “It would never work,” she repeated. “Never. Never ever.”

  He saw no benefit in arguing about it. His face also sagged in futility.

  “It was just a thought,” he eventually said, sunk in embarrassment and resignation.

  She reached for his hand and squeezed it damply, though as she did she turned her head to front again and did not look at him.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Brother Enos sat in the hallway outside the little chapel room where Flame Aurora Greengrass was confined. That wing of the old high school, which otherwise contained classrooms turned to workshops, was quiet as a mausoleum at this hour. Brother Jobe trudged down the hall carrying the sack that he’d brought from the hotel. A candle burned on a stand next to Enos’s chair and he just stared ahead into space.

  “Whyn’t you read a ding-dang book or something while you sittin’ here,” Brother Jobe said. “Improve your mind a little.”

  “Yessir, I’ll do that next time.”

  “You can read, can’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “There’s a whole doggone library down yonder hallway.”

  “You want me to go get a book right now, sir?”

  “No. Next time will do. Open the ding-dang door. And lock it back up whilst I’m inside.”

  Enos took the key that hung on a cord around his neck and unlocked the door. It opened with a creak. Brother Jobe carried his own tin candle lantern into the room. The twelve chairs set up for Christian meditation were shoved to one side of the room and a cot had been set up in one corner. Flame Aurora Greengrass had been lying on it. He could see where she had attempted to stack up two chairs in hope of getting to the clerestory windows near the top of the wall. But the window openings were only nine inches and someone her size could never have wiggled out, even if she’d been able to get up to them, which she hadn’t. Flame propped herself up on an elbow squinting in the meager light as Brother Jobe pulled up two chairs close to the bed and sat down on one of them.

  “Sit up, young lady.”

  “Think you can label me whatever way you like?”

  Brother Jobe ignored the remark.

  “Do you know who I am?” he said.

  “You’re some little fat man in funny clothes.”

  “I’m your fate, sittin’ here right next to you, taking a special interest in what you done and what you going to do.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “For starters it means you’d best be polite. Go on sit up now, right here acrost from me.”

  Flame stared back impudently a moment, then hauled herself upright on the cot facing Brother Jobe.

  “Are you some officer of the law?” she asked.

  “I’m the chief executive and pastor of the New Faith Covenant Brotherhood Church of Jesus, and that’s as much authority as you got for the time being.”

  “I have a right to an attorney?”

  “As it happens, I’m an attorney myself.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You want me to go git the Duke University sheepskin? Don’t bother answering. Maybe some other time.”

  “I have a right to remain silent.”

  “I wish you would because then I could get on with the bidness at hand.”

  Brother Jobe picked up the sack he’d brought in with him, reached in, carefully removed the mummified head of Glen Ethan Greengrass, and set it upright against the backrest on the other chair beside him. Flame recoiled at the sight of it and placed a hand over her mouth.

  “Yeah, I know it ain’t a pretty sight,” he said. “Maybe this here’ll help.”

  He took the wig out of the sack and put it on the mummified head without quite being able to determine how it was supposed to fit.

  Tears began to squirt out of Flame’s eyes and she drew her knees up into her chest.

  “That your daddy?”

  Flame nodded her head.

  “Looks like he ain’t been among the living for a while.”

  “He . . . lives . . . in our hearts,” she said.

  “As the departed should. But you been traveling all about the countryside with him for some time trying to scare folks, and rob them, and now you gone too far. You brung a lot of misery down on your own fellow travelers. There’s thirteen of yours dead and three more shot up but alive, one of them a seven-year-old girl that had to have her leg cut off. Plus one town man you shot in the head and one of my rangers killed today,” Brother Jobe said, his voice both rising in pitch and breaking, “one of the finest human beings I ever known, bushwhacked by that sharpshootin’ runt of yours, who’s dead now too, by the way.” He struggled to regain his composure. “There’s at least half a dozen common laws of conduct that I could hang you under.”

  “We don’t believe in capital punishment.”

  Brother Jobe smacked the seat of the adjoining chair so hard that the head of Glen Ethan Greengrass fell on the floor and rolled under the cot. He did not bother to retrieve it. Flame shrieked and began to hyperventilate.

  “It don’t matter what you believe,” Brother Jobe hollered back at her. “Not anymore. What matters from now on is what I require of you. Where’s that sumbitch Buddy?”

  Flame shook her head wildly.

  “You don’t know or you ain’t sayin’? I’m fixin’ to hang his ass too.”

  Brother Jobe watched Flame blubber awhile.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said eventually. “Do you know why Achilles chased Hector around the city of Troy three times?”

  She continued to shake her head while her eyes blazed and her nose ran.

  “Because he was just that pissed off,” Brother Jobe yelled at her again and rose halfway out of his seat doing so. The tendons in his neck stood out like they were piano wires. “And you got me feeling much the same way. Where’s that Buddy at?”

