A History of the Future (20 page)

Buddy was bringing potatoes out of cold storage that morning and filling bins at the front of the store when he overheard the conversation of Robbie Furnival, Bruce Wheedon, and Walter McWinnie, all gathered around the potbellied stove at the center of the store, and all enjoying mugs of an herbal “coffee” made from roasted dandelion and angelica roots, fennel seeds, and rhodiola, which Leslie Einhorn blended herself. Terry Einhorn stood behind his counter, helping Lucy Myles get her groceries.

“It’s out that they’re calling a grand jury,” Walter said. “From all I heard it sounds like she was defending the child from him.”

“I knew Rick Stokes,” said Robbie, “and I just don’t see him as the type of man that would kill his own son.”

“Something terrible went down in that house that night,” Bruce said, “and I suppose it’s the purpose of the grand jury to find out what, exactly.”

“I’ve been called to serve on it,” Terry said from behind his counter. “The rev came by earlier with a writ from you know who.”

“Terrible, what happened,” Lucy said. “Did you get any of that Shushan cheddar in by any chance?”

“Yes I did, dear,” Terry said.

“I hear the doc says the baby was shook to death,” Walter said. “Spinal cord all squarshed.”

Buddy’s head perked up at the potato bin.

“Rick would never shake a baby like that,” Robbie said. “He loved that kid.”

“There was no knife wounds on the baby,” Bruce said. “It must have happened that the baby was crying or carrying on and Rick did something. It doesn’t take much, you know. Little snap of the head is all.”

“She shake the baby,” Buddy said from over at the potato bin. His speech being impaired by his deformed palate, it came out as a kind of mere vocal noise that did not get the attention of the men around the potbellied stove.

“So she sees him do this and goes berserk and stabs him with a kitchen knife,” Walter said. “Must have happened like that.”

“Shake the baby,” Buddy repeated. It sounded like a kind of honking:
Hee hake da baby
. This time he caught the attention of Bruce and Robbie.

“It’s the only way that makes sense,” Walter added.

“Hee hake da baby!” Buddy said. In his pigeon-toed way he stepped closer to the center of the room where the men sat in rockers.

“What’s he sayin’?” Walter said.

“Da baby!” Buddy said. “Hee hake da baby.” Up at the counter, Lucy turned to look. Buddy then acted out what he remembered. He held his stubby arms out and as if holding a parcel in them he shook the imaginary bundle violently. “Hee hake da baby ike da.”

“He’s got a theory,” Walter said. “Imagine that!”

“No, I saw ih! I saw ih,” Buddy said.

Now Terry came around the counter.

Buddy pantomimed what he saw again.

“Hee hake da baby!”

Everybody was now looking at Buddy, who stopped the pantomime, suddenly nervous about the attention focused on himself.

“What’s he saying, Terry?” Robbie asked.

“He’s saying ‘she shook the baby,’ I think,” Terry said.

Buddy wagged his head up and down. “Hee hake da baby.”

“You see that?” Bruce said to Buddy, then to Terry, “Did he see that?”

Buddy continued nodding his head.

“Did you see that?” Terry asked and then he mimicked what Buddy had done, holding his arms out stiffly and shaking.

Buddy wagged his head again.

“How could he see that?” Bruce said.

“He lives here in the store now,” Terry said. “He’s here after we close up. Where’d you see this happen, Buddy?”

Buddy pointed toward the window.

“The street,” Buddy said.
Da hreet
.

“The street?”

Buddy nodded.

“When was that?”

“Ni’time. Hefo Crimmis.”

“Nighttime. Before Christmas?”

“Yah!”

“Christmas Eve?”

“Ya! Crimmis Eeh.”

“That’s when it happened, all right,” Robbie said.

“Does he really know what he’s talking about?” Bruce said.

“Yeah, he probably does,” Terry said, and turned back to Buddy, who seemed abashed and uncomfortable and squirmed in place.

