“Sure,” Robert said. “I’ll go get something.”
He went upstairs to Daniel’s boyhood room and brought down several books he thought a boy of Jasper’s age would be interested in: the old Landmark Books history series for children, Pirates of the New World, The California Gold Rush, and Guadalcanal Diary. Jasper took the one about pirates saying he’d already read the other two and retreated into it at once, foreclosing any further conversation. Robert had fetched his own bedside reading of the moment, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 by Robert C. Tucker, from the Union Grove library. Together, the two of them sat reading silently for another hour until Britney and Sarah returned to the house just after noon. Though they did not make a commotion coming in, something happened. Daniel’s eyes opened wide very suddenly, glistening with panic as though a klaxon had just gone off in the room. Robert looked up from his reading to see Britney with her mouth agape and followed her eyes back to Daniel, who had managed to raise himself up and twist around to see Britney and the girl.
“I know you,” Daniel croaked, panting slightly.
Britney glanced over at Robert and then back at Daniel.
“I was your babysitter years ago,” she said.
Daniel, still panting, turned to his father, who had dropped his book on the floor.
“Am I dreaming?” he said.
“No, you’re really home,” Robert said, getting out of his seat and coming over to squat down at Daniel’s bedside.
“Hope I don’t die.”
“We won’t let you.”
Daniel slumped back down again.
Twenty-three
Andrew Pendergast had a long-standing commitment to host a Christmas Day dinner party for his closest friends, twelve in all, most of them from the music circle plus Carolyn Smallwood, his assistant at the library, farmer Ben Deaver, and his wife, Nancy, and Larry Praeger, Union Grove’s sole practicing dentist, and his wife, Sharon. Andrew rose early on Christmas morning, went downstairs to the large, well-equipped kitchen, and called down the back hall to roust Jack Harron out of his room. Jack emerged blinking, hair askew like shocks of oat straw, pulling a suspender up over his shoulder.
“A Merry Christmas morning to you, Jack.”
Jack nodded his head gravely, looking somewhat baffled as to his exact whereabouts and his place in them.
“You’re late getting up.”
“I just woke up.”
“Exactly. Well, it’s Christmas after all. I’ll get you an alarm clock. There’s one kicking around here somewhere. Now, I’d like you to make a fire out in the parlor stove. I’ll get this cookstove going. In the future I’d like you to fire this one up first thing after you get up and put the kettle on for tea.”
“Uh, yessir.”
Andrew bent to the task himself, breaking up some old cedar shakes into kindling splints and shoving them into the firebox.
“We’ve got a lot to do around here today. Bring in some more stove billets for me from the woodshed. When you’re done firing the parlor stove, bring in extra cordwood and go shovel the snow off the front walk and the sidewalk. The shovel’s out on the back porch. Then, feed and water the chickens and collect whatever eggs there are. After that—”
“If you pile too many chores on me at once I’ll forget what I’m supposed to do.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll put some oats on and we’ll have a good hot breakfast when you’re done with the chickens.”
Twenty minutes later they both sat down to breakfast at the big farmhouse table in the kitchen. There was honey from Andrew’s own beehives and heavy cream from Schroeder’s dairy to go over the oats.
“I’ve got twelve friends coming over at four o’clock for Christmas dinner,” Andrew said. “You’re going to help me here in the kitchen and then you’re going to help serve the meal.”
“You mean, like a waiter?”
“Yes, that’s the idea.”
Jack appeared horrified.
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t have to know anything. Just carry some platters and bowls from here to the dining room. Take away some dirty dishes. Bring in some new ones.”
“But I’ll be seen.”
“We can’t help that, can we?”
Jack didn’t reply. His eyebrows scrunched together and his features clouded.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of what people will think,” Andrew said.
Jack poked at his oatmeal in silence.
“Did you break into other houses around town?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything else to annoy people?”
“No!”
“What’s the matter then?”
“I get nervous.”
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“I could drop something.”
“Yes, I suppose you could. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
“I could spill something hot on somebody.”
“They’d survive.”
“I’m always so nervous. I never feel relaxed. I hate being me.”
“I’ve got news for you, you’re all you’ve got.”
Jack went pale. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’re your whole world. Without you, there’s nothing. Surely you see some good things in the world around you.”
“Like what?”
“Beauty.”
“What about it?”
“It’s important. And it’s there for us.”
“Yeah, there’s some beauty in the world, I guess.”
“It’s there for you, Jack, in your world. Try paying attention to it. And know wherever you see a little beauty, there’s more there, beyond your vision and hearing, waiting for you to discover it.”
Jack appeared intensely interested in the idea for a moment, but then his eyebrows crowded together again and he tilted his head slightly.
“No offense, but what if that’s just some bullshit?” he said.
“Then it’s harmless bullshit. You can take it or leave it.”
The slightest smile for the first time crept up the corners of Jack’s mouth.
“You’re strange,” he said, “you know that?”
