The Harrows of Spring (20 page)

F
ORTY-THREE

Brother Jobe stopped at the front desk of the hotel, where Brother Jonah sat reading a book.

“What you studying on?” he asked.

Jonah held up the spine to show:
Mayday!
by Clive Cussler. “It's about airplanes,” he said.

“What do you know about airplanes?”

“They're a wonder. Maybe we can try to build one?”

“I was you, I'd study up on mules instead,” Brother Jobe said. “You seen any sign of that Mr. Goodfriend or Mr. Glen Ethan Greengrass?”

“No. That Goodfriend, he comes and goes. The woman does too. Mr. Greengrass, I don't think he's left his room since they checked him in.”

“That so? What number is it?”

Jonah told him. Brother Jobe went directly upstairs and knocked on the door. One of the teens opened it, a very large boy, well over six feet tall, but with a head that seemed as if it belonged to another body: small, undershot chin, a twenty-three-hair mustache, pimples on the forehead. Brother Jobe could see past him to where Glen Ethan Greengrass sat in his wheelchair facing the window, the back of his head to the door. Another large boy sat in a chair farther in near Greengrass. The overgrown boy who answered the door laid a finger across his lips and said, “Ssshhh. He's sleeping.”

“Right in his chair like that?”

The guard shrugged.

“I'll come back,” Brother Jobe whispered. “Tell him I'd like to parley.”

The boy practically shut the door in Brother Jobe's face. He went back downstairs. At that evening hour on a weeknight the establishment was quiet. Two men from the Schmidt farm sat at the bar while Brother Micah puttered at his sinks. But Brother Jobe was more than a little interested to see Ainsley Perlew sitting at a table in the back, farthest from the door, eating supper. He crossed the room to him, his boot heels striking the new varnished plank floor sharply.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked.

Perlew looked up from his soup bowl as though the sight of Brother Jobe mystified him. Brother Jobe took a seat anyway. He watched Perlew slurp his soup for a minute.

“That was you killed them cows out on Coot Hill, wasn't it?”

Perlew helped himself to another spoonful of the bean soup, watching Brother Jobe as he did.

“You don't talk much, do you?” Brother Jobe said. “But you hear what I'm saying.”

Perlew swallowed and something like a smile, but not quite, drew his lips into a taut line.

“Did Mr. Greengrass or Mr. Goodfriend put you up to that?”

Perlew shook his head.

“Oh, it was your idear, then?”

Perlew stared back blankly and put his soup spoon down.

“Sonny Boy, I don't think you know who you dealing with,” Brother Jobe said, and then he touched his right index finger to the outer corner of his right eye. Perlew's own eyes followed it. Brother Jobe captured his attention as surely as he might pin an odd specimen of moth to a cork. He easily entered the young man's mind. But what he found inside was a bewildering void like a hall of mirrors made of shimmering jelly. He was inside for only a moment when the mirrors seemed to shatter as if the place were booby-trapped, and then he found himself outside again seeing nothing but Perlew's pale, emotionless face, the boy's mouth slightly agape as if it were necessary for his breathing. Brother Jobe had never encountered a personality so strange and fractured. Perlew took up his spoon again and helped himself to more soup.

“You're an interesting piece of work,” Brother Jobe said.

Perlew continued to eat his soup but did not grudge up a word of reply.

“You seem to be enjoying your supper,” Brother Jobe continued. “When you're done, collect your things and get out of here. I don't care if the sun's down. You can sleep out in the fields. And when you wake, keep marching straight back to wherever you come from. If I hear that you're at large in the county after tonight I'll be sore vexed. If I hear about any more dead livestock, you'll find there is hell to pay.”

Perlew's eyes lit up and he emitted a strange, brief high-pitched laugh.

“Are you the Devil?” he asked.

“People do wonder,” Brother Jobe said.

F
ORTY-FOUR

Circumstances had gotten Duane Terrio, aka Wawanotewat, He Who Fools Others, and his eleven “Indian” warrior comrades into just the right mood for some mayhem. They had been sleeping rough for more than a fortnight since leaving Massachusetts, bathing in the cold, spring-fed brooks that flowed into the Battenkill, and eating irregularly. They had received their instructions and found their way easily to Temple Merton's farm near Summit Lake, and watched the house from the margin of the woods when twilight stole over the property, and saw someone light the candles in the kitchen and a room adjacent, and watched as figures moved around in there. Rough living had also necessarily sharpened their senses, and even at this distance they could almost smell the comfort, cleanliness, and nourishment emanating from the establishment. The aroma of corn bread baking was enough to excite their most savage instincts.

