“I hope he turns up, sir,” Joseph said. “I had a boy myself.”
“Had?”
“He was one of the twelve that was killed.”
“Oh… gosh… I’m sorry.”
“He was sixteen. Name of Aaron. He was a brave boy. Yours?”
“Daniel. Nineteen when he left. We haven’t seen that kind of strife up in Washington County, New York.”
“I know. That’s how come we like it.”
“I didn’t know it was so bad out there.”
“There’s grievances and vendettas all around at every level. Poor against whatever rich are left. Black against white. English-speaking against the Spanish. More than one bunch on the Jews. You name it, there’s a fight on. Groups in flight everywhere, ourselves among them. I haven’t seen any black folks or Spanish in Union Grove so far. You got any, sir?”
“Some black families lived in that hollow down by the WaylandUnion Mill, the old factory village. The mill closed up before I moved to town. There was a fellow named Archie Basiltree who worked in the Aubuchon hardware store when we first came. The store is gone and so is Archie. Another black man worked on the county road crew.”
Thunder had been pealing and lightning flashing all along, some strokes so close that they shook the building.
“I haven’t been anywhere in years,” I said. “I don’t really know what’s going on out there.”
“Let me tell you something, sir,” Joseph said. “There has been considerable churning of the population and warring among different sorts of people all over. Why do you think we left Virginia in the first place? I think the separate regions will go their own
“It would be a sad and sorry thing if it came to that.”
“Well, it has come to that, sir.”
In a little while, Joseph’s breathing fell into a regular rhythm, and I assumed he’d gone to sleep. I lay awake longer, listening to the rain drip from the eaves and thinking of the big map that hung from the top of the chalkboard in my primary school in Wilton, Connecticut, so many years ago, back in the days of cars, television, and air-conditioning. The states on this map were muted tones of pink, green, and yellow. Over it hung the flag that we pledged our allegiance to every single morning. “One nation, under God, indivisible…”
Thirty-two
In the morning, the sky had been swept clean again and, of course, the heat was rising. I had kept the bandana on my hand overnight and, when I took it off before breakfast, was astonished to see that a florid pink spot on my palm was all that remained of the blister. A new layer of skin had seemingly grown over the spot.
Minor joined us from the stable for a breakfast of fresh eggs, smoked fish, and corn bread downstairs, again paid for in silver coin. The animals were rested, watered, and ready, he said. He had straw in his hair from bedding down in the stable, but he didn’t complain about his duties.
I showed Minor my hand and asked him how it was possible that such an injury could actually heal overnight.
“Solomon’s seal has powers,” he said. “But you add a little Jesus juice to the mix and that puts her in overdrive, so to say.”
It wasn’t an explanation that squared with my understanding of how reality worked. But I couldn’t argue with the results either.
“I’m grateful to you,” I said.
We decided over our meal to devote the early hours of the day to shopping for wholesale goods and necessities along Commercial Row. New Faith needed everything from salt in quantity to candlewicks. I wanted to find machine-made paper and good steel pen nibs for the town so we could resume recording things again in a coherent way, medical supplies for Jerry Copeland, and whatever else I could scrounge up. We didn’t have a whole lot of cargo space in the donkey cart. After that, we’d break into two groups and search the wharves for the Elizabeth. If we found her, perhaps we could bring more goods back to Union Grove. But that remained to be seen.
When we turned out onto the street, the first thing we saw was the figure of a large man seated in the dirt, slumped against a rain barrel across the way with a hog rooting in his lap. The figure was inert. As we came closer, we could see a vivid red and gray mess of stuff that looked like sausage links in his lap, where the pig was rooting. Seth sent the animal off squealing with a blow across the hams with the flat of his sword.
“He’s dead,” Elam said. “Why, I’ll be dog.”
“What?” Joseph said.
“This is that same drover we took that jenny off of. Lookit.”
Elam took a kerchief rag out of his pocket and used it to hold the dead man’s head up at the chin for us all to see. The face was distorted in death, and the whites of his still-open eyes were shot through with blood as if he had suffered a severe blow to his head. But it apparently was indeed the same man we’d quarreled with at the Waterford bridge.
“I believe you’re right,” Seth said. “That’d be the one.”
“Did you kill him, Minor?” Joseph said.
“I didn’t do nothing,” Minor said. “Sumbitch probably fell out drunk and cracked his durn head.”
I stooped down. The stench he gave offwas impressive up close. Around the ragged edge of his dirty shirt, above the gross wound to his abdomen, you could see a pattern of small round holes, like shotgun pellets would make. I did not point it out, but I don’t think the others failed to notice either. I remembered that gunshotlike blast of thunder the night before and imagined this nameless wretch reeling out the stable door and collapsing where he now sat, to die in the rain, with a pig in his guts.
“I judge that this poor soul is beyond our assistance,” Minor said, “and if I linger here, I’m liable to lose my breakfast.”
“I suppose we can leave him for the constable,” Joseph said.
“If they got any law here,” Elam said.
“Anyway, it ain’t our business,” Minor said.
And so we went about our business, but not before Joseph invoked Matthew 5:13: “Ye are the salt of the earth,” he said, “but ifthe salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men.”
Thirty-three
Traders from elsewhere along the Hudson Valley were already out on Commercial Row, and men with drays and carts were busy moving goods off the wharves in a clatter of wheels and dust. Some smaller vendors had joined them along the street, selling fish, vegetables, and odd items of salvage from wagons and tarps spread on the ground. Here and there, snatches of songs of the loaders could be heard. Not everybody’s business was off, but it seemed a very dull trade in necessities. No groups collected on the street to socialize, as one might expect in a livelier marketplace. Hardly any women were among the traders, and the men were furtive in their movements. They scuttled in and out of the trading houses like wary rodents or bugs and left with whatever goods they’d purchased without lingering.
We found some of the things we needed among Minnery’s General Stocks, Hyde’s Salvage and Made Goods, and VanVoast’s Import and General Trade Articles, the three largest competing establishments on the row, and Aulk’s Provisions, the food wholesaler. I found aspirin, reusable hypodermic syringes, IV catheters, and adhesive tape for Doc Copeland. I could not find antiseptic or antibiotic medicines of any kind. Nor did they have any lidocaine or topical anesthetic for our dentist. I purchased a five-ream box of plain white twenty-pound bond paper (Xerox brand from the old days) and a gross of Phinney no. 4 steel pen points. They didn’t have any manufactured ink in stock, but you could make that easily enough yourself from lampblack or walnut shells. The New Faithers were delighted to come across a fifty-pound sack of peanuts, which they had not seen any of in some time, they said, as well as the other articles on their list, and some of Mr. Ricketts’s remaining inventory in linen fabrics at a very high price, which they apparently could afford Joseph’s fund of silver seemed bottomless. VanVoast’s actually had on hand a small inventory of manufactured instrument strings, and I bought several sets of guitar, violin, and cello strings. It had been years since we’d had any new ones, making do with the gut strings Andrew produced.