The Harrows of Spring (16 page)

“Is this another of your treatments?” Daniel said.

“I'll treat you fairly if you hand over the purse of money that you must be carrying to the boatyard,” the doctor said.

“What's the matter with him?” Annette said, pointing the muzzle of her pistol at Elam's bedroll. The blanket was bunched up to his hat and his boots stuck out the end but he remained motionless.

The doctor crept forward and kicked the blanket. His foot met no resistance. He snatched the end of the blanket and yanked it down. Between the empty hat and the empty boots lay all the party's saddlebags.

“You out there, friend?” the doctor called into the darkness.

“Yes I am,” Elam called back from an indeterminate distance.

“All right, then.”

“It's not all right.”

“Yes, I can see how you'd get that impression,” the doctor said. “Are you armed?”

“Why don't you make a move and find out?”

The doctor appeared to reflect on the proposition a moment before calling back, “What say we just call it a draw, go our own ways.”

“What, so you can rob other folks?”

“I assure you this is not our regular disposition.”

“Some vitamin deficiency drive you to it?”

“We don't want any trouble.”

“Too late,” Elam said. “You found it.”

“Are you going to kill us then?”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“What kind of Christian men would do that?”

“We're the avenging angel sort.”

Nurse Kelly backed away from Teddy Einhorn and huddled beside the doctor.

“Don't let him kill us,” she whimpered.

“There must be some way we can settle this without bloodshed?”

“Yes there is,” Elam said. “Place your weapons on my bedroll.”

They hesitated, but then did as he said, including the razor. It was only then that Seth threw off his blanket revealing that he had a pistol in his hand, leveled all the while at the doctor. Elam strode in from the darkness holding a length of an ash limb about the size of an old-times baseball bat.

“Interesting, how you managed that,” the doctor observed. “May I ask what aroused your suspicions?”

“Why, everything about you.”

“What's next, then?”

“I'll ask the ladies to hitch up your nag and prepare to leave,” Elam said.

“Hop to, girls,” the doctor said. They hurried to the task.

Dawn was breaking. The doctor shivered. The torch was nearly spent. Daniel got the campfire going again.

“I just want to say, it was damn nice of you boys to share your provisions with us last night,” Dr. Spinner muttered in a new and humbler way. “Despite what has happened, I want you to know that I really am a physician and that we really do serve the poor country people abroad in the county. But in these times, unfortunately, opportunity sometimes presents temptation.”

“That's a pretty way of putting it,” Elam said.

The rangers would not engage in further badinage with the doctor. They allowed him to just stand in place a few minutes and marinate in self-reproach while the girls prepared the wagon.

“We're ready to go, Doctor,” Annette called eventually.

“I don't suppose you'll give us our firearms back,” the doctor said. “We need protection out there on our rounds.”

“Against rogues like yourself?” Seth said.

“There's worse out there than us, I assure you.”

“Worse than cutthroats?” Seth said. “It don't need to get worse than that.”

“All right. Point taken,” the doctor said. “Will there be anything else?”

“Yes,” Elam said. “I'm going to give you a hearty thrashing to remember this by, and mebbe you will stick to your true calling from now on, which could be doctor or whoremonger or both, I don't really know, but I recommend you leave off thieving.”

And so did Brother Elam work over the doctor Lowell Spinner with a length of ash limb until he was limping, discolored, and bleeding in a few places. The women helped him up into the wagon, groaning, and then, as the sun broke over a distant Taconic hilltop, they were on their way.

T
HIRTY-FIVE

By ten in the morning the next day the four horsemen crossed the bridge at the former mill town of Cohoes, just north of Albany, where the Mohawk River met the Hudson in a maze of side channels and islands. A catastrophic fire had burned down the old downtown several winters ago. The jagged shells of three- and four-story brick buildings and piles of rubble in Remsen Street gave the scene the tragic look of an old World War Two photograph. A few sad-faced pickers scuttled among the ruins with their scavenging sacks but otherwise the place was uninhabited. The desolation continued along the sleeve of the Hudson shoreline south from there, past the ruins of the old Watervliet arsenal, where the U.S. military produced cannon carriages and ammunition beginning with the War of 1812 and then other ordnance all the way through Vietnam. The chain of industrial ruins ran from there to within a quarter mile of the new Albany waterfront at the base of the State Street hill, atop which stood the abandoned state capitol building. The legislature had not met in years, the vast state bureaucracy had shut down altogether, and the last governor, one Eric Champion, had disappeared in the chaos that attended the first visit of the Mexican flu.

