The Harrows of Spring (2 page)

“I'll meet with town trustees and set a date for an election,” Robert said. “Think about what I said.”

“Oh, all right. Anyways, Bullock's up to some new mischief we got to talk about. He's withholding trade goods from my folks.”

Bullock owned a boat that made regular trips down the Hudson to Albany to get goods that could not be made or grown in Union Grove, everything from cloth and tools to wholesale groceries such as cane sugar, wheat flour, and, once in a while, exotic commodities like coffee and lemons. It was Union Grove's chief connection with the wider outside world of commerce, or what remained of it.

“Why don't you just buy what you need at Einhorn's store?” Robert asked.

“Einhorn seems to be cut off too.

“What?”

“Yessir, as of yesterday. I confabbed with him at lunchtime. He sends his boy to Bullock's landing Tuesdays, and they blew him off. Told him they didn't have nothing.”

Terry Einhorn ran the town's only general merchandise and grocery. He received trade goods from Bullock's boat runs, too, while he also purveyed local produce, meat, and handicrafts from around the county. But it was the time of year when local supplies of last year's crops were running low—potatoes, onions, turnips, cornmeal—and no new crops were far enough along to eat. The farmers were just now planting corn and potatoes. Peas and lettuce, already in the ground, wouldn't be ready for weeks. Apart from the New Faith operation very few farms had greenhouses, since agricultural-grade plastic was no longer available for hoop tunnels, nor were manufactured metal sashes to hold glass panes, nor silicone for gaskets, nor so many of the materials that made things so magical in the old times.

“Did you talk to Bullock?” Robert asked.

“Naw. He don't talk to me anymore,” Brother Jobe said. “But I send a wagon over to his landing once a week, same as Mr. Einhorn, and he told my boys he didn't have nothing for us neither.”

“Is he still running the boat at all?” Robert asked. “You know last year we had all that trouble on the Albany docks. Maybe they're back at it again?”

Dan Curry, the boss of Albany, had gotten into the hostage and ransom business and made the mistake of taking Bullock's four-man boat crew into custody on trumped-up charges. He threatened to hang them. It was clear that any bail collected would never be returned. For his trouble, Dan Curry was shot in the head by one of Brother Jobe's rangers, who were enlisted by Bullock to go down and find the boatmen.

“We didn't hear nothing of the kind,” Brother Jobe said. “And I expect we would, since we helped him out of a jam last time. My boys said that the boat was setting right there at the landing, all rigged and ready to run, far as they could tell. I'd say it's up to you to go confab with Bullock. Maybe take Mr. Einhorn over with you. Find out what the heck he's up to.”

“All right,” Robert said. “I'll do it first thing tomorrow.”

“I suspect he just wants to punish everybody over here. My bunch, your bunch, all of Union Grove. Is he really like that? You know him better than I do.”

“He's headstrong, all right.”

“Ruthless, I'd say. Vengeful sumbitch.”

“He can't not trade with us out of spite,” Robert said. “People will go hungry around here if we don't get goods from outside.”

“Looks like that's exactly what he wants,” Brother Jobe said and handed his flask over to Robert again. “I don't know. Maybe we got to get our own dang boat.”

T
WO

Late that same afternoon, Britney Blieveldt, twenty-seven, Robert's girlfriend and housemate, had gone a mile out of the village “gathering wilds,” in the parlance of the new times; that is, she was searching for things to eat that grew naturally in the woods, meadows, and along the banks of the Battenkill River. Lithe and athletic, yellow hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a plain skirt sewn together from pieces of old leisure wear and a sweater she had knitted herself out of wool from the Deaver farm on Pumpkin Hill, she approached the railroad bridge warily. The old steel bridge across the Battenkill, built in 1917, would have been condemned by now if there were any bureaucrats left to decide such things. An actual train had not clanked over it since 1981—and that was just two excursion cars with tourists admiring fall foliage. The bridge was lately a favorite place for a considerable number of townspeople to come and end their lives—people impoverished, discouraged, beaten down, sick, disappointed, and driven mad by the rigors of the new times. It was generally avoided by those not interested in suicide, and in the new dark air of superstition that rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of modernity, many considered the bridge haunted. Because of all this, not many people foraged on the far side of the river and Britney favored it for that very reason. This day she was out for ramps, fiddleheads, and trout. In one hand, she carried Robert's treasured fly rod and, in the other, a long ash-splint basket made by herself. She carried a jackknife and a dandelion weeder in a canvas shoulder sack.

Britney looked forward to making a supper of fresh food for Robert and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, for the menu items of early spring had grown tiresome. At this time of year, the evening meal was usually corn bread and soup, an ongoing mélange of whatever had been put into the pot night after night, sometimes for a week or more, and called simply “soup” because no particular ingredient stood out. Of course, some people were better soup-makers than others, and Britney was a good one. The other staple of the new times cookery was the dish called “pudding,” a casserole of stale corn bread, eggs, cheese, sometimes a bit of meat, potatoes, turnips, onions, kale (which, when protected by mounds of straw, wintered over in the garden row), or really anything on hand or leftover. Robert had built two cold frames, in which he grew lettuce and spinach beginning in February when the days grew longer, but this spring they had attracted an infestation of leaf miners. In the older times that had preceded the machine age, this phase of the year had been called “the six weeks want” for lack of fresh food. The phrase had come back into use.

