A History of the Future (26 page)

The story in the newspaper was titled “Rumors of Atrocities Down South.” A battle had taken place around Marietta, Georgia, in a failed attempt by the Foxfire army to take back the city of Atlanta. Both sides were executing prisoners in horrific ways and the roads were festooned with soldiers hanging from trees, or crucified, or decapitated, with the heads displayed on poles, very brutal stuff. The paper said there were unconfirmed incidents of cannibalism on both sides. The USA was trying to stay out of it but there were rumors, too, of an imminent Foxfire incursion to take over Cincinnati and to therefore control the traffic along the Ohio River. An advertisement across the bottom of the sheet called for volunteers for the U.S. Army, mustering in Cleveland on the Fourth of July, with the promise to pay in hard money. The men in the barroom laughed at the idea of joining up, saying they would be damned to fight in a new civil war, and that they couldn’t depend on the government of Erie County, let alone the state of Pennsylvania, which was bankrupt and useless, and that the U.S. government was just a ghost of a government, haunting the land—and thank God for it because that was the end of the taxes that almost crushed everybody in the “last days of the empire,” they called it. I told them we hadn’t heard anything from the U.S. government back home for quite a while, which at once I regretted bringing up, in case anybody came around inquiring about two young men from New York State. Anyway, Evan and I had no desire or intention to travel south of the Mason–Dixon line, or go off fighting when we were free as a couple of birds on the lakes.

I tried to talk Evan out of seeking some romantic adventure that evening in one of the parlor shops, as the men in the barroom called places where love could be bought, and he was all grumpy when we returned to the public dock, especially when I said we would shove off that night, and we argued about that because I think he intended to sneak back into town once I was asleep and find a girl, and I said I would feel like a sitting duck sleeping tied up to the town dock if anyone came looking for us, and he says, “We must be fifty miles away from Buffalo now.”

I go, “That’s not far away enough for my comfort.”

“We’re not even in New York State anymore,” he says.

“I doubt that any pack of regulators would care about state lines.”

He’s like, “Who appointed you captain, anyway?”

I go, “I’m the senior member of the crew.”

He’s like, “And half of what you know about sailing this tub I had to teach you.”

“Well, I bought the boat,” I say.

“Partly with my money,” he goes.

“Shut up and get on the goddamn boat,” I say.

“Can’t make me,” he says.

I just stop for a long minute, drilling my eyes into him, and finally I’m like, “All right, you want to go your own way, then go. But I’m not sleeping here in the slips tonight, so I guess this is farewell. I won’t be here when you come back and neither will the
Kerry McKinney
.”

He’s like, “You can’t do that!”

“I can and I will,” I say. “We’re not out of danger in my judgment.”

“And when will that be?” he goes.

“It’ll be when I say so and not before,” I say. “You don’t have the sense of a box of rocks.”

Evan walks around in little circles on the dock, kicking at the planks there in frustration, like he would like to kick me, but he can’t. I’m bigger.

“Come on,” I say, “Get on the boat.”

Finally, he goes, “You’re no fun at all,” and climbs aboard.

We sailed in a light evening breeze until the sun went down and the moon came up, and we moored offshore, as usual, where there was no town and no people, just woods. We had bought candles back in town among the other things and we ate taffy as I read to him that night about Ishmael and Queequeg in their room at the Spouter tavern before they sailed off on Captain Ahab’s
Pequod
.

Evan came around to himself the next morning and apologized for being pigheaded and made me read the charts and say when exactly we could start enjoying ourselves and I said maybe Sandusky, Ohio, because by then we would be well away from any pursuers, and it looked to be much the finest natural harbor on Lake Erie, and I said we might even begin asking around there about taking cargoes for hire and beginning our business and that satisfied him.

It took us the better part of the rest of the week to beat a course west toward Sandusky. We decided to skip Cleveland altogether so as not to get dragooned or indentured into any military venture that might be marshaling there to fight at Cincinnati. We continued to live very easily and comfortably. Time seemed to stand still. It rained one day and we were glad to just laze around our bunks at anchor reading and napping, and then it was sunny again the next morning, which was our last on the
Kerry McKinney
.

We were coasting off Ohio now. We picked up some cheese and sausage in a hard-up little town called Vermilion, maybe twenty miles from the mouth of Sandusky harbor. It was early afternoon when we got back on board and under sail again. The sky had darkened and the wind was picking up but the boat handled nicely. We zigzagged in a close reach always following the shore, perhaps a quarter mile from land at most. I had a rough idea where we were from the charts and thought we could make it to our destination easily by late afternoon, and it was around the solstice, too, the longest day of the year, so we would have plenty of daylight in any case. We didn’t know what was coming our way, of course, which was a fierce and deadly blow. The rain started and pretty soon it was hitting us horizontally. It came down so hard that the shoreline disappeared. I tried to navigate by following the compass directly to the west, but that put us in the teeth of the wind and, from what I determined later, we blew off course, side-slipping toward a shoaly area around a set of islands and reefs to the north of Sandusky. I was beginning to despair of making it to the safe harbor there, and we were getting farther out into the vastness of the lake, exactly where I didn’t want to be in this kind of situation. Evan took down our forward sail and reefed the small one in the stern as the waves got higher. Soon, it was like being out in the ocean, the troughs were so big. They were huge rollers with whitecaps on top, probably thirty feet high. It happened so suddenly. The boat was like a toy on them. We’d get pitched up on the crest of a wave and then the bow would drop with a great crash on the other side so hard I thought the hull would shatter. The sky just grew darker and angrier, even though it was far from evening. Then, we came down off one particular wave and hit something that felt more like solid ground than water and the pilot wheel went slack. I realized that the steering cable had snapped. We were at the mercy of the wind. The boat spun around and we started taking the waves broadside and water was sweeping over the deck. It was a struggle not to get washed overboard. I cut the halyard of the stern sail into two pieces of about ten feet each and told Evan to tie himself to something on board. The storm and the crashing waves made a terrible din. Evan couldn’t hear what I was saying. I demonstrated by tying one end of the rope around my ankle and the other to a cleat on the starboard gunwale. Evan yelled that if the boat capsized, and we were tied to it, we’d drown. I yelled back that he’d drown if he got swept overboard and I think he was about to do as I had done when another wave caught us and swept over the cabin, and when I came through the wash Evan was gone, swept overboard.

