The Harrows of Spring (8 page)

“Jesus?” Flame recoiled, almost spitting the name out. “We don't have any use for Jesus. This is political. We're not in the twelfth century.”

“Oh. I see,” Seth said. “Jesus ain't part of the inclusion deal? He's
ex
clusioned out?”

“Everybody's free to believe what they like,” she said. “The People's Republic is a secular enterprise. We don't persecute anybody based on creed or color.”

“Speaking of color,” Seth said, “I don't see that your bunch here is anything but white folks.”

“New Africa has had a polarizing effect,” Flame said. “No question about it. Milton Steptoe is a very effective demagogue.”

“He ain't no demigod,” Seth said. “They say he ran a chain of payday loan shops is all.”

Flame just glared back disdainfully.

Meanwhile, a girl of eight came forward from the dozens huddled around the fire. She carried two sticks with smoldering coals at the end and proffered them to Seth and Elam.

“For you,” she said.

“What all you got there, little missy?” Elam said.

“Toasted marshmallows,” she said. “Glen Ethan Greengrass said to always be generous of spirit.”

“Is that so,” Seth said. He helped himself to the blackened confection at the end of the stick and made a show of savoring it. Elam took the other one. “Mmmmm,” Seth said. “That's tasty for sure. It's been a while since I had one. Is he here amongst you, Mister Greengrass?”

“He's asleep,” the child said and went back to the others.

“Tell him thanks, when he wakes up,” Seth called after her.

“You-all have a nice campout,” Elam called out to the crowd over Flame's shoulder. “Don't forget to bury your fires and your latrines.” Then to Flame, he said, “Maybe I'll see you again if you come to our town.”

Her mouth clenched and her nostrils flared.

“Maybe you will,” she said.

The rangers turned and walked back out into the moonswept landscape.

F
IFTEEN

Robert Earle came to the bedroom late, having worked after supper to begin setting up the summer kitchen under a shed roof off the back of the house. Mice had built nests over the winter in the oven of the wood-fired cookstove out there. Cleaning it had been a messy business. Then he'd had to heat up enough water to bathe the soot off.

When he came to her, Britney lay on her side of the bed with her back turned to the door, as though meaning to signal discontent. Also, a candle burned on her night table. Britney was generally fastidious about snuffing the candle out when she was not reading in bed, so he surmised she was awake and fretting. Robert had carried a candle of his own in from the bathroom. He set it down and knelt on the bed. Britney seemed inert. Weeks earlier, she might have rolled over to face him expectantly when she sensed his entry into the bed. He bent close to her ear.

“Are you still awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Is something the matter?”

She didn't answer.

“What's troubling you?”

“Nothing,” she said. Her voice sounded high, a little cracked, muffled.

He thought he could scent tears.

“I'm here if you want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” she said, though she remained frozen in place.

Robert reached over her and pinched out the candle on her night table, then found the side of her face under the blankets and kissed her on the cheek. Since her encounter with the bear she had been acting sullen, withdrawn, unreachable. He'd tried to talk to her about it since, but he could not penetrate the emotional shield she had erected. Their sex life, formerly avid and regular, had fallen away. Robert wondered if the incident had exhumed some painful memories of things she never told him about, some dark family incident, some buried childhood violation or secret shame. He knew she'd had trouble with her husband, Shawn, deceased now. Shawn had had a romance with a dairy girl at the Schmidt farm, Britney said, and maybe others too. Toward the end, they weren't sleeping in the same room. Shawn was angry at a world that had left him a farm laborer. Robert wondered if he ever hit Britney. After nearly a year of living together, a large part of her persona remained mysterious and inaccessible. He even wondered whether her encounter with the bear had involved more than she had let on, maybe even some kind of frightening sexual injury. It was a stretch but he couldn't help returning to it. He'd never heard of a bear raping a woman, but he knew that he knew very little about the behavior of wild animals.

With a sigh he reached for and opened the weighty tome that was McCullough's biography of John Adams, taking comfort that he was only at the beginning of its seven hundred–odd pages and that he could lose himself, and many hours of his own dubious life, in somebody else's exciting and momentous history. It did occur to him that the new times of his present life had more in common with John Adams's time of the late eighteenth century than the period of his childhood and of his parents in the late twentieth century. Modernity, he mused, was no longer up to date. Content with the warm presence of Britney's body next to him, he entered the world of the book and let go of himself.

Twenty minutes later, he was reaching to snuff his own candle when he heard three timid raps on the door. The knob turned and then Sarah opened the creaky door.