Six of the visitors stole down and brazenly entered the house through the open kitchen door while six waited in the woods. Once inside, they shoved the cook and the serving girl into the hallway. The women ran shrieking from the house out the front door. Three of the warriors remained in the kitchen, seizing everything that looked like food, stuffing their faces, and rifling the pantry, cabinets, drawers, bread boxes, pie safes, and meat safes for more. Terrio and two of his closest associates burst directly into the adjacent dining room, where Merton and his girlfriend Lorraine Moncalvo were about to address their supper of spring lamb and boiled potatoes arrayed on a platter for them.

“Hope we're not interrupting,” Terrio said. He and the two others helped themselves to the tender pink meat and the parsleyed potatoes with their fingers. The platter was clean inside a minute. They washed it down with the bottle of Merton's own farmhouse cider, which they passed around, and wiped their hands on the tablecloth. “Go in there and bring me something else to eat,” Terrio said to the Indian on his right, a former truck mechanic from Holyoke named Wally Eaton, now called Makkapitew, He Who Has Large Teeth. The one to his left was a former blackjack dealer from Agawam, Massachusetts, Eddie Wilczek, now known as Segenam, Lazy.

Oddly, Temple Merton's prior experience in the movie business, though years removed from the present moment, prompted him to admire the costuming and makeup of the noisy band that had just invaded his house. Terrio's blackened face with red eye sockets and a white spot on his forehead seemed particularly authentic and frightful, though his irises were blue. Both Merton and his girlfriend stared boldly at the invaders as if sheer contempt could disarm them. Meanwhile, Makkapitew returned with a large dish towel wrapped around various cheeses, links of hard sausage, a ragged piece of corn bread, and also a jar of preserved spiced pears. Terrio opened the quart-size pear jar at once, pried up the sealer lid, and drank up all the sugary juice before stabbing the nine-inch blade of his hunting knife into the fruit inside.

“What tribe are you boys?” Merton inquired.

“Me?” Terrio said. “I'm one-sixteenth Pocumtuc. The other guys, a mixed bag. Some are just honkies.”

“Are you going to kill us, rape the women?”

Terrio laughed. “Naw, we're just going to burn your barns down and steal some stuff.”

“Why stop there?” Merton asked.

“We have our instructions.”

“Are you with that Berkshire outfit?”

“We're on contract for them. You have a lot of nice stuff here. I'm surprised nobody's taken it from you before.”

“Just lucky, I guess. We're kind of off the beaten path.”

“Then it's an honor and privilege to be first. Say,” Terrio turned to Lorraine, “that meat was outstanding. There was some kind of rub on it. Something piney.”

“Rosemary, salt, and a little honey,” she replied.

“I'll remember that,” Terrio said. “I like to cook myself when I'm not living off the land.”

“What's the point?” Merton asked.

“Of cooking? You're kidding me. People have to eat. Why not do it right?”

“No, of pretending to be savages.”

“That's not fair,” Terrio said. “First of all, I'd call it going native, not savage, though I admit sometimes we have to play a little rough—”

He was interrupted by the sound of something crashing in another room.

“Like I was saying,” he continued, jacking his thumb toward the hallway. “No, this is not like those historical reenactment clubs of old, you know, the Renaissance fair freaks and the Civil War dudes. Some of us think this—whaddayacallit?—this
collapse
has a ways to go yet and we're kind of seeing whether the Native American lifestyle might be an option for the long haul. I mean, you've got your situation here, right? What would you call this lifestyle of yours? White colonial settler?”

“I call it necessity,” Merton said. “It's not a lifestyle or an act.”

“Let's not have a semantic argument,” Terrio said. “Don't get me wrong, I respect what you've got going here. I kind of wish I'd had the foresight to get something like this together. But I was leading a normal life—ha!—and got blindsided by what happened. I was one of those dumb bunnies still waiting for energy independence and economic recovery when the bomb went off in DC. Then, believe me, I got it, good, hard, and fast. And some of the guys at the casino—I worked over at the SunEagle in Chicopee—we put this going-native idea together. I've got to say, it's toughened us up a lot. Sometimes I'm out there on the land, looking up at the stars, and it's like old Christopher Columbus never landed. Well, we better get on with the job. I suppose this flatware is just stainless steel.”

“That's right.”

“Got any real silver?”

Merton didn't answer. He folded his arms.

“Okay, then. Where do you keep your coin?” Terrio persisted.

