“Good. But then how could you? I didn’t send you down there with that kind of money.”
“You didn’t?” I said.
“Of course not. Excise tax, my ass!” Bullock said, smacking the tabletop for emphasis. “This idiot could disrupt all the trade in the Hudson Valley. All right, then: how did you spring my men?”
“By other means,” Joseph said.
“Such as . . .”
“Such as was required in lieu of payment,” Joseph said.
Bullock was clearly frustrated. “Did it require force?” he said.
“You could say that.”
“To what extent?”
“To the extent that some people got hurt, sir.”
“Who. This Curry?”
“Yes, I’d say Curry was among them,” Joseph said.
Bullock took this in. “What do you mean by hurt, exactly?” he said.
“Do you really want to know?” Joseph said.
“Go on, tell me,” Bullock said.
“I had to shoot him in the head, sir.”
“You killed him?”
“I believe so. It’s not the kind of injury that people get over.”
“Was it necessary to kill him?”
“Yes, sir,” Joseph said. “But it wasn’t necessary to tell you.”
Bullock flinched, then retrieved the whiskey decanter, and poured another round of shots.
“Were you there when this happened, Robert?” Bullock said.
“Yes.”
“Was this necessary?”
“He was going to hang your men,” I said.
“You sure he wasn’t bluffing?”
“He said he would in so many words. And he hanged two boys earlier that day. When I say boys, I mean boys. Two teenagers from Greenport. He told us he enjoyed it.”
“Believe me,” Joseph said. “Stopping this fiend was the Lord’s work.”
Bullock brooded a while. “I suppose they’ll hold me responsible,” he said.
“I’m the one who shot him, sir,” Joseph said. “Anyway, he wasn’t the only one.”
“How many more?”
“I don’t know,” Joseph said. “A good many.”
“Like what? A baker’s dozen?”
“Something like that,” he said.
Bullock poured himself yet another shot. His hands trembled visibly. “Oh, Jesus . . .” he muttered to himself.
“Curry was all the law there was down there,” I said. “It began and ended with him. There won’t be anybody coming up here after you. I’m pretty sure of that.” I described my side trip to the capitol, the lieutenant governor rattling around the ruined building like a BB in a packing crate, the total absence of state authority.
Bullock reflected as I spoke, sipping more liquor.
“Hmm. I suppose the boat is a loss,” he said.
“You could send another party down for it, sir,” Joseph said. “But if it was me, I’d forget about it for now and build another boat until things settle out down there.”
“I take the point,” Bullock said. He seemed a little walleyed suddenly, as if the liquor was finally getting to him, and he ran his fingers down through his long white hair as if he were combing something out of it. “By the way, Robert, your man Jobe has kind of opened up a rat’s nest over in town with that water project.”
“Oh? Did he get started on that?”
“We can’t make pipe fast enough. It’s taking my men away from haying.”
FORTY-ONE
Most of the town was already asleep when we rode through in the moonlight. The few businesses on our little Main Street were closed. Here and there a candle glowed in a window on Salem Street and then down Linden. My own house was among the lighted ones. I swung off Cadmus for the last time and collected my gear from the panniers, a little sorry to be on my own again and wary of the uncertainties that awaited me. Elam retrieved my few parcels from the donkey cart. I thanked them all for their valiant efforts in our adventures, especially Brother Minor, for his caretaking of the animals, for the many meals he had cooked, and his attention to my injury. As I said goodnight to them, the front door swung open and there stood Britney. I had thought of her in only the most abstract terms since setting off, and now it was a shock to see her in the flesh. It was too difficult to imagine the changes she might represent in my living arrangements, not to mention my spirit. The others looked at her as though she were a perfectly roasted chicken.
“Welcome home,” she said.
Joseph tipped his hat, then led the others and their mounts down the street toward their new home, the old high school. I stood in the dooryard watching them, afraid to enter my own house, as the horses clip-clopped into the moonlight.
“Are you hungry?” Britney said.
“I suppose I am,” I said.
“You come in now.”
She helped me take my stuff inside. Sarah, her seven-year-old daughter, sat by a lighted candle in a rocking chair in the living room, braiding reeds into fat coils. Several new baskets sat on the floor beside her chair.
“Welcome home, Mr. Robert,” she said.
“Thank you, Sarah. Just plain Robert is okay, though.”
“Mama told me to say that.”
“Oh? Those are very nice baskets.”
“Mama and me trade for them, you know.”
“I expect you’ll do real well with those.”
I followed Britney out back, to the open summer kitchen. The house had obviously benefited from her being there. It smelled fresher, like strewn herbs. Yet nothing was really out of place.
“Thank you for cleaning up.”
“You were kind to take us in,” she said.
“I’ve been nervous about this. About how we would inhabit this house together.”
“What are your thoughts?” she said.
“I’ve been trying not to have any.”
“We’ll stay out of your way.”
“I don’t know as I’d like that, exactly.”
“What would you like?”
“I don’t know. A normal household.”
“This isn’t a normal situation, and these aren’t normal times.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“And I’m a young woman.”
“Yes, you are. And I’m what I am. Let’s maybe start by not having to apologize for ourselves.”