“I'm sick,” she said.

Britney fairly spun around as though she had been lying awake all that time. She propped herself up firmly on one arm.

“Come here.”

Sarah padded over in her long cotton nightdress.

“What is it? Your tummy?”

“No. Hot and achy. Head hurts.”

Britney felt the child's forehead. It was hot and damp indeed.

“I'll get the thermometer,” Robert said, already on his way to the bathroom. There was no need to communicate that sickness had to be taken seriously. Robert handed the old reliable oral thermometer to Britney, who reminded Sarah how to place it under her tongue. In the meantime, Sarah crawled into bed with Britney. After a few minutes, Robert took the thermometer out of Sarah's mouth and brought it over to his side of the bed to read it in the candlelight.

“A hundred-point-five degrees,” he said.

“She's got a little something,” Britney said.

“We can take her to see Jerry in the morning,” Robert said, meaning Dr. Copeland.

“Okay,” Britney said.

“Will I go to heaven?” Sarah asked.

“You're not going anywhere,” Britney said.

“What if it's Mexican flu?”

“Then a lot of other people in town would have it,” Britney said. “There's no sickness going around. It's probably just a spring cold.”

Britney spooned up behind the child and petted her damp hairline tenderly.

Robert was grateful to have Sarah in the bed with them to give Britney something to focus on beyond whatever was roiling her spirit. And he liked the physicality of feeling he was part of a family. Robert resumed reading
John Adams
. By-and-by he was satisfied that Britney and Sarah were asleep and he snuffed out his candle.

S
IXTEEN

When they returned from their scouting excursion, Seth and Elam went directly to Brother Jobe's suite, the old school principal's headquarters off the lobby. At eleven o'clock, the building was quiet. Brother Jobe had been occupied with one Sister Miriam of the New Faith kitchen crew, an excellent baker given what they had to work with, and incidentally a long-legged beauty with chestnut hair, laughing eyes, and a figure as soft and creamy as the sweet potato buns that were her particular specialty. She had expressed an interest in biblical hermeneutics, and so Brother Jobe began with her by elucidating his thoughts on the Pentecost, but they had moved on to other things. Now, mantled in an old tartan bathrobe, his thick black hair disheveled and his face pinker than usual, he padded into the outer office, his study, so palpably anointed with pheromones that the two rangers found their heads swimming slightly in a way not accountable to just the lateness of the hour.

“Well then,” Brother Jobe began, “did you learn who those birds are out there on the hillside?”

“Quite the flock of odd ducks,” Elam said. “They claim to be missionaries from over in Massychusetts. Say they come here on a spring fling.”

“Spring fling?”

“Their very words.”

“Sounds like some old-timey college nonsense.”

“They look the part, believe me,” Elam said.

“They got their own country,” Seth said.

“Huh?”

“Berkshire Republic, they call it.”

“They gone Foxfire?” Brother Jobe asked.

“Something like that. They can't stand not having gov'ment. They crazy for it. Can't get enough. It's all they talk about.”

“Sound like socialists.”

“I believe that's so,” Elam said.

“They got Jesus?” Brother Jobe asked.

“Scoffed at Jesus' name, when we brung it up.”

“That so? What kind of missionary is that?”

“Political missionaries, they say. Got their own bible. Showed it to us. Some kind of handbook for schoolteachers, near as I could make out. They was thumping for diversity, homeless, share-the-wealth, and all like that. Some of 'em is same-sexers, I'm sure.”

“That's your socialist right there,” Brother Jobe said. “What all they want with us?”

“Want us to join up in some kind of federation they putting together. They say southern Vermont's fixing to join. They had a meeting with the honchos in Bennington on the way here. They want to be the new U.S. gov'ment.”

“Well, what's in it for us, according to them?”

“I don't have a clue,” Elam said.

“They wasn't real clear on that,” Seth added.

“Hmph . . .” Brother Jobe said and waddled over to his desk, took a seat, and slumped in it. He opened a bottom drawer and lifted out a square glass bottle of Rupert Road Tawny double malt whiskey and an old jelly jar glass, poured out five fingers of the sunlight-colored liquor, swallowed a dram, and passed it to the rangers, who sampled it in turn. “What's their strength out there?”

“'Bout the same as ours in numbers,” Elam said. “Sixty-five, seventy. But they's pretty much kids out on a lark. Young softies. Even a few outright children. I counted eight horses, some simple box wagons.”

“No soldier types amongst them.”

“Not as we could tell.”

“Who's in charge of the outfit?”

