James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

Minor appreciated the joke more than anyone, of course.

Bullock’s men obviously didn’t know what to make of Minor. But he had caught several large pike and had roasted them up and fixed a pot of buckwheat groats, onions and fresh nettles to go with them, and boiled two dozen eggs that he’d traded for along the way, and that was all Bullock’s men concerned themselves with. They ate like wild animals, and when the fish and eggs and groats were gone they asked for more, so Minor turned out pan after pan of corn cakes, which they ate with butter and honey. Aaron was able to choke down a few of them too, and the others said it was the first they had seen him eat in days. By then, the sun had set, while the air remained mild. Joseph brought out the whiskey bottle and passed it among us. Elam sang a song about East Virginia in a reedy, mournful voice, and Joseph sang a brighter one about fair and tender maidens, with Minor playing harmonica softly behind him. I wished I’d had my fiddle there. Shortly, Bullock’s boatmen were snoring in the fragrant grass.

Joseph and the brothers discussed the attributes and shortcomings of various New Faith women, and which ones would be nice to “get with,” and I didn’t know whether this was their argot for getting married, or whether more casual arrangements prevailed among them. They teased Minor remorselessly about his interest in a girl named Zilpah, and Minor retreated into playing his har monica. They said that anyone who had been in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., as they had, seemed to have trouble bearing children. It concerned them that their community had so few. I told them that the same was true apparently of people who had recovered from the flu or one of the other illnesses that had visited us. They said a good deal of their prayer every day was devoted to asking God for children. I asked if it bothered them that their prayers weren’t answered, and they said it must be God’s will. Seth said God had decided the earth was overpopulated, and I asked how come he let it get that way in the first place. Seth said that God loved his children so much that he couldn’t bring himself to cut back until all this climate wickedness started and then he had to do something to save the planet from overheating and killing every last living thing on it. I argued that the human race should have known it was in for trouble, at least we in the United States should have, given how insane our way of life had become. Minor quit blowing into his harmonica long enough to say that John D. Rockefeller and the Bush family had made a deal with the Devil going back all the way to the 1900s.

By this time, my head was swimming with whiskey and the others sounded like they were far gone themselves. We let the fire run down. It was a warm night. Smoke from the smoldering embers helped keep the mosquitoes away. I lay back against my saddle to gaze at the stars twinkling against the incomprehensible depth of space and eternity, reflecting that I had shot a man, probably to death, that afternoon and had been an accessory in the killing of Dan Curry and his secretary, Birkenhaus. And the others had killed at least several more. Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required?

The rest of our journey home would have been unremarkable, even pleasant except for a disturbing encounter on Route 4, the River Road, some five miles south of Starkville in midafternoon the next day when we came upon an old man driving an automobile. Yes, an automobile.

I had not seen a car in motion for years. This one was a Ford, the big Explorer model, the color of dull brass, with daisies of rust around the wheel wells and a broken rear window. It was creeping down the road slower than our horses might go at a moderate walk. The pavement on Route 4 was badly broken with potholes, and the driver was obviously steering around them with the utmost care. He came to a stop as we approached. His engine knocked, sputtered, and backfired.

“What you running that thing on, old-timer?” Minor said.

“Who wants to know?” the old man said. He might have been eighty years old given the wizened face beneath a stained and tattered baseball cap. “You pickers or regulators?”

“Naw, just regular folks,” Minor said and flashed a big grin around at all of us. He’d been walking, leading Jenny and the cart. Aaron Moyer was up on Minor’s horse, sitting straight in the saddle on his own now, feeling better after a day in the fresh air and sunshine. The rest of us soon formed a circle around the car. “Where you going in that thing, anyway?” Minor said.

“None of your damn business.”

“Excuse me for breathing,” Minor said.

“I got a firearm,” the old man said.

“Well you should,” Skip Tarbay said. “But keep the safety on. We’re men of Union Grove.”

“Far afield, ain’t you?”

“Far enough, and coming home from Albany now, thank God.”

“Is the mall still there?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. That wasn’t the part we were at. Hope you’re not aiming to go down there in your car.”

“Nope. I just like to keep her running,” the old man said. “You know, use it or lose it.”

“Sounds like she’s losing it,” Minor said. “What’s she running on?”

“Grain spirits.”

“A waste of the taste, if you ask me,” Minor said.

“I can’t taste nothing anyway,” the old man said. “And who asked you?”

“Must be uncomfortable driving that thing on this busted up road,” Skip said.

“It’s a damn sorry excuse for a state highway. The state won’t fix it. How do you like that? The taxes we paid all those years and look what we got to show for it.”

“Don’t hold your breath waiting for improvements, old-timer,” Minor said.

“We got a right to decent roads. This ain’t the American way.”

“The American way has kind of lost its way,” Minor said. “Maybe you should get a horse.”

The old man snorted scornfully and spat out the window onto the fissured asphalt. “This is supposed to be the modern age.”

“The modern age went to hell some time ago.”

“Is that so? Well I don’t like it.”

“It’s a fact we all got to live with.”

“You should have been around in the 1960s, boy. Hooo-weee. Gas was twenty-five cents and the roads were smooth as a baby’s behind. You could buy good bread and ground round anywhere, and the TV came on when you felt like it. Now nothing’s on when you want it.”

“It ain’t even on when you don’t want it,” Minor said, to everyone’s amusement. “Do the home folks know you’re out and about?” “They don’t give a damn whether I live or die.”

“You must be lonesome, then, old man.”

“It ain’t none of your damn business what I am.”

“Have you found the Lord?”

“No, I ain’t.”

“You could find some comfort there.”

“I’ll pass, thank you.”

“Why don’t you try letting him into your heart?”

“I don’t care to. I got this far without it.”

“This far ain’t nothing,” Minor said, raising his voice shrilly. “What about the trackless eternity you’re going to spend down in hell, old man, where the modern age is still going strong, waiting patiently for you to show up and sign back on? And you’ll get there pretty durn soon, I imagine, from the looks of you.”

“Are you crazy or something?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, you talk like a goddamn crazy man.”

“And I ain’t drunk, neither. But if I was, I’d be sober tomorrow. And you’d still be a godless old sumbitch.”

“Sonny, I’d put a bullet in your ass if I wasn’t saving it for something worthwhile.”