A History of the Future (11 page)

But his regret did not persist very long this holiday eve as they called good night to neighbors and entered the house with all the urgent need to stoke the stove and light some candles and heat some water for washing and get Sarah ready for bed so she would ride unicorns through dream forests and be rested for the morning, when Robert would present her with the violin he had found to buy in nearby Center Falls, a very nice one-hundred-year-old German violin that would be a pleasure to play, and would become a familiar extension of the girl’s hands and, if she was fortunate, of her heart as well in the years to come. And after she was tucked in, Robert read to her from Anna Sewell’s
Black Beauty, the Autobiography of a Horse,
which had been one of his favorites as a child, and Daniel’s and Genna’s too. It was about a way of life that more resembled the new times of the present than Robert’s own boyhood in the days of
Star Wars,
computer gaming magic, and other techno-grandiosities that had come to such a shockingly abrupt end.

When Sarah slipped into sleep, Robert took the candle into the bathroom, where half a pail of warm water stood on the chest beside the sink waiting for him, and from there into his own bedroom where Britney waited for him naked beneath the quilt. He climbed in and gathered her in his arms, amazed at the generosity of the universe to have arranged things this way.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I had sneakers with little red lights on the edge of the soles. They twinkled whenever I took a step. I couldn’t get over how magical they were. I wore them one year to the big public Christmas breakfast when they used to hold it in the old theater on the top floor of the old town hall. Everybody followed my footsteps around the room while the high school kids sang carols on stage. It broke my heart when they wore out and the batteries stopped working.”

“Couldn’t you get another pair?”

“By then Daddy was gone and we were very poor. Everybody was poor. I used to be sorry that Sarah would never have a pair of magic sneakers like that, but I don’t think so anymore. There are other ways to feel special and other kinds of magic in the world. Merry Christmas, Robert.”

Britney slid on top of him and sat up with the quilt over her shoulders, a vision in the candlelight: compact, soft, fragrant, amorously ripe, and intent. Robert reached up and drew her face down to his.

S
EVENTEEN

When Andrew Pendergast came back to his house after directing the musicians (and playing piano) for the Christmas Eve program of lessons and carols, there were candles burning in two of the front windows and the woodstove had been tended to keep the house warm for his return, as he had instructed Jack Harron to do. More than one clock ticked around the big old house and the split logs hissed as they burned in the stove. He put his hat and overcoat carefully in the hall closet and proceeded to the kitchen, placing a splint basket down on the big farmhouse table there.

“Jack,” he called into the darkness where the back room was.

Shortly, Jack Harron emerged from his room into the hallway squinting in the candlelight. He was physically transformed from the filthy furtive creature of the previous evening to at least the outward representation of a housebroken human being. He wore a pair of Andrew’s old wool pants, tattered from years of outdoor excursions in pursuit of minerals for his paints, botanicals for his health, and spring trout for his frying pan, and an old, frayed, lavender-colored Calvin Klein button-down shirt from days when Andrew reported to an office in New York City. Because Jack was so emaciated, the pants were cinched and scrunched at the waist with an old belt that he had punched some new holes in. And because he was shorter than Andrew he had rolled up each trouser leg. He had trimmed his beard, as Andrew told him to do, and bathed more than once in the past twenty-four hours until he’d scrubbed all the layers of grime and grease off himself.

“Were you asleep?”

“I guess so.”

“Not sure?”

“I was asleep. I haven’t slept hardly at all lately in the cold.”

“Thank you for tending the stove and lighting the candles.”

“It’s what you told me.”

“Thanks for doing what I told you.”

“It’s comfortable here. I forgot what that’s like.”

“Sit down,” Andrew said and Jack took a seat at the table. Andrew fetched a plate from a cupboard and some cutlery from a drawer. He removed various articles from the splint basket: slices of ham, corn bread, a deviled egg, dried fruit, and nut cookies. “Are you hungry?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders.

“Anyway, help yourself. I brought this back for you.”

Jack nodded. Andrew sat down across from him.

“Do you have any idea why I did that?” he said.

Jack appeared puzzled. “No,” he said.

“It’s called an act of kindness, the important part of being human. Has no one been kind to you?”

Jack began to weep quietly with his head hanging, eyes on the table.

“When I came here last night, I think I wanted to do you harm,” he said.

“I thought so too,” Andrew said.

“But I don’t know why. I’m so confused . . . about everything.”

“Do you still want to harm me?”

“No.”

“All right. Eat something.”

Jack hesitated as if struggling to work through a conundrum, before he picked up the slab of ham and began nibbling on it.

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” he said.

“Tell me who you are.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at whatever part makes sense.”

“Sometime this fall,” he said, “I stopped showing up for work at Mr. Schmidt’s farm. I was just a common laborer. If there was a hard or a filthy job to do, Mr. Schmidt put me to it. I don’t know why.”

“He’s not a bad man.”

“I was a bad worker. I know it. I showed up late. I didn’t care how I did anything. I had no gloves. My hands froze. I couldn’t stand another day of it. I walked away. I never expected it would go this way.”

“What would go what way?”

“My life. Working in mud, in frozen pig shit. I can’t believe what’s happened in the world. Now I can’t even take care of myself.”

Andrew reflected that, given the tribulations of the society he was born into, he had been fortunate never to have felt so lost.

“When the world wants to destroy you, what do you do?” Jack said.

“I don’t believe the world wants to destroy you. At the worst it’s indifferent to us.”

“That’s an evil thing. It brings us here. I didn’t ask to be born. Nobody does. You’d think the world would have some pity on its creations.”

“It’s up to people to care for other people,” Andrew said.

Their eyes met. Jack’s were moist with emotion.

“Why would you let me stay here?”

“I’m by myself and there’s a lot to do just to run this household. I could use help.”

