James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“Did you kill him, Minor?” Joseph said.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Minor said. “Sumbitch probably fell out drunk and cracked his durn head.”

I stooped down. The stench he gave offwas impressive up close. Around the ragged edge of his dirty shirt, above the gross wound to his abdomen, you could see a pattern of small round holes, like shotgun pellets would make. I did not point it out, but I don’t think the others failed to notice either. I remembered that gunshotlike blast of thunder the night before and imagined this nameless wretch reeling out the stable door and collapsing where he now sat, to die in the rain, with a pig in his guts.

“I judge that this poor soul is beyond our assistance,” Minor said, “and if I linger here, I’m liable to lose my breakfast.”

“I suppose we can leave him for the constable,” Joseph said.

“If they got any law here,” Elam said.

“Anyway, it ain’t our business,” Minor said.

And so we went about our business, but not before Joseph invoked Matthew 5:13: “Ye are the salt of the earth,” he said, “but ifthe salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men.”

Traders from elsewhere along the Hudson Valley were already out on Commercial Row, and men with drays and carts were busy moving goods off the wharves in a clatter of wheels and dust. Some smaller vendors had joined them along the street, selling fish, vegetables, and odd items of salvage from wagons and tarps spread on the ground. Here and there, snatches of songs of the loaders could be heard. Not everybody’s business was off, but it seemed a very dull trade in necessities. No groups collected on the street to socialize, as one might expect in a livelier marketplace. Hardly any women were among the traders, and the men were furtive in their movements. They scuttled in and out of the trading houses like wary rodents or bugs and left with whatever goods they’d purchased without lingering.

We found some of the things we needed among Minnery’s General Stocks, Hyde’s Salvage and Made Goods, and VanVoast’s Import and General Trade Articles, the three largest competing establishments on the row, and Aulk’s Provisions, the food wholesaler. I found aspirin, reusable hypodermic syringes, IV catheters, and adhesive tape for Doc Copeland. I could not find antiseptic or antibiotic medicines of any kind. Nor did they have any lidocaine or topical anesthetic for our dentist. I purchased a five-ream box of plain white twenty-pound bond paper (Xerox brand from the old days) and a gross of Phinney no. 4 steel pen points. They didn’t have any manufactured ink in stock, but you could make that easily enough yourself from lampblack or walnut shells. The New Faithers were delighted to come across a fifty-pound sack of peanuts, which they had not seen any of in some time, they said, as well as the other articles on their list, and some of Mr. Ricketts’s remaining inventory in linen fabrics at a very high price, which they apparently could afford Joseph’s fund of silver seemed bottomless. VanVoast’s actually had on hand a small inventory of manufactured instrument strings, and I bought several sets of guitar, violin, and cello strings. It had been years since we’d had any new ones, making do with the gut strings Andrew produced.

We loaded all these things onto the cart, covered it with our waxed ground cloth, and set out on a systematic search of the wharves and their attached boathouses.

We divided into two groups, Joseph and myself to go one way, Elam and Seth the other, leaving Minor again in charge of the animals in a scrub pasture that used to be the football field of a public school on DeWitt Street. The school building itself was a scavenged ruin. One of the goalpost uprights remained in place. It was already hot out in the field. Plenty of rainwater stood in puddles for the animals. Minor found a spot of shade under a sumac tree and seemed content there while the horses grazed peacefully. I gathered that Joseph didn’t trust Minor’s hot head in the kind of search we were about to undertake, mixing with the locals and all. Joseph and I said we would work the wharves from the north end down. Elam and Seth would start near the waterworks and work up. We said we’d meet up in between somewhere.

So we set off, making like we were looking for a boat to buy. In fact, there were a lot of boats for sale along the wharves, given the depressed conditions lately, and we had to pretend to inquire about them, so it took the whole morning to work down the row, but we didn’t come across the Elizabeth. Along the way, we caught quite a bit of news chatting with the owners, traders, and dockmen and boatmen. For instance, we learned that a recent hurricane had crossed the east end of Long Island and swept up along the New England coast, drowning many of the towns east of Providence before swerving out to sea at Cape Cod. Boston was spared, but Boston might have benefited from a bath, one sloop owner said with a gallows laugh. The violent thunderstorms we’d seen in the Hudson Valley were a backwash of all that rough weather, he said. We heard that a gang of pickers had nearly burned down the town of Kinderhook while plundering the place. Several were captured and hanged. A bad gypsy moth infestation was moving north and had reached as far as Rhinebeck. At night, they said, you could hear the caterpillars munching on leaves, their numbers were so great. In some places down there, the trees were so denuded it looked like November. One boatyard owner said that the Chinese had landed on the moon, but his partner scoffed at the notion and said that the other man also believed there was still plenty of oil in the world, and a conspiracy between the Arabs and the Asian Coprosperity Alliance had deprived America of its share because “they hated our freedom.” Who really knew anymore? On the bright side of things, the shad run in the Hudson had been the best ever seen by people still living, though a lot fewer people were living than a decade ago.

At half past noon, having found nothing up along the north end of the waterfront, we met up with Seth and Elam, who said excitedly that they were sure they’d found the Elizabeth in the fourth place they looked, a boatyard associated with VanVoast’s Import. It was inside a big red boathouse which stood out in the distance against the china blue sky.

“How do you know it’s the right boat?” Joseph said.

“Oh, it’s her all right,” Seth said.

“The name Elizabeth is spelled out on the transom with a rose painted to each side of the name,” Elam said. This was what Mr. Bullock had specified in his written instructions. No sign of the crew. There was a manager on the premises and a few idle dockmen, waiting for a cargo. Elam and Seth had looked over the boat and left the place with a cursory thank you. We decided to go back immediately all together and ask some hard questions.

The manager of the VanVoast terminal, a well-fed man named Bracklaw, he said, sporting a set of bright green suspenders to hold up a pair of slovenly linen trousers, showed a high degree of alertness as the four of us entered the dim, cavernous boathouse, with swallows careening through the sturdy trusswork overhead. In fact, he seemed downright nervous seeing how Seth and Elam had suddenly multiplied to four of us. A couple of catboats occupied one side of the main slip, and there were side slips too, where the Elizabeth sat among an assortment of small craft. Bracklaw’s dockmen were not on the premises, perhaps off on lunch.

Joseph suggested we all go into the office and talk. Bracklaw resisted the idea but Joseph more or less shoved him in and we all followed. Elam closed the curtain on the window that faced Commercial Row. Seth kept his eyes on the opposite window, looking into the interior of the boathouse. Bracklaw was allowed to occupy his own ancient swivel chair behind a very disorderly desk piled with old cargo manifests and assorted junk. The chair squeaked every time he moved.