A History of the Future (5 page)

This evening, two days before Christmas, Bullock would attend the annual holiday ball, or levee, for his people at the grange. It was not so different from the Saturday night dances held throughout the year, except that the outside public of Union Grove was not invited. This traditional Christmas levee—in its seventh season—would be limited strictly to the greater Bullock farm family, his people. As usual, he intended to supply plenty of the farm’s own champagne-style “bright” cider, hams, fowls, and roasts with all the trimmings, a very large, grand cake constructed to resemble a Yule log, made by Union Grove’s master baker Danny Russo, with ice cream churned on the premises, cookies, puddings, and other sweets for the twenty-two children of his people, and the distribution of gifts from the goods acquired over the preceding year in trade for the prodigious outputs of his farm, which derived, of course, from his people’s labor.

But first there was a disagreeable matter to dispose of: the possible expulsion of one of his people, a very rare occurrence. He had asked Travis Berkey to report to the library in his house, the old manse, as they called it, at six o’clock in the evening. Bullock was already dressed for the levee in his customary riding trousers, shiny high black leather riding boots, a long green velvet frock coat, and a holly berry red satin vest within. He wore his long white hair in a tidy queue this evening. The large bookshelf-lined library contained an eight-foot-long map table covered with charts and drawings of Bullock’s ongoing projects—the sorghum mill, an expansion of the cement works, a contraption for sifting large batches of compost—as well as Bullock’s regular desk. A forty-watt bulb burned in the banker’s lamp there leaving the rest of the room shrouded in dimness.

Two of Bullock’s most trusted lieutenants, Dick Lee and Michael Delson, occupied comfortable leather club chairs in far corners of the room. Both wore their best clothing for this special evening and both were armed but did not display their weapons. An old mantel clock chimed six times above the blazing fireplace between where the two men sat. Bullock poured whiskey made on the property into three pony glasses and brought the drinks to his two men. He put a disc of carols by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, on the CD player. The first carol, “In Dulci Jubilo,” struck just the right tone of gravity for the occasion, he thought. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” would have been all wrong, smacking of everything that had ruined the country in the way of late-twentieth-century complacency, narcissism, and hubris . . . yuletide in Las Vegas, chorus girls in Santa Claus getups, and cash registers ringing everywhere . . . It made him shudder.

A knock on the door brought Bullock out of his reverie. The clock said 6:10. He put down his whiskey glass. Sophie Bullock, resplendent in a close-bodied silver satin gown that made her look like a Christmas tree ornament come to life, and which contrasted radiantly with the dim ambience of the library, showed Travis Berkey into the room, then withdrew into the hallway and closed the door, leaving all concerned in a resonant silence.

“You’re a little late,” Bullock said eventually.

“I had my duties,” Berkey said. He was sinewy and curved like a human scythe blade, as if well worn by physical labor, though he was not out of his thirties. He wore a greasy leather wool shearling-lined vest and wool trousers with holes in the knees. “Had to rebuild a singletree.”

“How’d it break?”

“Things get used hard around here.”

“Yes, well, I’ll just come to the point then,” Bullock said. “You have to leave.”

“Leave?” Berkey said. “I just got here.”

“I mean the farm.”

Berkey recoiled as from a blow and then visibly shrank within himself.

“What for?” he said.

“You beat poor Perses nearly to death.” Perses was a Belgian gelding used by the logging crew of which Travis Berkey was chief teamster. He seemed to search the air in front of him for an explanation.

“He stepped on my foot.”

“I suppose he did that on purpose.”

“It wasn’t the first time.”

“Perhaps you’re not so good around horses.”

“He’s a bad-tempered horse.”

“Horseflesh is dear. We can’t breed them fast enough these days. And we can’t be prima donnas about their temperament. We certainly can’t abuse them with ax handles. He was pissing blood, you know. How would you like it if I took an ax handle to your kidneys?”

Berkey seemed to search the dim corners of the ceiling for something to say.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I won’t never do it again.”

“Of course you would. That’s your temperament.”

