A History of the Future

by Kunstler, James Howard

  The Christmas ball for Bullock’s people was still under way inside the large community hall at the center of the village. Boaz could hear the music all the way over on such a cold, still night and as he approached the village he marveled to see electric lights burning in the village hall. He was aware that Bullock ran a small hydroelectric installation—Brother Jobe talked about it incessantly and was determined to get a system like it going over in town—but the sight of the dazzling strings of tiny colored electric lamps twinkling through the high windows, and the magnificence of the amplified recorded Christmas music playing over loudspeakers, startled one who had gotten used to the lower amplitude of things in the new times.

  Though Boaz took care to enter the building unobtrusively, some kind of formal ceremony was going on and many heads turned to him as he shut the big door and leaned against it. Bullock himself was preoccupied rummaging over a wide plank table piled high with bolts of cloth, tools, cooking implements, and boxes of hard to get trade goods he had accumulated over the year and was passing items out to his villagers in a kind of Christmas potlatch he had devised over the years in the belief that it represented a sharing of his wealth. Boaz could not help but wonder at the starkly different sets of social relations between Bullock’s establishment, his own community of the New Faith, and the sorry populace of Union Grove, who apparently had lost faith in God and progress and seemed to lack some crucial glue of belief that might support the town’s collective spirit. Boaz wondered which mode of living would prevail in the uncertain future.

  Shortly, a barrel-shaped man of medium height with a nonetheless imposing air approached him. This was Dick Lee, Bullock’s own chief factotum, who asked the stranger what he wanted. In a short while, when the dispensing of gifts seemed to conclude and some of the villagers began bundling up to leave, and others repaired one last time to long buffet tables where quite a bit of holiday viands, cakes, sweetmeats, and puddings remained to be picked over as well as the pitchers of beer and cider and bottles of Bullock’s own fine whiskey, Dick Lee brought Boaz to the front of the large room where Bullock stood speaking to a brawny younger man and a tall slender woman, his wife or companion, Boaz supposed. All were dressed in a manner that evoked older times than the old times, like characters in the storybooks of the War of Independence. Bullock himself was striking in his buff breeches, riding boots, red satin vest, and cutaway coat.

  “A messenger, sir,” Dick Lee said.

  “Is that right?” Bullock said. He seemed to have a deranged smile on his face as he torqued around to take in the shorter Boaz, who discerned fairly quickly that Bullock had had a lot to drink. “You’re one of them!” Bullock added with a rough, taunting humor he might not have employed if he were sober.

  “One of who?” Boaz said.

  “The uh . . . the cult!” Bullock said, the gleam in his eyes sharpening. “I hate to put it so bluntly but what else would you call it? Really?”

  “We’re who we are,” Boaz said.

  “That chief of yours, the Reverend Jobe. He’s a strange breed of porpoise now, isn’t he?” Bullock said.

  “He has many burdens and responsibilities and he’s as upright as they come.”

  “Maybe so,” Bullock said. “Want to sign on here with us?”

  “Uh, no, sir. I’ve come to—”

  “Well, of course. We’re always looking for new blood here. But then, so is your bunch. Aw, goddammit, Dick, where’s my glass. Care for a beverage, son?” he asked Boaz. “You must be cold from your journey. Have a damn drink.”

  By this time the handsome young couple had excused themselves and Dick Lee had fetched two glasses of Bullard’s special Christmas cider, one of which he held out for Boaz, the other he gave to his boss. The cider was fortified with jack brandy. The sound system played Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” recorded before anyone in the room had been born.

  “Thank you—”

  “Now, what’s up over in that sad-sack town of yours?”

  “A serious and sensitive matter, sir. Two people killed over there tonight.”

  “What? A fire?”

  “A double murder, sir.”

  Bullock bent a little closer and squinted at Boaz, who could sense the alcohol on the great man’s breath. “What the hell! Why can’t people behave?”

  Bullock stared down at Boaz as though expecting an answer.

  “I don’t know, sir. Wickedness abides.”

  “This have anything to do with that new barroom your chief has got going?”

  “Not as far as I know, sir.”

  “Not that I’m against it. That goddamn town needs some kind of spark to light its dim little fire. Pitiful what it’s come to since I was a boy and it had its own newspaper, its own police force, two or three decent places to eat, and even a movie theater in the White Swan Hotel. I tell you, it breaks my heart to think about it. Now who the hell got killed and under what circumstances?”

  “It looks like the husband killed the child and then the wife killed the husband.”

  “Oh Christ. What’s the world coming to?”

  “It’s already come a far piece to where it’s going to,” Boaz said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Bullock said. “I suppose they want me to do something about it.”

  “They do, sir. You’re the magistrate.”

  “Why the hell does everybody keep reminding me of that?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Bullock quaffed the remaining half glass of his drink.

