World Made by Hand (25 page)

The levee at Stephen Bullock's farm was the greatest social event around Washington County in decades, even going back into the old days, when television and all the other bygone diversions held people hostage in their homes after the sun went down, and you could hardly pry people out of their living rooms-as we used to call the place where the TVs lived. In the new times, Bullock's levee beat the Harvest Ball at Hebron, the Spring Frolic in Battenville, the Labor Day Picnic at Holyrood's orchard, and even the Christmas levee we put on every year at the First Congregational. Bullock's levee brought us out of ourselves, out of a dark wilderness of the spirit where we had sojourned for so long in anxiety and isolation.

As the afternoon merged into evening, everybody who could muster a wheeled vehicle and a horse or team began marshalling them in the vicinity of our church for the trip over. Bullock sent several wagons to town as promised, while the New Faith had its own too. Altogether they made a train of horse-drawn vehicles that stretched a quarter-mile long heading west into the sun, which still hung ten degrees above the treetops. Britney decided to stay behind, a relief to me, since it would have made an awkward public statement for us to appear as a couple at a festive event like this, apart from how things actually were between us. I didn't try to talk her out of it.

I rode over in Terry Einhorn's wagon with Leslie and her cello, Eric Laudermilk, and the Russos. Eric and I broke out our instruments en route, playing "Sail Away Ladies" and "Grey Eagle," and some other lively numbers as we rode past the vacant car showrooms and strip mall ruins at the edge of town. Leslie kept her cello under wraps since the rig had no springs to speak of. Eric was him self a cidermaker of some distinction, and we traded slugs from the bottle he brought along, so we were already in a mellow frame of mind when Terry followed the rest of the wagons into one of Bullock's new-mown hay fields where we hitched them to picket lines for the evening.

Bullock had strung colored Christmas bulbs all around the big circular drive between the barns, the workshops, and his house. It reminded me of the patio of a popular bar in Key West where I had gotten drunk a long time ago. Many of the Union Grove people were not aware that Bullock had his own hydroelectric setup, and as they were informed, their reactions ran from amazement to veiled jealousy. Sam Hutto just goggled at the lights like a kid at a carnival. I heard Debra Gooding say to Maggie Furnival, "I don't see why he can't send some of that juice over our way-I'd pay the sonofabitch!"

A beverage bar was set up on a long table under the arbor off the kitchen, with pitchers of Bullock's own cider, sparkling and jack, and beer, and jugs of whiskey, and a vast punchbowl with some sweet, potent brew flavored with lemon verbena and raspberries. Across the way from the bar stood more long tables groaning with puddings, new potato salad, sugar snaps, radishes, pickles, sauerkraut, creamed new onions, corn bread, cakes (real cakes made with wheat flour), pies (ditto the flour), berry crumbles, cookies and confections, butternut fondants, even a tray of fudge made from chocolate-an ingredient that few of us had seen for some years. Among all these things the Bullocks had placed enormous bouquets of purple loosestrife, now coming into bloom wherever the ground was damp, and black-eyed Susans. Removed from the center of things, where the smoke would not be bothersome, they had set up a barbeque operation. Over one fire, a pig roasted on an iron spit turned by a teenage boy who nipped at a cup of something as he worked the crank. Over another fire, a Bullock servant wrangled rows of beefsteaks on a steel mesh grill. Next to him, yet another Bullock man turned sausages with tongs. Meanwhile, the procession of wagons kept rolling into the adjacent hay field, and a steady stream of townspeople and New Faith people entered the courtyard until the outdoor room grew crowded. The aroma of grilling meat seemed to affect the people like a powerful drug, as much as their first stimulating drinks of the evening. For the first time since they came to town, the New Faith people of both sexes mixed openly and easily with the regular Union Grovers and Bullock's folks. The din of conversation was as intoxicating as the beverages.

