The Harrows of Spring (3 page)

T
HREE

Robert Earle's son, Daniel, twenty-one years old, who had recently returned from two years of wandering in the interior of America, was the chief suspect named in the assassination of Loving Morrow, president and “Leading Light” of the theocratic Foxfire Republic, a breakaway nation comprised of both Virginias, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, with its capital in the town of Franklin just south of Nashville. The name of Daniel Earle spread slowly across the broken United States in the scant broadsheet newspapers published here and there, and the news eventually reached the town of Union Grove in a paper published in Kingston, New York, and distributed in the port of Albany on the Hudson River, where Stephen Bullock's trade boat made weekly trips.

The story, which was a compilation of official reports out of Franklin adumbrated by retelling and rewriting and republishing as it moved through the states, accumulating rumor and myth as it churned along the way like a political hairball in the continental gut, was accurate in some respects. It characterized Daniel Earle as a federal spy, which was partially correct in the sense that he was an agent of the Federal Service, as the severely pared down agglomeration of intelligence bureaucracies from the old times was now called. But in fact he was not so much a spy as a trained assassin sent on a singular mission, one he had accomplished. He was not sent to the Foxfire capital merely to collect information. The original story out of Franklin, released by the Foxfire government news office, left out the fact that Daniel Earle had been enlisted as the Leading Light's sexual plaything in the weeks before her death, the last in a long string of young men who had occupied this role over the years since her ascendance from being a star of country music and a television evangelist to chief executive of the breakaway nation.

In the aftermath of the death of its Leading Light, the Foxfire Republic formally declared war on the remnant Federal government. The Foxfire army, underequipped and ragtag as it was, had been visibly preparing a siege of Cincinnati on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River for weeks before the assassination of its leader. So a de facto state of war already existed between the two countries. But the Foxfire Republic also had been openly at war for months with the breakaway nation of New Africa (formerly Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) led by the wily and elusive Milton Steptoe, aka Commander Sage. Steptoe's army not only had chased the Foxfires out of Atlanta, which they had only briefly controlled, but had pushed them back beyond Chattanooga in their home state of Tennessee. Steptoe then put Chattanooga to the torch. In the event, additional Foxfire troops had been rushed from the vicinity of Cincinnati to the outskirts of Chattanooga where 2,900 were taken prisoner and then massacred by Steptoe's army after the battle of Soddy Daisy in retaliation for the detention camp deaths of thousands of black civilians who had resisted being run off their property in the Foxfire secession.

One other detail in the broadsheet report about these faraway events did not escape the attention of those who read or heard it: a reward of one hundred ounces of gold had been offered for the life of the suspect Daniel Earle, said to be a businessman of Covington, Kentucky, but more likely an agent of the federal government now at large somewhere in North America, probably in Federal territory. It said he was more than six feet tall with light brown hair. Nothing else was known about him. The small printed picture of Daniel's supposed face under the headline was a crude woodblock engraving of a conjectural likeness drawn from a recollection of witnesses in Tennessee. It looked no more like Daniel Earle than an old times comic book drawing of Daniel Boone.

By the time Daniel Earle straggled home on Christmas Eve from his long and arduous journey that started in May back in Ohio, he was a scarecrow of a young man, near death from exhaustion, starvation, disease, and parasites. It became known around town that he'd ventured west along the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes and had endured hardships, including shipwreck in a storm on Lake Erie. But of his doings in Tennessee on behalf of the Federal Service, the only one he had told was his father, Robert, and then just the barest outlines.

In February, Daniel moved out of his father's house. In the weeks of his recovery, he had discovered the abandoned office and equipment of the defunct
Union News Leader
, a “pennysaver” type newspaper in its final incarnation, whose owner and publisher, one Paul Easterling, had frozen to death in his car years earlier trying to make it back from a Christmas visit to his daughter's home in Medford, Massachusetts, during one of the serial gasoline crises that had paralyzed the nation before the DC bombing put an end to the old times for good. Daniel staked a claim on the
Union News Leader
. There were many abandoned properties in Union Grove and in the absence of a functioning court system people could and did take casual possession of property in title limbo, as it came to be called. Daniel had seen a number of broadsheet newspapers as he made his way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the Foxfire states and he imagined that this was a business he would like to try his hand at, a good alternative to manual labor on some rich farmer's land or at a trade such as carpentry, like his father. He had to find a livelihood somehow. In the new times there was no other way.

Rummaging through decades of accumulated junk in the
Union News Leader
office on Elbow Street—originally a temperance hall, built in 1883—Daniel found an 1891 Albion nonelectric hand-operated flatbed proof press, along with drawers of movable type and related equipment for typesetting. The discovery helped reanimate him and he became determined to produce a regular broadside for a county starved for news, information, commercial advertising, and public notices. He set about cleaning up and reorganizing the old newspaper office, a massive job in itself. He arranged for Frank Ramsdell, the “salvage wizard” of Battenville, to fabricate a sheet metal woodstove for him. His father gave him three ounces of silver to pay for it and Robbie Furnival gave him three cords of stove wood on a note. He rounded up a few pieces of furniture, a bed, a long plank table, and some chairs and cast-off sofas. A fine oak rolltop desk was hidden behind the junk he cleaned out. His father's girl, Britney, gave him a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet. It was the first home of his very own.

