I woke up gasping to a great commotion of preaching on the radio. Even after I caught my breath, I could not overcome the sinking sensation in my gut. I recalled Jane Ann visiting me the night before and wondered what we thought we were doing together. The purity of my despair astonished me. The uproar on the radio finally wrenched me out of it. Roosters crowed off in the distance behind the din. I never turned off the old FM receiver in the living room anymore so as to be aware when the electricity kicked back on. It hadn’t been on in weeks. I wasn’t even sure who or what was putting juice through the wires when it did come on.
Sunlight was already filtering through the curtains, so I supposed it was around six. We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore. It was made by my friend Andrew Pendergast, the town librarian, a man of broad talents: portrait painter, sometime theater director, leader of our church music circle, and a wonderful piano player. He repaired instruments and made strings out of sheep intestine for those of us who played instruments that required them—in my case, fiddle.
Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was. Andrew had old almanacs that told the sunrise and sunset for a given date so he always had the correct time. If you asked him, Andrew would stop by your house and check your clock against his pocket watch, which was accurate. It was not so hard to keep track of the date, probably because holidays were important to us in ways that might be inconceivable to people whose sole conception of Christmas had been based on frantic excursions to gigantic chain stores. We lived by the seasons now. Our survival depended on it. And we marked the seasons by frequent holiday celebrations, fetes, levees, balls, and solemn days of remembrance.
The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar reassuring voices of normality were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation:
“I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth . . .”
I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out, until there was nothing. But when the electricity did come on, I automatically turned on the TV and roamed around the stations to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t.
I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn’t come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising, had gone with it. No shortwave bands were on my old receiver, so I returned the signal to the ranter on 90.3 FM just to hear another voice while I addressed myself to the project of breakfast. Even if the world had gone crazy, I preferred to know what was on its addled mind. Among us survivors were many who were confused and despondent.
“I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.”
What used to be the rear patio of my house was rigged up to be a summer kitchen. You didn’t want to run a wood-burning stove indoors when it was ninety degrees, and it was that hot much of the time, May through October. I had a sheet-metal wood-burning cookstove out there under a roof with open side walls, a sturdy eight-foot pine table I’d made, and a cupboard with pierced tin panels to keep my salt and cornmeal and honey safe from little animals while it let air in. A smoker sat a way back from there, an old refrigerator on blocks, over by the fence. It was hard to imagine that we used to cultivate lawns. My yard was now a raised bed garden. It was geometrical, a cruciform pattern, the beds transected on the diagonal as well, with brick paths carefully laid. With our many material privations, it was not possible to live without beauty anymore. I spent a lot of time in my garden, and the feel of being in it was as important to me as the vegetables I grew. At the center, I built a birdbath out of stacked granite blocks with a concave piece of slate on top that caught the rain. The birds seemed satisfied with it and it was pleasant to look at. I would have preferred a statue of the goddess Diana in the manner of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, but I hadn’t managed to scrounge one up. The smoker, much as I needed it, was an insult to the garden. It galled me to see the damned thing: a scarred old Kelvinator that mocked our failed industrial dreams. I intended to replace it someday with a proper brick smokehouse.
I prepared to smoke the trout I had left from the evening’s fishing because they’d be worth something in trade and for breakfast I had plenty of eggs and the brown bread Jane Ann brought me. We didn’t have a lot of things, but we had plenty of eggs. Half the people in town kept chickens, and rabbits too, which was the reason I didn’t. Much of the year we had plenty of milk and butter as well, though milk was more difficult to keep in high summer because we lacked refrigeration. Butter in a covered crock would keep on a sideboard for a week or more, even in hot weather. Many farmers made cheeses and traded for them, and Bill Schroeder, who ran the creamery, made several kinds.
So I had two fires to get going that day: cookstove and smoker. I split up ash kindling splints and whittled down some of them to shavings and started a fire under the smoker with one match. You didn’t like to waste matches. I put apple wood chunks on the burning ash kindling and let it work. By then I had the cookstove kindled up and brought fire to it from the smoker, and soon they were both going.
I generally ate a big breakfast. The amount of walking I did required it. In the old days, as a corporate executive, I kept going on little more than continuous cups of black coffee until dinnertime. I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important, you were. The people in my office joked that my thermal mug was surgically attached to my arm. In those days, in a life that now seemed as if it had taken place on another planet, we lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I worked for a software company called Ellipses on Route 128. Our division made network security programs: antivirus, antispam, antihacker, firewalls. I was head of marketing and spent the bulk of my time organizing promotional events at national trade shows in places like Atlanta and Las Vegas. We’d pay big-time rock and roll bands to get the customers in for the CEO’s sales pitch. We’d buy out whole vintages of California wineries to impress our clients. We’d hire celebrity chefs to feed them. My job paid well and we enjoyed the status of a nice house, German cars, and private schools for the children. I multitasked so hard I had panic attacks. I suppose all the coffee I drank didn’t help. Then, within a short span of time, our world changed completely.