“All right,” she said.
“Mostly I’m exhausted from riding and walking more than twenty miles today.”
“I have a spinach pudding made earlier tonight with some of Carl Weibel’s goat cheese. There’s no meat on hand. I didn’t know you’d be back tonight.”
“Pudding’s fine.”
“We have fresh lettuce and the first little sweet onions—”
“I would love some kind of fresh greens—”
“And I can make you some eggs too.”
“Please.”
“How do you like them?”
“Scrambled. But not runny. Five or six if they’re pullet eggs.”
I rooted around a cupboard and found half a bottle of Jane Ann’s wine.
“Here, sit down,” Britney said, pulling out a chair for me. She lit a candle in a tin can holder on the table.
I watched her load some splints in the cookstove and blow on them until they caught from the embers left over from their supper earlier. It was hard not to admire the delicacy and economy of her movements.
She proceeded to fill me in on what had happened in my absence. Greg Meers, a farmer from nearby Battenville, had died in Larry Prager’s dentistry chair. He was forty-seven and seemed to be in good health. He had received a substantial dose of laudanum for a root canal and his heart just stopped. He left a wife and two boys, nine and twelve.
“I knew him slightly,” I said. “He dropped out of Wayne Karp’s bunch some years ago to farm on his own. Sold snowmobiles back in the old days. Not a bad fellow.”
“Dr. Prager is very upset.”
“I
expect he would be.”
The main news, she said, was that the New Faith gang had commenced fixing the town water system.
“Bullock told me they were at it,” I said.
“But some problem’s developed and the water’s been cut off altogether for three days now,” she said. “People are coming around here looking for you, grousing, and demanding that something be done.”
“I’ll see about it first thing tomorrow.”
“Those that stop by look shocked to find me here.”
“What do you tell them?”
“I tell them I’m keeping house for you.”
“Good. It’s the truth. It’s exactly what you’re doing.”
I very much enjoyed seeing somebody else bustling around in my kitchen. In a little while, she served me a big square of the spinach and cheese pudding and a mound of scrambled eggs.
“May I sit with you?” she asked.
“Sure. Would you like some of this wine? It seems to me you could use some.”
“Thank you, I will.”
She got another glass out of the cupboard while I ate. Her cooking was first-rate.
“I want you to know a few things,” she said.
“All right.”
“My husband, Shawn, was a troubled person. Our life together was not what other people might think.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was what it was. For some time before he died, more than a year, we didn’t sleep in the same room. It was his choice as much as mine, in case you’re wondering. I think he had something going with the dairy girl up at Mr. Schmidt’s. A girl named Hannah Palfrey. Came down from Granville a couple of years ago. Lives out at the farm now. I don’t know much else about her. She was at the funeral, of course.”
“Was she?”
“Oh, yes. A big cushion of a girl, especially up in here.” Britney pushed up her compact breasts. “Shawn liked that. What could I do? It was a little late to go get implants.”
Luckily, my mouth was full and I couldn’t comment.
“Do you think Doctor Copeland could fix me up that way?” she said.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Suddenly the electric lights went on and someone was screaming about Jesus on the radio. The power could not have been running for more than five full seconds, and then it cut out again.
“Mama! Mama!” Sarah came dashing into the kitchen and practically leaped into her mother’s lap.
“It’s all right, darling. It’s over.”
“Who’s that man shouting?”
“Just a crazy preacher.”
“Why?”
“Shouting makes them feel important.”
“If I shout, will I be important?”
“You’re already important. You don’t have to shout. Maybe Mr. Robert will fix it so it won’t come on again like that.”
I went and hit the power button on the old stereo. In doing it, I was conscious of putting something behind me: the expectation that things would ever be normal again. There was a kind of relief in it. I also turned off the electric lights so they wouldn’t come on and scare anybody again. Britney was standing now, holding Sarah on her hip, the way one would hold a toddler, except Sarah was way beyond that stage.
“We’re going to bed now,” Britney said. “There are some buckets of clean water by the sink, in case you want to wash up.”
“Thank you.” I was quite desperate to bathe. “Where did you get it?”
“The river.”
“That’s a long way to carry water.”
“I’m strong,” she said. “I hope you sleep well, Robert. Goodnight.”
I watched as she went inside with the sleepy child, picked up the candle from the table beside the rocking chair, and climbed the stairs. Years ago, I’d watched Sandy go up those same stairs with a child on her hip.
Of all the things that no longer worked, we’d never lost our water before, because the town system relied on nothing more complicated than gravity. We’d never not had water, even during the worst times. The system had been put in place long ago and it was a given condition of life, like the oxygen content of the air. We never thought of it until the pressure went down that summer.