Once the place was warm, tidy, and coherently organized, it took Daniel weeks to figure out how all the printing equipment worked. He sought help from the polymath Andrew Pendergast, who had some formal training in letterpress from his college days at the Rhode Island School of Design. Andrew suggested some recipes for a suitable printer's ink that could be cooked up with materials at hand (linseed oil boiled and then burnt, lampblack, pine tar, and turpentine), and found the book
The Practice of Printing,
by Ralph W. Polk, for Daniel in the town library, which Andrew ran. Daniel read it backward and forward. He practiced setting type with the composing stick, and mounting the composed lines of type in the form case, and designed a four-column layout that would allow him to cram as much information on a single page as possible in 8-point type. He'd considered attaching a new name to the publication, but he'd found an elegant old engraved end-grain print block of the
Union
News Leader
logo made decades before Paul Easterling's time as publisher and so he decided to stick with the established name. Besides, he liked the idea of continuity. On fair days near the approach of spring, he went out of the office to collect items of news and gossip, notify local tradesmen of advertising opportunities, and went door-to-door soliciting subscriptions at one silver dime a month. By the vernal equinox, Daniel felt ready to produce a first edition, though he lacked a supply of newsprint paper.

It was about that time that he was visited in the office one rainy night by a delegation consisting of his father, Robert Earle, Loren Holder, the Congregational Church minister (and his father's best friend), and Brother Jobe of the New Faith brotherhood. In one corner of the office, Daniel had set up the old sofas and a battered club chair around his woodstove. When the three visitors stepped in, Daniel had been engaged in the never-ending task of sorting boxes of old odd-lot pied type into their proper upper and lower case drawers.

“We saw the light burning,” Robert explained. The light was a single beeswax candle.

“Dang,” Brother Jobe said, taking in the big old room with its fourteen-foot-high ceiling, tall arched windows, and small proscenium stage at the far end where temperance crusaders had inveighed against whiskey in another, different America. “Ain't this a grand place.”

Robert found the first proofs of specimen layouts that Daniel had run off on various odd scraps of paper with the Albion press.

“Looks like you're getting the hang of this,” he said.

“Thanks. I've had some help,” Daniel said. “But before I can really get started, I need to get a supply of proper newsprint paper.”

“You might have to go to Albany to find that,” Loren said.

The small talk ceased.

“Come on over and set down, son,” Brother Jobe said.

Daniel could not fail to notice the grave demeanor of the three men. He ran a little turpentine on a rag over his fingertips to get the ink off and joined them over by the stove with the candle. Brother Jobe drew his flask out of his coat and put it on the wooden crate that served as a table in front of the sofa.

“Try some,” he said.

Daniel hesitated, then went for it. Loren took a turn. Robert pulled a packet of paper out of his inside coat pocket, unfolded it to a single sheet, and passed it to his son. It was an edition of the
Kingston Pilot
, dated March 28. An item in the lower right column was circled and some words underlined. The headline read,
REWARD FOR FOXFIRE ASSASSIN
. The story named Daniel Earle in the second paragraph.

Daniel took it all in and then looked up at the men without speaking. His face seemed red in the candlelight.

“Interesting,” he said at length.

“Inneresting?” Brother Jobe said. “That all? It don't concern you?”

Daniel shrugged his shoulders and tried to look away but Brother Jobe captured him in his gaze. Brother Jobe was not just an adept hypnotist. He had an aptitude for preternatural empathy that allowed him to enter the interior lives of others, like an explorer crossing the frontier into an uncharted territory. It was not an ability he could account for, or even explain to himself. But he had learned to be comfortable with his gift. Daniel's mind was as transparent to him now as a glass of spring water.

“I'm advising you to take more'n a passing interest in this,” Brother Jobe said.

“Maybe it's some kind of coincidence,” Daniel said. “Or a mistake.”

Brother Jobe noticed how Daniel's leg was jiggling.

“Young man, I'm amongst your thoughts even as we speak,” he said.

“What's that mean?” Daniel glanced at his father and then at Loren.

Robert, too, had some prior acquaintence with Brother Jobe's strange talents.

“You can trust him,” Robert said.

Loren just raised his eyebrows.

“Do you read minds, sir?” Daniel asked.

“I have a sympathetic susceptibility,” Brother Jobe said. “It don't really matter what you call it.”

“What did you tell them?” Daniel asked his father.

“That you were in Tennessee,” Robert said. “That something happened down there.”

“Son, your name's in the papers now,” Brother Jobe said. “Probably in papers all around the states.”

Daniel left his seat, stalked across the room, and stood by his composing table in a pool of darkness with his arms crossed.

“A hundred ounces. That's a hell of a lot of gold these days,” Loren said. “Why the hell did you use your real name down there?”

Daniel sighed. It pained him almost physically to talk about what he had done, but he found that he could not resist.

“They figured I'd be less likely to slip up if anyone asked who I was, my name, my background,” he said. “But I had a cover story too, a
legend
, they called it in the service.”

“Did it occur to you that something like this might happen?” Loren said.

“I wasn't thinking so clearly at the time.”

“Maybe they didn't expect you to get out of there alive,” Robert said.

“Getting out was a big part of the training.”

“Anyway, for all these Foxfire people knew, Daniel Earle might have been an alias,” Loren said.

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Robert reached for the flask.

“The thing is,” Brother Jobe spoke across the room to Daniel, “now that you're about to start this here publication, it would be prudent to keep your name out of it.”

“Everybody in town knows that it's my paper,” Daniel said.

“Maybe so,” Robert said. “But people outside of town don't know that. They don't even know you live here or who you are. You see how these news sheets get carried far and wide. You can't advertise yourself as editor and publisher of this thing right there in the paper the way it's usually done.”

“The masthead, it's called,” Daniel said.

“Just leave it out. Use the space for an ad or something.”

“I have to put the office address somewhere on it so people can come in if they want to advertise or want me to do a print job.”

“Okay, put the office address on it somewhere, but leave your name out of it.”

“They have to ask for somebody.”

“Make up some other name,” Robert said.

Daniel rolled his eyes and snorted.

“Pen names are an old tradition in journalism,” Loren said. “James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers under the name
Publius
.”