The Harrows of Spring (4 page)

“Mark Twain done it too, didn't he?” Brother Jobe said. “Who was a bigger draw in letters than Mark Twain? See, I don't even remember his real name.”

“Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” Daniel said.

“That's right,” Brother Jobe said. “A fine appellation. It's got music in it, don't it? And he give it up? Was the law after him or something?”

“No, he was just crafting a persona for himself,” Loren said.

“How's that?” Brother Jobe said.

“Inventing a comic character for himself to play,” Loren said.

“There you go,” Brother Jobe said to Daniel. “You could do the same.”

“I'm not funny,” Daniel said. “And I'm not trying to be some made-up character.”

“Look, if you run a newspaper, you're going to be a public figure,” Robert said. “You must understand that.”

Daniel heaved a sigh. He'd been in the shop since just after daybreak. He returned to the woodstove and the others.

“All right. I'll do what you say. How does I. P. Daley sound?”

“Kind of made up,” Loren said.

“Put a little more thought into it,” Robert said. “You can do better.”

“Can I have some more of this?” Daniel asked, reaching for the flask.

“Have at her,” Brother Jobe said. “Maybe it'll get some funny going for you.”

“Where I've been and what I've done wasn't funny,” Daniel said, and everyone retreated into themselves again for a while.

“The thing is, anybody who tried to collect that reward would have to go all the way down to Tennessee to get it, wouldn't they?” Loren said, eventually.

“That's true,” Brother Jobe said. “Any jackass could turn up there and claim he done you in.”

Brother Jobe looked up and discovered Robert and Loren scowling at him.

“Just saying,” Brother Jobe explained. “I don't see how anyone might prove it, though. Anyways, the news, such as it is, travels slow and there ain't no regular mails in most places, so my advice to you, young man, is to keep well to the background in this here endeavor of yours. Maybe after a year or two it'll blow over.”

Robert lingered in the office after Loren and Brother Jobe departed.

“Hey, apart from all that,” Robert said, “I'm proud of you for pulling this together. You did a great job in here. It's a fine place to work.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said. “Do you happen to know if there are any more copies of that Kingston paper around?”

“That's the only one I've seen around here,” Robert said.

Daniel picked up the sheet lying on the sofa and studied it for a moment. “It's a good print job, I'll say that. Nice paper. Hope I can do as well.” He crushed it into a wad, opened the door to the woodstove, and laid it on the glowing embers within where it flared for a few moments and lit up that part of the big room dramatically. They both watched for a little while and then Daniel turned to his father. “I'm not proud of what I did,” he said. “It makes me sick to even think about it.”

“I know,” Robert said.

F
OUR

That was some weeks before the evening that Britney was assaulted on the railroad tracks by the bear. There was nothing else she could do but walk home, cold, wet, and barefoot, with her recovered basket of wild gatherings.

Darkness had just overcome the last glimmers of daylight when she arrived home. Robert had been teaching her daughter Sarah how to play the tune “Hollow Poplar” on the fiddle. She was learning quickly and had developed a nice shuffle rhythm with her bow. Britney walked glassy-eyed through the front door to the kitchen in the back of the house, put her basket on the counter there and the fly rod in the corner by the back door, and stripped off all her damp clothes, which she placed on a warming rack near the woodstove. Robert and Sarah watched, and then followed her progress as Britney came back into the front room, all without a saying a word, and went up the stairs.

“Mama's naked,” Sarah whispered.

“I know. It's okay,” Robert said, though he suspected something was very wrong. He was torn between staying with Sarah and following Britney upstairs. But before he could resolve that quandary Britney came back down in a bathrobe. She went directly into the kitchen and stuffed more billets in the cookstove.

“I made corn bread, Mama,” Sarah called in from the front. It was the child's duty to make corn bread every other day. Britney did not reply.

Robert watched Britney begin to go about her tasks in the kitchen as if nobody else was in the house. There was something oddly mechanical about her movements, he thought. He put his violin on the table among the candlesticks and sheet music and rose out of his seat to go to her. She had just set a big iron pan on the stove when he came behind her and put his arms around her. As he did, she began to shriek and then she slipped through Robert's arms onto the floor in a heap.

