The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  Upstream of the dam hundreds of black, brown, and white Canada geese were marshaling on an eddy and making a conspicuous racket doing it. Flights of several dozen would land and others would take off as though the geese were practicing some sort of war game maneuvers. Airborne, they assumed the familiar flying-V formation. The population of these geese had surged even before the old times ended as weather patterns changed. More of them wintered over than migrated now. The people of Union Grove killed and ate them as they could, but there were far fewer people than there had been a decade earlier and fewer of them had working firearms or factory-made ammunition. One townsman named Tommy Pernelle had affected to work occasionally as a market hunter with a gun he made himself that fired any kind of scrap metal and even pebbles, and occasionally he sold a brace of geese to Terry Einhorn. But then his dog died and he couldn’t find another retriever—the dog population being depleted even more than the human—and Tommy did not like going into the water to fetch the geese himself. Eventually Tommy preferred working in the comfort of Holyrood’s cider works to the life of a market hunter.

  Standing high above the river on Salem Street, the doctor watched the sqwonking geese below, realizing what a perfect disease vector they were for the next epidemic, and the arresting thought entered his mind that he would rather die than go through another epidemic as the town’s only doctor. It startled him because he had two children, Jasper, twelve, and Dinah, six, whom he loved desperately, and a wife, Jeanette, he was very content with, plus a beautiful home, a position of high regard in town, a good living by the stringent standards of the new times—he was often paid in hams, chickens, candles, crafted goods, liquor, and whatnot when he was paid at all—and days filled with purposeful activities, many of them life-and-death matters. In fact, the brief retreat from the office on this damp spring day was one of the rare tranquil intervals he had had in a long time. But anytime he managed to free himself of the hubbub that was his life, despair came over him and hung over his shoulders like a cold, wet mantle.

  On nights when he had seen a last patient, or finished checking on one confined in his infirmary, or returned from some house call, he more and more sought refuge in a bottle of pear brandy or rye whiskey, and his pipe, stuffed with some of the Afghani weed that grew wild everywhere along the roadsides these days. Lately, sometimes he had even taken to ingesting some of the laudanum, a tincture of opium, that he had learned to make, telling himself that he was merely doing quality control. In the past several days, he had gotten to feeling twitchy, anxious, nauseated, and horribly sore in all his muscles and joints if he didn’t help himself to a few drops of the stuff at regular intervals. In the cold clarity of the outdoors, watching the geese on the river, he could see where that path might lead.

  He could also see where society was going and it spooked him to the jellies at his core. It was going to a dark age. All of the old certainties of the Enlightenment had come to seem like a bad joke with the electricity out for good and circumstances making a mockery of his medical training—and, by extension, the entirety of science. Antibiotics were only the beginning of the supplies and equipment that were no longer available to him. About the only thing that couldn’t be taken away, that couldn’t plunge him all the way back to the eighteenth century, was his knowledge. For instance, of basic sanitary procedures such as scrubbing before examinations and surgery and sterilizing his instruments in the nonelectric autoclave he’d found in a barn among the effects of one Dr. Raymond Triffen (1878–1939), offered for sale up in the town of Argyle by Triffen’s descendants. Nobody could take the germ theory of disease away from him. He knew, unlike the physicians even of the great Benjamin Rush’s day, that disease was caused not by miasmas, humours, spells, impure thoughts, or supernatural agency but by microorganisms, toxins, and genetic programming. He was well trained in the minutiae of anatomy and physiology. When things didn’t work—limbs, eyes, organs—he was able to deduce what might be happening with them, even if he was not able to treat them successfully anymore.

  But how long would such specialized knowledge persist in this darkening age? Without the solid institutional support of the medical schools and the professional associations and the journals, what would people know three generations ahead? Would they remember genetics? Germs? Basic hygiene? After the Romans left Britannia, the doctor ruminated, the Britons stopped bathing and even forgot how to make pottery. The archaeological record showed it conclusively. He took a last hit on his pipe and a sip of whiskey, and his thoughts turned again to his son Jasper, who by now would have finished his chore of cleaning up the surgery. Jasper had been training with him for more than a year and the doctor was quite sure that he would become a competent physician before he was out of his teens, without the ridiculous hazing ceremonies of internship and residency that the doctor’s generation had been subjected to. Perhaps Jasper would become a better doctor than his father, given what he had to work with. At least he would not be tortured by the same regrets about what he had lost.

  SEVEN

  Daniel Earle had finished drawing a proof of his latest trial newspaper layout at about 5:30 that evening down in the old temperance hall that was his living and work space. Daylight waned in the big windows and he was tired after working twelve hours with only a break for lunch, which would be the same as his supper: a days-old soup of this and that he kept simmering atop the woodstove. He hadn’t spoken to another human being all day, he realized, when somebody knocked on his door. He wiped the ink off his fingertips and navigated around all the stuff in the big room in long graceful strides to find his father’s girlfriend, Britney, waiting outside the door. She bustled right in and went over to the long oval table near the woodstove. It served as his kitchen prep area and dining station and he often read and studied there when he was not working.

