World Made by Hand (15 page)

Jane Ann stole into my house, as she always did, without knocking, an hour or so after I'd returned from the meeting. I was sharpening my ripsaw with a file out back in the summer kitchen. In a world without electric powered saws, you had to take care with hand tools. She found me out there, slipped into the rocking chair I had pegged together out of some maple limbs, ash splints, and willow canes, filled a corncob pipe with some marijuana bud that she carried in a little leather pouch on the belt of her long skirt, and lit a splinter of stove wood off my candle to fire up the bowl.

"Want some?" she said, passing the pipe.

"All right."

The weed was just past green and very resinous. I knew I was getting stoned when I lost track of which saw tooth I was working on.

"Are you just going to keep toiling away on that?" she said.

"Not anymore, I guess."

"You've taken on quite a lot the past couple of days. All these heroics. And now you're the big pooh-bah around here."

"I'm hardly a pooh-bah. This sad little town just needs someone with organizational skills."

"I always pegged you as more of a background kind of person."

"Are you angry at me?"

She didn't answer. She relit the splinter and the bowl.

"I don't know what Loren thinks he can do as constable around here," she said.

"People look up to him."

"He's not the warrior type."

"There's no war on around here."

"Could be, though. Between Karp and this new bunch and everybody else."

"I think we can get some law going."

"I hope you're right," she said. "Here." She took a lace napkin out of the big pocket in her skirt and unwrapped a generous square of the walnut cake she was famous for. It was almost all ground nut meats and butter. "For you," she said.

"Why, thanks." I was suddenly rather hungry. I put the file and saw aside. "Tell me about your day. What did you do?"

"What didn't I do? Milked goats. Weeded. Forked compost. Put up rhubarb jam. Walked halfway to Battenville to call on Esther Callie. Her mom finally died."

"Oh? What of?"

"She was ninety-seven years old, you know."

"I knew she was very old."

"I think she'd just finally had enough. She was a nurse in the Second World War. The things she remembered were incredible."

"The things I remember seem incredible," I said. "Airconditioning. Cold beer. Baseball on television." I started to get lost in the maze of my own stoned mind remembering all the things we didn't have anymore.

"She'd seen so much. I asked her how she could maintain any faith in the human race." Jane Ann lit the pipe once again.

"Well, what was her view on that?"

"She said on balance she preferred the way things are now."

"Wow," I said.

Jane Ann stood and undid the ties along the front of her white blouse revealing her dark-nippled breasts. They shifted liquidly in the flickering candlelight as she swayed to unheard music. "Let's comfort each other a while," she said and went inside. That was her code. I knew to follow in a little while with the candle. She was naked when I came to her. We enjoyed our efficient carnal ceremony as we had so many times, and it concluded, as usual, with Jane Ann in tears.

"You know what bothers me most," she said.

"What."

"That in the sight of God we don't matter."

"Maybe it's enough that we act as though we do."

"We can't even act as if we matter to each other."

"You mean you and me? Or everybody in general?"

"You and me."

"Well, we can't advertise it," I said.

"No, I'd prefer to pretend it doesn't matter."

"Maybe God's pretending we don't matter too. He's got plenty to be pissed off about us."

In a few minutes she was gone again, leaving me in the dark and the heat with my mind on fire.

Sometime later that night a cool front blew through upstate New York and swept away weeks of spirit-sapping heat. You never knew the weather in advance anymore. You might be said to have a good weather eye but nobody knew anything for sure and some were just better guessers than others. In this case it was as though all of Washington County were suddenly air-conditioned, as we used to call refrigerated air, and it allowed me to sleep well for the first time in days. The change in the weather seemed to energize Union Grove. I had two callers before eight o'clock the next morning.

The first was Brother Joseph, one of the New Faithers. He came to the door, calling me "Mr. Mayor," just as I was frying up slabs of leftover hominy for breakfast and preparing to return to work on the cupola at Larry Prager's place.

"Hope I'm not interrupting your breakfast, sir," he said.

"It doesn't require all my attention, and you can call me Robert."

"All right, sir."

"Does this butter smell a little off to you?" I held the crock up for him to sniff.

"I'd eat it," Brother Joseph said with a smile after reflecting earnestly a moment. He looked oddly boyish for his considerable height, which must have been about six foot four. But all the New Faith men had that young look because they were clean-shaven.

I slathered honey on the fried hominy and laid into it as he stood there.

"Want some?" I said.

"Oh, I had a big breakfast just a while ago. Eggs, ham, corn bread."

"From the sounds of things, I'd guess you have fifty roosters over there at the school."

"We've got more than a few. Anyway, I bring you news. Hope you're not rushing out of here to start running things."

The way he put it, I had to chuckle. He had a winning manner.

My new position in the world had not exactly altered my habits overnight, or my estimation of myself. There was a mayor's office in the old town hall, but there was no electricity, no staff, no secretary, no telephone, nor even the common office supplies we took for granted in the old days, including paper and writing implements. We had no use whatever for the new town hall, which had been built out on the highway strip in 1983. Anyway, Wayne Karp's crew had removed the windows and aluminum sashes there. Dale Murray had used his own private law office on Main Street, but only as a drinking establishment, since he didn't do any official business, nor did he have any law business, as far as I could tell.

