The Harrows of Spring (11 page)

T
WENTY-THREE

Robert got to his house before Loren returned from the doctor's with Jeanette. He heard desperate voices and a commotion upstairs and hurried up to Sarah's room, where he found Jason LaBountie seated on the bed with Sarah's left leg jammed under his arm, as attempted to clean and dress the small infected puncture wound between her toes as her upper body thrashed and convulsed. Candlelight made the scene appear the more frightful, all glare and shadows, like a German expressionist horror movie of the last century. Britney knelt by the head of the bed, cradling Sarah's head, desperately trying to comfort her as the child bucked unnaturally, shrieking and squealing. Jason glanced up at Robert standing in the doorway. Robert's mouth had fallen open. Jason nodded at a candlestick on the seat of a chair.

“Pick that up and hold the light closer, will you?” LaBountie said.

“Where were you?” Britney snarled at him, firmly gripping Sarah's head and shoulder as the girl bucked violently again. “I came looking for you.”

“The hotel office,” Robert said, reaching for the candlestick. “What are you doing here, Jason?”

LaBountie ignored the question. “Hold this,” he said, passing the bloodied pocketknife to Robert.

“What's wrong with her?” Robert asked.

“Tetanus, I have to say. Hold this too,” he said, handing Robert the whiskey-soaked rag he used to disinfect Sarah's wound. “I sent Reverend Holder over to Jerry's a little while—”

“He's dead drunk!” Britney screamed.

“Loren?” Robert asked, confused.

“The doctor!”

“He's a disgrace,” LaBountie said. “I sent the rev to get a particular medicine over there. I'm hoping he'll bring some back.”

“He's so drunk,” Britney moaned. “He can't even stand up.”

“His wife's not drunk,” LaBountie said, struggling to finish dressing the wound. “She knows where everything is.”

Sarah bucked upward again with exceptional force and a choking shriek. They all heard something snap, like a bone breaking.

“Oh gosh . . .” LaBountie said. He let go of Sarah's leg and corkscrewed around to face the child, who continued in a series of subsiding, ratchet-like jerks, shuddering violently as though an engine inside of her had disastrously malfunctioned, until she was ominously still. Her eyes rolled up into her head and a stream of pink foam flowed out of her mouth. Britney goggled at her daughter as she felt all the tension come out of the girl's small body. She pressed Sarah's head against her breast, wailing, “No, no, no, no!” Robert stood frozen with terror behind LaBountie. Another commotion, this time on the stairs, signaled the arrival of Loren and Jeanette Copeland.

“Something just happened,” LaBountie told the doctor's wife, who was a nurse of long experience in both the old and the new times.

“Get out of the way!” she commanded them. “Let go of her head!” she barked at Britney, who backed away from the bed cringing and bawling. Sarah had stopped moving completely. The pink foam flowing from her mouth had turned darker and redder. Jeanette searched for a carotid pulse but failed to find any. She reached into Sarah's mouth attempting to clear the airway but the red foam was too profuse. She puzzled for a moment.

“Do something!” Britney shrieked.

“What are you waiting for?” Robert said.

Jeanette suspected that cardiopulmonary resuscitation would only add to the damage as she assessed it. But she could not even begin explaining, because it was too complicated, and because she was panicking she was suddenly stumbling over her English, thinking only in her native French. But importuned by the others she attempted a set of chest compressions. The first two had only the shocking effect of pumping gouts of blood from the little girl's mouth, and Jeanette stopped abruptly, breaking down in tears herself. The vet shoved her out of the way and tried a few compressions himself with the same horrific result. Jeanette batted at him and screamed “
Arrêtez!
” repeatedly, though he, too, quickly comprehended the problem.

Then, all that could be heard in the room was the sound of the two women weeping and the men breathing. Sarah lay still on the bed, blood pooling in the little depression between her turned head and the pillow. No one had to state that the child was dead, but the awful apprehension of it filled the air in the small room like a noxious gas. Jason LaBountie sidestepped toward the door, muttering, “We tried . . . I'm very sorry,” and exited the room. His heavy footsteps resounded on the stairway and the others heard the front door close.

Britney crept onto the bed, sitting in the pool of warm blood as she hoisted her daughter's body up into her embrace. More blood dripped from Sarah's lifeless lips onto Britney's clothing. The child's eyes remained open and empty as windows in an abandoned house. Robert took a step toward her but Britney snarled, “You stay away from me!” He didn't know what to say or do. Loren touched Robert's arm. “Come,” he whispered gently to him. Loren took Robert by the elbow and steered him gently out of the room.

