World Made by Hand

Twenty-four

Sometime later that night a cool front blew through upstate New York and swept away weeks of spirit-sapping heat. You never knew the weather in advance anymore. You might be said to have a good weather eye but nobody knew anything for sure and some were just better guessers than others. In this case it was as though all of Washington County were suddenly air-conditioned, as we used to call refrigerated air, and it allowed me to sleep well for the first time in days. The change in the weather seemed to energize Union Grove. I had two callers before eight o’clock the next morning.

The first was Brother Joseph, one of the New Faithers. He came to the door, calling me “Mr. Mayor,” just as I was frying up slabs of leftover hominy for breakfast and preparing to return to work on the cupola at Larry Prager’s place.

“Hope I’m not interrupting your breakfast, sir,” he said.

“It doesn’t require all my attention, and you can call me Robert.”

“All right, sir.”

“Does this butter smell a little off to you?” I held the crock up for him to sniff.

“I’d eat it,” Brother Joseph said with a smile after reflecting earnestly a moment. He looked oddly boyish for his considerable height, which must have been about six foot four. But all the New Faith men had that young look because they were clean-shaven.

I slathered honey on the fried hominy and laid into it as he stood there.

“Want some?” I said.

“Oh, I had a big breakfast just a while ago. Eggs, ham, corn bread.”

“From the sounds of things, I’d guess you have fifty roosters over there at the school.”

“We’ve got more than a few. Anyway, I bring you news. Hope you’re not rushing out of here to start running things.”

The way he put it, I had to chuckle. He had a winning manner.

My new position in the world had not exactly altered my habits overnight, or my estimation of myself. There was a mayor’s office in the old town hall, but there was no electricity, no staff, no secretary, no telephone, nor even the common office supplies we took for granted in the old days, including paper and writing implements. We had no use whatever for the new town hall, which had been built out on the highway strip in 1983. Anyway, Wayne Karp’s crew had removed the windows and aluminum sashes there. Dale Murray had used his own private law office on Main Street, but only as a drinking establishment, since he didn’t do any official business, nor did he have any law business, as far as I could tell.

“You can tell Brother Jobe that he and I should meet at the soonest convenient time and begin organizing the repair of the town water system.”

“Something else has come up, sir. Mr. Bullock from over the grand plantation has entreated us to form a party to search for his missing boatmen.”

“Entreated you?”

“Yessir.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“Yessir. And he would like you to be along on it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you will know the men we are searching for by sight, he says. And because he trusts you, I gather.”

“Well, he doesn’t really know your bunch.”

“My point, sir.”

“Have you got their names?”

He reached into his vest and pulled out a piece of good vellum paper. It was penned in a decorative hand, official looking, though it didn’t pretend to have any legal standing as a warrant or a sum mons or a commission, as far as I could tell. Among the instructions were the names of the missing crew. Thomas Soukey once ran the video rental in town and played softball with a bunch of us in a weekly game before the flu hit and he lost his family and went over to Bullock. Jacob Silberman used to print promotional T-shirts and coffee mugs for companies. Skip Tarbay had been a landscaper, mowing lawns and bedding annuals. And Aaron Moyer taught art history over at Bennington College. All lines of work which were no more.

“How many will be in this search party?” I said.

“Five, including yourself.”

“How long.”

“As we have planned it, maybe two days down, two days search around the locks and port of Albany and such, and then two days back.”

“That’s most of a week, Joseph.”

“Yes it is, sir.”

“I just assumed new duties here in town.”

“We’re aware of that.”

“Can’t you find somebody else?”

“Nosir. The other townsmen that don’t have family, they’re mostly ne’er-do-wells, drinkers and such. Anyway, Mr. Bullock stipulated for you to go.”

“Is he lending us a boat?”

“No, we’re going on horseback. That way a couple of us can bring his boat back, if we find it.”

“If we don’t find the crew themselves?”

“I suppose that would be the size of it, sir.”

“Do you have to call me sir?”

“It’s New Faith manners, sir. Anyway, we hope to find the men too.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have a personal weapon, sir?”

“A weapon?”

“A firearm.”

“No. Well, sort of.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. A revolver.”

“What caliber?”

“I can’t really say.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve never actually used it. It’s a large pistol.”

“We have .38 wadcutters that’ll go into a .357. Some nine millimeter. Do you have it at hand, sir?”

“No.”

“Well, can you get it?”

“It would take me an hour or so.”

“I’d suggest you fetch it, sir,” he said. “We’re looking to depart by midday. We’ll come by for you at one o’clock, say, with a mount. We’d encourage you to bring along some of your own meal, bacon, what have you. We’ll have some company provisions too. The rest we’ll scrounge along the way. Okay, sir?”

“Okay. Are you in charge of this expedition?”

“I suppose I will be, sir.”

“Then I’ll have to call you sir.”

“No you don’t. You can call me Joseph, like everybody else does. It’s only the five of us.”

“Were you in the military, Joseph?”

“Yessir. I saw action at Damascus and Qryat Shimona before the pullout,” he said.

“Did you shoot at people.”

“Yessir, and killed a fair number of the ones I shot at, I suppose.”