World Made by Hand (17 page)

The rest of us went through the motions long enough to be polite. Brother Joseph volunteered our services to help with the dishes, but Mrs. Raynor wouldn't hear of it and the four of us remaining retired to our camp. Minor had a fire started down there and a big fry pan of bacon working. I opened up my oilskin larder and got some corn bread and the hunk of sausage I brought along. The others got out their provisions. Joseph produced a jug of that Pennsylvania whiskey the New Faithers seemed well supplied with, and it felt good going down with river water. They also had a sack of little oatmeal "sticky cakes," as they called them, that their women made with dried currents, honey, and plenty of butter, and gladly gave me as many as I wanted. Joseph laid aside a rasher of bacon, a square of bread, and a hunk of sausage and a sticky cake on a plate, and when he was done eating, he ventured back up to the house. Mrs. Raynor came to the door and in the moonlight we watched him go in. In a while we heard shouting. Mrs. Raynor was letting Brother Joseph have it. We couldn't make out what she was saying, but she was loud for such a frail person. Then the door opened and she shoved him out on the front portico, and that was that. She began to wail and continued up there in her darkened house the whole way Joseph was coming back to us.

"She sounded right grateful," Brother Minor said when Joseph returned to the firelight.

"I guess I insulted her."

"Well, clearly she is off her rocker," Seth said.

"What'll we do about her?" I said.

"I'd say her man run off," Elam said. "She's liable to starve here."

"We should stop on the way back and take her with us," Joseph said, and without much discussion it was pretty much agreed that we should do that. Then it was a final dram, and we tucked ourselves into our bedrolls in nice cool sleeping weather, for a change, and all fell out rather quickly from our day's exertions.

Brother Minor might have been an irritating little fellow, but he was diligent, regular, and capable. He was awake before anybody else, had the fire going again, had watered our horses, and was boiling up a pot of cornmeal samp for our breakfast when the rest of us stirred from our bedrolls. The weather had a fractious look. The sky to the east was red and an ominous breeze was already making the weeds dip and sway. I sensed it would get hot again. We did not linger at the sod farm. On our way out, we paused in front of the house. I accompanied Joseph to the door to say thank you and farewell, so as not to leave on unfriendly terms. The others stayed on their horses.

Mrs. Raynor did not answer our knocks. Joseph said we'd better go inside. In daylight, the house was drearier than it had appeared by candles and moonlight. A coat of dust lay over most surfaces. As we entered from out in the summer meadow, the bad smell inside made its impression again. We called out to the lady of the house but she did not answer. With the electricity off, and no appliances humming, the place was stone silent. Joseph and I started poking around by unspoken mutual consent. Nothing was out of order on the first floor, except the muddy dishes remained unwashed on the kitchen counter from the night before along with the bowls of rocks and grass. Of course, Mrs. Raynor's electric well pump was not functioning, along with everything else, and to get water she would have had to fetch buckets from the livestock pond on her property, or else walk all the way down to the river, a good quarter mile.

"Well, let's have a look upstairs," Joseph said.

In the second bedroom we looked in, we found the source of the odor that pervaded the house. The body of a man was laid out on a bed. In actual fact it was mostly the clothed skeleton of a man, since even the insects seemed to be mostly done with the flesh of him. We could only guess how long he'd been laid out there. A month or more. We recoiled from the sight and the stench and very quickly went through the three other bedrooms and back through the ground floor again, including the back porch, looking for the old woman.

"She's gone," I said.

Brother Joseph gave a kind of dubious grunt. I followed him down to the basement. It was much cooler down there. In the meager light that came through window wells that hadn't been cleared of dead leaves for years, and among the odds and ends of a family life that circumstance had now obliterated-the old stroller, a broken bicycle, plastic incunabula, unsold yard sale junk, and trunks full of memories-we found Mrs. Raynor hanging from a pipe by a lamp cord. The ceiling was so low that she hadn't used a chair or a box to step off. She had merely bent her knees to allow her neck to receive the remaining weight of her body. Whatever the agonies or difficulties involved, she had succeeded in ending her life.

We cut her down and took much of the morning digging a single proper grave for the both of them in the back of the house, where we had lingered in the beautiful twilight the night before, looking east toward the river. We put the missus down first and then the remains of what we presumed to be her husband, wound in the bedspread we found him on. Then we covered them both up, another hour of work with one shovel among us.

