There was nothing I could do. We didn’t have any life buoy on board and I could not maneuver the boat at all. I could only scream out his name, and that didn’t do any good. I stayed with the boat. What else could I do? Evan was gone. The storm just blew and blew. I couldn’t tell how much time was passing except that night still hadn’t fallen. Finally another giant wave smacked the boat down on something hard again—a sand bank, a rock, I don’t know what. The forward mast cracked as though it had been hit by lightning and crashed down on the deck, crushing the cabin roof. Whatever the boat hit, she didn’t stay stuck on. We blew back off into the waves. Shortly after that another wave capsized the boat. I went over with her into the lake and thought I would drown. I was underwater for what seemed the longest time, and it was so strangely silent down there like the peace of death itself. But I managed to bust back up for air, and I was lucky to be tied to the boat by my leg because I was able to catch hold of the starboard leeboard and clung on to it for life. Eventually, the storm died down and I hoisted myself onto the flat-bottomed hull of the capsized boat.
“You probably don’t want to hear about how I was rescued, but obviously I’m here, so I was,” Daniel said.
Loren leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands and Jane Ann held her hand over her mouth as though to prevent something from escaping.
“I never saw Evan again,” Daniel said. “I’ve been informed that he didn’t come back home. At least not yet.”
Jane Ann shook her head. Tears began coursing over her fine cheekbones.
“Maybe he’s still alive,” Daniel said. “He might have made it to shore. It’s possible. I don’t know. Just because I couldn’t see anything out there in the rain doesn’t mean we weren’t close to land, maybe one of those shoal islands on the chart, and we kept on smashing onto things so wherever we were was shallow water. Anyway, we were separated for good by that storm. I’m awfully sorry. I tried to look out for him. He had a fine spirit. It wasn’t easy for me to get back here, and maybe he’s struggling to get home right now.”
Daniel subsided against his pillows. Loren squeezed his leg and mouthed the words “thank you.” Jane Ann kissed Daniel on his forehead. And then they both left the house.
Thirty-six
Stephen Bullock was up late in the library of the house built by his ancestors near the confluence of the Battenkill and Hudson rivers, watching a video recording of a favorite movie from his younger years: Goodfellas, a picture about mafia lowlife in New York City directed by the immortal Martin Scorsese. His wife, Sophie, who did not appreciate movie violence of that amplitude, had read herself to sleep upstairs (a novel about court intrigue swirling around Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn). Bullock was able to enjoy the movie because he possessed the only functioning hydroelectric generator in Union Grove and, as far as he knew, all of Washington County. It produced enough electricity to run his household and a few of his workshops and was frequently down with annoying mechanical problems of one kind or another. Bullock had originally laid in three Pelton runner wheels—the guts of the system—among many replacement parts some years back when he sensed that the economy was going south. But they were disappointingly fragile and impossible to repair once broken. He was on the last one now and he knew that he lacked the critical metallurgical resources to fabricate any more of them. So he lived in a perpetual mood of resigned precipitous nostalgia, thinking that any day would be his last with electricity. He drew some consolation from observing the townspeople of Union Grove make do, and even remain generally civilized, without electricity. But he feared the eventual discontinuity of being cut off from all the recorded culture of the times now bygone, as though he would be cut off from hundreds of old dear friends. These premature regrets were dogging him as he munched a bowl of buttered popcorn (prepared by Lilah the cook) and watched Joe Pesci’s character Tommy DeVito stomping Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) to a bloody pulp in the bar owned by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Moments after the body was wrapped in a tablecloth and dragged out of the bar, someone knocked on the library door. It was highly irregular for Bullock to be interrupted so late in the evening. He stopped chewing in mid-munch and said, “Come in.”
It was Dick Lee, his most trusted subaltern, wrapped in a greatcoat with a hat made of muskrat fur and a gray wool muffler hanging down over his shoulders.
“Got some bad news, sir,” Lee said.
Bullock had to get up from his comfortable chair to manually press PAUSE on the DVD player because batteries were no longer available to run remote control devices. His hamstrings ached from riding around the property all day and he was annoyed to have to stop the movie.
“Well . . . ?”
“Perses,” Lee said. “He’s not doing so well.”
“How bad?”
“He’s dead.”
Bullock absorbed the blow.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s about as unwell as it gets.”
“I’m sorry to tell you.”
“Okay,” Bullock said. “Give me a minute then.”
Bullock stopped the video and shut down the electronics. In the mudroom he pulled on his boots and bundled up in a raccoon coat made on the premises by a talented seamstress among his people out of varmints trapped on his own property. It featured a hood, which made him look immense, like a Sasquatch. Outside, it was sleeting. He stopped in the tool shop among the outbuildings and barns near the house and picked up a stout unfinished hickory ax handle. Then he and Dick Lee trudged a mile uphill to the site of the village where his people lived. Dick Lee carried a candle lantern that shed minimal light along the gravel road. But it was easy footing. The roads on Bullock’s property were much better cared for than the long-neglected county roads and state highways with their potholes and fissured pavements.