“Put me on some other crew, then. I’ll work. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“I hear that you hit your wife now and then too,” Bullock said.

Dick Lee coughed into his sleeve. Berkey stared into the carpet and seethed.

“Who told you I did that?” he said.

“Does it matter? More than a couple of people.”

“How come I don’t get to defend myself in front of my accusers?” Berkey said. In the old times, he’d been a deputy building inspector for the city of Glens Falls. He was not ignorant about official procedure. “Bring them in here and let’s hear it out face-to-face.”

“This isn’t some civil service union grievance.”

“I’m entitled to a hearing. It’s still America, goddammit.”

“That’s debatable. But this
is
my farm. I decide what happens around here, and I’m inclined to kick your ass out.”

Bullock sighed and puffed out his cheeks. He wanted to pour himself another whiskey, but Berkey was also reputed to be a problem drinker and he didn’t want to further aggravate the man’s state of mind.

“I’ve got a family here, a house,” Berkey said. His tone had shifted from defiant to pleading.

“I wouldn’t let your wife and child go with you, the way you act. They can stay here in that house. Sooner or later she’ll find a better man than you to keep company with and in the meantime we’ll see to their needs.”

“You can’t come between a man and his family!”

“You bet I can. And I will.”

“It’s Christmas, goddammit,” Berkey said and began to weep great heaping sobs. “Show a little mercy? I’m sorry. I’m sorry for anything I done. Please. Have mercy. Please . . .” Berkey sank into his haunches on the carpet and blubbered.

Dick Lee got up to poke the logs on the hearth.

Delson put his hand over his eyes so he didn’t have to look.

“Please don’t cast me out,” Berkey blubbered. “Have mercy. Oh, Jesus. Have mercy.”

If the man sank any lower into the carpet, Bullock thought, he’d vanish and leave a mere stain. Then Bullock swung behind his desk with catlike grace, took a seat behind the desk where he didn’t have to see Berkey on the floor, and poured himself another whiskey after all. He let Berkey carry on for a good five minutes. The clock ticked between carols and then the King’s Choir segued into “The First Noel,” and the music got to him as images of poor shepherds keeping their sheep softened his heart.

“Get up off the floor,” he said.

Weeping quietly now, Berkey gathered his loose limbs together and arose from the floor.

“Quit blubbering and look at me.”

Berkey hocked down a draft of phlegm and turned his rheumy eyes to meet Bullock’s.

“I’m putting you in the lockup tonight and you’re going to remain in there the next few days until Christmas is over,” Bullock said. He’d established a brig in a room behind the smithy where it stayed reasonably warm on a winter night. “We’ll send in rations and take out slops, and you’re going to reflect on your behavior while you’re there. When work resumes after the holiday you’ll report to the sawmill. I don’t want you around animals anymore.”

“You mean you’re not going to kick me off the premises?”

“I’m going to let you stay.”

Berkey shuddered.

“If I hear of you harming an animal again, I’ll hang you from a locust tree on the River Road. If you lay a hand on your wife or your child, I’ll take an ax handle to you. And if it happens that Perses dies from the injuries you inflicted on him, I will run you off after all.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You can thank whoever invented Christmas,” Bullock said. He looked across the room at his two trusted men and jerked his head.

Michael Delson and Dick Lee steered Berkey out the door by his elbows.

F
IVE

Rick Stokes came home to his cottage in Mill Hollow to find the wood-fired cookstove stone-cold. The past two winters with the baby, he and Mandy had closed off the upstairs rooms and lived on the first floor, with their bed set up in the former sitting room and the baby’s crib near the stove in the kitchen. In recent weeks, his every homecoming from the long days at the Larmon farm filled him with dismay and not a little fear. Every week the house was in more and more disarray. There was something wrong with Mandy and really no place to take her now, no hospital, no facility, just Dr. Copeland, who could not explain her malady. How could she not be moved to light a fire on such a cold winter night, Rick wondered? They had plenty of stove billets and kindling and he regularly bought matches from Roger Hoad, who made them according to a formula that reputedly included his own dried urine.

Rick found a candle stub on the kitchen counter and lit a match.

