A History of the Future (28 page)

“Well, yes, they have,” he said. “You’re here.”

“I don’t mean this house,” she said. “I mean the town.”

While he ate his eggs, and she prepared another corn bread batter of the never-ending corn bread, Britney told Daniel about the coming of the New Faith people and the odd, dominating figure of their leader, the preacher who called himself Brother Jobe, and changes in town politics that propelled Robert into the mayor’s job, and the rescue of Mr. Bullock’s boatmen from being hostages of the gangster boss of the Albany riverfront by Daniel’s father and the New Faith rangers, and the hanging of the nine pickers on River Road by Bullock after they had invaded his house late one night in October, and the death of Wayne Karp, the headman at Karptown and controller of the salvage operation that the old landfill had become, and the many other doings about town since Daniel left. She also ventured to explain how she had burned down her own house by accident in the dark weeks after Shawn was killed.

“I’m sorry about Shawn,” Daniel said of her murdered husband. “I was a friend of his little brother Cody.” Cody had died in the same flu epidemic that swept away Daniel’s little sister Genna.

“I want to tell you something very personal,” Britney said. She put down the corn bread pan that she had been buttering and looked directly at him.

He lifted his face from the plate and met her gaze. His demeanor told Britney that she had his permission to speak freely.

“Shawn and I weren’t very happy for quite a while before he got killed. Your father had nothing to do with that or with Shawn’s death, though he was with him at the General Supply when it happened. Shawn was very bitter about what the world had come to, and about what happened to his plans for the future, and all. He was working on the Schmidt farm as a common laborer and he was angry about it. He was messing around with one of the girls in the dairy there.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“So you understand how I came to be with your father so soon after Shawn died. There’s a lot of gossip around town. You’ll hear it sooner or later.”

“I think I already understand. It’s good that he found someone to be with.”

“He’s a good man, your father.”

“You’re a good woman.”

Their gazes locked again for a moment longer than what felt completely comfortable. Britney adjusted the top of her robe and turned her attention back to the corn bread she was making.

T
HIRTY-NINE

Donald Acker woke up freezing in his house off Huddle Road thinking that everything in his life had gone to shit. He lay on a bare mattress bundled in half a dozen blankets and quilts, which the cold still penetrated. The bedclothes stank and Acker could feel tiny things crawling on his skin under the layers of shirts and pants he was wearing in bed. Gray daylight in the window was filtered by a glaze of ice on the inside of the glass that formed through the night from Acker’s exhalations. Ordinarily, he would have gotten up, gone to the front parlor, and stoked the woodstove, but he had the nagging feeling that he had run out of matches, which led to the realization that he would have to walk the nearly two miles into town to get some matches at Einhorn’s store—except, he also realized, he was completely out of cash money. He’d made a little silver in the fall working as a “super” on the Schmidt farm, which is to say a nonregular seasonal employee doing stoop labor in the squash rows—hubbard, butternut, acorn, kabocha, pumpkin. He detested squashes of every kind. The several acres he cultivated behind his house produced onions and potatoes, a little corn, which lasted perhaps a month in season, but not much else. He didn’t like to eat most vegetables and he had neither the skills nor the equipment to put up food in jars. He hadn’t eaten meat in months. His gums were so inflamed that several of his teeth were loose. Lately, he was afraid to eat anything except mashed potatoes and onions. Now that the prick of a constable or priest or whatever he was had taken his horse away, he would not be able to get a crop in next spring even if he survived the winter.

