A History of the Future (41 page)

“Reckonize the place?” he said.

“I sure do.”

This was the house where Brother Jobe had been carried in the fall, delirious with illness, where an emergency surgery was performed on him by the doctor’s boy, who had run away from town after poisoning Brother Jobe’s horse and then fallen into the company of the bandit Billy Bones. This was the home of Barbara Maglie, who some in the county referred to as the Witch of Hebron.

Brother Jobe reined Atlas down into the drive, past the fenced garden. The others followed.

“You’all wait out here a minute,” he said. He dismounted and walked up the porch to the door. It took the lady of the house a moment to register the identity of the visitor, swaddled in winter traveling garb as he was, but then a look of delight brightened her face, which was the face of an enchantress inside a cascade of silver hair. Two people who could not have been less alike, Brother Jobe and Barbara Maglie had struck mutual chords in each other and gotten on like the oldest friends back when he was recuperating from his aforesaid ordeal. She was a refugee from New York City who had left in advance of the trouble that brought down the economy and the nation and established herself in this sheltered little corner upstate. In the old times, she’d appeared as a model in advertisements, and had a husband who ran a major ad agency, and had a summer house on the South Fork of Long Island, and consorted with the notables of what were once called the media, Wall Street, and show business. Now she was a recluse, a healer, a seer, a signal beauty of a certain age, who more than a few men of the county, and even beyond the county, mostly married men, visited regularly for stimulation, pleasure, counsel, and renewal. Otherwise, she lived happily alone.

“Why, it’s you!” she cried with silver ringing in her voice, “and on such a night, and New Year’s Eve!”

“It’s nice to see you again, ma’am.”

“Oh, come in, please come in.”

She was so delighted that she did not notice the others sitting their horses in the shadows up the drive.

As Brother Jobe stepped into the house a figure emerged from the rooms deeper within.

“Oh,” Brother Jobe said, stopping short, “sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no bother,” she said.

The stranger was a tall man, about forty, balding but handsome with a groomed full beard, well dressed as if for a levee in a fine cream-colored linen shirt with blousy sleeves and a wool vest embroidered with satin birds and flowers in gay colors. His name was Blake Harmon, a “scientific farmer,” as he described himself, from the nearby Camden Valley, where his thousand acres of orchard, pastures, fields, and excellent hardwoods straddled the New York–Vermont border. He held a stemmed glass filled with amber liquid, his own Tug Hollow whiskey. Barbara Maglie was also dressed for festivity in one of her characteristic long skirts of many colors, a clingy black sweater that emphasized all the pendant appeals of her flesh, and dangly earrings that sparkled in the candlelight. She introduced Brother Jobe to Mr. Harmon, who shook hands, with a hint of amusement visible in the set of his mouth. The house was infused with buttery aromas of things caramelizing in the oven and the perfume of herbs hanging to dry off an exposed beam: rosemary, bergamot, sage, yarrow, lavender, tansy.

“What are you doing so far from town on such a night?” Barbara said, helping dust the snowflakes off his shoulders, though Brother Jobe had begun to sweat under all his layers of clothing.

“Ma’am, we have a situation where I believe you can help a fair great deal.”

She asked the gentleman from Camden Valley to excuse them and she led Brother Jobe into a small room off the kitchen that had been set up as a cozy retreat for reading. There he briefly explained the predicament of Mandy Stokes. It was not necessary for him to go into extravagant detail because Barbara Maglie easily was able to infer more than he could convey in mere words.

“I believe you can help her get right in her mind,” Brother Jobe said, summing it up. “She’s come far but she’s got a ways to go.”

“Please, ask the others to come in,” she said. “There are stalls in the barn, and hay, water, and grain for your animals.”

“Thank you very much, ma’am.”

