Robert flinched. Daniel as a grown man seemed a stranger to him.
“This bunch are pretty good sorts,” Robert said. “They’ve done a lot for the town.”
Daniel lowered his mug and focused his gaze on Britney. The clock on the mantel ticked. Britney looked directly back at Daniel.
“Are you two hooked up?” he said.
“I guess you could say so,” Britney said.
Robert quelled the urge to explain himself. Being intimidated by his own son was a startling mental adjustment.
“I remember you had a little girl,” Daniel said.
“Sarah’s eight years old now.”
“Is she here?”
“Of course,” Britney said and pointed upstairs.
“Oh,” Daniel said. “Has she been healthy?”
“Yes.”
Daniel turned back to his father.
“Well, I can find a place of my own, then.”
“You don’t have to think about that right now,” Robert said.
“I’m not angry at you, in case you’re wondering. Mom’s been dead for years. I understand.” Daniel’s declaration hung awkwardly in the silence that followed it. “There must still be plenty of empty houses around town.”
“You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Sure, thanks,” Daniel said, settling back against the sofa cushion, with a sigh.
“You feeling okay?”
“A lot better. The food and all.”
“Maybe you should rest now.”
“I’m tired of resting. Don’t you want to know what happened . . . out there.”
“You have all the time in the world—”
“I need to start telling you now.”
Twenty-eight
Daniel’s Story: To the Lakes
“It was fine spring weather when we left,” Daniel said.
May. All the trees finally leafed out, fruit blossoming, people putting crops in here and there where they had the wherewithal to farm. Not everybody out on the land did. They didn’t have tools, or draught animals, the knowledge to farm, or even the will to live after all they lost. The landscape was beautiful but you could smell death everywhere. The scent of lilacs and death. That stuck.
We didn’t have to camp outside much. We found empty houses wherever we passed. You could take your pick. They were always full of people’s stuff, even though they were gone. Nothing of value, usually, ’cause pickers had always been through. Everything a mess, usually. Things strewn all over, broken, trashed. Now and then we came across a body where a person died alone and nobody came to get them or bury them. Once a whole family of four, all in one room. The bodies were pretty far gone. We figured the father probably killed them all and then himself because the largest corpse had a gun in what remained of its hand. It had five live rounds in the magazine, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic. We kept it. It’s a terrible thing to see a human being that has been unburied for some time. You could smell it down the road before you walked in the door. We never stayed over in a house where the dead lay, though obviously we went inside some of them to look.
The condition of the towns we passed through varied a lot from place to place. Based on what we saw our first weeks on the road, we rated Union Grove better than average. The towns at the center of a farming district were the best off because people could work for food, like here, and work at trades around the farming. All the population centers big and small had shrunk way down, of course. The suburban stretches were the most desolate. Wherever we went, people struggled to carry on. A lot of physically healthy people seemed to have mental problems. Maybe they were still dazed by how quickly things were changing. They had also come through another hard winter.
Here and there we came upon places like Mr. Bullock’s where some honcho had set up a domain for himself and ran things, somebody with good organizing skills and a commanding personality. These were like strongholds in a wasteland. You could tell them because all of a sudden, after many miles of raggedy farms where half-starving scarecrow people grubbed around in the soil for subsistence, you’d come upon well-tended fields, well-fed people working in groups together in an organized way, with draft animals pulling mechanical tillers and drag rakes, usually a big house in good condition visible from the road, sometimes armed guards or signs telling you to keep out. We stopped at a couple along the way those early days. Once, we offered to work for a meal and they laughed at us because we were just two jokers who didn’t know how things were done around there, but they gave us lunch anyway. Another place, they thought we were pickers and ran us off. I guess we could’ve been mistaken for pickers, but we were just travelers off to see the country.
The first town of size we came to on our quest to get to the Mohawk River was Amsterdam, New York, where the old Mohawk carpet mills stood on a bluff above the town like a giant Tibetan Buddhist monastery overlooking the valley. The buildings were so enormous. It was hard to believe that our society had produced these immense things, as if the people of the twentieth century were a race of giants who could do anything. We went inside. They were brick shells, gloomy and rank. The roofs were collapsing. The machinery was long gone. Some people had lived inside for a while, but the remnants of their campsites were old and we figured they didn’t make it through the winter.
Evan was great company, always bright and chirpy, cracking jokes, keeping it light when, if you had been all alone, after a while you might want to find a hole in the ground to crawl into just to hide from the reality of where things had gone to, or throw up, or maybe hang yourself. Evan called the dead people we came across “mummies.” He spun out an ongoing story as we hiked along about how the mummies had colonized the USA, and taken over the government, and infiltrated every level of society, and wrecked everything—and we were among the few survivors battling our way across Mummy Nation. Evan had quite an imagination.
