“I have work for you, old son,” he said.
“You’re not of any age to be my daddy,” I said.
“Figure of speech,” he said. “Relax.”
“You’re a cheeky son of a gun.”
“ ’Course I am. I’m a leader of men,” he said and cackled and gave me a little poke in the ribs. “Word is you are a fine woodworker.”
“Is that so?”
“You any good, then?”
“I’m plenty busy so I must be good enough.”
“Like I was saying.”
“You have plenty of hands among your followers,” I said. “Surely some of them are carpenters.”
“They’re coming along. I’d like for them to work with you, though. Learn a thing or two. There’s a particular special job over our way that needs doing.”
“What would that be?”
“You come by, I’ll show you.”
“Are you trying to recruit me?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Just so we understand each other.”
“Oh, I think we do. No strings attached.”
“I hear you’ve been coming around the young widow’s house.”
“We’ve dropped by, like everybody else, trying to help out.”
“You’re leaning on her to come over your way?”
“What’s wrong with that? You all bring her pies and meal and joints of meat. We offer that and more. We offer warm hearts and busy hands and shelter from the storm—and let me tell you, old son, in case you ain’t noticed, we got plenty of bad weather out there.”
We rolled on for a while without speaking, and I couldn’t resist the sheer enjoyment of the journey. The landscape had changed so much over the years. A lot of what had been forsaken, leftover terrain in the old days, was coming back into cultivation, mostly corn, some barley, oats, hay, and lots of fruit trees. Everywhere that had been a parking lot, the pavement was breaking up and growing over with scrub, sumac, and poplar mostly. The roadside commercial buildings going out of town to the west were in various stages of slow disassembly: the discount beverage warehouse, the strip mall where the movie rental, dollar store, and a Chinese takeout joint used to be. All the metal was stripped off. One particular building fascinated me whenever I came out this way: a bungalow that obviously once had been a regular house before it was engulfed by commercial sprawl, probably in the 1970s. The bungalow had finally evolved into a gift shop selling all kinds of poorly made and perfectly useless handicrafts to motor tourists bored by the interminable hours behind the wheel and desperate for any excuse to stop for a while. The word Gifts was still there in fading four-foot-high letters on the asphalt shingle roof.
“We don’t strong-arm nobody,” Brother Jobe said after a long interval of silence, bringing me out of myself. “If folks come over to us, it’s because of what they see we got to offer.”
“Our people are sore about the way you carried on at the funeral,” I said.
“Really? You all appear to be sunk in laxness and lassitude here.”
“It may seem that way to you, but they don’t like being pushed around any more than anybody else.”
“They’re demoralized, from what I can tell. Folks crave some structure in their lives. You want to see justice done? Don’t you? Ain’t that why you agreed to come along?”
I didn’t reply.
“You can’t live in fear of murderous thugs. And I tell you, we won’t tolerate them now. We have seen too much on our journey and come too far, and by God we are going to make a decent home here. Death has been our outrider all the way. We have learned how he drives men’s spirits, and the kind of respect he demands, and it ain’t in the key of D-major, my friend. Death ain’t no maypole dance. We seen what he did down around Washington.”
“How close did you get?” I said.
“We cut past the edge of the suburbs, coming out of Leesburg and across the highway bridge there into Montgomery County, Maryland. You couldn’t go any nearer. It’d be like committing suicide. We ran into people fleeing west, upwind of the city. Many of them were burned and had the radiation sickness. You’d come across bodies along the road. We couldn’t stop to bury them all. We did not linger.”
“You say you were in Pennsylvania a few years?”
“That’s so. The flu sickness was terrible there. It rained all winter, two in a row, and the summers were fierce. I think you might grow palmettos there now, the way this screwy weather is going. The white against black and so forth was spilling over from Philly too, and we had trouble with it.”
“What did your group live in there.”
