James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“Sure smells good, don’t it,” Brother Minor said. Banter was his way of allaying nervousness.

We all sat down. Joseph returned with more candles and soon the big table, at least, was lighted.

“Can we help you with anything in there, ma’am?” Seth said.

“No, you fellows just get comfortable.”

She soon appeared with a heaping dinner plate in each hand, put them down in front of me and Minor, went back for two more for Joseph and Elam, and then two additional for Seth and herself. We all swapped glances around at each other in the candlelight.

“Potatoes and peas coming right up,” Mrs. Raynor said and she came back in with two serving bowls. I took the one full of potatoes. It was not the least bit warm. I took one and put it on my plate. It was a rock. I passed the bowl left to Seth and he took his and so on. When the peas came around I took a helping. It was grass. The lamb stew on our plates was watered up dirt: mud. Mrs. Raynor told us to dig in. I pantomimed eating and the rest did as I did, except Brother Minor, who could barely conceal his mirth. Of course, I did not regard this as a mirthful situation, and I doubt the others did either.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Brother Minor said. “I don’t have much appetite tonight.” He got up from the table gingerly and left the room.

The rest of us went through the motions long enough to be polite. Brother Joseph volunteered our services to help with the dishes, but Mrs. Raynor wouldn’t hear of it and the four of us remaining retired to our camp. Minor had a fire started down there and a big fry pan of bacon working. I opened up my oilskin larder and got some corn bread and the hunk of sausage I brought along. The others got out their provisions. Joseph produced a jug of that Pennsylvania whiskey the New Faithers seemed well supplied with, and it felt good going down with river water. They also had a sack of little oatmeal “sticky cakes,” as they called them, that their women made with dried currents, honey, and plenty of butter, and gladly gave me as many as I wanted. Joseph laid aside a rasher of bacon, a square of bread, and a hunk of sausage and a sticky cake on a plate, and when he was done eating, he ventured back up to the house. Mrs. Raynor came to the door and in the moonlight we watched him go in. In a while we heard shouting. Mrs. Raynor was letting Brother Joseph have it. We couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she was loud for such a frail person. Then the door opened and she shoved him out on the front portico, and that was that. She began to wail and continued up there in her darkened house the whole way Joseph was coming back to us.

“She sounded right grateful,” Brother Minor said when Joseph returned to the firelight.

“I guess I insulted her.”

“Well, clearly she is off her rocker,” Seth said.

“What’ll we do about her?” I said.

“I’d say her man run off,” Elam said. “She’s liable to starve here.”

“We should stop on the way back and take her with us,” Joseph said, and without much discussion it was pretty much agreed that we should do that. Then it was a final dram, and we tucked ourselves into our bedrolls in nice cool sleeping weather, for a change, and all fell out rather quickly from our day’s exertions.

Brother Minor might have been an irritating little fellow, but he was diligent, regular, and capable. He was awake before anybody else, had the fire going again, had watered our horses, and was boiling up a pot of cornmeal samp for our breakfast when the rest of us stirred from our bedrolls. The weather had a fractious look. The sky to the east was red and an ominous breeze was already making the weeds dip and sway. I sensed it would get hot again. We did not linger at the sod farm. On our way out, we paused in front of the house. I accompanied Joseph to the door to say thank you and farewell, so as not to leave on unfriendly terms. The others stayed on their horses.

Mrs. Raynor did not answer our knocks. Joseph said we’d better go inside. In daylight, the house was drearier than it had appeared by candles and moonlight. A coat of dust lay over most surfaces. As we entered from out in the summer meadow, the bad smell inside made its impression again. We called out to the lady of the house but she did not answer. With the electricity off, and no appliances humming, the place was stone silent. Joseph and I started poking around by unspoken mutual consent. Nothing was out of order on the first floor, except the muddy dishes remained unwashed on the kitchen counter from the night before along with the bowls of rocks and grass. Of course, Mrs. Raynor’s electric well pump was not functioning, along with everything else, and to get water she would have had to fetch buckets from the livestock pond on her property, or else walk all the way down to the river, a good quarter mile.

“Well, let’s have a look upstairs,” Joseph said.

In the second bedroom we looked in, we found the source of the odor that pervaded the house. The body of a man was laid out on a bed. In actual fact it was mostly the clothed skeleton of a man, since even the insects seemed to be mostly done with the flesh of him. We could only guess how long he’d been laid out there. A month or more. We recoiled from the sight and the stench and very quickly went through the three other bedrooms and back through the ground floor again, including the back porch, looking for the old woman.

“She’s gone,” I said.

Brother Joseph gave a kind of dubious grunt. I followed him down to the basement. It was much cooler down there. In the meager light that came through window wells that hadn’t been cleared of dead leaves for years, and among the odds and ends of a family life that circumstance had now obliterated-the old stroller, a broken bicycle, plastic incunabula, unsold yard sale junk, and trunks full of memories-we found Mrs. Raynor hanging from a pipe by a lamp cord. The ceiling was so low that she hadn’t used a chair or a box to step off. She had merely bent her knees to allow her neck to receive the remaining weight of her body. Whatever the agonies or difficulties involved, she had succeeded in ending her life.

We cut her down and took much of the morning digging a single proper grave for the both of them in the back of the house, where we had lingered in the beautiful twilight the night before, looking east toward the river. We put the missus down first and then the remains of what we presumed to be her husband, wound in the bedspread we found him on. Then we covered them both up, another hour of work with one shovel among us.

“We don’t know who these people were,” Brother Joseph spoke over their mound when we were done with our work. “Who their relations or children are or where they might be. But these two will be together in eternity now. It is an awful thing when anyone falls into despair and takes their own life. If it was up to us, Lord, we would have rescued this poor soul in a few days time. But your ways are mysterious and you didn’t allow it. So may Mrs. Raynor-I’m sorry, but I have already forgotten her given name—”

“Gladys,” Seth said.

“-may her troubled spirit come into your love and dwell in your house forever. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, /So do our minutes hasten to their end. Amen.”

“Amen,” all around.

We mounted our horses.

“You know what I think?” Brother Minor said.

“What?” Seth said and Elam echoed him.

“I think she was waiting for some folks to come along who could give them a proper burial and we were elected,” Minor said. “Ain’t these times something?”

The heat was definitely back with us and we were tired from digging and hadn’t made any progress yet that day. Among the few things from the premises we helped ourselves to, we found two fishing rods, with good open-faced spinning reels and monofilament line, along with a box of lures, plugs, spinners, hooks, swivels, and bobbers. An hour or so later, we had made some headway down the river road again, and we stopped to water the horses at a place where a cool rill formed a sandy delta on the shore as it entered the Hudson. There were big flat rocks to sit on, and a grove of locust trees for shade. I took the opportunity to bathe away two days of grime. Joseph and Seth bushwhacked upstream a ways with the fishing rods. Elam was off looking for raspberries while Minor made a fire on the rocks.