A History of the Future (19 page)

“We might travel through Kentucky. You never know.”

“I’d stay away from there,” McCoy says. He’s all grins. I think he likes to see us go at it.

“How come?”

“Kentucky, Tennessee, that part of the country isn’t safe. I think we’re at war with them.”

“Since when?”

“More than a year.”

“What for?”

“They broke away from America.”

“How come?”

“They never did like us? It’s civil war all over again,” McCoy says. “Remember the Alamo?”

“The Alamo was the war with Mexico,” Evan says, “not the Civil War.”

“They don’t like Mexicans either,” McCoy says.

“Seems like the country has just fallen to pieces,” I go.

“As long as things keep moving on the Er-i-o, I don’t give a damn,” McCoy goes.

“So what
is
the capital of Kentucky, smart ass?” I ask Evan.

He ignores me. He goes, “Well, what about those five locks, mister?”

McCoy says, “They changed the system in 19 and 13 and built new locks that were bigger than the original ones, and only two to the set. But the gates ran off the electric, and with the electric out they don’t work anymore, so now they have to rebuild the old five-step, which they are doing and hope to finish up by midsummer. It’ll be dandy when they’re done. Meantime, we have to offload our cargoes at Lockport and put it in wagons up the slope and then the Buffalo boats take it the rest of the way. You could work on the locks when we get to it. They’re paying silver, I hear. I’ll introduce you to the boss there, if you like.”

So we just looked at each other, Evan and me, and knew we’d go west with Randall McCoy for a ways and then take it from there.

Daniel slid down from the sofa cushion, saying only, “So tired, got to sleep now.”

Robert removed the sofa cushion and placed a regular pillow back under his son’s head, tenderly, as though Daniel were not the mysterious man he had become but still a small boy who needed his father to take care of him.

T
WENTY-NINE

The next morning Robert Earle, Loren Holder, and Brother Jobe convened at the old former Union-Wayland mill down by the Battenkill River. Brother Jobe had brought a thermos bottle of real coffee and a little sack of raised donuts made of real wheat flour and dusted with real powdered sugar. The New Faith people had a knack for coming by scarce commodities in their trade dealings. Brother Jobe was attended by Brother Shiloh, chief engineer of the project ongoing in the old factory: a community laundry that was near completion. Brother Shiloh left the others in his office room equipped with a wood-burning stove and went off to inspect the new boiler fabricated in the New Faith’s own metal shop.

Without electricity, the old way of everybody having washing machines at home was out of date, and laundry was a laborious task. A few people had set themselves up to take in other people’s wash, but there were not enough laundry facilities for everyone, and some people could not pay to have it done, and on the whole the townspeople suffered from a lack of clean clothes and bedding. They had hoped to get the community laundry—which was originally Loren Holder’s idea—up and running by Christmas as a present to the town, but a few kinks in the mechanicals remained to be worked out.

The office was in one corner of the large open factory floor. It had a wall of windows that looked onto the works. Seven thousand square feet of space remained of the twenty-four thousand square feet the complex comprised in its heyday. The building had started its life in 1854 as a linen mill, was converted to a toilet paper factory in the early twentieth century, and produced cardboard boxes after the Second World War. It ceased to produce anything in 1971 and had languished for decades. The weather had its way with the flat roof and the rubber-asphalt cladding that cracked and split under ultraviolet exposure. Things started to leak, rot, rust, flake off, spall, and molder inside.

All the debris and rottenness had been cleared away in the past six months. Beams, joists, and flooring had been replaced and gleamed brightly with varnish made right in Washington County out of turpentine and seed oil. Robert had put in many extra hours of labor on the project when he wasn’t working elsewhere and the Reverend Holder had collected silver coin from the members of the Congregational Church toward paying for the fittings fabricated by local smiths, coopers, and craftspeople. At the center of the main workroom now stood two rows of four hundred-gallon oaken tubs four feet high, mangles made of the toughest and most rot resistant black locust wood with wrought-iron fittings for wringing out wet fabrics and several big tables for sorting clothes and sundries. An overshot water wheel on the river turned leather belts overhead connected to gearing that ran the paddles in the wash tubs.

“Shiloh thinks we can test-drive her in another week or so,” Brother Jobe said, pouring coffee into the cup that screwed off the top of the thermos. “Help yourself to a durned donut, you two.”

Robert and Loren did not hesitate. Robert closed his eyes as he savored the first bite and the sugar melted on his tongue.

“We’ve got four of our people and four of your people hired up to start,” Brother Jobe continued, “and if we need more we can hire up more. I know quite a few of your farm labor folk are idle this time of year. By and by some might like working in here better than out in the fields. We can shake out the operation in the weeks ahead. If you boys want some of this here coffee, we all got to drink out of the same cup. I didn’t bring no extra mugs.”

“Can your bunch cover those wages we’ll be paying until we get cash coming in?” Robert said.

“Sure. It’ll come out of you-all’s cut until we’re square.”

Robert and Loren glanced at each other. Both then nodded okay. Robert reached for the coffee. It had been many months since he’d tasted any. In the old times, when he was an executive at a computer software company in Boston, Robert’s steel coffee mug was his constant companion. Colleagues joked that it was a prosthetic extension of his brain.