Donald Acker watched his prospects of surviving another year grow so narrow that he couldn’t really see through the aperture of his destiny to any plausible future. It was like looking through a knothole in a fence at twilight only to see a dingy brick wall on the other side. He was sick and shaky, but he was afraid to visit the doctor, who he wouldn’t be able to pay in any case, not even in barter. He didn’t have a drop of whiskey left. He had some potatoes and onions but no lard or butter to fry them in or salt to make them palatable. He had absolutely no idea what he might do. There wasn’t any government left to turn to for help. Becoming a beggar wasn’t even feasible—on any normal winter day there weren’t enough people on Main Street in Union Grove. Most of the people who lived in town worked on the farms outside town, the big farms owned by rich pricks like his neighbor Ben Deaver, and Bill Schmidt, and Carl Weibel, and Ned Larmon. He’d heard that the other big prick of the locality Stephen Bullock took in people to live and work on his so-called plantation, on a basis that sounded like some kind of serfdom to Acker. Bullock was their lord and master. Anyway, he doubted that Bullock would accept him if he presented himself, sick and messed up as he was.

As his choices dwindled and the anger rose in his gorge like a wad of matter he could neither swallow nor spit out but just remained there choking him, Acker began to entertain thoughts about ending it all. There was nothing else to think about, no more old magazines left to take his mind elsewhere that he hadn’t read three times, no plans to make, no resources to call on, nothing but the constant reminders of all the body parts that ached, throbbed, stung, shook, and itched because he was simply decrepitating, journeying hour by hour to a place that was all darkness and silence. So why endure the misery of the journey? Without stating it clearly in his own mind, Donald Acker reached a decision. Only two questions remained. One was how to accomplish it. The other was what to do about that wad of anger pulsing in his throat. It occurred to him that he could fix that by taking down one or more of the rich prick farmers who treated him like something other than a man who had lived a perfectly normal, honest life in New Jersey, playing by all the rules, before the world went to shit and infected him with all its shittiness.

F
ORTY

A little later in the morning, Daniel told Robert that he wanted to venture out of the house to get some fresh air and see the town in daylight. Robert’s instinct, which he suppressed, was to try to argue that Daniel should wait for the doctor to sign off on that. Then he realized, again, that Daniel was now a grown man, not a child to be managed.

“Sure, let’s walk downtown,” Robert said. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He gave Daniel his puffy old goose down expeditionary jacket made by the EMS outfitters back in the days when American men liked to think of themselves as high-tech adventurers. It was stained and the rip-stop nylon had several rips in it. Robert wore it to cut wood with Robbie Furnival’s crew when his other work was slow, which had not been the case since the New Faithers showed up and employed him steadily much of the past year. As the year had wheeled around, and he had acquired some silver, he had developed some other ideas about how to get on with his trade as a journeyman carpenter.

Robert and Daniel stepped out into the gray morning. There was a glaze of ice on the sidewalks. They walked out in the middle of the street where years of horses passing by had overlaid the old asphalt with a layer of grit and horse manure and the footing was better. Daniel said little along the way. His eyes darted restlessly from one house to the next, off scenes and places he remembered from childhood. When they got to Main Street he was startled to see Brother Jobe’s new Union Tavern on the corner of Van Buren with its gold-on-black sign and its Christmas decorations still up.

“What happened to Luddies Pizza?”

“Gone,” Robert said.

“Jeez, I thought somebody might reopen it someday.”

“The great age of pizza is over.”

“That was my all-time favorite food.”

“The new place is pretty nice. They serve food in there.”

“Who opened it?”

“The Jesus people from Virginia. Brother Jobe’s bunch.”

“They allow drinking?”

“They seem to be quite in favor of it.”

“Isn’t that odd?”

“Yes, they’re pretty odd.”

“Do the people in town actually patronize the place?”

Robert laughed. “Yeah, they do. Maybe we’ll have lunch in there.”

“Well, I’ve got to say, the building looks a whole lot better now. This town is coming back from the dead.”

“Yeah, in some ways I think that’s true,” Robert said.

They rounded the corner onto Main. Robert steered Daniel up an alley between two empty shop-front buildings. It led back to a large gray barn. It had been a stable and a harness shop before the advent of the automobile. Robert unlocked a padlock and let them in. The inside was a cathedral-like space flooded with light from the tall mismatched windows, many of which Robert had collected and installed the past year. Robert had also assembled sets of workbenches and racks for his tools and jigs. There was a substantial old top-loader sheet metal woodstove against the far wall and a collection of mismatched sofas and chairs around it.