  She would not reply but only glared back in opposition.

  Brother Jobe brought his right index finger out vertically in front of Flame’s face. He captured her attention and it was all he needed.

  “Lookit here now and follow,” he said.

  He swerved his index finger up to the outside corner of his right eye. At the same moment, the glare went out of Flame’s eyes. She let go of her knees and came to sit primly on the edge of the cot, psychologically his captive.

  “I’m amongst your mind now,” he told her. “Can you feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s Buddy at?”

  “Bullock’s,” she said.

  “Was he aimin’ to rob Mr. Bullock?”

  “Yes,” Flame said.

  “From what all I know of Mr. Bullock, Buddy done picked the wrong fellow to try and snooker. I’d calculate that Mr. Bullock done disposed of him by now. You think I’m quick to anger? Why, Mr. Bullock, he’s a human magnum load with a hair trigger. Those men playin’ Indian go with Buddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s probably got them strung up like Christmas lights down along the River Road. Mr. Bullock don’t have no patience for bandits. Nor mercy. He’s a harsh man. I don’t like to think that I’m like that. But you and your bunch have really tried my Christian patience. Can you give me a reason why I shouldn’t hang you?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, without a particle of emotion.

  It was Brother Jobe’s turn to be startled. He left his position at the threshold of her mind and ventured deeper into the dark realm of her memory and experience. What he discovered the
re stunned him.

  “You’re carrying Elam’s child,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Brother Jobe sat quietly for quite a while, his own emotions in turmoil, weighing the situation and all its ramifications as he explored more deeply the mind of the young woman before him. The damage of her upbringing and her passage into the difficult new times was as plain to him as the injuries suffered by Mary Beth Ivanhoe after she was crushed by an SUV automobile.

  “You prepared to bear this child?” he asked at length.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You understand you will have to dwell with us?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m gonna make a special provision for you. You’ll live in a special place. You will be cared for and looked after and watched over. It ain’t gonna be like the life you led before. Understand?”

  “Yes.

  “Henceforth, you’ll be known among us as . . . Sister Venus. Flame is gone. She done sputtered out. A new you has took her place. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m gonna count backwards from ten and you gonna fall asleep. When you wake up, you won’t remember none of this, but you got a new place and a new role in this world. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten . . . nine . . .”

  When he arrived at one, Brother Jobe reached out and helped ease her down onto the cot, where she reposed in stillness with her head on a pillow and her hands clasped beside her face as if in prayer. He left his chair, retrieved the mummified head of Glen Ethan Greengrass from under the cot and the wig that had come off again, and stuffed them back in the pillowcase he brought them in with. Then he went to the door and told Enos to unlock it. Enos peered inside.

  “She asleep?”

  “She gonna be for a good while,” Brother Jobe said.

  “Mercy,” Enos said.

  “She’s out of the woods now, I judge. I’m gonna send some of the sisters down to set with her. By-and-by they gonna bring her upstairs. She won’t cause nobody no trouble no more.”

  When he got back to his own personal quarters at half past four in the morning, Brother Jobe found his all-around man Friday and confidential assistant Brother Boaz waiting in the office.

  “What’d you do with the better half of Mr. Glen Ethan Greengrass’s mortal remains?” Brother Jobe asked.

  “I got him in the janitor’s closet yonder, in a box.”

  “Well, take this here,” Brother Jobe said proffering the sack with the head and the wig in it, “and go bury him out in the corn somewheres. It’ll be light in little while.”

  “Yessir.”

  Boaz made to leave.

  “Wait!”

  Boaz halted in midstep.

  “On second thought, make a nice fire out there and cremate the sumbitch. Then scatter what’s left to the four winds.”

  SIXTY-NINE

  Karen Grolsch did not leave Daniel’s place that night but retired with him to the big bed between the Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen area and the printing office that occupied the rear two-thirds of the building. There they did what young people hungry for affection, affirmation, and amity will do, and they did it repeatedly through the long hours of night, and remained awake even after that, so thrilled were they in the unfolding discovery of each other’s bodies and beings. Moonlight poured into the room through the transoms of the fine old windows. They were far enough across town that the cries of the surgeries did not carry there.

  “They say you’ve been out west,” Karen murmured, folded halfway over Daniel with her long, elegant fingers tracing the valley between his pectoral muscles.

  “I was in Michigan for a while.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “On a beautiful ship. A big schooner. On the Great Lakes.”

  “What did you do in Michigan?”

  “I fell in with the government,” he said. “With what was left of it. What people now call the Federals. They moved their headquarters there, a town they named New Columbia. I stayed offshore at a place called Channel Island, out in Lake Huron, where most of the officials lived. I was enlisted into an agency called the Service and went through their training there.”

  “What were you trained to do?”

