The Harrows of Spring

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Dig in.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh please! Of course you are. Running around the countryside like a goddamn savage, looting and burning. Doesn’t that work up an appetite?”

  “Mister. You scold me for being sarcastic, but you talk in circles,” Terrio said. “Why don’t you just get to the point. How come you’re keeping me alive?”

  “Well, all right, then. First, I wonder if you might clarify this Berkshire People’s Republic baloney. What was that all about?”

  “It doesn’t exist,” Terrio said.

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Just a line of bullshit to get hard money out of suckers. We’re from over there, but it’s no better off than this part of the country, maybe worse. It was all Buddy’s idea. He picked up kids with no family, no parents, along the way to front him. Then he brought us into the picture and things got a little rougher. Now, here we are.”

  “Yes, here we are,” Bullock said. “How do you like it here?”

  “What? This place?”

  “Yes. Does it seem comfortable? Civilized?”

  “Civilized,” Terrio echoed him. “I’ve been struggling with that.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Look, the old me would say it’s a hell of an operation,” Terrio said. “I was sorry to try and burn it down.”

  “Why, thank you,” Bullock said. “And so now I’m thinking, perhaps this man—you—may prove useful in an enterprise like this, a person with the skills you have, and elastic scruples. You’re like a good piece of equipment, a weapon of war, say, that might come in handy. So why throw it away? Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I think so.”

  “Of course I had to sacrifice your traveling companions. I couldn’t keep such a crew around, wondering if you’d try to cut our throats some night. Please taste the omelet. It’s our own cheese and the ham comes from pigs that are finished off on acorns before we slaughter them.”

  Lilah returned with a pot of coffee and filled each man’s delicate pink luster cup, then set down the cream pitcher and honeypot.

  “Is that real coffee?” Terrio said.

  “Puerto Rican arabica, a sassy Mondo Nuevo.”

  “Damn. Where do you get it?”

  “If you make a little effort you can get stuff,” Bullock said. “We get stuff.”

  “Okay, what can I do for you?” Terrio said, and hoisted his fork to address the contents of his plate.

  “Do you know what a Pelton wheel is?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “It’s the key part of a hydroelectric generator system. I have such a system here. The Pelton wheel is what the running water hits to spin the turbine. As it happens, mine broke. I thought I was being clever to lay in several backup replacements, but they broke too. Serves me right. They were manufactured in China. If the goddamn thing was working, we’d be listening to some Erik Satie right now—just the thing for a beautiful spring morning. Did you know that Satie and Claude Monet were born in the same town in France about twenty-five years apart?”

  “No,” Terrio said.

  “I think of them as absolutely complementary, the music, the paintings—like fromage and jambon.”

  “Huh?”

  “You wonder what was in the air of Honfleur in those days.”

  Terrio just shook his head and tucked into his omelet. They ate silently for a minute.

  “Why didn’t you go solar?” Terrio eventually said.

  “Intermittancy,” Bullock said. “Sometimes the sun shines, sometimes it doesn’t. The Battenkill always flows.”

  “Even in the depths of winter?”

  “Oh yeah. The penstock is well below the ice formation.”

  “What’s the penstock?”

  “It’s a pipe that concentrates the flowing water into the turbine.”

  “Oh—”

  “But this is getting didactic.”

  “Huh?”

  “Too much information,” Bullock said. “The thing is, I know a gentleman over in the Camden Valley, just over the Vermont line, who purchased the exact same system as I did. Name of Blake Harmon. He’s doing pretty well over there, considering these times. He laid in some extra parts too.”

  Bullock hoisted his coffee cup.

  “You want me to go over there and get ’em?” Terrio asked.

  “I was thinking of something along those lines,” Bullock said.

  “I could do that. I could get ’em for you.”

  “Then maybe I could find some other ways you can be useful here. You’d have to live on the property, of course.”

  “I could live on the property.”

  “And not in some silly-ass wigwam, either.”

  “I can return to your ways.”

  “Oh, come on. They were your ways, too, most of your life. Plus, you have to wear regular clothing. Grow your hair back like a normal person. Halloween’s over.”

  “Whatever.”

  Bullock dashed his damask napkin into his empty plate and downed the last of his coffee.

  “I think we’ve reached a framework for understanding,” he said.

  Terrio lifted his coffee cup, a wary smile for the first time lightening his not unhandsome features.

  “Cheers to that, sir, and second the motion,” he said.

  “That’s the spirit. All right fellows, take him back.”

  “Huh? You’re putting me in that hole again?”

  “Well, I have to think about this,” Bullock said. “Weigh the pros and cons.”

  “But you said we had an understanding.”

  “Yes, a nice framework for an agreement. I won’t shilly-shally over it. Don’t worry. But this is a large establishment with a lot of complex parts and relationships. And it’s my responsibility to consider the big picture.” Bullock turned to his aide. “Oh, Dick, better put the cuffs back on.”

  “What!”

  “Just a formality. To preclude any transitory temptation.”

  “Oh, fuck you, mister . . .” Terrio said.

