The Harrows of Spring (30 page)

S
EVENTY-FOUR

Daniel came by the doctor's place well after sundown, when word reached him that Evan Holder was there. Loren and Jane Ann had been sitting with Evan for hours as he alternately slept and woke, and he was alert when Daniel got there. Evan's parents gave the small room to the two young men who had not seen each other for more than two years, since their misadventure on the way west ended in the foundering of their boat on Lake Erie.

Daniel took the chair that Loren had been sitting in. Such was their amazement at finding each other again that they couldn't stop beaming, or find the way to begin.

“Well,” Daniel said.

“Well,” Evan said. “Bet you thought you'd never see me again.”

“That's a wicked fine beard you've got going,” Daniel said. “Last time we were together you hardly had to shave.”

“Yeah? Think I should keep it?”

“There's a barbershop in town now.”

“You don't say.”

“Things are a little different here now.”

Their smiles faded and neither spoke for a while. A candle burned brightly on a table at each side of the bed.

“I'm told you got shot on your way home,” Daniel said.

“I've been shot at before. But this was the first time they actually hit me.”

Daniel was able to laugh before he gagged on his surging emotion.

“You can't imagine how many times I've thought about that storm on the lake, and watching you slip away, and not being able to save you.” Daniel reached for Evan's hand and took it and squeezed it. “I'm amazed to see you and so glad you're home. So glad.”

“Maybe when I'm around for a while you'll change your mind,” Evan said.

Evan closed his eyes and subsided into sleep. Daniel watched Evan's chest rise and fall. A minute later his eyes reopened.

“Was I asleep?”

“Yeah. Only a minute or so.”

“My father says I'm on opium. It's a weird feeling.”

“They say you're doing fine. Can you tell me what happened to you when our boat broke up?”

Evan coughed, tried to order his thoughts.

“Well, you wouldn't believe how close to land we were,” he said. “I saw a light in the distance and just swam for it. I dunno, a half mile maybe. I was half frozen to death when I crawled out of the water. A place called Kelleys Island, not far off Sandusky Harbor. I washed up on the rocks and yelled at the light. It was the cottage of a fisherman named Peter Sale. He lugged me inside, wrapped me in blankets, and poured hot water and whiskey into me. I survived. I had no idea how to go looking for you. So I didn't.”

“Same for me,” Danel said. “Go on.”

“I worked with him on his boat until August, netting whitefish and smoking them there on the island. He was a fine, fair fellow, and I felt that I owed him, but I couldn't stay at it. It was a lonely life there, just me and him. Once every two weeks we'd go to the mainland with the smokers. So that one time late in the summer I didn't go back to the island with him.”

“What happened to your silver and gold?”

“I had to drop my pants in the lake. They were dragging me down.”

“It was in your pockets?”

“Yeah, lost it all. Had to. I got work in the market in town, loading freights. As soon as I had a little silver I went back to cards. I got some decent clothes and made my way around that part of the country playing cards. It was what I was good at, turns out. I ranged as far as Wisconsin. I had a fine career. Oh, the lakes are grand. I was on my way home with thirty-two ounces of gold sewn into the lining of my coat when this happened. I don't even remember getting shot.”

“Where's the coat?”

“Oh, I suppose the robbers have it now.”

“That's a damn shame.”

“Tell you the truth, I've won and lost a few fortunes since we were traveling companions on the E-ri-o. Now tell me. What happened to you?”

Daniel did, mostly, in the rest of the hour that they were alone together, though he was not ready to tell his old friend what exactly he had done in the Foxfire Republic.

S
EVENTY-FIVE

In the week that followed, Stephen Bullock disposed of the bodies of the interlopers he'd had executed. To spare his workmen the chore of digging twelve graves, he put them to the less arduous task of building a wooden raft fourteen feet square, and on it he stacked the bodies amidst a great pyre of firewood. He towed the floating crematory several miles downstream with his schooner and had his men ignite it. A northwest wind blew the smoke in the direction of Massachusetts, the ancestral home of the Pocumtuc Algonquins. Sophie Bullock was satisfied with the arrangement and did not withhold her affections from her husband.

Jane Ann Holder met Robert Earle and Britney Blieveldt at the doctor's infirmary to visit the seven-year-old girl who had lost the lower part of her left leg. Her name was Elizabeth or Liza Kellner, a scrappy, bright-eyed child eager for life on the new terms it offered to her, and grateful for the prospect of being taken into a household with something like a real mother and father after her time in the custody of Sylvester “Buddy” Goodfriend and his minions.

All but seven of the surviving Berkshire youngsters were taken into the New Faith compound and other households among those townspeople who felt comfortable enough with their care and upbringing. Those other seven, all boys sixteen and older, were escorted in wagons to the boundary where Washington County, New York, met Vermont and released with the warning never to venture across it again.

