The Harrows of Spring (22 page)

F
ORTY-NINE

At ten that morning, Terry Einhorn opened his general merchandise store on Main Street. His inventory of food commodities was low owing to the recent hiatus in trade and to it being the time of year when last season's stored-up fruits and grains ran near exhaustion. Shortly after he opened the store a box wagon pulled by two hard-used plug mares drove up outside the front window and seven boys ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen strode inside the store followed by a tall young woman in trousers and layered sweaters, who came up to the counter.

“Good morning,” Terry said, a little awed by the swaggering figure before him. He remembered seeing her on the porch of the hotel the night that the Berkshire leader made his bewildering speech. The young men who came in with her made him nervous, fingering the merchandise and casting surly looks his way.

“Peace, brother,” she said.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have a list,” Flame said. She retrieved a folded sheet of paper from the fleshy cleft deep within her sweaters and handed it over theatrically. Terry was certain there was some kind of cologne on it, and he wondered if it was meant to somehow bamboozle him. It was a long list and the many items were designated in substantial quantities. As Terry read the list his eyes shifted from the paper to the woman and back again.

“Miz Greengrass is it?” Terry said.

“That's right.”

“You're the people from out of town.”

“Yes, we're from the Berkshire People's Republic,” Flame said, “with our capital in Great Barrington.”

“I've been there,” Terry said. “Quite a while ago. I saw Vampire Weekend play at the Mahaiwe Theater.”

“What was that?”

“They were a rock and roll band.”

“Oh? Sexism, drugism, and music appropriated from people of color.”

“It was more than that.”

“They can't play it anymore with the electric off, can they?”

“Not like it was meant to be played.”

“We're not enslaved by loud, violent music the way you old-timers were,” she said. “Young people today put their energy into proactive politics. We're on our yearly outreach to bring justice, diversity, gender equality, and good government to the regions adjoining the BPR, and to unite with them against reactionary oppression, which is spreading like a plague across the broken land formerly known as the USA.”

“Good luck,” Terry said, cracking a smile that he could tell at once was not appreciated.

Flame's back stiffened.

“It's a bond of principle,” she said. “A creed. A politics of fairness and decency. What have you people here got?”

“We're fair and decent,” Terry said. “We've come through a bad patch of history and things have stabilized now, maybe even getting better, slowly but surely.”

“Such as what in particular?”

“We have the new hotel and tavern.”

Flame guffawed. “Do you have a government that cares? A government that shares?”

“We have almost no government,” Terry said. “A village board of trustees. A mayor. We had a magistrate for a while but he resigned.”

“Are you aware that your people are talking to our people about forming a federation?”

“I've heard rumors,” Terry said. “I've also heard that our people are inclined to say thanks but no thanks.”

“How can that be an option?”

Terry was not accustomed to political debate. Rather than answer Flame's question, he made a show of peering down the list she had handed him over his out-of-date eyeglasses and said, “I can't sell you all these things in the quantities you desire.”

“Why not?”

“It wouldn't be fair to my regular customers, the people who live in and around Union Grove.”

“You'll sell all these things sooner or later,” Flame said. “What does it matter if you sell them sooner rather than later? They're just things.”

Terry's amazement provoked him to smile again.

“Do I really need to explain?” he said.

“I think it would be only fair of you to try.”

“Well, you see I've got a responsibility to ration out the goods I have on hand so our people can get through these lean weeks of the year when the crops are just going in and last year's stuff is running low.”

Flame did not reply directly but rather just stared at Terry, as though to produce maximum discomfort in him.

“Yours is the only store anywhere around here,” Flame said when she tired of staring. “You enjoy a monopoly. How is that? Who gave you permission to control the distribution of necessities?”

“Anybody else is free to open a store if they want,” Terry said.

“The powers that be probably want the people to think so.”

“There are no powers that be around here.”

“No? You've got a handful of rich farmers who employ most of the workers in town. How is that not an oligarchy?”

“They're, most of them, decent people,” Terry said. “They're not pushing us around. They're not telling me what to do. And the truth is, if they really mistreated everyone, the people would rise up against them. You don't see that happening, do you? Why's that? Because these farmers have provided some structure to people's daily life after it almost completely fell apart. You think the general run of folks could make a go at subsistence farming? They didn't have the skills. They needed the experienced farmers to organize a new system.”

“That system is called feudalism,” Flame inserted.

“I don't care what you call it,” Terry said. “For now, it works, and nobody here is agitating to overthrow it. By-and-by it'll change. Things always do. As for me and my business, this town only needs one general merchandise store for the present time. We've got other businesses. There's a clothing store across the street, a barbershop, Russo's bakery, a livery where you can rent horses and carts, the new hotel. There's a fellow breeding mules and selling them all over the county. We've even got a new community laundry over on the river. This place is coming back and so are people's spirits. If you don't want to do business here with me, you can go up to Glens Falls, or back toward Bennington. If you want some of these things here,” he hoisted the list, “then you'll take what I'm willing to sell and that's that. Do we understand each other?”

Flame shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever,” she muttered.