We knew that boats were running on the Mohawk River, which fed into the old Erie Canal system, and we were hoping to catch a ride west. We didn’t have any wish to go down to New York City because it was supposed to be a pretty terrible situation all around there, and farther south in Washington, DC, where the bomb went off, forget it. The town of Amsterdam had all concentrated down by the riverfront. Everything up the hill around the old factories was abandoned. They’d destroyed the center of town way back in the old times by bulldozing most of Main Street so there would be more room for cars. The ruins of an old downtown mall still stood there, in all its stupidity. The flat roof was shot from so many winters of ice and snow. Front Street down by the river was where people did business now. There were a few new buildings, merchant houses, they called them, doing trade on the river, a tavern, a general merchandise. They’d put in docks and slips and a yard where they were building new boats for the canal trade. That’s where we met the boatman Randall McCoy, master of a barge called Glory. The boat’s name was an exaggeration and he was in on the joke. I wish we were. He and Evan struck up a jabber as we searched among the vessels on the waterfront for a way to the west. McCoy gave off a lighthearted impression and that snared Evan’s sense of fun. McCoy was about thirty years old, a full-hearty grown-up dude well over six feet, brawny arms, thick neck, and kept his hair long, braided in the back like an Indian of yore. He wore good linen hand-sewn, pattern-made clothes, not the old-times shiz like our people wear around here, T-shirts with pictures on them and all that. McCoy was going for respect, even if he was a jokester.
The Glory was seventy feet long by about eight feet wide with a draft of four and a half feet loaded. Cabin near the back end. McCoy had a team of mules in the bow, another in the stern. It was easy work for them once you got the boat going. They had a nice life. If reincarnation really exists, I wouldn’t mind coming back as a canal mule. McCoy had just tied feed bags on the bow team when we came along. He seemed to find us comi
cal at the get-go. Evan told him we were searching for a long lost land called the United States.
McCoy goes, “I think I saw it under a rock at the Marengo Marsh cut.”
Evan goes, “What was it doing?”
McCoy’s like, “It’s just a feeble crawling little thing now. A shadow of its former self since they ran that General Fellowes out of office.”
“We’re out to see what’s left,” Evan goes. “We hear it’s lovely out on the lakes.”
“Trade’s picked up there or we wouldn’t be in business,” McCoy goes. “I’ve got a load of halite and hops going west, leaving tomorrow.”
I’m, suddenly, like, “Can we catch a ride on your boat?”
He goes, “If you pay for your own food and sleep on deck and work to offload the cargo at Lockport where they’re rebuilding the flight of five locks.”
“What’s that?” we both go.
McCoy explains that the original Erie Canal ran pretty flat across western New York until it got to the Niagara Escarpment where they had to build a big set of five locks to get boats up to the level of Buffalo and Lake Erie.
Evan goes, “Why not just go up into Lake Ontario and float into Lake Erie?”
McCoy’s like, “Ever hear of Niagara Falls, doinky-doink?”
“What about it?”
“It’s between the two lakes, is what. Kind of hard to sail up and over it in a boat.”
“And his mom’s the schoolteacher, back home,” I go, giving Evan my thumb.
“Is she really?” McCoy goes.
Evan goes, “Hey, I knew that about Niagara Falls.”
“Like hell you did,” I go.
Evan’s like, “You’re so smart, what’s the capital of Kentucky?”
I’m like, “Now how the hell should I know that?”
He goes, “We had to memorize all the capitals in the fifth grade, remember?”
“Well, I haven’t thought about it in ten years, and who gives a damn?”
“We might travel through Kentucky. You never know.”
“I’d stay away from there,” McCoy says. He’s all grins. I think he likes to see us go at it.
“How come?”
“Kentucky, Tennessee, that part of the country isn’t safe. I think we’re at war with them.”
“Since when?”
“More than a year.”
“What for?”
“They broke away from America.”
“How come?”
“They never did like us? It’s civil war all over again,” McCoy says. “Remember the Alamo?”
“The Alamo was the war with Mexico,” Evan says, “not the Civil War.”
“They don’t like Mexicans either,” McCoy says.
“Seems like the country has just fallen to pieces,” I go.
“As long as things keep moving on the Er-i-o, I don’t give a damn,” McCoy goes.
“So what is the capital of Kentucky, smart ass?” I ask Evan.
He ignores me. He goes, “Well, what about those five locks, mister?”
McCoy says, “They changed the system in 19 and 13 and built new locks that were bigger than the original ones, and only two to the set. But the gates ran off the electric, and with the electric out they don’t work anymore, so now they have to rebuild the old five-step, which they are doing and hope to finish up by midsummer. It’ll be dandy when they’re done. Meantime, we have to offload our cargoes at Lockport and put it in wagons up the slope and then the Buffalo boats take it the rest of the way. You could work on the locks when we get to it. They’re paying silver, I hear. I’ll introduce you to the boss there, if you like.”
So we just looked at each other, Evan and me, and knew we’d go west with Randall McCoy for a ways and then take it from there.
Daniel slid down from the sofa cushion, saying only, “So tired, got to sleep now.”
Robert removed the sofa cushion and placed a regular pillow back under his son’s head, tenderly, as though Daniel were not the mysterious man he had become but still a small boy who needed his father to take care of him.