“Oh yes. I’ve been told that many times,” Andrew said. “You’ll be fine today. Just follow some simple instructions.”
Andrew had hung a sixteen-pound turkey in his keeping room two days earlier. The room lay off the back end of the house. Here, beneath the hanging turkey, he kept his stores of preserved foods in neat stacks of glass bottles and things in bulk supply that did well at a cold temperature above freezing. Garlands and sprays of drying herbs hung around the turkey from bare rafters, along with ropes of onions and garlic. Andrew had laboriously constructed his own grain bins out of recycled sheet metal. Potatoes had their own wooden bins. Andrew grew much of his food in his own gardens, but like most everyone else in town he bought some commodities at Einhorn’s store.
He asked Jack to pluck the turkey while he began making pastry for two pies, pumpkin and mincemeat. He found that the ancient spelt grain grown by Stephen Bullock made exceptionally good pie crusts. It had a nuttier flavor than wheat and a lower gluten content. For shortening, Andrew cut in half lard and half butter. Instead of a few tablespoons of water, he used applejack to moisten the dough because the alcohol would evaporate a greater volume of liquid during the baking process, making the crust extra flaky and fine. His mincemeat differed from the old standard preparations in that he used dried apples, dried high-bush cranberries, black currants, and candied rose hips instead of citrus peels, because oranges and lemons came to Union Grove so seldom these days. Lacking cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and other tropical spices, Andrew flavored his pumpkin filling and
the mincemeat with caramelized honey, that is, cooked until it polymerized to a deep golden brown piquant elixir. Some pear brandy found its way in as well. By the time he had constructed his pies, the oven temperature was up to speed and ready to receive them.
Then Jack came in with the plucked turkey, looking exhausted but triumphant, as though he had overcome an adversary by main force.
“Good job,” Andrew said. “Did you save the big tail feathers like I asked?”
“Yeah. What do you do with them?”
“We use them over at the theater for costumes, and I tie trout flies and fletch arrows with them. You can make a pen out of the quill, though I still have plenty of steel nibs. Sometimes I just put them in a bottle like a bouquet of flowers.”
Jack looked perplexed. His mouth had been incrementally falling open.
“What?” Andrew said.
“Nothing,” Jack said.
“Go wash the turkey inside and out and drain it well.”
“Yessir.”
“Do you have cooking skills?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Our family didn’t cook. They just heated stuff up.”
He handed Jack a four-quart saucepan. “Go into the back room and get me as many onions as will fit in this.”
Andrew stuffed the turkey with stale corn bread, his own pork sausage, chunks of apple, and chestnuts acquired from Temple Merton’s farm and orchard on Coot Hill, five miles north of Union Grove. He carefully worked a half pound of butter under the skin of the upturned turkey’s breast. They shoved the turkey into the oven at eleven o’clock. An old railroad station master’s clock with big Roman numerals hung on the kitchen wall above a nineteenth-century portrait of a Jersey cow.
“Who taught you all this?” Jack asked, thinking himself as blank of mind as the cow in the picture.
“Nobody,” Andrew said. “I’m my own creation.”
“Are you favored by God?”
“I never thought so.”
“I felt cursed my whole life.”
“You’re not,” Andrew said. “It’s just something you tell yourself. The truth is we’re blessed just to be here. In that college you went to, did you ever hear of a philosopher named Wittgenstein?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, of course. He said, It’s astonishing that anything exists.”
Jack flinched and his eyes widened.
“What if it’s just an illusion?”
“I dunno,” Andrew said. “If reality is faking it, it’s doing a great job.”
Twenty-four
The Reverend Loren Holder plodded out of town up old Route 29 on a dreary task in his capacity as town constable. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the temperature reached 46 degrees, with the low sun breaking through patchy clots of cloud. The six inches of snow on the road had turned into viscid slush. In the old times, the road would’ve been plowed by midmorning. Now, besides the melting tracks of one sleigh that had passed earlier in the day, and some deposits of horse droppings among the melting hoofprints, it was hard even to make out where exactly the road lay in the landscape. Loren’s calf-high leather boots were well oiled with lanolin cooked with beeswax. His feet stayed dry but his blanket coat and shearling hat made him sweat as he slogged his way east toward the homestead of one Donald Acker, who was alleged by his next-door neighbor farmer Ben Deaver to be keeping a starved horse in his barn—so Loren had been casually informed by Deaver at the levee that had followed the Christmas Eve music performance, just in case, Deaver had said, Loren might want to do something about it.
Loren cursed his way out of town because there was no question that he had to do something about it and conditions were unfavorable for a long walk, not to mention a confrontation. He tried not to think about the end of his hopes for the return of his son Evan in the happy circumstance of Daniel Earle’s return. He almost didn’t want to hear what had happened from Daniel, and in the meantime he preferred to see about the starved horse, which might have a better chance of survival in this world of woe than his boy. Everything about the afternoon, from the low angle of the sun just days after the solstice, to the bleak appearance of the fields and pastures in their stark winter raiment, to the crashing silence of the landscape broken only now and again by the shrill debate of crows, oppressed Loren like the weight of a lifetime’s last days.
