James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

As I did, I noticed an impressive pain in my shoulder, but felt detached from it, like it was somebody else’s pain and I was only a casual observer of it. I must have made a face, though.

“You came down pretty hard on that side,” Jerry said. “Nothing’s broken, in my judgment. There would be more swelling. No reason why you can’t go home.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to imagine how I might hold the fiddle with a bum shoulder. I had fiddling on what was left of my brain.

“Eat some,” he said. “It’ll help clear your head.”

The tray had legs on it so a person could eat comfortably in bed without having to balance it on their lap. On it was a plate of scrambled eggs, two squares of corn bread, a little dish of creamed spinach, and a mug of rose-hip tea. I must have been staring at the tray.

“This is beautiful. Your wife makes a lovely breakfast.”

“You’re a hero now, Robert.”

“Huh?”

“Saving those two.”

“Oh.”

“Eat something.”

I picked up a fork. “I don’t think she wanted to be rescued.”

Jerry sat down at the end of the bed.

“What makes you say that?”

“She tried to run back into the fire. I had to catch her and shove her out the window.”

“Maybe she was confused.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I lifted a forkful of scrambled eggs, golden and buttery. Jeanette had panfried the corn bread in butter too.

“It’s a good thing we all work as hard as we do around here,” I said. “All the butter and cream we eat.”

“Do you suppose she set that fire herself?” Jerry said.

“Huh?”

“You think Britney Watling torched her own house?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Well, now I wonder,” Jerry said. “At first I figured lightning. But now I’m not so sure.”

“I don’t know either. The storms kept me up a long time but they were far off. I fell asleep sometime before the fire broke out.”

“Lightning can strike far from the center of a storm cell,” Jerry said.

“Maybe. I hope she didn’t try to harm herself and her kid. I stopped in on her two days ago with some cornmeal. She seemed mighty glum.”

“She’ll have to put in with someone,” Jerry said. “Sooner rather than later. Maybe with your neighbor Lucy Myles. Lucy could help with the child.”

“Who are they staying with now?”

“Allisons. I think.”

I finished the eggs and turned to the creamed spinach and finally the corn bread. Sandy used to think it was funny that I ate things in sequence off a plate. Never some of this and some of that. One item at a time. Who knows, maybe it was what made me a good organizer in the old days on the job. My head was clearing.

“Last night, before all this happened, I was thinking.”

“About Britney and the girl?”

“No. About the town. We really have to get our act together around here.”

“Yeah? How are we going to do that.”

“I’m calling a meeting of the trustees tonight,” I said after a while. Any of us on the town board could call a meeting. We just hadn’t done it in at least a year. “Can you help get the word out? Ask Loren to send for the farmers, and make sure Dale Murray is there.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “Any particular purpose?”

“For one thing, the water pressure used to be much higher than it is now. We really have to fix it.”

“I doubt it would have mattered last night.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I suppose.”

“You see how we give in? It’s some kind of reflex negativity.”

“We’re conditioned by adversity.”

“We don’t have to surrender to conditioning. Brother Jobe says we’re demoralized. I think it’s true.”

“Since when are you tight with him?”

“I took him over to see Bullock. He’s a cheeky bastard. He put it right to Stephen about taking up his duties as magistrate.”

“Stephen’s a proud man. I don’t imagine he rolled over for him.”

“He got Stephen to agree to help fix our water system. He can cast some concrete pipe for us, he says.”

“Maybe we should all take turns falling out a window,” Jerry said. “It seems to have pepped you up.”

“I’m just sick of sleepwalking through life. Can you take this tray up off me?”

“Of course.”

I got up and out of the bed. Everything felt wobbly, but I stayed on my feet. Sun streamed through the windows. It felt like a new day.

“Also, ask Loren to get Brother Jobe to the board meeting tonight. That new bunch has to be in on this.”

“All right,” Jerry said.

“Tell them eight o’clock at the old town hall, upstairs.”

The top floor of our three-story town hall, an 1879 Romanesque red sandstone heap, was the old council chamber that had also served for generations as the community theater and civic ballroom. It had a proscenium stage at one end. The seats were not fixed, so they could be arranged for official meetings, shows, dances, banquets, what have you. In the 1950s, they held boxing matches up there. The high coffered ceiling was partitioned into twelve octagons that had been painted long ago to depict the signs of the zodiac. They were so faded and flaked you could barely make out which sign was which.

Back of the stage, a painted flat from the last community theatrical production remained in place: the musical Guys and Dolls. It showed a Times Square scene of the mid-twentieth century. It was startling to be reminded that people had lived in a world of skyscraper apartments, night clubs, neon lights, and taxicabs. I remembered the excitement the week the show ran. We so looked forward to coming here and putting it on each night, no matter how hard we’d worked during the day or how frightened we were about what was happening around the country. Sandy played Sarah Brown, the Salvation Army girl, sweetheart of gambler Sky Masterson (Larry Prager). Loren was Nathan Detroit. Linda Allison was Adelaide. I played violin in the orchestra, of course. My Daniel was in the chorus of Nathan’s gambler chums, with a painted-on mustache. We lit the stage with footlights fashioned out of candles and tin cans dug up from the general supply, and it all looked perfectly enchanting. You didn’t need a thousand watts to put a show on. The people came from all around the county night after night to see it. Many came more than once. The children seemed baffled about the world that the play depicted. Since the flu hit, we hadn’t put on any more plays.

This evening the old wooden folding chairs were arranged in a few concentric circles with twelve at the center reserved for us trustees. I had slept most of the afternoon and felt nearly normal again, mentally. My shoulder hurt, but I had full rotation. The sun still lit the big arched windows when the trustees straggled in at eight. In late June, twilight would last until nine thirty. It was warm up there in the top floor of the old building and the big room smelled faintly of bats.

Before the meeting got underway, the trustees and some observers stood around in knots. They all stopped gabbing when I came in. Many acknowledged me with a nod, I supposed because of what happened at the fire. But then I realized it was because I was the one who’d called the meeting, and they were looking to me to explain why. The trustees were Ben Deaver, Ned Larmon, and Todd Zucker, all farmers; Cody DeLong, who still pretended to be a banker at the Battenkill Trust but barely survived off the big garden in the back of his house; Jason LaBountie, the veterinarian; shopkeeper Terry Einhorn; Rod Sauer, the mason; Victor Gasparry, the tinsmith; Loren, Andy Pendergast, and Dale Murray, the mayor. All the trustees were men, no women and no plain laborers. As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the highoctane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that’s what they’d become. That’s just the way things were. Shawn Watling, rest his soul, had called it clearly.