Twenty-nine
The next morning Robert Earle, Loren Holder, and Brother Jobe convened at the old former Union-Wayland mill down by the Battenkill River. Brother Jobe had brought a thermos bottle of real coffee and a little sack of raised donuts made of real wheat flour and dusted with real powdered sugar. The New Faith people had a knack for coming by scarce commodities in their trade dealings. Brother Jobe was attended by Brother Shiloh, chief engineer of the project ongoing in the old factory: a community laundry that was near completion. Brother Shiloh left the others in his office room equipped with a wood-burning stove and went off to inspect the new boiler fabricated in the New Faith’s own metal shop.
Without electricity, the old way of everybody having washing machines at home was out of date, and laundry was a laborious task. A few people had set themselves up to take in other people’s wash, but there were not enough laundry facilities for everyone, and some people could not pay to have it done, and on the whole the townspeople suffered from a lack of clean clothes and bedding. They had hoped to get the community laundry—which was originally Loren Holder’s idea—up and running by Christmas as a present to the town, but a few kinks in the mechanicals remained to be worked out.
The office was in one corner of the large open factory floor. It had a wall of windows that looked onto the works. Seven thousand square feet of space remained of the twenty-four thousand square feet the complex comprised in its heyday. The building had started its life in 1854 as a linen mill, was converted to a toilet paper factory in the early twentieth century, and produced cardboard boxes after the Second World War. It ceased to produce anything in 1971 and had languished for decades. The weather had its way with the flat roof and the rubber-asphalt cladding that cracked and split under ultraviolet exposure. Things started to leak, rot, rust, flake off, spall, and molder inside.
All the debris and rottenness had been cleared away in the past six months. Beams, joists, and flooring had been replaced and gleamed brightly with varnish made right in Washington County out of turpentine and seed oil. Robert had put in many extra hours of labor on the project when he wasn’t working elsewhere and the Reverend Holder had collected silver coin from the members of the Congregational Church toward paying for the fittings fabricated by local smiths, coopers, and craftspeople. At the center of the main workroom now stood two rows of four hundred-gallon oaken tubs four feet high, mangles made of the toughest and most rot resistant black locust wood with wrought-iron fittings for wringing out wet fabrics and several big tables for sorting clothes and sundries. An overshot water wheel on the river turned leather belts overhead connected to gearing that ran the paddles in the wash tubs.
“Shiloh thinks we can test-drive her in another week or so,” Brother Jobe said, pouring coffee into the cup that screwed off the top of the thermos. “Help yourself to a durned donut, you two.”
Robert and Loren did not hesitate. Robert closed his eyes as he savored the first bite and the sugar melted on his tongue.
“We’ve got four of our people and four of your people hired up to start,” Brother Jobe continued, “and if we need more we can hire up more. I know quite a few of your farm labor folk are idle this time of year. By and by some might like working in here better than out in the fields. We can shake out the operation in the weeks ahead. If you boys want some of this here coffee, we all got to drink out of the same cup. I didn’t bring no extra mugs.”
“Can your bunch cover those wages we’ll be paying until we get cash coming in?” Robert said.
“Sure. It’ll come out of you-all’s cut until we’re square.”
Robert and Loren glanced at each other. Both then nodded okay. Robert reached for the coffee. It had been many months since h
e’d tasted any. In the old times, when he was an executive at a computer software company in Boston, Robert’s steel coffee mug was his constant companion. Colleagues joked that it was a prosthetic extension of his brain.
“Meantime,” Brother Jobe said, “we got to assemble twenty-three upright individuals to sit on a grand jury to review criminal charges against poor Miz Stokes. Mr. Bullock has asked me as an officer of the court to direct you as constable”—he looked at Loren—“to notify these potential grand jurors.” He dug into the inside pocket of his frock coat, withdrew a folded document, and handed it to Loren. At the top of the first page, in florid cursive script, the document said, On Order of the Magistrate, Union Grove, New York, Hon. Stephen Bullock,” followed by several paragraphs of dense legalese that fogged Loren’s brain as he attempted to parse it. He flipped the page.
“There’s only fifteen people on this list,” Loren said. He knew them all. “You say we need twenty-three.”
“Well, he told me to tell you to scare up the rest, plus a few alternates.”
“Jesus Christ,” Loren said.
“No need for cussing there, Rev.”
Loren rubbed his temples as though he had a headache. “All this constable bullshit is taking over my life,” he said.
“Well, whyn’t you quit grousing and seek some upright and mature fellow amongst your regular townspeople to take your place as constable whilst you discharge this particular final obligation, which is your duty as long as there ain’t nobody else to fill your boots.”
Loren made a face, then sighed and reached for another donut.
“Maybe I will.”
“I know we all got a full plate these days,” Brother Jobe said. “If it’s any help, I can nominate a few grand jurors out of our outfit.”
“You think our people would mind that?” Loren said to Robert.
“His people live here now too,” Robert said. “They’re citizens of Union Grove.”
“My wife visited with Mrs. Stokes last night,” Loren said, turning back to Brother Jobe. “It sounds like she’s not fit for any trial.”
A History of the Future Page 14