A funeral for Brother Elam (old-times name, Hugh Parmelee) was held in the Union Grove graveyard, where he was buried beside Brother Minor, son of Brother Jobe, who had been shot the previous year by the villain Wayne Karp. Many of the regular villagers who had come to know and admire Elam turned out for the ceremony. The euology was delivered by Seth, his devoted friend and comrade, recounting their many adventures in the Holy Land and then in the not so united states of America in the years since.

Fifty volunteers combined from the village and the New Faith, under the supervision of Brother Shiloh, the engineer and builder, journeyed to Temple Merton's farm and camped there for three days restoring his barns and outbuildings, and then moved on to the other farmers who had suffered vandalism and rebuilt their barns too.

Daniel Earle published the first edition of the new
Union News Leader
with its editor and publisher denoted as one “Orlando Heathcoate.” The top story in the upper left-hand column of the crowded broadsheet was a frank report under the byline of Karen Grolsch about the tragedy at Ramsdell's Hayfield, as the property was subsequently called, because it belonged to farmer Frank Ramsdell of Battenville, including the strange events and depredations leading up to it and the horrific aftermath. Another column reported the executions of one Sylvester Goodfriend and eleven bandits captured in an arson and looting attack at Bullock's plantation. Copies of the newspaper were sent far and wide when the Germantown tub
Katterskill
made its maiden voyage down the Hudson River to Albany with a crew composed of Teddy Einhorn, the new pilot, and Corey Widgeon, his sole crew, an old schoolmate of Daniel Earle's. The
Kingston Pilot
and other papers replied over the following weeks with censorious editorials about “bloody Washington County.” Stephen Bullock, for one, considered these the best advertising conceivable to ward off future incursions of pickers, bandits, rogues, and riffraff who gave passing thought to visiting the locality.

In the middle of June, Robert Earle received a written message from Stephen Bullock, hand-delivered by Dick Lee. It was a proposal to put to rest all the ill will of the bygone year and an invitation to a baseball game to be played that Saturday night between the men of Bullock's plantation and the men of Union Grove, including any members of the New Faith brethren who felt competent to take the field. Bullock's hopes were pinned on his center fielder, Cecil Fullmer, a onetime minor league prospect for the New York Mets' Class AA Binghamton club (now in charge of Bullock's ox barn). The game would be played, Bullock proposed, in the old VFW field on the south side of Union Grove, tucked behind an abandoned Chevrolet dealership and the village road-sanding storage facility and garage, no longer in use.

Brother Jobe was interested in the proposal, for the sake of improving relations, and supplied four brothers to the Union Grove nine who had played at various times in their youth in the Babe Ruth League, the Army Ranger League, or the Carolina Collegiate Coastal Plain League, including his pitcher, Brother Seth. Bullock offered to supply fielder's gloves and several serviceable balls sewn in his harness shop. The bats were indestructible aluminum ones found in the old high school basement, likely to survive the next several ice ages. Brother Jobe offered to rebuild and groom the VFW field, bringing in five wagonloads of fine red clay from the deposits around the western base of Schoolhouse Hill. His men meticulously set down foul lines and the batter's box with powdered lime and scythed the field a few hours before the game.

It rained a little that Saturday morning but the skies cleared, the temperature rose, and at six o'clock in the evening the weather was perfect. Terry Einhorn had assembled an operation for grilling sausages, Brother Micah of the New Faith Tavern arranged for a setup of beer and cider kegs off the third base line. The two managers of the ball clubs, Bullock and Robert Earle, confabbed with the umpire at home plate. That crucial role was decided by a drawing of straws between the village trustees and the winner happened to be Brother Jobe. An announcement of the game was broadcast in the second edition of the
Union News Leader
, and word spread quickly, with families driving to the game in carts and wagons from as far away as Hoosick Falls, Argyle, and Cossayuna. The pitcher for Bullock's nine completed his warm-ups on the mound, and the lead-off hitter for Union Grove, Eric Laudermilk, stood in the on-deck circle with his arms hooked under a thirty-four-inch Miguel Cabrera model bat manufactured years ago under the Sam brand name. A stillness fell over the several hundred spectators gathered off the foul lines on benches or on chairs they had carried to the field themselves or just standing. Then, a clarion tenor voice rose from among them, belonging to Andrew Pendergast, director of the Congregational Church music circle and choir, posing the musical question:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

The people both on and off the field glanced around to one side and another and by the middle of the stanza, before the anthem's soaring bridge, all joined in the strains of a song they had not sung, or even heard, for a very long time.

And that is all there is to tell about the events of the year that concerns us in this history of the future where the people came to live in a world made by hand.