He picked her up, bundled her in his arms, and carried her over to the sofa in front, where she came back to herself sobbing and racking. After he brought her some whiskey, she was able to tell what had happened to her. The tale rendered him speechless.

“Does that mean we can't go back to the river, Mama?” Sarah asked.

“It's our river too,” Britney said. “We'll go back there.”

Robert wondered if he might convince her to carry a pistol next time.

F
IVE

The following morning, Robert and storekeeper Terry Einhorn, a brawny man of forty-two with red hair and whiskers and a usually cheerful demeanor, set out from Union Grove for Bullock's plantation, which lay four miles west of town, near where the Battenkill River entered the larger Hudson. They rode on Einhorn's spring-mounted store wagon behind a big Belgian gelding named Lancelot. The weather had turned cooler again and clotting clouds threatened showers. Robert wore a long waxed canvas raincoat over layers of shirts and a sweater.

“Where'd you come by that coat?” Terry asked as they went by the abandoned Ford dealership on the edge of town.

“My girl made it.”

“I could sell those. You tell her that.”

The freezing and thawing of the seasons had added another cycle of damage to the pavement of Route 29, the old state highway. It had been years since the government gave up on road maintenance and there were no prospects whatsoever of it resuming. In places where the potholes and fissures were especially bad, horse-drawn vehicles had departed from it and made a parallel carriageway off the shoulder in the soft dirt alongside the highway.

“You're tight with Mr. Bullock, aren't you?” Terry said.

“Yeah, we're friends, I guess.”

“How'd you get to know the squire?” Terry asked.

“Carpentry jobs,” Robert said. “I built a Japanese teahouse on his pond years ago. He lived in Japan for a while after college. He's crazy for it.”

“We'll never travel that far again,” Terry said. “The young ones, they'll be lucky if they get to see the Atlantic Ocean.”

“My boy sailed on the Great Lakes,” Robert said.

“I heard. Maybe he should get a boat and take over the Albany trade from Bullock.”

“He's set on starting up that newspaper.”

“Yeah. Well, it's a good thing, I suppose,” Terry said and added, as if talking to himself, “I thought me and Bullock had a nice arrangement. I always paid him hard money for his goods. I don't get why he's turned on us.”

“I think he's a little bipolar,” Robert said.

Terry cut him a nervous glance.

“You mean, like, crazy?” he said.

“Just real moody. You know, up and down.”

At that moment, as they rounded a curve on the River Road about a quarter mile from Bullock's Old Manse, as the main house on his vast property was called, they came upon a man nailed through the forehead to the trunk of a black locust tree with a twelve-inch spiral-shank landscape spike. He hung there with his feet suspended at least three feet off the ground, and his arms tied behind his back, and great gouts of dried blood crusted down his face and his clothing as far down as his ragged pant legs. He was barefoot, suggesting that someone had taken his boots. He had a full head of brown hair and was slight of frame, but with all the gore it was hard to tell whether he was twenty-five or forty-five years of age. Both men let out more than a few oaths of astonishment at the sight of him. Terry reined in Lancelot. Robert leaped down from the driver's box before the wagon came to a stop.

“Is he one of our people?” Terry said.

Robert stood on his tiptoes to examine the dead man's face.

“Nobody I recognize,” he said.

They regarded him silently for a minute. Crows could be heard quarreling in the distance somewhere.

“I hope they killed him before they did this,” Terry said eventually.

Robert did not voice his own thought: that the man must have been alive considering how much he bled out on himself.

“Yeah, you'd hope,” was all he said.

“Do you think this was Bullock's work?”

“I dunno. His men, anyway.”

“Moody, you say?”

“Well . . . ”

“There's got to be something really wrong with him.”

The previous October, nine marauders had invaded Bullock's property, as deep as the sanctity of his very bedroom. Bullock killed three of them himself with a Japaense sword. His men captured the other “pickers,” as such roving bandits were called. Bullock ordered them hanged along the same River Road and left them to rot until his wife Sophie complained about the odor.

“Are we just going to leave him here like this?” Terry asked.

