World Made by Hand

by James Howard Kunstler

  We rode at a gallop for at least a mile, and then trotted for a long way until we crossed the Waterford bridge, where we had encountered the man beating his donkey on the way down. We dismounted there to rest the animals, which were foaming from exertion. Bullock’s men fell into swoons of gratitude, saying that Adcock the jailer had promised that morning it would be their last day on earth. Tom Soukey, the captain of the Elizabeth, made noises about going back to Albany under cover of darkness to get the boat, but Joseph quashed that idea. In a little while we resumed riding north, to meet up with Brother Minor, who was waiting for us at the Raynor farm in Stillwater.

  Except for Aaron Moyer, who was very ill, the other boatmen were happy to walk freely along the pleasant country roads north of Waterford. I walked for much of the way too, giving them turns on Cadmus. They didn’t talk much, but they seemed keenly attuned to the sights and sounds along the way, as men would who had been locked up for weeks. We covered roughly fifteen miles, with ample rest stops, in five hours, making it over the last hill to the Raynor farm with the sun half lapped over the western horizon. Minor’s horse and the donkey stood hobbled peacefully in the shrubby field where we had passed such a strange night recently. Smoke from a campfire ribboned straight up in the soft breezeless air.

  Minor was extremely glad to see us when we rode up. He could barely contain his high spirits.

  “Listen up,” he said. “A momma mole, a daddy mole, and a baby mole lived in a hole in the ground up by yonder house. One day, the daddy mole poked his head out of the hole and said, ‘Mmmmmm, I smell bacon a’frying!’ The momma mole stuck her head outside and said, ‘Mmmmm, I smell pancakes!’ The baby mole tried to poke its head out of the hole but couldn’t get past the momma and the daddy. ‘Dang,’ he said, ‘all I can smell is mole-asses.’”

  Minor appreciated the joke more than anyone, of course.

  Bullock’s men obviously didn’t know what to make of Minor. But he had caught several large pike and had roasted them up and fixed a pot of buckwheat groats, onions and fresh nettles to go with them, and boiled two dozen eggs that he’d traded for along the way, and that was all Bullock’s men concerned themselves with. They ate like wild animals, and when the fish and eggs and groats were gone they asked for more, so Minor turned out pan after pan of corn cakes, which they ate with butter and honey. Aaron was able to choke down a few of them too, and the others said it was the first they had seen him eat in days. By then, the sun had set, while the air remained mild. Joseph brought out the whiskey bottle and passed it among us. Elam sang a song about East Virginia in a reedy, mournful voice, and Joseph sang a brighter one about fair and tender maidens, with Minor playing harmonica softly behind him. I wished I’d had my fiddle there. Shortly, Bullock’s boatmen were snoring in the fragrant grass.

  Joseph and the brothers discussed the attributes and shortcomings of various New Faith women, and which ones would be nice to “get with,” and I didn’t know whether this was their argot for getting married, or whether more casual arrangements prevailed among them. They teased Minor remorselessly about his interest in a girl named Zilpah, and Minor retreated into playing his harmonica. They said that anyone who had been in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., as they had, seemed to have trouble bearing children. It concerned them that their community had so few. I told them that the same was true apparently of people who had recovered from the flu or one of the other illnesses that had visited us. They said a good deal of their prayer every day was devoted to asking God for children. I asked if it bothered them that their prayers weren’t answered, and they said it must be God’s will. Seth said God had decided the earth was overpopulated, and I asked how come he let it get that way in the first place. Seth said that God loved his children so much that he couldn’t bring himself to cut back until all this climate wickedness started and then he had to do something to save the planet from overheating and killing every last living thing on it. I argued that the human race should have known it was in for trouble, at least we in the United States should have, given how insane our way of life had become. Minor quit blowing into his harmonica long enough to say that John D. Rockefeller and the Bush family had made a deal with the Devil going back all the way to the 1900s.

  By this time, my head was swimming with whiskey and the others sounded like they were far gone themselves. We let the fire run down. It was a warm night. Smoke from the smoldering embers helped keep the mosquitoes away. I lay back against my saddle to gaze at the stars twinkling against the incomprehensible depth of space and eternity, reflecting that I had shot a man, probably to death, that afternoon and had been an accessory in the killing of Dan Curry and his secretary, Birkenhaus. And the others had killed at least several more. Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required?

  THIRTY-NINE

  The rest of our journey home would have been unremarkable, even pleasant except for a disturbing encounter on Route 4, the River Road, some five miles south of Starkville in midafternoon the next day when we came upon an old man driving an automobile. Yes, an automobile.

  I had not seen a car in motion for years. This one was a Ford, the big Explorer model, the color of dull brass, with daisies of rust around the wheel wells and a broken rear window. It was creeping down the road slower than our horses might go at a moderate walk. The pavement on Route 4 was badly broken with potholes, and the driver was obviously steering around them with the utmost care. He came to a stop as we approached. His engine knocked, sputtered, and backfired.

  “What you running that thing on, old-timer?” Minor said.

  “Who wants to know?” the old man said. He might have been eighty years old given the wizened face beneath a stained and tattered baseball cap. “You pickers or regulators?”

