The Harrows of Spring Read online

  THE HARROWS OF SPRING

  ALSO BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

  Also in the World Made by Hand series

  A History of the Future

  The Witch of Hebron

  World Made by Hand

  Other Fiction

  Maggie Darling

  Thunder Island

  The Halloween Ball

  The Hunt

  Blood Solstice

  An Embarrassment of Riches

  The Life of Byron Jaynes

  A Clown in the Moonlight

  The Wampanaki Tales

  Nonfiction

  Too Much Magic

  The Long Emergency

  The City in Mind

  Home from Nowhere

  The Geography of Nowhere

  JAMES

  HOWARD

  KUNSTLER

  THE HARROWS OF SPRING

  A WORLD MADE BY HAND NOVEL

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2016 by James Howard Kunstler

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2492-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9037-6

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

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  This book is for Anne Poole

  Annie on the Mountain in Bear Creek, PA

  My ideal reader

  In a dark time, the eye begins to see

  —Roethke

  THE HARROWS OF SPRING

  ONE

  In late April of the year that concerns us, a year that has not yet come in the history of the future, in the strange new times that followed the collapse of the American economy and the country’s political breakup into several new, quarreling nations, mild spring weather finally arrived in the village of Union Grove, Washington County, New York. Spring came to this region of tender hills and hollows in the morning shadow of the Green Mountains, a two-day ride north of Albany, after a drawn-out winter of brutal storms and freakish cold that seemed to defy two decades of rising temperatures. At Easter, a crust of icy snow still lingered on the ground, coated with a dingy film of woodstove fly ash. Then it rained on and off for two weeks. Now, the last patches of snow had melted away and buds were close to bursting in trees along the village streets where automobiles had not been seen for many springtimes.

  Twenty-three men labored in their shirtsleeves this day in and around the new Union Grove Hotel, under construction on the site of the former Union Tavern, which had been burned down New Year’s night by a disgruntled farm laborer named Travis Berkey. The new hotel was one of several pet projects of Brother Jobe, pastor, patriarch, attorney, and head honcho of the New Faith Covenant Brotherhood Church of Jesus, an evangelical outfit of eighty-two souls that had fled the disorders of the southern states and pilgrimaged north seeking peace and the chance to be fruitful in these difficult new times. They had arrived in Union Grove the previous spring, bought the abandoned high school, and made countless improvements to their “New Jerusalem,” as Brother Jobe liked to call the group’s new headquarters. They had laid out gardens and fenced in paddocks on the athletic fields, planted fruit trees, nut trees, grapes, and berries, converted the bus garage into a barn with forty stalls, dug earthen root cellars, built several greenhouses, de-paved the parking lots and used the tar extracted to fix the school’s vast flat roof, created dormitories and workshops in the classrooms, and rigged a wood-burning furnace to run the heat system. They had also entered into beneficial relations with the populace of Union Grove, a secular people much beaten down by their broken economy and the failed promises of technological rescue, as well as repeated visits of so-called Mexican flu and other epidemic diseases that winnowed the town’s population down to 712 from the 3,245 who had greeted the millennium before the times turned.

  Lately, Brother Jobe walked over to the new hotel each afternoon to check on its progress and visit with his counterpart among the townspeople, Robert Earle, mayor of Union Grove and journeyman carpenter, who was straw boss on the construction site. Robert worked side by side with Brother Shiloh, a bona fide engineer, who had put up buildings all over North Carolina for the Days Inn hotel chain back in the old times. Construction methods weren’t what they used to be, though. The men had no power equipment. All the work was done with hand tools. Brother Mordecai did nothing but sharpen saws all day. Brother Shiloh had designed an ingenious oaken crane run with gears and counterweights to hoist materials to the upper stories. The materials were largely salvaged from existing vacant buildings in and around town. Some new custom stock for trim and moldings was milled by Lloyd Hokely at his sawmill on the Battenkill River, which ran through town and then down to the mighty Hudson four miles west of town. The roof was slate, a regional favorite, originally from the quarries of nearby Granville up by the Vermont border. The slate, too, was salvage, along with the copper nails needed to hold the slates on.

  Brother Jobe was anxious to complete the new hotel as he was working hard to reestablish trade in the region whose economy now centered on farming and the activities that supported it or depended on it. Among other things, the New Faith group was breeding mules and trying to popularize them in a part of the country that, before the old modern times, had been partial to oxen and draft horses. Brother Jobe held that mules were superior in brains, temperament, and handling for any kind of work. They even rode better than saddle horses, he insisted. His own personal mount, Atlas, was a handsome bay mule of great conformation and personality, fully sixteen and a half hands tall.

