World Made by Hand: A Novel

by James Howard Kunstler

  At our journey's end another long day had spent itself. When our party entered the front drive of the Bullock farm, we'd marched twenty miles since breakfast, pausing to dig a six-foot hole in the ground. The sun was down, but plenty of purple afterglow remained and to the east a coppery quarter moon was rising in the warm haze. The antique foursquare manse never looked lovelier, with trumpet vine blossoming over the pergola outside the kitchen, roses in the arbors, two potted fig trees beside the door, swallows dipping around the eaves, and purposeful human activity evident everywhere your eye came to rest. Lights glowed warmly inside the big house and a Debussy recording played. It was the epitome of what you would want to return home to after a harrowing journey to a dark place.

  I could see Stephen and Sophie Bullock at their dinner table through the French windows as we rode up. We must have made quite a commotion in the stillness of that hour. They put down their forks and bustled out of the house. The courtyard between the big house and the barns and workshops soon filled with Bullock's servants, and someone rang a bell that tolled out over the fields. The four boatmen seemed overcome with emotion. Tom was weeping again. Skip fell to his knees by the big oak tree. Even Jake uncharacteristically shook and blubbered. Bullock helped Aaron down from the horse and held him up in his arms until Aaron was steady on his feet. Roger Lippy hooked leads on and led Temperance and Cadmus to the soapstone water trough. Sophie helped Skip up off the ground, and he subsided in her arms, sobbing. Shouts rang out in the distance in the still evening air. Soon most of the inhabitants of Bullock's village swept down the lanes between the fields and the barns, answering what was generally construed to be an alarm bell, to find their friends, husbands, fathers returned from the dead. Sophie called for cider and soon pitchers of the potent brew went around.

  Bullock steered Joseph and myself away from the celebrating throng to his office inside the house. It was a spacious, airy room, with walls of built-in bookshelves, a long trestle table laid with engineering drawings for his various projects, and a beautifully carved cherry wood desk that had been his grandfather's. I had tossed back a tumbler of cider and the warmth was flooding through my veins. Bullock now poured shots of his best whiskey from a cut glass decanter. He allowed as we were surely anxious to continue on home to Union Grove but wanted to know briefly how things had transpired in Albany. I told him about Dan Curry and how he was running an extortion and ransom racket there, and how we had found the boat and then the crew in his custody, and how he demanded payment outright for their release, calling it excise taxes and fines. Bullock said he could see it getting to this over the preceding year.

  "What a bold sonofabitch he's become!" he said. "You didn't pay, did you."

  "No, sir," Joseph said.

  "Good. But then how could you? I didn't send you down there with that kind of money."

  "You didn't?" I said.

  "Of course not. Excise tax, my ass!" Bullock said, smacking the tabletop for emphasis. "This idiot could disrupt all the trade in the Hudson Valley. All right, then: how did you spring my men?"

  "By other means," Joseph said.

  "Such as ..."

  "Such as was required in lieu of payment," Joseph said.

  Bullock was clearly frustrated. "Did it require force?" he said.

  "You could say that."

  "To what extent?"

  "To the extent that some people got hurt, sir."

  "Who. This Curry?"

  "Yes, I'd say Curry was among them," Joseph said.

  Bullock took this in. "What do you mean by hurt, exactly?" he said.

  "Do you really want to know?" Joseph said.

  "Go on, tell me," Bullock said.

  "I had to shoot him in the head, sir."

  "You killed him?"

  "I believe so. It's not the kind of injury that people get over."

  "Was it necessary to kill him?"

  "Yes, sir," Joseph said. "But it wasn't necessary to tell you."

  Bullock flinched, then retrieved the whiskey decanter, and poured another round of shots.

  "Were you there when this happened, Robert?" Bullock said.

  "Yes."

  "Was this necessary?"

  "He was going to hang your men," I said.

  "You sure he wasn't bluffing?"