We came here, to Union Grove, Sandy’s hometown, after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. It tanked the whole U.S. economy. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. Freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went home with their cargoes undelivered. The earth stopped being flat and became very round again. Even nations that were still talking to us after the war in the Holy Land, stopped being able to trade with us. Ellipses went down by stages, one division at a time. Ours was the last to go.
I was thirty-six then. We sold the house in Brookline at a substantial loss just to get out. We dumped the big BMW and kept the sedan. You could still get gasoline, though it was expensive and sc
arcities were worsening. We wanted to be as far away from the action as we could get without leaving the northeastern region of the country. Sandy’s father, Bill Trammel, was alive then, a retired vice president of the nearby Glens Falls National Bank. He was glad to have us all in the house in Union Grove because Sandy’s mother had died of cancer the year before, and it was a bad time to be old and lonely. Pneumonia took Bill two years after we arrived. Common antibiotics were in short supply. In a way, I was glad he went before Sandy and Genna and everything else that happened, because it would have broken his heart. He was absolutely a man of the twentieth century. His last coherent words, in the delirium of illness, were “Don’t worry, I’ll bring the car around . . .”
By the time he passed away, it was obvious there would be no return to “normality.” The economy wouldn’t be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history. I was fortunate to have carpentry skills to fall back on and to have a decent collection of hand tools.
The evangelist on the radio cut out, and I realized that the electricity had gone off. I felt relieved, even though I had only myself to blame for leaving the radio on. Listening to these maniacs had gotten to be a compulsion for me. I was desperate to learn anything about the world outside Washington County, because I worried constantly about my Daniel and where he might be, and whether it was dangerous there.
We didn’t have coffee anymore, or any caffeinated substitutes for it. I made a pot of rose-hip tea, which was our chief source of vitamin C, and fried up three slices of Jane Ann’s brown bread with plenty of butter in a cast-iron skillet that I had owned my entire adult life—I actually remembered buying it in a Target store in Hadley, Massachusetts, the year after I graduated from Amherst College. When the bread slices were crispy and fragrant, I took them out and dropped in three small pullet eggs. I missed black pepper terribly. We hadn’t seen any for years. Cinnamon too. Anything from the Far East was no longer available. But over the years I had developed some skill in brewing my own hot pepper sauce. It was worth something in trade. I put plenty on my eggs.
Once the radio went off you could hear roosters battling for supremacy of the village. Some people were annoyed by them, but I found them pleasantly reassuring. Their crowing and the vapors of the hot sauce helped clear enough room in my head to think about what I had to do. Planning my day was a way of not giving in to despair. It really is not possible to pay attention fully to two things at once—for instance, carpentry and suicide.
I had to continue the work I had started on a cupola above Larry and Sharon Prager’s garage, which they were turning back into a stable. Larry Prager was our dentist. With the electricity off most of the time, he did not have the high speed drill anymore. He got ahold of a 1920s pulley drill in Glens Falls, and Andrew Pendergast helped him rig it up to a foot treadle which Sharon could operate like a pump organ while she assisted her husband. He had become adept at working with gold in the absence of complex polymers and advanced cements. His patients usually brought in their own gold, most often jewelry, which he converted into castings or foils. For anesthesia he was limited to tinctures of opium and marijuana. Nobody looked forward to a session with Larry, but we were lucky to have a dentist.
The job on his cupola required trips to the sawmill and the general supply, often called simply “the general.” So, I tidied up the breakfast things, hung the trout in the smoker, tossed more apple wood on the smoldering embers, and washed myself in the outdoor shower I’d rigged up next to the summer kitchen. We were fortunate to still have running water in the village. The town established its water system in the early twentieth century. The reservoir lay a hundred feet higher in elevation above the village, so the system was gravity fed and still worked. It wasn’t treated anymore but it was good potable water—though the pressure was noticeably lower lately. I had a little sheet-metal tank with a firebox rigged above the shower, all held up on a steel pipe frame. It was such a warm morning that I didn’t bother firing it, and the cool water brisked me up. Finally, I put on my work clothes: cutoff denim shorts and what used to be a Brooks Brothers pink pinstripe dress shirt, now minus the sleeves.
We didn’t use bicycles much anymore—rubber tires being unavailable, not to mention the poor condition of the pavements. For many ordinary chores, therefore, I was what we all jokingly referred to as a foot cowboy. I had a small wooden tote wagon that I’d built for my toolbox, which I’d left on the job over at Prager’s. I dreamed all the time about getting a horse, almost as much as when I was a six-year-old boy. They couldn’t breed them fast enough, and they were still very costly. You could rent one from Tom Allison here in town: saddle horse or horse with a rig, if you needed to transport something bulky or go visiting with your family. Anyway, I set off that day on foot with my old backpack to carry the nails and things I needed from the general. The sawmill would send my wood down by wagon after I went by and ordered and paid for it.