Here and there around the big circular drive, barrels stood on end, each presenting a deployed basket of-what?-triangular corn tortilla chips of the kind that used to be manufactured by the great snack corporations of yore and were the ubiquitous national party food until that part of our history ended. Evidently Bullock's cooks had made them from scratch for the occasion, along with a pickled hot pepper condiment-salsa!-to scoop up. The sweet herbaceous aroma of marijuana also began wafting around the courtyard. I saw Bullock himself take a hit on a pipe passed by Todd Zucker. A few of the New Faith men indulged too.

I had a toke or two myself, on top of the cider coming over and a tumbler of Bullock's own since I got there, and I was reaching a plateau of expansive amiability, shall we say, when Andy Pendergast took me by the elbow into the carriage barn.

"Isn't this great?" he said, excited as a little kid.

"It's something, all right."

The vehicles were removed from the barn for the evening and the place was all cleaned and beautifully lighted with those strings of little white minibulbs that fancy restaurants used to always put in their potted fig trees. Along the far side of the enormous room, going lengthwise, a plank stage was set up. The lumber was fresh cut. You could smell it. Somehow Bullock had come up with a sound system-four microphones on boom stands and two speakers at the sides coming out of a one-hundred-watt amp with a mixer. We tested the damn things and they actually worked. There was no piano, however, so Andy and I went to get his harmonium out of the wagon he'd come in.

On the way back, we heard that they were serving hot dogs in real wheat flour buns, and I went over to check it out as soon as we had Andy's keyboard set up. You could have your dog with sauerkraut or sweet pickle relish and a coarse, grainy mustard. It was just like Bullock to serve such a thing for the sheer theatricality of it, to demonstrate how the old luxuries were all available at his plantation, in case anyone was thinking of coming over to live there and work for him. The way the crowd carried on, you'd think these were the greatest culinary delicacies ever contrived by mankind. The truth was Bullock's hot dogs were far superior to any commercial hot dog I'd ever had back in the old days. Everything was handmade, including the sauerkraut and the mustard. The dogs themselves tasted more like bratwursts, and the buns were just out of the oven. The fact that so many of us were either drunk or stoned or both made them seem even more amazing, I suppose. Anyway, I ate two: one with kraut and mustard and one with sweet relish, and when I was done I went and got a chunk of beefsteak the size of my hand.

By now, a dense purple twilight had gathered and the courtyard took on an enchanted glow. The stars came out, fireflies began twinkling among the colored lights, and the moon was rising above the woods behind the field full of wagons. None of the New Faith women-thirty-five of them altogether-were older than middle age and most of them in their twenties, with a few apparently older teens, including the shy, pretty girl I saw that night we first came across Brother Jobe in the wagon, coming back from fishing. The New Faith women dressed differently than our people. They wore a kind of uniform: a long, herb-dyed linen skirt and a sun-bleached white muslin blouse buttoned primly at the throat. The only real difference between them was in the sleeves. Some long, some short, and some no sleeves. But their figures were on display despite the superficial modesty. They apparently did not wear anything in the way of underwear. Perhaps they dressed for the summer heat, but their muslin blouses were surprisingly sheer, and here and there, if one of them was standing in the light a certain way, you could see her figure outlined through the fabric. Our women were generally older, and despite the decolletage on display, and the variety of fabrics and styles they wore, they came off more modestly than the New Faithers.

I was standing by the bar, holding a piece of beefsteak between my thumb and forefinger, trying not to look like a slob, with a glass of Bullock's excellent sparkling hard cider in the other hand, when one of the New Faith ladies came up to me.

"Hello there," she said. "My name's Annabelle."

"You're a handsome creature, Annabelle," I said. It was the weed and the cider talking. I was feeling frisky for the first time in years.

"Are you somebody's husband?"

"No, ma'am," I said. I felt a passing twinge of guilt for failing to say I used to be.

"Do you know the Lord?"

"Bullock and I go back through the years."

"No, the Lord of heaven and earth," she said.

"Oh, him. Jesus."

"Yeah, him."

"Probably not in the way you mean."

"Can I have a bite?"

I held out the chunk of beefsteak so she could have some, and she nibbled off a piece, gripping my hand to steady it in the process, and giving an excellent demonstration of how her lips worked.