  “I was trained to kill people,” Daniel said.

  Karen hoisted the top half of her body above Daniel to take in his face. Her breasts dangled before him. He cupped one and kissed it.

  “Did you kill anyone?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She lowered herself back down and tucked her head beside his shoulder.

  “Were they bad people?”

  “They were bad enough in a particular way,” he said. “I’m not sure that anyone is evil through and through.”

  “Did you decide who you killed?”

  “One I had instructions to kill. The others I had to decide on my own due to the circumstances. One I had reason to kill, and he pretty much asked for it, but I let him go. I’m telling you this because I believe I can trust you. But you need to know who I am and what I’ve been.”

  “You can trust me,” Karen said. “I think I know what you are.”

  “What do you think that is?”

  “It might shock you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re a warrior.”

  Daniel struggled to digest it.

  “I never thought of myself that way,” he said. “I agonized over my mission.”

  “Then you’re the best kind of warrior.”

  He was so disconcerted he searched for a way to reply.

  “Does it scare you to be with someone who could do such things?” he asked.

  “I feel safe with you. I feel you would protect me.”

  “I would,” he said. “I’m grateful that you aren’t judging me.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. We must take the world for what it is and who we become.”

  “Maybe you have some warrior in you too.”

  “Right now I’m just the duck boss. Quack quack.”

  “Translation?”

  “I think I love you,” she said, and her lips went searching for his again.

  SEVENTY

  The table in the conservatory was laid for a morning meal as Duane Terrio, aka Wawanotewat of the Pocumtuc people, was led in hobbled and shackled by Dick Lee, Stephen Bullock’s estimable majordomo and Michael Delson, his second aide-de-camp. The latter two were armed and took wicker seats in opposing corners of the lovely room with its orchids, bromeliads, and other interesting specimens. Bullock was not there yet. The early morning sun traced a lacy pattern through the tangled vines that grew along the walls from brick-lined beds. Lilah the cook brought in a tray with two juice glasses on it. They were filled with a purplish liquid. She set them down and smiled at the prisoner. She had never been in a room with an Indian in native costume before.

  “Morning,” she said, taking in his topknot and his exotic accessories.

  “Morning to you, too, ma’am,” Terrio said. “You don’t happen to have a key to these handcuffs, do you?”

  She shook her head, smiled again, and withdrew.

  “Isn’t this pleasant?” Terrio observed.

  After a suitable interval, during which Terrio grew increasingly nervous and the other men remained silent, Bullock swept in through the door in his riding togs, having been out since dawn inspecting his domain on a fresh Hanoverian gelding named Plutus.

  “Why you’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my fine-feathered friend,” he said. “Forgive the mixed metaphor. How’d you sleep, by the way?”

  “Oh, just great. All chained up on a wet tile floor in a basement.”

  Bullock sighed, then said to no one in particular, “Why do people think that sarcasm enhances communication,
I wonder. Saying the opposite of what you mean for effect.” Then he turned his attention back to his guest at table. “Anyway, I’d think you’d be used to sleeping rough, living as you do.”

  “We don’t sleep wet, generally.”

  “I take your point. But then, admit it, you’ve been a rather naughty fellow. Trying to burn down my horse barn and scaring the servants. Of course I treated you harshly. But not as severely as your compadres, who sleep in bliss like never before because they are all dead now. Every last one of them. I’ve got them stacked like cordwood over in the apple storage barn. And Mr. Goodfriend, your patron? Why, he’s as stiff as a board this morning having, unfortunately, drunk himself to death.”

  Terrio flinched and then squirmed in his comfortable wicker chair.

  “Take off the cuffs, Michael,” Bullock said. Delson handed Bullock his rifle and freed Terrio’s hands. Terrio shook them to get the blood circulating. Delson returned to his seat with his weapon. “So perhaps now you’re thinking why have they kept me alive?” Bullock continued. “Are you thinking that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on, be a little more definite?”

  “Okay, I’m thinking that.”

  “Good, now we have some basis for conversation. Cheers!”

  Bullock hoisted his juice glass and drank down the contents.

  “What is that stuff?” Terrio asked.

  “Sumac tonic,” Bullock said. “Loaded with vitamin C. Try it. It’s great for you.”

  “You want me to be healthy, huh?”

  “Well, you seem a little wan. It’s not so easy living off the bounty of field and forest, I suppose.”

  “We’ve gotten better at it,” Terrio said.

  “But mostly you steal stuff, right? Come on, be frank.”

  “Okay, we had to supplement our diet.”

  “But I give you credit. You must be a pretty clever fellow to even attempt this aboriginal thing. Ah! Here come the blessings of Western culture!”

  Lilah reentered with another tray and slid plates before Bullock and his guest, along with a basket of freshly baked corn bread and little ramekins of butter and blackberry jam.