  “Where’s this woman now?” he said.

  “She’s with us.”

  “What! Are you recruiting murderers now?”

  “No, we’re holding her in a secure room in our compound. There was nowheres else. She’s under arrest, I guess you might say.”

  “Did she confess?”

  “She appears to be out of her mind, sir.”

  “It would be easy to pretend you were crazy after killing your husband. Lots of times they do.”

  “I can’t say, sir. I never kilt a loved one. Anyway, they say they have to start legal proceedings and you’re the one to see to it. They would like you to come over to town tomorrow afternoon, if that would be all right.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?

  “Mr. Earle, who’s mayor, my boss Brother Jobe, the Reverend Holder. He’s the acting town constable these days—”

  “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve for chrissake.”

  “Not until sundown.”

  “What’s the goddamn rush on this anyway?”

  “The town’s nervous, sir. They feel like there’s no real law anymore.”

  “Well, there isn’t,” Bullock said. “We’re just making it up as we go along now.”

  In the end, Bullock agreed to journey to town at a time and place specified in the written instructions Boaz carried on his person. Boaz felt the effects of the cider as he mounted up for the return trip. On his way down the hill he couldn’t help turning around to behold the wondrous colored electric lamps glowing so magically in the big wooden building, while the upholstered voice of Nat King Cole singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” carried on the still air of the hillside suddenly lambent with moonlight.

  Thirteen

  Andrew Pendergast took Jack Harron at his word. Having an enemy with an implacable animus toward himself was something Andrew could neither understand nor do anything about. Helping somebody was another matter, if the person in need of help was sincere about it. If Jack had wanted to harm him, Andrew reasoned, he could have coldcocked him when he entered his own house in the dark.

  “I can use some help around here,” Andrew told him. “Here’s what I propose. I’ll regard you as a project. You can sleep in the room behind the kitchen for now. There’s a bathroom across the hall. W
e’ll carry a bed down there. I’m going to give you lists of things to do and some instructions. Some of them you’ll do every day and some of them will be occasional or special. If it’s something you don’t know how to do, I’ll teach you how. From time to time we’ll talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Apart from just daily matters, we’ll talk about you and how you came to where you are and what you’re going to do from now on.”

  “I’m not interesting.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “Andrew, like everybody else. And yourself?”

  “Jack.”

  “Okay, Jack. Here’s how we’ll start. I’ll show you around the kitchen. There’s a wood cookstove in there. In general I’ll expect you to fire it up in the morning, every morning. We’ll stoke it tonight to show you how it all works. There’s a hot-water reservoir on it. When the water is hot enough, you’re going to take a bath. And I want you to burn those clothes you’re wearing.”

  “What will I do for clothes?”

  “I’ll give you some clothes. These ones you’re wearing stink horribly.”

  “They do?”

  “Take my word for it. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes. Very hungry.”

  “Do you want to eat something first?”

  Jack hesitated as if he was not used to deciding anything.

  “No. I want to wash up and burn these clothes,” he said. “I can’t stand myself how I am a minute longer.”

  “That would be a good start.”

  Fourteen

  Ten minutes after one o’clock on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the sky had darkened unnaturally to a metallic gray that seemed to mock the festive wreaths and catenaries of holiday fir that the people of Union Grove put up all over town. The clotting clouds above the modest parapets of Main Street withheld the snow they seemed to contain in their dark, fat bellies. The temperature crossed and recrossed the thirty-two-degree mark and the townspeople began to worry if the great night would be marred by rain. Meanwhile, Robert Earle, Brother Jobe, the Reverend Loren Holder, Dr. Jerry Copeland, senior village trustee Ben Deaver (a former United Airlines vice president in the old times, now a prosperous farmer who employed many townspeople), and Sam Hutto (a lawyer who ran a turpentine still on the back side of Pumpkin Hill in the absence of a functioning court system) all waited in a first-floor chamber of Union Grove’s old town hall.

  The new town hall (erected 1986), way out on State Route 29, a poorly constructed cartoon of the Federalist civic style, all executed in strand board and vinyl, now delaminating, was useless in the new times and had been abandoned some years ago. Whereas the old town hall, a sturdy Romanesque brick heap built in 1879, still contained all the original masonry flues for the parlor stoves it was designed to begin its useful life with—a life it had recently resumed. It stood on an honored site in the very center of Main Street, where it embodied in masonry and mortar the continuity of civic endeavor. In recent years, musical theater directed by Andrew Pendergast was performed seasonally up on the third floor, originally a temperance hall, with a proscenium arch beautifully decorated with motifs inspired by the great William Morris.

