World Made by Hand (26 page)

I grabbed another pitcher of cider from the bar on my way inside, relieved to be back in the crowd with the electric lights and the laughter. We played some more square dance tunes, including a grand version of Brother Jobe's requested "Virginia Reel." Eric's pipe went around again, and someone passed a whiskey jug and after a while we found our way into the old rock and roll songs, starting out with "The Midnight Hour" and moving through "Bring It on Home to Me," "Under the Boardwalk," "Twist and Shout," "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," and "Be My Baby." It felt pretty odd with only acoustic instruments-and my fiddle parts on the last two numbers were flat-out ridiculous-but Andy and Eric were both good singers (and had been in electric bands when they were kids), and Linda Allison, Bonnie Sweetland, and Jeanette Copeland climbed onstage to sing backup, vamping it up with all the little hand claps and steps in unison, and the saxophone player from Bullock's band joined in too, and it was sure fun, whatever it sounded like. Out on the dance floor, everybody was dancing in the old style, orgiastically, with hips swinging and arms flailing-even Brother Jobe and the New Faithers-and things got a little blurry for me after that.

I don't remember much about loading out, except when we stopped playing-or rather, got too wasted to keep playingBullock's servants went around the barn with trays full of grilled hamburgers on real buns, stacks of them, which everybody greeted with astonished delight. I gobbled down two and stuck one in my pocket. Then I was in the box of Jerry Copeland's wagon, lying in fresh hay looking up at the stars with several other people from town, jouncing our way down the rough roads back home. We were all too tired and drunk to talk anymore. I fell asleep more than once, and remained mostly asleep through the journey until the rig stopped in front of my house on Linden Street and Jeanette shook me awake. You could hear horses clomping elsewhere around town as other wagons wended through other streets, and here and there a cry of "goodnight," and screen doors slapping. Laughter.

I was careful to close my screen door gently so as not to wake anybody, but discovered that Britney was up anyway. She was sitting in a big stuffed chair in the living room with a candle burning on the table beside her. She wasn't reading or anything, just sitting huddled and small under an old blanket in a tattered cotton nightdress.

"How was the levee?" she said.

"I wouldn't know where to start," I said. I had sobered up some on the ride home, so I didn't say anything foolish like You should have been there. "Bullock served hamburgers before everybody left for home. Real ones on real buns."

"That's nice," Britney said.

"I brought one back for you."

It was not easy to extract the thing from my pocket. When I did, it was all compacted into the bun, a soggy mess with a deal of pocket lint around the edge. I tried to clean it off as I held it out for her.

"That's all right."

"There was nothing to wrap it up in."

"Don't worry about it."

"No tin foil or plastic wrap. Not even a paper napkin."

"I understand," she said.

I put the squashed, linty hamburger on the table beside her. The clock on the mantelpiece said ten after three.

"What are you doing up so late?" I said.

She seemed to shudder in the dim light but didn't reply.

"Are you okay?" I said.

She drew her knees up under the blanket to make herself look even smaller than she actually was. I went over and stooped down beside her chair.

"What's wrong."

"Those men from the general were here," she said. Her voice quavered.

"Who was?"

"Wayne Karp and two others."

"They came in here? Inside this house?"

"Yes."

"You let them in?"

"They let themselves in."

"What'd they want?"

"I think they were looking to steal things. I surprised them. Just being here."

"What happened?"

Britney sighed and made a choked sound like a sob that couldn't quite come out.

"Tell me," I said.

"They demanded `refreshments.' That very word."

"What'd you do?"

"I told them there was some milk and leftover corn bread. They went out to the kitchen on their own and rooted around and found some of your apple jack."

"Did they take anything else?"

"I don't think so."

"Is that all?"

"No."

"What else?"

"They touched me."

"Touched you?"

in my personal places."

"What do you mean by `touching'?"

"I mean touching."

"Nothing more?"

Britney looked into her lap and shook her head. "They talked about coming back another time for more `refreshments.' They like that word."