It would have been determined by an autopsy that Sarah Watling had died from a one-centimeter tear of the superior vena cava, the large vein supplying the right atrium of the heart, caused by a broken second right vertebrosternal rib due to the violent spastic hyperextensions (opisthotonos) resulting from the potent toxin produced by the tetanus bacterium,
Clostridium tetani.
But no autopsy would be performed because Britney would not allow Sarah's remains anywhere near the doctor, whether he had sobered up or not.

T
WENTY-FOUR

Elam woke up in strange surroundings. It took him five seconds to comprehend that he was in a second-floor room of the new Union Grove Hotel in the bed of the young woman named Flame Aurora Greengrass. He had run into her at the bar of the Cider Barrel with the raucous crowd all around and the music playing and she had allowed him to buy her several whiskeys. The drinks didn't seem to soften her up much, and it was so loud in there they could barely converse, but around ten o'clock Flame leaned forward on her bar stool and said, directly into Elam's ear, “Follow me upstairs, okay?”

“What for?” Elam replied, close to her ear, too, although as soon as the words came out of his mouth he knew he sounded like an oaf. He did, however, get to inhale the subtle natural perfume of her hair and skin, suffused as it was with alluring enzymes. Flame replied by making a face that communicated her awareness of exactly what Elam was thinking himself. She knocked back the last of her ­whiskey—it was a Dutchtown sour mash—jerked her head to indicate the the barroom exit, and climbed off her stool. She was only a few inches shorter than Elam, who was a very big man.

He followed her out of the tavern and into the hotel part of the building, then up a dim stairway lighted by a single candle at the landing and onto the second-floor hallway, also dimly lit, and into room number 22, which was lighted only by the glow of a waxing gibbous moon. The room was spare but comfortable: a double bed, two nightstands, a desklike table, a wooden chair, a chest of drawers, a mirror, a row of four hooks on the wall for coats, and one plain double-hung window. The curtains were simple muslin. Flame drew them closed, which diffused the moonlight.

“Let's get down to business,” she said, unwinding her turquoise silk scarf.

Elam said, “All right,” though he did nothing more than stand in place as if awaiting further instructions.

Flame began very methodically removing her layers of sweaters and shirts, pausing between each to watch Elam register the changes as she revealed the extraordinary fullness of her figure. Finally, she got down to a plain cotton camisole. The exact contours of her breasts, visible under that filmy garment, Elam thought, were like two small children sleeping in hammocks. She paused again, enjoying his look of rapt, frozen discomposure. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, removed her spandex leggings, and reclined on the bed in the briefest bikini underpants. In the process, her camisole hitched up enough for Elam to see the rippled muscles of her abdomen.

“You must work out,” he said.

“No,” she said and emitted a little yelp of amusement. “Do you know what we're here for?”

“You mean on earth?”

“No, just in this room.”

“Well, uh, yes, I think so, ma'am.”

“What'd I tell you about that—?”

“Sorry. I'm nervous.”

“I can tell.”

“I can't figure you at all,” he admitted.

“What's to figure?”

“Everything.”

“Don't try so hard.”

They examined each other in the dim light for a long moment.

“How come you picked me?” Elam asked.

“How come you followed me up?” she said.

“Human instinct?”

“Exactly!” she said. “Like being hungry. You don't have to puzzle it out. You just find something to eat. Don't you ever get hungry?”

“Yes I do,” he said. He took off his sack coat, pulled off his boots awkwardly standing by turns on each leg, stepped out of his pants, and began unbuttoning his shirt, but he fumbled so badly with trembling hands that he lost patience and pulled it over his head.

“All the way,” Flame said as he stood there in his drawers.

“You first,” Elam said, deciding at last that he'd had enough of being ordered around. “Go on.”

She hesitated a moment and then pulled the camisole over her head with arms crossed and wiggled out of her briefs.

“You're magnificent,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said.

And then they were upon each other with the moonlight lambent through the thin curtains. They feasted until well after the moon moved out of the window frame. When they'd concluded their exertions, Flame fell asleep with her back to Elam, who remained awake awhile longer marveling at the feel of the deep curve where her waist met her majestic hip. He fell asleep trying to construct some concrete notion of what her life was like back home in the place called Berkshire, some kind of mansion on a hill, he imagined, like a college hall, surrounded by the Kumbaya kids, a swimming pool out back, much bigger than the one behind General Stannart's house off base at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where Elam had trained in the reconnaissance leadership program at the outbreak of the war in the Holy Land. He pictured a wing of her mansion stuffed with professors wearing Coke bottle eyeglasses, all figuring out how to improve and perfect society. It seemed like something out of a long-ago sci-fi movie he'd seen in a mall cinema when he was a little boy. Somewhere down the slippery slope of that elusive fantasy he fell off into a few hours of oblivion. But his irrepressible internal alarm clock, a residue of the military life, brought him back to room 22 at exactly a quarter to six in the morning.