  This mild spring afternoon Brother Jobe was inspecting progress on the masonry heater at the heart of the new hotel. It consisted of a massive column of salvaged brick with an interior of baffle chambers designed to maximize the retention of warmth in the masonry mass. On a winter’s day, you could fire it once in the morning and again in the evening, they said, and steady heat would radiate into the building all day long and into the night. The masonry heater occupied the center of the new building. One side incorporated separate fireboxes, steel cooking surfaces, and ovens for what would be the hotel kitchen in the new tavern portion of the first floor. The old tavern, meant to be a place of fellowship and community in troubled times, had been a labor of love for Brother Jobe. When it burned down a mere week after its grand opening, he had to weigh the mysterious intent of Providence in the matter, but determined after much reflection and prayer that he was commanded to rebuild s
omething bigger and better, hence the added hotel. He had decided to name the new tavern the Cider Barrel, after the most popular beverage of the region.

  Brother Jobe, forty-six, plain made and burly like a barrel of cider himself, paused to admire the colored-glass transom window above the door to the new barroom. Made in a New Faith workshop, it depicted a federal eagle with wings spread, meant to convey the idea that the sympathies of Washington County and the village of Union Grove in particular lay with the remnant of the national government that called itself the Federal Union. Since the bombing of Washington, DC, that political entity was now centered at its capital of New Columbia in Michigan on Lake Huron. It had little practical influence on affairs in and around New England these days, but the people of Union Grove had political allegiances that went back beyond the battlefields of Ball’s Bluff, Gettysburg, and Malvern Hill. Even the New Faith bunch had let go of their southern political leanings and come over to the federal fold after the indignities they suffered when leaving Virginia three years earlier. Now hostilities had broken out between the two new nations east of the Mississippi: the Foxfire Republic centered in Tennessee—still reeling from the assassination of its leader, the evangelist and country singer Loving Morrow—and the deep south states of New Africa, led by the former check-cashing mogul Milton Steptoe, better known by his military moniker, Commander Sage. With the paucity of news and the absence of radio, television, and Internet these days, it was hard for people as far away as Union Grove to get a grasp of these doings.

  Brother Jobe wended through the ground floor. Carpenters were fitting beaded wainscoting into what would be the hotel’s reception room. It already looked cheerful and welcoming. The masonry team, New Faith brethren Gideon and Ithiel, were pointing up a few final joints on the big heater. Brother Jobe peered inside the firebox and was surprised to see ashes in it.

  “You test her already?”

  “We fired her up today, sir,” Ithiel said. “It was thirty degrees when we come down to work this morning.”

  “How’d she run?”

  “Perfect, sir,” Gideon said, grinning broadly. “She burned like a charm and kept us toasty till the afternoon when the temperature come on all springlike. Here, feel.”

  Brother Jobe placed his palm on the bricks, which still radiated warmth. A smile briefly lighted his face.

  “You done a fine job, boys.”

  He left them and climbed the main stairway. The paint crew was already finishing some of the guest rooms in the second and third floors. They used a milk paint colored with iron hydroxide ochre mined off an outcrop on nearby Colfax Mountain (really just a big hill at 1,200 feet elevation). They sealed the chalky paint with a finish coat of linseed oil and turpentine. The result was a lustrous patina over a warm, sunny hue. Brother Jobe then went up a steep, narrow set of stairs into the attic, where a two-hundred-gallon salvaged water tank stood on a masonry ledge of the thermal brick mass before the chimney’s final ascent through the roof. A hundred feet of salvaged copper coil pipe ran from the tank and was mortared within the thermal heater to deliver warm water to washrooms on the second and third floors and the tavern kitchen, another contrivance of the engineer Brother Shiloh. Union Grove was fortunate to have a gravity-fed water system that did not depend on electricity. The old village reservoir on a shoulder of Pumpkin Hill still worked reliably, though every once in a while a dead animal had to be removed from the grate over the intake pipe.

  Satisfied that work was proceeding nicely, Brother Jobe returned downstairs and found Robert Earle in the new barroom of the tavern, where Robert was at work installing the new cherrywood bar-back cabinetry he had built based on the design of the handsome woodwork that had gone up in flames months earlier.

  “You got a moment there, old son?” Brother Jobe said.

  His features generally crowded toward the center of his broad face, as though he were in a constant state of perturbation, but this mild afternoon Robert detected more than the usual tension in a man who bore many burdens and responsibilities.

  “Sure,” Robert said, and put down the rubber mallet he had been using to coax a beaded fillet into a tight spot.

  “Let’s go set outdoors and enjoy the vapors of spring.”

  “All right.”

  They settled down on the top of the four broad steps that connected the deep hotel veranda to the sidewalk. Brother Jobe produced a flask from the inside pocket of his black frock coat.

  “Taste?” he said. “This here’s the Tiplady rye from up Hebron way. I like it fine. You folks is definitely learning the finer points of the distillery craft. My own people were the leading moonshiners in Scott County, Virginia, back in the day. They turned out a corn beverage that would take the varnish off a fiddle.”

