A History of the Future (2 page)

“It’s not half bad.”

“I’ll try half a dram then. Sounds indifferent.”

“It’s different enough.”

Brother Jobe scanned the other menu items on offer from the kitchen as he sipped the whiskey. Ham plate. Cheese plate. Hard sausage plate. Pulled pork plate. Variety plate. Chicken liver fry-up. Meatballs and gravy sauce. Corn dodger with pepper jelly. Tater tots (“our own!”). Cheese toast. Pickled eggs. Pickled peppers. Mixed pickles. Popcorn.

“What all is the darn soup, anyway?” Brother Jobe asked.

“Split pea with lard cracklings, I believe,” Brother Micah said as he pounded a bung valve into a keg of Holyrood’s special Christmas brew, pear scrumpy, a carbonated cider with a greater than average kick. A knock on the front window prompted both brothers to turn their heads. Peering through the glass was Robert Earle, carpenter by trade and, since last June, mayor of Union Grove. Brother Jobe waddled over to the door and let him in. Three other townsmen who had gathered out on the sidewalk made to follow Robert inside but Brother Jobe stopped them.

“Hey, let us in, too!” said Dennis Fontana, chicken house manager at Ned Larmon’s big farm on Pumpkin Hill.

“Four-thirty, boys, like it says on that there sign in the window,” Brother Jobe said.

“Aw, come on—”

He locked the door briskly behind Robert, who carried his fiddle case.

“You gonna grace us with some tunes here on our opening night?” Brother Jobe said. He pronounced it
chunes
.

“I’m on my way to Christmas practice,” Robert said. By this he meant the music circle at Union Grove’s First Congregational Church. They’d been rehearsing for months.

“I hear you all gonna put on a musicale Christmas Eve.”

“That’s right. Your bunch is welcome.”

“We was thinking of putting on some carol singing ourself, mebbe Christmas Day, proper. You think some of your town folks might want to come over to our sanctuary for it? We got a heat system all rigged up. I aim to see we all mix more, your people and ours.”

“Hang up a sign for it in the window here,” Robert said. “Folks will see it. This place is all the talk of the town.”

“Is that so?” Brother Jobe said, perking up visibly. Now there were five men and two women waiting outside for the place to open, one pressed right up against the window peering in. “You suppose they’ll come regular, like?”

“Look at them out there. You’re not insecure, are you?”

“Hmph,” Brother Jobe said. “What do you think of the joint?”

“I like it. Your boys did a nice job.”

“It ain’t exactly a come-to-Jesus spot, but we’re all for fellowship whatever style it comes in.”

“How’d a guy like you ever learn the bar business?” Robert said.

“It ain’t brain surgery. My daddy had a half-interest in a roadhouse in Gate City, Virginia. Ugly little burg full of hillbillies. I worked there one summer as the fry cook and learned just how the partner was robbing us. Daddy burned the place down and collected on the insurance. The partner happened to electrocute himself in his own hot tub a month later. Vengeance is the Lord’s, I guess. Won’t you have a taste of something on the house?”

“I came by to give you my invoice.”

Robert handed Brother Jobe a folded sheet of paper. Robert had been working for two months outfitting the interior of a special chamber over in the former high school. The work had involved very exacting marquetry and a coffered ceiling. It was designed to be the winter quarters of the New Faith’s clairvoyant epileptic spiritual guide Mary Beth Ivanhoe, also known among them as Precious Mother or the Queen Bee.

“We appreciate the fine job you done,” Brother Jobe said. “I was just sampling this here whiskey, the Shushan what-have-you. It’s got bark and bite both. Try a glass.”

“Sure, thanks,” Robert said.

The crowd was yet growing outside on the sidewalk. A few were clean-shaven New Faith members in broad-brimmed hats. Carol singing could be heard among them.

Brother Jobe called for two more whiskeys, then glanced down at the invoice.

