The thoughts that preoccupied him as he left the house this winter evening revolved around pieces he was about to rehearse with the other members of the music circle: “The Boar’s Head Carol,” “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” “Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen,” “The Wexford Carol,” “In Dulci Jubilo,” “The Gloucester Wassail,” and about ten more. The regular music circle was composed of seven instrumentalists including himself on piano and harmonium, Robert Earle and Bruce Wheedon on violins (fiddles, they called them), Leslie Einhorn, cello, Dan Mullinex, flutes and clarinet, Eric Laudermilk on guitar, and Charles Pettie on bass fiddle and trombone. This group met once a week all year round and played at the many balls, fetes, and levees that composed the social life of Union Grove now that canned entertainment no longer existed. In addition to this lineup was the Congregational Church choir, which came on board with the music circle only at Christmas and Easter. Andrew’s mind was crowded with orchestrations as he proceeded down Main Street toward the center of the old business district. He was distracted from his musical ruminations when he noticed the unusual number of people on the sidewalks, in particular the crowd that had formed outside the New Faith group’s new tavern. It looked so wonderfully cheerful in the December twilight, like the best bars in downtown New York on a TGIF night back in the day. He was tempted to go have a look for himself, but he wanted to be on time for rehearsal so he stayed on the opposite side of the street.
As he rounded the corner onto Van Buren Street, he saw a figure in a battered and patched goosedown jacket pissing against a vacant storefront that had last been a Verizon wireless phone store and, before that, a farmers credit union, a liquor store, a psychedelic head shop (briefly), a jewelry and watch repair emporium, and for decades, starting when the building was erected in 1912, a greengrocer. As Andrew passed him, the ragged figure, named Jack Harron, age twenty-six, turned around and directed the stream of his piss toward Andrew so that a little bit of it actually splashed on the bottom of his wool overcoat. Andrew was so amazed that he stopped in his tracks.
“What are you looking at?” Harron said.
“You
. . .
wet my coat.”
“So I did,” Harron said, slurring his words. He wove and listed in his laceless boots, barely keeping upright.
Andrew searched Harron’s haggard face for something that was not present behind the scraggly brown beard. Harron returned his gaze with a chilling look in his red-rimmed eyes that denoted more an utter vacancy of purpose than actual malice.
“I have to go now,” Andrew said, thinking himself ridiculous for saying so.
“Too late for a pissing match anyway,” Harron said. “I’m all out of piss. What makes you think you’re better than other people?”
“I’m not better than other people,” Andrew said.
“Sure you are.”
Andrew spun on his heels and resumed his journey up Van Buren Street. He could see the white steeple of the Congregational Church two blocks ahead gleaming in the last moments of twilight while his brain spun out one fantasy after another about how he might have defended his honor. As he neared the church and heard the sound of instruments tuning in the community room, his fantasies of violent combat turned to a vague searching curiosity as to what this antagonist had been doing in life before the great hardships of the new times scuttled just about everybody’s hopes, dreams, and expectations—everyone except himself, Andrew Pendergast, who was thriving. Perhaps the drunken young man was right. Andrew gave the appearance of being better than other people, certainly of doing better. Was that okay, he reflected, something to be ashamed of, or just a plain fact in the new order of things?
T
HREE
Mandy Stokes, thirty-two, left her brick cottage in the Mill Hollow section of town at the prompting of a voice she called the “spirit guide” that had taken up residence within her beginning the previous summer after a brief, violent illness during which something happened in her mind. As a result, the everyday world had become for her a shadowy backdrop to a more vivid beckoning interior realm of colorful event populated by dream figures who alternately tempted and persecuted her. Mandy carried her fourteen-month-old infant boy, Julian, in an ash-splint backpack made by her husband, Rick, chief foreman on Ned Larmon’s farm. Rick was still out at the farm, baby-sitting a sick horse.