Merton remained silent, his chin jutting defiantly, so Terrio sprang from his seat and commenced smacking the older man about the head. Lorraine rose to defend him but Segenam rushed around the table to restrain her. In the process, he couldn't resist groping her abundant bosom. She screamed.

“You okay in there, sir?” a voice called through the open window from out in the back garden, one of Merton's hired men, nine in all, who had rushed from their quarters on the property when the two servant women raised the alarm.

“Not exactly,” Merton yelled back, before Terrio whacked him again.

“What do you want us to do, sir?” the hired man yelled back.

“You don't have to turn this into a shit show,” Terrio advised Merton.

“Just stand by,” Merton hollered out the window.

Meanwhile, the other six of the Indian band came shrieking and whooping out of the woods with brands they had set aflame and ran down the pasture to Merton's great barn, and then his sheep barn, and then his carriage barn and carpentry shop, and began to set them alight. From his position at the table, Merton himself could see only the orange glow of the ensuing fire reflected on the landscape. Soon, animals could be heard shrieking. Merton's hired men could be heard shouting to each other to save them.

Two of the Indians who had gone upstairs entered the dining room. One of them, wearing an antique opera hat bedizened with turkey quills and a black, red, and gold U.S. Marine dress tunic above his loincloth and leggings, presented a sack that jangled as he opened it to show Terrio.

“Nice,” their leader said as he peered inside. Then, to Merton, “Looks like we found what we were looking for. Guess we'll be on our way, then.”

Hoofbeats could be heard as Merton's draft animals, released from the burning barns, stampeded past the house.

“Say, is it true you were an actor in a cable TV show back in the day?”

“Fuck you,” Merton explained.

“If that's the way you want to be . . .” Terrio went around the table to where a large landscape painting hung on the wall. Dated 1911, it depicted a factory village on the Housatonic River in springtime by the American impressionist J. Alden Weir. Merton had purchased it at a Christie's auction in Beverly Hills at the height of his earning years playing Lamont Circe in
Boomtown
on cable television. Terrio drew his knife from its porcupine quill–decorated sheath on his loincloth cord and slashed the canvas diagonally both ways. “Fuck you, too, then,” he said, “and the boat of Western civ you sailed in on.”

F
ORTY-FIVE

After Robert and Britney returned to the house on Linden Street, she went directly to the sickroom no longer occupied by Sarah, stripped off the sheets, put the room in order, swept up the splinters of the shattered violin in the parlor, and at last went up to the bedroom that she and Robert shared the past year to sleep away the rest of the afternoon. Robert did not trust her state of mind, and he was fearful of what she might decide to do, but he had no illusions about his ability to influence her. Their kitchen stores were low, but their four hens had been laying nicely as spring advanced. In the early evening he scrambled three eggs with some crumbled stale corn bread and chives from the garden mixed in, and some of Britney's own preserved hot pepper jelly on top, and brought this supper upstairs to her. She awoke and sat up in bed and accepted the plate and ate silently with the low evening sun pouring golden light into the room while Robert sat stoically beside her.

She cleaned the plate and, handing it back to him, said, “Thank you,” before burrowing back under the blankets. Robert left her as the sun dipped below distant Schoolhouse Hill. He scrambled three more eggs and the rest of the broken-up corn bread for himself, weeded the flowering pea vines and puttered in the garden until the twilight faded, and then sat outside watching the stars, feeling like a shipwrecked castaway on the tides of time. He was conscious that his thoughts and feelings were the same utterly unoriginal torments of billions like him: the bewildering indifference of the universe, the pointlessness of suffering, the inescapable obligation to abide with it. Flickering vignettes of Sarah flashed across his memory leaving a contrail of melancholy that made his skin crawl and his eyes burn. He longed to play some airs in the minor keys on his fiddle but did not dare disturb Britney. Finally, he could only ask himself, what are the duties of the living? And the only answer that came to him was to keep living, and, in his case, to find his way back to the elusive gratitude for being that resided somewhere inside him.

It was chilly now. After a while the moon came up and he didn't need a candle to find his way around upstairs. He took off his clothes and stole into bed beside Britney feeling the heat of life radiate off her and inhaling the complicated scent of her hair and the soft skin where his face came to rest against the back of her neck. She stirred and reached back for his arm and dragged it over her side and held his hand between her breasts. Tenderness swelled within him, crowding out all the confounding existential conundrums as exhaustion overtook him. Before long, their breathing synchronized and Robert slipped effortlessly toward a place where anything was possible, even something as fugitive as happiness.