A History of the Future (16 page)

“Everyone needs a little friend,” said Brother Eben, the stable’s evening manager. “She’ll speed his recovery.” He then went to fetch water, hay, and grain while Brother Zuriel, the New Faith farrier, examined the horse’s neglected hooves and Brother Jonah began brushing the dirt out of its coat. Loren watched them with deep satisfaction that something had gone right in the world this day. The horse drank greedily when Brother Eben brought in a bucket of clean water. Then he hand-fed flakes of hay to it. Presently, Brother Jobe, who had been alerted to the situation, stopped in.

“I hear you brung me a Christmas present.”

“Another mouth to feed,” Loren said and explained.

“Oh, hey now, isn’t that a sad sack of a feller, poor old boy,” Brother Jobe said, coming into the stall. “Throw a stable sheet on him tonight, will you, Eben?”

“Yessir.”

“You done the right thing,” Brother Jobe said to Loren. “We’re glad to take it in. He’ll come back from his tribulation, just watch. Horses are wealth nowadays. Folks are beginning to realize it. There wasn’t enough of them when the old times up and quit on us. We’re breeding ’em as fast as we can. I aim to build another barn and go all out for mules this year. The mule is misunderstood and undervalued.” Brother Jobe paused a moment. His demeanor grew quiet and he steered Loren out of the stall into the center aisle. “I’ve heard that Robert Earle’s son turned up last night. And that your boy who lit out with him did not.”

Loren sighed and nodded his head.

“I’ve lost a son too,” Brother Jobe said, referring to Brother Minor, killed in a shoot-out the previous summer with the gang that ran the town landfill as a cash salvage business. “It’s very hard, I know.”

“We don’t know what happened yet,” Loren said. “Daniel’s still out of it.”

“Anytime you want someone to talk to, my door is open.”

“Thank you.”

“And you need a horse for any reason, you just take one of ours, hear? I’ll tell my boys.”

“Thank you for that too. How is Missus Stokes doing?”

“Under the circumstances not exactly thriving, but she’s safe and warm and taking her food,” Brother Jobe said.

Loren sighed and nodded. His shoulder and back muscles throbbed.

“I aim to persuade the squire to hasten proceedings, get the grand jury convened ASAP and the trial set,” Brother Jobe continued. “That poor girl might have done a terrible dark deed but I feel for her nonetheless. I wonder if in the meantime she could stand a little company from one of her own townspeople. I have in mind a mature and sensitive woman such as your wife. I know she makes ministerial calls among your sick and bereft. I think our folks frighten Miz Stokes.”

“I’ll speak to Jane Ann,” Loren said. “I’m sure she’ll come over.”

“Thank you. This gal ain’t right in the head, poor thing. I’d go along with Mr. Hutto if he pleaded her insane, but I think the squire will try to hang her anyways.”

“Bullock can’t just do whatever he feels like.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Brother Jobe said. “The law is a tattered and flimsy thing nowadays. Not so long ago in history, right here before this was its own nation, a woman who done such terrible deeds could be burned for a witch, legal proceedings and all, and sentenced to it with the full authority of a sage and solemn magistrate like our squire Bullock. Real justice is a fugitive thing in the long run. I look back on the times of my youth and marvel that the mills of the law worked as fair as it did. We weren’t such a bad country then, after all.
He has showed you, O men, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God
.”

“Micah 6:8,” Loren said. “
All the works of Ahab’s house are done. And you walk in their counsels, that I may make you a desolation, and your inhabitants a hissing
. Micah 6:16.”

“I’ll be ding-danged,” Brother Jobe said. “You know your Bible after all.”

“We’re in the same line of work,” Loren said.

