A History of the Future (7 page)

“Are you going to hang somebody?” said Troy Cotterill, a cooper, who was still quite drunk from his evening in the Union Tavern.

“I suppose you already heard that we have two bodies in there,” Robert said, ignoring Cotterill.

There was agreement that this was so among the crowd.

“Don’t she get a trial?” said Kyle Tripp, another farmhand.

“Nobody’s been charged yet and there won’t be any lynchings,” Robert said. Just then, a two-wheeled cart raced under the old railroad bridge into Mill Hollow pulled by a fine bay gelding. Somebody came up with a length of old nylon rope, the really strong kind that was not manufactured anymore. Robert gave it to the doctor and Loren, who bound Mandy’s wrists behind her, and hobbled her ankles, and wrapped her in a blanket, and conveyed her out the door to the cart driven by Brother Boaz from the New Faith Brotherhood Covenant Church of Jesus.

There was plenty of time to take the bodies where they needed to go.

S
EVEN

Hours later, Loren Holder returned to the rectory of the Congregational Church where he lived with his wife, Jane Ann, and his four little orphaned boys. The presence of the boys in their household—since their rescue from the criminal child trafficker Miles English in the nearby village of Argyle—had lit up their lives, even while Loren and Jane Ann grieved for their own missing twenty-year-old son, Evan, who had gone off two years earlier with Robert Earle’s son, Daniel, to see what had happened to America beyond the boundaries of Washington County. Nothing had been heard of them since. The big white clapboard rectory house with its figured gables and arched windows had once again become, for Loren and Jane Ann, the beating heart of their spirits, instead of a bleak outpost in the realm between the living and the dead. Striding up Van Buren Street in two inches of fluffy snow, Loren fixed his gaze on the candlelight that glowed through the curtain in their second-floor bedroom. A three-quarter moon spread enough soft radiance through the clouds that the street looked as vivid as a miniature scene in a glass snowglobe.

Loren entered the house carefully so as not to wake the children sleeping upstairs. A big Christmas tree stood in the front parlor. With the electricity out for good, there was no need to worry about a short circuit in a string of lights burning the house down. By standards of the old times, the number of presents under the tree would have seemed paltry. Christmas was no longer the frantic commercial potlatch it had been in the late days of the so-called consumer society. It was the custom in the new times to give children only one special present each year. Instead of manufactured wrapping paper, the gifts were concealed in scraps of fabric and garments that would be used when the holiday was over.

Loren lit a candle and checked the woodstoves in the front parlor and in the kitchen. They were well stoked. It put him in mind of the chill dreariness of the murder scene and how delicate the devices were that kept anyone from a life of tragic futility in these harsh new times. In the kitchen he poured himself three fingers of rough plum brandy in a pony glass. Upstairs, he found Jane Ann in bed, in a flannel nightshirt, reading the biography of a long-gone movie star renowned for her feisty independence and battles with the studio moguls. Jane Ann could tell by the way Loren was standing beside the bed, sipping the plum brandy, that something was up. She put down her book.

“I think you have something to tell me,” she said.

E
IGHT

By the time Robert Earle returned to his 1904 arts and crafts–style bungalow on Linden Street, his housemate and girlfriend, Britney Blieveldt, was cleaning up the debris from her candle-making operation. It had taken her four hours to dip sixty beeswax and tallow tapers and fill two dozen old glass jars with triple wicks that she liked to use as lighting for other handwork—from basketry to sewing to making the candles themselves. She had hung the tapers to harden on a rack attached to a varnished wooden pallet that Robert had made for her to collect any wax drippings that could be scraped off and saved. Beeswax was dear. She was industrious because she believed she had to be, and at twenty-nine she still had the energy. In the old times, when she was a teenager, she spent countless hours supine in front of the flat-screen television following the so-called reality antics of strangers. The new times had transformed her as had the murder of her husband, Shawn Watling, half a year earlier by the thugs who managed the old landfill as a salvage operation. She had been left dangerously adrift with a seven-year-old daughter. In the new times, in a community demoralized by the failed religion of scientific progress, in what had become a hard subsistence economy, being without a man was an unpromising situation. Robert Earle had rescued her, quite literally, from her burning house. And so she and her daughter, Sarah, fell in with Robert, a widower who was a generation older than Britney, and she had joined his household.

Robert took his boots off and removed the heavyweight Polartec fleece jersey that had held up so remarkably since he first bought it for telemark skiing more than twenty years ago, when the world was full of miracle fabrics and miracles in general, and all that was necessary to beat back the dark of night was the flick of a switch when you walked into a room. Now everything that used to be automatic was a chore in a daily cavalcade of chores that some days added up to an ordeal of chores. He carefully placed his fiddle case on top of the upright piano and moved to the woodstove to warm his hands and face. The aroma of balsam pine filled the house from the tree in the corner farthest from the woodstove. It was covered with a mix of old manufactured glass ornaments and whimsical figures Robert had carved, festooned with swags of popcorn strung on sewing thread.

Usually, when he entered the house he had some news, especially if he had just come from a meeting where a lot of other townspeople were present, as he had this evening with the assembly of musicians and choristers for Christmas practice. News had no other way of traveling now that the immersive media of TV, radio, and Internet were not a presence in their lives. Britney observed him closely trying to guess what he was holding back from telling her. She concluded that Robert was making an effort to avoid eye contact.

“Would you like something hot to drink?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, not looking her way. “Milk with honey and whiskey, please.”

She disappeared into the rear keeping room, which was far enough from the various stoves to serve as a place of refrigeration this time of year. She returned shortly with a saucepan of milk and placed it on the parlor stove because the kitchen cookstove had been banked for the night and she didn’t want to stoke it again as their bedroom was upstairs from the kitchen and Robert hated to sleep in a hot room. Then she set about assembling a supper plate for him.