He could see pink daylight just beginning to glow through the curtains and remembered that he was obliged to report to the New Faith stables to commence a journey to Albany with the mayor's boy and Mr. Einhorn's son. Flame still slumbered with her back to him. She was snoring just enough to charm him with the deep animal commitment to sleep that seemed equal to her carnal devotions. She radiated a delicious warmth and a complicated female sweetness with a slight note of rot, and he repressed, with some difficulty, the impulse to press his body against hers one last time before departing. He suspected that he would never be this way with her again. Then, with his ranger's discipline and catlike stealth, he left her bed, retrieved his clothing, and soundlessly slipped away into his duties.

T
WENTY-FIVE

Daniel Earle, Teddy Einhorn, and Brother Seth were waiting in the New Faith stable when Elam came from his quarters, where he had stopped to fetch his traveling necessaries, his firearm, his saber, his dagger, his toothbrush, and his waxed jacket. Brothers Eben and Zuriel had prepared four mounts for their journey. Seth was already aboard his blue roan, Ollie.

“You taking your time this morning,” he observed as Elam shambled in.

“I wish I could have took more,” Elam said.

“You wasn't in your room.”

“That's true.”

“I went looking. Where were you?”

“I was elsewheres.”

“Since when are you steppin' out?”

“Since when you become my daddy?”

“I'm your guardian angel, brother. Don't never forget that.” In fact, Seth had rescued Elam from the carnage at Dimona, in the Holy Land, when his mechanized unit was wiped out in an ambush and Elam spent two nights in the latrine of an abandoned kibbutz hiding from the enemy, stung by scorpions while watching his shrapnel-shredded leg swell to nearly twice its diameter. Seth's unit had chanced along after the Hezbollah regulars pulled out and they found the sole survivor of one of the last battles of the war in that god-awful hole. Seth's own outfit was reduced to one remaining MRAP vehicle. With Elam half out of his head, they managed to evacuate back to Ashkelon on the coast and the doctors on the U.S. naval hospital ship
Forbearance
saved Elam's leg.

“You know I won't forget that,” Elam said with absolute sincerity and then turned to the others. “Good morning, gentlemen. Ready for a little sightseeing?”

Teddy Einhorn, the youngest, giggled nervously.

Daniel nodded respectfully. “I'm good to go,” he stated and straightened his beehive crown flat-brimmed straw hat, a product of the New Faith workshops. In anticipation of the journey, he found himself reimmersed psychologically in the training he received at Channel Island, Michigan, two years earlier with the federal division that called itself, simply, the Service. They had gone into the core of him and inserted things there that made him effective in situations that ordinary people rarely entered. However, Daniel was unaware of the dreadful events that had passed the night before at his father's house. He had not stopped in to say good-bye just as dawn was breaking when he walked across town from his lodgings in the newspaper office. His father had already provisioned him with a heavy purse of silver coin.

Eben brought out a black American standardbred gelding named Raven, sixteen and a half hands high, for Daniel, who was nearly as tall as Elam. Daniel used the mounting block to climb aboard. He was comfortable in the saddle, having ridden his Kentucky hunter Ike from Cincinnati to Tennessee and then back all the way to northeastern Ohio in his flight from the Foxfire Republic.

Zuriel, the New Faith farrier, inspected the hooves on Elam's Percheron-Appaloosa mix, Lad, with its massive brown and white spotted rump. Teddy Einhorn was much more used to driving the double spring-mounted box wagon for the family business than riding saddle horses. A compact, calm, and reliable bay mare quarter horse named Rosie was all tacked up waiting for him. Teddy had brought more clothing and equipment than could fit in the panniers provided to him and was now sorting things into two piles (take and leave behind) on a poncho laid down in the center aisle.

“You don't need that fry pan,” Daniel told him from high in the saddle. “Pick one of those books, but don't bring both.”

Teddy, who was smallest of the four men at five feet and eight inches, red-haired and stout like his father, had not been more than twenty-five miles from Union Grove since he was a small child. He traveled incessantly around the county, though, making deliveries and picking up farmers' produce and specialty items for the Einhorns' store. Unlike Daniel or the rangers, he knew the going price of just about every commodity or product that might be purchased in the new times, both wholesale and retail, and his father had furnished him with a list of items and commodities to bring back if they were fortunate enough to find a proper boat.