“We'd need a hacksaw to get him down.”

“You want to just go back to town then?”

“No,” Robert said.

“A man who would do this,” Terry said. “Sheesh.”

“We still have to talk to him about the trade boat,” Robert said. “People are running out of things in town.”

He climbed back up onto the driver's box and sat down beside Terry.

“Are you going to tell Bullock that we came upon this?” Terry asked.

“How can we not mention it?”

“Your call,” Terry said and geed up Lancelot. “This is beyond moody, if you ask me.”

They passed Bullock's river landing on the way. His sloop, the
Sophie
, sat quietly in its crib dock with its rigging bare and sails stowed. There was no sign of any activity around the warehouse. Since Bullock began his trade runs to Albany three years prior, there was usually a man posted on the premises to keep an eye on things.

“Looks like he's closed for business, all right,” Terry said.

Shortly, they turned up the drive to Bullock's house. Eddie Flake, a young man with a lopsided head and a touch of palsy, hitched Lancelot to a post beside the soapstone water trough and ran awkwardly up the gravel lane and across a field of new pale green timothy grass to fetch his master at some unknown remove. They watched him lope toward the horizon till he was out of sight. Lancelot drank from the trough.

“This is a hell of an outfit he's got going here,” Terry said, taking in the big old house, the several barns, the workshops, the distillery, and the fields sloping up from the river valley. “He lives like some kind of royalty, doesn't he?”

“He saw what was coming from a long ways away,” Robert said, “and he was well prepared when it hit.”

“How many people, you figure, has he got living on this place now?”

“Twenty families, maybe. New ones turn up all the time. Some single people too. It's not a bad life here, considering how things are.”

“But basically he rules the place,” Terry said. “Like a lord of old.”

“Pretty much,” Robert said.

“Do you suppose they like being told what to do?”

“I think they knew what they signed up for,” Robert said. “They can always leave and strike out on their own, or move to town if they prefer a different life. He doesn't hold them against their will. The thing is, most of them came here without any skill for the new times, how to farm, manage animals, the useful crafts. They had office jobs in the old times, like you and me. They learned these things after they came here.”

“What keeps them here then, after they learn a few things?” Terry asked. “There are plenty of abandoned farms around.”

“An ordered existence. Community. Security. A sense of belonging to a successful enterprise in a time when everything else is shaky and there's nothing to hang your life on to. Whatever else you think of Bullock, he's a good organizer and a commanding personality.”

“I'd take liberty over security any day,” Terry said.

“Liberty's great, but first you've got to feed yourself and your family.”

“It smells like serfdom, if you ask me.”

They heard hoofbeats. Bullock and his right-hand man, the versatile Dick Lee, crested the hill cantering down through the field of timothy grass on big bay Hanoverian mounts, Bullock's preferred saddle breed. When they got to the soapstone trough under its canopy of budding old maple limbs, Bullock dismounted with surprising agility for a large man of sixty-one. Dick Lee remained in the saddle. Bullock's long silver hair, aquiline nose, fine riding clothes, high brown boots, and erect posture gave him the air of someone born to a high position. But his face was inflamed with dudgeon and his eyes burned as he stood before Robert and Terry.

“The electric's out,” Bullock announced.

“Oh?” Robert said. “Back in town the electric's been down for more than a year.”

As it happened, one of Bullock's far-seeing preparations for life in the new times was to rig up a hydroelectric system for his property.

“I mean out for good here,” Bullock said. “As in over and out. That's all she wrote. Good night, Missus Calabash, wherever you are.”

“Uh, gee. Sorry about that, sir,” Terry said.

“I laid in three goddamn replacement Pelton wheels for that turbine, and now the last one's shot to hell. I can't believe it.”

“What are you going to do?” Robert said.

“I'm going to scour the countryside to see if anyone can fix the goddamn things. You can't weld them without special equipment and materials. And, of course, you'd need electricity to do the welding. I should have bought twenty or thirty of the goddamn things instead of just three. Goddamn shortsighted of me.”

Robert and Terry shared a glance.