The cuisine of the new times was rich but monotonous, being limited mostly to what grew in the vicinity and what could be made from it. They had plenty of butter, cream, cheeses, meats, and sausage. Wheat would not grow in the northeast because of pervasive stem-rust disease in the soil, and deliveries of it from elsewhere were erratic at best. They got by on corn, rye, barley, oats. Stephen Bullock was experimenting with the ancient grain called spelt. He’d gotten one small crop in that year. In trials so far it made a dense, nutty loaf like rye and rough crumbly noodles, which his wife, Sophie, pronounced “inedible.” The staple in the new times was corn bread and many dishes were made around it, for instance the so-called pudding that Britney cut a big oblong of and put on a plate for Robert, with pickled garden vegetables and a side of fermented cabbage spiced with hot peppers, garlic, and green onions, not unlike the Korean kimchi that had been catching on in America just when things fell apart. Britney’s pudding this evening was a savory baked dish of day-old corn bread, eggs, cream, kale, onions, and leftover duck, of which she had used everything but the quack.

Robert seated himself next to the stove in a hoop-back rocking chair built with his own hands out of maple, oak, and poplar the month after his daughter Genna died of encephalitis at age eleven. It had required all his attention to build it correctly.

“You know, we could get a horse now,” Robert said.

“Why would you want to get a horse?”

This brought him up short. He wondered for a moment if Britney was being snarky with him, but this was not her way.

“I have quite a bit of hard money due. Enough for a horse.”

“You could always rent a horse from Mr. Allison,” she said. Tom Allison had been a vice president for administration at the county community college in the old times. Now he ran the town livery, a business he had to improvise because the model for running it hadn’t existed in a century. He rented out carts and wagons as well as saddle horses. In the new times most people not involved with the transport of goods did not have to go anywhere.

“I’ve wanted a horse for a long time,” Robert said.

“It’s not like having a car where you can just leave it sit until you need it,” Britney said. “You have to care for them constantly. And they get sick fairly often.”

“What do you know about horses?”

“I half-leased a palomino named Josie when I was twelve and thirteen. That is, my mom did for me. Josie got Lyme disease and we had to pay the vet bills. On top of everything else. All the routine stuff.”

“I didn’t know you rode horses.”

“There’s probably a lot we don’t know about each other,” Britney said.

“I guess so.”

Britney poured Robert’s hot milk into a mug, stirred in a golden glob of honey, and finished it with a liberal shot of rye whiskey. As she brought it over to him, she tried again to get him to look at her. He actually closed his eyes as he took the mug and savored the first gulp of the warm, sweet beverage and felt it go to work in his belly.

“Oh, that’s good,” he said, still avoiding her gaze. “At least there’s no more Lyme disease since people jacked all the deer.”

“There’s always something going on with a horse,” Britney said. “And the vet doesn’t have what he used to have to deal with it.”

When she brought his supper plate over to him, Robert finally looked right back at her. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought you would be thrilled at the idea of getting a horse.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“I thought Sara would like to have a horse to ride.”

“I wasn’t so crazy about it. Mom pushed me into it because the real well-off girls in town rode horses.”

Robert savored his first bite of the duck and kale pudding. Nobody in town had a horse except for the farmers and Tom Allison, Dr. Copeland, and Terry Einhorn the storekeeper. These were the well-off in the society of the new times. Robert wondered whether he was considered well-off. He was getting by. He was paid in hard silver for his work. He had plenty of firewood and food. So many others were not doing so well and had little prospect of it. But the plain fact was, he liked riding a horse and he still wanted to have one. You could go places.

“What kind of riding did you do?” he asked Britney.

“Dressage, it’s called. Fancy steps. Like dancing for horses. I didn’t like it. I just wanted to gallop around and we weren’t allowed to.”

“Sara could just gallop around.”

“Horses are very dangerous. What do you know about horses?”

“I rode one to Albany and back last summer. And then up to Hebron and back in October on one of Tom’s saddle horses. They were both well behaved.”

“How did you like it?”

“I guess I liked it pretty well. I like the smell and the feel of them. I like that they’re alive like us, with personalities.”

“I liked that about them too.”

“Down in Albany we got shot at, you know. We rode through that.”

“It must have been a very good horse,” Britney said.

“I thought I would get a cart for carrying my tools.”

“Don’t you usually leave your tools on the job?”

“Maybe it’s childish but I just want a horse.”

“It’s not like a car,” Britney said again.

He finished his supper plate in ruminative silence, his thoughts once more turned on the murder scene. Britney cut the wicks on the finished candles she had dipped and began putting them away in a chestnut drink cabinet that had belonged to Robert’s grandfather, an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut. In the old times, Robert had housed his stereo amplifier and CD player in it.

“I’m going to wash up,” Robert said. Britney had put a pail of water on the woodstove as she did every night for their ablutions. The town water system still worked, miraculously, because it was gravity-fed from an old town reservoir at an elevation on a low shoulder of Pumpkin Hill. Robert carried the steaming pail upstairs with a rag around the handle.

Not long after Robert retired to the bedroom, Britney came in from her own turn in the washroom and looking in on her sleeping daughter. Robert was reading by candlelight, his usual habit. It was a biography of Stalin. Britney wore a flannel nightshirt with her hair down. She smelled of lilac. Her compact, muscular physical presence excited him. He put down his book and watched her maneuver around the bed to her side. They had evolved a comfortable protocol for sexual activity in the months since Britney moved into the household. On the nights when she was interested in lovemaking, she always made a little show of removing her nightclothes before turning up the covers. This night, she just climbed quickly into bed.