All kinds of blustery phrases echoed through my head. Ifthey set foot in here again, I'll kill 'em, and things like that which I had probably heard on TV years ago. I didn't say any of them. I was sober enough to know that they sounded stupid.

"Where was Sarah?" I said.

"She was upstairs. Asleep, I think."

"Look, forgive me for asking, but I want to make sure I understand-they didn't force you to have sex?"

"No, they didn't rape me."

"Look at me. Listen. Two things: I'll make sure you're not left in this position again. And these guys will pay some kind of price for what they did."

She nodded.

"I don't think this is the only house they went into," she said.

She didn't especially want to move out of that chair, but I persuaded Britney to come upstairs, and I literally tucked her into her bed. Her room was Daniel's-my son's-old room. His collection of birds' nests was arrayed along a narrow shelf that I had built for that purpose high up along one wall. There was a large map of the world salvaged from the final days of the high school. On it, the great pink amoeba of Russia was still called the Soviet Union and Germany was divided in two. Britney had no belongings of her own to speak of, everything she owned having been consumed in the fire that destroyed her house. Some of the other women in town had given her a few items of clothing, a comb, a pin cushion, and sewing implements.

"We can find a place to store Daniel's things if you like," I said, "so you could make it more like your own room."

She nodded. The sadness she carried was a palpable force, like gravity doubled. I wondered, if someone tried to lift her up now, would she weigh two hundred pounds?

As I sat there on the bed, her hand searched along the thin summer covers until it found mine. I held it a moment, then joined my other hand, and she hers, and we held each other's hands for a while.

"The world has become such a wicked place," she said quietly, just a statement of fact.

"There's goodness here too."

"Where is it?"

"In all the abiding virtues. Love, bravery, patience, honesty, justice, generosity, kindness. Beauty too. Mostly love."

"I'm afraid sometimes that we drove those things out of existence."

"No, we carry them in our hearts. They're always with us."

"I don't know what's in my heart anymore. It's too dark to see."

"Light follows darkness."

"Thank you for saying so," she said, and let go of my hands. She rolled over on her side and I left her there.

I looked in on Sarah before I went to bed. She was in what had been Genna's room, full of the little wooden dolls and puppets I had made over the years, with doll and puppet clothing made by Sandy. Sarah was fast asleep, small, innocent, and perfect.

Larry Prager was out in the extensive garden behind his house (and dentistry practice), on Locust Street, on the northeast side of town, not far from the defunct Wayland-Union Mill. I liked to come over to his place because he was one of the few people in town who still had a dog. Bogie was some kind of a retriever-terrier mix, about fifty pounds with a terrier beard. He was a playful, happy dog, and he met me as I came around back of the house.

Larry's garden was among the most beautiful and productive in town, a half acre of well-established raised beds with bluestone paths between them and a twelve-foot-high south-facing brick wall with pear and plum trees espaliered against it, and a full complement of berry bushes in disciplined ranks on the other three sides. He cultivated intensively, getting several crops of different things out of some beds in a season. When I came along that morning, he was tying up tomato vines to their stakes. He watched me come through the garden gate-which I had reconstructed for him the year before-with Bogie jumping up at my side. The dog let me rub his belly as I stooped down to talk to Larry.

"They love this heat," Larry said of his tomatoes.

"It looks like they're really taking off. Hey, I'm sorry I haven't been able to get back to the job here," I said.

Their garage had originally started out as a carriage barn when the place was first built in the 1870s. It was upgraded to a garage sometime in the 1920s, and the original cupola was removed. I was converting it back to a barn now. It required a new cupola because the hayloft needed to be well ventilated. Larry and Sharon had plans to acquire a horse of their own. Larry bartered with most of his patients. I was one of his patients, of course. Sometimes he paid me in dental work and sometimes in cash money. Under the circumstances, they lived well.

"I've heard about your recent exploits, Robert," he said, "so there's no pressure at this end. And it's nice to have the water back on again too, thank you very much."

