The Harrows of Spring (6 page)

N
INE

Sarah Watling, daughter of Britney Blieveldt and Shawn Watling (deceased), had skills and responsibilities that would have seemed impossible for an eight-year-old back in the old times. She knew, for instance, all the steps to making a splint basket from a black ash log. She could slaughter, pluck, and butcher a chicken, and then roast it perfectly. One night a week she was required to cook the family dinner and it was her job to make corn bread every other day. She could sew well enough to make her own skirts and trousers. She could knit a pair of socks. And it was also her task to milk Cinnamon, the family cow.

Cinnamon lived in the barn on Salem Street that once had belonged to Sarah's grandparents Denny and Marge Watling, Britney's in-laws (also deceased). The accompanying house burned down the previous spring. Only the foundation remained, with blackberries now beginning to creep over the dry-laid fieldstones. The barn behind it, built in 1889, had replaced an even earlier, cruder structure erected by a veteran of the Revolutionary War, one Dyer Goodsell, partner in the town's first flax mill. It was Sarah's favorite place because she felt it truly belonged to her. It came down through her father's family and she was the one who spent the most time there, mostly alone. Sarah loved the forecourt with its old mossy marble pavement, and the Dutch door with its diamond-shaped windowpanes, and the old dark wood of the interior. The floor was made of chestnut planks four inches thick when they were new. She loved the animal fragrance that seemed to carry the memory of every horse and cow that ever lived there.

The back of the barn opened up to a third-of-an-acre fenced paddock that had once been a shady lawn in Denny and Marge's day, scene of barbecues and children playing ringolevio in the summer twilight. Most of the big maples had since been cut down for firewood and to allow the grass to grow better in the paddock for Cinnamon to graze on. Evenings, Cinnamon also got some hay, which was stored in the loft.

Robert had made considerable improvements to the building in the year that Sarah and Britney came to dwell with him. He replaced the sill atop the stone foundation on the north side of the structure. He rebuilt the milking stall, replaced the stall gate and the rolling door to the paddock, and removed decades of miscellaneous clutter from the unused stalls and the loft. He put a salvaged three-sash diamond-paned window (to match the one in the door) in the milking stall now that the electricity appeared to be out for good. It admitted more daylight and made milking and caretaking much easier.

Robert had tricked out one of the other three stalls as a chicken coop, with a small hatch door to an exterior pen covered in salvaged chicken wire to keep the skunks and opossums out. They generally kept four laying hens there along with as many as twenty meat birds, which Britney and Sarah raised for trade as well as for their own table. The barn was on the village water system, gravity fed from a reservoir on the shoulder of Pumpkin Hill. It was the gift that kept on giving, though the purification system no longer operated and had to be bypassed.

Cinnamon was a 950-pound, fawn-brown, five-year-old Jersey cow. On her diet, she gave about two gallons of milk a day. She had been “freshened”—bred to produce offspring—sixteen months ago and was still milking reliably. Her calf had been weaned and sold. Sarah was told not to name the calf because Robert and Britney did not want her to become too attached to it. But she named it Cleo after a friend who died in the encephalitis epidemic, and it was hard on Sarah when they sold her. They didn't have the means or the need to keep two cows, and good livestock was in short supply these years directly after the collapse of the old economy.

This evening, Sarah entered the barn on the Salem Street side and passed through the churchlike interior to the sliding door and the paddock. Cinnamon looked up, seemed to be glad to see her, and began walking toward the barn. Cinnamon knew that it was time to be milked and was eager to feel more comfortable. Sarah gave the chickens some cracked corn while she waited.

Cinnamon came directly to her stall and turned around facing a manger where Sarah had placed a flake of hay. She put a halter on Cinnamon's head and clipped the end of the lead line to an iron ring on a nearby post. Then she filled a plastic pail at the standing faucet in the aisle outside the stall and wiped down Cinnamon's udder with a wet rag, which got specks of manure off and massaged the teats to let the milk down. Next, she squirted each teat twice onto the floor to get any old liquid out of the way. Her three-legged stool was made by Robert, with a heart-shaped seat. Her milking bucket was stainless steel, with a lid, the sort of thing that might never be manufactured again. Cinnamon was an exceptionally calm and gentle cow and cooperated with every step of the procedure. While Sarah milked, squeezing the teats alternately with both hands, she sang a song that Robert had been teaching her called “The Blackest Crow,” a traditional Appalachian ballad in a minor key that was sad and beautiful and grown-up sounding. She sang her harmony part as a shaft of low evening sunlight beamed through the window into the stall.

