World Made by Hand (19 page)

Joseph and I lay side by side on a rank mattress in the close dank room. I had been ruminating sleeplessly about the young widow and child whom I had perhaps rashly agreed to let move into my house, worrying what people would think, worrying about her getting into my things, worrying about being so far from home, just worrying, anxious in the storm-lashed darkness.

"You awake?" I said. Joseph's breathing had not seemed the regular pattern of a man asleep. The rain had not even succeeded in cooling off the jungly night air.

"Yessir, I am," Joseph said.

"Do you remember air-conditioning?"

"Yessir, I do." He gave a mordant little laugh. "If it's not raining out tomorrow night, I say it's back to camping for us in the fresh air."

"I'm with you on that. Should we pay a call on this Boss Curry tomorrow?"

"Not right off," Joseph said. "I smell something."

"What?"

"Just a feeling. I say we comb the docks and the boathouses first."

"What feeling?" I said.

"Some kind of trap," he said. "We saw situations like this in the Holy Land, when things were not what they seemed to be."

"Do you think this Curry has done something to Bullock's crew?"

"I think they may be in his custody."

"Hostages?"

"Yessir."

As I paused to reflect on this, a vicious thunderbolt, like a gunshot, crackled across the rooftop and reverberated against the concrete slabs of the old ruined highway above.

"Like a ransom situation?"

"Yessir."

"But nobody sent any message to Bullock demanding money for his crew," I said.

"How do we know that?"

His question caught me up short.

"Leastwise, Bullock didn't mention any," I said.

"Why risk sending a messenger all the way up there," Joseph said, "when sooner or later Mr. Bullock would surely send someone down here to inquire, which he has now done, namely us."

"Then I suppose we can't be too careful."

"Exactly so."

"I see," I said, trying to take measure of what I didn't see. "I hardly recognize this city. It's frightening how much has changed here in just a few years."

"Everything's gone to the devil all over our poor country. Believe me. We've seen a lot."

"Why did you leave Pennsylvania, Joseph?"

For an awkward interval, we lay silently there in the moist darkness. I wondered if he had heard me.

"Well, sir," he said finally, "race trouble, to be honest."

"What do you mean?"

"A lot of people cut loose when Washington got hit, you know. They left there with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some firearms. You had civil disorders in Philadelphia and Baltimore, refugees fleeing, what you folks call pickers, bandit gangs. Pennsylvania became a desperate place. After a while, it was like cowboys and Indians."

"What happened?"

"There was no getting along."

"Did you fight?"

"Yessir. Over two years we lost twelve of our number."

"Why did you stay as long as you did?"

"It was mighty good land. Some of the best I ever seen. But, obviously, we decided to move on."

"I've got a boy out there somewhere," I said.

"Where?"

"I don't know, exactly. He set out two years ago with Reverend Holder's boy. We haven't heard from them since."

"I hope he turns up, sir," Joseph said. "I had a boy myself."

"Had?"

"He was one of the twelve that was killed."

"Oh ... gosh ... I'm sorry."

"He was sixteen. Name of Aaron. He was a brave boy. Yours?"

"Daniel. Nineteen when he left. We haven't seen that kind of strife up in Washington County, New York."

"I know. That's how come we like it."

"I didn't know it was so bad out there."

"There's grievances and vendettas all around at every level. Poor against whatever rich are left. Black against white. English-speaking against the Spanish. More than one bunch on the Jews. You name it, there's a fight on. Groups in flight everywhere, ourselves among them. I haven't seen any black folks or Spanish in Union Grove so far. You got any, sir?"

"Some black families lived in that hollow down by the WaylandUnion Mill, the old factory village. The mill closed up before I moved to town. There was a fellow named Archie Basiltree who worked in the Aubuchon hardware store when we first came. The store is gone and so is Archie. Another black man worked on the county road crew."

Thunder had been pealing and lightning flashing all along, some strokes so close that they shook the building.

"I haven't been anywhere in years," I said. "I don't really know what's going on out there."

"Let me tell you something, sir," Joseph said. "There has been considerable churning of the population and warring among different sorts of people all over. Why do you think we left Virginia in the first place? I think the separate regions will go their own

"It would be a sad and sorry thing if it came to that."

"Well, it has come to that, sir."

In a little while, Joseph's breathing fell into a regular rhythm, and I assumed he'd gone to sleep. I lay awake longer, listening to the rain drip from the eaves and thinking of the big map that hung from the top of the chalkboard in my primary school in Wilton, Connecticut, so many years ago, back in the days of cars, television, and air-conditioning. The states on this map were muted tones of pink, green, and yellow. Over it hung the flag that we pledged our allegiance to every single morning. "One nation, under God, indivisible ..."

In the morning, the sky had been swept clean again and, of course, the heat was rising. I had kept the bandana on my hand overnight and, when I took it off before breakfast, was astonished to see that a florid pink spot on my palm was all that remained of the blister. A new layer of skin had seemingly grown over the spot.