  "He said he would in so many words. And he hanged two boys earlier that day. When I say boys, I mean boys. Two teenagers from Greenport. He told us he enjoyed it."

  "Believe me," Joseph said. "Stopping this fiend was the Lord's work."

  Bullock brooded a while. "I suppose they'll hold me responsible," he said.

  "I'm the one who shot him, sir," Joseph said. "Anyway, he wasn't the only one."

  "How many more?"

  "I don't know," Joseph said. "A good many."

  "Like what? A baker's dozen?"

  "Something like that," he said.

  Bullock poured himself yet another shot. His hands trembled visibly. "Oh, Jesus ..." he muttered to himself.

  "Curry was all the law there was down there," I said. "It began and ended with him. There won't be anybody coming up here after you. I'm pretty sure of that." I described my side trip to the capitol, the lieutenant governor rattling around the ruined building like a BB in a packing crate, the total absence of state authority.

  Bullock reflected as I spoke, sipping more liquor.

  "Hmm. I suppose the boat is a loss," he said.

  "You could send another party down for it, sir," Joseph said. "But if it was me, I'd forget about it for now and build another boat until things settle out down there."

  "I take the point," Bullock said. He seemed a little walleyed suddenly, as if the liquor was finally getting to him, and he ran his fingers down through his long white hair as if he were combing something out of it. "By the way, Robert, your man Jobe has kind of opened up a rat's nest over in town with that water project."

  "Oh? Did he get started on that?"

  'We can't make pipe fast enough. It's taking my men away from haying."

  Most of the town was already asleep when we rode through in the moonlight. The few businesses on our little Main Street were closed. Here and there a candle glowed in a window on Salem Street and then down Linden. My own house was among the lighted ones. I swung off Cadmus for the last time and collected my gear from the panniers, a little sorry to be on my own again and wary of the uncertainties that awaited me. Elam retrieved my few parcels from the donkey cart. I thanked them all for their valiant efforts in our adventures, especially Brother Minor, for his caretaking of the animals, for the many meals he had cooked, and his attention to my injury. As I said goodnight to them, the front door swung open and there stood Britney. I had thought of her in only the most abstract terms since setting off, and now it was a shock to see her in the flesh. It was too difficult to imagine the changes she might represent in my living arrangements, not to mention my spirit. The others looked at her as though she were a perfectly roasted chicken.

  "Welcome home," she said.

  Joseph tipped his hat, then led the others and their mounts down the street toward their new home, the old high school. I stood in the dooryard watching them, afraid to enter my own house, as the horses clip-clopped into the moonlight.

  "Are you hungry?" Britney said.

  "I suppose I am," I said.

  "You come in now."

  She helped me take my stuff inside. Sarah, her seven-year-old daughter, sat by a lighted candle in a rocking chair in the living room, braiding reeds into fat coils. Several new baskets sat on the floor beside her chair.

  "Welcome home, Mr. Robert," she said.

  "Thank you, Sarah. Just plain Robert is okay, though."

  "Mama told me to say that."

  "Oh? Those are very nice baskets."

  "Mama and me trade for them, you know."

  "I expect you'll do real well with those."

  I followed Britney out back, to the open summer kitchen. The house had obviously benefited from her being there.
It smelled fresher, like strewn herbs. Yet nothing was really out of place.

  "Thank you for cleaning up."

  "You were kind to take us in," she said.

  "I've been nervous about this. About how we would inhabit this house together."

  "What are your thoughts?" she said.

  "I've been trying not to have any."

  "We'll stay out of your way."

  "I don't know as I'd like that, exactly."

  "What would you like?"

  "I don't know. A normal household."

  "This isn't a normal situation, and these aren't normal times."

  "Don't I know it."

  "And I'm a young woman."

  "Yes, you are. And I'm what I am. Let's maybe start by not having to apologize for ourselves."

  "All right," she said.

  "Mostly I'm exhausted from riding and walking more than twenty miles today."

