The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Wait!” Goodfriend shrieked.

  “Well?”

  “There is something,” Goodfriend said between wails and sobs. In another minute, stammering in desperate urgency, he betrayed Duane Terrio and his band of counterfeit Indians.

  “You mean, they’re here, out there on the property, as we speak?” Bullock asked.

  Goodfriend nodded and broke down blubbering.

  “Get the riot squad,” Bullock told Michael Delson, who departed at once to alert the core of twenty dependable men among the denizens of the plantation who were trained to disarm bandits, pickers, and other interlopers. “Let’s get this poor sot a drink,” Bullock said to Dick Lee, his sturdy aide-de-camp, who didn’t have to search far in the bottling room. He quickly located a jug of off-batch corn whiskey with a rather high fusel oil contaminent ratio, not good enough to sell and certainly not to consume on the premises.

  Bullock pulled the cork and held the jug up to Goodfriend’s lips, but they could not persuade him to drink any.

  “What’s the matter, Buddy,” Bullock said. “Lost your taste for life’s comfort?”

  Goodfriend replied only with more blubbering.

  “Very well, then,” Bullock said. “We’ll give you a little help.”

  He fetched a big red plastic funnel from the shelves and touched Goodfriend under the chin to prompt him to tip up his head. In a swift agile motion that took him back to his college EMT training days, Bullock jammed the neck of the funnel clean down Goodfriend’s throat, past the base of the tongue and the hyoid bone into the esophagus. He grabbed a good fistful of hair so Goodfriend was immobilized while Dick Lee proceeded to empty the entire contents of the jug into the funnel. Goodfriend affected to gag, but the liquor was draining straight down into his stomach.

  “Get another,” Bullock said.

  Dick Lee emptied a second jug of the 90-proof whiskey down Goodfriend’s throat. They yanked out the funnel and held him upright by main force, still chained to the bench, for a good ten minutes, at which point Goodfriend went limp. Meanwhile, they heard a distant commotion and scattered gunfire somewhere outside the two-foot-thick stone walls of the distillery’s foundation. The riot squad had engaged the enemy.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Seth left both bodies on the shoulder of Spook Hill and hurried to his appointment at the Center Falls bridge. The evening sun had just ducked behind the treetops when he saw the fifty-three armed men waiting where the road crossed the river, some squatting in the broken pavement, some leaning over the old iron railing watching trout fin the Battenkill below, and Joseph standing somewhat ahead and apart from the others, as though he knew that his comrades would show up exactly as they were supposed to. Then Seth appeared alone, hurrying down the road.

  “Where’s Elam?” Joseph asked.

  “Shot and killed, sir,” Seth said plainly, his own tears having dried in transit.

  “Oh, my good Lord,” Joseph said as though rocked by an ocean wave. “By who?”

  “Young bushwhacker from the outfit we’s after,” Seth said. “I done put an end to his career. His remains is up there too.” Seth watched Joseph struggle to get a hold of his emotions. “We’ll sort it out later, sir,” he went on. “Our objective is about two klicks yonder in a hayfield on the river.” He pointed up the road he’d just come from, opposite the setting sun.

  Joseph mustered his men to attention and explained what they were about to do next: march up the road a mile or so, duck into the woods, and take up positions around a hayfield, pinning the Berkshire raiders with their backs to the river, then round them up and march them in custody back to town, where the village trustees would determine what to do with them.

  “It’s going to be twilight time we get there,” Joseph told them. “Not the best visual conditions. I believe we can git this done without violence. They are many amongst this bunch no more than children, so don’t you be trigger happy. All right, let’s move out and set a double-time pace. We can make our objective in fifteen minutes, maybe still be able to see what the heck we’re doing.”

  A half mile up the road they came upon Brother Gabriel groaning in a ditch. That was the first they’d heard that the Berkies had hijacked his trap cart and its cargo of six rifles and ammunition. Joseph left two men with him in expectation that they would return soon with wagons and transport him back to the doctor in town.

