James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“Yes…?”

We stared at the two corpses another minute or so.

“The young man on the left there was brought in about three thirty in the morning,” he said. “Wayne here-well you brought him in yourself at noon.”

“That’s right.”

“You got any idea who killed him?”

I hesitated a moment as a whole catalog of scenarios, complications, explanations, and cockamamy stories scrolled through my imagination.

“I did,” I said.

“How come?”

“He was trying to escape.”

“What you kill him with?”

“Pistol.”

“There aren’t any bullets in Wayne’s head. Whatever did this to him, it wasn’t a bullet.”

“Maybe they passed through.”

“There aren’t any exit wounds.”

“Hmm. That’s odd too.”

“I’ll say.”

I glanced back and forth between the corpses and Jerry.

“Just thought you’d be interested,” Jerry said after an awkward interval. “He was an arrogant prick, though, wasn’t he, Wayne Karp?”

“He wasn’t a model citizen,” I said. “But he was a leader of men, in his own way.”

We stood there and gazed at the bodies a while longer, and then Jerry drew the tarp back over their faces.

In the days that followed, stories circulated around town about Brother Minor and Wayne Karp coming to an eerily similar end. I doubt Jerry said anything to anyone, but Jeanette might have whispered it among her circle, or perhaps their boy Jasper told his friends, who might have told their parents. Anyway, the tale got around and was quickly conventionalized into an eye-for-an-eye legend which, in ten more years, would probably mutate into a classic ghost story of our region. I had to answer for Karp’s death in an inquest, but the coroner was Jerry Copeland, and the matter was little more than a procedural formality, though my testimony was completely false. The truth would have been too incredible for the community to digest.

Not long after I had left Jerry in the springhouse that night, a New Faith delegation came by and took Minor’s body away to prepare it for burial. Wayne’s people got wind of his demise and sent a wagon down the following day to get him. Which is to say that nobody besides Jerry and me really examined the two bodies side by side, and nobody else knew how precisely their wounds compared, or what might have caused them-except for one other person, and I was not altogether sure anymore that he was exactly what you might call a person.

But the story was spooky enough to keep the superstitious denizens of Karptown from mounting revenge on Union Grovethat and perhaps their fear of the New Faith cavalry. We heard stories about them too, about how one would-be alpha male or another was jockeying for leadership of their community with Wayne gone, and factions had formed, and friction was leading to conflict among them. There was also talk of the New Faith bunch taking over the operation of the general supply and the old landfill with it, but we in town preferred the Karptowners to keep running it since it occupied the time of the more antisocial elements in Washington County and afforded them a means of support to keep them from banditry and other mischief. We didn’t care, especially, who ruled their little world, though we preferred someone who might be reasoned with. And for all of their peculiarities and shortcomings, the Karptown bunch had a system down for collecting a lot of useful materials that we depended on, and trading it more or less fairly.

I thought it was a good sign when Brother Jobe decided to bury Minor in the Union Grove cemetery, instead of somewhere on the grounds of the old high school. Minor was the first of their number to pass away since they came here. It made me wonder whether some of the New Faithers might begin drifting away from the core group and move in amongst us in town, rather than any of us going over to their side, which had been everyone’s fear until then. There were plenty of empty houses around town.

As it became known that Brother Jobe’s own son had been killed, much of the resentment against the sect, and him in particular, was put aside. Many Union Grove people attended Minor’s funeral service at the high school and followed the coffin to the town cemetery afterward, and Brother Jobe gave a eulogy of exceptional eloquence-though he looked to me, at odd moments, strangely like a large insect in his black garb, with his arms waving this way and that way in fervid gesticulation so that there seemed to be many more than two of them.

Two weeks later, Brother Jobe went before Bullock on a firstdegree battery complaint in the matter of cutting off the beards of nine individuals against their will. A guilty plea was entered and Brother Jobe was fined nine thousand dollars, about the price of a hundred-pound sack of buckwheat groats.

After Minor’s funeral, the life of our town and the factions within it and around it seemed to settle into that fugitive condition I refer to as normality-which, I suppose, is a way of saying a merciful period of time in which nothing terrible happens. Though things did happen. Heath Rucker, the former constable, and even more distantly a State Farm Insurance claims adjuster, was found hanged in his kitchen from a length of cable, clearly a suicide. He had no family left. The temperature on July twentieth reached 107 degrees, the highest that any record existed for in our area. Della Laudermilk had a baby, the first one born in our community that year. Carl Weibel’s son, Will, wed Felix Holyrood’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, a marriage of consequence for two of the leading farm families of the region. Sister Annabelle of the New Faith came to preside over the new clothing store they opened next to the barbershop on Main. Brother Jobe was right about one thing: the New Faith look caught on because people in town started wearing the clothes they made. The secular look, composed of remnants of the old days or often clumsily sewn homemade clothes, seemed downright shabby in comparison.

By midsummer, Stephen Bullock resumed regular trade with Albany with a new, larger boat, though he eventually recovered the Elizabeth too. Among the interesting items that came our way from that trade via Einhorn’s store was a sack of coffee beans (which lasted three days), some additional supplies of weevil-free true wheat flour, a hundred-weight of sea salt, fifty pounds of Dutch cocoa, and a crate of somewhat shriveled, leathery-skinned lemons. Bullock learned that the port of Albany was under new and more honest administration, and that the remainder of Dan Curry’s bunch had been rooted out like rats.

Loren Holder recovered from his injuries and returned to his duties at the First Congregational, though he told me and several other close friends that he had “lost God.” If so, then it might have been the conclusion of an older personal struggle that predated his encounter with Wayne Karp. And anyway he seemed to hedge his bets by saying it was more possible that the human race possessed a spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show, and maybe it was the job of clergy to nurture that divine spark in us and make something of it. The word worship always rubbed him the wrong way, anyhow, Loren said. That summer, Loren also got the other project dear to his heart underway: conversion of the old Wayland-Union Mill building into a community laundry, with one Brother Shiloh, formerly a civil engineer for the Roanoke Water Authority, assigned by Brother Jobe to figure out a plumbing scheme.

The music circle resumed regular Christmas practice Monday nights, while the ever busy Andrew Pendergast organized auditions for a fall production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1940s musical, Carousel. The role of Julie Jordan went to Maggie Furnival. The story was set in a New England seacoast mill town in the nineteenth century, something more our speed lately than the Broadway hijinks of Guys and Dolls.