The Albany of the new times was now concentrated along the river, where a score of boatyards lay in the shadow of the old elevated Interstate 787 highway, along with a new street called Commercial Row, lined by modest warehouses, wholesale mercantile establishments, shops, and two hotels. Since the demise of Dan Curry, a commission of business owners and boatbuilders had swept the rest of Curry's minions and hangers-on out of town, set up a new lawful administration, along with a court and paid constables, and a dockmaster's office, and installed a full-time town manager, a former Target executive named John Alonzo.

With its current population at 3,200, plus many transient boatmen, farmers, and men of trade on any given day, Albany was a much bigger town than Union Grove. Teddy Einhorn had never been in a place so bustling with commerce and activity. When he was a small child the national economy was still roaring but, paradoxically, the towns and cities were dead. All the action took place in the ambiguous suburban periphery of chain store shopping and free parking. He dimly remembered the whir and flash of automobile traffic with a kind of thrilling nausea. As he recalled, there were no places in that old-times world where people walked down sidewalks and gathered around shop fronts. The people of Union Grove did gather in his family's general merchandise store—especially in winter with the woodstove burning. But on any given day most of the town's denizens were off at their jobs on the farms of the wealthy landowners, or at the sawmill, the creamery, the cider house, and so forth, so Main Street was generally sleepy. Albany's growing Commercial Row housed a score of businesses and emporia, with goods going in and coming out from daybreak to sunset, people likewise coming and going, and many of them lingering outdoors in the fine weather to talk business or socialize. With the great urban sink of New York in breakdown and disorder, the rising sea level aggravating its problems, and international trade all but discontinued, the locus of remaining commerce had shifted inward away from the coast to the interior of the continent, and the Hudson River had once again become the watery main street of the region. Albany had become a center of exchange with its favorable position at the top of the Hudson estuary, where the tides were still felt and the water was yet slightly brackish, and with its connections both north to Canada and west to the vast inland empire of the old “flyover” states.

Much of the Albany business was wholesale trade, with produce and goods coming all the way from the Great Lakes down the Erie Canal and Mohawk River, and a lot of it went out as quickly, bound for markets as far away as Quebec or downriver to Kingston and Newburgh. The businesses on Commercial Row ranged from farm products to fishmongers, butchers, tools, farm implements, animal feeds, textiles and fabrics, pipes and fittings, crockery, cutlery, hardware, boots, pattern-cut clothing, sail lofts and chandlers for the outfitting of watercraft, even a new icehouse. Much of the merchandise for sale in these establishments was not new but salvaged old-times goods, and many stores had back workrooms where men and women labored to repair things and make them as much like new as possible. Customers most cared that these articles worked well and might last, not whether they were the latest thing or not.

As the men of Union Grove rode down the street, Teddy exclaimed to himself over and over, “This place is up and coming!” so enthralled was he by the noise, color, and motion. Seth and Elam remarked to each other how the scene had improved in just a year, looking much less like a frontier settlement than when the odious Dan Curry ruled. Daniel drew down the brim of his hat as he passed through Commercial Row, his thoughts harking back to Franklin, Tennessee, and his momentous deed there. His nerves entered a state of high alert as he glanced around and his eyes locked here and there with the casual gaze of shop clerks, tradesmen, and passersby. He had not been in a town of consequence since his weeks in Franklin, approaching two years ago, and even here among his own people, far from the Foxfire Republic, he fretted over the price on his head.