"You can thank New Faith. And Bullock for making the pipe. I just came by to check in, let you know you were not forgotten."

I stood there watching him tie off some more vines. Something seemed wrong because usually Larry was a much more voluble person, always ready to palaver.

"We missed you over at the levee last night," I said.

"I couldn't go. A man died in my chair last week."

He was referring to Greg Meers.

"Yes, I heard. Terrible."

"It wouldn't have been decent."

I was unprepared for what happened next. Larry, a selfpossessed, dignified man of forty-nine with a professorial air and a graceful bearing, just fell apart. He began weeping, quietly at first and then with greater and greater vehemence. After a while, he put his fists up against his ears, like a little boy protecting himself against a flurry of physical blows, and keened in the utmost despondency. Finally he put his head down against ground, like a Muslim at prayers, and sobbed into the dirt. I crouched down beside him to try to give him some comfort, but I honestly didn't know what to say. I just patted him on the shoulders. Bogie, the dog, tried to nuzzle him. Larry kept at it for a couple of minutes, and then with equally surprising suddenness pulled himself together. I stayed there with him. He eventually kneeled upright again, sniffled some, dried his cheeks with each sleeve, and finally gave a big fraught sigh as if letting go of all that emotion.

"It got to me, Robert," he said.

"I guess it did."

"He appeared healthy. He just slipped away."

"Nobody's blaming you."

Larry let out another tortured sigh. "I don't know if I can practice anymore."

I listened to the birds and insects for a moment, noticing that the peas in one of the raised beds had about gone by. He had peppers coming along nicely in another bed.

"We don't have another dentist in town, Larry."

He was scribing in the dirt with a pair of Japanese garden shears that he had probably gotten from some fancy mail-order catalog in the old days. In his other hand he held a bunch of cloth ties, torn from some old rags, which he was using to secure his tomatoes to their stakes.

"He needed a root canal so I had to put him under pretty deep," Larry said. "I finished the damn tooth before I even realized he wasn't breathing anymore. Man, when I got out of dental school, we had no idea what we were in for. All that fabulous high-tech stuff we took for granted, gone! Now I've got to put patients under crude general anesthesia and drill with a damned foot treadle. It's madness. You know, what really bothers me is the thought that I'm going to lose some little kid the same way. There's no precision with these crude opiates."

"It's better than nothing, isn't it?"

"The effective dose is sometimes close to the lethal dose," he said.

"Even back in the old days, in the big hospitals, the docs lost patients," I said. "What they gained in technological magic, they lost in bureaucracy and inattention and sloppiness."

"Dentists didn't lose patients," he said. "This is not thoracic surgery.

"Well, whatever else is happening, you've still got your knowledge and skill. And the people here in town aren't dying of simple abscesses."

Larry resumed tying up his tomato vines.

"This Greg Meers had a couple of kids," he said. "God knows what happens to them now. There's no social safety net. There's nothing."

"He used to run with Wayne Karp's bunch," I said. "The wife too. Maybe they'll end up back there, in Karptown."

Larry glanced up at me.

"They came around here last night," he said. "Wayne Karp. And two of his cronies."

"Tell me about it."

"Sharon and I were back here in the garden, sitting outside around sundown. Bogie ran barking around the front of the house. I went in from the back and found Wayne on the entrance portico with his, uh, associates, when I opened the front door."

"Did they seem surprised to find you at home?"

"Actually, I assumed at first that they came over because of what happened to Greg Meers. I was afraid they were going to, I don't know, rough me up, or maybe something worse."

"Did they do anything?"

"No. But they did seem kind of surprised that I answered the door, now that you mention it. I wasn't too comfortable finding them there, of course."

"Did they say what they wanted?"

"They said the town hired them to act as security for the night while everybody went off to Bullock's and they were just making rounds."

"Security? That's a laugh. I sure didn't hire them. And I'm certain Loren didn't either."

"Do you think they were up to no good."

"Of course they were," I said.