"We don't know who these people were," Brother Joseph spoke over their mound when we were done with our work. "Who their relations or children are or where they might be. But these two will be together in eternity now. It is an awful thing when anyone falls into despair and takes their own life. If it was up to us, Lord, we would have rescued this poor soul in a few days time. But your ways are mysterious and you didn't allow it. So may Mrs. Raynor-I'm sorry, but I have already forgotten her given name-"

"Gladys," Seth said.

"-may her troubled spirit come into your love and dwell in your house forever. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, /So do our minutes hasten to their end. Amen."

"Amen," all around.

We mounted our horses.

"You know what I think?" Brother Minor said.

"What?" Seth said and Elam echoed him.

"I think she was waiting for some folks to come along who could give them a proper burial and we were elected," Minor said. "Ain't these times something?"

The heat was definitely back with us and we were tired from digging and hadn't made any progress yet that day. Among the few things from the premises we helped ourselves to, we found two fishing rods, with good open-faced spinning reels and monofilament line, along with a box of lures, plugs, spinners, hooks, swivels, and bobbers. An hour or so later, we had made some headway down the river road again, and we stopped to water the horses at a place where a cool rill formed a sandy delta on the shore as it entered the Hudson. There were big flat rocks to sit on, and a grove of locust trees for shade. I took the opportunity to bathe away two days of grime. Joseph and Seth bushwhacked upstream a ways with the fishing rods. Elam was off looking for raspberries while Minor made a fire on the rocks.

The blister on my burned left hand had broken open from helping to dig the Raynors' grave. I was concerned that it might get infected. You couldn't be too careful about infected wounds when there were no more antibiotic medicines. I asked Minor for some whiskey I could apply as disinfectant. He asked to see it. I held my hand out to him. He studied it a while, told me to wait right there, and bustled off into the woods. He returned in a minute with several stems of some kind of leafy weed.

"What's that?"

"Solomon's seal," he said. "This here might seem uncouth, but it's necessary."

He picked off one leaf after another from the stems and put them in his mouth until he was masticating a great chaw of them. Meanwhile, he took a bandana out of his pocket. By and by, he extracted the wad of chewed leaves from his mouth and laid them on the bandana.

"Give me your hand."

I did. He arranged it so the chaw was over my blister and then rather tenderly tied the bandana around my hand.

"You keep it like so the rest of the day and overnight," he said. "That burn blister'll be healed up in the morning."

He stated this with complete assurance. I didn't want to act contrary about it or seem ungrateful so I agreed.

Our fishermen came back in surprisingly short order with more than enough good-sized fish for our lunch: several largemouth bass and a northern pike the size of a Yule log. We were hungry after all that digging.

There had been a lot less angling in the Hudson River in recent years as epidemics drove down our numbers and motorboats stopped running, and there was no more factory-made tackle. Less pollution of all kinds ran into the river, no more factory fertilizers and pest control poisons, no more detergents. So the fish had returned in numbers not seen in anyone's memory. Land-based game, on the other hand, was noticeably sparser now, as nobody observed hunting seasons anymore. The deer, especially, were down, even though commercial grade ammunition had also gotten scarce. People jacked deer all year round, by any means possible, including pitfalls, deadfalls, and traps. Rabbits were down because nobody cut lawns anymore and the grassy margins they thrived in were returning to woods. Coyotes were up in tandem with sheep and goats. Ben Deaver swore he saw a mountain lion on the roof of his chicken shed one morning the previous September, and further north of us, in Hebron, where the human population was back to the pioneer level of the mid-1700s, a "catamount" reputedly killed a four-year-old boy inside a house.

Minor butchered the fish expertly with his short knife. His grandfather ran a catfish farm in South Carolina when he was little, he said. He could cut fillets all day long and into the dark.

"How do you stop a fish from smelling?" he asked and before anyone could come up with a quip, he said. "Cut off its nose."

He dipped the bass fillets in cornmeal and fried them in last night's bacon grease, which he had saved in a can.

"What has big sharp little teeth, a tail, scales, and a trunk?" he asked and immediately answered. "Pikey fish going on vacation. Y'all are slow. Maybe retarded."

The pike he just gutted and roasted whole on crisscrossed green sticks. The New Faith boys all brought jars of their own pickled peppers and onion relish. It did make everything taste interesting when salt and pepper were scarce.

Elam had discovered a thicket of raspberries growing up along the roadside and we filled our hats with them as Minor cooked off the fish. We packed up directly after this lunch and resumed walking our horses toward the city, as well fed as if we had been home.

