On this cold, damp Christmas Eve, the straggling inhabitants of Mechanicville stayed shuttered inside their mean dwellings with few signs of the holiday on display, and none of the old electric kind. A putrid pall hung over the place as of burning garbage and rotting meat. Daniel did not happen to pass by the block between Spring and South Streets where twelve houses had burned to ground two nights earlier, killing five people, whose bodies remained among the smoldering ruins—the sort of event, so emblematic of the times, unnoticed by outsiders, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest that nobody hears. He was relieved when he left the town behind and followed Route 4, the river road north through countryside little scarred by the suburban fiasco because it was so far from anything that mattered.
He retreated inside his imagination as he trudged up the empty road in the falling snow, with the river always on his right, though not always visible through the intervening woods cloaked in darkness. He did not know the time, but in fact it was 8:30 p.m. when he walked out of Mechanicville. Just then the music circle and the choir and the members of the Union Grove Congregational Church—his father, Robert Earle, among them—had concluded their Christmas Eve lessons and carols and retired to the communal banquet that followed, unaware of the lone figure miles away struggling toward them in the darkness. Daniel had consumed countless feasts in his mind in recent weeks as he traversed the landscape, sick and wretched. Sometimes they included manufactured things he remembered from early childhood but which no longer existed: the cheesy corn fantasy puffs of yore, factory-made cakes with creamy white centers, soda pops in every color from orange to brown to an unearthly phosphorescent chemical green, Mars bars, hamburgers on sesame seed buns, ramen noodles, corn dogs, egg rolls, pizza, marshmallow and chocolate Easter eggs, jelly donuts, ice cream studded with fragments of cookies or toffee or sugared nuts or an ingenious elastic confection called gummy bears. At other moments he conjured up massive roasts and haunches of red meat, corn slathered in butter, sauerkraut and sausages, potatoes in bubbling cheese, buckwheat pancakes saturated in butter and syrup, Indian pudding, the simpler foods of the new time, his time.
By and by he came on the town called Starkville, where he would finally cross to the east side of the Hudson River over a disintegrating steel and concrete highway bridge and enter Washington County. Coming upon it, his heart wanted to soar but all it could manage was a dull sense of warmth rising out of a cold hollow vacancy at the center of himself that had been there for some time. Starkville, once a factory village of five mills that manufactured things such as wallpaper and cardboard boxes and had a population of two thousand in the 1970s, when the mills last operated, was now a ghost settlement of fewer than a hundred souls, many of them engaged in fishing on the river and then smoking and pickling the pike and sturgeon that had come back in such spectacular numbers when the industrial age ebbed. Daniel had kept company in the months before he left home to see what was left of America with a prankish and pretty sixteen-year-old red-haired girl there named Kerry McKinney, walking the five miles from Union Grove in all weathers to see her. He had met her at the harvest ball in nearby Easton the previous fall where she step-danced on the plank stage in a flouncy turquoise dress and orange tights that matched her flaming hair. Her father owned the only going retail concern in what remained of Starkville, a general merchandise and grocery that got all its dry goods from Bullock, who got them from Albany on his boat. Then one Saturday around Easter, Daniel made the journey to Starkville only to learn that Kerry had died of cholera two days earlier, along with one of her three brothers. Daniel had seen plenty of death in that time of plagues, epidemics, and afflictions, including the deaths of his mother and sister. But this one provoked him to leave home to see if there was any place left in America where death and failure didn’t rule. He never found that place, though he saw a lot of things that opened his young eyes in places that were not like home.
By midnight, when Christmas Eve was turning into the holy day itself, Daniel slogged through three inches of accumulating snow up State Route 29, past the abandoned house with the word “GIFTS” painted in capital letters on its roof. In the old times, a woman had sold poorly made items of decor to tourists called “leaf peepers” who flocked north to behold the fall colors. The building stood among an ambiguous assortment of car dealerships and food dispensaries that had once marked the ragged edge of town. Now only pieces of the buildings stood since the windows were blown out, the flat roofs had collapsed, and the trusses and sashes had all been removed in the Great Collection of salvaged metal that had preceded the disastrous war in the Holy Land. The snow-filled parking lots were devoid of cars.
As Daniel drew closer to the old center of Union Grove, he felt as helpless as a swimmer caught in a powerful current, the pawn of tremendous natural forces that seemed determined to defeat him, and to do it with malicious humor just as he neared his long-sought goal. He had not eaten anything since that morning, pieces of a mushy, deliquescing, half-rotten pumpkin he found in the dooryard garden of a house in Rexford with the front door banging in the winter breeze, suggesting the people who lived there were dead or gone. He had been staggering forward on bodily reserves for so long he took for granted that they would keep him going forever, and now he was astounded to find himself utterly depleted. As he paused in his frozen footsteps, panting slightly and dizzy, he thought he could make out the white steeple of the Congregational Church above the rooftops of the town’s darkened houses, like an arrow in the night pointing at the cold distant spaces of a baffling universe. He could barely lift his legs high enough above the accumulating snow to swing them forward toward the heart of Main Street and its familiar buildings. Instead of jubilation, a strange and exorbitant pain lodged in his chest like a big reamer hollowing him out, as though he were an apple being cored. His last coherent thought was how funny it would be if he dropped dead a hundred feet shy of his destination and the falling snow buried him so that his body would not be discovered until spring.
N
INETEEN
Robert rose up through the depths of sleep thinking that something was banging on the house in the wind, a loose shutter, a section of fallen roof gutter. Soon, he apprehended that it might be someone at the door downstairs. Oddly his next thought was that it was Christmas and he couldn’t help imagining an old fat man in a red suit trimmed with white fur attempting to enter the house by the front door because the old chimney was blocked up with stovepipe. Robert’s sudden motion sitting up in bed woke Britney. The only working clock in the house was downstairs.