"Would you like to know the Lord?" she said. The buzz of chatter was so loud we practically had to shout into each other's ears. I could smell the scent of her skin and fresh laundry.

"I'll pass for now," I said.

"Knowing Jesus is like an orgasm, I find."

"That's more than I could bear," I said. "It'd give me the vapors.

"Are you mocking me?"

"No. Where are you from, Annabelle?"

"Raleigh-Durham area, originally."

"And what were your people originally?"

"Greek," she said and covered her bashful smile with four long fingers. "My daddy had seven pizza shops."

"Were they Eastern Orthodox?"

"No, they were just regular pizza, but you could get lots of toppings."

"No, I meant your parents."

Annabelle giggled and kind of slapped my shoulder and then sort of pressed herself into me so I could feel the yielding curves of her torso.

"They were pagans," she said. "Our religion was pizza. You're cute."

Just then I heard an electronic crackle from inside the barn. Bullock was onstage. He started making a speech. His amplified voice was garbled from where we stood, far over by the barbeque. There was applause. A lot of the crowd had begun to migrate inside the barn. More speech, more applause. Then Brother Jobe took over the mike, and whatever he was saying provoked several outbursts of laughter as well as applause. He knew how to work a crowd.

"Would you like to stroll up into yonder field with me?" Annabelle said.

I was amazed at her forwardness. And, I must confess, more than a little aroused at that point.

"Did Brother Jobe put you up to this, by any chance?"

"Huh?"

Something about her smile told me she was playing dumb.

"I think there's more going on here than meets the eye."

"I swear I don't know what you're talking about," Annabelle said, still beaming radiantly.

"You're very charming, Annabelle," I said, "but your bunch has got to stop trying to recruit me. Especially on such a lovely night as this when we should all relax and have a good time."

Just then, Loren found me and took my elbow and dragged me away into the barn, where I had to get up on stage with Joseph and the three other brothers who I went down to Albany with, and Tom and Skip and the boys from the Elizabeth, and there was more clapping and hugging and good fellowship and salutations. I still had the rest of the beefsteak in my fingers. Finally Bullock said the music and dancing would commence presently, and the rest of the Union Grove music circle came up and traded places on stage with the heroes of the occasion, and I got my fiddle out of its case, and the others started tuning up to Andy's harmonium, and I could see Annabelle way over to the side with Brother Jobe, no doubt reporting the outcome of her mission. The cheeky rascal saw me looking at him, raised his cider glass in my direction, and gave me a big wink.

We warmed up with some nice loose-limbed old-time tunes starting with "The Maysville Road," "Big Scioty," "Saint Anne's Reel," "Lost Indian," "Granny Will Your Dog Bite," "Speed the Plow," "Hell among the Yearlings," and "Blackberry Blossom." We played the tunes in clumps, medley-style, and either we were in especially fine form, or we were pretty lit, or both, because we all swapped glances around the stage, Andy and Dan and Eric and Charles and Bruce and Leslie and me, and all of us had big goofy smiles plastered on our faces like we hadn't felt so good in a long time, and how could we be so dumb as to have neglected the music circle all these weeks. And the crowd below got into the spirit right away, with no bashful waiting around for somebody else to step out on the dance floor first. They all went right to it. By the time we got some traction on "Big Scioty," what do you know but Brother Minor emerged from the crowd, jumped up on stage, and began calling figures. You could tell that he knew what he was doing. Between calls, he plugged a Jew's harp in his mouth and twanged along with our tunes-another of his strange talents.

