James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“Probably not in the way you mean.”

“Can I have a bite?”

I held out the chunk of beefsteak so she could have some, and she nibbled off a piece, gripping my hand to steady it in the process, and giving an excellent demonstration of how her lips worked.

“Would you like to know the Lord?” she said. The buzz of chatter was so loud we practically had to shout into each other’s ears. I could smell the scent of her skin and fresh laundry.

“I’ll pass for now,” I said.

“Knowing Jesus is like an orgasm, I find.”

“That’s more than I could bear,” I said. “It’d give me the vapors.

“Are you mocking me?”

“No. Where are you from, Annabelle?”

“Raleigh-Durham area, originally.”

“And what were your people originally?”

“Greek,” she said and covered her bashful smile with four long fingers. “My daddy had seven pizza shops.”

“Were they Eastern Orthodox?”

“No, they were just regular pizza, but you could get lots of toppings.”

“No, I meant your parents.”

Annabelle giggled and kind of slapped my shoulder and then sort of pressed herself into me so I could feel the yielding curves of her torso.

“They were pagans,” she said. “Our religion was pizza. You’re cute.”

Just then I heard an electronic crackle from inside the barn. Bullock was onstage. He started making a speech. His amplified voice was garbled from where we stood, far over by the barbeque. There was applause. A lot of the crowd had begun to migrate inside the barn. More speech, more applause. Then Brother Jobe took over the mike, and whatever he was saying provoked several outbursts of laughter as well as applause. He knew how to work a crowd.

“Would you like to stroll up into yonder field with me?” Annabelle said.

I was amazed at her forwardness. And, I must confess, more than a little aroused at that point.

“Did Brother Jobe put you up to this, by any chance?”

“Huh?”

Something about her smile told me she was playing dumb.

“I think there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Annabelle said, still beaming radiantly.

“You’re very charming, Annabelle,” I said, “but your bunch has got to stop trying to recruit me. Especially on such a lovely night as this when we should all relax and have a good time.”

Just then, Loren found me and took my elbow and dragged me away into the barn, where I had to get up on stage with Joseph and the three other brothers who I went down to Albany with, and Tom and Skip and the boys from the Elizabeth, and there was more clapping and hugging and good fellowship and salutations. I still had the rest of the beefsteak in my fingers. Finally Bullock said the music and dancing would commence presently, and the rest of the Union Grove music circle came up and traded places on stage with the heroes of the occasion, and I got my fiddle out of its case, and the others started tuning up to Andy’s harmonium, and I could see Annabelle way over to the side with Brother Jobe, no doubt reporting the outcome of her mission. The cheeky rascal saw me looking at him, raised his cider glass in my direction, and gave me a big wink.

We warmed up with some nice loose-limbed old-time tunes starting with “The Maysville Road,” “Big Scioty,” “Saint Anne’s Reel,” “Lost Indian,” “Granny Will Your Dog Bite,” “Speed the Plow,” “Hell among the Yearlings,” and “Blackberry Blossom.” We played the tunes in clumps, medley-style, and either we were in especially fine form, or we were pretty lit, or both, because we all swapped glances around the stage, Andy and Dan and Eric and Charles and Bruce and Leslie and me, and all of us had big goofy smiles plastered on our faces like we hadn’t felt so good in a long time, and how could we be so dumb as to have neglected the music circle all these weeks. And the crowd below got into the spirit right away, with no bashful waiting around for somebody else to step out on the dance floor first. They all went right to it. By the time we got some traction on “Big Scioty,” what do you know but Brother Minor emerged from the crowd, jumped up on stage, and began calling figures. You could tell that he knew what he was doing. Between calls, he plugged a Jew’s harp in his mouth and twanged along with our tunes-another of his strange talents.

When we completed the opening medleys, Loren came over to the stage with a big pitcher of cider for us. Jane Ann, I couldn’t fail to notice, lingered off to the side of the dance floor with her arms wrapped around herself, as if holding on for dear life. She was wearing a beautiful old peacock blue sequined satin gown that seemed to hark way back to the mid-twentieth century, something that Barbara Stanwyck would have worn to the Academy Awards in 1953. It frightened me to think how gone the past was, and to see Jane Ann looking so beautiful and so desolate. But then Eric sent a pipe around the circle, and we hit the cider again and started in on the main part of the program, which was the contra dance part, the pieces we really excelled at, the English eighteenth-century dance tunes out ofJohn Playford’s English Dancing Master anthologies. These tunes included “Juice of the Barley,” “Newcastle,” “Lord Burghley’s Maggot” (meaning a “whim,” not a worm), “Liliburlero,” “The Chestnut,” “The Rakes of Rochester,” “Gathering Peascods,” and a few of the beautiful Irish O’Carolan tunes that Shawn Watling had liked so much: “Sheebeg and Sheemore,” “Planxty Irwin,” and “Fanny Power.” The Union Grove people knew what to do, but everybody else was confused by the antique steps, which were more complex than square dance figures, and the New Faith people stood off to the sides watching. Eventually, a few at a time, they ventured to join in the lines and quadrilles on the dance floor, and our people showed them every consideration in teaching them how it all went.

Our set ran over an hour. At the break, I climbed down from the stage and was immediately engulfed by Elsie DeLong, Cody’s wife, a rather large woman of about sixty, with breasts like Hubbard squashes, and evidently quite drunk. She planted her lips on mine and said, “I’ll take him,” to her surrounding girlfriends, who howled and cackled. I slipped out of her clutches and made off through the crowd. Near the door, Brother Jobe took me aside by the arm.

“The jenny’s yours,” he said.

“Huh?”

“That little donk you all rescued down in Albany. You can have her and the cart she come with. I daresay you could use her.”

“Why, thank you. But I have nowhere to keep her.”

“You can keep her over our way for now. Come and get her when you need her.”

“Okay. Gosh. I appreciate that.”

“I’d like to breed her to our jack, though, if you don’t mind.”

“By all means.”

“It can only help to have a few more donks. Especially a younger jack. Oh, say, suppose you could manage a turn at the old `Virginia Reel’ when you boys come back on? It’d mean a lot to my people.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Didn’t you like that other little gift I sent your way?”

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but…”

“You’re a hard case, old son.”

“Just an old heathen.”

He reached up and tousled my hair like he was my camp counselor and then peeled off to flirt with some of the Union Grove ladies.

I made my way out of the barn. It was mercifully cooler in the fresh air, and the night smelled sweetly of hay. My head swam, as much from playing hard for an hour as from all the cider and pot. I found a quiet spot in the vicinity of the bar where I had run into Annabelle earlier. Stephen Bullock stepped up to me there.