A new hotel, the Empire, had been erected the previous fall on Commercial Row, across from the dockmaster's headquarters. The hotel featured a fourth-story domed cupola at center and a sixty-foot-long, two-story veranda along the whole frontage. A big sign across the left side of the veranda said
OYSTER BAR
. Farther down the street, at the south end of Commercial Row, stood the poorly contrasting Slaven's Hotel, where the rangers had stayed the last time, now strictly the haunts of the lowest boatmen, while business people flocked to the Empire. The day market of pushcart vendors and farmers' stalls was also established in the vicinity of Slaven's, and pigs, some of them large, dangerous boars, roamed down there at night rooting in the gutters after the stalls closed.

A man named Grasso had established a day livery in the side street called Maiden Lane, a corral where the horses of day travelers could be rested, watered, and watched over while their owners went about business in town. The four men of Union Grove left their mounts there. The rangers, with their shopping list from Brother Jobe, went off at once to scout their purchases among Minnery's General Stocks, Hyde's Salvage and Made Goods, Van Voast's Import and General Trade Articles, and Aulk's Provisions, the food wholesaler. Daniel and Teddy Einhorn made for the boatyards. They all agreed to meet at the Oyster House of the Empire Hotel at four in the afternoon.

As the modern age waned, the practical design of inland waterway trade boats devolved to models long forgotten during the decades of motors and cheap oil. In the new times, the workhorse of the Mid-Hudson Reach was a flat-bottomed, shallow-draft, sprit-rigged sailing barge in the twenty-five- to forty-foot-long range, a homely but sturdy and capacious craft, easily maneuverable with leeboards to prevent side slipping, cheap to build, able to be managed by a crew of two, and with plenty of room on and belowdecks for cargo. They were denoted “Germantown tubs” because the prototype was first built in that village midway between Albany and Poughkeepsie.

Weems's Boat Works was one of several establishments that trafficked in previously owned watercraft along the Albany riverfront. Daniel and Teddy came to it after inspecting many boats in other yards, none of them suitable for one reason or another—spongy hulls, filthy bilges, bad rigging, sails not included, ­overpriced—and found one there that fit all their requirements. Ned Weems, the proprietor, had lost his twenty-year-old son the previous fall when a wooden loading crane up the street at Orvo's Marine Supply snapped and a stone counterweight flew out of its basket and cracked the young man's head open. Consequently Weems had a soft spot for young men, especially those seeking to improve themselves in difficult times, and gave the pair from Union Grove a very fair price for the tub called
Katterskill
, twenty-eight feet long, with striking red sails. They settled for ninety ounces of silver. They said they would sleep on her that night and sail away in the morning if that was all right. Weems said it was, and he would tidy up the cabin for them, and invited them for supper but they declined. Having business up the street, they thanked Weems and then the two went their own ways.

Teddy Einhorn had a long list of provisions to see about for his father's store and Daniel went in search of newsprint and things his father had asked for, in particular guitar and violin strings. They found mostly what they were looking for. Daniel bought five reams of 24 x 36–inch double-broadsheet paper at Van Voast's and was informed that weekly newspapers like his were starting up in Albany, Amsterdam, and Rhinebeck. He learned, too, that a weekly mail packet had just begun service between Albany and Peekskill and that he could arrange to distribute copies of his newspaper on it.

The four reassembled at the Oyster House bar at the appointed hour. The place glittered with luxurious furnishings. Its large room ran clear through the building from the veranda to a beer garden in the rear. Above the chair rail, mirrors lined the room, which amplified the available light. All the brass fixtures were brightly polished and crisply ironed white tablecloths lay on the tables. Even at four in the afternoon the bar was lively with patrons, many of them refined-looking, including not a few women of business, and the bar thrummed with conversation. A wire basket filled with lemons stood on the bar, a startling sight, and the burly bartender shook fancy drinks. A platter of smoked Lake Ontario whitefish and pickled onions greeted all comers gratis on a sideboard across from the bar.

