“Your sense of humor’s still there.”
“It’s not so funny, what’s out there in America. I need something to drink. Make me wobbly cow.”
“Okay,” Robert said. A wobbly cow was a glass of milk with honey and some whiskey or apple brandy in it. He gave it to the kids when they were sick. Its power as a medication was limited, but it eased the mind a little. Robert went back to the kitchen while Daniel continued eating. The kitchen stove still had live embers in the firebox and the steel surface was warm enough to dissolve the honey in a mug of milk. He was generous with the whiskey. When he brought the beverage in, Daniel asked for more food. It was after midnight when he had finally finished eating. He had just handed the empty plate back to his father when Britney came down the stairs. Daniel followed her with his eyes, as though she were making an entrance on a stage. She wore a floral robe that had once belonged to Daniel’s mother, Sandy. Britney had lost all her own clothes when her house burned down in June. She stopped at the end of the bed.
“Hello, Daniel,” she said with her usual directness. “I’m glad to see you’re okay.”
“Do you live here?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What about Shawn?” Daniel said.
“Shawn’s dead.”
“I’m sorry. I was friends with his little brother Cody. He’s gone, too, of course. Evan’s gone. So many people dead. What happened to Shawn?”
“He got shot at the General Supply. Your father was there when it happened.”
“Did Wayne shoot him?” Daniel said. Wayne Karp was head man of the tribe of former bikers and motorheads who ran the old town landfill as a salvage operation.
“No,” Robert said. “Bunny Willman pulled the trigger.”
“He’s dumb enough,” Daniel said. “You didn’t see it?”
“I was in the office buying nails and stuff from Wayne when it happened out by the gate. Wayne’s dead now too.”
“Is anyone I know still alive here?”
“A lot’s happened since you left home. Last June, a bunch of Christian evangelicals arrived here, about eighty people. They came from Pennsylvania somewhere, but that was just a stopover from where they started in Virginia. They call themselves the New Faith Church. They bought the school . . .”
Daniel gagged slightly on his warm milk and whiskey.
“It was just sitting there, unoccupied,” Robert said. “They’ve done a lot to it, turned it into a . . . a hive of activity. I’ve worked in there myself doing renovations. You’ll see. The old ball fields are gardens and pastures now.”
“Evangelicals,” Daniel said, bitterly. “You have no idea.”
Robert flinched. Daniel as a grown man seemed a stranger to him.
“This bunch are pretty good sorts,” Robert said. “They’ve done a lot for the town.”
Daniel lowered his mug and focused his gaze on Britney. The clock on the mantel ticked. Britney looked directly back at Daniel.
“Are you two hooked up?” he said.
“I guess you could say so,” Britney said.
Robert quelled the urge to explain himself. Being intimidated by his own son was a startling mental adjustment.
“I remember you had a little girl,” Daniel said.
“Sarah’s eight years old now.”
“Is she here?”
“Of course,” Britney said and pointed upstairs.
“Oh,” Daniel said. “Has she been healthy?”
“Yes.”
Daniel turned back to his father.
“Well, I can find a place of my own, then.”
“You don’t have to think about that right now,” Robert said.
“I’m not angry at you, in case you’re wondering. Mom’s been dead for years. I understand.” Daniel’s declaration hung awkwardly in the silence that followed it. “There must still be plenty of empty houses around town.”
“You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Sure, thanks,” Daniel said, settling back against the sofa cushion, with a sigh.
“You feeling okay?”
“A lot better. The food and all.”
“Maybe you should rest now.”
“I’m tired of resting. Don’t you want to know what happened . . . out there.”
“You have all the time in the world—”
“I need to start telling you now.”
T
WENTY-EIGHT
Daniel’s Story: To the Lakes
“It was fine spring weather when we left,” Daniel said.
May. All the trees finally leafed out, fruit blossoming, people putting crops in here and there where they had the wherewithal to farm. Not everybody out on the land did. They didn’t have tools, or draught animals, the knowledge to farm, or even the will to live after all they lost. The landscape was beautiful but you could smell death everywhere. The scent of lilacs and death. That stuck.
We didn’t have to camp outside much. We found empty houses wherever we passed. You could take your pick. They were always full of people’s stuff, even though they were gone. Nothing of value, usually, ’cause pickers had always been through. Everything a mess, usually. Things strewn all over, broken, trashed. Now and then we came across a body where a person died alone and nobody came to get them or bury them. Once a whole family of four, all in one room. The bodies were pretty far gone. We figured the father probably killed them all and then himself because the largest corpse had a gun in what remained of its hand. It had five live rounds in the magazine, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic. We kept it. It’s a terrible thing to see a human being that has been unburied for some time. You could smell it down the road before you walked in the door. We never stayed over in a house where the dead lay, though obviously we went inside some of them to look.
The condition of the towns we passed through varied a lot from place to place. Based on what we saw our first weeks on the road, we rated Union Grove better than average. The towns at the center of a farming district were the best off because people could work for food, like here, and work at trades around the farming. All the population centers big and small had shrunk way down, of course. The suburban stretches were the most desolate. Wherever we went, people struggled to carry on. A lot of physically healthy people seemed to have mental problems. Maybe they were still dazed by how quickly things were changing. They had also come through another hard winter.
