“What become of the first five thousand?” Victor Gasparry asked.
“We’ve, uh, received that in the form of a note,” Dale said.
“In other words, they didn’t pay nothing.”
“Since when does anybody pay cash for real estate around here?”
“And what the hell is that five million going to be worth in ten years?” Ned Larmon said. “Why five thousand bucks’ll barely buy a wagon wheel now.”
“Fiat currency: that’s what did us in,” Rod Sauer said.
“I don’t believe there’s going to be any U.S. dollar in ten years, way things are going,” Jason LaBountie said. “I do almost all barter these days, myself. Unless someone has hard silver.”
“Then how come we don’t get some kind of barter agreement out of these people over at the school?” Cody DeLong said. “Payment of some kind in lieu of cash.”
“Funny, coming from a would-be banker,” Dale said. “I thought you liked money, Cody.”
“Money’s important, all right.” Cody said. “You don’t have civilization without it. But these aren’t normal times.”
“Make-believe money,” Ned Larmon said. “Phooey.”
“There’s more than one way to do a deal,” Terry Einhorn said.
“The contract is signed,” Dale said.
“Maybe this council can vote to nullify it,” Jason LaBountie said.
“You can’t nullify a duly signed contract like that,” Dale said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m an attorney, and I’m telling you the law doesn’t allow it,” Dale said.
“Maybe that law don’t apply no more,” Victor said.
“I’d like to know what the hell value that school has standing around empty, nobody using it, with the roof leaking?” Dale said.
“As I understand it,” Andy Pendergast said, “the disposal of any significant town asset requires a vote of the trustees. That’s what we did when we sold the snowplow garage to Bill Schroeder for his creamery operation.”
“Look at it this way,” Dale said. “These newcomers are an asset to the town, and the school wasn’t anything but a liability. So it’s a win-win for the community.”
“I hate that goddamn phrase, win-win,” Ben Deaver said. Long ago, before he farmed, he had been a United Air Lines executive. He didn’t say much at meetings, but when he did, it was usually pungent.
“That building was nothing but a damn safety hazard,” Dale said.
“How in the hell was it a safety hazard?” Todd Zucker said.
“Children were playing in there. Messing around.”
“Hell, it used to be a school. Wasn’t a safety hazard then.”
“Messing around a place without supervision is something else. They could hurt themselves,” Dale said. “Lock themself in the walk-in refrigerator.”
“Now you’re talking like a lawyer,” Victor said.
“I am one,” Dale said.
“Too bad there’s no law anymore.”
“Of course there is.”
“It’s all pretend,” Ned Larmon said. “Where are the courts, then?”
“They’ll reconvene by and by,” Dale said. “When things settle down.”
“Things are about as settled as they’re going to get,” Todd Zucker said, and several of the men laughed ruefully because they knew exactly what he meant.
“I didn’t see any courts convene in the case of that Watling boy,” Cody said.
“We’ll get to that separately,” I said. “Let’s go back to this school deal. Maybe we can work something out. Maybe it’s a good thing no cash was involved. There was nothing to get mislaid—”
“Are you insinuating—”
“Oh, shut up now, Dale,” Loren said.
“You all talk about how there’s no law, and you don’t even observe the order of the council chamber.”
We went around in that vein for quite a while. But finally we gave up gibing each other and I proposed a solution: the New Faithers would work in lieu of payment, and that work would consist of civic improvement projects, starting with repair to the town water system so the next time a house caught fire we might have a chance to put it out. I further proposed that Brother Jobe be appointed to the vacant post of public works director at a salary of one dollar a year. The trustees voted him into the job unanimously with Dale Murray abstaining.
Brother Jobe said he would accept the post and the financial arrangement and he would begin making an assessment of the water system and the town reservoir right away.
Dale Murray, as mayor and chair of the board of trustees then moved to adjourn the meeting.
“We’re not done,” I said. “I told you I had a list of particulars.”
“All right, all right,” Dale said. “Don’t get all touchy.”
We turned to the matter of Shawn Watling and the fact that nobody was doing anything about it. Stephen Bullock, the elected magistrate, hadn’t commenced an inquest. Heath Rucker hadn’t started even the most elementary investigation—I knew that for a fact because I was the only person at the scene besides Wayne Karp’s bunch, including Bunny Willman, and Heath had not even spoken to me about it. So I made a motion to begin by replacing the constable, Heath Rucker. The other trustees glanced around at each other, and that’s when it occurred to me that nobody else wanted the job, I suppose because nobody wanted to go up against Wayne, when it came down to it.
“I move formally to remove Rucker,” I said. “Second?”
Andy Pendergast seconded.
“Mr. Rucker’s not here to defend himself,” Dale Murray said.
“He isn’t charged with anything,” I said. “We’re just firing him.”
“And anyway, why isn’t he here?” Terry Einhorn said. “He’s required to be present at town board meetings, if I remember the charter right.”
“Probably off drunk somewhere,” Cody DeLong said.
“So, who’s going to replace him then?” Dale said. “Any nominations?”
“Is that a move to call for nominations?” Ned Larmon said.
“Yes it is.”
“Then say it,” Dale said.