  “Why would anybody drink that?”

  “Our competition put out a product that could flat-out kill you. Poor quality control batch to batch. We was more careful. And our price was right. You couldn’t get a half pint of aftershave for what we charged on a half-gallon jug of Tway Hollow Three-Hog Stand-Pat corn.”

  “Where did the hogs come in?”

  “That’d be my grandfather Royce and my great-uncles Fen and Cool-Ray, partners in the operation. They was all in the First Cav in the Kim Son Valley of Vietnam. Survived a night ambush, scaring the devil out of the VC with their hog calling. All received the Silver Star for valor.”

  “Cool-Ray? How’d he come by that?”

  “He had a kind of voodoo love magic that made him catnip to women. Wore sunglasses day and night. Played the Fender Telecaster and sang in a honky-tonk band. The other two, one being my daddy, was no slouches for high times, though they was married, obviously, else you wouldn’t be talking to me now. Go on, take a pull on this here. The workday’s most done.” He proffered the flask again.

  Robert knocked back a dram. Then Brother Jobe took his turn, a long pull that made him shake his jowls and suck in the spring air across his teeth. The sound of hammers and handsaws filled the air.

  “The squire’s at it again,” he said, referring to Stephen Bullock, owner of the sprawling plantation four miles west of town—­Bullock, the leading citizen, wealthiest freeholder, elected magistrate, and employer (some said feudal lord) of three score laborers and craftspeople, plus children, who lived in a village constructed by them on his property. Bullock, it was said, wanted to take America back to a society like thirteenth-century England’s.

  “It happens that I received a letter yesterday from him,” Robert said. “He’s resigning as magistrate.”

  “Oh . . . ?” Brother Jobe perked up.

  There had been considerable trouble just after Christmas concerning the disappearance of a murder suspect, a woman named Mandy Stokes, alleged to have slain her husband and infant son while her brain was addled by the aftereffects of meningitis. She had been in custody at the New Faith compound—the jail in the old town hall was unheated in January—and apparently escaped a few days before Bullock could convene the grand jury. It was further suspected that Brother Jobe and his men had contrived to help her get away. In any case, Mandy Stokes had not been seen nor heard from since New Year’s Eve. Stephen Bullock had threatened to bring charges against Brother Jobe for facilitating the woman’s escape but he had not acted.

  “He wasn’t no good in that position anyhow,” Brother Jobe said. “Bad law or arbitrary and malicious law is worse than no law at all. Do you get to appoint a replacement now?”

  “I’ll have to call a special election.”

  “There ain’t but one other competent attorney in town: Mr. Hutto.”

  Sam Hutto, respected as he was, ran a turpentine still on the backside of Pumpkin Hill for a livelihood these days. The absence of functioning courts, deeds registries, jails, and all the other accessories of the law had obviated any paid work for lawyers.

  “There’s you,” Robert said. Indeed, Brother Job
e held a law degree from Duke University, as well as the bachelor of divinity from Roanoke College.

  “Your town folks wouldn’t stand for that,” Brother Jobe said.

  “Well, who’s Sam going to run against?”

  “He can run uncontested.”

  “You could run just to give the appearance of a contest,” Robert said. “Sam’s well liked, but you might get more votes than you imagine.”

  “I ain’t got time for the job, anyways. It’s all I can do to run my own outfit. I s’pose I know why it annoyed Mr. Bullock to get elected, busy as he is.”

  “Well, does the magistrate absolutely have to be a lawyer?”

  “It’d sure help,” Brother Jobe said. “The fact is, what we got going in the way of law don’t bear much resemblance to the system that used to be. Mr. Bullock’s right about one thing: we making it all up as we go along now. The situation kind of compels us to. Remember, this country used to have vast networks of judges, justices, jurists, arbitrators, mediators, social services, juvenile services, and so forth, and now there ain’t none of that left. All we really got is tradition and precedent. The tradition is pretty strong—innocent until proven guilty, habeas corpus, and so on—but the precedent in case law is withering away cuz you need institutional support for it: functioning courts, law schools with legal scholars, access to records, up-to-date publications. It’s all gone.”

  “I’ll meet with town trustees and set a date for an election,” Robert said. “Think about what I said.”

  “Oh, all right. Anyways, Bullock’s up to some new mischief we got to talk about. He’s withholding trade goods from my folks.”

  Bullock owned a boat that made regular trips down the Hudson to Albany to get goods that could not be made or grown in Union Grove, everything from cloth and tools to wholesale groceries such as cane sugar, wheat flour, and, once in a while, exotic commodities like coffee and lemons. It was Union Grove’s chief connection with the wider outside world of commerce, or what remained of it.