“What the hell, Mandy?” he muttered, more to himself than to his wife. He set about starting the firebox on the cookstove, and when he got a few splints going he put in some oak billets and closed the iron door. He had been keeping watch at the farm on a colicky horse since two o’clock in the afternoon. The horse, a well-mannered Haflinger gelding named Duffy, had been in great pain, assuming tortured positions on its haunches in its stall, and sweating copiously. Around eight that evening, it shat out a bloody mass that looked like an afterbirth, but by nine o’clock it was back on its feet taking water and a few handfuls of grain. Ned Larmon and Rick concluded that Duffy was going to be all right. Rick was exhausted, having left the house before daylight that morning.

Rick was losing confidence that Mandy was ever going to be all right again. She seemed to be straying deeper and deeper into a distant hinterland of the mind from which return was increasingly unlikely. It had begun to occur to him that they couldn’t go on like this. And now coming home to find the house like a cold storage locker, he realized the baby was no longer safe in her care. He would have to find a family with a competent adult female to look after Julian, at least during the days. However, Rick had no idea who might look after Mandy while he was off working on the farm. And what might she do then? Search desperately around town for her child? Throw herself in the river? These ruminations vexed and grieved Rick. He’d spent weeks thinking round and round about what to do. Now, he was ready to act. And all of this just as Christmas was coming, he thought, in what should have been the happiest time of year in these years of hardship and tribulation. It made him so heartsick he wobbled in his boots.

He took the candle stub and moved quietly to the sitting room. Mandy lay under a heap of blankets and quilts with her back toward the kitchen. Her body was motionless. He padded back into the kitchen and held the candle high above the crib where Julian slept. The baby, too, lay motionless beneath a heap of quilts. Rick watched Julian a full minute. He had the impression in the flickering candlelight that the baby’s little body seemed unusually inert.

“Hey little pup,” he said softly and reached under the quilts to get a grip on the boy. His discovery that the boy’s body felt very cold sent a bolt of fear through him that seemed to explode in his head like a bomb. He put the candle down on a nearby sideboard, lifted Julian out of the crib, and held him to his chest. The boy’s head lolled lifelessly, and his face, bundled in his colorful knitted wool hat, looked ashen gray.

“Mandy!” Rick called across the room. Then again, with more urgency, “Mandy!”

As he wheeled around, he heard her stir. The bedsprings groaned. The floorboards creaked. A dark shape arose in the dim light. Then, Mandy hurtled across the room, shrieking like a raptor, and plunged a nine-inch cook’s knife into a soft space between her husband’s sternum and rib so that the blade neatly sectioned the right atrium of his heart and severed the pulmonary artery. Rick dropped Julian and fell backward onto the crib that he had made himself out of cherrywood in the months preceding the baby’s birth. He had no clear sense of what happened to him in the elongated moment when the crib splintered beneath him and he came to rest on the floor at the sudden end of his life. He certainly did not hear the keening wail that Mandy emitted as the blood ran out of him, which soon drew several neighbors to the house.

S
IX

Christmas music practice at the Congregational Church was reaching its triumphal climax with the concluding song of this year’s program: “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” with Andrew Pendergast directing the choir in its soaring invocations of
Come and worship, worship Christ the newborn king
in place of the latin
Gloria in excelsis deo
and all the musicians variously pounding, blowing, and bowing away on their instruments in a transport of yuletide jubilation. It is true that a certain amount of cider had been consumed during the two hours of rehearsal, courtesy of Dan Mullinex, flutes and clarinet, who happened to be the ramrod at Holyrood’s cider works and who brought a keg of 12 percent alcohol “farmhouse draught” to the proceedings. Platters of cakes, sweetmeats, meringues, and cookies also had been brought and devoured in the course of things so that the twelve musicians and twenty-two chorale members were well sugared too. Spirits ran high. An old Harmon top-loader stove warmed the big community room aided by the body heat of thirty-four people. And the room was well lighted by the standards of the new times with a central eighteen-taper chandelier and candles deployed wherever a musician or chorale member needed to read sheet music.