  “I brought you some things,” Britney said. She put a basket down on his table and began taking items out of it. “Here’s some corn bread. Turnip and onions for your soup. Some preserved pork. It’s salty. I’d soak it for a day and change the water a few times before you put it in your pot. Oh, and here’s a little honey.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel said. “But maybe it’s time you stopped bringing me things.”

  “We have extra,” she said.

  They stood in place, regarding each other without words for an elongated moment.

  “Are we playing ‘stare down’?” Britney asked.

  “I’m not.”

  “Do you want some company?”

  Daniel had to think about it. Britney excited his senses in a way that set off alarm bells in several parts of his brain.

  “Sure,” he said. He sat down at the long table and began skinning the onions before chopping them.

  “Mind if I sit too?” Britney asked.

  “Go ahead,” Daniel said. He lit a candle on the table.

  “Maybe I’m bothering you.”

  “Does my father know you’re here?”

  “He hadn’t come home when I left.”

  “Does he know you bring me stuff?”

  “Of course. He wants you to . . . to thrive.”

  Daniel dumped the onion skins into a battered plastic garbage pail.

  “You should start a second soup pot and put your vegetable peels in it so you always have some fresh stock to add to the regular pot,” Britney said. “That’s how I do it.”

  “I don’t have another pot.”

  “I can bring you one.”

  They sat in silence again while Daniel peeled and trimmed the turnip.

  “I’m surprised you don’t have a woman yet,” Britney said.

  “What’s surprising about it?”

  “You could have your pick. All those girls doing farm labor.”

  “I can barely take care of myself.”

  “You could take care of each other.”

  “Maybe I’m not ready for that.”
<
br />   “A full-grown man like you? Do you like women?”

  Daniel swept the chunks of turnip into his hand and dumped them in his soup pot.

  “Did my father tell you what happened in Tennessee?”

  “He said you went there.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Pretty much. Why?”

  “Did he tell you I killed a woman there?”

  Britney recoiled.

  “You?” she said. “You killed someone?”

  “I did,” Daniel said. He looked straight at her for an awkward interval, but then his eyes clouded and moistened and he averted them back down at the empty chopping board on the table.

  “What did she do to you?” Britney asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She was evil.”

  “Evil? How?”

  Daniel shook his head. Britney saw his shoulders hump and shudder as he began to weep. She watched for a while, then got up from her seat, hurried around the table, stooped down beside Daniel’s chair, and attempted to put her arms around him, but he stood up abruptly and turned away.

  “Excuse me,” he said, trying to get hold of his emotions.

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’ll never be all right,” Daniel said. “But that’s not your fault.”

  He turned in place. Britney stepped toward him.

  “Maybe I better go,” she said.

  Daniel did not reply but merely stood his ground studying her as if the two of them were chess pieces on a board come to life, able to decide for themselves which way to move. He could not fail to notice her chest heave under her lumpy brown sweater.

  “Yes, you should go,” he said.

  EIGHT

  Robert Earle called the village trustees to a meeting in the upstairs of the old town hall on Main Street the following Monday evening. The big room, with its hand-painted ceiling, was the scene of many a seasonal ball and holiday levee. Here, too, Andrew Pendergast’s community theater company put on their plays and musicals, beloved by a people who had lost their access to recorded entertainments. The scenery flats of the New England seaside village left over from last fall’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel stood onstage at the far end of the room. Auditions for the spring production of The Boys from Syracuse would get under way in a week. Most of the seats were stacked up against the wall. Eleven chairs were deployed around a long table at the center of the room. At seven p.m., a salmon-colored sun could be seen through the tall, arched windows, hanging just above the crest of Schoolhouse Hill behind a band of wine-dark clouds and a scrim of budding pink treetops. Robert threw open a lower sash to let in some spring evening air.

  Shortly, the trustees could be heard climbing the wooden stairs: Ben Deaver, Todd Zucker, Ned Larmon, all wealthy farmers, Loren Holder, minister of the Congregational Church, Jason LaBountie, the veterinarian, Robbie Furnival, the cordwood cutter, lawyer Sam Hutto, storekeeper Terry Einhorn, and Brother Jobe. Robert chaired the meeting from one end of the long table. Leslie Einhorn, recording secretary, sat at the other end taking notes. She’d brought to the meeting a tin of the popular oat and nut cookies sold in the store. They resembled the granola bars of yore. Her husband, Terry, lit three candles along the table as the daylight dwindled.

  Young Daniel Earle arrived minutes later amid the brief pleasantries and took a seat outside the charmed circle of the trustees’ conference table. He brandished a clipboard holding some loose sheets of paper and a pencil stub.

  “What do you think you’re doing here, son?” Jason LaBountie said. He’d been up since one in the morning the previous night with a colicky horse and his brain ached. “We’ve already got a recording secretary.”