“Don’t kill him,” was all Dick Lee said on the way up.
“All I have is an ax handle,” Bullock said. “You’re the one with the pistol.”
The cottages of Bullock’s village were situated along a little main street with the larger community building at the end of it, set into a formal village square. At this hour, no lights were burning inside it, and only here and there did windows of the cottages glow. Several narrow lanes ran perpendicularly off the main street, the cottages built close together on narrow lots with dooryard gardens, the fall stubble in them now glazed with ice. Dick Lee directed his boss to the home of Travis Berkey. It was dark within. Bullock rapped stoutly on the door. After waiting a minute he rapped again, this time with the ax handle. Shortly, the door opened a crack and a frightened woman in a muslin nightdress peered through the slot.
“Let us in, Molly,” Dick Lee said. She opened the door and backed away. Dick Lee raised his lantern. The interior of the cottage was tidy but smelled of fermentation. “Sorry to come by so late,” he continued gently, while Molly Berkey’s gaze was fixed on Bullock, in the immensity of his fur coat. “Would you ask Travis to come down.”
“He’s . . . not here,” she said.
“Who’s that?” said a man’s voice from up the staircase.
Molly looked away from Bullock and wrapped her arms around herself. He noticed that she looked old, though she was half his age.
“Get down here, Travis,” Bullock bellowed. The three of them waited. The first floor of the cottage was effectively one room: a kitchen with a long table, some rustic chairs, and a wooden bench with a crude back. Much of one end wall was taken up by a fieldstone fireplace with an iron crane for hanging cook pots and trivets and other iron furnishings disposed around the hearth. Bullock was a little shocked to discover how primitive the arrangement was, like life in the Thirteen Colonies. His mind was still sojourning in the formerly modern world of the movie he had been watching. Most of his people at least had proper cast-iron woodstoves, which Bullock had taken pains to collect in the initial crash years of the economy. It was cold enough in the
room so that their breath came in visible huffs of steam. Finally, they heard a commotion on the stairs and Travis Berkey appeared, slender and crooked like an old hand tool, in patched wool pants, shirtless and barefoot.
“Get in here,” Bullock said. There was more noise on the staircase. A small boy’s face appeared near the top of the stairs in the meager lantern light. Berkey came closer, moving sideways, as though expecting a blow.
“What’s up,” he said.
“Perses is dead.”
Berkey did not reply but his eyes slammed shut and he hung his head.
“Get into your warmest clothes and your best boots,” Bullock said.
“What about them?” Berkey muttered, cocking his head at his wife.
“They stay.”
“What’s he mean?” Molly said.
Berkey turned his head sharply and said, “I’m being run off.”
She rushed across the room, not to her husband but to Bullock, and threw herself at his boots. “Don’t make him go,” she said and repeated it several times until her voice turned to blubbering.
The boy on the stairwell, who was six, began keening.
“You can’t come between a man and his family,” Berkey said.
“Go finish getting dressed,” Bullock said, pointing upstairs with the ax handle.
Berkey glared, then turned, climbed the stairs, tenderly scooped up his son, and disappeared.
“What’ll I do?” Molly blubbered.
“You’ll stay here. Our people will care for you. You’ll work. You’ll have food and a place to live,” Bullock said. The child could be heard weeping above.
“What about him?” she said tremulously.
“He’ll be fine.”
“Maybe we should go too,” Molly said. Bullock detected the lack of conviction in her voice.
“You can’t,” Bullock said. “He might survive out there on his own this time of year, but with the two of you weighing him down you’ll all perish. I can’t allow that.”
“But he’s my husband,” she said.
“He’s an ill-tempered rogue. He beat my horse to death and I’m aware that he beats you too. You can find a better man. When the time comes, as magistrate, I’ll annul your marriage, if that’s what you want.”
Molly grasped at Bullock’s leather boot tops and her sobs turned racking in a manner that seemed theatrical. Bullock didn’t fail to notice that she did not dispute the idea of finding a better man. He also noticed that she did not so much as attempt to prepare a parcel of food for Travis to take on what was bound to be a difficult journey. Berkey soon came downstairs followed by his son, who then clamped his arms around Berkey’s leg as he keened. Dick Lee separated them with some difficulty and the boy then threw himself, shrieking, on his sobbing mother. Berkey stuffed his feet into a pair of ancient manufactured hiking boots, grabbed a wool coat and knitted toque from pegs on the wall, and pulled on two thick, crudely assembled shearling mittens.
“Do you want to say good-bye to them?” Bullock asked, meaning the wife and child.
“I’ll send for you,” Berkey muttered.
The child lifted his head but Molly did not.
