The Harrows of Spring (23 page)

F
IFTY-TWO

Following his aborted interview with Glen Ethan Greengrass, Brother Jobe was in turbulent spirits when he returned to the old high school. He consulted in the old basement boiler room with Brother Amos, and inspected the arsenal of firearms the New Faith brethren had managed to lay in over the past year, much of it in barter for their excellent mules. He instructed Amos to get fifty rifles and a thousand rounds of suitable ammunition up to the horse barn. The hayfield beside it, formerly the school's soccer field, had gotten its first scything and would be ready for the townsmen to receive their abbreviated weapons training. Next he summoned one Brother Gabriel, a former short order cook from Fancy Gap, Virginia, and told him to ready a horse cart to transport half a dozen rifles to farmer Merton's place on Coot Hill. After that, Brother Jobe confabbed with his two rangers and his second in command, Brother Joseph, informing them that, on top of these kumbaya rascals from Berkshire attempting to work a grift on the whole neighborhood, a pack of rogues got up like Indians were on the loose burning down barns. Plus which, he'd made the mistake of releasing a sharpshooting, cow-killing psychopath named Sonny Boy who was liable to be at large somewhere in the vicinity, armed and dangerous.

“What kind of Indians?” Seth asked.

“A farmer called Merton up toward Hebron told our Mr. Earle that they was blue-eyed white men in buckskins and like that. They torched his buildings with the livestock inside. His men barely managed to get the animals out alive—”

“What the hell?” Elam said.

“Since when you start cussing around here, son?”

“Sorry, Boss. Guess my old army mind tooken over.”

“Might's well keep it switched on,” Brother Jobe said. “You-all got to come up with some kind of plan to run these birds to ground before they hurt somebody. The town men are coming over to muster in the hayfield in a little while. They'll be joined by an equal number of our men. Amos is sorting out the small arms down below as I speak. Joseph, you got one afternoon to shape them into some kind of tactical force to deal with all this vexation. Seth and Elam, I want you to go out on a recon starting ASAP. I'm informed them kumbayas done moved their bivouac. Find out where they's holing up. Far as we know them Indian sumbitches is on the move too. And mind that lone wolf Sonny Boy is out there. Keep a low profile. Don't take no horse. You'll present too much of a target right out there on the road. Go out on foot and stay in the cover —”

Before he was quite finished, Sister Zeruiah burst into Brother Jobe's office and interrupted, saying he must hurry to Mary Beth Ivanhoe's chamber to witness “a strange and awesome transfiguration.” Zeruiah was in an emotional state so tumultuous and agitated that Brother Jobe supposed that Mary Beth, the woman known variously as Precious Mother and the Queen Bee at the spiritual center of the New Faith sect, must be dying.

F
IFTY-THREE

Loren steered clear of home, the parish house of the Congregational Church, and his wife Jane Ann. He could not tell her that the gunshot young man lying in the doctor's recovery room was their son, Evan. The doctor had warned him that the danger of infection and complication from surgery was hardly over, was really only beginning, and that, frankly, the chance that Evan would die was not a small one. In case he didn't make it, Loren would rather that Jane Ann never knew Evan had made it within ten miles of home, only to be gunned down by bandits. He'd been away from home for exactly three years now. The accepted story, Daniel's, was that Evan had been lost when their boat foundered in a storm on Lake Erie off the shoals of Sandusky, Ohio. Jane Ann would never get over the loss of a child—no parent ever does—but she had accepted it and moved on, as he had, Loren thought, and now she had the four orphaned small boys to look after, and at the level of practical, day-to-day existence, as he observed her, she was okay. She was able to laugh and find joy in the world and abide with the affections of her husband, and Loren didn't want to bring all that crashing down. The doctor promised Loren he would not tell Jeanette what they had discovered. If Evan didn't make it, the secret would remain between the two of them.

Loren sat with Evan for an hour afterward, talking to him, though Evan remained in a deep, heaving sleep all the while. Eventually, Loren left to attend to his own pressing duties. He rode a New Faith mare to Ben Deaver's farm, which was closest to town of all the big farms. Ben had six men available for the muster, and he sent a seventh man on a very fleet horse around to the other farms of Todd Zucker, Ned Larmon, Bill Schmidt, and Carl Weibel to inform the men they could spare to report to the old high school at midafternoon, and meanwhile Loren returned to town to round up the other available, able-bodied men who did not work as laborers out on the big farms.