Brother Jobe went back outside and waved to the others to come down the drive. The accumulating snow muffled the horses’ hooves as they walked and swayed toward the house. He told Seth to stable their mounts. Broad-shouldered Elam took Mandy in his arms, helping her down from Jinx. She slid against his firm solidity to the snowy ground as if returning to the earth after a long absence.

F
IFTY-ONE

Daniel had moved his bed from the parlor downstairs to his childhood room on the second floor. After the family’s return from the New Year’s Eve levee at Weibel’s farm, Daniel lay awake in an enervated cocoon of anxiety as he dimly apprehended sounds of amorous exertion from the room where his father had retired with Britney. Long after the house fell silent again, trapped in the haunted room of his childhood, Daniel remained wide awake as his mind waded beyond the confounding tumult of the present moment to his final deadly days in Franklin, Tennessee, capital of Loving Morrow’s Foxfire Republic.

The Monday following the automobile races at the Carter’s Creek Speedway, and the reception that followed, he found an envelope with instructions waiting on his desk when he returned to the Logistics Commission after making the rounds of the warehouses and grain storage depots. The instructions told him to meet an automobile that would be sent to convey him on official business to “executive headquarters” and to bring the summons with him as a pass. So, at the designated hour, late in the afternoon on a late summer day, he waited at the curb on a quiet block of 4th Avenue North, where a large blocky black car manufactured years ago under the brand name Lincoln Navigator pulled to a stop right in front of him. Daniel marveled at the near soundlessness of the engine—so unlike the roaring race cars at the speedway. The big machine had the presence of a large animal. Fluids pulsed audibly through its churning guts. It even had a kind of face in front, a grinning grille and two eyelike lights. A tinted side window dropped, revealing the operator of the car, a middle-aged sergeant in a dress tunic.

“Got your letter, boy?” he said.

Daniel presented it.

“Okay. Git in.”

Daniel heard a thunk as of a switch being thrown. The rear door opened.

Several civilians at the far end of the block had gathered to gawk at the car.

“What you dallying for, boy?” the sergeant said.

The seats were butter-colored leather and the surfaces within appeared to be made of fine polished wood, though they were plastic. Daniel discovered that he could see out of the windows more easily than he could see in from outside.

“You’re a dandy,” the sergant said. “She gawn like you.”

“Where are we going exactly?”

“You’ll see,” the sergeant said and he did not speak again for the duration of the journey.

They drove past a military checkpoint at the western edge of town without stopping, and then three miles out into the countryside. The road was in excellent repair the whole way. Daniel was not used to moving through the landscape at such speed. It made him dizzy. He had only the dimmest memory of riding in cars as a small child, except for the vivid discomfort of the plastic safety seat in which he was encased and immobilized like an astronaut. The car climbed a steady, looping grade into some low hills where there were no visible habitations. Then it turned through a gatehouse manned by more soldiers onto a gravel driveway lined with stately tulip trees. An enormous house appeared at a distance. As the car drew closer the house resolved into a chaotic pastiche of historical gestures, architectural conceits, and mixed modular building components made of materials not found in nature. The various parts seemed to be at war with one another: Corinthian columns battling with mansard roofs, corbeled turrets, Victorian chimney pots, Palladian windows, stained-glass windows, leaded oriel windows, and soaring triangular bay windows, vinyl clapboard-clad facades joined to half-timbered facades next to redbrick plastic veneer facades—the whole fantastic heap piled onto a wedding cake of landscaped terraces with statue-like topiaries, including a cavalryman on a rearing horse, a race car of the type Daniel had seen at Carter’s Creek, a fanciful baby elephant, a Tyrannosaurus, and a pair of gigantic praying hands.

The car bypassed the broad porte cochere in front of the mansion, where two other black cars sat parked among soldiers mounted on horseback, soldiers on foot, and a bustle of people coming, going, and confabbing. The car turned around the rear of the building to an inconspicuous gray service door on a far wing, where a lone soldier sat with a complex firearm Daniel had never seen before, a machine pistol. The guard checked Daniel’s pass, opened the gray door, and said, “Gawn up.”