  “Naw, just regular folks,” Minor said and flashed a big grin around at all of us. He’d been walking, leading Jenny and the cart. Aaron Moyer was up on Minor’s horse, sitting straight in the saddle on his own now, feeling better after a day in the fresh air and sunshine. The rest of us soon formed a circle around the car. “Where you going in that thing, anyway?” Minor said.

  “None of your damn business.”

  “Excuse me for breathing,” Minor said.

  “I got a firearm,” the old man said.

  “Well you should,” Skip Tarbay said. “But keep the safety on. We’re men of Union Grove.”

  “Far afield, ain’t you?”

  “Far enough, and coming home from Albany now, thank God.”

  “Is the mall still there?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. That wasn’t the part we were at. Hope you’re not aiming to go down there in your car.”

  “Nope. I just like to keep her running,” the old man said. “You know, use it or lose it.”

  “Sounds like she’s losing it,” Minor said. “What’s she running on?”

  “Grain spirits.”

  “A waste of the taste, if you ask me,” Minor said.

  “I can’t taste nothing anyway,” the old man said. “And who asked you?”

  “Must be uncomfortable driving that thing on this busted up road,” Skip said.

  “It’s a damn sorry excuse for a state highway. The state won’t fix it. How do you like that? The taxes we paid all those years and look what we got to show for it.”

  “Don’t hold your breath waiting for improvements, old-timer,” Minor said.

  “We got a right to decent roads. This ain’t the American way.”

  “The American way has kind of lost its way,” Minor said. “Maybe you should get a horse.”

  The old man snorted scornfully and spat out the window onto the fissured asphalt. “This is supposed to be the modern age.”

  “The modern age went to hell some time ago.”

  “Is that so? Well I don’t like it.”

  “It’s a fact we all got to live with.”

  “You should have been around in the 1960s, boy. Hooo-weee. Gas was tw
enty-five cents and the roads were smooth as a baby’s behind. You could buy good bread and ground round anywhere, and the TV came on when you felt like it. Now nothing’s on when you want it.”

  “It ain’t even on when you don’t want it,” Minor said, to everyone’s amusement. “Do the home folks know you’re out and about?”

  “They don’t give a damn whether I live or die.”

  “You must be lonesome, then, old man.”

  “It ain’t none of your damn business what I am.”

  “Have you found the Lord?”

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “You could find some comfort there.”

  “I’ll pass, thank you.”

  “Why don’t you try letting him into your heart?”

  “I don’t care to. I got this far without it.”

  “This far ain’t nothing,” Minor said, raising his voice shrilly. “What about the trackless eternity you’re going to spend down in hell, old man, where the modern age is still going strong, waiting patiently for you to show up and sign back on? And you’ll get there pretty durn soon, I imagine, from the looks of you.”

  “Are you crazy or something?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Well, you talk like a goddamn crazy man.”

  “And I ain’t drunk, neither. But if I was, I’d be sober tomorrow. And you’d still be a godless old sumbitch.”

  “Sonny, I’d put a bullet in your ass if I wasn’t saving it for something worthwhile.”

  “And what’d that be?”

  “You got more goddamn questions—get out of my goddamn way.”

  The old man put the engine back in gear and continued on, hardly giving Seth a chance to step his mount aside. He wove the car around a stretch of divots, ruts, and potholes and we watched him go, the very sight of an automobile going down the road a marvel, like seeing history come back to life. He had gone perhaps a hundred yards when we heard a little pop. I thought, oh no, he’s gone and blown a tire, given how old they must have been, and how rough the road, but the car did not stop. It veered to the side of the road and then clean off the shoulder and into a shrubby field where it plowed over a series of poplar saplings before coming to rest with a crunch against the trunk of a mature black ash tree. Even so, the engine kept running and the horn blared. We hurried down to it.

  The old man lay slumped against the wheel. Tom and I helped get him out. He had a gash above an eyebrow. We laid him down in the weeds—black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace—and realized he was no longer breathing. Then we discovered it wasn’t the crash that had killed him. Rather, his tattered flannel shirt was dark and sopping with blood. We ripped it open. Underneath he had a clean purple hole in his chest with a slightly raised doughnut of blue flesh around it, just over his heart. Minor rooted around the interior of the car and emerged holding the pistol. He examined the cylinder and said, “One spent shell, all right. Sumbitch done himself in. How do you like that?”

  Joseph slid down off his horse as though he was suddenly all in a hurry and stalked over to Minor.

  “Give me that damn thing,” he said and wrenched the gun out of Minor’s hand, and proceeded to cuff him across the head, driving the smaller man to the ground. “You think death is just another of your jokes,” Joseph said. “I’m sick of it.”

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with this—”

  “You got to talk trash with everybody that crosses your path?”

  “You think he kilt himself ‘cause I made a little chitchat?”

  “Calling him a godless sumbitch! I got half a mind to strop you skinless.”

  “Just you try it!” Minor reached for the dagger he called the last resort. Joseph kicked it out of his hand and, using a move that he might have learned in the military, had Minor flipped over with his face pinned in the weeds, a knee on his neck, and both of his arms nearly dislocated, held painfully behind him.