Britney stood before the bridge taking in the beauty of the river below. The snowmelt runoff was over for the year and the current ran clear now. A hatch of late day mayflies fluttered out of the water and made the air above appear to vibrate in the lowering light. She eyeballed the bridge to determine how far gone it looked. The process of dilapidation was accelerating lately. Every time she came out this way, there were alarming new signs of structural failure. In places, she could see clean through the rusted girders and plates attached to the crumbling concrete abutments down to the water rushing below. Above, an osprey had built a huge nest at the point where the top chord met the front strut. The railroad tracks themselves had been torn up during the years of the Great Collection, when steel was desperately needed for the war in the Holy Land. The wooden cross ties had been disturbed in the process and were rotting too. There were holes here and there that a person could easily fall through. Some rude planks had been laid down on them over the years to make crossing the decrepit bridge on foot a little less scary. Britney had been on the middle school gymnastics team years before, specializing in the balance beam. She crossed the bridge in a firm, economical stride, marveling as she did that something built only a bit more than a century before was already a ruin. Someday, she mused, it would crash into the river and then the forest behind the far bank would become a tract of untrodden wilderness. The next town to the east, Bennington, was fourteen miles away, and people didn't range very far from their towns in the new times.

A quarter mile beyond the bridge she came to the sunny, south-facing embankment where the ostrich ferns liked to grow along a curve in the railroad bed. Hundreds of the curled green sprouts poked through the leaf litter there. They looked like the scroll at the top of a violin peg box. She set about methodically collecting the fiddleheads with her jackknife, dropping them into a cotton sack that had once been a pillowcase. In a little while she had enough for the evening meal and some additional to pickle, and she moved on to a lower place nearer the river where the ramps grew. These wild leeks, with their strong garlic overtones, spread profusely along this half-acre patch, their broad double leaves like flags against the umber forest floor. The dandelion weeder was the perfect tool for extracting them without bruising the tender pink and white bulbs. She would pickle some of these, too, and made a bundle of them in a damp dishrag to keep them fresh. She stuffed the bundle into the sack with the fiddleheads.

Next, she proceeded back down the railroad bed along the river to a place she knew well. Many trout lurked in the riffled feeding lanes between a quartet of large boulders anglers had always called the Four Brothers. She laid her basket in the shade of a blown-down sycamore tree and the rod with it, kicked off her leather, wood-soled clogs, and waded up to her shins in the stream with an old plastic jar that, years before, had contained factory-made mayonnaise. She hitched up her skirt and tucked the hem into the waistband to keep it out of the water, which was so cold her feet quickly went numb. After a quarter of an hour of foraging under rocks in the gravel streambed, she'd captured half a dozen crayfish in the jar, little ones, two inchers, the kind the trout adored. She held one in her left hand and placed the jar with the rest of them on the exposed gravel bed beside the blown-down tree and her basket. Robert was an adept fly fisherman but Britney had not learned the difficult particulars of the art. Instead, she had tied a bare number 12 hook to the end of the leader with a small lead split shot eight inches above it. She ran the hook between the carapace and the first tail plate of the squirming crayfish, then pulled out several yards of the flourescent green fly line, manufactured out of miracle polymers in the old times, and used the line's weight to roll out a cast so that the crayfish landed with a delicate plop in a riffled run behind the nearest of the four toolshed-sized boulders in the stream. The crayfish sank and not a second later something seemed to snap in the frothy riffle where it landed as if a rat trap had sprung underwater.

Britney clamped the loose fly line to the cork butt of the rod to get it taut, then jerked it. The rod tip bent parabolically down and quivered. A speckled trout exploded out of the water and danced on its tail trying to throw the hook. The crayfish had broken off, but the hook held fast in the fish's lip plate. It remained up in the air for such a long still moment that she could make out all its vivid colors. The native speckled brookies had made a strong comeback in the new times, with the human population down by two-thirds and many of these surviving people working long days on the farms, with little leisure for sport fishing, and dwindling supplies of the old manufactured fishing tackle. The imported European brown trout, stocked assiduously every year by the state in the old times, were almost all gone now, but the native brookies were better fish. They had gorgeous red fins and bellies and red spots in a blue aureole on their flanks, and their meat was pink, like salmon.

Britney let the fish tire itself out and landed it carefully on the gravel beach. It was a good fourteen inches. She placed her thumb in the trout's gasping mouth and bent its head back until its spine snapped so it would have a quick death instead of suffocating slowly. Then she took her jackknife out and made a slit from its anal vent to its gills. She removed the guts and flung them onto the bank for the raccoons or the fisher cats or the minks, and then ran her thumb along the inside of the cavity to remove the dark blood sac along the spine. Finally, she cut out the gills, which would give the meat an off flavor if they remained attached. When the trout was laid in her basket under the damp bundle of ramps and the fiddleheads, she rigged up another crayfish, moved about ten yards upstream toward another of the Four Brothers, and roll-cast her line into the riff behind it, with similar results.