Rick was aware that his wife had come through her illness changed and distant, but she did not tell him about her new familiars—they had warned her not to—and he had waited patiently all these months for her to “come back to herself,” as Dr. Copeland told him to expect she would, while Rick continued to take the doctor’s hopeful words literally, against the evidence of his senses. If anything, Mandy became more unreachable as the weeks went by. She appeared at times to talk to herself, but when Rick asked if she had said something she denied it. In the days that beat a quickening path to the December solstice, Rick sometimes came back home from his duties at the Larmon farm to find Mandy sitting in the dark, with the baby crying on the floor and the ashes from the morning’s fire cold in the woodstove. He was afraid to leave the child alone with her but ashamed to admit to anyone that she was unwell and so unable to manage.
Rick and Mandy were the sort of people for whom the economic collapse had harshly undone all of their own early programming. Rick was an Amherst grad, fortunate to find a job as an on-air reporter at the NBC affiliate TV station in Albany when the bomb went off in Washington. Mandy had just completed her master’s thesis on gender relations in Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The SUNY Albany campus shut down a week after the bombing when supply chains for everything from cafeteria stocks to payroll funding broke down. Rick’s TV station suspended paychecks the following week, though by then the banks were on a government-declared “holiday” and cash money was vanishing everywhere. The two of them stayed in the sizzling apartment in a not very good neighborhood of central Albany waiting for something like normal life to resume. Up until then, Mandy had entertained furtive thoughts of leaving Rick, who she saw as hopelessly conventional in habits and aspirations, but in the first weeks of the emergency his stolidity impressed her and she clung to him as if he were a lifeboat after a shipwreck.
Meanwhile the supermarket shelves grew bare as the jobbers quit their resupply deliveries and angry, unoccupied people milled in the streets at all hours, giving the city a vivid sense of constant menace. The state government affected to distribute food, but diesel fuel was in short supply, too, and the few trucks sent out were easily hijacked. As Mandy and Rick ate through the last of their dried lentils and the jar of years-old curry powder, their situation grew desperate.
Rick had a college roommate, Matt Larmon, whose father ran a farm, a big successful dairy operation, in the little town of Union Grove, some thirty-five miles northeast of Albany. Rick had spent one memorable July there, after his junior year, haying, fixing machinery, running cows, and hanging out on country roads drinking beers with Matt and some local girls on hot nights. Mr. Larmon had told him more than once that he was a good worker. It had been seven years since then, and he’d fallen out of touch with Matt, but Rick proposed that he and Mandy now try to get to the Larmon farm and ride out whatever craziness was going on in the world there, if possible. The phones were down and they could not contact Matt’s father, Ned Larmon, but the city was quickly growing untenable with scavengers invading apartments, so Rick and Mandy decided to get going. They took only what they could carry in two small backpacks. Rick left his now useless Honda Civic behind. For three days they made their way north on foot in pleasant summer weather, eating early corn out of the fields and getting some hot meals here and there from kind people along the way. The people they met on the road were as baffled as they were frightened. How could something like this happen in the United States?
Rick and Mandy succeeded in finding their way to the Larmon farm. Matt was already there, too, it turned out, having left his apartment in Brooklyn and his job managing the web advertising revenue for a sports magazine group. Within an hour of the Washington bombing, with a full tank of gas, Matt had crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge out of Manhattan and then navigated his way north on back roads, avoiding the interstates. That first evening at the farm was pervaded by a strange combination of giddy excitement and dread, like a class reunion in wartime. In the background, behind the flowing liquor and the plentiful local viands, they were all painfully aware that the economy was failing, that many things had stopped working, and it had begun to look as if there would be no going back to anything that resembled the normality of life before the bombings.
