“I will be very respectful of your stuff and your ways.”
She said she didn’t have much to bring over, that pretty much all she owned had been lost in the fire. I showed her around, how the outdoor shower worked and where I kept my store of meal and honey and things. Finally, I saw her to the door. She said they’d come back later in the day after I’d gone.
“Have a safe journey,” she said. “I hope you find Tom and the others.”
“Thank you. I’m a little nervous about it, to tell you the truth.”
“Think about coming home to a clean and orderly house.”
I watched her walk a ways back up Linden Street. She was a good walker, with a strong, purposeful stride.
Soon, I left to fetch that pistol I’d hidden under the bridge over Black Creek on North Road, and all the way up and back my mind reeled with terrible thoughts of what it would be like to not be alone anymore, and what Jane Ann would think when she found out.
Twenty-six
Riding along in a band with four other mounted men in fine summer weather was so exhilarating that I cast aside my worries and apprehensions for the rest of the afternoon as we made our way south on the old county highway along the Hudson River. The other three besides Joseph were Brothers Elam, Seth, and Minor. Elam and Seth were large, broad-shouldered earnest men, like Joseph, but Brother Minor was skinny and smaller than me. He had a sharp, weasely face and a joking demeanor, and when he laughed at his own jokes, which was often, his eyes creased and seemed to close up tight, while his laughter was nearly silent, more like air huffing through a pipe. He joked incessantly.
“You hear about the farmer was milking and a fly went in one of the cow’s ear ’n out th’ udder?” was a typical Minorism, as the other men called his constant banter.
Joseph and Elam carried rifles, and Seth wore a sword, a saber, some kind of museum piece he had come across in their journeys. All had pistols. Brother Minor carried a sawed-off shotgun scabbarded off his saddle and two daggers in his belt, one long one he called a “pigsticker” and another he called “the last resort.”
I’d found that pistol where I had stashed it, all right, under the Black Creek Bridge, the one that killed Shawn Watling. It proved to be an old Ruger.41 Magnum, an odd “bastard caliber,” Brother Joseph said, and they didn’t have any ammunition for it. There were three rounds left in the cylinder. I brought it along thinking I could not possibly run into three situations in a few days that would require me to fire at another man. I carried the pistol tucked in my belt, and I must confess it was reassuring to feel its heft there as I rode along all afternoon and we ventured into what was, for me, unknown country-at least country I had not been to in years, since we stopped going places in cars. My mount was an eight-year-old bay gelding named Cadmus, a full sixteen hands high with white stockings and a blaze from lips to forehead. He was responsive and forgiving, considering my paltry experience, though we barely moved faster than a walk that day.
The first settlement we rode through was the town of Starkville, seven miles altogether from Union Grove and on the other side of the river. The old highway bridge there was in terrible condition. In places the cement roadway had rotted out and you could see daylight down to the water through twisted, rusty filaments of iron rebar and flaking girders. We dismounted and led the horses across with the utmost care. In a few years the thing would be completely shot and there would be no connection across the Hudson River for twenty miles in either direction, unless somebody started a ferry.
Then there was the town. It was hard to believe that as recently as 1971 Starkville had an industrial economy-a wallpaper factory and a cardboard box mill, using wood out of the Adirondacks up river. They employed hundreds at decent wages a family could live on. Back in the 1950s, the town had its own movie theater and even a newspaper. Now, the little business section of Main Street was deserted in midafternoon on a weekday. The windows were broken in all but one shop front. The one remaining had a Sorry Closed sign in it. We stopped and peered through the dusty glass. The shelves and counters inside were bare, and Elam remarked that it was probably closed for good. The commercial buildings themselves along Main were in sorry condition. In some cases blue sky peeked through the ceilings in the upper stories, and scraggly shrubs had taken root in the decayed gunk along the parapets, so you knew the roofs were ruined.
I had heard Starkville was particularly hard hit by the Mexican flu. We didn’t know anyone from there, and I wasn’t aware of anyone from our town who carried on trade down there these days. Now I had to wonder if anything was left. Beyond the modest business district, Main Street reverted to old state Route 4. Some of the houses along there were occupied by gaunt, slovenly adults and a few halfnaked children dressed in tatters hanging around the front porches doing nothing. Even the few pigs running in the street seemed mostly skin and bone. No dogs came out to greet us. They had probably succumbed to the roasting spit or the stewpot as life grew harder over the years. The yards were filled with weeds and shrubs. Only here and there had anyone made an attempt to grow potatoes or corn. The inhabitants regarded us suspiciously as we walked our horses by, probably frightened by the well-fed New Faith men in their imposing broad-brimmed hats and the weapons they carried. Brother Minor ventured to banter with these people in his joking way as we walked by, but they did not respond to his gags and most skulked indoors when he spoke at them.
“Sometimes I think I’m a chicken,” he said to one ill-looking old man with his face sunk into his beard, sitting on his porch on a broken-down sofa. “Felt this way ever since I was an egg.” The old fellow just stared hollowly. I was glad to leave the place behind.
South of Starkville, we passed some individual farms that looked like going concerns, not exactly prosperous, but at least as though the owners had not given up. The corn was in and their gardens were laid. But you had to wonder what held them together as a community. Whenever we approached, if there was anybody outside, we’d see them head into their houses at a distance. Possibly they took us for marauders or scavengers, and for all I know they went inside in order to train rifles on us. Along in that stretch we came upon one particular young man, perhaps sixteen, leading a swayback horse pulling a hay wagon. He did not seem afraid of us.
“Are you militia or pickers?” he said.
“Neither,” Brother Joseph said and explained as how we were on a search to Albany.
“They’s all thieves down there,” the boy said. “Got any sugar? You can have a flake of hay each if you spare a little sugar.”
“We don’t have no sugar,” Brother Minor said.
“I’ve got some honey,” I said.
“I don’t have no vessel to carry no honey. I’ll give you all a flake for a spoonful.”
“All right,” I said.
We stopped and made a little trade. The hay was good, sweet timothy grass.
Brother Minor sang to himself as he fed his flake to his mount.
The pavements on Route 4 were badly broken, and we walked in line along the shoulder, where the asphalt had worn away altogether and the dirt was beaten soft by hooves. Black-eyed Susans, blue bugloss, chicory, and Queen Anne’s lace bloomed there. Here and there, carcasses of the odd truck and automobile that had not been collected years before in the great drive for metal sat rusting in the flowers. Now and then the road came very close to the river, and we could see through the trees along the bank. We did not see a single sail or an oar craft on the water wherever we were afforded a look.