T
WENTY-FIVE

The big table in Andrew Pendergast’s dining room was set for twelve with his Villeroy & Boch china in the red basketweave pattern and his antique steel flatware with cream-colored Bakelite handles on a pink damask tablecloth figured with cabbage roses. In the years of crash and collapse it was easy to buy fine things for next to nothing as households desperately liquidated their chattels for cash. Andrew lighted the eight beeswax candles arrayed in pewter holders molded into whimsical figures of forest animals: bear, bobcat, fox, and so on. They were low so his guests could see over them around the table. The centerpiece was an art nouveau silver bowl figured with leaves, blossoms, and nymphs. It was occupied by a small potted rosemary plant on which Andrew had hung a few tiny red and gold glass Christmas balls. On one side of the dining room, an oval mirror six feet in diameter hung over a 1920s reproduction serpentine Hepplewhite sideboard between two windows that looked out to his snow-blanketed garden. On the other side of the room a fire burned in a hearth behind a fitted glass fireplace door.

It was not so easy for Andrew to get his guests away from the woodstove in the adjoining parlor where they had been enjoying cocktails. All the talk initially was of the return of Daniel Earle and the sad absence of the companion he set out with two years before, Loren Holder’s boy. Dr. Copeland told the gathering about Daniel’s condition, and said that nothing yet was known of his adventures or tribulations, for he remained in a febrile sleep. He had no more to say about it for the moment, and the effects of the drinks was putting the company in a lighter mood.

“You know what I like about coming to your house?” Sharon Praeger said as Andrew poured her a second glass of extra-dry German-style sparkling
apfelwein
cider, which tasted almost like champagne. “It’s like the way everything was before.”

“It’s nice to pretend, anyway,” said her husband, Larry, the town’s only dentist, who, like the doctor, had to improvise constantly in his practice to make up for lost technologies and materials of the no-longer-modern age.

“Back in the day, we’d watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
on Christmas night,” said Dan Mullinex, whose wife was among those taken in the Mexican flu epidemic. He had been a young economics prof just starting out at Williams College in the old times and now worked for Holyrood, the cidermaker. He had brought several bottles with him.

“I loved that movie,” said Linda Allison. “It breaks my heart that I may never see it ever again.”

“We could put it on as a play, next Christmas,” said Andrew. “If we could find a way to heat the theater.”

“Did you ever notice in the movie that George Bailey’s bank’s main business was loaning money for the first suburban houses built after the war?” said Linda’s husband, Tom Allison, another former academic left high and dry by the crash, who now ran the only livery in town.

“Which war?” said Larry Praeger.

“The Second World War,” Dan said. “The movie came out in 1946. It was a box office flop, by the way.”

“Maybe it would have been better if his bank had failed,” said Maggie Furnival, with a glance toward her husband, Robbie, who had been in on the final burst of McMansion development as a building contractor before the collapse. He had lost everything for a while and his hatred for banks was assuaged when they all collapsed in a single week after the DC bombing. Now he was Union Grove’s chief purveyor of cordwood, who employed eight roughneck woodcutters and had a stable of four Percheron horses for his logging operations.

“Well, finally, they all did.” Robbie said. “In real life.”

“It’s hard to tell what’s real life anymore,” Larry said.

“The suburbs that George Bailey lent money to build eventually destroyed his little town, Bedford Falls, and everything else like it in America,” Tom said. “You know that part in the movie where George wants to commit suicide on the bridge and the angel, what’s his name—?”

“Clarence!” Dan said, like a good student.

“—and Clarence shows him what his town would be like if he had never been born. It would have been an evil little burg named Pottersville, named after the town villain played by, uh—”

“Lionel Barrymore!” Dan said.

“How do you remember these things?” Tom said. Dan just made a face and emptied his glass. “Anyway, in the dream sequence we see the Main Street of Pottersville. It’s all gin mills and people getting in and out of taxicabs. Lights are blazing. The sidewalks are bustling. The town may be wicked but it’s alive! Main Street business is booming. The shop fronts are all occupied. If the supposed nightmare of Pottersville had come true, this would have ended up a way better country. So, you see, George Bailey was the real villain of
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”

“Funny, how things work out,” said the doctor, who always seemed preoccupied and indeed almost always was, given the many cares for the many he cared for in town.

“And now look at us,” said Ben Deaver.

“Go ahead and look. There’s a lot to like now, actually,” said Tom.