  The rest were shortly upon the Berkshire bivouac. The hayfield had gotten a first cutting. The grass was laid in rough rows to dry before stacking. A half dozen horses were picketed near the river and the various wagons parked in a line between the field and the road. Many individual campfires were lit before the ragtag of tents, and also one larger communal one at the center of the grounds. The men of Union Grove deployed stealthily in the darkening woods on two sides of the hayfield, with several more riflemen stealing behind the idle wagons to defend that egress. The Berkshires had been cooking a communal meal at the big fire, turning out crude cornmeal and water hoecakes baked on a shovel over the coals and attempting to boil up beans in several pots on a piece of chain-link fence that was their grill. The men in the woods overheard a mixed thrum of chatter, palaver, complaint, plus the shouts and cries of children playing indefatigably and a cacophony of various stringed instruments being plucked. Somewhere in the hayfield, a child shouted, “I can’t eat this,” and an older voice shouted back, “You’ll eat it if you know what’s good for you!” Orange and green twilight lingered in treetops. When he was satisfied that all his men were in position, Joseph strode out of his cover in the woods into the open and discharged a shot from his rifle into the sky. The chatter and shouts ceased. Some of the young ones dropped closer to the ground. Heads turned toward Joseph as if viewing a fearsome apparition.

  “All of you in there, listen up!” Joseph bellowed to them. “Drop whatever you are doing and assemble over on the road.”

  None of them moved or spoke.

  “Do not tarry,” Joseph said.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” a husky female voice replied from near the big fire. It was a voice familiar, at least, to Seth.

  “We are the authorities from Union Grove,” Joseph said, “and I am placing you under arrest.”

  “We don’t recognize your authority.”

  “You don’t have a choice in the matter,” Joseph said. “You are surrounded on all sides. Assemble up on the road and do not waste another minute.”

  “He’s bluffing,” one of the older boys shouted across the campground. “It’s a trick.”

  “This is no bluff and no trick,” Joseph said. “Get up to the road or we will come and drag you up there.”

  “Stay where you are!” the same boy retorted.

  There was no further reply. Joseph waited thirty seconds and gave the signal to press inward, which was transmitted all round the hayfield. The men of Union Grove began to emerge from the woods in the dim light and press in. As they did, they were met by the muzzle flashes of rifle fire from the center. They dropped to the ground and commenced to return fire in withering volleys, their own rifles well outnumbering their adversaries’. The fierce exchange lasted barely ten seconds. When it was over, groans, shrieks, and weeping could be heard all around. Joseph and ten men on the south side of the hayfield swept into the campground. The men on the other sides followed, snagging many of the youngsters as they attempted to escape into the woods or past the line of wagons. In the chaotic hour that followed, with daylight extinguished and only the big campfire at center providing any illumination, all the young adults and children of the Berkshire spring outreach were rounded up under armed guard and accounted for, including Flame Aurora Greengrass, their weapons taken from them. Nine of their number lay dead, all ages from a girl six years old to a boy of seventeen, lined up like windrows in the hay stubble. Seven additional wounded were placed in the wagons. One man of Union Grove lay dead: Bob B
ouchard, a woodcutter on Robbie Furnival’s crew, shot in the eye. One Ralph Horsley, a laborer on the Ben Deaver farm, broke his ankle tripping over a log. Joseph left Seth with five men behind to wait for daylight, when they could inspect the premises for anyone and anything of value left behind and retrieve the two bodies off Spook Hill. Everyone else, the living, the groaning wounded, the dead, returned to town in procession as the moon rose over the old county highway.

