World Made by Hand (36 page)

His words struck me like a blow with a shovel. Next thing I knew, I was blubbering into the clover, hardly on account of Minor alone, but because of my Daniel, and Genna, and Sandy, and all of us who had lost so much over a few years time, and the sheer accumulated discomfort of my senses. I know I was hardly in my right mind. No doubt my perceptions were off. But when at last I stopped weeping, and lifted my face back off the ground, and turned around to speak to Brother Jobe, I found nothing there but an empty chair and a hot wind blowing up the pasture, rattling the branches in the nearby trees. There wasn't even any sign of him walking down the pasture back to the school. It was like he'd simply vanished. I assumed he was using this opportunity to make yet another pointwhich he would later deny, of course-about exactly who and what he was. But for the moment I decided to simply accept the fact that, whatever else he might be, he was a father who had lost a son.

And when I returned to my little 1904 arts-and-crafts house on Linden Street, it was at last with nothing left to do, no onerous tasks or obligations ahead of me. Britney had left a note on the table out in the summer kitchen: Dear Robert, I have heard much talk about your doings and all that went on. Not knowing when you might return, I took Sarah and we are outgathering wilds where Bright Creek meets the river. Corn bread and good cheese in the cupboard. Also some apple butter from Mr. Schmidt. In case you return before we do. We look forward to having you home. Love, Us.

Bright Creek ran into the Battenkill a half mile west of the old railroad bridge. You could follow the tracks there because the tracks ran through the whole river valley. I spotted them just where she'd said they would be. Britney was standing thigh-deep upstream of the creek junction using my fly rod to work the pool where the two streams came together. Sarah was off wading a shallow side channel behind a gravel bar, picking watercress and stuffing it in a large creel that hung off her shoulder on a strap. I left the tracks and busted my way through a slough of bracken to the gravel bar by the river proper. As I got closer I could see that Britney was dapping with earthworms, letting the hook drift downstream in the current. The trout liked the pool there at the junction of the two streams because the spring-fed water of Bright Creek was a lot cooler than the river. It energized them and they fed more. I was impressed to discover that she knew this. I sat on a driftwood stump there on the gravel bar watching. She worked the pool with her back to me. Within a minute she had hooked a large, lively trout. She brought it in without any trouble and grasped it by its lower jaw, the way experienced anglers do, to get the hook out. Then, with the butt of the rod jammed under her arm, she took a paring knife out of her creel and slit the trout's belly from the anal vent to near its gills, like you're supposed to. She reached in and removed its guts and flung the guts out in the current. Then she ran her thumb down along the spine inside of the rib cavity to get out the congealed blood there that can make the meat taste off if you leave it in, especially on a hot day. Finally, she slipped the fish inside the creel and washed the slime and blood off her fingers in the current. I clapped my hands in appreciation. Hearing that, she finally turned around. What a sight she was in a wet cotton dress. I kicked off my boots and waded out in the water, scooped her into my arms, and carried her to the gravel bank.

A while later we were all back at the house. The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney's old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sauteed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert. Above all, I was starved for something I could think of only as normality, and felt I had begun to get a purchase on it as I settled down to read a chapter of The Wind in the Willows with Sarah, when there was a knock on the door. Britney answered it. Jerry Copeland was standing there, looking distracted and more morose than usual. For a moment I was seized again by the despairing nausea that had gripped me so many times in the days just passed.

"I hope it's not about Loren," I said.

"No, but you better come with me."

"What is it?"

"I think you better see for yourself," Jerry said.

We walked over to his place together. He said Loren appeared to be recovering. He didn't show signs of serious infection. His temperature was only slightly elevated. Jerry was going to taper him off of the morphine the next day. He would not say anything more about why we were going over to his place, though. It was getting on toward darkness in town, another warm night. The sun had sunk below the treetops and swallows were dipping for bugs in the dooryard gardens. People were out on their porches, and they shouted salutations as they saw us hurry by.

When we got to Jerry's, he led me into the springhouse out back. He lit a hanging candle lamp overhead and another plain stub in a brass saucer. The two bodies lay together side by side on the table, both now covered by the blue tarp. Jerry drew it back, exposing their heads and torsos. On the left lay Brother Minor, Wayne Karp to the right, their heads slightly elevated on wooden blocks.

"Have a look," Jerry said. "Tell me what you see."

I studied them a few minutes.

"Their wounds are similar," I said.

"Think so? Look closer."

Jerry held the candle just above their heads.

"They're extremely similar," I said.