  "I have a spinach pudding made earlier tonight with some of Carl Weibel's goat cheese. There's no meat on hand. I didn't know you'd be back tonight."

  "Pudding's fine."

  "We have fresh lettuce and the first little sweet onions-"

  "I would love some kind of fresh greens-"

  "And I can make you some eggs too."

  "Please."

  "How do you like them?"

  "Scrambled. But not runny. Five or six if they're pullet eggs."

  I rooted around a cupboard and found half a bottle of Jane Ann's wine.

  "Here, sit down," Britney said, pulling out a chair for me. She lit a candle in a tin can holder on the table.

  I watched her load some splints in the cookstove and blow on them until they caught from the embers left over from their supper earlier. It was hard not to admire the delicacy and economy of her movements.

  She proceeded to fill me in on what had happened in my absence. Greg Meers, a farmer from nearby Battenville, had died in Larry Prager's dentistry chair. He was forty-seven and seemed to be in good health. He had received a substantial dose of laudanum for a root canal and his heart just stopped. He left a wife and two boys, nine and twelve.

  "I knew him slightly," I said. "He dropped out of Wayne Karp's bunch some years ago to farm on his own. Sold snowmobiles back in the old days. Not a bad fellow."

  "Dr. Prager is very upset."

  "I expect he would be."

  The main news, she said, was that the New Faith gang had commenced fixing the town water system.

  "Bullock told me they were at it," I said.

  "But some problem's developed and the water's been cut off altogether for three days now," she said. "People are coming around here looking for you, grousing, and demanding that something be done."

  "I'll see about it first thing tomorrow."

  "Those that stop by look shocked to find me here."

  "What do you tell them?"

  "I tell them I'm keeping house for you."

  "Good. It's the truth. It's exactly what you're doing."

  I very much enjoyed seeing somebody else bustling around in my kitchen. In a little while, she served me a big square of the spinach and cheese pudding and a mound of scrambled eggs.

  "May I sit with you?" she asked.

  "Sure. Would you like some of this wine? It seems to me you could use some."

  "Thank you, I will."

  She got another glass out of the cupboard while I ate. Her cooking was first-rate.

  "I want you to know a few things," she said.

  "All right."

  "My husband, Shawn, was a troubled person. Our life together was not what other people might think."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. It was what it was. For some time before he died, more than a year, we didn't sleep in the same room. It was his choice as much as mine, in case you're wondering. I think he had something going with the dairy girl up at Mr. Schmidt's. A girl named Hannah Palfrey. Came down from Granville a couple of years ago. Lives out at the farm now. I don't know much else about her. She was at the funeral, of course."

  "Was she?"

  "Oh, yes. A big cushion of a girl, especially up in here." Britney pushed up her compact breasts. "Shawn liked that. What could I do? It was a little late to go get implants."

  Luckily, my mouth was full and I couldn't comment.

  "Do you think Doctor Copeland could fix me up that way?" she said.

  "There's nothing wrong with you."

  Suddenly the electric lights went on and someone was screaming about Jesus on the radio. The power could not have been running for more than five full seconds, and then it cut out again.

  "Mama! Mama!" Sarah came dashing into the kitchen and practically leaped into her mother's lap.

  "It's all right, darling. It's over."

  "Who's that man shouting?"

  "Just a crazy preacher."

  "Why?"

  "Shouting makes them feel important."

  "If I shout, will I be important?"

  "You're already important. You don't have to shout. Maybe Mr. Robert will fix it so it won't come on again like that."

  I went and hit the power button on the old stereo. In doing it, I was conscious of putting something behind me: the expectation that things would ever be normal again. There was a kind of relief in it. I also turned off the electric lights so they wouldn't come on and scare anybody again. Britney was standing now, holding Sarah on her hip, the way one would hold a toddler, except Sarah was way beyond that stage.

  "We're going to bed now," Britney said. "There are some buckets of clean water by the sink, in case you want to wash up."