  At the head of the procession Joseph drove the trap cart that the Berkies had taken from Brother Gabriel earlier that day. A sickness of spirit gripped Joseph all the way back to town as he realized that the action of this evening would resound in infamy far, wide, and long: the massacre of the children. History would not care about the actual circumstances, that he and his men were fired upon and responded instinctively as men under fire will. Nobody will see or care about any part of this story except the children gunned down by grown men, Joseph thought, a slaughter of innocents, whether it was true or not.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Robert went to Daniel’s newspaper office and living quarters directly, before he even brought Mookie back to the New Faith stable. A light burned deep within through the front window. He tied the horse to a lilac bush beside the building, tried the doorknob, and entered without knocking. Daniel was seated at the end of the long table near the woodstove, eating a supper of the remaining things he and Teddy had brought back from Albany: some smoked sturgeon, hard cheese, and what was left of the groat bread. He was also working on a bottle of Kinderhook rye whiskey.

  Daniel stood up abruptly as Robert entered. Father and son regarded each other for a long moment across a yawning gap of age, experience, and expectation.

  “We only returned a little while ago,” Daniel said. “We were on the river all day long. Then we had to off-load the cargo. I was going to come over to the house later.”

  “I guess you found a suitable boat.”

  “A fine one. Got hold of some good broadsheet newsprint paper too.”

  “Great,” Robert said. “Can I sit with you awhile?” He seemed agitated and abstracted to Daniel.

  “Sure,” Daniel said. He fetched another glass from the nearby hoosier cabinet and poured Robert a double dram of whiskey. “You smell like a horse.”

  “The whole world smells of horse,” Robert said. “I’ve been riding all over the county.” He helped himself to some of the smoked fish with his fingers.

  “You must be hungry,” Daniel said. He fetched another fork and plate for his father, sliced off some cheese, and carved up the heel of the groat bread to share.

  “Whoever smoked this fish knew what they were doing,” Robert said.

  “It’s from a provisioner in Albany. Aulk’s.”

  Robert told Daniel about the barn burnings, the men gotten up like Indians terrorizing the farmers, the shakedowns and robberies, the phantom presence of Glen Ethan Greengrass holed up in the new hotel.

  “I heard about some incident at Einhorn’s store today,” Daniel said.

  “What incident? I was gone all day.”

  “Late morning, a bunch of those Berkshire kids looted the place. They roughed up Teddy’s father and the retarded boy.”

  “How bad?”

  “They’ll be all right. They beat them with a broom handle.”

  They ate silently for a while. The whiskey got into Robert’s bloodstream quickly. He looked up at Daniel. His eyes were moist and he appeared to have difficulty forming words.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “Something terrible has happened to us,” Robert said. A sound came out of him that was something between a groan and a bark. He covered his face and sobbed. Daniel had not seen his father in such a state since his mother, Sandy, died. He nervously got up from the table and stood back in the dimness beyond the corona of the candlelight, as if he had to physically put distance between himself and his father’s torment.

  “Our little girl died,” Robert said, his voice full of phlegm and grief.

  “Huh?”

  “Sarah.”

  “What? Just like that? While I was gone?”

  Robert nodded.

  “Oh no . . .” Daniel moaned and doubled over as if someone had kicked him in the gut. He struggled to control his own breathing. He had come to know Britney’s little girl as though she were his own sister.

  Robert struggled to compose himself again. He managed to tell Daniel the story in a string of succinct sentences: tetanus, the death scene, the burial at the old house. When Robert was finished, Daniel rolled his eyes in a gesture of cynical contempt for the malign and capricious entity some called God.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “She was a dear, sweet child.”

  Robert nodded but choked up on a tangle of words unspoken and fell to weeping again with his face buried on his arms on the table. Daniel came around the table and squeezed his father’s shoulder. He was sure that anything else he might say would be fatuous. Eventually, his father pulled himself together again and Daniel returned to his seat, thinking he could just abide with father and his grief for a while. He poured himself another whiskey and refreshed Robert’s glass.

  Robert knocked it back in one gulp.

  They sat together silently awhile longer, Robert slumped in his seat, eyes unfocused, looking inward, really.

  “Britney wants another child.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “I do,” Robert said. “And I don’t want to lose her.”

  “Then give her another child.”

  “I can’t.”

  Daniel puzzled over that a moment.

  “When I was recovering at the house,” he said, “I was pretty sure you two were . . . doing it.”