“Is this your place?” Daniel said.

“More or less,” Robert said. “One of the perks of being mayor is I’ve learned a lot about which properties are in title limbo, where the owners are known to be dead or can’t be found.”

“What if some relative does show up from . . . out there . . . and claims rightful ownership of the property?”

“So far that hasn’t happened. If it does, I’ll go find another barn. There’s plenty of vacant property around town and not enough people left to inhabit it. The trouble is that none of it is being cared for. It’ll all fall apart if people don’t use it. That’s how buildings are. How do you like the layout?”

“It’s sweet,” Daniel said. “You always wanted a big workshop.”

“Let’s get a fire going and sit a while before lunch.”

“All right.”

There was plenty of split cordwood in a rack beside the stove. Robert started some kindling with ancient newspaper, which he had found bales of in one of the old horse stalls when he first cleaned the place out. It amused him to read these news stories from the 1990s, before anyone had a clue how fragile the economy really was. He got the stove fired up in short order. A fan stood on the top powered by an ingenious Stirling engine that ran off the heat of the stove itself. Soon it was wafting warm air across the room.

Daniel kicked off his boots and reclined on an old sofa with sprung, sagging springs.

“I suppose you want to hear what happened after I capsized on Lake Erie.”

“Yes, I do,” Robert said. “I’ll make some tea for us.” He had a five-gallon plastic jug with some water in it and he put it near the stove to melt the ice inside.

Daniel’s Story:
The Great Northern

Of course, Evan was gone. The boat was upside down in the water. There was no way to right it. The mainmast had snapped off. I hung on to the leeboard going up and down those big storm swells. It was like riding a bucking horse. The lake was horribly cold, even though it was late June. The storm did end. The water calmed down. I was able to climb all the way onto the hull and get out of the water. The sun eventually came out, pretty low on the horizon. It was evening. The air cleared. I could see a shoreline a couple of miles away, a slim little gray band on the horizon, and some darker islands between it and me, but still too far to try and swim to. If I stayed with the boat, I had no way of propelling it in any direction. I thought, if I could just hang on maybe the wind would push me close enough to something I could swim to. Then again, there was as much chance that the wind would shove me farther out in the lake. I decided to just stay with the boat. Then the sun finally started to sink down into the lake. My clothes were nearly dry by then and the lake was calm again, but I knew if we got the usual night breezes that the waves would slap against the hull and I’d get wet again and I worried about hypothermia and getting disoriented, losing my grip, slipping into the cold water
. . .
I don’t know. I kept on calling Evan’s name in bursts every half hour or so, but there was no response from out in the darkness. I figured I’d be dead, too, before long unless somebody came along.

As it happened, I was on that hull all night long and nearly froze to death. It wasn’t even that cold, maybe sixty degrees, but I got splashed and soaked, and my clothes kept the wet against my skin and even the mild breeze chilled me to the bone. I was shivering so hard I found it difficult to keep hanging on to the leeboard. I fell into a strange state of despair where you’re convinced that it’s all over for you, but you’re still there hanging on because the instinct to stay alive is so strong. The immensity of the sky and all the stars overwhelmed me with a feeling of my utter insignificance and the indifference of the universe. I didn’t sleep for a moment though at times I felt I was in a dream. I heard your voice, Mom’s voice, Genna, the voices of the dead. I’ve never felt so far removed from life, from humanity, even in all the breakdown of our country that I had already witnessed, as I did alone that night riding the hull of my wrecked boat, with Evan lost on top of all that. Then, the sky turned a luminous blue green and as a clear morning broke I saw two things: one, that I was completely out of sight of land at all compass points and, two, a white sail on the horizon a mile or so away.