A History of the Future (14 page)

“I know you’re anxious to find out,” Robert said.

“I can’t stand it,” Loren said.

“If you have things to do, I’ll send for you when Daniel wakes up.”

Loren nodded in resignation and got up to put on his blanket coat, shearling hat, and enormous shearling mittens. He was a large man and the thick clothing made him seem solidly mountain-like and intimidating. His reddened, damp eyes told more about his state of mind.

“I’ll send for you,” Robert repeated. Loren nodded his head, with his lips in a tight resolute line, and made for the door.

Then Robert was alone in the room with his unconscious son and the doctor’s boy. A nineteenth-century console clock reconditioned by Andrew Pendergast ticked away the minutes from the mantelpiece. Daniel’s face twitched now and again, a welcome sign, the doctor’s boy said. In repose, Daniel’s face was now so strikingly that of a grown man compared to the nineteen-year-old boy who had walked out of town on a May morning two years before. His ordeal had carved furrows of maturity above the bridge of his nose and on his forehead. When he left home his facial hair had been downy and sparse. Robert could see the vivid reminders of Daniel’s deceased mother, Sandy, in his long nose with its slight bump, deep-set eyes, and full lower lip. It disturbed Robert to realize that he had not thought so much about Sandy in recent months. She had been dead for longer than Daniel had been away.

“You must have had quite an adventure back in October,” he said to Jasper, while the boy switched out an empty IV bottle. In the fall, Jasper had run away from home. Robert had joined the doctor in a search for him, unsuccessfully, it turned out. The boy was later brought back to town by two of Brother Jobe’s rangers. It made Robert nervous to watch Jasper perform these doctoring chores, though the boy seemed to know how and Robert was keenly aware that he himself did not.

“I don’t remember it so well,” Jasper said.

“You went places, met up with people.”

“I think so.”

“Who?”

“Nobody,” Jasper said. Peculiar as it was, the boy had a way of shutting down that seemed perfectly natural, like someone drawing a curtain against a storm. Robert thought the boy much stranger than he had previously imagined. After Jasper was brought back home that Halloween night there were whispers of trauma and intimations that he had been involved in strange, violent doings out in the county. A rumor floated that he had killed Brother Jobe’s stallion Jupiter for stomping his dog Willie to death, but the head of the New Faith never made any formal accusation. No one ever learned all the details of the boy’s exploits, including, as far as Robert knew, the doctor and the boy’s mother. It remained an incident shrouded in mystery. Choral music sounded dimly in the distance, the nasal, modal shape-note singing of the New Faithers. Their harsh songs gave a dark edge to the very idea of Christmas and, combined with the diffident presence of the doctor’s boy, made Robert want to reach for the applejack in the kitchen. But he didn’t want the boy to see him drinking at this hour.

“Do you have any books I can read?” Jasper said.

“Sure,” Robert said. “I’ll go get something.”

He went upstairs to Daniel’s boyhood room and brought down several books he thought a boy of Jasper’s age would be interested in: the old Landmark Books history series for children,
Pirates of the New World,
The California Gold Rush,
and
Guadalcanal Diary
. Jasper took the one about pirates saying he’d already read the other two and retreated into it at once, foreclosing any further conversation. Robert had fetched his own bedside reading of the moment,
Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941
by Robert C. Tucker, from the Union Grove library. Together, the two of them sat reading silently for another hour until Britney and Sarah returned to the house just after noon. Though they did not make a commotion coming in, something happened. Daniel’s eyes opened wide very suddenly, glistening with panic as though a klaxon had just gone off in the room. Robert looked up from his reading to see Britney with her mouth agape and followed her eyes back to Daniel, who had managed to raise himself up and twist around to see Britney and the girl.

“I know you,” Daniel croaked, panting slightly.

Britney glanced over at Robert and then back at Daniel.

“I was your babysitter years ago,” she said.

Daniel, still panting, turned to his father, who had dropped his book on the floor.

“Am I dreaming?” he said.

“No, you’re really home,” Robert said, getting out of his seat and coming over to squat down at Daniel’s bedside.

“Hope I don’t die.”

“We won’t let you.”

Daniel slumped back down again.

T
WENTY-THREE

Andrew Pendergast had a long-standing commitment to host a Christmas Day dinner party for his closest friends, twelve in all, most of them from the music circle plus Carolyn Smallwood, his assistant at the library, farmer Ben Deaver, and his wife, Nancy, and Larry Praeger, Union Grove’s sole practicing dentist, and his wife, Sharon. Andrew rose early on Christmas morning, went downstairs to the large, well-equipped kitchen, and called down the back hall to roust Jack Harron out of his room. Jack emerged blinking, hair askew like shocks of oat straw, pulling a suspender up over his shoulder.

“A Merry Christmas morning to you, Jack.”

Jack nodded his head gravely, looking somewhat baffled as to his exact whereabouts and his place in them.

“You’re late getting up.”

“I just woke up.”

“Exactly. Well, it’s Christmas after all. I’ll get you an alarm clock. There’s one kicking around here somewhere. Now, I’d like you to make a fire out in the parlor stove. I’ll get this cookstove going. In the future I’d like you to fire this one up first thing after you get up and put the kettle on for tea.”

“Uh, yessir.”

Andrew bent to the task himself, breaking up some old cedar shakes into kindling splints and shoving them into the firebox.

“We’ve got a lot to do around here today. Bring in some more stove billets for me from the woodshed. When you’re done firing the parlor stove, bring in extra cordwood and go shovel the snow off the front walk and the sidewalk. The shovel’s out on the back porch. Then, feed and water the chickens and collect whatever eggs there are. After that—”

“If you pile too many chores on me at once I’ll forget what I’m supposed to do.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll put some oats on and we’ll have a good hot breakfast when you’re done with the chickens.”