“Meantime,” Brother Jobe said, “we got to assemble twenty-three upright individuals to sit on a grand jury to review criminal charges against poor Miz Stokes. Mr. Bullock has asked me as an officer of the court to direct you as constable”—he looked at Loren—“to notify these potential grand jurors.” He dug into the inside pocket of his frock coat, withdrew a folded document, and handed it to Loren. At the top of the first page, in florid cursive script, the document said,
On Order of the Magistrate, Union Grove, New York, Hon. Stephen Bullock,
” followed by several paragraphs of dense legalese that fogged Loren’s brain as he attempted to parse it. He flipped the page.

“There’s only fifteen people on this list,” Loren said. He knew them all. “You say we need twenty-three.”

“Well, he told me to tell you to scare up the rest, plus a few alternates.”

“Jesus Christ,” Loren said.

“No need for cussing there, Rev.”

Loren rubbed his temples as though he had a headache. “All this constable bullshit is taking over my life,” he said.

“Well, whyn’t you quit grousing and seek some upright and mature fellow amongst your regular townspeople to take your place as constable whilst you discharge this particular final obligation, which is your duty as long as there ain’t nobody else to fill your boots.”

Loren made a face, then sighed and reached for another donut.

“Maybe I will.”

“I know we all got a full plate these days,” Brother Jobe said. “If it’s any help, I can nominate a few grand jurors out of our outfit.”

“You think our people would mind that?” Loren said to Robert.

“His people live here now too,” Robert said. “They’re citizens of Union Grove.”

“My wife visited with Mrs. Stokes last night,” Loren said, turning back to Brother Jobe. “It sounds like she’s not fit for any trial.”

“That was my impression, too, frankly, but the wheels of justice are in motion, my friend. We got to roll with them.”

Brother Jobe poured some more coffee into the cup and handed it to Loren.

“Those wheels are attached to a runaway wagon,” Loren said, “and the wagon is named Bullock.”

T
HIRTY

Einhorn’s General Merchandise at the center of Union Grove was the favorite gathering place, casual meeting spot, and business exchange in town. It was also the only place within an eleven-mile radius of Union Grove to buy household goods and groceries. It occupied a one-story cinder-block structure built in 1957 originally for a store called Carpetland, which had replaced the burned-down Beeman Block (completed 1899), a far more elegant and substantial exercise in the small-town Beaux Arts that had housed Beeman’s Hardware on the first two floors for almost six decades. When the economy crashed and the government withered and everything about daily life changed, Terry Einhorn acquired the long-vacant Carpetland building, built a wide and comfortable porch on front, and an icehouse on the rear alley, and started his business, which for a number of years was the only going concern in town besides Allison’s livery and the Fixit Shop.

In the old times Terry Einhorn had represented a kitchen and bath products company, selling high-quality fixtures to vendors in a sales territory that included all of eastern upstate New York, western Massachusetts, and Vermont, a region, back then, with a large number of wealthy people in fine houses who spent their money on gourmet cooking equipment and home spa furnishings. He made a good living. On a fluky, nervous hunch that things weren’t going so well in the world, a few months before the outbreak of war in the Holy Land, Terry took $70,000 out of his investment account and bought gold coins in half and quarter ounce denominations. He bought as many again just before the Los Angeles bombing. When the economy cratered soon after that, and the banks with it, he was one of the few citizens of Union Grove left with fungible wealth. Being a deeply practical person, and one who cared about his town, and someone who could connect the dots and see where the collapse was leading, he used a fair portion of this wealth in setting up the store. The Kmart was already done for by then and the Hovington supermarket was on its last legs with intermittent deliveries, half-empty shelves, and irregular electric service that rendered the freezers inoperable. Of course, the corporate managers of the supermarket chain had no interest in finding local sources of food, while Terry arranged his new network masterfully, helping the local farmers to organize and cooperate with one another as a beneficial side effect.

His wife, Leslie, was a mainstay of Andrew Pendergast’s music circle (cello) and of the Union Grove Theater Company—she played Cousin Nettie in the fall production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel,
directed by Andrew Pendergast. Terry and Leslie lost one child in the Mexican flu epidemic, a girl, Kristan, fourteen. Their son Teddy, eighteen, who survived, made daily rounds in his wagon of the farms throughout the county, picking up produce, meats, cheeses, cider, and other merchandise instead of waiting for the farmers and craftspeople to bring it in. Einhorn’s store was therefore always reliably supplied. Teddy had not been old enough when the world changed to have developed more elaborate career plans involving college, an office job in a faraway city, and all the other trappings of bygone modernity. He was a happy, busy, well-adjusted young man of his own new time. He loved plying the hills and vales of Washington County in the double-spring-mounted wagon with its snug driver’s box behind the big steady Belgian gelding Lancelot. He had a girl over at Center Falls who he got to visit with at least once a week on his rounds, and he was developing the notion of opening a branch of the store there.

After the death of their daughter, the Einhorns had taken in the orphaned Buddy Haseltine, then sixteen. Buddy was born with Down syndrome and was classified as “higher functioning” by the medical establishment. As it happened, he’d attended a special-ed class until the schools closed and was able to read and write at the level of a normal seven-year-old, as well as to add up simple sums—though subtraction baffled him. Buddy worked in the store, too, and by the time he was twenty-one had begun to campaign to live away from the Einhorn house on his own, the answer to which was a comfortable room in the rear of the store, the store being the center of his universe. All day long the people came and went and Buddy Haseltine enjoyed the human traffic immensely and went about his simple duties of stocking, and sweeping, and sometimes waiting on customers, and delivering their orders around town in a handcart he pulled himself, as though he were a horse, and was well loved by everybody, and may have been the happiest soul in Union Grove despite the disadvantages life dealt him from the start. In a troubled period of history, Einhorn’s store was a happy place.