It took him an hour to trudge the mile and three-quarters up Route 29 to Acker’s place on Huddle Road on the shadowed east side of Pumpkin Hill, where the blue snow was icing back up again as the temperature dropped. Acker’s house was an 1870s vernacular cottage that had received several ghastly additions and makeovers in the late twentieth century. These putative improvements were now decrepitating at a faster rate than the original sections of the structure, including a sagging bay window that, in the process of detaching itself from the exterior, pulled puffs of pink fiberglass insulation out from behind the broken vinyl clapboards like the frothy guts leaking out of a mortally injured animal.
He went directly into the barn on the property, an old wreck of a thing with blue daylight glinting through the ancient siding. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness within, he saw a brindle horse standing still in a box stall in such stolid suffering that tears came to Loren’s eyes as he imagined the animal’s many days of anguished perseverance. The horse’s ribs were visible through a blotchy coat of thick winter fur and his pelvis jutted out as though he had swallowed a piece of furniture. As he made his way closer he could see that the horse’s stall was piled deep with the animal’s own excrement and, though the horse had obviously tried at first to shit in one corner, where it was piled higher, the entire floor had come to be filled. The horse appeared to be dead on its feet. Only the blink of its eye informed Loren that it was not frozen in place. Its water bucket held an inch of muddy slush and both its haylage rack and its manger were empty. The horse didn’t flinch or, for that matter, move in any way when Loren ran his hand down its bony withers. It was still warm.
He left the barn and trudged up to the house, made his way through a careless strewage of cordwood on the front porch, and pounded on the door. A gruff voice within cried “all right, all right,” and then Donald Acker threw the door open. Acker, once a State Farm Insurance adjuster, was one of those who had moved into an abandoned property in title limbo, with the county courts closed and its records in disarray and claimants either dead or too distant to pursue any claims. Acker was hardy enough to have escaped the epidemics of recent years, and determined enough, with no background in farming, to subsist on ten acres, of which he barely cropped about three, leaving the rest in scrubby pasture. When the economy first came apart, he’d left a wife named Chrissie behind in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey—she’d refused to move to “the boondocks” even after the bombing of DC—and he hadn’t heard from her since he used his last two five-gallon plastic storage tanks of hoarded gasoline to go north without her. That was years ago, and the car he’d arrived in was long gone, too, picked up for steel scrap during the Great Collection.
Standing in the slightly lopsided doorway of the house, Acker was an inch taller than Loren, who stood six-foot-three. He had a sallow moon face that disclosed no emotion, a gray-blond beard cut to the nub in a patchy way that resembled his starving horse’s blotchy coat. He wore several layers of flannel and more than one sweater, making him appear more physically robust than he was. He appeared not altogether steady on his feet. Loren recognized Acker dimly from seeing him around town, but he’d never spoken with him before.
“Sorry to disturb you on Christmas,” he said.
Acker flinched.
“Is it really Christmas?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Wow. You lose track living out here.” Acker scratched himself.
Loren scanned the dim interior of the place behin
d him. It was sparely furnished to an extreme and yet also disorderly. A broken-down plush chair and a small table were deployed close to a woodstove. There was no candle on the table and no other furniture was visible. Loren wondered if Acker had burned it for kindling and if he spent the long winter evenings sitting in the dark. The big front room was strewn with old magazines, some in piles. Venetian blinds hung askew in several windows. Blankets lay heaped onto the lone chair as if Acker had been sleeping there. The place gave off a vibrant stink, as of an old gym sock stuffed with Roquefort cheese, and maybe a decomposing creek chub thrown in, Loren thought.
“I’ve had a complaint about you,” he said.
Acker gazed back blankly for an awkward interval.
“You’re the priest in town, aren’t you?” he finally said, scratching again.
“Congregational minister, actually.”
“Somebody complain that I skipped services? It’s a free country last time I checked.”
“I’m the town constable, too, as it happens.”
“Is that like the police?”
“It’s sort of what’s left of the police.”
“So much for the Constitution, then. Separation of church and state.”
“I’m not too mixed up about it,” Loren said.
Acker stared into Loren’s face as though attempting to impress upon him his slight height advantage, but a tremor in Acker’s left eye made the lid flutter in a way that revealed infirmity and weakness. Loren could not help but think that Acker was only marginally more healthy than his horse. The stare down concluded when Acker reached for the doorjamb to steady himself. Then he scratched again.
“Do you want to come in out of the cold?” he said. “I’ve got a little whiskey.”
“That’s kind of you,” Loren said, “but the way you’re scratching I suspect you’ve got a nice hatch of fleas going in there, so I’ll just come to the point. There’s a mistreated horse on the premises and I’m afraid I have to take it away from you.”
Acker flinched again.
“Did Deaver tell you that?”
A History of the Future Page 11