Here and there we came upon places like Mr. Bullock’s where some honcho had set up a domain for himself and ran things, somebody with good organizing skills and a commanding personality. These were like strongholds in a wasteland. You could tell them because all of a sudden, after many miles of raggedy farms where half-starving scarecrow people grubbed around in the soil for subsistence, you’d come upon well-tended fields, well-fed people working in groups together in an organized way, with draft animals pulling mechanical tillers and drag rakes, usually a big house in good condition visible from the road, sometimes armed guards or signs telling you to keep out. We stopped at a couple along the way those early days. Once, we offered to work for a meal and they laughed at us because we were just two jokers who didn’t know how things were done around there, but they gave us lunch anyway. Another place, they thought we were pickers and ran us off. I guess we could’ve been mistaken for pickers, but we were just travelers off to see the country.
The first town of size we came to on our quest to get to the Mohawk River was Amsterdam, New York, where the old Mohawk carpet mills stood on a bluff above the town like a giant Tibetan Buddhist monastery overlooking the valley. The buildings were so enormous. It was hard to believe that our society had produced these immense things, as if the people of the twentieth century were a race of giants who could do anything. We went inside. They were brick shells, gloomy and rank. The roofs were collapsing. The machinery was long gone. Some people had lived inside for a while, but the remnants of their campsites were old and we figured they didn’t make it through the winter.
Evan was great company, always bright and chirpy, cracking jokes, keeping it light when, if you had been all alone, after a while you might want to find a hole in the ground to crawl into just to hide from the reality of where things had gone to, or throw up, or maybe hang yourself. Evan called the dead people we came across “mummies.” He spun out an ongoing story as we hiked along about how the mummies had colonized the USA, and taken over the government, and infiltrated every level of society, and wrecked everything—and we were among the few survivors battling our way across Mummy Nation. Evan had quite an imagination.
We knew that boats were running on the Mohawk River, which fed into the old Erie Canal system, and we were hoping to catch a ride west. We didn’t have any wish to go down to New York City because it was supposed to be a pretty terrible situation all around there, and farther south in Washington, DC, where the bomb went off, forget it. The town of Amsterdam had all concentrated down by the riverfront. Everything up the hill around the old factories was abandoned. They’d destroyed the center of town way back in the old times by bulldozing most of Main Street so there would be more room for cars. The ruins of an old downtown mall still stood there, in all its stupidity. The flat roof was shot from so many winters of ice and snow. Front Street down by the river was where people did business now. There were a few new buildings, merchant houses, they called them, doing trade on the river, a tavern, a general merchandise. They’d put in docks and slips and a yard where they were building new boats for the canal trade. That’s where we met the boatman Randall McCoy, master of a barge called
Glory
. The boat’s name was an exaggeration and he was in on the joke. I wish we were. He and Evan struck up a jabber as we searched among the vessels on the waterfront for a way to the west. McCoy gave off a lighthearted impression and that snared Evan’s sense of fun. McCoy was about thirty years old, a full-hearty grown-up dude well over six feet, brawny arms, thick neck, and kept his hair long, braided in the back like an Indian of yore. He wore good linen hand-sewn, pattern-made clothes, not the old-times shiz like our people wear around here, T-shirts with pictures on them and all that. McCoy was going for respect, even if he was a jokester.
The
Glory
was seventy feet long by about eight feet wide with a draft of four and a half feet loaded. Cabin near the back end. McCoy had a team of mules in the bow, another in the stern. It was easy work for them once you got the boat going. They had a nice life. If reincarnation really exists, I wouldn’t mind coming back as a canal mule. McCoy had just tied feed bags on the bow team when we came along. He seemed to find us comical at the get-go. Evan told him we were searching for a long lost land called the United States.
McCoy goes, “I think I saw it under a rock at the Marengo Marsh cut.”
Evan goes, “What was it doing?”
McCoy’s like, “It’s just a feeble crawling little thing now. A shadow of its former self since they ran that General Fellowes out of office.”
“We’re out to see what’s left,” Evan goes. “We hear it’s lovely out on the lakes.”
“Trade’s picked up there or we wouldn’t be in business,” McCoy goes. “I’ve got a load of halite and hops going west, leaving tomorrow.”
I’m, suddenly, like, “Can we catch a ride on your boat?”
He goes, “If you pay for your own food and sleep on deck and work to offload the cargo at Lockport where they’re rebuilding the flight of five locks.”
“What’s that?” we both go.
McCoy explains that the original Erie Canal ran pretty flat across western New York until it got to the Niagara Escarpment where they had to build a big set of five locks to get boats up to the level of Buffalo and Lake Erie.
Evan goes, “Why not just go up into Lake Ontario and float into Lake Erie?”
McCoy’s like, “Ever hear of Niagara Falls, doinky-doink?”
“What about it?”
“It’s between the two lakes, is what. Kind of hard to sail up and over it in a boat.”
“And his mom’s the schoolteacher, back home,” I go, giving Evan my thumb.
“Is she really?” McCoy goes.
Evan goes, “Hey, I knew that about Niagara Falls.”
“Like hell you did,” I go.
Evan’s like, “You’re so smart, what’s the capital of Kentucky?”
I’m like, “Now how the hell should I know that?”
He goes, “We had to memorize all the capitals in the fifth grade, remember?”
“Well, I haven’t thought about it in ten years, and who gives a damn?”