The Harrows of Spring (29 page)

S
EVENTY-ONE

Britney told Robert that she was going out gathering wilds. The morning was warm, dry, and so clear that, to Britney, the air itself seemed to magnify every detail of the waking world, every leaf, every cloud, every living, flying, buzzing thing. Robert had gotten up before her to make their breakfast, but when she came downstairs she said that her stomach was too upset to eat. She said good-bye through the door while he was in the bathroom and left the house without a sack or basket to carry her wild gatherings home.

She took Main Street east out of town, past the ruined Kmart, and hiked up the empty highway through a landscape raucus with birdsong until she got to the old railroad right-of-way that led just a short distance to the decrepit steel truss bridge across the Battenkill. She walked carefully down the old rotting wooden ties that lay across the rusty girders, cognizant of the irony in watching her step. She stopped about two-thirds of the way across. Forty feet below, the large glacial erratic boulder called the Priest by fly fishers of the old times waited in a current reduced in force from its early spring flow. The Battenkill made a lush green tunnel an eighth of a mile down to a bend in the river where yellow iris blazed in a sunbeam above a quiet shoal. Cedar waxwings dipped back and forth across the stream eating caddis flies as they shed their larval armor and took flight as adults. The insects that dallied in the surface tension skin of the water, drying their wings too long, were slurped down from below by hungry trout, who made little dimples in a pool downstream of the Priest as they fed.

Britney could not reconcile the stupendous beauty of the world with its sadness. The birds, the fish, and the insects that performed in the spectacle before her all owed some duty to violence and death, Britney thought, and so did she. There was no escape from it. In the old times, which she remembered very well, there was a multitude of distractions to allow you to forget these primal obligations to existence. Some people never even encountered them until their final moments, when it turned out to be the biggest surprise of their lives. The last thing she would be, Britney thought, on this warm, bright spring morning, was surprised.

A waist-high strut ran the length of the bridge on the edge of the carriageway deck. Britney leaned against it breathing deeply. Her pulse raced and her head pounded as she contemplated what she willed herself to do. A sour bile rose into her throat as if a reminder of creation's bitter ruthlessness and her vision blurred as her eyes filled with tears. She made a short speech in her head thanking Robert for his kindness and care, apologizing for the way she'd said good-bye, and wishing his forgiveness, and then she stepped on a diagonal brace to climb to the top of the strut.

Jane Ann Holder saw the figure on the bridge from about fifty yards down the tracks on the far side of the river. She had been earnestly gathering wilds herself—nettles and burdock in a sack and morel mushrooms in a basket—as a way to get outside and clear her head after the ordeal of the night surgery. She had been relieved in the recovery room at seven in the morning by Bobbie DeLand, who had been a geriatric nurse. The horror of the dying and mutilated children still left Jane Ann wobbly and a night without sleep amplified the raw emotion roiling inside her. When she halted in her footsteps up the tracks from the bridge, and realized that the woman in the thin white frock was Britney, she put down her sack and basket and called out to her. As Britney turned her head to see who was hailing her, Jane Ann hurried the rest of the way onto the bridge. Britney clambered onto the strut, looked down at the Priest and at Jane Ann rushing toward her, and let go of her grip on the vertical girder post. For a moment she hung suspended between the world and the not-world. But Jane Ann was six inches taller than Britney, and strong, and she gripped Britney around the hips and wrenched her down off the strut. In the process, both women fell in a heap on the railroad ties that formed the flimsy, rotting deck, Britney shrieking and flailing at Jane Ann with her fists. Jane Ann held tight to Britney until her shrieks became sobs and she stopped struggling.

“Let me go,” Britney sobbed.

“Only if you promise to be still,” Jane Ann said.

She hesitated to agree and Jane Ann held on. Finally Britney said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay . . .”

Jane Ann relaxed her grip. She could see daylight and rushing water through the railroad ties and girders beneath. She torqued her body and hauled herself upright. Then she reached down and took hold of Britney's slender but muscular upper arms, hoisted her up, and allowed Britney to fall into her embrace.