Britney fished that stretch until six o'clock, when the sun fell below the ridge of Schoolhouse Hill and the first intimations of nighttime dimmed the corridor of the little river valley. She had five nice trout, three for the table and two for Robert's smoker. The basket was heavy enough that she had a bit of a struggle climbing the steep bank to the old railroad bed for the walk back to the bridge and then town. She had gone perhaps two-tenths of a mile up the track when she stopped to pick a trout lily from a little patch of them growing behind a bent and rusted bridge signal stanchion. She was just fitting the stem behind her ear when an unusual odor came to her attention. She turned slowly and looked down the track where she had come from. A black bear lumbered toward her some fifty yards away. As she stood up and straightened the bear stopped.

She took out her jackknife, opened the blade, and gripped it tightly against the butt end of Robert's fly rod. The bear's head swayed back and forth. In a person, that body language might be interpreted as something like sheepishness, but Britney was not at all sure that was the case for the bear. She took her eye off it a moment and glanced down the tracks at the bridge. It was about a hundred yards away. When she looked back at the bear, it was on the move again, slowly stalking forward.

“You stay the hell away from me!” she shrieked at the bear. It stopped and sat on its haunches like a dog. “I'll cut your heart out!” she shrieked again. She turned and began walking briskly toward the bridge, thinking that if she ran she would surely prompt the bear's instinct to chase her. The bear continued to follow her anyway and was closing the distance between them. She remembered with a shudder that it was her time of the month. She was wearing a simple napkin of cotton batting, made by herself, in her underwear. She wondered if the bear could scent her the way she scented the bear. This time of the year, a female bear would almost certainly have a cub or two with her, and this being a solitary animal she supposed it must be a male. She quickened her step and broke into a trot. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the bear break into a lope.

Britney was twenty-five yards from the bridge. She dropped the basket full of trout and the sack of wild gatherings, hoping the bear would be satisfied with that, but he loped right past them. She now broke into a sprint thinking if she could just get onto the rickety structure made by clever and fearsome humanity, the bear would not dare to follow. She could hear his paws hit the ground as he loped up to her heels, and then she reached the bridge. She had taken perhaps three strides onto the planks laid across the disintegrating cross ties when she felt the weight of the bear on her back, inhaled its vicious stink, felt its forepaws encircle her torso, and sensed both of them go suddenly weightless. And then everything—bridge, treetops, pale sky, black fur—spun wildly as Britney and the bear fell clean through the bridge and made a full rotation until their sickening and wondrous descent through the air came to a violent stop as the bear, with Britney in its arms, landed on his back on another glacial erratic boulder in the streambed under the bridge, this one known as the Priest.

The fall knocked the wind out of Britney but the bear took the brunt of the impact—his spine snapped and the force of the collision drove a piece of shattered clavicle bone into his heart, killing him instantly. Both Britney and the bear then slid down the sloping boulder into the water, whereupon Britney came free of the bear's embrace as the cold current sucked her into a deep eddy and she submerged completely for a moment. Her spasming diaphragm saved her life, for her temporary inability to breathe prevented her from inhaling any water and thus drowning. The swirling water propelled her out of the eddy into the main current, which deposited her gasping on a gravel bank some thirty yards downstream of the bridge. Soon, she stopped gasping and resumed breathing—hungrily but regularly, though her solar plexus ached. Eventually, she began to shiver and her teeth chattered. She slowly groped onto all fours as the water poured out of her clothes. The gravel hurt her knees. But what impelled her upright was the recognition that she had let go of Robert's precious fly rod, and after establishing that nothing else was wrong with her, nothing broken, she set about searching for it along the gravel banks in the fading twilight. Her skirt was so heavy now that she took it off, wrung it out, and slung it over her shoulder as she moved down the river.

She did not have to search long or far. She found the graphite fly rod in a tangle of willow stems where a sharp bend in the river formed a little island. The fluorescent green fly line was easy to spot in the low light. She waded a chest-deep backwater pool to get it. Many yards of line had come off and gotten tangled in the willow branches but the rod was completely intact. She freed the line, reeled it in, and secured the hook in the little wire loop at the top of the cork butt. There was no sign of the bear, which had floated farther downstream in the main current. She wondered whether what had just happened was real and not imagined as she slogged back upstream in the gathering darkness. The iron bridge came into view against the green and orange twilight, a weird, looming reminder of times past and gone. She was able to climb up the steep bank there on the old path worn by generations of fishermen. She walked back down the track a little way on the wild side of the bridge and retrieved her basket with its trout and wild edibles. The cold of a spring night was coming on. She hurried back across the bridge barefoot, careful where she stepped in the dim light, fly rod in one hand and basket in the other. It wasn't until she got to the road another quarter mile down the track that she realized she had lost her jackknife, probably forever.