“Uh, Stephen,” Robert said. “We just saw something kind of horrifying down on the River Road—”

“So that's it for the goddamn stereo, among other things,” Bullock continued undeterred. “I suppose I could get hold of some more musical instruments for my people and have them put on live music, like you folks do over in the village. But, hell. I couldn't summon them every time I wanted to, like at the dinner table. And there are things they'd never be able to perform correctly: Erik Satie, Mahler, the Doors—”

“Uh, Stephen, there's a guy nailed to a tree down there,” Robert said.

“Oh?” Bullock said, coming out of himself. “Is that so?” He craned around and looked up at Dick Lee, still mounted. “Is that so, Dick?”

“Yessir,” Dick Lee said.

The men swapped glances all around.

“What did he do?” Robert asked Bullock.

“Remind me: what was it, Dick?”

“Stealing a horse,” Dick said. “Attempted, anyhow.”

“There you go, horse thief,” Bullock said. “I'd forgotten in all the excitement today, I guess.”

“Isn't the punishment a little harsh?” Robert said.

“Hell no,” Bullock said. “Historically it's punishable by death in many jurisdictions. Horse theft is serious stuff.”

“Was it necessary to nail him to the tree through the head like that?”

Bullock appeared to flinch slightly.

“Was that your idea, Dick?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“He was alive when they drove that spike through his head, you know,” Robert said.

Bullock again glanced up at Dick Lee, who rolled his eyes.

“How's that?” Bullock said.

Robert explained about all the blood.

“Well, it's a bit over the top, I guess,” Bullock said. “But what's a fellow to do in these times, with savage riffraff everywhere creepy-crawling around the property, filching things, threatening life and limb? You remember those jokers who broke into my bedroom last October? We can't have that sort of thing. Now this fellow down on the River Road was a solitary picker, skulking about the property. Imagine how many more like him are out there. You have to send a message. By the way, I'm done serving as magistrate for a town that just can't even keep a homicide suspect in lockup. You got my letter of resignation, I presume.”

“Yes, I did,” Robert said. “And under the circumstances it's a little shocking to see you take the law into your own hands out here.”

“Well, Robert, there is no law anymore, is there, really?”

“Sure there is,” Robert said. “But the system for running it is broken.”

“Well, exactly,” Bullock said. “Which is why we do what we can over here in our domain to protect our people and our property. I also presume you'll hold an election and get yourself a new magistrate.”

“Yes, we will. I think Sam Hutto will make a fine one.”

“Last time I heard, he was operating a turpentine still on the back side of Pumpkin Hill.”

“That's right. We all have to make a living somehow.”

“I wouldn't trust him to draw up a prenuptial,” Bullock said. “Did you handpick him already? I thought you said you were going to hold an election.”

“Yes, we will. And he'll win, don't worry.”

“I'm not worried,” Bullock said. “About that anyway. I'm worried that I'll never get to hear a recording of Satie's
Reveries and Nocturnes
ever again. That would be goddamn tragic. But I think we can keep the vagabonds and riffraff in line.”

Dick Lee's horse pawed at the ground restlessly.

“Uh, that's actually not why we've come out here to see you, sir,” Terry Einhorn said.

“What else do you want?”

“I thought we had a good system worked out with you for getting wholesale trade goods from Albany on your boat, and all.”

“You always settled your accounts straight up, Terry,” Bullock agreed. “I appreciated that.”

“Well, I'm a little confused, sir. My boy has come down to the landing for pickup twice lately on the regular schedule only to be told that you have no goods for us.”

“I've discontinued the service for now.”

“Like, temporarily or what?” Terry said.

“At least through planting season. Turns out I need all the men I've got around here.”

“When exactly do you expect to resume?” Terry asked.

“I dunno,” Bullock said. “Midsummer maybe. And then there's the harvest to contend with.”

“The town has come to depend on you, Stephen,” Robert said.

“That's not my fault. I'm not the Union Grove's sugar daddy. Maybe you should make other arrangements, be more self-reliant.”

“There is nobody else sending a regular trade boat downriver.”

“Then get your own goddamn boat and build a landing for it like I did. There's plenty of vacant riverfront property.”