“Okay then,” Terry said. “I can give you fifty pounds of cornmeal, not a hundred . . .” And so Terry read down the list. Finally, he called for Buddy Haseltine, the young man with Down's syndrome he had adopted during the depths of the collapse, when the epidemics were raging regularly and Buddy, then a teenager, lost his parents. These days, wanting to be more independent, Buddy slept in the back of the store, serving as an all-around helper and night watchman. This morning, as Terry worked through the Berkshire outreachers' shopping list, Buddy lugged sacks of provisions, slabs of bacon, strings of hard sausage, flats of eggs, and a gallon tub of butter to the front from the storeroom out back, and Terry got all of the stuff assembled in the sitting area in front of the idle woodstove, warning the boys who came in with Flame not to start loading it out the door yet. And then the time came to settle the account. Terry prepared a handwritten bill of sale. It came to twelve and a half ounces of silver. He handed it to Flame and crossed his arms.

“You charged us for the plastic tubs,” she said.

“That's right,” Terry said. “If you bring them back, I'll refund the deposit. They don't make them anymore, you know.”

Flame pulled a face, but then reached into her right trouser pocket and withdrew a fat wad of pinkish paper. She commenced to lay out twelve hundred Berkshire People's Republic dollars on the counter in various denominations.

“What's this?” Terry said.

“Money,” Flame said.

“No it's not.”

“It is. It's our money.”

He picked up a note, examined it closely, and held it up to the daylight coming through the window.

“It's a shabby printing job,” he said. “We don't take paper money here anymore, not even old U.S. Federal Reserve notes. You'll have to pay in silver.”

“We don't go with silver in the BPR.”

“You're not in your home territory. This is Washington County, New York, ma'am.”

Flame bristled.

“Soon to be part of the Berkshire People's Federation,” she said.

“Not if I have anything to say about it. Next time you venture over here, better bring more provisions with you.”

“I'm sorry if you don't understand,” Flame said. “This is what we're paying with. This is the people's money.”

“It's worthless paper.”

“Load the wagon, guys,” Flame said over her shoulder, and several of the boys started picking up plastic tubs and sacks.

“Put that down,” Terry barked. They made to hustle the goods out the door.

“Don't try to stop them,” Flame said.

Terry came out from behind the counter and tried exactly that. He wrested a twenty-pound sack of cornmeal away from one boy, a brawny fourteen-year-old with some black mustache fuzz, and, as soon as he did, he was beset by several of the others. Another boy seized a broom from a hook near the front door and began swinging at Terry's head with it. Three more boys ganged up on Buddy Haseltine, smacking and punching him with their bare hands until he curled into a ball near the window display of recycled plastic tubs, cookware, and candle lanterns, where they continued to kick him. Yet another grabbed an ax handle and landed several blows on Terry's kidneys. He dropped the sack of cornmeal he had wrested away from the young bandit and fell writhing on the floor. When he was finally able to pick himself up the boys were gone, and Flame with them, and all the provisions they had ordered up, too, together with the wagon they came in on. Even the paper money had been swept up off the counter and taken.

F
IFTY

Brother Jobe strode wrathfully into the front room of his new hotel where Brother Jubal, the day man, was sweeping up.

“Is that Mr. Goodfriend about in his room?” Brother Jobe asked.

“I believe his key is yet behind the front desk,” Jubal said, alluding to the house system whereby guests left their keys when out. It was not an easy matter to make a new key if one was lost.

“What number is the sumbitch in?” Brother Jobe said, storming behind the check-in desk himself. Jubal told him. Brother Jobe snatched the key off its hook and charged up the stairs, taking two at a time to the top floor. He didn't bother knocking, just unlocked the door and went in. Goodfriend's gear was scattered around the bed, the chest of drawers, and on the floor: shirts made of wondrous synthetic fibers, waterproof mountaineering pants, polarfleece outer­wear, and a ripstop nylon duffel bag which, when he unzipped it, proved to be stuffed with bundles of red-tinted Berkshire People's Republic money.

Brother Jobe slammed the door in disgust and made for Glen Ethan Greengrass's room on the second floor. Lacking the key to it, he knocked. The same large, pear-shaped young man as before, six feet and three inches of him, came to the door again. He put his index fingers across his lips and said, “Sssshhhh.”

“You tell Mr. Greengrass I got to see him.”

“Please, keep your voice down,” the young man said. “He's extremely ill.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Barely.”

“That's good enough for me. Let me in.”

“No.”

“Get out of my way, son.”

Brother Jobe attempted to shove him aside, but he was too bulky and stolid to get past. In the commotion, two other large boys became visible farther back in the room.

“I can't allow you in,” the young man at the door said.

“If your Mr. Greengrass is so sick, why don't you-all send for the doctor? We got one in town, you know.”

“Doctors can't do anything for him.”

“Is that your opinion or something you actually know about?”

“He doesn't believe in it,” the boy said. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“I'm the owner of this ding-dang hotel.”

“Come back later,” the young man said. “He's better some times of day than others.”

The door closed in Brother Jobe's face.

“Lookit here, son,” Brother Jobe spoke into the door. “When I come back Mr. Greengrass better be ready to talk to me or I'm gonna throw his ass out of the hotel, and you-all with him. Hear me?”

