“I see you like horses?” Brother Jobe said.
“I do.”
“There’s a lot to like there,” he said and bid me to climb aboard the rig. We took off at a trot.
It felt grand to sit high up behind that team and exhilarating to move so swiftly down the street, like the dream I had about the magic chair. He drove confidently. There was nothing I had yet seen that he was not confident about. The few people out on Main Street stopped to watch as we flew by. The temperature was rising, though, and he slowed the horses to a walk as soon as we got outside of town where there was no more need to show off, and the pavements got bad again. We passed the ruins of the Toyota dealership with its defunct lighting standards lording over a phantom inventory of sumac bushes where the Land Cruisers and Priuses used to sit parked in enticing ranks.
“I have work for you, old son,” he said.
“You’re not of any age to be my daddy,” I said.
“Figure of speech,” he said. “Relax.”
“You’re a cheeky son of a gun.”
“’Course I am. I’m a leader of men,” he said and cackled and gave me a little poke in the ribs. “Word is you are a fine woodworker.”
“Is that so?”
“You any good, then?”
“I’m plenty busy so I must be good enough.”
“Like I was saying.”
“You have plenty of hands among your followers,” I said. “Surely some of them are carpenters.”
“They’re coming along. I’d like for them to work with you, though. Learn a thing or two. There’s a particular special job over our way that needs doing.”
“What would that be?”
“You come by, I’ll show you.”
“Are you trying to recruit me?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Just so we understand each other.”
“Oh, I think we do. No strings attached.”
“I hear you’ve been coming around the young widow’s house.”
“We’ve dropped by, like everybody else, trying to help out.”
“You’re leaning on her to come over your way?”
“What’s wrong with that? You all bring her pies and meal and joints of meat. We offer that and more. We offer warm hearts and busy hands and shelter from the storm-and let me tell you, old son, in case you ain’t noticed, we got plenty of bad weather out there.”
We rolled on for a while without speaking, and I couldn’t resist the sheer enjoyment of the journey. The landscape had changed so much over the years. A lot of what had been forsaken, leftover terrain in the old days, was coming back into cultivation, mostly corn, some barley, oats, hay, and lots of fruit trees. Everywhere that had been a parking lot, the pavement was breaking up and growing over with scrub, sumac, and poplar mostly. The roadside corn mercial buildings going out of town to the west were in various stages of slow disassembly: the discount beverage warehouse, the strip mall where the movie rental, dollar store, and a Chinese takeout joint used to be. All the metal was stripped off. One particular building fascinated me whenever I came out this way: a bungalow that obviously once had been a regular house before it was engulfed by commercial sprawl, probably in the 1970s. The bungalow had finally evolved into a gift shop selling all kinds of poorly made and perfectly useless handicrafts to motor tourists bored by the interminable hours behind the wheel and desperate for any excuse to stop for a while. The word Gifts was still there in fading four-foothigh letters on the asphalt shingle roof.
“We don’t strong-arm nobody,” Brother Jobe said after a long interval of silence, bringing me out of myself. “If folks come over to us, it’s because of what they see we got to offer.”
“Our people are sore about the way you carried on at the funeral,” I said.
“Really? You all appear to be sunk in laxness and lassitude here.”
“It may seem that way to you, but they don’t like being pushed around any more than anybody else.”
“They’re demoralized, from what I can tell. Folks crave some structure in their lives. You want to see justice done? Don’t you? Ain’t that why you agreed to come along?”
I didn’t reply.
“You can’t live in fear of murderous thugs. And I tell you, we won’t tolerate them now. We have seen too much on our journey and come too far, and by God we are going to make a decent home here. Death has been our outrider all the way. We have learned how he drives men’s spirits, and the kind of respect he demands, and it ain’t in the key of D-major, my friend. Death ain’t no maypole dance. We seen what he did down around Washington.”
“How close did you get?” I said.
“We cut past the edge of the suburbs, coming out of Leesburg and across the highway bridge there into Montgomery County, Maryland. You couldn’t go any nearer. It’d be like committing suicide. We ran into people fleeing west, upwind of the city. Many of them were burned and had the radiation sickness. You’d come across bodies along the road. We couldn’t stop to bury them all. We did not linger.”
“You say you were in Pennsylvania a few years?”
“That’s so. The flu sickness was terrible there. It rained all winter, two in a row, and the summers were fierce. I think you might grow palmettos there now, the way this screwy weather is going. The white against black and so forth was spilling over from Philly too, and we had trouble with it.”
“What did your group live in there.”
“We had the use of a large spread, gratis, so to speak, but between the weather, the sickness, and the violence it was no go. I’ve got a good feeling about this little corner of the country, though. I don’t think the sorrows of the cities will make it up this far north, and I take it you still got something like winter up here.”
“It still snows and the ponds freeze.”
“Snow,” he said, breathing deeply. “I look forward to it like a little boy waiting on Christmas.”
Seventeen
Stephen Bullock strode out of the dark interior of his carriage barn as we came into his driveway at a trot. Brother Jobe told the team to get up on the approach to the big house to give himself a perky entrance.
“That’s Bullock right there,” I said, and Brother Jobe brought the horses to a snorting halt.
Bullock was about sixty, hale and brawny, six foot three in boots, with silver hair that hung to his shoulders and was only starting to thin in the front. He was clean-shaven like the New Faithers. His blade of a nose and penetrating blue eyes added to his look of Roman authority. His white linen shirt looked freshly laundered and he wore close-tailored tan riding trousers tucked into black boots. Striding toward us, he wiped off his hands with a rag and handed it, without a glance, to a chunky man in coarser apparel who had followed him out of the barn, as though he had every expectation that the man would be there to take it at the moment he wished to dispose of it. That would be Roger Lippy, who was long ago a salesman at the Chrysler dealer in town and now was Bullock’s chief factotum.
When he saw it was me up on the high seat, his forbidding expression gave way to a friendly smile. We’d always gotten along. He had a harvest ball every year that people came to from far and wide around the county, and he hired me and the usual suspects from the music circle to play. He played a fair flute himself, went to Yale undergraduate and Duke Law, and admired things Japanese, having spent time after college teaching English in Osaka. I had built him a little traditional teahouse beside his pond behind the main house, which he was well pleased by. He prepared a set of plans from memory of what he had seen in the Far East years ago. I just followed them. The lumber came from his own land, milled on the premises, mostly cherry. It was nice wood to work with. Selfsufficiency was not new to him, but the necessity of changed times made him take it to higher levels.