  “See what I mean? How am I supposed to keep you around if you fly off the handle so easily?”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” Terrio said. “I apologize. Really. Go ahead, put the cuffs back on. Look, I’m cooperating.”

  “Noted,” Bullock said, then he left the table. Dick Lee and Michael Delson led Duane Terrio back to the basement of the carriage barn.

  Ten minutes later, Bullock emerged back into the courtyard, where Dick Lee held the reins of a fresh mount for him. His lumber crew was cutting some old-growth cedar on Lily Pond Hill two miles over at the west end of his property and he wanted to make sure they didn’t overdo it.

  “I’ve been thinking it over, Dick,” Bullock said as he put one leg on the mounting block.

  “Yes?” Dick Lee said.

  “That fellow’s just not going to work out.”

  Dick Lee nodded.

  “It was worth a try,” Bullock added.

  “I’ll take care of it, sir.”

  Bullock climbed on board his fresh horse and rode off to supervise the morning’s work.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Britney told Robert that she was going out gathering wilds. The morning was warm, dry, and so clear that, to Britney, the air itself seemed to magnify every detail of the waking world, every leaf, every cloud, every living, flying, buzzing thing. Robert had gotten up before her to make their breakfast, but when she came downstairs she said that her stomach was too upset to eat. She said good-bye through the door while he was in the bathroom and left the house without a sack or basket to carry her wild gatherings home.

  She took Main Street east out of town, past the ruined Kmart, and hiked up the empty highway through a landscape raucus with birdsong until she got t
o the old railroad right-of-way that led just a short distance to the decrepit steel truss bridge across the Battenkill. She walked carefully down the old rotting wooden ties that lay across the rusty girders, cognizant of the irony in watching her step. She stopped about two-thirds of the way across. Forty feet below, the large glacial erratic boulder called the Priest by fly fishers of the old times waited in a current reduced in force from its early spring flow. The Battenkill made a lush green tunnel an eighth of a mile down to a bend in the river where yellow iris blazed in a sunbeam above a quiet shoal. Cedar waxwings dipped back and forth across the stream eating caddis flies as they shed their larval armor and took flight as adults. The insects that dallied in the surface tension skin of the water, drying their wings too long, were slurped down from below by hungry trout, who made little dimples in a pool downstream of the Priest as they fed.

  Britney could not reconcile the stupendous beauty of the world with its sadness. The birds, the fish, and the insects that performed in the spectacle before her all owed some duty to violence and death, Britney thought, and so did she. There was no escape from it. In the old times, which she remembered very well, there was a multitude of distractions to allow you to forget these primal obligations to existence. Some people never even encountered them until their final moments, when it turned out to be the biggest surprise of their lives. The last thing she would be, Britney thought, on this warm, bright spring morning, was surprised.

  A waist-high strut ran the length of the bridge on the edge of the carriageway deck. Britney leaned against it breathing deeply. Her pulse raced and her head pounded as she contemplated what she willed herself to do. A sour bile rose into her throat as if a reminder of creation’s bitter ruthlessness and her vision blurred as her eyes filled with tears. She made a short speech in her head thanking Robert for his kindness and care, apologizing for the way she’d said good-bye, and wishing his forgiveness, and then she stepped on a diagonal brace to climb to the top of the strut.

  Jane Ann Holder saw the figure on the bridge from about fifty yards down the tracks on the far side of the river. She had been earnestly gathering wilds herself—nettles and burdock in a sack and morel mushrooms in a basket—as a way to get outside and clear her head after the ordeal of the night surgery. She had been relieved in the recovery room at seven in the morning by Bobbie DeLand, who had been a geriatric nurse. The horror of the dying and mutilated children still left Jane Ann wobbly and a night without sleep amplified the raw emotion roiling inside her. When she halted in her footsteps up the tracks from the bridge, and realized that the woman in the thin white frock was Britney, she put down her sack and basket and called out to her. As Britney turned her head to see who was hailing her, Jane Ann hurried the rest of the way onto the bridge. Britney clambered onto the strut, looked down at the Priest and at Jane Ann rushing toward her, and let go of her grip on the vertical girder post. For a moment she hung suspended between the world and the not-world. But Jane Ann was six inches taller than Britney, and strong, and she gripped Britney around the hips and wrenched her down off the strut. In the process, both women fell in a heap on the railroad ties that formed the flimsy, rotting deck, Britney shrieking and flailing at Jane Ann with her fists. Jane Ann held tight to Britney until her shrieks became sobs and she stopped struggling.

  “Let me go,” Britney sobbed.

  “Only if you promise to be still,” Jane Ann said.

  She hesitated to agree and Jane Ann held on. Finally Britney said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay . . .”

  Jane Ann relaxed her grip. She could see daylight and rushing water through the railroad ties and girders beneath. She torqued her body and hauled herself upright. Then she reached down and took hold of Britney’s slender but muscular upper arms, hoisted her up, and allowed Britney to fall into her embrace.

  “Come, let’s sit together awhile,” Jane Ann said.

  Britney nodded.