Minor joined us from the stable for a breakfast of fresh eggs, smoked fish, and corn bread downstairs, again paid for in silver coin. The animals were rested, watered, and ready, he said. He had straw in his hair from bedding down in the stable, but he didn't complain about his duties.

I showed Minor my hand and asked him how it was possible that such an injury could actually heal overnight.

"Solomon's seal has powers," he said. "But you add a little Jesus juice to the mix and that puts her in overdrive, so to say."

It wasn't an explanation that squared with my understanding of how reality worked. But I couldn't argue with the results either.

"I'm grateful to you," I said.

We decided over our meal to devote the early hours of the day to shopping for wholesale goods and necessities along Commercial Row. New Faith needed everything from salt in quantity to candlewicks. I wanted to find machine-made paper and good steel pen nibs for the town so we could resume recording things again in a coherent way, medical supplies for Jerry Copeland, and whatever else I could scrounge up. We didn't have a whole lot of cargo space in the donkey cart. After that, we'd break into two groups and search the wharves for the Elizabeth. If we found her, perhaps we could bring more goods back to Union Grove. But that remained to be seen.

When we turned out onto the street, the first thing we saw was the figure of a large man seated in the dirt, slumped against a rain barrel across the way with a hog rooting in his lap. The figure was inert. As we came closer, we could see a vivid red and gray mess of stuff that looked like sausage links in his lap, where the pig was rooting. Seth sent the animal off squealing with a blow across the hams with the flat of his sword.

"He's dead," Elam said. "Why, I'll be dog."

"What?" Joseph said.

"This is that same drover we took that jenny off of. Lookit."

Elam took a kerchief rag out of his pocket and used it to hold the dead man's head up at the chin for us all to see. The face was distorted in death, and the whites of his still-open eyes were shot through with blood as if he had suffered a severe blow to his head. But it apparently was indeed the same man we'd quarreled with at the Waterford bridge.

"I believe you're right," Seth said. "That'd be the one."

"Did you kill him, Minor?" Joseph said.

"I didn't do nothing," Minor said. "Sumbitch probably fell out drunk and cracked his durn head."

I stooped down. The stench he gave offwas impressive up close. Around the ragged edge of his dirty shirt, above the gross wound to his abdomen, you could see a pattern of small round holes, like shotgun pellets would make. I did not point it out, but I don't think the others failed to notice either. I remembered that gunshotlike blast of thunder the night before and imagined this nameless wretch reeling out the stable door and collapsing where he now sat, to die in the rain, with a pig in his guts.

"I judge that this poor soul is beyond our assistance," Minor said, "and if I linger here, I'm liable to lose my breakfast."

"I suppose we can leave him for the constable," Joseph said.

"If they got any law here," Elam said.

"Anyway, it ain't our business," Minor said.

And so we went about our business, but not before Joseph invoked Matthew 5:13: "Ye are the salt of the earth," he said, "but ifthe salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men."

Traders from elsewhere along the Hudson Valley were already out on Commercial Row, and men with drays and carts were busy moving goods off the wharves in a clatter of wheels and dust. Some smaller vendors had joined them along the street, selling fish, vegetables, and odd items of salvage from wagons and tarps spread on the ground. Here and there, snatches of songs of the loaders could be heard. Not everybody's business was off, but it seemed a very dull trade in necessities. No groups collected on the street to socialize, as one might expect in a livelier marketplace. Hardly any women were among the traders, and the men were furtive in their movements. They scuttled in and out of the trading houses like wary rodents or bugs and left with whatever goods they'd purchased without lingering.

We found some of the things we needed among Minnery's General Stocks, Hyde's Salvage and Made Goods, and VanVoast's Import and General Trade Articles, the three largest competing establishments on the row, and Aulk's Provisions, the food wholesaler. I found aspirin, reusable hypodermic syringes, IV catheters, and adhesive tape for Doc Copeland. I could not find antiseptic or antibiotic medicines of any kind. Nor did they have any lidocaine or topical anesthetic for our dentist. I purchased a five-ream box of plain white twenty-pound bond paper (Xerox brand from the old days) and a gross of Phinney no. 4 steel pen points. They didn't have any manufactured ink in stock, but you could make that easily enough yourself from lampblack or walnut shells. The New Faithers were delighted to come across a fifty-pound sack of peanuts, which they had not seen any of in some time, they said, as well as the other articles on their list, and some of Mr. Ricketts's remaining inventory in linen fabrics at a very high price, which they apparently could afford Joseph's fund of silver seemed bottomless. VanVoast's actually had on hand a small inventory of manufactured instrument strings, and I bought several sets of guitar, violin, and cello strings. It had been years since we'd had any new ones, making do with the gut strings Andrew produced.

We loaded all these things onto the cart, covered it with our waxed ground cloth, and set out on a systematic search of the wharves and their attached boathouses.