At the top of a short stairway another door opened to a spacious hallway with a vaulted ceiling painted clumsily in the manner of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco. Instead of God and Adam, the vignette portrayed an airborne Jesus reaching to touch the extended hand of an enrobed female figure recognizable as Loving Morrow, recumbent on a pink cloud. Rather than angels and cherubim, Jesus was surrounded by deceased luminaries of country music: Elvis, Dolly, Garth, Waylon, Willie, Tammy, Patsy, Mother Maybelle, June and Johnny. Daniel had no idea who they were. Two more soldiers were posted by a door there. They were in size relation to ordinary soldiers as prize oxen are to common steers. They asked Daniel to produce his “letter of conveyance” and, satisfied, admitted him within.

It was a very grand suite of rooms, each one larger than the entire downstairs of his family’s house back home in Union Grove. The furniture, too, was oversized and overstuffed. Nobody else seemed to be there. The pictures on the wall caught Daniel’s attention. They depicted cottages in idealized twilit landscapes with blazing windows, as though complex thermochemical reactions were happening inside. He was studying one intensely when a door opened deeper within the suite. Footsteps. Moments later, Loving Morrow stood before him. She was shorter than he remembered because she was barefoot. Her hair was held up in a pile atop her head with a big tortoiseshell plastic clasp. She was dressed not in her customary robes of office but in cutoff blue jean short pants with fuzzy frayed hems and a stretchy pink camisole with string straps, with apparently nothing beneath it.

“Hi,” she said. “’Member me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You like that pitchur?”

“The house. It’s so bright. Like it’s about to burst into flames.”

“I’ll tell you, I’m ’bout to burst into flames,” she said. “Mr. Tillman won’t let me run the a.c. as cool as I like it. He knows best, of course, and anyway we got to pinch pennies, so to speak, if we’re going to take the Ohio River from the federals. You got any idea how much it takes in hard cash money to move and supply a battalion of twelve hundred foot soldiers with mounted officers?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You don’t want to know. I got all this junk on my mind twenty-three hours of the day.” She stepped closer so he could feel the heat radiating off her. “Then there’s the blessed hour when I like to forget all that. That’s where you come in.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are an obliging young man,” she said, and ran an index finger down his breastbone, then executed a dancelike step around him. “This here pitchur is an original Thomas Kinkade,” she said. “He was an old-times
artiste
of California. It’s worth a fortune. Those others, they’re just reproductions. He was known in his time as the painter of light.”

“That’s a bright house for sure,” Daniel said.

“Do you like my home?”

“I’ve never seen a house like it. It’s . . . roomy.”

“Yeah, and this is just my personal hideaway. You should see the gubment part. Lemme show you around.”

She took his hand and led him through a series of rooms. Her hand was small, soft, and warm. One room was an exercise parlor filled with machines that required electricity to make a human being operate her muscles. Flat screen televisions hung on three walls. The screens were dark. Another room had a billiard table at center and video game consoles around the edges.

“This one here is for the boys,” she said. “You like to play pool?”

“I never played, ma’am.”

Loving Morrow shot him a sideways frowny look.

“You a space alien, honey?”

“Not as far as I know, ma’am.”

“Naw,” she said. “You look human enough.”

They came to a kitchen with vast granite countertops, pot racks festooned with copper cookware still bright with their original protective varnish.

“You hungry?”

“No, ma’am.”

“’Course you are. Why, I bet you’re still growin’. I got just the thing for you. We can share.”

Loving Morrow produced two jars from a cabinet. One had brown paste in it and the other white. Then she pulled a bulbous loaf of wheat bread out of a drawer and sawed two slices off it. Of these materials she composed a sandwich and held one end up to Daniel’s mouth.

“Where do you get peanut butter?” he asked.

“They make it for me, special.”

“Been a long time since I tasted that.”