“You don’t miss electricity?”

“Not as much as I might have thought before. Look at us here. This is a happy gathering. We’re all occupied doing worthwhile things. We probably eat better than before—I’m sure we will tonight, knowing Andrew. We’re healthier than we would’ve been if we were still driving around in cars all day long, scarfing pizza, and watching Larry Kudlow on CNBC.”

“You watched him?” Dan said.

“For laughs.”

“Not much to laugh at there, in my opinion,” Ben said.

“We’re the lucky ones,” Robbie said, thinking of the people he knew who could buy only a half cord of firewood at a time and lived in cold houses and didn’t have enough to eat.

“I’m glad the whole rotten thing went down,” said Nancy Deaver, who was working on her third glass of cider.

“She was a doomer,” her husband, Ben, said.

“I was not,” Nancy said. “I was just paying attention. It was obviously all a Ponzi scheme. You all were just too busy watching CNBC.”

“Not me,” Dan Mullinex said.

Andrew held up his glass. “A toast. To Mr. Charles Ponzi. For making it all possible.”

The others smiled, not all of them comfortably, and drained their glasses, which Andrew refilled again.

“Well, I sure miss good crusty bread,” Ben Deaver said. “How can this country be so screwed up that we can’t even get regular shipments of wheat up the Hudson River. I tried growing a few acres five years ago but the stem rust got it right away.”

“Have you tried Bullock’s spelt?” Andrew said.

“I asked him for some seed and he wouldn’t give me any,” Ben said. “He wants the market all to himself, which is ridiculous because he can’t supply it all.”

“That’s Bullock for you,” Dan said.

“I don’t mind corn bread,” said Carolyn Smallwood, Andrew’s assistant at the library, who had worked there through the entire transformation of life in recent times and had lived in the same house built by her great-grandfather on Van Buren Street all her life. “I’m quite fond of it, actually.”

“People, people,” Andrew said. “Can I ask you to move to the table?”

Early twilight had begun to gather under the eaves and Andrew lit the candles in the dining room. The aroma of good things roasting filled the first-floor rooms. When everybody was seated, Andrew picked up the lid of a silver chutney dish and banged it with a spoon. It produced a ringing musical tone that was Jack’s cue to enter the dining room with serving bowls of mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts braised with bacon and cider. The women in particular watched him come and go and return with a platter of carved turkey and stuffing. As instructed, Jack held the platter so each guest could help him- or herself and moved briskly along. Jack’s hair was plastered down and he wore another of Andrew’s old striped shirts so that he looked a little like a character out of a 1920s magazine advertisement for men’s clothing. Dr. Copeland’s wife, Jeanette, who was born in Normandy, said, “
merci,
” and giggled when Jack moved on to her husband, who struggled against pouring himself a fifth glass of the sparkling cider. When they were all served, Jack put the platter on the sideboard, went to the kitchen, and came back out with a large gravy boat, which he deposited next to Nancy Deaver.

“Who are you?” she said to him softly.

“Nobody,” Jack said, and hurried back toward the kitchen again.

Nancy, seated in the middle of the long table, leaned toward the host’s end and said in stage whisper, as though eager for all the others to hear, “Tell us, Andrew, who’s your new companion?”

Andrew flinched. “You mean him?” he said, pointing toward the kitchen.

“You found someone at last,” Nancy said, very satisfied with her perspicacity and rather drunk.

“He’s not my companion,” Andrew said, his sense of comedy aroused. “He’s my servant.”

T
WENTY-SIX

Around the same time that Andrew Pendergast and his friends addressed their plates of Christmas victuals, Jane Ann Holder, the minister’s wife, turned up at the front door of the New Faith headquarters, formerly the town high school. She huddled inside her hooded wool cape, fashioned from a blanket, with a basket clutched to her body, and waited in the evening murk for the watchman Brother Asa to unlock the door. To the west, over a scrim of naked treetops, the sun was going down in a pink-gray soup of cloud. Once inside, she asked to be taken to see Mrs. Stokes. Brother Asa did not immediately comprehend.