  “Yeah,” Robert said. “We do it.”

  “So keep doing it. You know, on the right day when she’s—”

  “I had a vasectomy back . . . after your sister was born.”

  “A what?”

  “You don’t know what a vasectomy is?”

  “I never heard of it.”

  Robert just stared at Daniel for a moment, putting it together. Of course Daniel had never heard of a vasectomy. It was no longer part of adult life in the new times of America, hadn’t been since Daniel was a small child. There may have been a number of things Robert took for granted that Daniel had never heard of because they no longer existed: radiation therapy, Prozac, dialysis, liposuction, stents, CAT scans, gastric bypass.

  “It’s an operation where they snip the little tubes that carry your sperm into the stream of semen,” he explained.

  “Like castration?”

  “No, no. Your testicles still produce male hormones. But you’re effectively sterilized. You can’t get a woman pregnant.”

  “You had that?”

  “Yeah. It just was after we’d moved here. The economy was just starting to fall apart. We had no idea it would get to this, but we were afraid to bring any more children into the world. Anyway, it’s done. They can’t undo it. I can’t give Britney a child.”

  They sat at the table in the candlelight silently for a long time after that, working on the Kinderhook rye.

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Robert said eventually.

  “Yes. What about?”

  “Maybe you could . . . you know . . .” Robert had been staring into the refracted light of the candle flame in his whiskey glass. He looked up at Daniel and they locked into each other’s gaze.

  Daniel did not say anything. He just nodded his head to signify that he’d comprehended.

  “Just . . . an idea,” Robert said. “Maybe you could think about it.”

  Daniel nodded again. Robert drank down the whiskey remaining in his glass and pushed back from the table.

  “I guess I’ll be going,” he said.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Joseph l
eft the injured and dead children at the doctor’s with four New Faith brothers and several townsmen to assist the doctor in moving them in and out of his surgery and the springhouse that served as his morgue. Then he hurried to the old high school and dispatched some of the sisters who had experience nursing the invalid Mary Beth Ivanhoe when she was ill down to the doctor’s place as well. The fifty-nine Berkshire children and teens arrested but not injured were taken to the sanctuary, formerly the school assembly hall, where blankets were found for them, and guards posted to watch over them sleeping on the proscenium stage until it could be decided what further to do. Joseph took Flame Aurora Greengrass to a special solitary cell, a small chapel that had been a teachers’ lounge in the old times, and placed her under guard there. Finally, he faced the awful task of informing Brother Jobe what had happened.

  The pastor and honcho of the New Faith Covenant Brotherhood Church of Jesus was in his quarters, the old principal’s suite on the first floor, where he’d been waiting anxiously all evening for the return of the defense force. He sat behind his desk, where he’d been trying without much success to compose a sermon for the coming Sunday service titled: “Getting in the Glory Land Way for Dummies.” Joseph entered without knocking. Brother Jobe shot out of his seat.

  “You’re still up, then,” Joseph said.

  “’Course I’m up,” Brother Jobe retorted. “Did you find them birds?”

  “Yessir,” Joseph said, fingering his hat.

  “You round ’em up and bring ’em back?”

  “Yessir, we did.”

  Brother Jobe waited for more.

  “Well, don’t just stand there like a seegar store injun.”

  “It didn’t go down so smooth, sir.”

  “Let’s have the details, then.”

  When he learned that the stalwart Elam was dead Brother Jobe’s legs wobbled. He lunged for the back of his desk chair and lowered himself gingerly into the seat as if he might fall down on the floor and shatter like a porcelain statuette. Then, when Joseph went on to say that they had killed and wounded over a dozen children in the skirmish, Brother Jobe cradled his forehead in his hands, leaned forward on his elbows, and struggled to keep from hyperventilating. Joseph gave him the rest of it briefly and gently: Seth remained at the site of the fray and would bring back the bodies of Elam and his murderer at daylight. The wounded were at the doctor’s. The rest of the children were in custody on the premises and the woman known as Flame was sequestered from the rest under guard in the little chapel.