“Okay, I make a motion for nominations to the post of town constable,” Cody said.
There was no rush to nominate anyone. You could hear birds twittering their evening songs outside the open windows.
“You can nominate yourselves,” I said. “If anyone wants to volunteer.”
More birds singing. A horsefly buzzed across the circle of chairs. Someone coughed.
“I’ll nominate you, Robert,” Todd Zucker said finally.
“I decline because of where I stand in the Watling case.”
“All right,” Jason LaBountie said, “then I nominate you for mayor.”
That brought everybody up short, and a silence followed wide enough to drive a team of oxen through.
“That post is occupied,” Dale said eventually.
“We can vote you out, just like that good-for-nothing constable,” Jason said.
“There’s a different motion on the table.”
“Well, I move we suspend that motion and move on with my motion,” Jason said. “Anyone second?”
“I second,” Victor Gasparry said.
“I don’t know that you’re in order on that,” Dale said.
“I don’t give a damn,” Jason said. “Discussion?”
“Let’s vote him the hell out,” Rod Sauer said.
“Look at what’s become of our town under him,” Cody DeLong said.
“Point of order,” Dale said. “You are not following proper procedure here. Didn’t any of you bring the Robert’s Rules?”
“If proper procedure means so much to you, why didn’t you bring the damn Robert’s Rules?” Jason said.
“We’ve never had these disputes at town board,” Dale said.
“Maybe we should have,” Ned Larmon said.
“I call a vote on the motion to get rid of Mayor Dale Murray,” Todd Z
ucker said, “and replace him with Robert Earle.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How come nobody asked me if I want the job?”
“Sometimes duty just calls, son,” Brother Jobe said from the outer circle of the few nonvoting observers. He was grinning.
“You’re out of order, sir,” Dale Murray said.
“Those in favor of the motion to give Dale the boot and put Robert in, raise your hands,” Jason said.
“You can’t call the vote,” Dale said. “That’s the chair’s job.”
All the trustees except Dale raised their hands.
“The motion is carried,” Jason said. “You’re out, Dale. Robert’s the mayor now.”
“And the chair of this board,” Rod Sauer said.
“Congratulations, son,” Brother Jobe said, and everybody in the room except Dale Murray clapped their hands briefly. Terry Einhorn actually got up, walked across the circle, and made to shake my hand—the one that wasn’t bandaged up. I was flustered by this recognition from my peers, of course. But I also realized that somebody had to be responsible for things in town after years of apathy and paralysis, and that I was ready to try. I figured if I managed to accomplish the least thing it would be an improvement over the current situation.
“I guess you can always vote me out if you’re dissatisfied,” I said.
“You’re damn straight we can,” Ben Deaver said.
“All right, then, let’s get back to the business of this meeting,” I said. Meanwhile, Dale Murray made a big show of shoving his chair into the center of the circle and stalking out of the hall.
“Go easy on the corn liquor,” Ned Larmon said, as Dale clomped across the big room to the exit.
And that was how the gavel passed to me, except there wasn’t any gavel. By God, I thought, I could make one, though.
We went on with the meeting. Loren was nominated for the post of constable and the board elected him. I was surprised that he agreed to serve, considering all the rest of his duties around the community. We couldn’t agree what to do about the Shawn Watling case. Victor Gasparry wanted to convene a special court and haul Bunny Willman in—Andy Pendergast called it “a kangaroo court”—but anyway that meant going up to the trailer park, Karptown, and placing Willman under arrest, and that posed additional problems.
Andy brought up for discussion the related matter that Wayne Karp’s bunch had no legal right operating the former town landfill as their own private resource mine, and that we should investigate some means for getting it away from his control altogether and running the place as a public utility.
“Good luck with that one,” Victor said.
“My people could run it,” Brother Jobe said.
“How do we know you wouldn’t turn it into a racket for your own selves?” Jason LaBountie said.
“Because we walk upright in the sight of God,” Brother Jobe said.
“I’ve heard that before,” Ben Deaver said.
“It can’t be said enough,” Brother Jobe said.
“All right, let’s just back off that for now,” I said. “Loren, I’m going to instruct you as constable to send a letter to Stephen Bullock formally recommending an inquest. I’m sure Heath Rucker never put it in the form of a legal document.”
“All right.”
“One of my boys can ride it over to Mr. Bullock’s, post haste,” Brother Jobe said. “Maybe there’s something we can do for him in return.”
“We’ll need a town attorney with Dale gone,” Loren said.
“I’ll talk to Sam Hutto,” I said. Sam had dropped law for running a turpentine distillery on the back side of Pumpkin Hill, but I thought he could be induced to help out.
Finally, I moved that we form a committee to meet and make an inventory of the town’s needs—everything from meal sacks to medicine—and start an organized effort to obtain these things. By then, the true darkness of night was creeping over town and stealing into the third floor of the old town hall, and since nobody had brought any candles, I moved to adjourn the meeting.