“Why are you by yourself?”

“It’s how I am,” Andrew said.

“Then why let me stay here?”

“You asked to be fixed. In the meantime, I’ll ask you to do things. And you’ll get fixed.”

“I’ll do things,” Jack said. “I won’t do any . . . personal things.”

“I won’t ask you to do any personal things.”

“All right then.”

Jack ate the rest of the ham more earnestly and popped the deviled egg in his mouth.

“Do you mind if I ask,” Andrew said, “what you were before?”

“Before everything went to shit?”

“Yes.”

“A student at Adirondack. The community college up to Glens Falls.”

“Studying what?”

Jack laughed ruefully. “Communications,” he said. “After a certain point, I couldn’t drive up there anymore because of the gas shortage. Anyway, the school shut down, like everything else after a while. My mom lived here, over on Southside behind the Cumberland Farms store. She died. My older sister, she died too. You should have seen her in high school. Sizzling hot. She had a kid. The baby daddy was a useless piece of shit. Blew himself up in a trailer over to Battenville cooking drugs. In the last years of the old times, my sister got hugely fat. Like a cartoon. Then the world turned upside down. Her baby died the same year as Mom from the same disease. There was no food coming into the supermarket anymore. Not the stuff she ate, which was only stuff you could put into a microwave. Then she got to be skinny as a scarecrow. Her teeth fell out. Killed herself. Drank some old cleaner from under the sink. That’s my family.”

“What about your father?”

“Out of the picture since I was three. I couldn’t tell you what he was like, except loud.”

“Where have you been living?”

“The old place on Southside. There’s no fireplace or stove in it. It was colder inside than out.”

“There are plenty of empty houses around town.”

“I didn’t have the means to get cordwood anyhow.”

A clock in a distant room chimed twelve times. It had a muted velvety tone.

“Merry Christmas, Jack.”

“Merry Christmas to you, sir.”

E
IGHTEEN

He was a shadow of a man, a ghost, clothed in shroudlike shreds with a ragged blanket roll slung over one shoulder, stealing across a haunted landscape. He had lost count of the days as he trekked from the deep interior of the continent toward home, passing through an autumn season of glorious color and bright days to the frozen, dim sepia vistas and endless nights of the northeastern early winter. Comfort was a distant memory. For weeks, he had known nothing but pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and loneliness. He subsisted on things stolen: the gleanings of harvested cornfields, turnips and potatoes purloined from root cellars, chickens, not always cooked, small wild animals, whatever the roadsides and forests grudged up. Though he had once eagerly met and consorted with strangers in his two years of adventuring, he now avoided them because in his current condition he looked like trouble coming, and others looked like trouble to him. The wool balaclava he pulled down over his face in the cold gave him an outward demeanor of alien menace, but he was too sick and weak to defend himself against people who might rush to judgment about who or what he was.

What kept Daniel Earle alive was a repository of sense memories that he played and replayed in his mind as he staggered across the landscape: fragments of places, vignettes, sights, smells, and sounds that connected to his deepest emotional center. One particular sense scene he returned to constantly was the image of a small barn, like a carriage house, with a loading door up in the hayloft. It was always spring there, with a welcoming pool of sunlight in the forecourt. That’s all. It was not any place he remembered out of his own history, and he didn’t connect it with any particular beloved person, but it spoke to him in deeply resonant tones suggesting that someday he would come home to it. Another fragmentary scene was of a shopfront window of many small panes, from the inside, a warm and well-lighted refuge, looking out on a street gathered in winter twilight. He didn’t know why it meant so much to him, but when he called it forth from the vaults of his imagination it stirred things deep within him and produced a sense of profound contentment that allowed him to keep swinging one foot in front of the other.

Throughout his day and its gathering night, which he did not know to be that of Christmas Eve, he passed through increasingly familiar landscapes. He had skirted New York’s capital city, Albany, to the north, thinking all big cities to be dangerous traps now, and wended through the broken, desolate suburbs across the Mohawk River, an unresolved countryside of abandoned tract housing, scraps of woodland, scavenged malls and strip malls, highways without cars, and scarecrow people scuttling around the ruins of it all in the cold with arms full of sticks for their fires. In and about this terrain of failed modernity lay country roads that had never been
developed,
as the old term went for farmland waiting to be paved over, and the visible traces of the farms that preceded the suburbs still stood represented by barns with sagging roofs and see-through walls and silos shrouded in Virginia creeper. He had slept in such a barn for a few hours the previous night in a place called Rexford, a former dormitory town for General Electric executives from Schenectady back in the mid-twentieth century, now a liminal zone where the suburban expansion of the old times came to a dead stop with the shattered economy. The population there had been reduced so severely that even good farmland in the vicinity lay fallow and unused, with sumacs sprouting equally in the former cornfields as they did in the parking lots.

In the gray twilight of Christmas Eve, Daniel trudged east and made it to the town of Mechanicville for his first sight of the Hudson River in two years. Coming upon the beautiful familiar river in light so dim he could barely make out the far shore eight hundred feet away, charged his flagging spirit like a glimpse of redemption. As he stood there on the river road looking north at the rusty steel-truss railroad bridge, the fine drizzle that had started in the afternoon turned to snow. Mechanicville itself was a decrepit spectacle of forsaken overbuilt highway junctions, skeletal hamburger shacks, ugly and mostly empty houses clad in tattered, disintegrating vinyl, and factories inactive since the 1970s now overgrown with mature trees. Daniel knew from his travels through post-collapse America that many towns proved themselves unable to recover from the economic trauma and everything that followed, while a few others did better. In the decades previous, Mechanicville had become a county welfare sink where the unfortunate great-grandchildren of earnest factory workers lived on government handouts in purposeless anomie. These people were among the first to go in hard times, and the towns went with them.