"No," he said. "They're absolutely identical. See where the skin is split above each eye socket. Identical fractures across the supraorbital ridge and then diagonally down the malar bone. Same length of fracture to the millimeter. The eyeball itself is gone in both. Blown out or ... something. Then, down below in the lower wound, see how the lip is split open with a fracture at the incisive fossa, below the nose. Same length of fracture to the millimeter. Now look here. Three teeth broken off: numbers two, three, and four. Upper lateral incisor, cuspid, first premolar. Same thing over here at this one."

"It's weird," I said.

"Look real close at the teeth. See where number two, the lateral incisor is diagonally sheared off on this fellow?" Jerry said, meaning Minor.

"Yeah?"

"Now look at Wayne."

He was right. They were absolutely identical.

"Very weird."

"I measured it with a micrometer, by the way," Jerry said. "I'll tell you something else: I pulled a .38-caliber wadcutter out of this young man's brain. And a second one down there in his neck."

"Yes...?"

We stared at the two corpses another minute or so.

"The young man on the left there was brought in about three thirty in the morning," he said. "Wayne here-well you brought him in yourself at noon."

"That's right."

"You got any idea who killed him?"

I hesitated a moment as a whole catalog of scenarios, complications, explanations, and cockamamy stories scrolled through my imagination.

"I did," I said.

"How come?"

"He was trying to escape."

"What you kill him with?"

"Pistol."

"There aren't any bullets in Wayne's head. Whatever did this to him, it wasn't a bullet."

"Maybe they passed through."

"There aren't any exit wounds."

"Hmm. That's odd too."

"I'll say."

I glanced back and forth between the corpses and Jerry.

"Just thought you'd be interested," Jerry said after an awkward interval. "He was an arrogant prick, though, wasn't he, Wayne Karp?"

"He wasn't a model citizen," I said. "But he was a leader of men, in his own way."

We stood there and gazed at the bodies a while longer, and then Jerry drew the tarp back over their faces.

In the days that followed, stories circulated around town about Brother Minor and Wayne Karp coming to an eerily similar end. I doubt Jerry said anything to anyone, but Jeanette might have whispered it among her circle, or perhaps their boy Jasper told his friends, who might have told their parents. Anyway, the tale got around and was quickly conventionalized into an eye-for-an-eye legend which, in ten more years, would probably mutate into a classic ghost story of our region. I had to answer for Karp's death in an inquest, but the coroner was Jerry Copeland, and the matter was little more than a procedural formality, though my testimony was completely false. The truth would have been too incredible for the community to digest.

Not long after I had left Jerry in the springhouse that night, a New Faith delegation came by and took Minor's body away to prepare it for burial. Wayne's people got wind of his demise and sent a wagon down the following day to get him. Which is to say that nobody besides Jerry and me really examined the two bodies side by side, and nobody else knew how precisely their wounds compared, or what might have caused them-except for one other person, and I was not altogether sure anymore that he was exactly what you might call a person.

But the story was spooky enough to keep the superstitious denizens of Karptown from mounting revenge on Union Grovethat and perhaps their fear of the New Faith cavalry. We heard stories about them too, about how one would-be alpha male or another was jockeying for leadership of their community with Wayne gone, and factions had formed, and friction was leading to conflict among them. There was also talk of the New Faith bunch taking over the operation of the general supply and the old landfill with it, but we in town preferred the Karptowners to keep running it since it occupied the time of the more antisocial elements in Washington County and afforded them a means of support to keep them from banditry and other mischief. We didn't care, especially, who ruled their little world, though we preferred someone who might be reasoned with. And for all of their peculiarities and shortcomings, the Karptown bunch had a system down for collecting a lot of useful materials that we depended on, and trading it more or less fairly.

I thought it was a good sign when Brother Jobe decided to bury Minor in the Union Grove cemetery, instead of somewhere on the grounds of the old high school. Minor was the first of their number to pass away since they came here. It made me wonder whether some of the New Faithers might begin drifting away from the core group and move in amongst us in town, rather than any of us going over to their side, which had been everyone's fear until then. There were plenty of empty houses around town.

As it became known that Brother Jobe's own son had been killed, much of the resentment against the sect, and him in particular, was put aside. Many Union Grove people attended Minor's funeral service at the high school and followed the coffin to the town cemetery afterward, and Brother Jobe gave a eulogy of exceptional eloquence-though he looked to me, at odd moments, strangely like a large insect in his black garb, with his arms waving this way and that way in fervid gesticulation so that there seemed to be many more than two of them.

Two weeks later, Brother Jobe went before Bullock on a firstdegree battery complaint in the matter of cutting off the beards of nine individuals against their will. A guilty plea was entered and Brother Jobe was fined nine thousand dollars, about the price of a hundred-pound sack of buckwheat groats.