"You can tell Brother Jobe that he and I should meet at the soonest convenient time and begin organizing the repair of the town water system."

"Something else has come up, sir. Mr. Bullock from over the grand plantation has entreated us to form a party to search for his missing boatmen."

"Entreated you?"

"Yessir."

"That's a mouthful."

"Yessir. And he would like you to be along on it."

"Why's that?"

"Because you will know the men we are searching for by sight, he says. And because he trusts you, I gather."

"Well, he doesn't really know your bunch."

"My point, sir."

"Have you got their names?"

He reached into his vest and pulled out a piece of good vellum paper. It was penned in a decorative hand, official looking, though it didn't pretend to have any legal standing as a warrant or a sum mons or a commission, as far as I could tell. Among the instructions were the names of the missing crew. Thomas Soukey once ran the video rental in town and played softball with a bunch of us in a weekly game before the flu hit and he lost his family and went over to Bullock. Jacob Silberman used to print promotional T-shirts and coffee mugs for companies. Skip Tarbay had been a landscaper, mowing lawns and bedding annuals. And Aaron Moyer taught art history over at Bennington College. All lines of work which were no more.

"How many will be in this search party?" I said.

"Five, including yourself."

"How long."

"As we have planned it, maybe two days down, two days search around the locks and port of Albany and such, and then two days back."

"That's most of a week, Joseph."

"Yes it is, sir."

"I just assumed new duties here in town."

"We're aware of that."

"Can't you find somebody else?"

"Nosir. The other townsmen that don't have family, they're mostly ne'er-do-wells, drinkers and such. Anyway, Mr. Bullock stipulated for you to go."

"Is he lending us a boat?"

"No, we're going on horseback. That way a couple of us can bring his boat back, if we find it."

"If we don't find the crew themselves?"

"I suppose that would be the size of it, sir."

"Do you have to call me sir?"

"It's New Faith manners, sir. Anyway, we hope to find the men too."

"Of course."

"Do you have a personal weapon, sir?"

"A weapon?"

"A firearm."

"No. Well, sort of."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. A revolver."

"What caliber?"

"I can't really say."

"You don't know?"

"I've never actually used it. It's a large pistol."

"We have .38 wadcutters that'll go into a .357. Some nine millimeter. Do you have it at hand, sir?"

"No."

"Well, can you get it?"

"It would take me an hour or so."

"I'd suggest you fetch it, sir," he said. "We're looking to depart by midday. We'll come by for you at one o'clock, say, with a mount. We'd encourage you to bring along some of your own meal, bacon, what have you. We'll have some company provisions too. The rest we'll scrounge along the way. Okay, sir?"

"Okay. Are you in charge of this expedition?"

"I suppose I will be, sir."

"Then I'll have to call you sir."

"No you don't. You can call me Joseph, like everybody else does. It's only the five of us."

"Were you in the military, Joseph?"

"Yessir. I saw action at Damascus and Qryat Shimona before the pullout," he said.

"Did you shoot at people."

"Yessir, and killed a fair number of the ones I shot at, I suppose."

Brother Joseph had not been gone ten minutes when another knock sounded on the front door. I was a little annoyed, what with being obliged on short notice to go on a possibly dangerous journey far from home that I was unprepared for, and because, at the moment, I was pouring cornmeal from a sack into one of the few decent plastic storage tubs I had left with a lid that closed tight, and I spilled some on the brick floor of the summer kitchen.

"Just a minute," I said. The bandage on my left hand was driving me crazy. I took it off hurriedly. The blister on the meaty edge of my palm was the size of a half-dollar. I threw open the door.

It was Britney Watling. She had some visible scrapes and scratches on her face from the misadventure the night before last.

"Can I come in?" she said.

"Sure," I said, remembering the sizzling sound of my palm frying on her doorknob. "Would you mind following me out back, though. I'm getting some things together out there."

I wondered whether she had come to apologize for nearly getting both of us killed in her burning house. She followed me.

"That's a very pretty garden," she said. She looked on edge, as if she had been sleeping poorly. "What's that thing in the center?"

"It's a birdbath."

"Oh? Looks like a pile of rocks."

"It's that too, I suppose. Are you feeling all right?"

"What do you mean? Am I okay in the head?"

"No, that's not what I meant-"

"Because folks are acting like I'm a crazy person."

"Well I don't know whether you are or not," I said, "and I wouldn't try to judge."

She glared at me a moment and then seemed to soften up. "Can I sit down?" she said.

"By all means."

"Folks seem to think I started that fire."

"Well did you?"

"No! A candle set it off. I couldn't sleep in the heat. I was reading a book. I must have drowsed off and knocked the candle over. The bedclothes caught and then a curtain, and then it got up into the window sashes, I guess."

"Can you tell me why you went back into the fire when I tried to pull you out?"

"I don't know," she said, sweeping the floor with her eyes, as if she might turn up an answer there. "I lost heart, I suppose. First Shawn. Then my home. I didn't really want to die. I have a child to look after. It was moment of ... selfish confusion."