  "Thank you." I was quite desperate to bathe. "Where did you get it?"

  "The river."

  "That's a long way to carry water."

  "I'm strong," she said. "I hope you sleep well, Robert. Goodnight."

  I watched as she went inside with the sleepy child, picked up the candle from the table beside the rocking chair, and climbed the stairs. Years ago, I'd watched Sandy go up those same stairs with a child on her hip.

  Of all the things that no longer worked, we'd never lost our water before, because the town system relied on nothing more complicated than gravity. We'd never not had water, even during the worst times. The system had been put in place long ago and it was a given condition of life, like the oxygen content of the air. We never thought of it until the pressure went down that summer.

  I had that outdoor shower rigged up off the summer kitchen with a steel tank over a wood-burning firebox, all built from salvage. I had soldered a supply pipe going into the tank, and a shower nozzle coming off the bottom. It had a piece of old screen over the top to keep bugs out. I brought a chair over, poured half a bucket of water in the tank, and made a little fire in the box with some splints. Over the years, I'd developed a pretty good sense of how long it took to heat up. In the meantime, I went and fetched my fiddle from inside. I hadn't played in weeks. I was eager to put on the machine-made strings that I picked up in Albany. I switched them out with the old gut strings, one at a time, so as not to unseat the bridge. My bow was in fine condition because two things we had plenty of were horsehair and rosin. The wound steel wire strings were wonderfully even, with a clear, bright sound. I played a slow, sad favorite tune called "The Greenwood Tree" in the key of D. In a little while, the water in the shower tank was heated. I got wet enough to soap up, shut it off, and used the rest to rinse. It left me a changed man.

  A commotion of voices downstairs woke me up. The sun was well above the rooftops outside my bedroom window, so I must have slept unusually late. I threw on my summer work clothes and hurried down to find Victor Gasparry and two other local men there, Roger Hoad and Frank Arena, bullyragging Britney with complaints about the water situation.

  "Where the hell you been?" Victor said when I appeared on the stairs. "They got this deal all screwed up-"

  "We ain't had water for days now," Frank said.

  "You've got to do something!" Roger said.

  "All right, al
l right-"

  "What the hell you mean taking on leadership here and then leaving your people high and dry for the better part of a week?" Victor said.

  "Well, I'm sorry, but I had some other obligations."

  "If we wanted nothing done, we could have stuck with old Dale."

  "I'm going up there personally this morning and see what this is all about," I said, "and don't you ever come in here again raising a ruckus like this-there's a young child around!"

  "And whose child, I'd like to know," Roger muttered.

  I never did like him much, and now I liked him even less. He lived alone in the shell of the former Dunkin' Donuts and made matches by a secret process, they said, that involved boiling down large quantities of his own urine. I suppose the basic resource was easy enough for him to come by, since he drank so much. His matches were sold by the dozen at Einhorn's store. I kept mine in an old mint tin. He must have made enough off it to stay alive because everybody needed matches and they were the only kind you could get lately. They made a smell like fireworks and probably a quarter of them were duds. At this moment, I would have liked to pick Roger up by the seat of his coarse-woven pants and toss him into the street, but it occurred to me that the essence of politics was to not act on your impulses.

  "She's a child of someone who has passed away," I said. "And in these times we had better look out for each other, or there is no point to what remains of this life."

  They left us in peace, but it would be a long day ahead.

  The Union Grove water system began in a six-acre reservoir created where Alder Brook was first dammed up in 1879. The original crude wooden aqueduct system was replaced in 1921 with buried iron pipes that carried the water by gravity to the town a total of a mile and three-tenths. The earthen dam was replaced at that time by one made of concrete. A treatment station was added below in the 1950s where Hill Street dead-ends. It had not been attended to since the station superintendent, Claude Wormsley, died in the flu several years ago. We couldn't have got the chemicals to run in it now anyway.