Twenty-seven
Brother Minor might have been an irritating little fellow, but he was diligent, regular, and capable. He was awake before anybody else, had the fire going again, had watered our horses, and was boiling up a pot of cornmeal samp for our breakfast when the rest of us stirred from our bedrolls. The weather had a fractious look. The sky to the east was red and an ominous breeze was already making the weeds dip and sway. I sensed it would get hot again. We did not linger at the sod farm. On our way out, we paused in front of the house. I accompanied Joseph to the door to say thank you and farewell, so as not to leave on unfriendly terms. The others stayed on their horses.
Mrs. Raynor did not answer our knocks. Joseph said we’d better go inside. In daylight, the house was drearier than it had appeared by candles and moonlight. A coat of dust lay over most surfaces. As we entered from out in the summer meadow, the bad smell inside made its impression again. We called out to the lady of the house but she did not answer. With the electricity off, and no appliances humming, the place was stone silent. Joseph and I started poking around by unspoken mutual consent. Nothing was out of order on the first floor, except the muddy dishes remained unwashed on the kitchen counter from the night before along with the bowls of rocks and grass. Of course, Mrs. Raynor’s electric well pump was not functioning, along with everything else, and to get water she would have had to fetch buckets from the livestock pond on her property, or else walk all the way down to the river, a good quarter mile.
“Well, let’s have a look upstairs,” Joseph said.
In the second bedroom we looked in, we found the source of the odor that pervaded the house. The body of a man was laid out on a bed. In actual fact it was mostly the clothed skeleton of a man, since even the insects seemed to be mostly done with the flesh of him. We could only guess how long he’d been laid out there. A month or more. We recoiled from the sight and the stench and very quickly went through the three other bedrooms and back through the ground floor again, including the back porch, looking for the old woman.
“She’s gone,” I said.
Brother Joseph gave a kind of dubious grunt. I followed him down to the basement. It was much cooler down there. In the meager light that came through window wells that hadn’t been cleared of dead leaves for years, and among the odds and ends of a family life that circumstance had now obliterated-the old stroller, a broken bicycle, plastic incunabula, unsold yard sale junk, and trunks full of memories-we found Mrs. Raynor hanging from a pipe by a lamp cord. The ceiling was so low that she hadn’t used a chair or a box to step off. She had merely bent her knees to allow her neck to receive the remaining weight of her body. Whatever the agonies or difficulties involved, she had succeeded in ending her life.
We cut her down and took much of the morning digging a single proper grave for the both of them in the back of the house, where we had lingered in the beautiful twilight the night before, looking east toward the river. We put the missus down first and then the remains of what we presumed to be her husband, wound in the bedspread we found him on. Then we covered them both up, another hour of work with one shovel among us.
“We don’t know who these people were,” Brother Joseph spoke over their mound when we were done with our work. “Who their relations or children are or where they might be. But these two will be together in eternity now. It is an awful thing when anyone falls into despair and takes their own life. If it was up to us, Lord, we would have rescued this poor soul in a few days time. But your ways are mysterious and you didn’t allow it. So may Mrs. Raynor-I’m sorry, but I have already forgotten her given name—”
“Gladys,” Seth said.
“-may her troubled spirit come into your love and dwell in your house forever. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, /So do our minutes hasten to their end. Amen.”
“Amen,” all around.
We mounted our horses.
“You know what I think?” Brother Minor said.
“What?” Seth said and Elam echoed him.
“I think she was waiting for some folks to come along who could give them a proper burial and we were elected,” Minor said. “Ain’t these times something?”
The heat was definitely back with us and we were tired from digging and hadn’t made any progress yet that day. Among the few things from the premises we helped ourselves to, we found two fishing rods, with good open-faced spinning reels and monofilament line, along with a box of lures, plugs, spinners, hooks, swivels, and bobbers. An hour or so later, we had made some headway down the river road again, and we stopped to water the horses at a place where a cool rill formed a sandy delta on the shore as it entered the Hudson. There were big flat rocks to sit on, and a grove of locust trees for shade. I took the opportunity to bathe away two days of grime. Joseph and Seth bushwhacked upstream a ways with the fishing rods. Elam was off looking for raspberries while Minor made a fire on the rocks.
The blister on my burned left hand had broken open from helping to dig the Raynors’ grave. I was concerned that it might get infected. You couldn’t be too careful about infected wounds when there were no more antibiotic medicines. I asked Minor for some whiskey I could apply as disinfectant. He asked to see it. I held my hand out to him. He studied it a while, told me to wait right there, and bustled off into the woods. He returned in a minute with several stems of some kind of leafy weed.
“What’s that?”
“Solomon’s seal,” he said. “This here might seem uncouth, but it’s necessary.”
He picked off one leaf after another from the stems and put them in his mouth until he was masticating a great chaw of them. Meanwhile, he took a bandana out of his pocket. By and by, he extracted the wad of chewed leaves from his mouth and laid them on the bandana.
“Give me your hand.”
I did. He arranged it so the chaw was over my blister and then rather tenderly tied the bandana around my hand.
“You keep it like so the rest of the day and overnight,” he said. “That burn blister’ll be healed up in the morning.”
He stated this with complete assurance. I didn’t want to act contrary about it or seem ungrateful so I agreed.
Our fishermen came back in surprisingly short order with more than enough good-sized fish for our lunch: several largemouth bass and a northern pike the size of a Yule log. We were hungry after all that digging.
There had been a lot less angling in the Hudson River in recent years as epidemics drove down our numbers and motorboats stopped running, and there was no more factory-made tackle. Less pollution of all kinds ran into the river, no more factory fertilizers and pest control poisons, no more detergents. So the fish had returned in numbers not seen in anyone’s memory. Land-based game, on the other hand, was noticeably sparser now, as nobody observed hunting seasons anymore. The deer, especially, were down, even though commercial grade ammunition had also gotten scarce. People jacked deer all year round, by any means possible, including pitfalls, deadfalls, and traps. Rabbits were down because nobody cut lawns anymore and the grassy margins they thrived in were returning to woods. Coyotes were up in tandem with sheep and goats. Ben Deaver swore he saw a mountain lion on the roof of his chicken shed one morning the previous September, and further north of us, in Hebron, where the human population was back to the pioneer level of the mid-1700s, a “catamount” reputedly killed a four-year-old boy inside a house.
Minor butchered the fish expertly with his short knife. His grandfather ran a catfish farm in South Carolina when he was little, he said. He could cut fillets all day long and into the dark.