World Made by Hand (3 page)

"Name's Robert Earle."

"Robert Earle what?"

"Just Earle. That's the family name."

"Oh? Down where we're from that'd be a man's given name."

"Like Billy Bob."

"Exactly."

"I take it you hail from Dixie," Loren said.

"Indeed I do," Brother Jobe said, running a sleeve across his damp brow. It must have been uncomfortable for him in a suit on a warm summer night like it was.

"A troubled place these days, isn't it?" Loren said.

"There's plenty of mischief to go around this poor country of ours. What's left of it."

'We don't get much news of the outside anymore," Loren said. "The electric's hardly on these days."

"We've noticed," Brother Jobe said. "But you've got something here maybe even more valuable."

"Yeah?" Loren said. 'What's that?"

"Peace and tranquillity."

"The last real news we had was when the bomb went off in Los Angeles."

"California got dealt a bad hand, all right," Brother Jobe said, "but things are rough from sea to shining sea. It's no fun in Phoenix or Albuquerque either, so I've heard. From Texas clear to Florida, there's folks shooting each other and trouble between the races and all like that. Seems like the law is on the run everywhere. We were on our way up out of Virginia when the other bomb hit Washington, D.C. Pennsylvania wasn't no picnic after that, I can tell you. We tried it for more than two years, but it wasn't any go for us there. We pulled out the end of April."

"I'd like to hear what you've observed on your travels sometime," Loren said.

"Hardship. Not a whole lot of brotherhood."

"This is a friendly place," I said. "But it would have been nice if the powers that be had consulted us about selling the school. We weren't informed."

"It's all signed and legal, I assure you."

"It seems to have happened under cover of night," I said.

"Are you up to the Lord's business too?" Brother Jobe asked me pointedly.

"In a manner of speaking,"

"How's that?"

"I'm a carpenter," I said.

Brother Jobe pointed at me and laughed, the way comedians used to do long ago on TV. The girl beside him cracked a trace of a smile too, but looked away self-consciously when she saw me notice. Eventually Brother Jobe's strenuous hilarity ebbed.

"Let's have a look in those creels, boys. I've got to see those whoppers you bragged on."

Loren opened up his creel and held it up to show.

"Hooo-weee," Brother Jobe said. "I'll take 'em."

"Excuse me?" Loren said.

"Five hundred bucks, American."

"They're not for sale."

"Aw heck, okay, seven hundred fifty."

"No, I-"

"You boys drive a hard bargain," Brother Jobe said and whipped out a fat roll of bills. "Here's a thousand. Lay them babies right down there under the dash by my boots."

Loren shot a look at me that attempted to convey a humorous appreciation for all this but really signaled his discomfort. He liked to make other people happy but not usually at his own expense. He had lined his creel with ferns to keep his four nice trout cushioned and moist, and he now laid them all down, including the ferns, like a kind of grocer's display, at the driver's feet up under the Foley's curved mudguard.

"Let's see yours now," Brother Jobe said to me.

"I didn't get any."

He guffawed. "Like fun you didn't. Let's have a look."

"There's nothing to show."

"I thought you said it was good fishing down there tonight."

"It was good for him, not so good for me."

He held up the bankroll again. "Sure you won't talk to the old persuader?"

"A dollar isn't what it used to be."

"That's the God's truth. But heck, I've got a flock to feed."

Brother Jobe made a kind of show of looking deflated for a moment, then pulled himself upright and puffed out his cheeks.

"All right then. I hope you have better luck next time. We'll be starting a regular service soon in that old school auditorium. Maybe you'll come by sometime."

"I'm in his outfit," I said, cocking my head at Loren.

"We put on a hell of a show. Hymns and preaching. I got a 1930 Schwimmer pump organ. It's like the old-timey times."

Smiling broadly, Brother Jobe raised his whip and sort of dusted both horses over the hindquarters. They snorted and began to walk. They were well trained. We watched them set off and a little way down he got them trotting. He never did introduce us to his companion.

We walked the next mile in silence. The brilliant salmon-colored sky turned to a yellow-gray clotted pudding as darkness came on. I wondered what the weather would be like. You never knew in advance anymore. A warm breeze had come up, and I surmised it would be hotter tomorrow.

"What are you going to spend all that money on?" I said finally.

"It's not like I wanted to sell them," Loren said.

"Then why did you?"

"You saw how he was. Might as well have been a holdup."

"Well it looks like you've suddenly got some competition in town."

"The church isn't a business."

"I don't know about that. Sometimes it seems like the only business left."

"That's why you should take my idea seriously," Loren said.

"Okay, I'll think about it."

"I want you to go look through the building with me."

"All right."

"It'd benefit everybody."

We hiked past the raggedy commercial strip that used to mark the eastern built-up fringe of town, but the town had shrunk back into itself. The strip mall stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything else worth scavenging was stripped out. A fragment of the plastic Kmart sign remained bolted to the facade-the piece that saidart. The irony did not move me. I wasn't sorry that it was out of business, but I was sorry that the remnants were still there.

"Did you notice the girl?" Loren said.

