“They seem well fed,” Brother Jobe said.
“They’re not fed,” Bullock said.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I’m not running a zoo here. They feed themselves.”
EIGHTEEN
Bullock’s own house was built in 1802, when the area was first coming up after the American Revolution, a handsome old clapboard thing that now looked like it had grown out of the ground along with the two-hundred-year-old oak trees around it. It had belonged to Bullock’s great-great-great-great-grandfather who acquired it from a Colonel Templeton who was wounded heroically at the battle of Saratoga and later ran a flax mill in town, which burned down in 1811 and ruined him. The Bullocks acquired the house, afterward ran a big farm there, and also sent barges of molding sand down the Hudson River to the cast-iron works in Troy. The exceptionally fine sand was a gift of the retreating glaciers that had carved out the Hudson Valley eons before and laid a big ragged deposit along the bank where the Battenkill met the Hudson on his property. In the twentieth century, when mechanization came on, the Bullocks planted thousands of fruit trees, mostly apples but some pears and plums too.
This is what I understood about Stephen Bullock: In the 1980s, his father, Richard, was producing cider commercially on contract for the Star supermarket chain. Stephen was in his second year of law school at Duke University, after his sojourn in Japan, when his father was killed in a highway accident. Stephen was the only son and he went back to run the place. It wasn’t what he had planned to do, but Richard had been a controlling and difficult father, and without having to rebel against him anymore, Stephen found that he liked the farm life and did a good job of running the place, and he decided he hadn’t really cared for the law after all. His mother passed away two years later and he didn’t have to answer to anyone anymore.
As the modern world came apart, and the local economy with it, Bullock took the opportunity to acquire at least eight other properties adjacent to the original family farm. They were not all in agriculture. One was an auction yard for secondhand farm equipment and trucks. Another was a marina for pleasure boats on the river, which now served as Bullock’s landing (and was called Bullock’s Landing by everybody else, if not Bullock himself). Several others were derelict dairy operations with ruined barns, pastures gone to poplar, and houses that let the rain in. Some of the owners had died off. Others sold out only to end up working for him. It was clear to me from the conversations we had in the days when I was building his teahouse—and they were many, often over a glass—that Stephen Bullock had a comprehensive vision of what was going on in our society and what would be necessary to survive in comfort, and I don’t think he ever deviated from that vision for a moment.
Bullock met his wife Sophie one night at the Asia Society in New York City. He used to go down (he told me this) to meet girls, and he met Sophie there. She was a young assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum, fresh out of graduate school at Brown University, and she quite liked the idea of visiting her new boyfriend on this prosperous apple farm upstate where, I suppose, he charmed her with autumn rambles in the orchards and evenings before the fireplace in his lovely 1802 house. She married him, of course, and for many years in the old days they carried on the family orchard business until things fell apart. They had two daughters. The daughters had grown up, and each moved to exactly the wrong cities at the wrong time: Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and now they were gone, or at least presumed to be gone because they had not been heard from since so many perished in those cities, and that was before the mails and telephones went down.
Sophie Bullock greeted us at the side door. I had not seen her in a while. Coming along into her fifties, she was still commandingly beautiful. Her wheat straw hair had more of a silvery glint in it now. Her face was a little more lined. She was dressed in a simple white cotton gown puffed at the shoulders with roses embroidered at the bodice, a costume of leisure. She gave the instant impression of a person effortlessly enjoying her position in the world, and I sensed that Brother Jobe was awed by her.
“How nice to meet you,” she said. She seemed to regard Brother Jobe with the amusement that a kindhearted but essentially superior being would show to an obvious primitive, with a dash of bewilderment as to why such a curious creature had turned up at her house this day.
Bullock led us into his dining room. The walls were filled with pictures, including a portrait of a Bullock ancestor, a landscape of the upper Hudson River Valley, two colorful abstract blobish compositions done by Bullock’s mother in the 1960s, and some large old engraved maps of the area. But what really caught Brother Jobe’s eye was the ceiling fan, which was revolving.
“How’s that work?” he said, pointing.
“Electric,” Bullock said.
“You got electric?”
“We run a small hydro outfit.”
“I’ll be dog.”
Next Bullock opened a cabinet under the sideboard and turned on recorded music. Mozart. A piano concerto. Brother Jobe was now speechless.
Mrs. Bullock asked us to sit down and pretty soon an older servant woman brought in our plates through a swinging door from the adjacent kitchen. On each plate sat a grilled hamburger on a round bun with fat golden slivers of fried potatoes along with a mound of cabbage slaw. The servant woman returned with a pitcher of sumac punch and a little serving bowl of ketchup, made on the premises, Mrs. Bullock said.
“My goodness,” Brother Jobe said pointing at his bun. “This wheat?”
“It is,” Bullock said.
“Where’d it come from?”
“Originally? I don’t know. Ohio maybe. I send things to Albany and get stuff back in trade. We got a store of wheat in April, but we’ve seen a sharp falling off.”
“You run boats down there?”
“I lost a crew ten days ago.”
“What do you mean lost?”
“They didn’t return.”
“Oh my . . .”
