We followed the road along the extensive hay fields and oat fields where they raised animal feeds and came, at last, to the collection of little cottages that Bullock had erected over the years for his people. It really amounted to a village, but of a kind that had not been seen in America for a long time. The cottages were deployed along a picturesque little main street with a few narrow lanes off it. There were about thirty buildings in all. This main street lacked shops or places of business because the only business there was Bullock’s business. There was a commissary building, where his people could get their household needs. I didn’t know if they used money in it or whether Bullock’s people even got paid. Two new cottages were under construction, meaning I supposed that more people were joining up. This too seemed to pique Brother Jobe’s interest.
“What do you call the place?” he said.
“Metropolis,” Bullock said.
“Ain’t that were Superman lived?” Brother Jobe said.
Bullock grinned and winked at me, and Brother Jobe grinned too, back at Bullock. It was grins all around.
“We just call it the New Village,” Bullock said.
“I like that,” Brother Jobe said. “It’s plain and to the point.”
“Maybe when I’m dead they’ll name it after me. Bullocktown.”
“They ought to.”
“Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though, does it?”
“There’s worse. Near us back in Virginia was a little burg name of Chugwater. And another one called Stinktown. Well, that was more like a nickname for Stickleyville.”
One larger structure stood out at the center of things, and that was the meeting hall, offset from a little grassy square at the end of the main street. Bullock’s people all generally took a midday meal together there and schooled the few children they had managed to produce. It was a plain but dignified clapboard building, with large light-gathering windows, and a cupola on top for additional light. All the buildings were whitewashed.
“Is this your church?” Brother Jobe said.
“Sometimes,” Bullock said.
“Where do you stand on religion, if I might ask?” Brother Jobe said.
“I’m not against it.”
“But you don’t minister to them.”
“Beyond my competence.”
“Maybe you’re unnecessarily modest.”
“Well, I’m not Superman. After all.”
The streets and lanes of the little village communicated only with the wagon roads between Bullock’s fields and works. We rarely saw his people over in Union Grove, unless they were on a specific errand for him. Otherwise, he had a landing on the Hudson River. The things he needed came up from Albany and beyond. The cottages where his people lived there in the plantation village were of a common vernacular type, also very modest, though some were decorated more than others, with brackets and moldings, according to the tastes of who lived in them. I suppose they were allowed to do as they pleased with them. Some had summer kitchens out back. All had brick chimneys. Nobody was working on the new houses now. I supposed they did that in their off-hours.
While we stood out in the grassy square, a stout woman in an apron stepped out of the meetinghouse and pounded a tubular iron gong that hung from a stock beside the door. She regarded the three of us with a kind of wary respect, as if our presence portended something. Then she bustled back inside, wiping her hands on her apron. An appealing familiar aroma of baking corn bread emanated from the place. Soon Bullock’s people began streaming in from the fields and forests. All nodded their heads at Bullock in deference.
“They seem well fed,” Brother Jobe said.
“They’re not fed,” Bullock said.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I’m not running a zoo here. They feed themselves.”
Eighteen
Bullock’s own house was built in 1802, when the area was first coming up after the American Revolution, a handsome old clapboard thing that now looked like it had grown out of the ground along with the two-hundred-year-old oak trees around it. It had belonged to Bullock’s great-great-great-great-grandfather who acquired it from a Colonel Templeton who was wounded heroically at the battle of Saratoga and later ran a flax mill in town, which burned down in 1811 and ruined him. The Bullocks acquired the house, afterward ran a big farm there, and also sent barges of molding sand down the Hudson River to the cast-iron works in Troy. The exceptionally fine sand was a gift of the retreating glaciers that had carved out the Hudson Valley eons before and laid a big ragged deposit along the bank where the Battenkill met the Hudson on his property. In the twentieth century, when mechanization came on, the Bullocks planted thousands of fruit trees, mostly apples but some pears and plums too.
This is what I understood about Stephen Bullock: In the 1980s, his father, Richard, was producing cider commercially on contract for the Star supermarket chain. Stephen was in his second year of law school at Duke University, after his sojourn in Japan, when his father was killed in a highway accident. Stephen was the only son and he went back to run the place. It wasn’t what he had planned to do, but Richard had been a controlling and difficult father, and without having to rebel against him anymore, Stephen found that he liked the farm life and did a good job of running the place, and he decided he hadn’t really cared for the law after all. His mother passed away two years later and he didn’t have to answer to anyone anymore.
As the modern world came apart, and the local economy with it, Bullock took the opportunity to acquire at least eight other properties adjacent to the original family farm. They were not all in agriculture. One was an auction yard for secondhand farm equipment and trucks. Another was a marina for pleasure boats on the river, which now served as Bullock’s landing (and was called Bullock’s Landing by everybody else, if not Bullock himself). Several others were derelict dairy operations with ruined barns, pastures gone to poplar, and houses that let the rain in. Some of the owners had died off. Others sold out only to end up working for him. It was clear to me from the conversations we had in the days when I was building his teahouse-and they were many, often over a glass-that Stephen Bullock had a comprehensive vision of what was going on in our society and what would be necessary to survive in comfort, and I don’t think he ever deviated from that vision for a moment.
Bullock met his wife Sophie one night at the Asia Society in New York City. He used to go down (he told me this) to meet girls, and he met Sophie there. She was a young assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum, fresh out of graduate school at Brown University, and she quite liked the idea of visiting her new boyfriend on this prosperous apple farm upstate where, I suppose, he charmed her with autumn rambles in the orchards and evenings before the fireplace in his lovely 1802 house. She married him, of course, and for many years in the old days they carried on the family orchard business until things fell apart. They had two daughters. The daughters had grown up, and each moved to exactly the wrong cities at the wrong time: Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and now they were gone, or at least presumed to be gone because they had not been heard from since so many perished in those cities, and that was before the mails and telephones went down.