After Minor's funeral, the life of our town and the factions within it and around it seemed to settle into that fugitive condition I refer to as normality-which, I suppose, is a way of saying a merciful period of time in which nothing terrible happens. Though things did happen. Heath Rucker, the former constable, and even more distantly a State Farm Insurance claims adjuster, was found hanged in his kitchen from a length of cable, clearly a suicide. He had no family left. The temperature on July twentieth reached 107 degrees, the highest that any record existed for in our area. Della Laudermilk had a baby, the first one born in our community that year. Carl Weibel's son, Will, wed Felix Holyrood's sixteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, a marriage of consequence for two of the leading farm families of the region. Sister Annabelle of the New Faith came to preside over the new clothing store they opened next to the barbershop on Main. Brother Jobe was right about one thing: the New Faith look caught on because people in town started wearing the clothes they made. The secular look, composed of remnants of the old days or often clumsily sewn homemade clothes, seemed downright shabby in comparison.

By midsummer, Stephen Bullock resumed regular trade with Albany with a new, larger boat, though he eventually recovered the Elizabeth too. Among the interesting items that came our way from that trade via Einhorn's store was a sack of coffee beans (which lasted three days), some additional supplies of weevil-free true wheat flour, a hundred-weight of sea salt, fifty pounds of Dutch cocoa, and a crate of somewhat shriveled, leathery-skinned lemons. Bullock learned that the port of Albany was under new and more honest administration, and that the remainder of Dan Curry's bunch had been rooted out like rats.

Loren Holder recovered from his injuries and returned to his duties at the First Congregational, though he told me and several other close friends that he had "lost God." If so, then it might have been the conclusion of an older personal struggle that predated his encounter with Wayne Karp. And anyway he seemed to hedge his bets by saying it was more possible that the human race possessed a spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show, and maybe it was the job of clergy to nurture that divine spark in us and make something of it. The word worship always rubbed him the wrong way, anyhow, Loren said. That summer, Loren also got the other project dear to his heart underway: conversion of the old Wayland-Union Mill building into a community laundry, with one Brother Shiloh, formerly a civil engineer for the Roanoke Water Authority, assigned by Brother Jobe to figure out a plumbing scheme.

The music circle resumed regular Christmas practice Monday nights, while the ever busy Andrew Pendergast organized auditions for a fall production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1940s musical, Carousel. The role of Julie Jordan went to Maggie Furnival. The story was set in a New England seacoast mill town in the nineteenth century, something more our speed lately than the Broadway hijinks of Guys and Dolls.

The electricity stayed off, without even a few more spasms. We got used to it. George Murdlow's candlemaking operation had to go further afield for supplies of beeswax, which was far superior to the abundant tallow in our neighborhood of Washington County. I got in four cords of stovewood working a no-title woodlot on the back side of Pumpkin Hill with the help of Tom Allison and his team of Haflingers.

A weird corn fungus appeared in mid-August, something nobody had seen before. We held an emergency meeting of the town trustees and passed an ordinance to send a team of inspectors around to every farm and compel the burning of all infected fields. It did not sweep the county, but it made us nervous since we had little to fall back on but buckwheat, Bullock's limited experiments with spelt, and whatever came up the river from Albany.

The fate of our nation remained shrouded in mystery. Without the occasional radio broadcast, we existed beyond the hypothetical doings of President Harvey Albright and his people in Minneapolis (or wherever), and their people, and their people's people. Printed broadsides out of Newburgh, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and other towns down the Hudson Valley came to us via Bullock's trade boats. They were full of religious hysteria with nuggets of news here and there. The hurricane that battered New England in June generated ocean surges that left parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and low-lying New Jersey uninhabitable. The immense overburden of skyscrapers in Manhattan had proven unusable without electric service. Long Island, a geographic dead end, had suffered terribly from the hurricane and a dengue fever epidemic, and now had a population equivalent to what it had been in the year 1800-with an immense surplus of free parking. Of the world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, we heard nothing at all. We were content to be undisturbed in our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the Empire State, where the Battenkill runs into the Hudson River.

Britney was right. I now had a family to look after. It made all the difference. She was tough and tender both and brought me home to myself after a long sojourn in a dark region of my heart. I still thought about Sandy, and mourned her and Genna, and often woke before dawn wondering if my Daniel was out there somewhere, still alive. But I had new responsibilities and new affections, and by the end of August, I had a little girl who was able to play "Old Joe Clark" on the fiddle. I resumed my regular labors, starting with the cupola of Larry Prager's barn, and enjoyed the benefit of using the donkey we had rescued in Albany. And that is the end of the story of that particular summer when we had so much trouble and so much good fortune in the world we were making by hand.