The blackest crow that ever flew would surely turn to white

If ever I prove false to you bright day will turn to night

Bright day will turn to night my love, the elements will mourn

If ever I prove false to you the seas will rage and burn

Sarah could tell when Cinnamon was empty from the hash mark inside the pail and the shape and heft of the udder. She clipped the cover on the pail, took off Cinnamon's halter, and that was that. With new spring grass up, Sarah knew that Cinnamon would want to go back out to her paddock for a while in the remaining light and wander back inside when it was full dark. They went their separate ways. As she stepped toward the door on the Salem Street side, Sarah misstepped and her left foot jammed up against the doorsill, sending a jag of pain up through her leg. She knew at once it was more than a stubbed toe. She was able to set the pail down without the lid popping off, and that was more immediately important to her than the injury. She limped outside, sat down in the early weeds, and tried to take her moccasin off but it would not come off. Lifting her lower leg close to her face, she saw a round metallic button at the tip of her shoe. She touched it and it seemed rigidly fixed to the meaty part of her foot between her big and second toe. Understanding instinctively what it meant, and without thinking the matter through any further, she pulled on the metallic button and drew out a brown five-penny, 1¾-inch box nail, manufactured in Elyria, Ohio, in 1957. The slightly bent nail had lain loose in the space between two floorboards for decades. Though she hyperventilated and shed some tears drawing it out the wound did not really hurt much afterward. She angrily tossed the nail into the street and removed her moccasin and sock. The tiny hole barely bled at all. Mostly, Sarah was afraid of getting in trouble, specifically of not being allowed back in the barn by herself. So she dried her eyes, put her shoe back on, got up off the ground, picked up her pail, and hurried home so her mama could make some fresh cheese out of the milk, as planned.

T
EN

Robert Earle, Loren Holder, and Brother Jobe met for breakfast in the town laundry in which they were all business partners. The venture was a great success in its second month of operation. They employed four townspeople in the old repurposed Union-Wayland mill building on the river, charging ten cents (in pre-1965 silver coin) for ten pounds of laundry, the problem being that nickels and pennies did not circulate, not being silver. Customers who brought in less than ten pounds could carry over their credit in cents to the next load. Accounts were recorded in a ledger. The three partners were surprised that the number of customers did not level off in the first month, but continued growing as farm people out in the county heard about it and began to bring their wash in on trading days.

It was also evident just walking about town these fresh spring days that the people of Union Grove were looking better, taking more of an interest in their appearance. As their off-the-rack, mail-order casual clothing from the old times wore out, they began to sport some of the apparel sold in Brother Jobe's “haberdash” on Main Street, where garments sewn in the New Faith workshops were sold, simple cotton shirts, canvas and wool trousers and coats, skirts and jumpers for women. Likewise, in the New Faith barbershop, where the gloomy but skillful Brother Judah presided, some townsmen said good-bye to their beards, so that altogether the denizens of Union Grove, both New Faith and regular, were looking more like one unified people in manner and costume. The Reverend Loren Holder now went in for a shave twice a week, while Robert Earle still wore a full beard but trimmed it in the manner of General U. S. Grant. Brother Jobe, of course, was shaved daily at headquarters by his factotum Brother Boaz.

Brother Jobe had been waiting for the other two in the office down at the laundry for a little while. He came early, enjoying the look, smell, and feel of a successful new enterprise. At eight o'clock the operation with its wood-fired furnace, copper wash kettles, and water-powered machinery was just getting under way for the day. The office was already so warm Brother Jobe took off his black frock coat. Sister Miriam had packed a basket for him with a thermos of “coffee”—brewed from roasted barley and chickory root, with plenty of cream and honey—and generous squares of breakfast pudding for three—cornmeal mush baked with cheese, onions, and flecks of New Faith ham. Robert and Loren arrived a little after eight. After pleasantries, the men settled into the comfortable seating with their mugs and rations.

“How come you didn't tell me the squire done pinned some poor sumbitch to a tree down on the River Road like a ding-danged luna moth in the natural history museum?” Brother Jobe commenced the meeting.

Loren looked up from his steaming beverage with his eyebrows hoisted. “Say, what?” he said.

“Some poor, lone picker,” Robert explained to Loren, who hadn't heard. “Bullock says they caught him trying to steal a horse. He nailed him to a tree clear through his forehead.”

“Oh, that's lovely,” Loren said. “Why didn't you tell the trustees?”

“Things are complicated enough right now,” Robert said.

“That ole boy is off the reservation,” Brother Jobe said. “Of course, you can't feel sorry for a fellow that'd steal a horse, but these public displays of barbarism and cruelty gonna demoralize folks for miles around.”

“I can't talk to him anymore,” Robert said. “I tried the other day when Terry and I went over there.”