We addressed our hamburgers. Mrs. Bullock cut hers in quarters daintily.
“Why, this is better than what we used to get at the Sonic drive-in,” Brother Jobe said, “and it didn’t get much better than that. My compliments.”
“A hamburger amuses me,” Bullock said.
“Just like old-timey times.”
“Pickle?” Mrs. Bullock said, proffering a dish.
We ate silently for an awkward interval.
“What do you aim to do about that boat crew?” Brother Jobe said.
“Right now I’m waiting to see if they’ll return,” Bullock said.
“What if they don’t?”
“I’ll most likely have to organize another bunch to go down and search for them. But I’ll need some outside men. I can’t spare many more from here.”
“Maybe I can spare some of my men,” Brother Jobe said.
“How many have you got?”
“I have thirty-eight men in all.”
Bullock seemed impressed, but didn’t take him up on it right then and there. Instead, he just said, “From now on I’ll have to arm my crews.”
“Did you pass through Albany on your way here, Brother Jobe?” Mrs. Bullock said. “I understand you’ve come a long way.”
“No, ma’am. We avoided the cities.”
“Probably a wise thing,” she said.
“You say your trade has fell off?” Brother Jobe said.
“Things have gotten more disorderly down there,” Bullock said. “We were already paying excise taxes, as they called them, that amounted to extortion. I expect it will get worse, not better. But we are doing everything we can here to become as self-sufficient as possible.”
“Yes, well, that unfortunate bit of news about your boat crew sort of brings me to the purpose of my visit,” Brother Jobe said. “There’s been a killing over in town and no law brought into the picture, and you being the only law in the jurisdiction I want to persuade you to come in on this here business and establish a little authority.”<
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“I declined the honor of the election,” Bullock said.
“I heard. You can’t do that,” Brother Jobe said.
“Of course I can.”
“Where’s your community spirit.”
“It’s here on the farm.”
“Surely you have a little left over for your neighbors?”
“I’m not going to start a feud with Wayne Karp.”
“So you must already know about this business,” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock pushed his plate forward with the half-eaten sandwich on it.
“Yes, I heard about it,” Bullock said.
“How’s that, you being so disconnected from things over here?”
“I send a man to Einhorn’s store at least once a week, and I have to get things from Mr. Karp like everybody else.”
“Then you know that Robert here was the chief witness to the crime?”
Bullock sighed. “I heard the bare bones of the story.” He shifted his gaze to me. “You were up there with this young man who was shot.”
“I was in the store with Wayne,” I said. “I didn’t see what happened.”
“Something about a mad dog, I was told,” Bullock said.
“There wasn’t anything wrong with the dog. It was hot. It was a big dog, some kind of Newfoundland. You know how they drool. But I don’t know what the dog did, if it did anything, or what Shawn Watling might have done to get shot.”
“My feeling, Mr. Bullock, sir,” Brother Jobe said, “is that what you do might never lead to any prosecution in this matter, but it would be a moral support to the town for you to at least authorize an investigation, reestablish some rule of law. I tell you, sir, I have been around this country some in recent years, and once the law goes altogether, the center don’t hold.”
“Why don’t you set up to govern things over there yourself, Brother Jobe? You seem to have a substantial organization in place. I assume you have some reliable people with you.”
“We only just come. It wouldn’t look right. The people in town might not stand for it.”
“You think? Did the people mount any effort to look into this crime, if it was a crime?”
“Exactly what I’m saying—”
“Why would they object if you took over matters that they’re too busy, or lazy, or too disorganized to take on?”
“If I set up as judge or sheriff or whatever you want to call it, why, I’d have to rule over you then too, wouldn’t I?” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock smiled. “I don’t know that we would require your attention over here,” he said.
“I’m just laying it out, to be frank. Are you comfortable knowing you send a trade boat down to the state capital and the goldurn thing don’t come back? And there ain’t no one to look into the matter?”
“I’ll find out what happened. Don’t you worry about that,” Bullock said and turned to me again. “Robert, you’re a capable fellow. There are things that need to be done in town. I hear from Einhorn that the town water system is about shot.”
“Is that so?” Brother Jobe said.
“There’s something wrong with the outflow up at the collect pond,” I said. “And the main coming down from it leaks in more than a few places.”
“Now that you mention it, we’ve noticed the pressure is low as heck over our way,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re at the high school.”
“I’ve heard,” Bullock said.
“Goldurn roof was falling in.”
“You fixed it, I suppose.”
“You’re well told, we did, sir.”
“Why, then I suppose the water will be next,” Bullock said.
“We’ll get to it,” I said.
“What I’ve been trying to tell you,” Brother Jobe said. “You see, all these individuals in the town trying to live like it’s still old times, each on its own, each family alone against the world. You can’t have that in these new times or things will fall apart. See what a splendid show Mr. Bullock is running here,” he said, evidently for my benefit. “Everyone has a part to play and does its job and the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. Am I right? That’s exactly like how we do in New Faith, only we bow to a higher authority. You never got Jesus, I take it, sir.”
“Never did,” Bullock said.
“Well that’s a goldurn shame. Ever tempted to try?”
“Not really.”