When we completed the opening medleys, Loren came over to the stage with a big pitcher of cider for us. Jane Ann, I couldn't fail to notice, lingered off to the side of the dance floor with her arms wrapped around herself, as if holding on for dear life. She was wearing a beautiful old peacock blue sequined satin gown that seemed to hark way back to the mid-twentieth century, something that Barbara Stanwyck would have worn to the Academy Awards in 1953. It frightened me to think how gone the past was, and to see Jane Ann looking so beautiful and so desolate. But then Eric sent a pipe around the circle, and we hit the cider again and started in on the main part of the program, which was the contra dance part, the pieces we really excelled at, the English eighteenth-century dance tunes out ofJohn Playford's English Dancing Master anthologies. These tunes included "Juice of the Barley," "Newcastle," "Lord Burghley's Maggot" (meaning a "whim," not a worm), "Liliburlero," "The Chestnut," "The Rakes of Rochester," "Gathering Peascods," and a few of the beautiful Irish O'Carolan tunes that Shawn Watling had liked so much: "Sheebeg and Sheemore," "Planxty Irwin," and "Fanny Power." The Union Grove people knew what to do, but everybody else was confused by the antique steps, which were more complex than square dance figures, and the New Faith people stood off to the sides watching. Eventually, a few at a time, they ventured to join in the lines and quadrilles on the dance floor, and our people showed them every consideration in teaching them how it all went.

Our set ran over an hour. At the break, I climbed down from the stage and was immediately engulfed by Elsie DeLong, Cody's wife, a rather large woman of about sixty, with breasts like Hubbard squashes, and evidently quite drunk. She planted her lips on mine and said, "I'll take him," to her surrounding girlfriends, who howled and cackled. I slipped out of her clutches and made off through the crowd. Near the door, Brother Jobe took me aside by the arm.

"The jenny's yours," he said.

"Huh?"

"That little donk you all rescued down in Albany. You can have her and the cart she come with. I daresay you could use her."

"Why, thank you. But I have nowhere to keep her."

"You can keep her over our way for now. Come and get her when you need her."

"Okay. Gosh. I appreciate that."

"I'd like to breed her to our jack, though, if you don't mind."

"By all means."

"It can only help to have a few more donks. Especially a younger jack. Oh, say, suppose you could manage a turn at the old `Virginia Reel' when you boys come back on? It'd mean a lot to my people."

"Sure," I said.

"Didn't you like that other little gift I sent your way?"

"I don't want to seem ungrateful, but ..."

"You're a hard case, old son."

"Just an old heathen."

He reached up and tousled my hair like he was my camp counselor and then peeled off to flirt with some of the Union Grove ladies.

I made my way out of the barn. It was mercifully cooler in the fresh air, and the night smelled sweetly of hay. My head swam, as much from playing hard for an hour as from all the cider and pot. I found a quiet spot in the vicinity of the bar where I had run into Annabelle earlier. Stephen Bullock stepped up to me there.

"Robert," he said. He proffered a pitcher but I declined for the moment.

"Swell party, Stephen," I said and burped. "Pardon."

"The pleasure is ours, I assure you. Tell me something: are you shacked up with the young widow of the unfortunate fellow who got shot some weeks back?"

"I wouldn't call it that."

"Doesn't look so good."

"People have got the wrong idea," I said.

"I'm going to have to convene a grand jury on that killing."

"I thought sooner or later you would."

"And you'll be called to give testimony."

"I expected that too."

"Just so you know."

Musicians were tuning up over the PA system inside the barn. It seemed like it had been an awful short break. Something sounded off.

"Who's that playing inside?" I said.

"That'd be our boys," Bullock said. "I told them they could play the breaks. They're not as good as your bunch, but it'll be good practice for them to play in front of strangers."

We stood there listening for a while. It was a weird mix: more than one guitar, banjo, bass, a trombone, and a saxophone in there somewhere. When the tuning was done, they went into a raggedy Dixieland version of "Bye Bye Blackbird," the kind of thing you might have heard on a Carnival Cruise in the old days.

"Hey, let me ask you something, Stephen: just what do you suppose I'm doing with that young widow?"

"I really don't know," he said. "Is she here with you tonight?"

"No, she's back in town, because she knows everybody would be giving her the hairy eyeball."

"That was prudent, at least."

"Goddammit, Stephen."

"I'm not being facetious."

"Do you think she should go out and get a job selling real estate or something? Maybe rent an apartment and mail-order a sofa from Crate and Barrel?"

'Well, obviously ..."