“Do you aim to thrash me with that thing when we get outside?” Berkey said, pointing his scruffy chin at the ax handle.
“Not if you leave peaceably,” Bullock said.
“Let’s do it, then,” Berkey said, twin billows of steam issuing from his nostrils as he struggled to contain his emotion. He glanced back at his wailing son and then left the house followed by Bullock and Dick Lee.
Thirty-seven
Brother Jobe, snug in his personal quarters, the former office suite of the high school principal back in the day, was notified late at night that the prisoner had been weeping strenuously and carrying on for several hours in her cell. Her guard for that shift, Brother Levi, was distressed and didn’t know whether something ought to be done about it, so he sent for guidance. Brother Jobe asked his companion for the evening, Sister Susannah, to excuse him, wearily pulled on his clothing, and wended his way through the large building to the prisoner’s place of confinement. He could hear her plainly enough himself through the barred door.
“Let me in,” he said to Levi.
He brought a candle with him and set it on the table. Mandy lay heaped on her bed in something like what the yoga instructors of yore used to call the child position, her knees drawn up to her belly, face buried in the blankets. Her body shuddered with her sobs.
Brother Jobe took a seat and sat with her patiently, leafing through a Bible he had brought in with him. At first, Mandy seemed unaware of his presence. By and by her sobs subsided, she unfolded herself from her compact position on the bed, and slowly, with a feline economy of movement that impressed him, came to sit erect on the edge of it with her feet on the floor and her head down, as if waiting for some pronouncement, which was not long in coming from Brother Jobe.
“It says here,” he read, “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. The him in here,” he said, “that could be a her, of course. Could be you.”
Mandy lifted her head and looked up at him. Her eyes were directly level with his. She had stopped weeping and she wiped the residual moisture away from her eyes.
“I’ve done terrible things,” she said. “It’s all become clear.”
“I’m afraid that’s so. You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Yes. You’re the minister up from Virginia.”
“And you know where you are?”
“Somewhere in the old high school?”
“That’s right. In confinement, of course.”
“In confinement,” she repeated. The words fell off her lips as though they had weight and seemed to crash on the floor.
“I’ve been amongst your mind a few times recently.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say I have, uh, special abilities that would puzzle your average folks. It don’t matter. The thing is, you come back to yourself now. You been a sick girl. Your mind was affected. I know it. Now, apparently, you know it.”
Mandy’s shoulders humped as a spasm of despair ran through her and she choked on a fresh sob. She wiped her eyes again and came out of it.
“I’m in a nightmare,” she said.
“Well, you’ve woke up, at least, and that’s a start. I can tell you that the sickness itself, it’s gone out of you. Now the law don’t easily separate acts done in sickness from the person that done them. It also happens that I’m an officer of the court that is going to try you for your acts. I’m concerned that justice is done. And to do that we got to get down to some serious bidness. Lookit here at my pointing finger.”
Brother Jobe held his index finger up to his right eye. It was his key to unlocking the door to someone’s interior. She slipped into his thrall easily. Her jaw fell slightly and her own eyes went glassy.
“One thing I got to know,” he said. “Do you want to live?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I killed my husband and my son. How could I deserve to live?”
“You can let God be the judge of that question. The answer to death does not have to be more death. Tell me how you were in this sickness and who was in it with you, and what they did with you.”
Mandy complied, recounting her journey through the meningitis, and the demon-like entities who held her captive, and all the particulars of the fateful night when the baby Julian died and she slew her husband upon his discovery that the baby was dead.
It was well after midnight when Brother Jobe concluded the session.
“You going to come out of this after I count backwards from ten,” he said. “When you do, you gonna suspend judgment on yoursel
f while the law works its way with this. It is important for you to know that grace means getting mercy that you may not deserve or think you deserve. God is abundant in grace and mercy. It is what God means, what He is all about. His greatest grace is salvation, and He loves us with a love everlasting. It says here in Hebrews: Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
“What do you want me to do?” Mandy said.
“You don’t have to do nothing for now but be open to God’s grace,” Brother Jobe said, then began counting backwards from ten.
Thirty-eight
Daniel Earle was up on his feet early in the morning, well before dawn, restless with returning energy. He kindled a fire in the cookstove, made himself a pot of mint tea, found a ration of leftover corn bread and the butter tub, warmed up the bread on top of the cast-iron stove, sat down, and enjoyed the leisure of a breakfast indoors, unharried by trouble and hardship. He was making a second pot when Britney appeared in the doorway, wearing a flannel robe that once had belonged to Daniel’s mother. The sight of her in it startled him.
“It’s only me,” she said.
They exchanged a fraught glance that seemed to suggest many possibilities of thought, emotion, action, and judgment.
“I hope you don’t mind that I rustled up some breakfast for myself,” he said.
“Mind? It’s your house.”
“It’s my father’s house. I’m in the way here.”
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