  Jane Ann led the smaller woman the rest of the way across the bridge to a mossy embankment cut through the land a century and a half earlier by the railroad builders. The gentle slope there was as soft as a carpet.

  “Come sit.”

  They lowered themselves onto the moss. Sunlight shimmered in the silver beeches across the tracks as a mild breeze stirred the glittery coinlike leaves. Britney cried again for a long time and Jane Ann simply held her hand until she ran out of tears.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” Britney said.

  “I won’t.”

  “What am I going to do in this world?” Britney asked.

  Jane Ann hesitated, struggling to contain her own emotions.

  “I heard what happened to you,” she said. “I know what it’s like to lose a child. Evan has been gone for three years. Every day I have to battle with the empty hope that he’ll turn up. I don’t win the battle. But even so, something inside me remains grateful to be in this world. I don’t want to leave it, even if he’s gone. If anything, I feel a stronger duty to remain here.”

  “This world is vile,” Britney said.

  “No, it’s a strange and mysterious gift. But it’s up to us to care about each other and somehow, after a while, that leads to caring about being here.”

  “I don’t know if I can bother trying anymore.”

  “There’s a child who needs you,” Jane Ann said.

  “What child?”

  “One of the kids wounded yesterday.”

  Britney looked bewildered.

  “You don’t know what’s happened?”

  Britney shook her head. “Something about bandits, Robert said.”

  “These were not bandits,” Jane Ann said. She described the incident in the hayfield. The casualties. The night surgery. The survivors.

  “How terrible,” Britney said.

  “There’s a little girl, six, maybe seven, we’re not sure. No name yet. Her lower leg was shattered and the doctor had to take it off. She’ll need a home. She’s not going back to where she came from. None of them are. Would you consider taking this little girl in and caring for her?”

  Britney appeared overwhelmed.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Would you come see her with me?”

  Britney brought the heels of her palms up to her eyes, struggling to find the will to reply.

  “You’re a good mother,” Jane Ann said.

  Britney dropped her hands, nodded her head, and resumed weeping.

  “Okay,” she said between sobs. “Okay.”

  Jane Ann put an arm around Britney’s shoulder and drew her close. They sat in a little patch of sunlight until Britney came back to herself.

  “Come,” Jane Ann said. “Let’s go see her.”

  She helped Britney to her feet. Jane Ann retrieved her sack and her basket. Together they crossed the old railroad bridge and made their way back to town.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Bullock returned from the timber cutting at midday for lunch with his wife. Sophie brought a basket up to the Japanese teahouse that Robert Earle had built some years ago beside the half-acre pond stocked with trout. They sat on cushions at a low wooden table in the open pavilion with blue clematis climbing up the trellis on each side. The table was weather-burnished the same vivid silver color as Sophie’s hair. She took the various items out of the basket and arranged them on the table: a small teapot and two porcelain cups, a glass box containing negimaki—grilled rolls of thin-sliced beef around spring onions—and another of mushroom dumplings, a tiny ceramic jug with a wooden stopper containing soy sauce made on the premises, and a shaker containing ground red pepper. They ate off the blue Karakusa plates that Bullock had shipped home from Japan during his post-collegiate sojourn there. The whole operation thus far had been conducted in a kind of formal silence they often observed for these teahouse lunches, a retreat from the morning’s busyness into ceremonial Zen-like calm. Today, however, S
ophie’s concerns could not be palliated by simple stillness.

  “Dear,” she said, lifting her teacup.

  “Um . . . yes?”

  “A favor, please.”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Those trespassers you captured last night?”

  “Yes. Very bad men.”

  “Of course. Did you . . . you know . . .”

  “Yes, it’s done.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Laid out in the apple storage cooler.”

  “I hope you won’t make a morbid display of them on the River Road?”

  “You never go down there,” Bullock said.

  “Yes. But they frighten other people.”

  “Gosh, hon. That’s the idea,” he said, spreading his hands out as though a banner hung in the air between them. “Message: thieves and riffraff will be dealt with severely.”

  “A painted sign might do as well, don’t you think? Perhaps with a picture of a hanged figure.”

  “Frankly, I disagree. There’s something more persuasive about a ripe corpse hanging from a tree picked over by buzzards.”

  “Stephen! We’re eating,” she said, placing a delicate hand demurely over her midriff to denote gastric distress.

  “Sorry,” he said, brandishing a chunk of negimaki between two chopsticks, “but you know those savages came this close to burning the place down last night.”

  “I understand, darling.”

  “Who knows who or what might blow this way next. Cannibals, thrill killers, Visigoth wannabes.”

  “The thing is, dear, after a few days they begin to stink.”

  “It can’t be helped.” Bullock made a helpless face, a moue, as if his samurai demeanor had suddenly and mysteriously turned French.

  “A south wind comes up on a hot day and it’s so bad I go all cross-eyed,” she said. “It even gets into the draperies and the linens.”

  “Actually, I think the smell is a most effective element in the total presentation—”

  “I insist, darling. You must find some other way to dispose of them. Or I may be forced to, I dunno, withhold my affections.”