Out in the dooryard, I heard the distant clip-clop of hooves on pavement, and then I saw a wagon glide up Salem Street toward where the high school had been. That was the extent of the traffic. The tranquillity was pleasing, despite what it signified about what had happened to our society. You could tell it was going to be a hot day. A gauzy haze already hung over the sun-struck little town. The birds sounded discouraged.
Mrs. Myles, my neighbor, was outside firing up the immense copper tub that she used to do the laundry she took in. Her given name was Lucy, and she had been an English teacher in the high school, which was no more. She had lost her husband, Dexter, as I’d lost Sandy, from the encephalitis. He had been the Washington County family court judge. Since she was at least seventy years old, and was used to being addressed a certain way by children, everybody called her Mrs. Myles rather than Lucy. I’d helped her out by constructing her laundry system, a drywall fieldstone hearth under the tub, and the pipe system, and two long pine tables for sorting and stacking things, and the pavilion that sheltered it all from rain and snow. We’d run the gray-water drain pipe out of the copper tub and into the ground across the yard to her substantial patch of currents and gooseberries. She was an excellent gardener. Forty years ago she had been a Cub Scout den mother and member of the town zoning board. Back then, she went to the supermarket every week, like everybody else. She was never once cold or hungry until she was an old woman. She no longer knew where her children were or even if they were still alive.
“Want some eggs, Robert,” she called from across the fence.
“No thanks. Hey, the electric was on for a while just now.”
“Was it?” she said. “I don’t even notice anymore.”
“I’m going to the general. You want me to pick up anything for you?”
“I could use some mason jar lids.”
“I’ll ask.”
“You going up with the truck?” She meant my tote wagon.
“No. Not today.”
“All right.”
“Why?”
“I could use a couple more buckets. Tin, plastic, whatever they’ve got.”
“I’ll get you some real soon.”
“Peas are coming in like gangbusters.”
“That’s good.”
“You get me a nice trout, we’ll be in hog heaven.”
“I’ve got two smoking up right now.”
“I like ’em fresh, fried in butter.”
“Okay. Will do. You have a nice day now, Mrs. Myles.”
“You stay out of trouble, Robert.” She said that to me every time I said goodbye to her. I suppose that was what she used to tell her kids back in school.
FIVE
In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove’s leading industry. When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and ot
her trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump, which had been capped over in the 1990s. The general was run at first as a public cooperative, under the illusion that the ongoing catastrophes would ebb and normality would return. But the flu and the bombing of Washington put an end to that illusion, and the general eventually came under the management of Wayne Karp and his gang of former motorheads.
In the old days, Wayne Karp worked as a trucker for the Holland and Vesey paper mill in Glens Falls. Sometimes he hauled loads of pulpwood down from Saranac. Sometimes he took giant rolls of machine-finished magazine paper from the H & V plant to the big web-offset printing operation in Schenectady where regional editions of Newsweek were run off. In his leisure time, Karp was addicted to sporting entertainments that required gasoline engines: motorcycling, motorboating, snowmobiling, off-roading, jet-skiing, and watching NASCAR racing on television. He couldn’t relax unless an engine was roaring somewhere near his head. He lived four miles outside Union Grove in a former trailer park near the general supply along with about a hundred like-minded former motorheads, greasers, bikers, quasi-criminals and their families who had drifted in over the years.
In normal times, Wayne Karp would have passed through life as just another lumpen American Dreamer, a hardworking consumer of shoddy products, chemically tweaked foods, and rude popular entertainments, a taxpayer subject to the ordinary restrictions of the social contract. But in the new era, he blossomed into a local kingpin.
He was married for some years to a barmaid from a now defunct tavern called Waterhole No. 3, which occupied the even longer defunct Boston and Maine train station. The barmaid earlier had a son out of wedlock with a guard from Comstock State Prison up at the northern end of Washington County. The guard ended up incarcerated in his own joint for selling heroin to the inmates. Wayne Karp raised the child. This stepson ended up in Comstock himself at age nineteen for stabbing to death another teenage boy one summer night at the quarry outside town where kids gathered to drink and hook up with girls. His was one of the last cases tried in the county criminal courts. A month later, flu swept through Comstock prison and killed seventy percent of the inmates, including the stepson and his natural father. Wayne’s wife died under mysterious circumstances a year later. By then the justice system had ground to a halt like so many things that had once seemed woven into the fabric of regular life. The rumor was that Wayne strangled her in their trailer. He had more or less bragged about it openly. The phrase with his bare hands always seemed to crop up whenever you heard someone whispering about it.
World Made by Hand Page 3