"I'm sorry so many bad things have happened to you."

Looking down at her sitting there only emphasized her small size. Shawn must have been at least twice her weight. I seemed to remember them dancing together once at a levee in Battenville. Like a bear with a doe, each full of youth and life in its own way, but an odd pair.

"I know you've seen your share of heartache too," she said.

"Life remains a precious blessing for us the living."

"I hope I come around to feel that way."

"I hope you do too."

I hadn't been away from home for a week in as long as I could remember, and it was hard to determine how much food I ought to bring for myself. I had a hunk of Terry Zucker's smoked hard sausage, which I wrapped carefully in a piece of waxed canvas and tied with an old piece of string. I saved absolutely everything.

"Are you going somewhere?" Britney said.

"Yes."

"Is it a secret?"

"I have to go to Albany. I'll be gone most of a week."

"Albany? What's down there?"

I told her about Bullock's missing boatmen.

"Tom Soukey used to babysit me when I was a little girl," she said. "He was in high school. I beat him at checkers. I hope you can find them."

"I don't know what we'll find down there," I said. "I haven't been out of the county in years. Anyway, they're coming by to get me soon and I have to go see about something before that."

"Okay, then," she said resolutely. "I came here for a reason. I have a proposal."

"What's that?"

"I thought you might need somebody to keep house."

It took me a moment to absorb that.

"I can't pay someone to keep house," I said.

"That's not what I had in mind."

Now she was making me nervous. I put some corn bread, hard cheese, three onions, and a head of garlic into an oilcloth and tied it with more string into a compact package. Anything you cook will taste okay with onions and garlic. I figured we could get eggs along the way. Everybody had chickens nowadays.

"What did you have in mind?" I said.

"Like I said. Keep house for you."

I just stared at my bundle.

"To be on the premises," she said.

It took me a moment to get it.

"You want to live here?" I said.

"We don't have any place to live."

"You just lost your husband."

"Thank you for reminding me."

"I mean, how would it look?"

"You can say yes or no."

"I hear you're with the Allisons?"

"We can't stay there. It's not a comfortable situation."

"There are quite a few vacant houses in town."

"This isn't a good time for a single woman with a child to live alone."

"Mrs. Myles lives alone right next door. Maybe you could live with her."

"She was my fifth grade teacher. I don't want to live with her."

"Well, why do you want to live with me?"

"I would feel safe here."

I went over to search the shelves above the counter for my purple Lexan water bottle. I hadn't seen it in a while and they sure weren't making them anymore.

"It looks to me like you could use somebody to keep house around here," she said.

"I'm not used to living with other people," I said.

"You had a family once. Look at this place," she said. "It's like some old trapper dude lives here."

"Thanks."

The Lexan bottle was not where I thought I put it. Did I leave it over at Pragers'? It was making me upset.

"It wouldn't look right," I said. "You moving in here."

"You have been alone for some years now, isn't that right, Robert?"

"Yes."

"Do you want to be alone to the end of your days?"

"I'm old enough to be your father, and I was present where your husband was murdered. People might get some strange ideas."

"I'm well aware," she said. "But I need a helping hand, and these are not normal times. I'm old enough to remember the difference. I once had my own television. My mom drove a pickup truck. We used to go to the Target in Glens Falls and buy stuff when she got paid. Those days are gone, and so is any idea of what's normal or decent. I don't want to put in with that New Faith crowd and pray three times a day and have some pack of busybodies raise my child. And I won't put in with Bullock and be a damn serf. We can help each other, you and me. Just let me and Sarah stay here while you're gone. We'll weed your garden for you."

I gave up looking for my water bottle.

"All right," I said. "You can stay while I'm gone."

"What about when you're back?"

"I mean you can move in after I leave today, and we can see how it works out when I return."

"I still have a big garden of my own behind where the house used to be, plus the cow, so you don't have to worry about feeding us."

"All right."

She gave me an intense studying look. I worried now whether she would throw her arms around me and sob, and make me feel uncomfortable. But she just took my right hand in hers and shook, like a sales representative sealing a deal.

"You were kind to me when I was very low," she said. "I'm grateful, and you won't regret this."

"There's four bedrooms upstairs," I said "It'll be obvious which one's mine. You and Sarah can have any two of the others. Please don't go rearranging things too much, especially the kitchen setup. I've got everything where I know how to find it."

"I will be very respectful of your stuff and your ways."

She said she didn't have much to bring over, that pretty much all she owned had been lost in the fire. I showed her around, how the outdoor shower worked and where I kept my store of meal and honey and things. Finally, I saw her to the door. She said they'd come back later in the day after I'd gone.

"Have a safe journey," she said. "I hope you find Tom and the others."

"Thank you. I'm a little nervous about it, to tell you the truth."

"Think about coming home to a clean and orderly house."

I watched her walk a ways back up Linden Street. She was a good walker, with a strong, purposeful stride.

Soon, I left to fetch that pistol I'd hidden under the bridge over Black Creek on North Road, and all the way up and back my mind reeled with terrible thoughts of what it would be like to not be alone anymore, and what Jane Ann would think when she found out.