“Are you sure it was a woman you saw?” Terry asked him.

“She! She!” Buddy said, pointing outside. “
Hee, Hee
!”

“Is that a he or a her?” Walter said.

“Woman!” Buddy said.
Hooman
!

“A human?” Walter said.

“You mean a lady?” Terry said.

Buddy nodded again.

“I gah go,” Buddy said, overcome by anxiety. “Mo ’tatoes.”

“Wait a minute,” Walter said.

“No, let him go,” Terry said.

They all watched Buddy pigeon-step to the storeroom in the back, across the hall from his living quarters.

“Well, this puts a new light on things, don’t it?” Walter said. “You’re going to have to inform you know who.”

It took Terry a longish moment to digest that.

“Buddy can’t testify,” Terry said eventually.

“Why not?” Walter said.

Robbie Furnival just shrugged his eyebrows and lit a splint in the stove to relight his pipe.

“Is it legal?” Bruce Wheedon said. “Being who he is and all.”

“Well,” said Lucy Myles from over at the counter, “we can’t pretend we didn’t hear it. Sounds like she killed them both.”

T
HIRTY-ONE

“
We signed on with Randall McCoy to voyage west on the Erie Canal in exchange for helping them load and unload cargo along the way,” Daniel said, sitting up in bed at four o’clock that afternoon as twilight gathered in the windows of his father’s house. Loren and Jane Ann Holder sat beside the bed. Thirteen-year-old Mary Moyer was looking after their four young adopted children back at the rectory.

Robert Earle put a log on the fire. Britney worked on a splint basket in a seat at the end of the bed. Britney’s child, Sarah, stood in the kitchen nearby in a nimbus of candlelight, making corn bread. Daniel clutched a mug of rose hip tea in both hands. The color was returning to his face.

Daniel’s Story: Incident at the Five-Step Flight

The night before we left the town of Amsterdam, McCoy took us to the boatmen’s tavern for a meal and what he called “sport.” The place was rough but lively. In the big front room men played cards. It was good weather, though, and they had an open-air deck overlooking the river. Out there a geezer was playing fiddle with an old gal on the mandola. The boatmen put dimes in a hat for them. The food there was pretty good for that time of year: corned beef and potatoes, all kinds of pickles, bacon and beans, and fresh shad from the spring run over to the Hudson that boats brought up the Mohawk. I don’t care for shad roe. It tastes like liver from another planet. But others were shoveling down great platters of it. The meat’s bony as hell. They say that a porcupine chased by a mountain cat once took refuge by jumping in the river and God turned him inside out and that’s how the shad got created.

McCoy was popular among the boatmen. Many stopped by our table to joke with him, being old friends, I thought, and the society of the canal being a close one because they saw each other coming and going all the time and in the canal taverns along the line. They asked who we were and McCoy told them we were bound west to the end of the line at the five-step locks of Lockport, and from there God knew. When they heard that, more than a few raised their eyebrows as if impressed or busted out laughing. I supposed they were all pretty drunk. The tavern was that kind of place, and it was that time of day—the purple hour of twilight—when workingmen were inspired to drink quick and hard. McCoy bought us ciders with our meal and whiskeys after we finished, and some ladies came around our table. They were in skirts, all clean and buffed up, and we understood what kind of girls they were. Anyway, McCoy left us there, the girl with him tugging at his arm, and said we could sleep on deck of the
Glory
that night and get under way in the morning. Two girls remained with us, Haven and Lily. They informed us that they were at our service. I’m like, “I never paid for it.”

Lily goes, “Well, you don’t have to because Mr. McCoy took care of it.” She was most winsome, let me tell you.

“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Jane Ann said.

“I’ll spare you the details,” Daniel said. “Let’s just say we went with them.”

“Oh, my little Evan.”