Twenty minutes later they both sat down to breakfast at the big farmhouse table in the kitchen. There was honey from Andrew’s own beehives and heavy cream from Schroeder’s dairy to go over the oats.

“I’ve got twelve friends coming over at four o’clock for Christmas dinner,” Andrew said. “You’re going to help me here in the kitchen and then you’re going to help serve the meal.”

“You mean, like a waiter?”

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

Jack appeared horrified.

“I don’t know how.”

“You don’t have to know anything. Just carry some platters and bowls from here to the dining room. Take away some dirty dishes. Bring in some new ones.”

“But I’ll be seen.”

“We can’t help that, can we?”

Jack didn’t reply. His eyebrows scrunched together and his features clouded.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of what people will think,” Andrew said.

Jack poked at his oatmeal in silence.

“Did you break into other houses around town?”

“No.”

“Did you do anything else to annoy people?”

“No!”

“What’s the matter then?”

“I get nervous.”

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

“I could drop something.”

“Yes, I suppose you could. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“I could spill something hot on somebody.”

“They’d survive.”

“I’m always so nervous. I never feel relaxed. I hate being me.”

“I’ve got news for you, you’re all you’ve got.”

Jack went pale. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’re your whole world. Without you, there’s nothing. Surely you see some good things in the world around you.”

“Like what?”

“Beauty.”

“What about it?”

“It’s important. And it’s there for us.”

“Yeah, there’s some beauty in the world, I guess.”

“It’s there for you, Jack, in your world. Try paying attention to it. And know wherever you see a little beauty, there’s more there, beyond your vision and hearing, waiting for you to discover it.”

Jack appeared intensely interested in the idea for a moment, but then his eyebrows crowded together again and he tilted his head slightly.

“No offense, but what if that’s just some bullshit?” he said.

“Then it’s harmless bullshit. You can take it or leave it.”

The slightest smile for the first time crept up the corners of Jack’s mouth.

“You’re strange,” he said, “you know that?”

“Oh yes. I’ve been told that many times,” Andrew said. “You’ll be fine today. Just follow some simple instructions.”

Andrew had hung a sixteen-pound turkey in his keeping room two days earlier. The room lay off the back end of the house. Here, beneath the hanging turkey, he kept his stores of preserved foods in neat stacks of glass bottles and things in bulk supply that did well at a cold temperature above freezing. Garlands and sprays of drying herbs hung around the turkey from bare rafters, along with ropes of onions and garlic. Andrew had laboriously constructed his own grain bins out of recycled sheet metal. Potatoes had their own wooden bins. Andrew grew much of his food in his own gardens, but like most everyone else in town he bought some commodities at Einhorn’s store.

He asked Jack to pluck the turkey while he began making pastry for two pies, pumpkin and mincemeat. He found that the ancient spelt grain grown by Stephen Bullock made exceptionally good pie crusts. It had a nuttier flavor than wheat and a lower gluten content. For shortening, Andrew cut in half lard and half butter. Instead of a few tablespoons of water, he used applejack to moisten the dough because the alcohol would evaporate a greater volume of liquid during the baking process, making the crust extra flaky and fine. His mincemeat differed from the old standard preparations in that he used dried apples, dried high-bush cranberries, black currants, and candied rose hips instead of citrus peels, because oranges and lemons came to Union Grove so seldom these days. Lacking cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and other tropical spices, Andrew flavored his pumpkin filling and the mincemeat with caramelized honey, that is, cooked until it polymerized to a deep golden brown piquant elixir. Some pear brandy found its way in as well. By the time he had constructed his pies, the oven temperature was up to speed and ready to receive them.

Then Jack came in with the plucked turkey, looking exhausted but triumphant, as though he had overcome an adversary by main force.

“Good job,” Andrew said. “Did you save the big tail feathers like I asked?”

“Yeah. What do you do with them?”

“We use them over at the theater for costumes, and I tie trout flies and fletch arrows with them. You can make a pen out of the quill, though I still have plenty of steel nibs. Sometimes I just put them in a bottle like a bouquet of flowers.”

Jack looked perplexed. His mouth had been incrementally falling open.

“What?” Andrew said.

“Nothing,” Jack said.

“Go wash the turkey inside and out and drain it well.”

“Yessir.”

“Do you have cooking skills?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Our family didn’t cook. They just heated stuff up.”

He handed Jack a four-quart saucepan. “Go into the back room and get me as many onions as will fit in this.”

Andrew stuffed the turkey with stale corn bread, his own pork sausage, chunks of apple, and chestnuts acquired from Temple Merton’s farm and orchard on Coot Hill, five miles north of Union Grove. He carefully worked a half pound of butter under the skin of the upturned turkey’s breast. They shoved the turkey into the oven at eleven o’clock. An old railroad station master’s clock with big Roman numerals hung on the kitchen wall above a nineteenth-century portrait of a Jersey cow.

“Who taught you all this?” Jack asked, thinking himself as blank of mind as the cow in the picture.

“Nobody,” Andrew said. “I’m my own creation.”

“Are you favored by God?”

“I never thought so.”

“I felt cursed my whole life.”

“You’re not,” Andrew said. “It’s just something you tell yourself. The truth is we’re blessed just to be here. In that college you went to, did you ever hear of a philosopher named Wittgenstein?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, of course. He said,
It’s astonishing that anything exists
.”