James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“Because we walk upright in the sight of God,” Brother Jobe said.

“I’ve heard that before,” Ben Deaver said.

“It can’t be said enough,” Brother Jobe said.

“All right, let’s just back off that for now,” I said. “Loren, I’m going to instruct you as constable to send a letter to Stephen Bullock formally recommending an inquest. I’m sure Heath Rucker never put it in the form of a legal document.”

“All right.”

“One of my boys can ride it over to Mr. Bullock’s, post haste,” Brother Jobe said. “Maybe there’s something we can do for him in return.”

“We’ll need a town attorney with Dale gone,” Loren said.

“I’ll talk to Sam Hutto,” I said. Sam had dropped law for running a turpentine distillery on the back side of Pumpkin Hill, but I thought he could be induced to help out.

Finally, I moved that we form a committee to meet and make an inventory of the town’s needs-everything from meal sacks to medicine-and start an organized effort to obtain these things. By then, the true darkness of night was creeping over town and stealing into the third floor of the old town hall, and since nobody had brought any candles, I moved to adjourn the meeting.

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.