If they did, they did not signify from behind the closed door.

F
IFTY-ONE

The doctor was on his way up River Street toward the Congregational Church parish house when once again the enormous flock of black, brown, and white Canada geese down below stole his attention. They had marshaled on a wide bend of the Battenkill so thickly on the water that, the doctor mused, a mink could cross the river on their backs without getting its feet wet. The geese seemed to be going through some kind of population explosion. Their summer habitat in the Canadian far north had expanded with the retreat of the polar ice cap and now it was their time of the year to journey there. So absorbed was he that he did not notice the Reverend Loren Holder coming his way down the street until he was nearly upon him. The doctor turned, somewhat startled.

“Hey, I was just coming up to see you,” he said.

“I was looking to talk to you too,” Loren said. “Ever seen so many freakin' geese around?”

“No. It's got me worried.”

“Last time I went fishing, there was so much goose shit in the water that weeds are starting to choke the Pothole,” Loren said, referring to a pool famous among the trout fishers. “There were never weeds like that there before.”

“I'm more concerned about when we're going to see another flu outbreak,” the doctor said. “You must have noticed that the first two coincided with the spring migration.”

“Only now that you mention it,” Loren said.

“I think these geese are the vector.”

“Is that why you were coming to see me?”

“No. I've got a patient in the surgery and I need help getting him into a bed. It's too much for Jeanette. Can you give me a hand moving him?”

“Sure. Anyone I know?”

“Young man. No name. Still unconscious. Those two army boys from the Jesus cult found him all shot up in a ditch down in Stillwater. Robbery, I guess. Even took his shoes. They brought him back here thinking he was going to die on the way but he made it. Now he's got to survive the surgery. So far, so good, but it's still early. What were you looking to talk to me about?”

“Your drinking,” Loren said without any throat clearing.

“I don't know that I can stop.”

On the way back to the doctor's house Loren said what he had to. The people in town needed the doctor. They couldn't lose faith in him. Everyone would soon know what condition he was in the night that little Sarah Watling died. It would get around.

“I couldn't have saved that girl,” the doctor said.

“You certain about that, Jerry? Absolutely certain? I sure couldn't save her. I know that. Jason couldn't. He's just not an MD. But you? Anyway, we'll never know.”

After a protracted silence, the doctor could only repeat himself: “I don't know how to stop.”

“When you feel helpless before that bottle, you come and see me,” Loren said. “I don't care what time of the day or night. You can get me out of bed if that's how it is. We'll go out walking. We'll walk in the daylight or the moonlight or by starlight. We'll talk. If it's raining, come into the house and we'll drink tea in my study. We'll talk some more. We'll go fishing in the goose shit and talk. You come and see me when you feel like you have to have a drink.”

“All right,” the doctor said.

“All right,” Loren said.

By then they'd reached the doctor's place. He led Loren into the carriage house that was his office and his lab. Jeanette came in from the house a moment later. The gunshot man still lay on the operating table in the lab with a nasogastric feeding tube taped to his face and a massive bandage over his neck wound. The doctor explained carefully to Loren how they were going to transfer him to a gurney and take him into a bed in the recovery room behind the lab. Loren took the foot end. They managed the lateral transfer without incident. Loren provided the push to the gurney while the doctor helped steer through the door and Jeanette controlled the rolling glucose bottle stand. They did another lateral onto the bed, got the soiled sheet out from under the patient, and log-rolled him a half turn so he could be given another opium suppository. Jeanette pulled up the side rails on the bed. It was a bright, clean, spartan whitewashed room with nothing in it but the bed and a table. It was on the north side of the building and soft daylight came through the window, filtered by a lilac tree that perfumed a cool breeze stirring the gauzy curtains. The doctor checked the feed tube and the drip. Jeanette went off to fetch some clean dressings for the surgical wounds.

“You can go now, if you want,” the doctor said to Loren.

But Loren hardly heard him. He was staring intently at the young man's bearded face from near the foot of the bed. Loren's jaw dropped. He came around the bed and peered closer. He reached over the bed and seized the doctor by his arm and squeezed so tightly the doctor said, “Ow.”

“Dear Lord,” Loren said. “That's my boy. That's Evan.”

The doctor was so astounded to hear this that he swung around and knocked a candlestick off the bedside table.

Loren collapsed into the seat of the chair beside the bed. His hands began to rove over Evan's body as though he were trying to physically reassemble him in the form he remembered, a laughing boy of eighteen.

“Look,” Loren said. “It's him. Oh, Lord.”

“Better not to touch him.”

“Huh . . . ?”

“Danger of infection.”

Loren withdrew his hands and sat stiffly in the chair, nearly breathless with agitation, struggling to readjust the cognitive mechanism in his mind that had finally permitted him to accept his son's death and now had changed back the other way.

Even during the years before Evan left home to see the country with Daniel Earle, the doctor had barely attended the boy as a patient, for Evan was never sick. But he knew the family, of course, and Evan was always there in the background with the other children in town, so he knew him a little.

“I think you're right,” the doctor said. “Oh, my goodness.”

“He's a grown man,” Loren said. “But it's him. It's my boy.”