The afternoon weather resolved into an uncomfortable drizzle, driven by hot winds out of the south. I had an old ripstop nylon poncho from my collegiate camping days, but it had lost its waterproofing. We began to enter what had been the suburbs emanating out of the capital city, Albany, and its neighbor, Troy, and a handful of other industrial towns in and around the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. We planned to cross the Mohawk at Waterford on the railroad bridge there.

Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River. But the locks there no longer functioned because they were rebuilt and enlarged in the early twentieth century to open and close on electric power. Now there was no way to operate them. They were too big for human or animal power.

We began to encounter more people now, inhabiting the ruined suburbs, the lawns replaced by potato patches, the split-levels and raised ranches turned into hovels now that the electric amenities and the plumbing were out of order, including the wells and toilets. Ill-clad, scrawny children played in mud puddles in the broken streets and stopped to blink at us as we passed on our horses. When Brother Minor offered up one of his jokes, they just gaped. By and by, we crossed an old commercial highway strip with its complement of dead gigantic discount stores, strip malls, and defunct burger barns. The buildings were all in various stages of disassembly as materials of value were stripped from themcopper pipes and wires, aluminum sashes, windowpanes, steel girders, and cement blocks. The parking lots seemed especially desolate with nothing in them but mulleins and sumacs poking through the cracked pavements.

At Waterford, the bridge connected two bluffs about a hundred feet above the surface of the Mohawk River. It was one of those engineering marvels from the early twentieth century that could never be replaced now, any more than the Coliseum in Rome could be rebuilt by the most talented subjects of Frederick Barbarossa. Near the northern approach to the bridge, we came upon a man beating his donkey with a long-handled whip. The donkey was hitched to a cart full of bricks and made a terrible racket with each blow. The man, a hulking, well-fed brute, wore a pair of homespun pants tucked into crude ankle boots and a chewed up straw hat that was little more than crown. His belt was a rope. Shirtless in the drizzle, his wet muscles bulged as he laid into the donkey, which was as starved-looking as the man was stout. The donkey already had several bleeding stripes on his back.

"That ain't right," Brother Minor said as we came upon the scene. Minor rode up to the man. The rest of us hung back.

"Afternoon," Minor said.

"What do you want?" the man said, drawing back his whip hand as if not to miss a stroke.

"You ever hear this one?" Minor said to him. "There's this here zebra lived her whole life at the zoo, and the kindly old zookeeper decided to put her out to pasture on a farm in her last years."

"What the hell-" the man said.

"Just listen up, you'll like this."

"You get the hell out of my sight," the man said to Minor and turned to lay on his stroke. The donkey cried out as the lash fell.

"So, this here zebra was so excited," Minor said, without skipping a beat, "when she got onto that farm and was amongst all these strange new animals. And she come up on this big fat brown and white critter. `Hey thar, I'm a zebra, what're you?' `I'm a cow,' it says. `That so? What do you do?' the zebra asks. `I make milk,' the cow says-

"I'm warning you," the man with the whip said.

"So what do you know?" Minor said. "Next this fluffy white ball of feathers steps by. What're you?' the zebra asks. Why, I am a chicken and I lay eggs,' it says. So next, what do you know, the zebra sees an animal that looks exactly like her only without no stripes, and the zebra asks, What're you-?"'

"Didn't you hear me," the stout man with the whip said.

"I heard you," Minor said.

"You're still here."

"Don't you want me to finish the joke?"

With that the man tried to lay into Minor with his whip. But before he could the more nimble Minor slipped down from his horse with his sawed-off shotgun drawn and leveled it at him. Seth came and got Minor's horse under control.

"I'm anxious to tell you the rest of this story," Minor said as he stalked the big man with the shotgun leveled.

"You regulators or something?" the man said.

"Yeah, that's right," Minor said. "At the moment we're regulating the animal cruelty situation. There's a fair bit of it these days. Where was I now ... Oh yeah, so this here zebra is on the farm and met the cow and the chicken, and now she meets this animal that looks just like her only without no stripes, and the zebra says, `What are you?' And the jackass says, `Take off them striped pajamas, little honey, and I'll show you."'

Minor nearly fell over with laughter at his own joke, as usual. The man turned away with a snort and drew back his whip once more to strike the donkey. Minor rushed up behind him, swung the heavy barrel of his weapon, and struck the man in his right kidney. The big man crumpled onto all fours emitting a bellow as loud as the cries of his donkey had been. A kick from Minor to his ribs fetched him over on his back. Then Minor perched on his chest with the point of his pigsticker poised under the man's chin and the shotgun barrel pressed to his cheek.

"Want to hear another one?" Minor said.