"Of course I did."

"Kind of young, didn't you think?"

"Maybe she was his daughter."

"Didn't look a bit like him," Loren said. "How can they come in here and buy the school and we don't even know about it?"

"It wouldn't be the first time Dale made a deal on his own." Dale Murray was our mayor. The apparatus of our government had fallen way off, along with the population. It was Dale and a drunken constable for the most part, and a magistrate who said he wouldn't do the job if elected-before he was elected. Sometimes things just happened and then you heard about it. Mostly nothing happened. "The school was just sitting there, rotting," I said.

"It must be worth something," Loren said. "I don't like giving up on the idea that we might need it again in the future."

"It's your nostalgia working overtime."

"Well, it bothers me. And more to the point, I'm not sure I like that fellow," Loren said. "Why did they have to pick this town?"

"People are on the move again. We should expect it. Maybe some of them will break off from his bunch and come our way."

"I doubt it. Those sectarians are tight as ticks."

"We'll see. It's still a free country, isn't it?"

"I don't know what kind of country it is anymore," Loren said, "and neither do you."

We hiked past the burned-out hulk of the old wholesale beverage center.

"Do you want any of these trout to take home?" I finally said, offering my creel to Loren.

"You don't have to."

"I'm just going to put them in the smoker. Go ahead. Take two.

"Okay. Thank you."

"Tell Jane Ann I appreciated the wine."

By now, we'd entered the town proper. The streetlamps were off, as usual. Many of the houses we passed were dark. I would venture that the population here was down by three-quarters. The safety net for the elderly had dissolved, with so much else, and since a disproportionate number of houses in town had been owned by older folks who had died off, many were now vacant. It was nice to see the Copeland kids running around playing in the yard beside their big old place, with candles burning inside, welcoming and homey. Jerry Copeland was our doctor. He was a GP but he had to do it all, becoming an excellent surgeon by necessity. The hospital in Glens Falls had closed after the flu killed more than half the staff. Jerry had trouble getting medicines and supplies, but he was also resourceful. His wife, Jeanette, was an able assistant and a dazzling soprano. Their boys were polite and well behaved. Being so few in numbers, children no longer enjoyed solidarity in rebellion, and our society was too fragile to indulge much symbolic misbehavior. The flu had carried off Jerry's youngest, a girl named Fawn. There was nothing even he could do.

We eventually came to Loren's parish house next to the big white wooden church on Salem Street. The church was in excellent condition because those of us who remained did not have diversions like television or recreational shopping anymore, and the church had become our get-together place in a way churches had ceased to be for generations. So we took care of it. We worked on it and we kept it painted, though of course paint wasn't what it used to be either. We made it ourselves out of slaked lime, milk, and chalk.

I gave Loren two nice trout of my five and we said goodnight.

My house was a block and a half past where Linden Street met Salem Street. On nights like this the surface normality of smalltown America overwhelmed you with sadness. Here and there a candle glowed in a window, but people worked hard and were likely to turn in when the sun went down, so it was difficult to tell occupied houses from vacant ones. My own house was haunted by the ghosts of my family: wife Sandy, gone from an outbreak of encephalitis, daughter Genna, taken by the flu, and son Daniel, who left home and did not return. The sight of the place plunged me into memory and feeling no matter how many times I came upon it.

Just as things were starting to fall apart, Sandy had painted the house a gray-violet with sage green trim. She was a stickler for quality materials, and the paint had stood up well in the years since. The house was built in 1904 in the arts-and-crafts style, which was a romantic reaction to the juggernaut of industry, and perhaps because of that it worked well under these new conditions of austerity. The front porch was deep and graceful, though I had lately been using it as a woodshop in the warm part of the year. Inside it was generous for a bungalow, with four bedrooms in all, and it had many fine touches, including oak wainscoting, a cozy inglenook beside the fieldstone fireplace, built-in bookshelves everywhere, and graceful windows with arched sashes that still slid beautifully and closed snugly after more than a hundred years.

I lost Sandy and eleven-year-old Genna in two successive years. Daniel was thirteen when his sister passed away and nineteen when he set out from here, which was two years ago, and I wished I knew whether he was alive and well, and where he had gone and been to, but there were no more phones or mail as we once knew them. I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now.

I don't think the electricity had been on for half an hour all that month. When it did come on it was always at some time you least expected it, before you could do something useful with it, like run a board through a planer. It cut out as mysteriously as it came on, so you didn't dare start any job of work involving machines. When the electricity was on, you didn't get much over the radio. We apparently had a president now named Harvey Albright, but I would be damned if I knew how he got elected because they didn't hold it here. This was well after the short, unhappy reign of General Fellowes, who removed President Sharpe from office on account of the fiasco in the Holy Land and might have been instrumental in his death. Fellowes himself was taken down by the more constitutionally minded generals, and Vice President Beebe was installed to finish Ted Sharpe's term, with the army looking over his shoulder. The various shifting factions worked hard at managing the news even as the TV, newspapers, and Internet were failing in one way or another from irregular electric service.

