James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“And what’d that be?”

“You got more goddamn questions-get out of my goddamn way.

The old man put the engine back in gear and continued on, hardly giving Seth a chance to step his mount aside. He wove the car around a stretch of divots, ruts, and potholes and we watched him go, the very sight of an automobile going down the road a marvel, like seeing history come back to life. He had gone perhaps a hundred yards when we heard a little pop. I thought, oh no, he’s gone and blown a tire, given how old they must have been, and how rough the road, but the car did not stop. It veered to the side of the road and then clean off the shoulder and into a shrubby field where it plowed over a series of poplar saplings before coming to rest with a crunch against the trunk of a mature black ash tree. Even so, the engine kept running and the horn blared. We hurried down to it.

The old man lay slumped against the wheel. Tom and I helped get him out. He had a gash above an eyebrow. We laid him down in the weeds-black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace-and realized he was no longer breathing. Then we discovered it wasn’t the crash that had killed him. Rather, his tattered flannel shirt was dark and sopping with blood. We ripped it open. Underneath he had a clean purple hole in his chest with a slightly raised doughnut of blue flesh around it, just over his heart. Minor rooted around the interior of the car and emerged holding the pistol. He examined the cylinder and said, “One spent shell, all right. Sumbitch done himself in. How do you like that?”

Joseph slid down off his horse as though he was suddenly all in a hurry and stalked over to Minor.

“Give me that damn thing,” he said and wrenched the gun out of Minor’s hand, and proceeded to cuff him across the head, driving the smaller man to the ground. “You think death is just another of your jokes,” Joseph said. “I’m sick of it.”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with this—”

“You got to talk trash with everybody that crosses your path?”

“You think he kilt himself’cause I made a little chitchat?”

“Calling him a godless sumbitch! I got half a mind to strop you skinless.”

“Just you try it!” Minor reached for the dagger he called the last resort. Joseph kicked it out of his hand and, using a move that he might have learned in the military, had Minor flipped over with his face pinned in the weeds, a knee on his neck, and both of his arms nearly dislocated, held painfully behind him.

“Ow, ow! Damn you, you’re hurtin’ me!” Minor said.

“I aim to hurt you,” Joseph said. “If you ever raise up a weapon against one of your brothers again, you’ll get hurt so bad you’ll never recover. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I can’t breathe!”

“I don’t care about your comfort just now.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” Minor said. Joseph released his arms and his boot from Minor’s neck, but Minor remained facedown. His body shook and he seemed to be blubbering. The Union Grove men turned away, in embarrassment I suppose. Elam and Seth eventually helped Minor back up on his feet. Jenny stood at the edge of the road in front of her cart blinking at us.

We made inquires up the road and eventually found the old man’s people living a mile away in a miserable split-level house that sat alone on a hill, with two windows over a gaping garage door that gave it the look of a woeful human face. All around it lay a poorly kept garden composed of little more than squash vines, the garden of people who had lost the will to cultivate anything, as well as the knowledge to do so. Stumps around the house indicated that the shade trees had been cut down over the years, probably to heat the place. Now, with the temperature above ninety, the sun beat down remorselessly on the asphalt shingle roof. It was one of millions of such cheap houses erected in the last century in rural places on one-acre road frontage out-parcels cut from old farms when nobody cared whether they lived near a town or a job because they could always hop in the car and drive somewhere. If the place had a drilled well with a submersible electric pump, then it probably didn’t have running water these days. It was exactly the kind of place that Wayne Karp’s crew was disassembling for materials all around Washington County as the owners died or went crazy.

A living scarecrow answered the door looking enough like the dead man to have been his son. And so he proved to be. He barely registered any emotion when we told him what happened. The old man’s body was slung facedown over Joseph’s horse but the man said he recognized the clothes.

“We’re sorry about it,” Joseph said.

An equally scrawny woman stood behind the man in a pool of darkness, with her hand over her mouth. The inside of the house stank fiercely. You could smell it wafting out the door.

“Would you care to help us bury him?” the man said, adding, “We can’t pay.”

“Sure, we’ll help you,” Joseph said.

So we, the able-bodied, spent an hour digging another grave out beyond the squash vines, and Joseph conducted another funeral. Minor didn’t speak a word, but he did more than his share of the digging. I noticed that Joseph did not give the couple the old man’s gun, though he did hand over the car keys. Nor did he bother to proselytize them. We were anxious to return to the road, being within striking distance of home. Once we passed through Starkville proper, the landscape grew recognizable, and I felt tears of gratitude well up inside as the familiar contours of Willard Mountain and the little range of hills known as the Gavottes came into view.

At our journey’s end another long day had spent itself. When our party entered the front drive of the Bullock farm, we’d marched twenty miles since breakfast, pausing to dig a six-foot hole in the ground. The sun was down, but plenty of purple afterglow remained and to the east a coppery quarter moon was rising in the warm haze. The antique foursquare manse never looked lovelier, with trumpet vine blossoming over the pergola outside the kitchen, roses in the arbors, two potted fig trees beside the door, swallows dipping around the eaves, and purposeful human activity evident everywhere your eye came to rest. Lights glowed warmly inside the big house and a Debussy recording played. It was the epitome of what you would want to return home to after a harrowing journey to a dark place.

I could see Stephen and Sophie Bullock at their dinner table through the French windows as we rode up. We must have made quite a commotion in the stillness of that hour. They put down their forks and bustled out of the house. The courtyard between the big house and the barns and workshops soon filled with Bullock’s servants, and someone rang a bell that tolled out over the fields. The four boatmen seemed overcome with emotion. Tom was weeping again. Skip fell to his knees by the big oak tree. Even Jake uncharacteristically shook and blubbered. Bullock helped Aaron down from the horse and held him up in his arms until Aaron was steady on his feet. Roger Lippy hooked leads on and led Temperance and Cadmus to the soapstone water trough. Sophie helped Skip up off the ground, and he subsided in her arms, sobbing. Shouts rang out in the distance in the still evening air. Soon most of the inhabitants of Bullock’s village swept down the lanes between the fields and the barns, answering what was generally construed to be an alarm bell, to find their friends, husbands, fathers returned from the dead. Sophie called for cider and soon pitchers of the potent brew went around.

Bullock steered Joseph and myself away from the celebrating throng to his office inside the house. It was a spacious, airy room, with walls of built-in bookshelves, a long trestle table laid with engineering drawings for his various projects, and a beautifully carved cherry wood desk that had been his grandfather’s. I had tossed back a tumbler of cider and the warmth was flooding through my veins. Bullock now poured shots of his best whiskey from a cut glass decanter. He allowed as we were surely anxious to continue on home to Union Grove but wanted to know briefly how things had transpired in Albany. I told him about Dan Curry and how he was running an extortion and ransom racket there, and how we had found the boat and then the crew in his custody, and how he demanded payment outright for their release, calling it excise taxes and fines. Bullock said he could see it getting to this over the preceding year.