TWENTY-THREE
Jane Ann stole into my house, as she always did, without knocking, an hour or so after I’d returned from the meeting. I was sharpening my ripsaw with a file out back in the summer kitchen. In a world without electric powered saws, you had to take care with hand tools. She found me out there, slipped into the rocking chair I had pegged together out of some maple limbs, ash splints, and willow canes, filled a corncob pipe with some marijuana bud that she carried in a little leather pouch on the belt of her long skirt, and lit a splinter of stove wood off my candle to fire up the bowl.
“Want some?” she said, passing the pipe.
“All right.”
The weed was just past green and very resinous. I knew I was getting stoned when I lost track of which saw tooth I was working on.
“Are you just going to keep toiling away on that?” she said.
“Not anymore, I guess.”
“You’ve taken on quite a lot the past couple of days. All these heroics. And now you’re the big pooh-bah around here.”
“I’m hardly a pooh-bah. This sad little town just needs someone with organizational skills.”
“I always pegged you as more of a background kind of person.”
“Are you angry at me?”
She didn’t answer. She relit the splinter and the bowl.
“I don’t know what Loren thinks he can do as constable around here,” she said.
“People look up to him.”
“He’s not the warrior type.”
“There’s no war on around here.”
“Could be, though. Between Karp and this new bunch and everybody else.”
“I think we can get some law going.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Here.” She took a lace napkin out of the big pocket in her skirt and unwrapped a generous square of the walnut cake she was famous for. It was almost all ground nut meats and butter. “For you,” she said.
“Why, thanks.” I was suddenly rather hungry. I put the file and saw aside. “Tell me about your day. What did you do?”
“What didn’t I do? Milked goats. Weeded. Forked compost. Put up rhubarb jam. Walked halfway to Battenville to call on Esther Callie. Her mom finally died.”
“Oh? What of?”
“She was ninety-seven years old, you know.”
“I knew she was very old.”
“I think she’d just finally had enough. She was a nurse in the Second World War. The things she remembered were incredible.”
“The things I remember seem incredible,” I said. “Air-conditioning. Cold beer. Baseball on television.” I started to get lost in the maze of my own stoned mind remembering all the things we didn’t have anymore.
“She’d seen so much. I asked her how she could maintain any faith in the human race.” Jane Ann lit the pipe once again.
“Well, what was her view on that?”
“She said on balance she preferred the way things are now.”
“Wow,” I said.
Jane Ann stood and undid the ties along the front of her white blouse revealing her dark-nippled breasts. They shifted liquidly in the flickering candlelight as she swayed to unheard music. “Let’s comfort each other a while,” she said and went inside. That was her code. I knew to follow in a little while with the candle. She was naked when I came to her. We enjoyed our efficient carnal ceremony as we had so many times, and it concluded, as usual, with Jane Ann in tears.
“You know what bothers me most,” she said.
“What.”
“That in the sight of God we don’t matter.”
“Maybe it’s enough that we act as though we do.”
“We can’t even act as if we matter to each other.”
“You mean you and me? Or everybody in general?”
“You and me.”
“Well, we can’t advertise it,” I said.
“No, I’d prefer to pretend it doesn’t matter.”
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“Maybe God’s pretending we don’t matter too. He’s got plenty to be pissed off about us.”
In a few minutes she was gone again, leaving me in the dark and the heat with my mind on fire.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sometime later that night a cool front blew through upstate New York and swept away weeks of spirit-sapping heat. You never knew the weather in advance anymore. You might be said to have a good weather eye but nobody knew anything for sure and some were just better guessers than others. In this case it was as though all of Washington County were suddenly air-conditioned, as we used to call refrigerated air, and it allowed me to sleep well for the first time in days. The change in the weather seemed to energize Union Grove. I had two callers before eight o’clock the next morning.
The first was Brother Joseph, one of the New Faithers. He came to the door, calling me “Mr. Mayor,” just as I was frying up slabs of leftover hominy for breakfast and preparing to return to work on the cupola at Larry Prager’s place.
“Hope I’m not interrupting your breakfast, sir,” he said.
“It doesn’t require all my attention, and you can call me Robert.”
“All right, sir.”
“Does this butter smell a little off to you?” I held the crock up for him to sniff.
“I’d eat it,” Brother Joseph said with a smile after reflecting earnestly a moment. He looked oddly boyish for his considerable height, which must have been about six foot four. But all the New Faith men had that young look because they were clean-shaven.
I slathered honey on the fried hominy and laid into it as he stood there.
“Want some?” I said.
“Oh, I had a big breakfast just a while ago. Eggs, ham, corn bread.”
“From the sounds of things, I’d guess you have fifty roosters over there at the school.”
“We’ve got more than a few. Anyway, I bring you news. Hope you’re not rushing out of here to start running things.”
The way he put it, I had to chuckle. He had a winning manner.
My new position in the world had not exactly altered my habits overnight, or my estimation of myself. There was a mayor’s office in the old town hall, but there was no electricity, no staff, no secretary, no telephone, nor even the common office supplies we took for granted in the old days, including paper and writing implements. We had no use whatever for the new town hall, which had been built out on the highway strip in 1983. Anyway, Wayne Karp’s crew had removed the windows and aluminum sashes there. Dale Murray had used his own private law office on Main Street, but only as a drinking establishment, since he didn’t do any official business, nor did he have any law business, as far as I could tell.
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