“Why don't you go see Mr. Bullock, Reverend Holder, in your clerical capacity?” Brother Jobe said. “Appeal to the better angels of his nature.”

“He's an atheist,” Loren said.

“He don't have to believe for you to read him the riot act. Someone's got to get through to his moral sense, if he's still got any left.”

“I wouldn't know what to say to the bastard.”

“Seems to me you're the man for that job,” Robert said to Brother Jobe.

“I'm liable to hurt him if he sasses me like the last time we were alone together in a room,” Brother Jobe said and puffed out his cheeks in frustration. The others studied their breakfast, letting the subject pass. “Anyways, Mr. Einhorn proposes to send his boy to Albany along with your boy, and I can lend two of my rangers to accompany them there, with horses, and some small arms in case of any monkey business, and with some luck they'll bring a boat back. They better leave soon, though. Mr. Einhorn says things are getting a little desperate amongst the town folk, so many being common laborers and of small means. Speaking for my own outfit, we put aside plenty of cornmeal, potatoes, smoked meats, and a few other things, but we're nearly out of sugar, salt, cotton duck, and like that, and I hope to fetch me some ding-dang real coffee up from Albany, if there's any to be got. My men can leave on Sunday with our fifty ounces of silver and whatever you-all can scare up.”

“I'm up to thirty-two ounces soliciting my people,” Robert said. “If you lend me a mount, I'll ride out to Holyrood's cider mill and over to Temple Merton's farm at Coot Hill tomorrow. They're men of means.”

“They must be anxious to get some of their poteen to market, too, if that'll inspire them,” Brother Jobe said. “By the way, I'm fixing to officially reopen my tavern on Saturday night. We'll be putting on the dog. You tell folks that. Mebbe it'll take their minds off their empty larders for a little while.”

“I'll hit up my congregation for last-minute contributions,” Loren said. “Hey, did we decide what to do about Bullock?”

“Tell you what, don't do nothing,” Brother Jobe said. “I'll send Brother Joseph over. He don't brook no aspersions from the hoity-toity.”

E
LEVEN

Brother Jobe gave Robert a brindle mare named Belle to ride out into the county on Friday afternoon. The mare had been rescued the previous Christmastime from the possession of the indigent homesteader and would-be murderer Donald Acker (deceased), who had lacked the means to keep her in feed and was too stupidly proud to ask for help. She was in sorry condition then, but four months in the New Faith stables and paddocks had restored her to health. Robert was not an experienced rider, but Belle was smart and tractable, and being at large in the landscape burgeoning with new life in fine spring weather exhilarated both of them.

He rode out to the north toward Hebron first, to Temple Merton's orchard and distillery, past men and women laboring in the fields, plowing behind horses and oxen, clearing drainage ditches, coppicing in the hedgerows, burning heaps of bark and woodland trash to spread ashes on the crop rows, and attending to new lambs and calves in the pastures. Some of the smaller holdings were slovenly subsistence farms, where people seemed to be barely hanging on, overworked, scarecrow-thin, ill-clothed, like figures out of a medieval woodcut of the plague years, grubbing around in the soil with hand tools. In the new times, it was hard to go it alone on the land. Places organized for production with many hands were more successful, though there were many ways of organizing the hands.

Robert got to Temple Merton's house near Summit Lake just before noon. He'd been there more than a few times over the years and he was always thrilled by the beautiful orderliness of the establishment. The proprietor was a formalist, like his father before him, who had built walled gardens, planted an allée of blight-resistant American chestnuts from the road to the front of the house and its dependent barns and workshops, and kept his animals clean. The farm gave the impression that at least one corner of the universe was safe and secure. The housekeeper directed Robert out to the orchards where he found Temple and two other men mulching a stand of pears. They had a load of velvety black compost in a cart pulled by a goat. Without even inquiring about his reason for dropping in, Temple invited Robert to lunch. He chucked his shovel onto the cart and told the others he was taking off for an hour and that they could, too, once they fetched the goat some water.

Temple Merton's people had fought in the Revolution and then farmed the same four hundred acres afterward going down the generations to Temple's father, who shifted from dairy to fruit in the 1970s. Temple himself had fled the farm right after high school, gone off to NYU in the theater arts program, and emerged as a highly employable character actor, best known for his role as the carefree Victorian-era poisoner Lamont Circe in the cable TV series
Boomtown
, which ran for six seasons. Before that, he'd been a regular in the Coen Brothers ensemble, beginning with
The Big Lebowski
.