“Come, let's sit together awhile,” Jane Ann said.

Britney nodded.

Jane Ann led the smaller woman the rest of the way across the bridge to a mossy embankment cut through the land a century and a half earlier by the railroad builders. The gentle slope there was as soft as a carpet.

“Come sit.”

They lowered themselves onto the moss. Sunlight shimmered in the silver beeches across the tracks as a mild breeze stirred the glittery coinlike leaves. Britney cried again for a long time and Jane Ann simply held her hand until she ran out of tears.

“Please don't tell anyone,” Britney said.

“I won't.”

“What am I going to do in this world?” Britney asked.

Jane Ann hesitated, struggling to contain her own emotions.

“I heard what happened to you,” she said. “I know what it's like to lose a child. Evan has been gone for three years. Every day I have to battle with the empty hope that he'll turn up. I don't win the battle. But even so, something inside me remains grateful to be in this world. I don't want to leave it, even if he's gone. If anything, I feel a stronger duty to remain here.”

“This world is vile,” Britney said.

“No, it's a strange and mysterious gift. But it's up to us to care about each other and somehow, after a while, that leads to caring about being here.”

“I don't know if I can bother trying anymore.”

“There's a child who needs you,” Jane Ann said.

“What child?”

“One of the kids wounded yesterday.”

Britney looked bewildered.

“You don't know what's happened?”

Britney shook her head. “Something about bandits, Robert said.”

“These were not bandits,” Jane Ann said. She described the incident in the hayfield. The casualties. The night surgery. The survivors.

“How terrible,” Britney said.

“There's a little girl, six, maybe seven, we're not sure. No name yet. Her lower leg was shattered and the doctor had to take it off. She'll need a home. She's not going back to where she came from. None of them are. Would you consider taking this little girl in and caring for her?”

Britney appeared overwhelmed.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Would you come see her with me?”

Britney brought the heels of her palms up to her eyes, struggling to find the will to reply.

“You're a good mother,” Jane Ann said.

Britney dropped her hands, nodded her head, and resumed weeping.

“Okay,” she said between sobs. “Okay.”

Jane Ann put an arm around Britney's shoulder and drew her close. They sat in a little patch of sunlight until Britney came back to herself.

“Come,” Jane Ann said. “Let's go see her.”

She helped Britney to her feet. Jane Ann retrieved her sack and her basket. Together they crossed the old railroad bridge and made their way back to town.

S
EVENTY-TWO

Bullock returned from the timber cutting at midday for lunch with his wife. Sophie brought a basket up to the Japanese teahouse that Robert Earle had built some years ago beside the half-acre pond stocked with trout. They sat on cushions at a low wooden table in the open pavilion with blue clematis climbing up the trellis on each side. The table was weather-burnished the same vivid silver color as Sophie's hair. She took the various items out of the basket and arranged them on the table: a small teapot and two porcelain cups, a glass box containing negimaki—grilled rolls of thin-sliced beef around spring onions—and another of mushroom dumplings, a tiny ceramic jug with a wooden stopper containing soy sauce made on the premises, and a shaker containing ground red pepper. They ate off the blue Karakusa plates that Bullock had shipped home from Japan during his post-collegiate sojourn there. The whole operation thus far had been conducted in a kind of formal silence they often observed for these teahouse lunches, a retreat from the morning's busyness into ceremonial Zen-like calm. Today, however, Sophie's concerns could not be palliated by simple stillness.

“Dear,” she said, lifting her teacup.

“Um . . . yes?”

“A favor, please.”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Those trespassers you captured last night?”

“Yes. Very bad men.”

“Of course. Did you . . . you know . . .”

“Yes, it's done.”

“Where are they?”

“Laid out in the apple storage cooler.”

“I hope you won't make a morbid display of them on the River Road?”

“You never go down there,” Bullock said.

“Yes. But they frighten other people.”

“Gosh, hon. That's the idea,” he said, spreading his hands out as though a banner hung in the air between them. “Message: thieves and riffraff will be dealt with severely.”

“A painted sign might do as well, don't you think? Perhaps with a picture of a hanged figure.”