“Shoo-wee,” he said. It was for $350, payable in silver. “You kept track of your hours, I suppose.”

“Yes I did.”

“Sure you won’t take paper money? It’ll work out to more than a half million bucks if you do.”

“People don’t like paper dollars anymore.”

“You’d feel rich, though.”

Robert shifted his weight on the stool. “I’d only be fooling myself,” he said.

“I’m just funnin’ with you, old son. Come by my office at headquarters and you’ll be paid in full in hard silver coin. Say, what if our choir put on a free concert on Main Street on Christmas Day? Right on the town hall steps or something. Think your townies would turn out for that?”

“It’s possible.”

“Spread the word, then. We’ll do it! Now lookit, I’m about to throw the doors open, first time ever. Won’t you give us just one tune to kick her off?”

“Oh, all right.”

By the time Brother Jobe let the public in there were twenty-three people waiting. Seven were women. Robert Earle played a medley of “Deck the Halls,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and “Jingle Bells,” and by the time he stopped there was such a groan of protest from the now thirty-five people standing three deep at the bar that it was all he could do to get out of the place.

T
WO

When dire events overtook American life and the economy collapsed and so many once normal arrangements dissolved with it, and everything changed in a matter of months, Andrew Pendergast’s true romance with the world began. It manifested in a rebirth of his gratitude for being. The world tilted, but he had anticipated and prepared for it and the tilt affected him favorably, especially his internal demeanor, which was one of a cheerful engagement with reality. His work as a freelance editor of scientific books and journals evaporated, of course, as so many livelihoods did, but before long so did any need to make monthly mortgage and car payments to a bank that no longer functionally existed, nor to an electric company that no longer delivered service, or the phone company, or the Internet provider, or any other entity that had formerly claimed some obligation from him. With every far-flung corporate network down, from the state and federal governments with their tax collectors to the skein of rackets that had posed as health care, the vast parasitical armature of institutions and corporations lost its grip on those who had survived the difficult transition and the epidemics, and Andrew Pendergast, for one, blossomed.

Andrew had no family left. He had lost his only sibling, a sister he had idolized, in a waterskiing accident when she was sixteen and he was twelve. His parents never lived to see the global collapse. Andrew was a bachelor who lived alone. In the old times, he defined himself and the precinct of his daily life as
gay,
meaning homosexual. Now, with the old contexts dissolved, it was no longer possible to think that way. His personal map of the world had changed as much as the geography he was immersed in.

He had survived a decade of adventures in the New York City publishing world and its extracurricular social venues. He had felt himself an outsider even in that lively subculture. Then, seeing the disorders blossom in politics, banking, and oil, he very deliberately planned his escape from that life to a new one in the distant upper Hudson River valley, a region he had discovered on B & B weekends before everything fell apart. On one of those forays upstate, he had seen the house for sale on Cottage Street. The seller was “highly motivated” due to financial reverses, the realtor disclosed in a low whisper. This was the case for a lot of unfortunate people at the time. Andrew bought the house, moved up from the city, and worked his freelance editing jobs at a remove until the bomb in Washington, DC, tanked the nation’s economy altogether and scattered the remnants of its government. By then, though, he had made a beachhead for himself in Union Grove.

A person of diverse skills and interests, Andrew found many roles to play in the post-collapse village of Union Grove, Washington County, New York. He took charge at the town library after Mrs. Downs, librarian since the 1990s, lost her life to the vicious encephalitis that winnowed the region’s population by a good third. Nobody else stepped forward at a time when the townspeople were consumed with grieving for their dead and finding some way to salvage their lives by practicing useful occupations that they had never planned on and were not trained for. Andrew took charge of the library building, resurrected the mothballed card catalogs stored in the basement, and opened up the place three evenings a week plus Sunday afternoons. As well as reopening the library, he had helped form the public volunteer burial committee when the Mexican flu followed the encephalitis epidemic and the bodies piled up like stacked cordwood outside Dr. Copeland’s infirmary. He established a model garden on his half-acre property and his methods were emulated by other householders for whom gardening was a lost art that necessity required them to relearn. He repaired old mechanical clocks, which were much in demand, with the electricity down for good. He painted portraits, now the only method for recording likenesses. He organized and directed the stage shows put on in the old theater on the third floor of the town hall, most recently Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel
the previous fall. And he presided over the music circle of the Congregational Church, which was the heart of the one reliably enduring institution in Union Grove that the townspeople could organize their lives around.