F
IFTY-FOUR

Robert Earle got a sturdy paint saddle horse named Mookie from the New Faith stables and set out for the rural townships with much on his mind besides the mischief of the Berkshire interlopers. As he left the village behind and ventured into the lush, mid-spring landscape, with pink and white phlox starting to bloom along the roadside and the trees fully fledged and the stupendous quiet of a landscape without motors, he was stunned as ever by the contrast between the world's beauty and its cruelty. And he marveled that it was possible for an ordinary man to function in that world made of those overpowering oppositions.

Britney was the main thing on his mind, like a musical refrain in a minor key stuck in his head. He knew her well enough to be sure that she absolutely required a child, just as she had said, and he knew for certain that he was unable to give her one. His vasectomy was his last encounter with modern medicine before the times finally turned. He'd gone with Sandy to the outpatient minor surgery facility in a strip mall outside Glens Falls. These were the first weeks when the electricity had just begun to falter. It would go out mysteriously for an hour or so every few days, enough to spook people without upsetting all of everyday life. It happened to go out that day fifteen minutes into Robert's procedure. He was under an IV sedative and a local anesthetic, and he was very much aware when the lights flickered and the emergency diesel generator kicked in. The doctor and other medical personnel carried on with a semblence of jaunty normality, as if it were England bedeviled by the Luftwaffe in 1942.

But the war in the Holy Land was far far away, and the situation was quite different. The nation was cracking under the weight of bloated modernity and all the patches pasted onto its excessive and malfunctioning hypercomplexity, and people were bewildered by the strange glitches, failures, and shortages. Going forward, nothing would really work anymore as it was designed to, yet the hope and expectation that it would all magically recover dominated the chatter in the rare moments when people could step back from their frantic lives and share a meal or a drink.

Now, this day years later, Robert carried a pistol as he rode the old county highways and back roads, alert for trouble in whatever form it might come in, but nothing untoward crossed his path. He stopped first at Holyrood's establishment, the county's leading cider works with several hundred acres of fruit, sixteen workmen resident on the premises, most with wives, all very busy in the orchards this week as the trees had blossomed and set fruit and needed a lot of tender love and care. Robert was relieved to see that Holyrood's barns, cider mill, and outbuildings were all unharmed, and Felix Holyrood himself had not heard of the arson at Temple Merton's place, which was seven miles away. He said he would set watchmen before sundown and that he had enough firearms and ammunition to put up a fight if someone came looking for trouble.

Robert proceeded from there, stopping at seven other farms in his planned nineteen-mile circuit. Of these farms, two had suffered arson and robbery by men dressed up like Indians following a visit by Buddy Goodfriend. One of the farmers, a goat dairyman named Brett Maun, had killed one Indian with a trenching shovel as the rascal was about to torch his birthing barn. He said it was the most startling thing in his life to be fending off an Indian attack, having been a small boy when that sort of thing happened only on TV. The dead man, suspiciously green-eyed, had lingered through the night after his cohorts slipped away into the dark woods. Maun and his wife gave him what attention they could, but his head was visibly cracked and he expired before dawn. He had been unable to speak while in their custody, so they learned nothing of his origins, purposes, or connections.

Robert completed his circuit of the rural townships late in the afternoon and set his course toward home, knowing that the combined town and New Faith defense force by now would have left the village seeking to evict the visitors from Massachusetts from their campground. He was a little sorry not to be there but confident with Brother Joseph in charge of the operation. Meanwhile, Robert knew Daniel was likely to have returned from his journey to Albany and, as he made his way home with the sun blaring in his eyes, an idea presented itself to him that seemed both inescapable and dreadful.

F
IFTY-FIVE

Brother Jobe entered Mary Beth Ivanhoe's chamber gingerly, expecting a grim and ghastly vigil, only to find a stranger sitting up in the bed at the center of the room and daylight flooding in from the cupola above, from which drapes had been removed. The usual group of attendant sisters was nowhere to be seen. The woman in the bed appeared to be in her mid-thirties, sturdy and big-boned with the high cheekbones and sharp nose of her Appalachian ancestors, descended from Scottish border ruffians who came to America before the Revolution. Her light brown hair was short, rather pixieish, as if it was just growing in after a season of chemotherapy. She wore a plain cotton shift and was sitting outside the bed covers with her feet out and crossed at the ankles. She had been buffing her nails when Brother Jobe crept in, his face flushed and his heart up in his throat.