The bomb in Washington put an end to that revolving cast of political characters. We heard rumors that a federal government had been reorganized in Nashville and then Chicago under Speaker of the House Rhodes, who was out of town when Washington was bombed. By that time we weren't getting any oil from the Middle East or Venezuela, and even the mail stopped. The last election evidently happened around the time of the flu, when every community was shuttered up in desperate quarantine, at least here in the upper Hudson River Valley. It seemed to me that the federal government was little more than a figment of the collective memory. Everything was local now. We liked to think the worst disorders were behind us, that we came out on the other side of something. But the truth was we didn't know what the truth was anymore.

I had put some raspberry canes in the side yard three years ago, and they had filled in nicely. I noticed drupes were forming on the canes but were still green and hard. In a week or so I would have all the raspberries I could eat. I could also trade them for bacon. I was lighting a stub of candle on the kitchen counter when I heard a sigh and wheeled around to see Jane Ann's face emerge out of the warm light as the wick took flame.

"It's only me," she said.

"You scared me."

"It's not your night."

"I know."

"Loren's back too, of course."

"He can find his way around the house okay without me."

"He'll worry."

"I brought you a brown bread," she said. Jane Ann was resourceful in the kitchen. We had trouble getting wheat lately because trade had fallen off, and we couldn't grow it locally because of a persistent wheat rust in the soil that returned no matter how you rested a field. Mostly we had to rely on corn and buckwheat, with some barley, rye, and oats. Buckwheat, of course, is not even remotely related to real wheat. It has no gluten in it. Ground into flour, it was good only for pancakes. Otherwise, we ate the whole groats boiled, like rice, or baked like a pilaf with other things mixed in. Jane Ann's brown bread was corn and rye, sweetened with honey and steamed rather than baked. It was her New England heritage.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

For some time now, Jane Ann had been visiting me one night a week in a connubial way. Usually she came Thursday nights. It was an arrangement. She was my best friend's wife. My wife was dead. No suitable single women were around. Loren was apparently no longer able to have sexual relations with Jane Ann for reasons that I did not delve into but were probably not that mysterious. After all, things happened to people and between people and it was not necessarily anyone's fault. We were able to manage things among the three of us this way. Perhaps we flattered ourselves to think it could go on like that indefinitely. But Jane Ann had no intention of leaving Loren, and I didn't want her to. It wouldn't have helped her or me or any of us if she did. She had been in a state of despair since her girl was taken by the flu and her son, Evan, went off to see the country with my Daniel, who was a year older than him. We used to call people like her "depressed," but we dropped those clinical locutions because despair was a spiritual condition that was as real to us as the practical difficulties we struggled with in everyday life. Jane Ann could not stop mourning. She was not the person she used to be, but she resembled her.

She reached up and undid my belt buckle in the candlelight. At forty-seven, Jane Ann was still a beautiful woman, with deep breasts, a slim waist, and a small behind. Her qualities of physical beauty were undiminished by the constant sorrow she carried like a burdensome cargo. These days, most anyone who had survived was in good physical condition because life was so relentlessly physical, unless they drank too much. She generally kept her silvery gold hair in a fat braid. Sometimes she let it out for me because I asked her to, as a favor, but only if I asked. She told me she was beyond capable of conceiving a child, but I secretly believed that our relations were, on her part, an enactment of the wish to do so. I loved Jane Ann but I was conscious that I was making love with a ghost. She was so unlike my Sandy that I could not have pretended she was Sandy, and Jane Ann was not altogether present herself either.

This night we made love quickly as though doing each other a routine kindness. I felt sorry for both of us, and for Loren too, old as we all were and rather hopeless in our strange circumstances. Afterward, Jane Ann sat on the edge of the bed lacing her doeskin slippers. Her shoulders seemed to slump in the candlelight.

"I heard somebody bought the high school," she said. "A preacher with a congregation, they say."

"We met him on the road coming back from fishing."

"Oh?"

"He was driving a rig with two fine horses."

"What was he like?"

"Pushy. Seemed full of himself. Loren will tell you about him. Why did you come here tonight? It isn't Thursday until tomorrow."

"Oh? I lose track."

"Feeling sad?"

"Yes. A bit more than usual, I guess."

"Loren's an upright man," I said.

"It's true. But I'm still sad."

"He's got two nice trout waiting for you."

She finished lacing her slippers and turned around to face me. "How do you keep from going crazy, Robert?"

I had to think about it. "I'm not sure. Disposition maybe."

"Sometimes I wish you were as sad as me."

"Why would you suppose I'm not?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"We're not the first society who fell into hardship," I said.

"I can't find much consolation in that."

"Maybe I am crazy. I live with hope."

"What for?"

"That we'll recover some. Maybe not back to before, but some. I live in hope that my Daniel will walk into this house again some fine morning, and your boy with him."

Jane Ann sighed.

"It's not all bad now," I said.

"We've lost our world."

"Only the part that the machines lived in."

Jane Ann patted my thigh, but said no more and got up to leave.

"Thanks very much for the bread," I called after her.

She was careful not to let the screen door slap on her way out.