"Her house burned down and she has a little girl."

"She can come over here and live," he said. 'We could use a young female. And a child too. Our people are not reproducing that well."

"You're as bad as Brother Jobe."

"Well, we've got similar problems, both of us having to look out for large organizations with complicated social considerations in extraordinary times. You think this all just runs itself?"

"I'm well aware of your responsibilities, Stephen."

"Hell, you're welcome to come over here, Robert, and bring the young widow and child with you. I'd build you all a house if you did."

"Thanks, but I like living in town."

"The invitation stands if you change your mind."

He patted me on the shoulder and headed back to the party. The band had moved on to "Mack the Knife." It made me wonder what Bertolt Brecht might think of how we were living now. It made me painfully aware of how over the twentieth century was. Even more oddly, it prompted me to remember the night long ago when, by happenstance, I sat through part of a Wayne New ton show in Las Vegas. Where did Wayne Newton go when the USA went to shit? I was more stoned than I had realized. And so when I saw Jane Ann come toward me in her sparkling blue gown in the moonlight I was dazzled by the sight of her.

She took me by the hand, and we walked up a grassy lane into the orchard behind Bullock's house. She didn't have to say anything. I was suddenly on fire for her. We sat down in the cool grass up in the orchard, and she hiked her gown over her head in a single swift motion so that she was just pale skin, silvery hair, and fragrance lying before me in the grass. I was less agile getting free of my own clothing, and my hunger for her was, as always, sharpened by the ache of my moral failure. Then we were upon each other, and everything beyond the field of our senses fell into darkness for a while as we enacted the old urgencies.

Afterward we lay side by side under a plum tree looking at the stars through boughs laden with early fruit, waiting for our hearts to stop pounding. Bullock's band was playing an old standard I recognized, but I couldn't remember the title to save my life.

"What's that tune?" I said.

"Beyond the Sea," Jane Ann said. "Has she come to your bed yet?"

"No," I said.

"She will."

"Maybe she's got more moral fiber than I do."

"Women are not moral animals," she said.

"What a thing to say."

"Look at me: the minister's wife."

"I see someone sweet and beautiful and kind."

I heard voices and saw shapes moving darkly up the grassy lane. Jane Ann and I automatically shielded our faces. A man and a woman tumbled past us perhaps ten yards away. Apparently they didn't see us. The woman tripped on something and giggled. I thought it sounded like Annabelle. The man said, "Sssshhhh," drunkenly. Whoever it was, he had a beard, so he was not one of the New Faith men. He helped her up. They both laughed and continued on. You had to marvel at the determination of that bunch.

"You must think I'm pathetic," Jane Ann said when they were out of earshot.

"You don't have to run yourself down."

"What do you think of me?"

"You're a human being in an odd situation in a strange time."

"How diplomatic."

"It's how it is."

"Maybe we're just wicked, Robert."

"I wouldn't encourage you to think so."

"It's getting to Loren."

"Do you two ever talk about this?"

"Are you crazy?" she said.

"I'm not there when you two are alone. I don't know what you talk about."

"Do you ever talk to Loren about how you're fucking his wife when the two of you are off on one of your fishing adventures?"

"Of course not. Do you want me to?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Maybe we should just stop this, then."

"If you do, I'll kill myself."

"That's a heckuva thing to say."

Jane Ann started to cry quietly. "Why her and not me?"

"I can't bust up you and Loren."

"Why not?"

"Do you want to leave him? Is that what you're saying?"

"I don't know," she said and cried some more.

We didn't speak for a while. Jane Ann continued crying quietly, squeezing my hand. Meanwhile the music had stopped, and then I heard instruments tuning up again, including a fiddle, Bruce Wheedon of our bunch, since the others hadn't had a fiddle, and I realized I had to get back down there.

"We're on again," I said. "I have to go back in and play."

"Okay," she said. "You go. I'll come down in a little while, after a decent interval."

"You know if you killed yourself I would be very sad and guilty for the rest of my life."

"I know," she said. And I then left her up there under the plum tree.