We divided into two groups, Joseph and myself to go one way, Elam and Seth the other, leaving Minor again in charge of the animals in a scrub pasture that used to be the football field of a public school on DeWitt Street. The school building itself was a scavenged ruin. One of the goalpost uprights remained in place. It was already hot out in the field. Plenty of rainwater stood in puddles for the animals. Minor found a spot of shade under a sumac tree and seemed content there while the horses grazed peacefully. I gathered that Joseph didn't trust Minor's hot head in the kind of search we were about to undertake, mixing with the locals and all. Joseph and I said we would work the wharves from the north end down. Elam and Seth would start near the waterworks and work up. We said we'd meet up in between somewhere.

So we set off, making like we were looking for a boat to buy. In fact, there were a lot of boats for sale along the wharves, given the depressed conditions lately, and we had to pretend to inquire about them, so it took the whole morning to work down the row, but we didn't come across the Elizabeth. Along the way, we caught quite a bit of news chatting with the owners, traders, and dockmen and boatmen. For instance, we learned that a recent hurricane had crossed the east end of Long Island and swept up along the New England coast, drowning many of the towns east of Providence before swerving out to sea at Cape Cod. Boston was spared, but Boston might have benefited from a bath, one sloop owner said with a gallows laugh. The violent thunderstorms we'd seen in the Hudson Valley were a backwash of all that rough weather, he said. We heard that a gang of pickers had nearly burned down the town of Kinderhook while plundering the place. Several were captured and hanged. A bad gypsy moth infestation was moving north and had reached as far as Rhinebeck. At night, they said, you could hear the caterpillars munching on leaves, their numbers were so great. In some places down there, the trees were so denuded it looked like November. One boatyard owner said that the Chinese had landed on the moon, but his partner scoffed at the notion and said that the other man also believed there was still plenty of oil in the world, and a conspiracy between the Arabs and the Asian Coprosperity Alliance had deprived America of its share because "they hated our freedom." Who really knew anymore? On the bright side of things, the shad run in the Hudson had been the best ever seen by people still living, though a lot fewer people were living than a decade ago.

At half past noon, having found nothing up along the north end of the waterfront, we met up with Seth and Elam, who said excitedly that they were sure they'd found the Elizabeth in the fourth place they looked, a boatyard associated with VanVoast's Import. It was inside a big red boathouse which stood out in the distance against the china blue sky.

"How do you know it's the right boat?" Joseph said.

"Oh, it's her all right," Seth said.

"The name Elizabeth is spelled out on the transom with a rose painted to each side of the name," Elam said. This was what Mr. Bullock had specified in his written instructions. No sign of the crew. There was a manager on the premises and a few idle dockmen, waiting for a cargo. Elam and Seth had looked over the boat and left the place with a cursory thank you. We decided to go back immediately all together and ask some hard questions.

The manager of the VanVoast terminal, a well-fed man named Bracklaw, he said, sporting a set of bright green suspenders to hold up a pair of slovenly linen trousers, showed a high degree of alertness as the four of us entered the dim, cavernous boathouse, with swallows careening through the sturdy trusswork overhead. In fact, he seemed downright nervous seeing how Seth and Elam had suddenly multiplied to four of us. A couple of catboats occupied one side of the main slip, and there were side slips too, where the Elizabeth sat among an assortment of small craft. Bracklaw's dockmen were not on the premises, perhaps off on lunch.

Joseph suggested we all go into the office and talk. Bracklaw resisted the idea but Joseph more or less shoved him in and we all followed. Elam closed the curtain on the window that faced Commercial Row. Seth kept his eyes on the opposite window, looking into the interior of the boathouse. Bracklaw was allowed to occupy his own ancient swivel chair behind a very disorderly desk piled with old cargo manifests and assorted junk. The chair squeaked every time he moved.

"Can you imagine what we're after?" Joseph said.

"I ain't clairvoyant," Bracklaw said.

"Do you suppose we came to rob you?" Elam said.

"That would be very unwise."

"We're looking for the crew of that light bateau yonder that you have took in," Joseph said. "The Elizabeth."

Bracklaw didn't answer. He glared at us as if we had a nerve for asking.

"Four men came down here on her," Joseph said, "Out of Union Grove, with families and all. Any notion about 'em?"

Bracklaw just crossed his arms.

"How'd you come across that boat out there?" Joseph said.

"Mr. Curry's people brought it in," Bracklaw said.

"That'd be Mr. Curry of the waterworks and such?"

"The very one."

"I understand it was carrying ten kegs of cider, among other things."

"That so?"

"I don't suppose you'd have a bill of landing for that here on your desk."

"I don't recall any such a cargo recently."

"Not of slight value, I'd think," Joseph said. "Given how times are.

"Whatever."

"You're not inclined to say?"

"I'm not inclined to being put upon in my own place of business," Bracklaw said.

"Well, we're hardly putting upon you. We could I suppose. Actually, it hadn't occurred to me until you suggested it-"

"You'd be wasting your time. And in the end you'd have to answer to Mr. Curry anyway, and he would be displeased."

"I wouldn't want to displease Mr. Curry."

"No, you wouldn't."

"Then do you suppose we might go see Mr. Curry about the crew of that boat?"

"That's exactly what I would do if I were you.,,