There was nothing I could do. We didn’t have any life buoy on board and I could not maneuver the boat at all. I could only scream out his name, and that didn’t do any good. I stayed with the boat. What else could I do? Evan was gone. The storm just blew and blew. I couldn’t tell how much time was passing except that night still hadn’t fallen. Finally another giant wave smacked the boat down on something hard again—a sand bank, a rock, I don’t know what. The forward mast cracked as though it had been hit by lightning and crashed down on the deck, crushing the cabin roof. Whatever the boat hit, she didn’t stay stuck on. We blew back off into the waves. Shortly after that another wave capsized the boat. I went over with her into the lake and thought I would drown. I was underwater for what seemed the longest time, and it was so strangely silent down there like the peace of death itself. But I managed to bust back up for air, and I was lucky to be tied to the boat by my leg because I was able to catch hold of the starboard leeboard and clung on to it for life. Eventually, the storm died down and I hoisted myself onto the flat-bottomed hull of the capsized boat.

“You probably don’t want to hear about how I was rescued, but obviously I’m here, so I was,” Daniel said.

Loren leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands and Jane Ann held her hand over her mouth as though to prevent something from escaping.

“I never saw Evan again,” Daniel said. “I’ve been informed that he didn’t come back home. At least not yet.”

Jane Ann shook her head. Tears began coursing over her fine cheekbones.

“Maybe he’s still alive,” Daniel said. “He might have made it to shore. It’s possible. I don’t know. Just because I couldn’t see anything out there in the rain doesn’t mean we weren’t close to land, maybe one of those shoal islands on the chart, and we kept on smashing onto things so wherever we were was shallow water. Anyway, we were separated for good by that storm. I’m awfully sorry. I tried to look out for him. He had a fine spirit. It wasn’t easy for me to get back here, and maybe he’s struggling to get home right now.”

Daniel subsided against his pillows. Loren squeezed his leg and mouthed the words “thank you.” Jane Ann kissed Daniel on his forehead. And then they both left the house.

T
HIRTY-SIX

Stephen Bullock was up late in the library of the house built by his ancestors near the confluence of the Battenkill and Hudson rivers, watching a video recording of a favorite movie from his younger years:
Goodfellas,
a picture about mafia lowlife in New York City directed by the immortal Martin Scorsese. His wife, Sophie, who did not appreciate movie violence of that amplitude, had read herself to sleep upstairs (a novel about court intrigue swirling around Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn). Bullock was able to enjoy the movie because he possessed the only functioning hydroelectric generator in Union Grove and, as far as he knew, all of Washington County. It produced enough electricity to run his household and a few of his workshops and was frequently down with annoying mechanical problems of one kind or another. Bullock had originally laid in three Pelton runner wheels—the guts of the system—among many replacement parts some years back when he sensed that the economy was going south. But they were disappointingly fragile and impossible to repair once broken. He was on the last one now and he knew that he lacked the critical metallurgical resources to fabricate any more of them. So he lived in a perpetual mood of resigned precipitous nostalgia, thinking that any day would be his last with electricity. He drew some consolation from observing the townspeople of Union Grove make do, and even remain generally civilized, without electricity. But he feared the eventual discontinuity of being cut off from all the recorded culture of the times now bygone, as though he would be cut off from hundreds of old dear friends. These premature regrets were dogging him as he munched a bowl of buttered popcorn (prepared by Lilah the cook) and watched Joe Pesci’s character Tommy DeVito stomping Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) to a bloody pulp in the bar owned by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Moments after the body was wrapped in a tablecloth and dragged out of the bar, someone knocked on the library door. It was highly irregular for Bullock to be interrupted so late in the evening. He stopped chewing in mid-munch and said, “Come in.”

It was Dick Lee, his most trusted subaltern, wrapped in a greatcoat with a hat made of muskrat fur and a gray wool muffler hanging down over his shoulders.

“Got some bad news, sir,” Lee said.

Bullock had to get up from his comfortable chair to manually press
PAUSE
on the DVD player because batteries were no longer available to run remote control devices. His hamstrings ached from riding around the property all day and he was annoyed to have to stop the movie.

“Well . . . ?”

“Perses,” Lee said. “He’s not doing so well.”

“How bad?”

“He’s dead.”

Bullock absorbed the blow.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s about as unwell as it gets.”

“I’m sorry to tell you.”

“Okay,” Bullock said. “Give me a minute then.”

Bullock stopped the video and shut down the electronics. In the mudroom he pulled on his boots and bundled up in a raccoon coat made on the premises by a talented seamstress among his people out of varmints trapped on his own property. It featured a hood, which made him look immense, like a Sasquatch. Outside, it was sleeting. He stopped in the tool shop among the outbuildings and barns near the house and picked up a stout unfinished hickory ax handle. Then he and Dick Lee trudged a mile uphill to the site of the village where his people lived. Dick Lee carried a candle lantern that shed minimal light along the gravel road. But it was easy footing. The roads on Bullock’s property were much better cared for than the long-neglected county roads and state highways with their potholes and fissured pavements.