“We had the use of a large spread, gratis, so to speak, but between the weather, the sickness, and the violence it was no go. I’ve got a good feeling about this little corner of the country, though. I don’t think the sorrows of the cities will make it up this far north, and I take it you still got something like winter up here.”
“It still snows and the ponds freeze.”
“Snow,” he said, breathing deeply. “I look forward to it like a little boy waiting on Christmas.”
SEVENTEEN
Stephen Bullock strode out of the dark interior of his carriage barn as we came into his driveway at a trot. Brother Jobe told the team to get up on the approach to the big house to give himself a perky entrance.
“That’s Bullock right there,” I said, and Brother Jobe brought the horses to a snorting halt.
Bullock was about sixty, hale and brawny, six foot three in boots, with silver hair that hung to his shoulders and was only starting to thin in the front. He was clean-shaven like the New Faithers. His blade of a nose and penetrating blue eyes added to his look of Roman authority. His white linen shirt looked freshly laundered and he wore close-tailored tan riding trousers tucked into black boots. Striding toward us, he wiped off his hands with a rag and handed it, without a glance, to a chunky man in coarser apparel who had followed him out of the barn, as though he had every expectation that the man would be there to take it at the moment he wished to dispose of it. That would be Roger Lippy, who was long ago a salesman at the Chrysler dealer in town and now was Bullock’s chief factotum.
When he saw it was me up on the high seat, his forbidding expression gave way to a friendly smile. We’d always gotten along. He had a harvest ball every year that people came to from far and wide around the county, and he hired me and the usual suspects from the music circle to play. He played a fair flute himself, went to Yale undergraduate and Duke Law, and admired things Japanese, having spent time after college teaching English in Osaka. I had built him a little traditional teahouse beside his pond behind the main house, which he was well pleased by. He prepared a set of plans from memory of what he had seen in the Far East years ago. I just followed them. The lumber came from his own land, milled on the premises, mostly cherry. It was nice wood to work with. Self-sufficiency was not new to him, but the necessity of changed times made him take it to higher levels.
I introduced him to Brother Jobe, who gave a compressed version of how he and his followers had landed in Union Grove, but did not exactly disclose the purpose of our visit.
“Will you stay for lunch?” Bullock said. Without waiting for an answer, he told Roger Lippy to have Mrs. Bullock set two extra places. I could tell from the way Brother Jobe was craning his neck around that he was anxious to get a look at the operation, and Bullock, who was not modest, readily offered to give him a tour. He called the name “Kenneth” into the barn, and another man came out with grease on his hands to take Brother Jobe’s team over to where a great old stone watering trough stood in the shade. I did not recognize this Kenneth, but new people were added to Bullock’s rolls on a regular basis as life everywhere else grew more difficult, and people gave up on it.
For the two-hour duration of the tour, Brother Jobe goggled and gaped unself-consciously while entering notes in a little handmade book of folded foolscap that he carried. There were, first, the impressive workshops in t
he vicinity of the house, several of them new fieldstone buildings: the creamery, the smokehouse, the brewery, the harness shop, the glass shop, the smithy, the laundry. Brother Jobe took a particular interest in the brewery, where Bullock not only made beer, but distilled an annual supply of rye whiskey and applejack, some for trade and some for his own use, and some pure grain for running small engines on the place. Bullock’s farm was the only place I knew where you might still hear engines running. Not even Wayne Karp managed that. Back in the days when I had been building the teahouse, when it was still unclear which way the country would go, Bullock sometimes ran an English sports car around with the engine tricked up for alcohol. Then he broke a front axle over in Hebron going through a pothole the size of a bomb crater, and had to tow the car home behind a hired team of oxen. It took three days to go the twenty miles. The roads were much worse now.
Bullock poured us each a generous sample of his whiskey from a cask in the rear, where many barrels were racked, into jade green pony glasses made there on the premises too. Brother Jobe tossed his dram straight back, said it was “fit for all occasions and all weathers,” and Bullock refilled his glass. I had not been there for a while, but it seemed that everything was coming up at Bullock’s establishment whereas everything in our town was running down. You could understand the allure of the place.