I never saw Evan so happy as that evening. He liked Haven because their names sort of rhymed. He thought that was, like, fate. Anyway, their establishment was up the street and we went with them. We weren’t allowed to sleep there. So after that, we made our way back to the docks and lay out our bedrolls on the
Glory
’s deck between the mules on the bow and McCoy’s cabin. The air was chill, perfect for sleeping, and the sky full of stars. We’re lying there, pretty buzzed on drink.

Evan goes, “I’m gon’ come back and marry that girl.”

I go, “No you’re not. By the time we come back she woulda had a thousand other dudes and I’m sure at least half of them’ll have the same idea. And she’ll say yes to one of them, I’m sure.”

“She was the most beautiful li’l thing I ever saw in my life.”

“More beautiful than Abby Sweetland?”

“I never did it with Abby. Tonight was my first time.”

“Oh God . . .” Jane Ann said, groaning.

“Well, it was our lives,” Daniel said. “You’ve already had your lives and done things like that when you were young, and it was our turn.”

“Let him tell it,” Loren said.

Robert shared a glance with Jane Ann.

“Please go on,” Loren said.

Okay, so we heave off in the morning, early. McCoy’s in great spirits, singing on the cabin roof. Evan and I take turns walking the mules, two hours at a time walking the towpath. We changed mule teams every four hours. McCoy would rotate them from the so-called barn in front to the “barn” in the stern. It wasn’t any kind of real barn, you understand, just a portion of the deck where they stood happily munching flakes of hay on the slow, gentle, steady boat that never rocked because the water was never rough. Our work was easy. We occasionally offloaded a few barrels of this and that and took on a few barrels of this and that.

Walking the towpath with the animals was loveliness itself, except when it rained, which was only a very few times, it being a dry spring, and quite warm too. Everything about canal boat work is slow and stately. You never hurry up. Everybody along the way knows each other. The only danger is being around mules, and McCoy’s were exceptionally well behaved, Spark and Goose on one team and Shadow and Beans the other. I think they liked towing the
Glory
. You could hardly even call it work for them. Flowers were out. Yellow and blue iris in the marshy spots, May apples in the woods, wild mustard along the towpath, fruit trees blooming in old abandoned orchards.

The towns floated by: Fultonville, Canajoharie, Fort Plain, Herkimer, Ilion. The Mohawk River finally funneled down into the canal for good at the town of Frankfort, which was abandoned except for the lock keepers, who ran a rude tavern with lodgings there, of course, and charged a dime toll to pass through their lock. They couldn’t charge more because the boatmen couldn’t stand it and stay in business. We checked out the center of town. You could tell it was mostly ruined, before the old times ended, with parking lots. The three older brick buildings left were burnt out—by firebugs, the lock keeper said. They liked their situation there, with a cow and gardens and boats bringing them stuff to trade for all day long, and the dimes adding up.

We stayed in their lodgings for one night in crude bunks because it started to rain and McCoy wouldn’t let us in his cabin on board, and Evan got lice there. McCoy had a razor so in the morning he shaved Evan’s head. Evan was very discouraged by it and said no girl would ever look at him again. I told him that in the old times it was all the fashion for men to shave their heads. He said it was the ugliest look he could imagine and would grow his hair out as long as McCoy’s and wear it braided up like he did. He and McCoy got on like big and little brothers, their sense of humor being very similar. I began to feel a little like odd man out.

Utica was spooky. It was set back half a mile from the canal past a wasteland where the old state thruway ran, now all busted up, with mulleins and sumacs poking through the pavements. Utica was once big enough to have some tall office buildings in the downtown and they were all vandalized, windows shattered up to about the fourth floor where, I guess, the vandals couldn’t throw rocks any higher. A big old hotel, too, from over a hundred years ago, all forsaken. We went inside. The lobby was a mess of fallen plaster, broken furniture, and stinking carpets. Must have been sweet when it was new. Hard to believe people lived so grandly in this land then. Utica was one of those places that just couldn’t get back on its feet. There was nothing left even to steal, if you were a picker. We didn’t linger.