The Harrows of Spring (15 page)

“Excuse the technical difficulties, ladies and gentlemen. It's old equipment. Glen Ethan has to rest now. It's been a long journey from over in Massachusetts. But he wanted me to tell you how glad he was to see you all and he looks forward to a great alliance between the people of the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley.”

Karen had been scribbling furiously in her homemade notebook. She dotted a final
i
and turned to the man standing beside her, Charles Pettie, the cheese boss at Schroeder's creamery.

“What did you make of that, sir?”

“Quite a show. The sound wasn't so hot.”

“How about what he said?”

“Well, the parts that I could make out, I didn't understand what the hell he was saying.”

T
HIRTY-FOUR

The four horsemen of Union Grove, traveling south on the Route 40 ridge along the Hudson Valley, reached the town of Harts Falls across the Rensselaer County line at midday. The town's favorable location on a fourteen-foot drop of the Hoosick River made it the site of two water-powered mills, one for grains, the other for lumber, both constructed in recent years. The Hoosick River then continued below the falls two miles farther to the Hudson River where commodities could be loaded on barges and shipped to Albany or other points. The mills together employed forty men in season, but at this time of the year there was no Rensselaer County grain to grind. An establishment calling itself Guff's Lunch Room operated in an old foursquare house between the two mills. There, the four travelers were able to buy a meal of hard-boiled eggs, cheese, and sturgeon chowder. The great prehistoric fish had made a comeback in recent years, along with the teeming shad. The chowder was made of five simple ingredients: milk, butter, onions, potatoes, and fish. It lacked salt and, when asked, the serving boy said they had none lately. The cheese had an off flavor and a greenish tint, as if it had been made by amateurs. A crude sign above the pass-through to the kitchen told diners, “Sorry no bread today.” The dozen or so workmen in the front room seemed to be making up for the shortcomings of the fare with beer. The men of Union Grove ate quickly and didn't linger at Guff's.

By late afternoon the temperature had climbed into the seventies, the warmest day so far that year. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the horsemen decided to sleep out for the night, the empty houses along the way being full of mold, vile odors, or intimations of lives that ended badly. Fourteen miles north of Albany, they made a camp in a grove of black locust trees off the old Irish Road, close by a clear-running rill that afforded them drinking and wash water. They picketed the horses on a high line so they wouldn't step on their leads, with enough slack so they could touch their noses to the ground. The horses had stopped to graze in fields of clover more than once during the afternoon ride, and Brother Eben had supplied them with feedbags and enough oats for the journey down.

With their ground cloths spread and saddles for backrests, the men swapped around various food items all had brought along, expecting to spend a night or two out of doors in this way. The rangers had slabs of rich corn bread pudding, larded thickly with crumbled bacon and a mellow jack cheese made by the New Faith sisters. They also had a jar of pickled peppers, links of dry-cured sausage, and a sack of honey and oat cookies. Teddy Einhorn had an especially fine array of traveling treats: a plastic box of spicy smoked jerked-mutton strips (a staple on the counter back at the store), store-made potato chips, thick and oily with lard, a large sack of walnuts, another of dried apple rings, and a fondant log rolled in hazelnuts made by his mother, another store favorite. Daniel had brought some hard flat biscuits he made on his woodstove in the office with cornmeal, barley, mashed beans, and shards of desiccated ham. It was the best he could come up with on short notice. Elam remarked that they might be used as roofing shingles when they built the new mule barn.

At dusk they made a fire and boiled rose hips and water in their steel cups on a little travel grill that Seth had brought along, a wire shelf from an old refrigerator. They watched the stars come out. Between the four of them, they could identify the Big and Little Dippers, Polaris the north star, Orion with his three-star belt, the M-shaped Cassiopeia, and Draco, whose long tail wound between the two dippers. A shallow band of turquoise sky persisted above the horizon to the west when a box wagon wobbled up to the intersection of the Irish Road, came to halt, and then turned down the brushy field toward the campsite. A woman drove while a man with another woman walked alongside the wagon through the field of poplar and sumac scrub, with buttercup, garlic mustard, and clover between. The driver pulled the wagon up broadside to the fire and stopped.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” the man said, flicking up the rim of his stiff-brimmed hat with a knuckle. He might have been fifty years old, handsome in an actorish way. His hair, whisking out beneath the crown of his hat, was a wavy gold-silver mix in the firelight, and his smile revealed teeth in good order. He stood a lean six feet, wore a gray-brown long coat, well made in a pattern cut, and a blue wool sweater vest with a loose-collared shirt. His trousers were buff canvas, also pattern cut and machine sewn, tucked into brown satiny leather boots. The female beside him was twenty-four, wearing tight-fitted old-times denim trousers that emphasized her extravagantly long legs, an open wool cape over a scoop-necked sweater, and a floppy wool beret with a pom-pom on top. Her straw-colored hair framed a big-eyed look of innocence accentuated by her half-opened mouth, as though perpetually in wonder at some small thing of the moment. She was as tall as the man. The wagon driver was a few years older than the first girl, long torsoed and well made, with an orange kerchief about her head. She wore a long skirt and a tight wool tunic with not all the buttons fastened and some mounded flesh showing pale in the firelight. Before saying anything, the man swept his left arm back to gesture grandly at the side of the wagon. Painted on the cabin wall, in jaunty lettering, it read:

