James Kunstler: World Made by Hand

“I’d like to hear what you’ve observed on your travels sometime,” Loren said.

“Hardship. Not a whole lot of brotherhood.”

“This is a friendly place,” I said. “But it would have been nice if the powers that be had consulted us about selling the school. We weren’t informed.”

“It’s all signed and legal, I assure you.”

“It seems to have happened under cover of night,” I said.

“Are you up to the Lord’s business too?” Brother Jobe asked me pointedly.

“In a manner of speaking,”

“How’s that?”

“I’m a carpenter,” I said.

Brother Jobe pointed at me and laughed, the way comedians used to do long ago on TV. The girl beside him cracked a trace of a smile too, but looked away self-consciously when she saw me notice. Eventually Brother Jobe’s strenuous hilarity ebbed.

“Let’s have a look in those creels, boys. I’ve got to see those whoppers you bragged on.”

Loren opened up his creel and held it up to show.

“Hooo-weee,” Brother Jobe said. “I’ll take ’em.”

“Excuse me?” Loren said.

“Five hundred bucks, American.”

“They’re not for sale.”

“Aw heck, okay, seven hundred fifty.”

“No, I—”

“You boys drive a hard bargain,” Brother Jobe said and whipped out a fat roll of bills. “Here’s a thousand. Lay them babies right down there under the dash by my boots.”

Loren shot a look at me that attempted to convey a humorous appreciation for all this but really signaled his discomfort. He liked to make other people happy but not usually at his own expense. He had lined his creel with ferns to keep his four nice trout cushioned and moist, and he now laid them all down, including the ferns, like a kind of grocer’s display, at the driver’s feet up under the Foley’s curved mudguard.

“Let’s see yours now,” Brother Jobe said to me.

“I didn’t get any.”

He guffawed. “Like fun you didn’t. Let’s have a look.”

“There’s nothing to show.”

“I thought you said it was good fishing down there tonight.”

“It was good for him, not so good for me.”

He held up the bankroll again. “Sure you won’t talk to the old persuader?”

“A dollar isn’t what it used to be.”

“That’s the God’s truth. But heck, I’ve got a flock to feed.”

Brother Jobe made a kind of show of looking deflated for a moment, then pulled himself upright and puffed out his cheeks.

“All right then. I hope you have better luck next time. We’ll be starting a regular service soon in that old school auditorium. Maybe you’ll come by sometime.”

“I’m in his outfit,” I said, cocking my head at Loren.

“We put on a hell of a show. Hymns and preaching. I got a 1930 Schwimmer pump organ. It’s like the old-timey times.”

Smiling broadly, Brother Jobe raised his whip and sort of dusted both horses over the hindquarters. They snorted and began to walk. They were well trained. We watched them set off and a little way down he got them trotting. He never did introduce us to his companion.

We walked the next mile in silence. The brilliant salmon-colored sky turned to a yellow-gray clotted pudding as darkness came on. I wondered what the weather would be like. You never knew in advance anymore. A warm breeze had come up, and I surmised it would be hotter tomorrow.

“What are you going to spend all that money on?” I said finally.

“It’s not like I wanted to sell them,” Loren said.

“Then why did you?”

“You saw how he was. Might as well have been a holdup.”

“Well it looks like you’ve suddenly got some competition in town.”

“The church isn’t a business.”

“I don’t know about that. Sometimes it seems like the only business left.”

“That’s why you should take my idea seriously,” Loren said.

“Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“I want you to go look through the building with me.”

“All right.”

“It’d benefit everybody.”

We hiked past the raggedy commercial strip that used to mark the eastern built-up fringe of town, but the town had shrunk back into itself. The strip mall stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything else worth scavenging was stripped out. A fragment of the plastic Kmart sign remained bolted to the facade-the piece that saidart. The irony did not move me. I wasn’t sorry that it was out of business, but I was sorry that the remnants were still there.

“Did you notice the girl?” Loren said.

“Of course I did.”

“Kind of young, didn’t you think?”

“Maybe she was his daughter.”

“Didn’t look a bit like him,” Loren said. “How can they come in here and buy the school and we don’t even know about it?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Dale made a deal on his own.” Dale Murray was our mayor. The apparatus of our government had fallen way off, along with the population. It was Dale and a drunken constable for the most part, and a magistrate who said he wouldn’t do the job if elected-before he was elected. Sometimes things just happened and then you heard about it. Mostly nothing happened. “The school was just sitting there, rotting,” I said.

“It must be worth something,” Loren said. “I don’t like giving up on the idea that we might need it again in the future.”

“It’s your nostalgia working overtime.”

“Well, it bothers me. And more to the point, I’m not sure I like that fellow,” Loren said. “Why did they have to pick this town?”

“People are on the move again. We should expect it. Maybe some of them will break off from his bunch and come our way.”

“I doubt it. Those sectarians are tight as ticks.”

“We’ll see. It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what kind of country it is anymore,” Loren said, “and neither do you.”

We hiked past the burned-out hulk of the old wholesale beverage center.

“Do you want any of these trout to take home?” I finally said, offering my creel to Loren.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m just going to put them in the smoker. Go ahead. Take two.

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Tell Jane Ann I appreciated the wine.”

By now, we’d entered the town proper. The streetlamps were off, as usual. Many of the houses we passed were dark. I would venture that the population here was down by three-quarters. The safety net for the elderly had dissolved, with so much else, and since a disproportionate number of houses in town had been owned by older folks who had died off, many were now vacant. It was nice to see the Copeland kids running around playing in the yard beside their big old place, with candles burning inside, welcoming and homey. Jerry Copeland was our doctor. He was a GP but he had to do it all, becoming an excellent surgeon by necessity. The hospital in Glens Falls had closed after the flu killed more than half the staff. Jerry had trouble getting medicines and supplies, but he was also resourceful. His wife, Jeanette, was an able assistant and a dazzling soprano. Their boys were polite and well behaved. Being so few in numbers, children no longer enjoyed solidarity in rebellion, and our society was too fragile to indulge much symbolic misbehavior. The flu had carried off Jerry’s youngest, a girl named Fawn. There was nothing even he could do.

We eventually came to Loren’s parish house next to the big white wooden church on Salem Street. The church was in excellent condition because those of us who remained did not have diversions like television or recreational shopping anymore, and the church had become our get-together place in a way churches had ceased to be for generations. So we took care of it. We worked on it and we kept it painted, though of course paint wasn’t what it used to be either. We made it ourselves out of slaked lime, milk, and chalk.