“How about your folks on the farm here?”
“My people are free to believe what they want to believe.”
“Maybe some of them would like to take a look over our way, then, and come to the Lord.”
“I don’t have any to spare, Brother Jobe. I just lost four hands on the river. Robert,” Bullock turned once again to me, his patience visibly ebbing. “Why don’t you talk to the Reverend Holder and the other men over there and see if you can get them going on repairing that water system. Brother Jobe here is right. You people over in town need to show a little initiative.”
“Loren and I aim to start a laundry operation,” I said, surprising myself by sounding so deliberate.
Brother Jobe perked up. “First I heard of it.”
“Where will you do this,” Bullock said.
“In the old Wayland-Union Mill,” I said.
“Well then you’d better fix the water supply.”
“Of course.”
“I can cast you some lengths of concrete pipe here,” Bullock said “and get them over to you, if that’d help. You’ve got at least six feet of head on the Battenkill in two locations up there. You could be running hydroelectric for the whole town. There’s enough metal parts lying around this county to build a steam locomotive, if you looked hard enough. We built a five-kilowatt generator out of the automotive scrap on Bacon Hill.”
I couldn’t help but feel that Bullock was looking to purchase Brother Jobe’s goodwill as a tactical measure.
“I like the sound of that,” Brother Jobe said, rubbing his hands. “I’ll tell you what: we’ll examine those water pipes right away. We have the manpower to repair them and we’ll do it. And we’ll see to the electric this summer, if your offer to lend a little guidance still stands. And my offer still stands to help out in case your boat crew don’t report back. I’ve got some fellows that have been trained in this sort of thing.”
“What? Military types?”
“Holy Land vets.”
“Really? Well, great,” Bullock said, pushing away from the table. “It was sure nice of you to visit. We don’t get many breaks from the routine here.”
“You notify me if you want our boys to help turn up those boys of your’n. They’re stout fellows, upright and fearless.”
“Very kind of you.”
“And maybe you’ll consider starting up those wheels of justice.”
“I’ll consider those things.”
“It’s been an honor to meet you too, sir,” Brother Jobe said. “But say, if you’re not going to eat the rest of that fine hamburger, why I’d like to take it with me, if you don’t mind. It’s been years since I’ve seen such a thing and, you know, waste not want not, especially in these times.”
“Of course,” Bullock said with a strange broad smile that didn’t seem altogether natural, while he handed the plate to Brother Jobe. “By the way, this hamburger came from one of our oxen.”
“You don’t say?”
“His name was Dick.”
“What happened to him?”
“Freak accident. A scaffold fell on him down at the new cane mill and crushed his spine. We had to put him down.”
“My condolences. Well, he sure come to a tasty end, though.”
“Come back some time for hot dogs,” Bullock said. “We make those here too.”
The sky had darkened and it looked like a storm was gathering when we stepped outside. On the way back to town in the cart, not much was said. I suppose we were both lost in our own thoughts. But as we passed the old Toyota lot just west of town, Brother Jobe surp
rised me by muttering, as if to himself, “That fellow is a dangerous man.”
NINETEEN
Lightning played crazy patterns on the walls all night, though the storms stayed off in the distance and no rain fell. I kept waiting for it to come closer, work its fury, and be over. Even more, I longed for a cool front to drive off the relentless heat. At times I imagined that maybe it wasn’t thunder and lightning at all but a terrific battle beyond the horizon between whatever was left of the great war machines—though I hadn’t seen an airplane in the skies for years, civilian or military. In any case, the distant storms kept me awake, so I got out of bed and sat in a soft chair by the window to watch the sky until I was satisfied that it was indeed lightning and not Armageddon. I must have fallen to dozing there because I woke up with a jerk. I quickly recognized that the scream which woke me up was real, not in a dream, and noticed an orange glow reflecting off the side of Lucy Myles’s house next door. I strapped on my sandals and hurried outside.
Lucy was out in her yard in her nightclothes.
“Someone’s house is burning down,” she said.
An orange aura flickered over the nearby rooftops. A hot wind blew leaves and dust down the street, as if every loose particle in town was being prompted into motion by unseen forces. I rushed around the block toward the fire, joined by half-clad neighbors, till we all converged in front of the Watling house on Salem Street. Flames licked through the tall windows of the broom shop and up into a dormer. The fire visibly gathered strength in the few seconds that I stood there gaping at it. Bonnie Sweetland, the Watlings’ next-door neighbor, was screaming. Loren and Jane Ann, Jason LaBountie, Sam Hutto, Andrew Pendergast, Tom Allison, Terry Einhorn and his older boy, Teddy, the Copelands and their kids, Larry Russo the baker, who generally started work before dawn, and many others all soon arrived on the scene, some half-dressed, many carrying buckets. Even Heath Rucker and Dale Murray, the constable and our mayor, showed up. Bruce Wheedon, a foreman on Deaver’s farm, who was the nominal chief of our pathetic fire department, appeared with a huge box wrench, but was not able to open the valve on the nearby hydrant. Who knows how many years it had been since the valve head had been turned, and I was not aware that anybody went around testing them. The nut was rusted frozen.
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