“Frankly, I disagree. There's something more persuasive about a ripe corpse hanging from a tree picked over by buzzards.”

“Stephen! We're eating,” she said, placing a delicate hand demurely over her midriff to denote gastric distress.

“Sorry,” he said, brandishing a chunk of negimaki between two chopsticks, “but you know those savages came this close to burning the place down last night.”

“I understand, darling.”

“Who knows who or what might blow this way next. Cannibals, thrill killers, Visigoth wannabes.”

“The thing is, dear, after a few days they begin to stink.”

“It can't be helped.” Bullock made a helpless face, a moue, as if his samurai demeanor had suddenly and mysteriously turned French.

“A south wind comes up on a hot day and it's so bad I go all cross-eyed,” she said. “It even gets into the draperies and the linens.”

“Actually, I think the smell is a most effective element in the total presentation—”

“I insist, darling. You must find some other way to dispose of them. Or I may be forced to, I dunno, withhold my affections.”

“Oh, don't say that.”

“I feel rather strongly about it.”

Bullock popped the beef morsel in his mouth and chewed contemplatively for a minute.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “I don't want to make you unhappy.”

S
EVENTY-THREE

Later in the afternoon, the Reverend Loren Holder sat beside the bed of his wounded son in the doctor's back room. The young man had not shown any signs of fever or infection but he remained asleep on tapering doses of opium. People had come and gone all day outside the door and upstairs where several children lay recovering from their surgeries, along with Edward Tenant, who had come through his ordeal with the sawmill splinter.

Loren stayed at his boy's bedside downstairs. He slept a few hours on the floor beside the bed but remained depleted from the travail of the night surgery. He did not think about food. He drank water from a pitcher on the table beside the bed and he peed out the window into the bushes when necessary. Now he was reading
Lolita
by Nabokov, marveling at the lost world of the mid-twentieth century, and the sly mastery of the author's manner, when he looked away from the page and saw his son looking right up at him with his eyes half open.

“I think you're my father,” Evan said in slow, slurred, weak voice.

Loren dropped the book.

“I am your father,” he said, and fell to his knees beside the bed so that he and Evan were face-to-face. “It's me, son.”

“How'd I get here?”

“Some of our men found you on the road and brought you back.”

“Hey, I'm really stoned. This is like some kind of dream.”

“The doc's got you on opium.”

“I think I prefer whiskey,” Evan said. He laughed slightly and then coughed. “Really, where are we? Heaven?”

“No. You're home.”

Loren brought his hand up and tenderly brushed the hair off Evan's forehead.

“Home? Oh, that's where I was going. I made it then.”

“Yes you did. I'm so glad.”

“What happened?”

“I thought you might tell me,” Loren said.

Evan sighed. “I don't know. I was on a horse. What happened to my horse?”

“I think the people who shot you stole it.”

“They shot me?”

“Yes. Several places. Dr. Copeland worked on you. You're in the room behind his lab.”

“Oh, gosh . . .”

Evan tried to move his body.

“Careful,” Loren said.

“These sheets are too tight. Untuck them a little.”

“I think the idea is to keep you from moving.”

“Aw, Dad, my butt is sore. Give me a little room in here.”

Loren did as he asked. Evan shifted slightly.

“Ouch. Whoa. I got a lot of sore places. What are these tubes?”

“Glucose and water. Are you hungry, thirsty, do you want anything?”

“How do I pee?”

“He's got a catheter in there.”

“Oh, jeez . . . Where's Mom?”

“She doesn't know you're here.”

“Huh? You didn't tell her?”

“You had a lot of surgery. If you didn't make it, I didn't want her to know you came all the way back home and . . . you know . . .”

“You were gonna not tell her?”

“Yeah, that was the plan.”

“Jeez . . . Hey, maybe I won't die after all.”

“I'm thinking maybe you're going to be okay.”

“Well, maybe you should go tell her I'm here.”

Loren burst into tears and touched his cheek to Evan's, kissed him several times, and in a voice choked with emotion said, “Yeah, I think I'll go get your mother now.”