“Big strapping gal dressed up in man clothes,” Seth said. “Twenty-something. A looker if she put a little effort in, but I don't think she goes that way. Calls herself Flame.”

“Flame?” Brother Jobe said, the corners of his mouth lifting in mirth. “Sounds like a pole dancer.”

“Don't tell her that,” Elam said. “She's a fire-breather. Got all huffy when I called her ma'am. Thought she might try to paddle me.”

“She don't have nothing on her mind but socialism,” Seth said. “She's hell-bent.”

“How'd the country get so full of crazy people?” Brother Jobe said, shaking his head and smiling. “Well, this bunch seems harmless enough. We can resist the heady vapors of socialism, I'm sure. Life is improving enough for folks around here without it. Now, you got my leave to ride down to Albany with these two young fellows Mr. Einhorn's son and the mayor's son. His papa has rousted out enough silver from the home folks to procure a boat, which they will sail on back up here. I got a long list of supplies I want you to get while you're down there and put on that boat. Meantime, we gonna construct a landing just south of Mr. Bullock's, show him a thing or two about taking care of our own bidness.”

“What do you want to do about them campers?” Elam asked.

“Don't do nothing. If they want to come into town and confab with me or the town trustees, we ain't goin' nowheres. Sounds like it'd be amusing to meet 'em.”

S
EVENTEEN

In the morning, little Sarah Watling was still unwell. Robert went and fetched Dr. Copeland at one of the rare intervals, as it turned out, when no one was waiting in his outer office with an illness or an injury. He walked over the two blocks with Robert and his son Jasper, who came on house calls as part of his training. It was a glorious spring morning with the air full of lilac and the foliage of the street trees forming a soft, cathedral-like ceiling overhead. Crabapples, dogwoods, and loquats were in bloom in dooryard gardens that had once been lawns. Robert and the doctor talked about trout fishing. The doctor had come by a fine old-times graphite fly rod in trade for an emergency caesarean delivery he'd performed at Cossayuna. The Hendrickson mayflies (brown bodies, gray wings) were pouring off the Battenkill that week, he said, and he was hoping to get out on the water around four in the afternoon when the nymphs rose from the gravel bottom, shucked their exoskeletons, and flew off to mate during their one ecstatic evening of adult life. Their mass emergence generally drove the trout wild, and there were many more large trout in the river now than in the old times, when great numbers of anglers from elsewhere drove up to the county and mercilessly pounded the good beats. Robert said, alas, he could not go out because he was needed to finish the work at the new hotel, due to open that night. Their bright mood darkened when they entered Robert's house on Linden Street, where Britney was waiting with her brow knitted, her arms crossed, and a baleful aura around her. Robert felt strangely intimidated in her presence in his own house. She took the doctor and his son upstairs to Sarah's room. Robert followed them.

“How are you feeling, dear?” the doctor asked the child.

“Things hurt,” she said.

Sarah's temperature had risen half a degree to 101. She had a headache and complained of a stiff neck. Jasper took her pulse. It was rapid at ninety beats per minute.

“Is he a doctor too?” Sarah asked.

“I will be,” Jasper said.

“Do you think I'm going to die?”

Jasper put his hand on her forehead, feeling the warmth tenderly. She blinked at him in awe.

“You're going to be all right,” he said.

“Sarah,” the doctor said. “Did you cut yourself or step on anything sharp recently?”

“No,” Sarah said. She remembered pulling the wire nail out of her foot in the barn, but she was afraid
to tell on herself
, as she put it in her own thoughts, afraid that she would get in trouble and would not be allowed back in the barn to spend time with her animal friends whom she loved dearly.

The doctor merely nodded. Then he rummaged in his black doctor's bag and took out a six-ounce glass bottle.

“Give her a teaspoon of this every four hours,” he told Britney. “It's a tincture of willow bark with some ginseng and honey. The active ingredient is salicin, which is sort of related to aspirin: an anti-inflammatory. It will help with the fever and the aches.” Then, to Sarah: “This stuff tastes a little funny, but it'll make you feel better, so be a good girl and take it.”

“Okay,” Sarah said.

Robert, the doctor, and Jasper left the room and went back downstairs.

“What do you think?” Robert asked.

“Was she vaccinated before the shit show started?”

“I don't know.”

“Could be the start of chicken pox or something. All that crap is coming back. I hate to see it. But they usually get over it. I did when I was a child.”

“Me too,” Robert said.

“There's nothing going around town for the moment, at least,” the doctor said. “Keep an eye on her. If anything changes, we can get her over to my infirmary.”

“All right,” Robert said.