Dr. Lowell Spinner, Mobile Care Unit

General Medicine, Holistic Healing, and Surgery

“I take it that would be you,” Seth said.

“Yours truly,” Dr. Spinner said. “And these are my clinical associates, Kelly and Annette, nurse and physician's assistant,” the latter being up on the wagon seat. They both smiled and gave a little wave. “How's your health, gentlemen?”

“Pretty durn good, considering these times,” Elam said, and gave a glance to his comrades to see if they agreed, and all did.

“You're a plucky fellow,” Seth said.

“How's that?” Dr. Spinner asked.

“Why, for all you know, we're a pack of rascally bandits, and here you drive right in amongst us like you do.”

“I don't take you for that.”

“Ever'one else does,” Seth said with a high-pitched giggle.

“I take you for Christians,” Dr. Spinner said and that got Elam's eyebrows hoisted.

“Why, that's us exactly,” Elam said. “What was the giveaway?”

“I'd like to say I had a nose for such things. But actually, it was just a wild guess.”

“Well, I be dog,” Elam said and proceeded to give the visitors a one-minute history of the New Faith, its journey north, et cetera.

“But it's true the highway's infested with pickers, riffraff, and scum nowadays,” the doctor said, “and so we'd feel obliged to take our rest tonight in your company if that's all right. You know, security in numbers.”

“The more the merrier,” Seth said.

“There's a clear brook yonder for your horse,” Elam said. “Ours are on a picket line there.”

Annette attended to their horse and the other, Kelly, fetched bed rolls from inside the wagon.

“We're between towns of substance,” the doctor said, “having made our circuit of the country people and farmers the past five days, and I wonder if you might have some extra food to share with us.”

“Things must be sparse among your farm folks here in Rensselaer,” Teddy Einhorn said.

“They don't have much to trade with this time of year,” the doctor said. “It's the six weeks want, as they say. We're lucky to get the butt end of a sausage and some hominy porridge.”

“Why do you bother making the rounds?” Daniel asked.

“These folks need help, especially this time of year after the long winter and all. Many of their ills are nutritional deficiencies and I can treat them for things such as lack of vitamin C and like that. Since the big change of times, the country people have gained in cunning but lost in knowledge, if you know what I mean. Sanitation is poor out there, and that accounts for a lot of unnecessary sickness—if only they would wash their hands after contact with their animals. Anyway, when we make the rounds again as the seasons wheel by, they have more to give and we're better rewarded.”

“Why don't you set up in a town practice?” Elam said. “Let them come to you?”

“Because they won't,” the doctor said. “They'll just hunker down on the farm and try to wait out their troubles, grin and bear it, pray, resort to witch doctoring, and like that. No, they need us to come out to them.”

Teddy Einhorn had broken out his remaining edibles and the others did likewise, putting the items on an old nylon poncho beside the fire. Seth burrowed into his saddlebags and produced a quart bottle of spirits.

“Good Lord, what have we here?” the doctor said.

“This here is a nice peppy rye whiskey from up our way,” Seth explained. “Half our farmers run a distillery for cash money.”

“And a new tavern just opened in the village,” Teddy added eagerly. “Union Grove is up and coming.”

“Maybe we should have a look up there,” the doctor said. “What do you say, ladies?”

By this time, the two women had taken their places on blankets to either side of the doctor. Annette shrugged and Kelly nodded indifferently.

“We've already got a doctor in town,” Daniel said. “Friend of the family.”