This glowing winter evening, Andrew stepped lightly down the porch stairs of his house, leaving the front door unlocked, one of the pleasures of living in a tightly knit village in these new times. His house was the oldest surviving in town with its original details intact, an 1841 center-gable Gothic cottage with a trefoil window in the peak under the figured bargeboards. Before the Civil War it had been a station on the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses that had sheltered escaped slaves on their journey to Canada. Robert Earle helped Andrew restore the sills, the porch, and the scrollwork ornaments. Andrew fixed the old windows himself, one by one, even rebuilding the sash-weight counterbalances. He made his own house paint from boiled linseed oil, turpentine, and an oxide yellow ocher pigment he discovered in a cliff face on one of his rambles along the Battenkill. His neighbors thought it strange that Andrew put so much effort into fixing up the old house, while they neglected theirs in melancholy discouragement. His mental state was not like theirs. The world was singing in all his cells.

This evening, with the scent of fir mixed with wood smoke on the crisp air, Andrew wore a fine wool overcoat over his customary worsted trousers and waistcoat. He had an impressive collection of vests from his days as a young dandy in book publishing. Andrew had devoted much of his meager income in those years to assembling a wardrobe of the highest quality, which he now cared for meticulously. His feet were shod in lace-up ankle boots, made to order for him in town by Walter McWhinnie, Union Grove’s cobbler and harness maker. Andrew was thrilled when the New Faith people opened their haberdash, because they sold a pretty good bib-front cotton shirt that went well with his outfits after his old Ralph Lauren shirts grew threadbare with pilled collars. On his head this cool winter evening, Andrew wore a felted wool slouch hat, collected with other hats during his city years. Unlike most of the regular townsmen of Union Grove, he was clean-shaven.

Andrew did not have a close companion or a romantic partner. He was careful and guarded with his emotions, the opposite of impulsive. Even back in New York he had been prudent in his sexual adventures. In Union Grove, he had avoided the appearance of seeking liaisons. He did not want to tempt the fearful reactions of frightened people struggling among the remnants of their culture. More to the point, however, since the world and everything in it had changed he had come to reexamine the question of his sexual orientation, wondering whether it even was an orientation or something less fixed in his persona than a figment from a bygone cultural ideology. He wondered how much of the story he had told himself back then was just a story scripted for him by others, a convenient explanation for a sequence of acts undertaken to stick to the script. Despite the enormous pressures to conform to it, the script did not validate his deeper feelings of uncertainty and shame. He wondered how much of it had come from sheer avoidance of the tension he felt around women, and whether there was perhaps something marvelous in meeting that tension that he had avoided just because it was easier to do so. He wondered above all why, for years after he’d grown up, he could not quite conceive of himself as a genuine adult. He recognized the paradox of wanting to escape into femininity, as represented by his idolized dead sister, while associating sexually only with other males, many of whom made a fetish of mocking the femininity they affected to imitate. His episodes with other men had been furtive encounters of priapic ritual not so different from sex with himself, except they left him in a state of enervated anxiety. Of all the feelings they generated, pride was not one of them, whatever the script insisted. That was all over for him now. He hadn’t heard the word “gay” in as long as he could remember and at one point he realized what a relief that was. The memories of his acts with other men resided in an emotional compartment that he rarely revisited. He was more than content, at age thirty-seven, to sublimate the terrors of sex in all the other activities that lately engaged his hours.