“What?” she said.
“Stay here,” Robert whispered. He swung out of bed in an economic arc of motion and groped for his trousers in the dark.
“Be careful,” Britney whispered back.
The knocking from the front door was weak but persistent, more like a small animal working away at something than a human being signaling its presence. He approached the front door warily and tried to steal a glimpse out each sidelight but couldn’t see much beside a humped shape in the darkness. The knocking came in no particular pattern except a cluster of several raps, then a pause, then more. If anything, it communicated defeat.
“Who’s there?” he said, speaking to the door.
The reply from outside was a low muffled sound like the groan of a bear, incomprehensible and sinister. Bears were not infrequent visitors in town. The winter thaws of recent years had interrupted their hibernation pattern. But there was little trash to attract them. The people of Union Grove did not generate anything near the volumes of garbage as in the old days; little food was wasted, and scraps were collected for pigs and chickens. The rest was burned or reused in some way. The bears would molest chicken houses, sheep, and goats, though. The absence of cars for many years made the bears bolder and to get places they commonly used roads and village streets that they had avoided in the old times. Anyway, Robert thought, nobody ever heard of bears rapping on the front door to a house out of politeness. It occurred to him that it was a drunken human being, someone who had gotten hammered on Christmas Eve and could not figure out which house was his. It happened before, the preceding New Year’s Eve when Donny Willits, the “hard cheese boss” at Schroeder’s creamery, made a commotion at his doorstep insisting that it was his home, so Robert let him sleep on the sofa even though Donny’s house was a hundred and fifty feet down Linden Street.
An umbrella stand beside the door held several walking sticks that his father had used in the last year of his life when he’d come to stay with Robert after the war in the Holy Land was lost and things began unraveling badly in the country. Robert seized a stout ash cane with a brass handle in the shape of a serpent’s head. He saw a blur out of the corner of his eye in weak light: Britney on the stairway wearing a cotton nightdress. He gestured to her to go back but she only retreated up one stair. Meanwhile, the rapping at the door had stopped.
Robert crouched down and cocked back the walking stick, feeling the weight of the business end and tensing to strike. He pressed his ear to the door for a moment but could hear nothing. Thinking not to alert whoever or whatever might be on the other side of what he was about to do, Robert reached for the doorknob, silently turned the lock button, then the knob itself, and jerked the door open. Pressure against it from the outside accelerated the door’s inward arc and the knob smacked Robert on his forehead, knocking him backward. A large blob-shaped thing fell inside over the threshold and pitched sprawling onto the rug, where it came to rest, inert. Britney gave out a choked little shriek. Cold air rushed into the room.
Robert righted himself and shook the pain out of his head. Britney hurried the rest of the way downstairs to the kitchen and lit a candle there, returning quickly to the front parlor. The heap on the floor was a man clad in odious shreds of clothing, sprawled on his face, with snow still humped on his shoulders. His hands looked like stumps under windings of filthy rags. The soles of his lace-up boots had partially separated from the uppers. Robert and Britney could see his torso rise and fall slightly in the candlelight. He was still breathing. Robert prodded the man’s side with his cane. It produced no response.
“He’s out of it,” Robert said.
“What do you want to do?” Britney said.
“I’ll pull his feet out of the way. Go shut the door.” Robert pulled the body forward. It remained inert. “Come, help me roll him over.”
“I’ll do it,” Britney said. “You stay back so you can whack him if he wakes up and gets violent.”
Britney, petite but compact and strong, found a point of leverage and tipped the body over in a deft motion.
“God, he stinks,” she said before recoiling at the sight of the wool balaclava the intruder wore, like the homicidal murderer in so many movie melodramas of the old times.
As frightful as the wool mask was, a different unbid thought formed in Robert’s mind, the thought that he’d dared not think until this moment. With trembling hand and with his heart fluttering in his chest, he grabbed the top of the balaclava and yanked it off. Britney stepped closer with the candle. Robert gaped at the face below with hollow cheeks under its months-long growth of yellow beard, pores blackened with grease and soot, and swollen, bloody chapped lips. He looked up at Britney.
“It’s my boy,” Robert said, his eyes brimming with emotion. “It’s Daniel.”
T
WENTY
Robert pulled on his boots and coat and ran five blocks to Dr. Copeland’s house. The doctor appeared at the door tucking his shirt into his trousers and carrying his boots. He was accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night, knowing that it meant some kind of medical emergency. He let Robert into the kitchen, lit a candle, and pulled on his boots after asking what the matter was. Robert explained. The doctor grabbed a leather bag off the pew bench beside the kitchen door and the two of them hurried back over in snow that was now six inches deep.
When they entered the house, Britney had arrayed a battery of candles around the front parlor and was finishing the job of cutting Daniel’s fetid clothing off him. She had removed his boots as well. Meanwhile, her daughter Sarah had come downstairs and Britney had put her to work lighting fires in the main woodstove and the kitchen cookstove, setting a large pot of water on it to warm up.
The doctor knelt down to examine Daniel, checking his pulse against a pocket watch.
“What is it?” Robert said, squatting beside the doctor.
“Thirty-eight,” the doctor said.
“That’s low, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“Exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, sickness.”
The doctor grabbed a candlestick off a nearby side table and handed it to Robert.
“Hold the light so it shines in his eyes,” the doctor said.
Daniel remained unconscious. The doctor retracted both of Daniel’s eyelids. The pupils constricted bilaterally even in the meager light.
“Take the light away,” the doctor said, leaning in close to see. Both pupils dilated with the light at a remove, suggesting Daniel’s neurological function was normal. His skin was covered with sores. His feet were so blistered and red that they looked like raw meat. A flakey red rash began at the edge of his hairline.