The week of the Washington bombing, he managed to drive all the way back to the family homestead from a James Cameron film location in the Sonoran desert outside Tucson in one of the on-set Escalade limousines, which he'd simply commandeered in the confusion. He was already separated from his actress wife, Fannie Dana (the fortune hunter Maggie O'Toole in
Boomtown
), and left behind all his chattels in Santa Monica, which were blown up nine months later anyway in the Los Angeles bombing. His alcoholic older brother, Jess, occupied the farmhouse back home and had been letting the orchards go to hell for a decade, but the economic collapse finished him psychologically and he lasted less than a year after Temple arrived back home to take charge. He shaped up the place in short order, relearning everything his father had taught him as a boy.

Temple Merton was renowned now in Washington County, New York (and southern Vermont), for his Coot Hill apple brandy that was too fine to be called “jack.” He also raised beef cattle and mixed poultry: turkeys, ducks, chickens. His house was red brick, with a curious Dutch stepped roof, and he'd added several new buildings: quarters for workers, stables, a wagon barn, and a bottling works, forming a handsome courtyard arrangement that reminded Robert of establishments he had seen in Europe years ago. At sixty-seven, Temple was hale and athletic. He employed twenty laborers and a household staff of four. His divorce had never been finalized back in California, so he felt unable to marry again, but he found a girlfriend half his age named Lorraine Moncalvo, esteemed as the finest cook in the county. She'd run a Boston catering company in the old times and published two cookbooks, and literally walked out of that city during the post-crash troubles with little besides a change of clothing and three of her best kitchen knives in a backpack. Temple met her three Septembers ago along the road driving home from Bennington, where he'd traveled with five cases of his brandy to sell. He gave her a ride, of course, on the deadhead trip home. It took mere minutes of conversation for him to discern that she was an extraordinary person, and she wasn't bad looking either, though she wore many layers of clothing that concealed her figure. She was looking for a situation, she said, as opposed to a job. Temple liked the way she put that. Once she got talking about food up there on the bench seat beside him in cool autumn weather, he told her that she may have found her situation. And so she had. And Temple Merton was a happier man in the new times by far than he had ever been back in Hollywood.

Robert was quite hungry that day, having forgotten to pack so much as a square of corn bread in his excitement to saddle up. Temple sat him down in the sun-filled dining room. Lorraine, full bodied with loose curly auburn hair and a winning lopsided smile, brought out duck legs preserved in their own fat with beans and cabbage and pickled beets, onion and pepper relishes, and delicate cornmeal pancakes with sour cream. By-and-by, Robert turned to the matter at hand: the need to resume the Albany trade. The couple were interested and receptive, being short of many necessities from grape-stake wire to veterinary supplies. Temple averred that he had always respected Stephen Bullock without particularly liking him, and he gave Robert twenty ounces of silver toward the purchase of a proper boat.

Robert made it to Felix Holyrood's cider mill eight miles south by four o'clock. Holyrood was desperate for priming sugar, clean copper tubing, tin solder, and other things he was used to sending to Albany for when Bullock was making regular runs there. He gave Robert fourteen ounces of silver coin on a promissory note and sent him home with a bottle of his Normandise bouche brut blush, a particularly fine, dry sparkling cider, which Robert could not help sampling on his return trip to Union Grove in the glow of his successful venture raising additional funds. In fact he was a little high coming down the ridge behind Holyrood's place when something caught his attention in the distance in the low-slanting late afternoon light.

He saw the smoke of many fires curling up out of a pasture on the east side of Lewis Hill, a mile and a half away. Squinting and shielding his eyes with his left hand, he made out colored patches behind the curls of smoke. His eyesight was not what it used to be. Tents, he supposed. He spied movement among them. People. He'd heard nothing of any encampment on Lewis Hill, which was five miles east of Union Grove. Whoever it was had not been there very long. Possibly they had just arrived that afternoon and made camp. He could only guess at the number of people there, figuring perhaps twenty tents were pitched on the hillside. If there were more than one person per tent, the encampment might have amounted to, say, fifty people, maybe more. He wondered if they were displaced persons, or pilgrims of some sort like the New Faithers had been, or perhaps an organized horde of pickers. Certainly they were not out there for the fun of it with nighttime temperatures still dipping into the thirties. In the years since the collapse, the county had not seen a gang larger than the nine who invaded Bullock's place back in October. But such a thing wouldn't be out of the question in these times. If men like Temple Merton and Stephen Bullock could organize many hands to work on their farms, surely some talented criminal could organize a brigade of marauders. He decided not to ride over there by himself to make inquiries, thinking that if they were not friendly he might be detained. Instead, he corked the bottle of cider, tucked it in his coat, and rode Belle at a brisk trot the rest of the way back to town.