By August of that year, as their predicament became clear, Ned and Matt Larmon worked to reorganize the farm to operate as though the modern age had permanently ended. They acquired draft horses, Belgians and Haflingers. Matt and Rick scoured the countryside buying up antique horse-drawn machinery, mowers, seed drills, and balers and learned step by step to rebuild them. They repaired several outbuildings on the property and constructed a new creamery, anticipating that all the old long-distance supply lines would unravel now that the tanker trucks no longer made their routine bulk collections of milk for the conglomerate food companies—meaning that value-added goods, such as butter and cheese, had to be produced on site. Mandy went to work in the creamery. It was not a life she could have anticipated the previous spring as she completed the work for her master’s degree in Women’s Studies.
It was obvious that much of the work done previously by machines and fossil fuels would now have to be realized by human labor. Rick’s role was enlisting local men from Union Grove to sign on to work on the Larmon farm under terms that would have seemed crazy in the old times—shares of the food that was produced there, no cash because there wasn’t any as the weeks went by. Few of the people in Union Grove were keen to do farm work. They were used to offices or, at least, to manual jobs aided by power equipment. Rick found twelve willing men and organized several crews rotating between the fields, the barns, and the pastures, and five women for milking and the creamery. Many other townspeople just waited fretfully for normality (and their accustomed jobs and paychecks) to return and wouldn’t consider stooping to farm labor, and in the first winter these would be among the people who froze to death in unheated houses, or went hungry in ways unimaginable to a nation of former Walmart shoppers, or ran down their immune systems with liquor and drugs just as the first wave of the Mexican flu hit. The more nimble personalities understood that the great changes wracking the U.S. economy would probably be permanent. The Larmon farm’s system of shares and bonuses was different from Stephen Bullock’s more explicitly feudal operation, located seven miles east on the Hudson River, where the workers and their families lived on the premises and sold their allegiance to Bullock in exchange for security. But as the first planting season of the new times got under way, the Larmon system seemed to work, and the model was adopted by other landholders in the neighborhood of Union Grove, including Ben Deaver, Carl Weibel, and Bill Schmidt.
Rick and Mandy’s lives moved from the grinding anxiety of those first weeks in Albany to the settled routines of farm life alien to everything their culture had prepared them for. They slept in a spare bedroom in the Larmons’ big house and became a part of the family. In November, Matt was crushed to death by a falling king post while he and Rick were working on major structural repairs to the horse barn. Things were not the same afterward. Ned tried to suppress his devastation, but a raw, resentful gloom pervaded the household like the odor of a dead animal in the walls. One time, after the older man had more than a few whiskeys, and Rick was helping him up the stairs to bed, Ned muttered the phrase, “Why him and not you?” As the epidemics and attendant hardships winnowed the population that winter, and as houses were abandoned and the county courts and deed registries ceased operations, Rick and Mandy found a vacant house in the village that they could move into. They kept their positions on the Larmon farm but no longer lived there, and that was how their lives had wended in those years until Julian was born.
Now, this winter evening two days before Christmas, Mandy walked up Elbow Street out of Mill Hollow to Main Street, at the urging of her spirit guide, an entity who called himself Caim or Caym (she was not sure how it was spelled because he specifically forbade her to write it or speak his name to anyone else). He took the form in her mind of a big black bird and radiated an overpowering aura of wisdom and authority made visible in shimmering gold pulsations that Mandy saw in the third eye of her fervid imagination. She could not resist the instructions he uttered in a reverberating voice plangent with intimacy, like a lost ancestor speaking to his posterity with a fiery love. “Go to the town and find the people,” the voice urged her.
As Mandy turned onto Main Street she saw lights glowing in the windows of the big storefront on the corner of Van Buren and people coming and going through the door. A light snowfall, the first of the season, was beginning to stick on the sidewalk and the smooth soles of her fleece-lined moccasins slipped against it, causing her to stumble. As the back of Julian’s head bonked the back of Mandy’s head, he started to cry.
“Be still,” she said.
She came up to the new Union Tavern and stared through the window at the crowd within and the bright, merry scene, the burning candles, the holiday swags. Here were the people, she thought.