Supper at the Oyster House was their reward, Elam said, for making the journey. Their boss had allocated extra coin for it, and they could order whatever they liked. The men found a table outside in the back and recounted their adventures of the day over a brew advertised as Cropseyville lager, reddish brown with a toasted malt flavor and no hops. A boy waiter, so young his voice had not changed, persuaded them to try the Cortland Blue Point oysters that had come to flourish on the reefs along the Tappan Zee, and when they were finished with six each of those he talked them into another order of Ossining Wiannos, both types served with horseradish cream. The menu consisted mostly of articles that came out of the river: shellfish, sturgeon, shad, bream, spring bluefish, smelt, eel, and white catfish, grilled, fried, smoked, or configured in chowders and stews. Potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, and turnips figured in. But even in Albany fresh vegetables were in short supply that time of year and there was no fresh fruit whatsoever besides the lemons, which came all the way from Maryland, the waiter said. Wheat bread was listed at a price that put it out of the question, but there was plenty of corn bread and ample fresh butter, now that cows could graze again. They ordered supper and, before their plates arrived, Elam announced that he and Seth would begin their return journey that evening and would have a good three hours of daylight if they left around five o'clock. They would take all four horses back, of course, as prearranged. They'd leave Daniel's and Teddy's bedrolls and personal gear at the livery. They expected to be home in Union Grove the following evening, unless they were detained by cutthroats, pickers, regulators, bushwhackers, bandits, or other riffraff, whom they were prepared to vanquish, Elam said with a grin.

Before they left, the rangers gave Daniel and Teddy a wad of receipts for the goods they'd bought, to be loaded on the new boat. The merchants' system was to convey bulk purchases to the docks by handcart, and would do so in the morning when presented with the papers. From dawn to dusk Commercial Row was full of carts pulled by cart boys who made up a special society of their own in the town. They lived in the orphans' “mansion” on James Street behind the crumbling elevated freeway. The late Dan Curry had set up the establishment, one of his few acts of civic generosity, because he had been an orphan himself, and had grown up sleeping in abandoned houses, and went for days without meals. At the mansion, the orphans ate as well as the merchants who employed them and slept in real beds.

Finally, Elam toasted the table, saying the journey down had been a fine one in good company—even including the antics of Dr. Lowell Spinner—and wished “the boys” a good trip home on their new boat. They were to look for a new landing on the river near Bullock's when they got home. Seth gave Daniel the .38-caliber revolver they had taken from Dr. Spinner's girl, saying he hoped there would be no reason to use it, but that having it would surely be a comfort. Elam kept Dr. Spinner's shotgun. Then the rangers drained their glasses and left the Oyster House.

“The boys” lingered out on the terrace. Later arrivals to the Oyster House seemed to prefer the glitter of the main barroom to the back garden, so there was no pressure to vacate their table. Daniel asked the waiter to bring any newspapers lying around and the boy came back with the latest edition of the
Kingston Pilot
. The news of doings in the rogue Foxfire Republic concerned one Trey Dansey, successor to the assassinated president Loving Morrow. Dansey was threatening to “capture and crucify” Milton Steptoe, president of New Africa. Armies of both breakaway nations had engaged in April in a series of battles between Corinth, Mississippi, and Florence, Alabama. The Foxfire government claimed the engagements amounted to a draw, but that raised the question: why was the fighting so close to the Tennessee border? The dispatch implied poor military leadership and low troop morale on the Foxfire side. There was no further news about the search for Loving Morrow's killer. Almost two years on, the incident seemed to have disappeared into the maw of history like a bawling animal of the wilderness sinking in quicksand out of earshot of God Almighty. In other news, the federal president Harvey Albright vowed to “rebuild the northern electric grid one county at time.” A murrain thought to be viral rinderpest was killing cattle in the St. Lawrence River valley. A spring nor'easter had drowned Providence, Rhode Island, and it took two weeks for the waters to recede. The scant international news mentioned the ongoing breakdown of China into many autonomous states, despotic fiefdoms, and contested dominions. A devastating drought parched the breakaway nation of New South Wales, formerly of Australia. And there was a short item about the lynching of the Argentine dictator Ricardo Scarpa, plus five of his ministers, leaving the resource-rich country in a state of anarchy. Daniel read all the stories out loud to Teddy while they nursed their beers and enjoyed their leisure.