I had that outdoor shower rigged up off the summer kitchen with a steel tank over a wood-burning firebox, all built from salvage. I had soldered a supply pipe going into the tank, and a shower nozzle coming off the bottom. It had a piece of old screen over the top to keep bugs out. I brought a chair over, poured half a bucket of water in the tank, and made a little fire in the box with some splints. Over the years, I’d developed a pretty good sense of how long it took to heat up. In the meantime, I went and fetched my fiddle from inside. I hadn’t played in weeks. I was eager to put on the machine-made strings that I picked up in Albany. I switched them out with the old gut strings, one at a time, so as not to unseat the bridge. My bow was in fine condition because two things we had plenty of were horsehair and rosin. The wound steel wire strings were wonderfully even, with a clear, bright sound. I played a slow, sad favorite tune called “The Greenwood Tree” in the key of D. In a little while, the water in the shower tank was heated. I got wet enough to soap up, shut it off, and used the rest to rinse. It left me a changed man.
FORTY-TWO
A commotion of voices downstairs woke me up. The sun was well above the rooftops outside my bedroom window, so I must have slept unusually late. I threw on my summer work clothes and hurried down to find Victor Gasparry and two other local men there, Roger Hoad and Frank Arena, bullyragging Britney with complaints about the water situation.
“Where the hell you been?” Victor said when I appeared on the stairs. “They got this deal all screwed up—”
“We ain’t had water for days now,” Frank said.
“You’ve got to do something!” Roger said.
“All right, all right—”
“What the hell you mean taking on leadership here and then leaving your people high and dry for the better part of a week?” Victor said.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I had some other obligations.”
“If we wanted nothing done, we could have stuck with old Dale.”
“I’m going up there personally this morning and see what this is all about,” I said, “and don’t you ever come in here again raising a ruckus like this—there’s a young child around!”
“And whose child, I’d like to know,” Roger muttered.
I never did like him much, and now I liked him even less. He lived alone in the shell of the former Dunkin’ Donuts and made matches by a secret process, they said, that involved boiling down large quantities of his own urine. I suppose the basic resource was easy enough for him to come by, since he drank so much. His matches were sold by the dozen at Einhorn’s store. I kept mine in an old mint tin. He must have made enough off it to stay alive because everybody needed matches and they were the only kind you could get lately. They made a smell like fireworks and probably a quarter of them were duds. At this moment, I would have liked to pick Roger up by the seat of his coarse-woven pants and toss him into the street, but it occurred to me that the essence of politics was to not act on your impulses.
“She’s a child of someone who has passed away,” I said. “And in these times we had better look out for each other, or there is no point to what remains of this life.”
They left us in peace, but it would be a long day ahead.
The Union Grove water system began in a six-acre reservoir created where Alder Brook was first dammed up in 1879. The original crude wooden aqueduct system was replaced in 1921 with buried iron pipes that carried the water by gravity to the town a total of a mile and three-tenths. The earthen dam was replaced at that time by one made of concrete. A treatment station was added below in the 1950s where Hill Street dead-ends. It had not been attended to since the station superintendent, Claude Wormsley, died in the flu several years ago. We couldn’t have got the chemicals to run in it now anyway.<
br />
The service road up to the dam was overgrown after years of neglect, and a crew had evidently worked hard to clear it the past week. The pungent smell of freshly cut trees and raw disturbed earth made for an exciting aroma of enterprise. The scale of the operation was impressive when you consider it was all done without machines or power tools. We hadn’t mounted a collective effort like this in town for years. Some New Faith men were working at a sawbuck there, cutting the felled trees into eight-foot lengths to send back down below for stove wood.
I found Brother Jobe and a large gang of men further up in the vicinity of the dam. The work crew included twenty New Faith brothers, among them my recent companions Joseph, Elam, and Seth, and five of our own town men: Tom Allison, Doug Sweet-land, Rod Sauer, the mason, Jim VanMeter who used to run an excavation service, and Brad Kimmel, a talented fellow whose fix-it shop was vital in a society that was forced to recycle virtually everything. It was the first time I’d seen Brother Jobe without his frock coat and some kind of necktie. He was dressed in muddy linens with his sleeves rolled up, and was right in there working with the rest of the men. I stood back and watched them lay a six-foot length of ten-inch-diameter concrete pipe in a trench, about a hundred yards from the dam. They had rigged up a portable crane out of timbers and a chain winch, with a box at the leverage end for field-stone counterweights, and this allowed them to jockey the heavy pipe into place. When the new concrete section was positioned to their satisfaction, they yanked up a length of rotted iron pipe from the trench.
At the conclusion of this operation, Brother Jobe called a break. News had obviously gotten around about our successful return from Albany with Bullock’s boat crew, and the town men gathered round to greet me and ask me about what was now being called the Big Breakout. It frightened me to think back on it, about the horror and confusion of the moment, and the man with the red whiskers who pointed his gun at me, and what I did. But I was grateful that their spirits were high. Both the Union Grove men and the New Faith men seemed energized by the new experience of working shoulder to shoulder at a task that would make life in our town better for a change.
They had set up a camp kitchen under an open-walled tent nearby, and several New Faith women were in there along with townspeople Marsha Kimmel and Joanne Pettie turning out a mid-morning snack for the crew: big buckwheat-and-potato-flour flatcakes rolled up with butter and jam, and rose-hip tea to wash it down. Brother Jobe steered me over to the face of the dam while the others got their food. It was about fifteen feet high. A trench ran up to it and I could see a new copper fitting that had been run up into the original supply pipe at the base of the dam below the frost line.
World Made by Hand Page 19