We proceeded to the horse-breeding barn. Bullock was raising big Hanovers for the cart and saddle, and Percherons for freight loads. Brother Jobe said he favored a mule in the field, that it was the coming thing with all the hotter weather. Bullock said he hadn’t seen a jackass in Washington County that was worth breeding a mare to. Brother Jobe said he had just such a one and would lend it over.
“Have you tried oxen?” Bullock said. “They’re peachy in the woodlot and behind the plow.”
“I don’t know the first thing about an ox,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re all about mules where we come from.”
“I’ll tell you something about an ox,” Bullock said. “You can eat him when he’s past his prime for work.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Brother Jobe said. “I confess, I never tried to eat a mule either in or out of its prime.”
Bullock refilled our glasses. He said he admired Brother Jobe’s team of blacks, but the latter said that the sire had been left back in Virginia.
“We’re miserably short of new blood,” Bullock said.
“Your welcome to try our stallion. He’s a liver-chestnut, fifteen-and-a-half-hands Morgan. Maybe sometime we can swap out.”
They were in excellent spirits by the time we strolled through the orchard to the beginning of Bullock’s extensive fields. The corn seemed to go on forever, but we crossed a hedgerow over a stile and came to what Bullock really wanted to show.
“Why, iddin that sweet sorghum?” Brother Jobe said. It was not a crop that I recognized.
“You are correct, sir,” Bullock said. “With the maple borers killing our sugar trees, and mites on our bees, we’re a bit hard up for sweetening lately.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Well, it’s this heat, you know.”
“We always had sorghum syrup on Momma’s table.”
“It’ll be a new thing here, but our people will like it, won’t they Robert?”
“I suppose they will, Stephen,” I said, not really knowing.
“It beats heck out of blackstrap molasses, I’ll tell you,” Brother Jobe said. “Milder.”
“It’s got a flavor all its own,” Bullock said.
“My point,” Brother Jobe said.
The two of them seemed to be getting on like boon companions. It made me a little sick to see it, or maybe it was just the heat and the whiskey.
We made our way around the extensive property, down grassy lanes between fields of one crop and another. The corn was knee-high and lush. The buckwheat was in flower. From his years in Japan, Bullock was fond of soba noodles made from the grain. He was particularly proud of his experiments with spelt, an antique precursor of our common wheats and apparently immune to the rust disease that lurked in our soils. It did not have the gluten content of modern wheat, he said, but it was better than rye. He hoped to expand production to a hundred acres next year, he said. The hillsides above his grain fields were dotted with brown and white cattle, some dairy and some steers for beef. Coyotes had been killing his calves lately. He’d had to post sharpshooters. There were ten acres alone in potatoes and as much in kitchen vegetables. He had mostly women and a few children chopping weeds among the crop rows out there, and men on construction and heavy labor jobs around the plantation. We saw a crew coming in from the woodlots with a load of red pine logs behind a team of massive oxen.
“There you are,” Bullock said. “Red and white Holsteins. Tractable, steady, strong. And not nearly as dumb as they say.”
“Maybe we’ll try some,” Brother Jobe said. “Holsteins,” he said to himself, scribbling in his little book.
Soon we got over to the new sorghum cane crushing mill and refinery that Bullock was building on a high bank beside the Battenkill River. It stood about a quarter mile above the place where that stream runs into the Hudson, on a site that had been the Kiernan and Page cardboard box mill early in the last century, of which little remained but foundation stones and some giant pieces of iron machinery so rusted that their exact purpose was no longer identifiable. The men working around the new cane mill greeted Bullock enthusiastically. I recognized at least two of them from the old days: Jack Hellinger, who used to be the Rite Aid pharmacist in town, and Michael Delsen, who had a little insurance agency with his dad on Main Street. It was hard to tell whether the workmen’s enthusiasm on seeing their boss was that of free, happy men or of people who had to put on a face to authority. Bullock’s relations with the people who lived on the plantation was the subject of much speculation among us who lived back in town. Being a world of its own, there was no way we outsiders knew what his people had to say about how things worked there, except that it pretty obviously wasn’t a democracy.