“Uh, where's, uh, Mary Beth?” he stammered.

The woman put down the smooth river stone wrapped in goatskin she'd been buffing her nails with and glared at him with slitty eyes and forehead all scrunched.

“What's the matter with you, Lyle?” she said. “It's me.”

Brother Jobe took two steps back, as if recoiling from an object of incomprehensible bewilderment.

“That can't be you, Precious Mother,” he said.

“Git used to it,” she said, in a voice that retained some of its raw mountain screech. “And quit callin' me that.”

“Where are all your . . . your helpers?”

“I told 'em to git lost. They's makin' me nervous, fussing and hoo-hahing all about. Where you been at, anyways?”

In fact, it had been days since the honcho of the New Faith had visited the previously bedridden seer and protector who had led the group north from the violent wilderness of Dixieland.

“I been busy,” Brother Jobe said. “We got trouble in town. What all happened to you, Mary Beth?”

“First you tell me what kinda trouble.”

“Don't you know? You can see things.”

“Not anymore,” she said. “I done quit that.”

“That ain't something you resign from.”

“Want to bet? I done it. Last time you come to see me, I was at death's door, remember?”

“'Course I do.”

“Well, I went through that door a ways and up the elevator. Got some face time with the boss of bosses. He said, ‘Mary Beth, we're not ready for you. I'm sending you back, and you gonna lead a normal life.'”

“Jesus said that?”

“He don't like to be called that up there. But it was him, all right.”

“Mind if I set down?”

“Suit yourself.”

Brother Jobe took a seat. He picked up a small metal tray from the bedside table and fanned himself with it.

“I'm movin' out of this hothouse,” Mary Beth said. “Goin' down with the regular sisters. Maybe find a man amongst the brethren. Git back to regular living.”

“So hold on a second—you don't have no more powers?” Brother Jobe said.

“What I said? You even listening? That was part of the deal. He said, ‘You want to live normal, you got to act normal and be normal.'”

“What about your injuries? Your illnesses?”

“He done fixed all that.”

“I be dog,” Brother Jobe said. “Just like that?”

“You don't miss it when it's gone, believe me. Tell you the truth, I 'most forgot already what it was like to feel that way, all bloated up, achy and itchy, and them dang fits I used to git. Tell you something else I like. He said I could eat as much pie as I want now and won't never put on a extra pound again. I might work in the kitchen. The sisters tell me that's the place to be around here.”

“Mind if I ask, what was it like up there where you had your meet-up with you-know-who?”

“It was nice.”

“That all you got to say about it?”

“Kind of like I remember the penthouse suite of the Hilton Grand at Myrtle Beach. I was there one time before that sumbitch bashed me up with the car at the mall, 2006. A boy named Ramsey Burgwyn took me. He come in second in the NASCAR Coca-Cola Six Hundred sprint cup that year. It had a sitting room as big as the Ford showroom back home and a circular bed. He worked me over on it like an unfreshened heifer. The place smelt like a monkey house by the time we was done. Heaven's different that way. It smells like air freshener up there. Now, what kind of trouble you-all havin' in town?”

“Grifters and Indians,” Brother Jobe said. “I'm afraid you wouldn't understand now.”

“Well, I can't see through the veil of the humdrum no more, but it sure sounds like a bad combo,” she said. “Think we gonna overcome?”

“I mean to see that we do. I guess we gonna have to wait to find out.”

Mary Beth leveled her gaze at Brother Jobe. “Do you think I look pretty?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, I do,” Brother Jobe said. “Why you're prettier than a blue bunting in a tulip tree. I confess, I had no idear what was underneath all that blubber and sickness. Turns out you could dance with the stars, if they was still at it.”

Just then, another sister put her head inside the room and said, “We're ready for you down below, Mary Beth.”

“Hot doggies,” Mary Beth said.

Brother Jobe rose from his seat.

“You've had quite a life, girl,” he said.

“And I ain't done yet,” she said, climbing off the big bed and wobbling a little on her smallish feet. “Ain't that a novelty, though, standing up by my own self again. Sure feels dandy. Now make way for me, world. Mary Beth Ivanhoe is back in action amongst ye.”