James Kunstler: World Made by Hand

I gave Loren two nice trout of my five and we said goodnight.

My house was a block and a half past where Linden Street met Salem Street. On nights like this the surface normality of smalltown America overwhelmed you with sadness. Here and there a candle glowed in a window, but people worked hard and were likely to turn in when the sun went down, so it was difficult to tell occupied houses from vacant ones. My own house was haunted by the ghosts of my family: wife Sandy, gone from an outbreak of encephalitis, daughter Genna, taken by the flu, and son Daniel, who left home and did not return. The sight of the place plunged me into memory and feeling no matter how many times I came upon it.

Just as things were starting to fall apart, Sandy had painted the house a gray-violet with sage green trim. She was a stickler for quality materials, and the paint had stood up well in the years since. The house was built in 1904 in the arts-and-crafts style, which was a romantic reaction to the juggernaut of industry, and perhaps because of that it worked well under these new conditions of austerity. The front porch was deep and graceful, though I had lately been using it as a woodshop in the warm part of the year. Inside it was generous for a bungalow, with four bedrooms in all, and it had many fine touches, including oak wainscoting, a cozy inglenook beside the fieldstone fireplace, built-in bookshelves everywhere, and graceful windows with arched sashes that still slid beautifully and closed snugly after more than a hundred years.

I lost Sandy and eleven-year-old Genna in two successive years. Daniel was thirteen when his sister passed away and nineteen when he set out from here, which was two years ago, and I wished I knew whether he was alive and well, and where he had gone and been to, but there were no more phones or mail as we once knew them. I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now.

I don’t think the electricity had been on for half an hour all that month. When it did come on it was always at some time you least expected it, before you could do something useful with it, like run a board through a planer. It cut out as mysteriously as it came on, so you didn’t dare start any job of work involving machines. When the electricity was on, you didn’t get much over the radio. We apparently had a president now named Harvey Albright, but I would be damned if I knew how he got elected because they didn’t hold it here. This was well after the short, unhappy reign of General Fellowes, who removed President Sharpe from office on account of the fiasco in the Holy Land and might have been instrumental in his death. Fellowes himself was taken down by the more constitutionally minded generals, and Vice President Beebe was installed to finish Ted Sharpe’s term, with the army looking over his shoulder. The various shifting factions worked hard at managing the news even as the TV, newspapers, and Internet were failing in one way or another from irregular electric service.

The bomb in Washington put an end to that revolving cast of political characters. We heard rumors that a federal government had been reorganized in Nashville and then Chicago under Speaker of the House Rhodes, who was out of town when Washington was bombed. By that time we weren’t getting any oil from the Middle East or Venezuela, and even the mail stopped. The last election evidently happened around the time of the flu, when every community was shuttered up in desperate quarantine, at least here in the upper Hudson River Valley. It seemed to me that the federal government was little more than a figment of the collective memory. Everything was local now. We liked to think the worst disorders were behind us, that we came out on the other side of something. But the truth was we didn’t know what the truth was anymore.

I had put some raspberry canes in the side yard three years ago, and they had filled in nicely. I noticed drupes were forming on the canes but were still green and hard. In a week or so I would have all the raspberries I could eat. I could also trade them for bacon. I was lighting a stub of candle on the kitchen counter when I heard a sigh and wheeled around to see Jane Ann’s face emerge out of the warm light as the wick took flame.

“It’s only me,” she said.

“You scared me.”

“It’s not your night.”

“I know.”

“Loren’s back too, of course.”

“He can find his way around the house okay without me.”

“He’ll worry.”

“I brought you a brown bread,” she said. Jane Ann was resourceful in the kitchen. We had trouble getting wheat lately because trade had fallen off, and we couldn’t grow it locally because of a persistent wheat rust in the soil that returned no matter how you rested a field. Mostly we had to rely on corn and buckwheat, with some barley, rye, and oats. Buckwheat, of course, is not even remotely related to real wheat. It has no gluten in it. Ground into flour, it was good only for pancakes. Otherwise, we ate the whole groats boiled, like rice, or baked like a pilaf with other things mixed in. Jane Ann’s brown bread was corn and rye, sweetened with honey and steamed rather than baked. It was her New England heritage.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

For some time now, Jane Ann had been visiting me one night a week in a connubial way. Usually she came Thursday nights. It was an arrangement. She was my best friend’s wife. My wife was dead. No suitable single women were around. Loren was apparently no longer able to have sexual relations with Jane Ann for reasons that I did not delve into but were probably not that mysterious. After all, things happened to people and between people and it was not necessarily anyone’s fault. We were able to manage things among the three of us this way. Perhaps we flattered ourselves to think it could go on like that indefinitely. But Jane Ann had no intention of leaving Loren, and I didn’t want her to. It wouldn’t have helped her or me or any of us if she did. She had been in a state of despair since her girl was taken by the flu and her son, Evan, went off to see the country with my Daniel, who was a year older than him. We used to call people like her “depressed,” but we dropped those clinical locutions because despair was a spiritual condition that was as real to us as the practical difficulties we struggled with in everyday life. Jane Ann could not stop mourning. She was not the person she used to be, but she resembled her.

She reached up and undid my belt buckle in the candlelight. At forty-seven, Jane Ann was still a beautiful woman, with deep breasts, a slim waist, and a small behind. Her qualities of physical beauty were undiminished by the constant sorrow she carried like a burdensome cargo. These days, most anyone who had survived was in good physical condition because life was so relentlessly physical, unless they drank too much. She generally kept her silvery gold hair in a fat braid. Sometimes she let it out for me because I asked her to, as a favor, but only if I asked. She told me she was beyond capable of conceiving a child, but I secretly believed that our relations were, on her part, an enactment of the wish to do so. I loved Jane Ann but I was conscious that I was making love with a ghost. She was so unlike my Sandy that I could not have pretended she was Sandy, and Jane Ann was not altogether present herself either.

This night we made love quickly as though doing each other a routine kindness. I felt sorry for both of us, and for Loren too, old as we all were and rather hopeless in our strange circumstances. Afterward, Jane Ann sat on the edge of the bed lacing her doeskin slippers. Her shoulders seemed to slump in the candlelight.

“I heard somebody bought the high school,” she said. “A preacher with a congregation, they say.”