Bullock’s new mill certainly was impressive. They were levering a great shallow iron evaporation pan into position over a rectangular stone hearth where the cane juice would be boiled into syrup. The building was all fieldstone, mortared up nicely. Bullock had a lime kiln up on the plateau above the river valley where he burned limestone to make the adhesive component of cement: quicklime. Brother Jobe scribbled away. Altogether, the mill was a big new thing that looked like it was well thought out, well made, and would work. Nothing in town compared so well. We had built virtually nothing new there in years. It got me thinking about Loren’s idea to start a laundry, and that maybe I should show a little more enterprise and help him get something going.
We followed the road along the extensive hay fields and oat fields where they raised animal feeds and came, at last, to the collection of little cottages that Bullock had erected over the years for his people. It really amounted to a village, but of a kind that had not been seen in America for a long time. The cottages were deployed along a picturesque little main street with a few narrow lanes off it. There were about thirty buildings in all. This main street lacked shops or places of business because the only business there was Bullock’s business. There was a commissary building, where his people could get their household needs. I didn’t know if they used money in it or whether Bullock’s people even got paid. Two new cottages were under construction, meaning I supposed that more people were joining up. This too seemed to pique Brother Jobe’s interest.
“What do you call the place?” he said.
“Metropolis,” Bullock said.
“Ain’t that were Superman lived?” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock grinned and winked at me, and Brother Jobe grinned too, back at Bullock. It was grins all around.
“We just call it the New Village,” Bullock said.
“I like that,” Brother Jobe said. “It’s plain and to the point.”
“Maybe when I�
�m dead they’ll name it after me. Bullocktown.”
“They ought to.”
“Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though, does it?”
“There’s worse. Near us back in Virginia was a little burg name of Chugwater. And another one called Stinktown. Well, that was more like a nickname for Stickleyville.”
One larger structure stood out at the center of things, and that was the meeting hall, offset from a little grassy square at the end of the main street. Bullock’s people all generally took a midday meal together there and schooled the few children they had managed to produce. It was a plain but dignified clapboard building, with large light-gathering windows, and a cupola on top for additional light. All the buildings were whitewashed.
“Is this your church?” Brother Jobe said.
“Sometimes,” Bullock said.
“Where do you stand on religion, if I might ask?” Brother Jobe said.
“I’m not against it.”
“But you don’t minister to them.”
“Beyond my competence.”
“Maybe you’re unnecessarily modest.”
“Well, I’m not Superman. After all.”
The streets and lanes of the little village communicated only with the wagon roads between Bullock’s fields and works. We rarely saw his people over in Union Grove, unless they were on a specific errand for him. Otherwise, he had a landing on the Hudson River. The things he needed came up from Albany and beyond. The cottages where his people lived there in the plantation village were of a common vernacular type, also very modest, though some were decorated more than others, with brackets and moldings, according to the tastes of who lived in them. I suppose they were allowed to do as they pleased with them. Some had summer kitchens out back. All had brick chimneys. Nobody was working on the new houses now. I supposed they did that in their off-hours.
While we stood out in the grassy square, a stout woman in an apron stepped out of the meetinghouse and pounded a tubular iron gong that hung from a stock beside the door. She regarded the three of us with a kind of wary respect, as if our presence portended something. Then she bustled back inside, wiping her hands on her apron. An appealing familiar aroma of baking corn bread emanated from the place. Soon Bullock’s people began streaming in from the fields and forests. All nodded their heads at Bullock in deference.
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