  The men gathered in the first-floor room, which was used for winter meetings of the town trustees. The sheet metal woodstove heating the room was a more primitive device than the original cast-iron Windsor-Latrobe coal burners that the building had been outfitted with in 1879. Coal was no longer available in this corner of the country. Waiting for Bullock, the men made small talk about crops, weather, illnesses, and other matters to avert the difficult agenda they were called together to discuss. At twenty minutes past one, Bullock arrived in a cloak and a massive shearling hat that gave him the appearance of a Napoleonic hussar. Not everyone present was forbearing.

  “You’re late,” Ben Deaver observed.

  “Sorry,” Bullock said, shedding his top clothes. “Some days you just have no sense of time.”

  “Ever notice,” Deaver said to all present, “how people who say they have no sense of time never show up early.” Awkward laughter ensued. Some coughing. Having worked high up in running an airline and then becoming one of the largest landholders in the county and a successful farmer enabled Deaver to speak this way to Bullock where others might not have dared.

  Bullock ignored the remark.

  “You’ve got two dead people and a woman in custody, I’m told,” he said, and sat down with his leather folio of papers at the head of the big chestnut table that was one of the building’s original furnishings. “We all know the law is not functioning the way it used to and we’ll have to start from scratch here to create something like a fair procedure. Has she confessed, by the way?” Bullock searched the faces around the table.

  Brother Jobe looked down at his hands, knowing that what he knew was both inadmissible and so far out of the normal sway of other people’s expectations about reality that he dare not introduce it.

  “What have you got, Loren?” Bullock said.

  “Not much. A diagram of the scene. Notes on interviews, I guess you’d call them, with those who came to the house in response to the screaming.”

  “Well, what the hell, Loren?”

  “What the hell do you mean ‘what the hell,’ Stephen?”

  “I mean . . . is that it?”

  “It’s what we’re able to do,” Loren said, his voice rising. “We don’t have a professional police force here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Believe me, I’ve noticed.”

  “Is there some crime lab I haven’t been informed about where I’m supposed to send materials?”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down. What about the murder weapon?”

  “I left it in place,” Loren said.

  “Where?” Bullock said. “What place?”

  “In the chest of the victim,” Loren said.

  Bullock made a face.

  The others around the table swapped glances.

  “I told him to leave it in there,” the doctor said. “The bodies were brought over to my place. I conducted a postmortem examination to determine the exact cause of death. It was self-evident in the case of the man, of course.”

  “And . . .”

  “I’ve written a report,” the doctor said, retrieving a tri-folded, handwritten clutch of papers from his inner coat pocket and handing them over.

  “Don’t you miss the old Xerox machine?” Bullock said, taking the papers. No comments were offered. “Can you give me the verbal bottom line on this? Who killed who and how?”

  “No, I can’t do that,” the doctor said.

  “He can’t do that,” Sam Hutto, who had spent years in courtrooms, agreed. “Didn’t you go to law school, Stephen?”

  “Yeah, I went to Duke,” Bullock said with visible pride. “Never actually practiced, though. The law just wasn’t in my blood.”

  “Maybe you should eat a little more red meat,” Ben Deaver said.

  Bullock scowled at Deaver but did not retort.

  “You understand that the coroner doesn’t pronounce verdicts,” Sam Hutto said. “That’s what the regular procedure is for—hearing, grand jury, trial, and all that.”

  “Oh, all right. Sorry I asked. What about the baby? You can summarize your medical findings about the baby without pronouncing a verdict, can’t you?” Bullock said, and then turned to Sam. “Can’t he?”

  Sam didn’t object.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “You have the spectrum of injury that’s consistent with what’s called shaken baby syndrome,” he said. “Retinal hemorrhage, that is, bleeding, subdural hemorrhage, bleeding in the outer layers of the brain, but chiefly this child died of a broken neck, a severe insult to the brain stem. The other injuries suggest that he’d b
een shaken before, probably more than a couple of times.”

  “So, father shakes baby, kills him, and mother stabs father to death,” Bullock said.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Robert said. “It’s just conjecture.”

  Bullock visibly struggled to contain his irritation.

  “Let’s get the old ball rolling then, shall we,” he said. “You want to prosecute or defend, Sam?”

  “Gawd, I was afraid it would come to this.”

  “Well, how many lawyers have we got left around here? Not too goddamn many. There’s you and Dale Murray.” Dale Murray, Robert Earle’s predecessor as mayor of Union Grove, was rumored to be spending his late innings on planet earth drinking Battenkill light rye whiskey from dawn to dark.

  “Oh, please, let’s not drag him into this,” Loren objected.

  “I have the degree in jurisprudence,” Brother Jobe said, startling the others around the table, who now all turned at him.

  “You’re kidding me,” Bullock said. “How is that possible?”

  Brother Jobe now glared darkly at Bullock, and the latter seemed to shrink visibly from his hard gaze.

  “I ain’t kidding one ding-dang bit, your honor. And it’s possible ’cause I applied and got in and grinded my goldurned way through the goshdarned program, is how.”