In a little while, the two rangers and the two townsmen left Union Grove at a trot with a strong spring sun rising above Schoolhouse Hill to warm their backs and the temperature already climbing toward 60 degrees. They turned down the old state highway number 40, a two-laner that followed the ridge due south along the Hudson Valley. The pavements were fissured and broken from years of frost heaves and no maintenance and they walked their horses single file along the shoulder where the ground was softer and even. From the Route 40 ridge on the east side to Bemis Heights on the west side, the ancient Hudson Valley was four miles across, though the river itself was a mere ribbon of water one hundred to two hundred yards wide as it curled down the valley's center. With the foliage fledging out, it was rarely visible through the scrim of forest that had deepened and thickened over the years as the human population dwindled. At intervals they passed abandoned houses dating from the late twentieth century, once occupied by people who thought nothing of burning half a gallon of gasoline to fetch groceries or of driving forty miles back and forth to a job day in and day out. These people, who were neither town people nor farmers, had been left marooned in the collapse. In just a few years most had either left or died. Their homes were split levels and bunker-like ranches and the “colonials” beloved by the home builders of yore. Now the vinyl claddings were coming apart, the fake stone veneers were splitting off, and the particleboard underlayment beneath was disintegrating from rainwater leaking in. In many houses, the “picture” window was shattered, from weather or malice it was impossible to tell. Some had their front doors stoved in. The tawdry lack of permanence was a joke on the culture of waste that had produced these dwellings. Likewise, the businesses along the highway from the old times stood in uniform desolation: a swimming pool supply company in a tilt-up concrete box had mature box elders growing out its empty front windows. The Dairy Girl drive-in, once a happy scene of summer family frolics and teenage romances, was a grim skeleton of wood framing, all the plate glass gone and the equipment inside scavenged in the Great Collection of steel that had accompanied the war.

The warm air was gravid with the scent of lilac. The hardy bushes planted in the early settlers' dooryards still grew where no trace of the original dwelling remained, poignant reminders of fleeting human endeavor along the furrows of history. Farther down off the ridge, in the distance, where the Hudson bottomlands made for rich loamy soils with few rocks, farm laborers could be seen driving oxen and plow horses in fields that had the texture of fine dark brown fur. On three occasions along the way that morning they passed others going about their business. One was a scrawny boy of twelve driving a herd of flop-eared Nubian goats to better pasture up the road. He stopped and watched the four horsemen blankly, in tight-lipped terror that they would take one of his animals and roast it for lunch. Another was an old woman with a brace of six slaughtered partridges tied by their feet to either end of a pole that she carried across her shoulder. She could not have weighed a hundred pounds herself, had wild frizzy white hair, and wore an old-times coat of bright red plastic meant to look like patent leather, with an incongruous number of zippered pockets and one sewn-on belt too many. She marched past them with her chin thrust out, ignoring the men as though they were ghosts.

“You must be a deadeye shot, ma'am,” the voluble Seth called after her, but the woman didn't even turn her head.

“I think she snared them,” Elam said. “She ain't carrying a firearm.”

The last was a grown man of forty-five who drove a cart filled with seed potatoes behind a spindly gray pony.

“No money, no money,” he said extra loudly as he approached, assuming that the four were freeboot bandits.

“We're men of Jesus,” Seth said.

“What . . . ?”

“Do you know the Lord, sir?”

“Is this the new style in robbery?”

“I tell you, we're foursquare and upright,” Seth rejoined. “When we talk to God, he answers back. We're in his service, and he's at ours.”

“He's a harsh employer, to my mind,” the man said.

“He's love incarnate, my friend,” Seth replied. “Lookit how your wagon box doth o'erflow in spuds. That's his doing.”

“So you say. Almost killed myself diggin' them. Once upon a time I sat behind a desk in a comfortable chair you could adjust sixteen different ways, with a coffee machine right at hand, and a girl outside the door who took all my calls. Our office handled half the fire and casualty between Albany and Glens Falls. Now look what I'm reduced to.”

“You could just as well say you been elevated.”

“How's that?”

“That whole old-times way of life was false. You know that.”

“I don't see it that way at all,” the man rejoined rather vehemently. “If you are in communication with the alleged deity, please tell him we've had enough punishment.”

“Okay, then. Go your way, sir, and God bless.”

Shaking his head in puzzlement, the potato cart driver flicked his reins until the pony stepped lively.