  “Haven’t you heard? He’s the press,” Ben Deaver said.

  “You starting a newspaper, sonny?”

  “I’m bringing back the old News Leader.”

  “I used to line the cat box with it.”

  “You’ll find it much changed, sir. Would you like to advertise?”

  “I’ve got all the work I can handle,” LaBountie said. “It was the news media that brought down this country, you know.”

  “Quit talking out of your ass, Jason,” said Robbie Furnival, who was a very large man, physically powerful from wrangling logs every day, and unafraid of expressing himself.

  Robert tapped the butt end of his Swiss Army knife on the tabletop to get everyone’s attention. The trustees dutifully took their seats.

  “Some of you might have heard we have a situation with our supply line for trade goods,” Robert began, and explained what he and Terry had learned at Bullock’s the other day concerning the trade boat. He omitted mentioning the picker pinned through his skull to the tree, in order to avoid a distracting ruckus over it. “Bullock’s right, of course,” Robert continued. “We ought to get our own boat instead of being at the mercy of his moods and whims. To that end, I suggest we take up some kind of collection around town—”

  “Sounds like a tax,” LaBountie said. “A coming-at-you-sideways tax.”

  “No, it isn’t. Nobody will be forced to pay anything,” Robert said. “And frankly I’m going to ask the farmers to dig a little deeper than the rest.”

  Ben Deaver made a face and appealed to his fellow farmers Todd Zucker and Ned Larmon, but they would not venture to argue about it. In the new times, in the absence of big corporations and a so-called consumer economy, wealth came from land used productively, putting farmers on the higher rungs of the economic ladder.

  “We’d be looking altogether for about a hundred ounces of silver,” Robert said. “Is that right, Daniel?”

  “Maybe a little more depending on the boat,” Daniel said. “Or four, five ounces of gold.”

  Ned Larmon whistled through his teeth.

  “Wait a minute,” Jason LaBountie said. “He’s not a member of this board. He can’t participate in the discussion at the same time he reports on it.”

  “Relax, will you, Jason—” Loren said.

  “Anyway, we didn’t vote to admit any news media to village board meetings.”

  “Move to vote to admit journalists to the meeting,” Sam Hutto said.

  “Second,” Robbie Furnival said.

  “Call to vote,” Terry Einhorn said.

  “All in favor?” Robert said.

  Nine hands went up, plus Leslie Einhorn’s.

  “She’s not a voting member of this board,” LaBountie said.

  “Motion is carried in any case,” Robert said. “Press is welcome to observe the meeting,”

  “Move for public discussion,” Loren said. “So he can speak too.”

  “Second,” Terry Einhorn said.

  “Oh for chrissake. What does the kid know about boats anyway?” LaBountie asked.

  “I bought a cargo scow at Buffalo summer before last, sir,” Daniel said, “and sailed on Lake Erie.”

  “Did you run freight?” Todd Zucker asked.

  “Never got to,” Daniel said. “I lost her in a storm on the shoals off Sandusky.”

  “Not much of a sailor, then, were you?”

  “It was a wicked gale, sir, as they are on the lakes, and it came up fast without warning.”

  “Sorry to hear it. But how’d you get the money for the boat in the first place?” LaBountie asked. “A hundred ounces of silver, or so you say.”

  “I had it,” Daniel said.

  “Oh, you just had it? A veritable fortune?” LaBountie said. “Got any more where you had it from? Maybe you can buy the town a boat. And, by the way, what did you pay for this newspaper? And who to?”

  “You’re out of line, Jason,” Robert said.

  “It was an abandoned property,” Daniel said.

  “Well, shouldn’t unclaimed, abandoned prope
rty become an asset of the town, of the common weal, so to speak?” LaBountie said. “An editor, for one, ought to have some sense of the public interest, don’t you think? Oh, and I assume this newspaper is intended to be a moneymaking operation.”

  “Of course I intend to make a living at it.”

  “Maybe you should kick back some of your profits into the village kitty and then we don’t have to levy a coming-at-you-sideways tax at folks that barely have a pot to piss in, pardon my French.”

  “Other commercial operations are being run in abandoned properties,” Daniel said. “Schroeder’s creamery was a garage in the old times owned by one Butch Casper.”

  “Butch was a friend,” Todd Zucker said. “Influenza got the whole family.”

  “McWhinnie’s Boots and Harness used to be a restaurant,” Daniel said, “and before that a butcher shop and the building was owned by a George Hazen.”

  “He was a village trustee back in the day,” Sam Hutto said. “Coached Little League too. I was his attorney. Died without issue just before that bomb destroyed our nation’s capital.”

  “Allison’s Livery used to be the video rental store owned by Paul Michaelides—”

  “Encephalitis,” Sam said. “Strange to relate, the building was originally built as a livery stable, way before Paul had it. What goes around comes around, I guess.”