“Well, you're a fine bunch of gentlemen, nonetheless!” the doctor said, rubbing his hands, surveying the treats at hand. The visitors ate daintily but steadily and consumed all the items that were laid out for them, and all had more than one pull on the bottle. In the distance to the east in the Taconic highlands a chorus of wolf howls erupted with eerie musicality. The animals had more of a presence in the region every year as the human population went down by increments. Daniel tossed another stout branch on the fire.

“I hate to hear those monsters go at it,” Teddy said.

“They have their place in the order of things,” Annette put in. Her voice was husky and resonant.

“It's good to be here among friends, isn't it?” Dr. Spinner said. “And what brings you fellows out on the highway this time of year?”

“We're off to buy a boat at Albany so we can resume regular trade from our town with the outside world,” Teddy Einhorn said, and proceeded to explain about the trouble with Mr. Bullock.

“What does a boat like that cost?” Dr. Spinner asked.

Teddy was going to toss out a figure but Daniel interrupted him, saying, “I guess we'll find out in a day or so when we get down to the boatyards.” He and the two rangers all cut disapproving glances Teddy's way.

“Yes, I'm sure you will,” Dr. Spinner said. “Say, any of you fellows interested in a relaxation treatment before you turn in? Both of my staff are capable of administering such, and there will be no charge, thanks to your generous hospitality.”

“How does that work, then?” Seth asked.

“It's no work at all,” the doctor said. “You just retire into the wagon with your choice of this one or this one, and she'll take charge.”

“What kind of treatment is that, exactly?” Seth asked.

“It's a kundalini chakra cleansing,” Kelly said. “An energy release technique combined with deep tissue massage that is purifying, relaxing, and pleasurable. You'll sleep well, even on this hard ground.”

Seth looked at the others. Their faces were skeptical in the firelight.

“Will it do for sore muscles?”

“That and a good deal more,” Kelly said.

“Well, I'm your man for that,” Seth said. “What I have to do?”

“Leave it to me,” Kelly said.

She got up, went around the fire to him, and extended her hand. Seth took it and she pulled him up. He looked back at the others, grinning, as she led him up into the wagon from a door at the rear. There was some muffled murmuring from in there but then the doctor commenced a disquisition on the many diseases and illnesses that they had encountered out in the country this season. A muffled moan could be heard now and again from within the wagon as he spoke, and the box shifted rhythmically on its creaky springs. The bottle went around again more than once. Young Teddy Einhorn could be heard snoring under his bedroll when the doctor went off on a tangent about the presentation of vitamin B deficiencies, Wernicke's encephalopathy, glossitis, pernicious anemia, beriberi, pellagra, dementia. He always saw a lot of it this time of year, he said, with the grain shortages and few green vegetables yet available.

Eventually, Seth and Kelly emerged from the wagon. He wore a sheepish smile and a scent of bergamot trailed behind him from the oily liniment that she had applied all over him.

“Feeling improved, my friend?” Dr. Spinner said.

“Yes, and all for the better,” Seth said, reaching for the whiskey bottle, which was drawn down by a good two-thirds. “I suggest you give it a try, brother,” he said to Elam with wink.

“I believe I had a treatment somewhat like it just last night,” Elam said.

“Oh? Is that where you was at?”

“How about you, young fellows?” the doctor asked Daniel and Teddy, who had stirred blinking from his slumber.

Daniel made a little hand wave and just mouthed, “No thanks.”

“Sure?” Dr. Spinner said. “Annette here is renowned for her healing skills. You look like you're a bit bottled up, wound kind of tight. She can uncork you, son.”

Daniel declined again and cut a glance at Teddy, who seemed to weigh the matter and reluctantly shook his head. Daniel bunched up the sweater he intended to use for a pillow. Soon he was asleep. Elam put more tree limbs on the fire and watched Dr. Spinner and his girls drift off all bunched up together under a big maroon wool blanket. Seth fell out after them.

It was in the cold and darkness before dawn that Teddy Einhorn started awake to the feel of cold steel on the soft hollow between his chin and his throat. The fire had burned down to a few embers. But a light went on as Dr. Spinner struck a match to a torch of rags soaked in a blend of beeswax and turpentine. He jammed the pointed end into the soft ground. In the lurid torchlight, the girl named Kelly held a straight razor under Teddy Einhorn's chin. Daniel sat half up, blinking. Seth merely unfurled his eyelids, careful not to move one fiber of muscle unnecessarily. Dr. Spinner and his assistant Annette both held firearms, she a .38-caliber police revolver and he a pump shotgun.