  “Ow, ow! Damn you, you’re hurtin’ me!” Minor said.

  “I aim to hurt you,” Joseph said. “If you ever raise up a weapon against one of your brothers again, you’ll get hurt so bad you’ll never recover. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “I can’t breathe!”

  “I don’t care about your comfort just now.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” Minor said. Joseph released his arms and his boot from Minor’s neck, but Minor remained facedown. His body shook and he seemed to be blubbering. The Union Grove men turned away, in embarrassment I suppose. Elam and Seth eventually helped Minor back up on his feet. Jenny stood at the edge of the road in front of her cart blinking at us.

  FORTY

  We made inquires up the road and eventually found the old man’s people living a mile away in a miserable split-level house that sat alone on a hill, with two windows over a gaping garage door that gave it the look of a woeful human face. All around it lay a poorly kept garden composed of little more than squash vines, the garden of people who had lost the will to cultivate anything, as well as the knowledge to do so. Stumps around the house indicated that the shade trees had been cut down over the years, probably to heat the place. Now, with the temperature above ninety, the sun beat down remorselessly on the asphalt shingle roof. It was one of millions of such cheap houses erected in the last century in rural places on one-acre road frontage out-parcels cut from old farms when nobody cared whether they lived near a town or a job because they could always hop in the car and drive somewhere. If the place had a drilled well with a submersible electric pump, then it probably didn’t have running water these days. It was exactly the kind of place that Wayne Karp’s crew was disassembling for materials all around Washington County as the owners died or went crazy.

  A living scarecrow answered the door looking enough like the dead man to have been his son. And so he proved to be. He barely registered any emotion when we told him what happened. The old man’s body was slung facedown over Joseph’s horse but the man said he recognized the clothes.

  “We’re sorry about it,” Joseph said.

  An equally scrawny woman stood behind the man in a pool of darkness, with her hand over her mouth. The inside of the house stank fiercely. You could smell it wafting out the door.

  “Would you care to help us bury him?” the man said, adding, “We can’t pay.”

  “Sure, we’ll help you,” Joseph said.

  So we, the able-bodied, spent an hour digging another grave out beyond the squash vines, and Joseph conducted another funeral. Minor didn’t speak a word, but he did more than his share of the digging. I noticed that Joseph did not give the couple the old man’s gun, though he did hand over the car keys. Nor did he bother to proselytize them. We were anxious to return to the road, being within striking distance of home. Once we passed through Starkville proper, the landscape grew recognizable, and I felt tears of gratitude well up inside as the familiar contours of Willard Mountain and the little range of hills known as the Gavottes came into view.

  At our journey’s end another long day had spent itself. When our party entered the front drive of the Bullock farm, we’d marched twenty miles since breakfast, pausing to dig a six-foot hole in the ground. The sun was down, but plenty of purple afterglow remained and to the east a coppery quarter moon was rising in the warm haze. The antique foursquare manse never looked lovelier, with trumpet vine blossoming over the pergola outside the kitchen, roses in the arbors, two potted fig trees beside the door, swallows dipping around the eaves, and purposeful human activity evident everywhere your eye came to rest. Lights glowed warmly inside the big house and a Debussy recording played. It was the epitome of what you would want to return home to after a harrowing journey to a dark place.

  I could see Stephen and Sophie Bullock at their dinner table through the French windows as we rode up. We must have made quite a commotion in the stillness of that hour. The
y put down their forks and bustled out of the house. The courtyard between the big house and the barns and workshops soon filled with Bullock’s servants, and someone rang a bell that tolled out over the fields. The four boatmen seemed overcome with emotion. Tom was weeping again. Skip fell to his knees by the big oak tree. Even Jake uncharacteristically shook and blubbered. Bullock helped Aaron down from the horse and held him up in his arms until Aaron was steady on his feet. Roger Lippy hooked leads on and led Temperance and Cadmus to the soapstone water trough. Sophie helped Skip up off the ground, and he subsided in her arms, sobbing. Shouts rang out in the distance in the still evening air. Soon most of the inhabitants of Bullock’s village swept down the lanes between the fields and the barns, answering what was generally construed to be an alarm bell, to find their friends, husbands, fathers returned from the dead. Sophie called for cider and soon pitchers of the potent brew went around.

  Bullock steered Joseph and myself away from the celebrating throng to his office inside the house. It was a spacious, airy room, with walls of built-in bookshelves, a long trestle table laid with engineering drawings for his various projects, and a beautifully carved cherry wood desk that had been his grandfather’s. I had tossed back a tumbler of cider and the warmth was flooding through my veins. Bullock now poured shots of his best whiskey from a cut glass decanter. He allowed as we were surely anxious to continue on home to Union Grove but wanted to know briefly how things had transpired in Albany. I told him about Dan Curry and how he was running an extortion and ransom racket there, and how we had found the boat and then the crew in his custody, and how he demanded payment outright for their release, calling it excise taxes and fines. Bullock said he could see it getting to this over the preceding year.

  “What a bold sonofabitch he’s become!” he said. “You didn’t pay, did you.”

  “No, sir,” Joseph said.