A History of the Future (15 page)

Jack flinched and his eyes widened.

“What if it’s just an illusion?”

“I dunno,” Andrew said. “If reality is faking it, it’s doing a great job.”

T
WENTY-FOUR

The Reverend Loren Holder plodded out of town up old Route 29 on a dreary task in his capacity as town constable. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the temperature reached 46 degrees, with the low sun breaking through patchy clots of cloud. The six inches of snow on the road had turned into viscid slush. In the old times, the road would’ve been plowed by midmorning. Now, besides the melting tracks of one sleigh that had passed earlier in the day, and some deposits of horse droppings among the melting hoofprints, it was hard even to make out where exactly the road lay in the landscape. Loren’s calf-high leather boots were well oiled with lanolin cooked with beeswax. His feet stayed dry but his blanket coat and shearling hat made him sweat as he slogged his way east toward the homestead of one Donald Acker, who was alleged by his next-door neighbor farmer Ben Deaver to be keeping a starved horse in his barn—so Loren had been casually informed by Deaver at the levee that had followed the Christmas Eve music performance, just in case, Deaver had said, Loren might want to do something about it.

Loren cursed his way out of town because there was no question that he had to do something about it and conditions were unfavorable for a long walk, not to mention a confrontation. He tried not to think about the end of his hopes for the return of his son Evan in the happy circumstance of Daniel Earle’s return. He almost didn’t want to hear what had happened from Daniel, and in the meantime he preferred to see about the starved horse, which might have a better chance of survival in this world of woe than his boy. Everything about the afternoon, from the low angle of the sun just days after the solstice, to the bleak appearance of the fields and pastures in their stark winter raiment, to the crashing silence of the landscape broken only now and again by the shrill debate of crows, oppressed Loren like the weight of a lifetime’s last days.

It took him an hour to trudge the mile and three-quarters up Route 29 to Acker’s place on Huddle Road on the shadowed east side of Pumpkin Hill, where the blue snow was icing back up again as the temperature dropped. Acker’s house was an 1870s vernacular cottage that had received several ghastly additions and makeovers in the late twentieth century. These putative improvements were now decrepitating at a faster rate than the original sections of the structure, including a sagging bay window that, in the process of detaching itself from the exterior, pulled puffs of pink fiberglass insulation out from behind the broken vinyl clapboards like the frothy guts leaking out of a mortally injured animal.

He went directly into the barn on the property, an old wreck of a thing with blue daylight glinting through the ancient siding. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness within, he saw a brindle horse standing still in a box stall in such stolid suffering that tears came to Loren’s eyes as he imagined the animal’s many days of anguished perseverance. The horse’s ribs were visible through a blotchy coat of thick winter fur and his pelvis jutted out as though he had swallowed a piece of furniture. As he made his way closer he could see that the horse’s stall was piled deep with the animal’s own excrement and, though the horse had obviously tried at first to shit in one corner, where it was piled higher, the entire floor had come to be filled. The horse appeared to be dead on its feet. Only the blink of its eye informed Loren that it was not frozen in place. Its water bucket held an inch of muddy slush and both its haylage rack and its manger were empty. The horse didn’t flinch or, for that matter, move in any way when Loren ran his hand down its bony withers. It was still warm.

He left the barn and trudged up to the house, made his way through a careless strewage of cordwood on the front porch, and pounded on the door. A gruff voice within cried “all right, all right,” and then Donald Acker threw the door open. Acker, once a State Farm Insurance adjuster, was one of those who had moved into an abandoned property in title limbo, with the county courts closed and its records in disarray and claimants either dead or too distant to pursue any claims. Acker was hardy enough to have escaped the epidemics of recent years, and determined enough, with no background in farming, to subsist on ten acres, of which he barely cropped about three, leaving the rest in scrubby pasture. When the economy first came apart, he’d left a wife named Chrissie behind in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey—she’d refused to move to “the boondocks” even after the bombing of DC—and he hadn’t heard from her since he used his last two five-gallon plastic storage tanks of hoarded gasoline to go north without her. That was years ago, and the car he’d arrived in was long gone, too, picked up for steel scrap during the Great Collection.

Standing in the slightly lopsided doorway of the house, Acker was an inch taller than Loren, who stood six-foot-three. He had a sallow moon face that disclosed no emotion, a gray-blond beard cut to the nub in a patchy way that resembled his starving horse’s blotchy coat. He wore several layers of flannel and more than one sweater, making him appear more physically robust than he was. He appeared not altogether steady on his feet. Loren recognized Acker dimly from seeing him around town, but he’d never spoken with him before.

“Sorry to disturb you on Christmas,” he said.

Acker flinched.

“Is it really Christmas?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Wow. You lose track living out here.” Acker scratched himself.

Loren scanned the dim interior of the place behind him. It was sparely furnished to an extreme and yet also disorderly. A broken-down plush chair and a small table were deployed close to a woodstove. There was no candle on the table and no other furniture was visible. Loren wondered if Acker had burned it for kindling and if he spent the long winter evenings sitting in the dark. The big front room was strewn with old magazines, some in piles. Venetian blinds hung askew in several windows. Blankets lay heaped onto the lone chair as if Acker had been sleeping there. The place gave off a vibrant stink, as of an old gym sock stuffed with Roquefort cheese, and maybe a decomposing creek chub thrown in, Loren thought.

“I’ve had a complaint about you,” he said.

Acker gazed back blankly for an awkward interval.

“You’re the priest in town, aren’t you?” he finally said, scratching again.

“Congregational minister, actually.”

“Somebody complain that I skipped services? It’s a free country last time I checked.”

“I’m the town constable, too, as it happens.”

“Is that like the police?”

“It’s sort of what’s left of the police.”

“So much for the Constitution, then. Separation of church and state.”

“I’m not too mixed up about it,” Loren said.

Acker stared into Loren’s face as though attempting to impress upon him his slight height advantage, but a tremor in Acker’s left eye made the lid flutter in a way that revealed infirmity and weakness. Loren could not help but think that Acker was only marginally more healthy than his horse. The stare down concluded when Acker reached for the doorjamb to steady himself. Then he scratched again.

“Do you want to come in out of the cold?” he said. “I’ve got a little whiskey.”

“That’s kind of you,” Loren said, “but the way you’re scratching I suspect you’ve got a nice hatch of fleas going in there, so I’ll just come to the point. There’s a mistreated horse on the premises and I’m afraid I have to take it away from you.”

Acker flinched again.

“Did Deaver tell you that?”

“Yes, he did.”

“How does he know about it? That horse lives in the barn.”

“Maybe he had a look inside.”

“Maybe you should go arrest him for trespass.”

Loren hitched up his coat and closed the top flap on the high collar. He was getting cold again standing on the porch in the evening shadows.

“You’re a squatter here,” Loren said. “You don’t have standing to be trespassed on.”

“How do you know I don’t own the place?”

“Because at least a year before you moved in I presided over the burial of George Lund, who last owned it.”

“Half the people around here live in houses they don’t own and don’t pay rent on,” Acker said. “We still have rights. Deaver’s trying to get a hold of this place. He wants to put me off it and take it over.”

“This isn’t a land dispute,” Loren said. “It’s about the horse. Anyway, I’ve looked in on the horse myself. It’s suffering. I’m taking him with me.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“This doesn’t require a warrant,” Loren said.

Acker searched the porch ceiling as though seeking a useful argument that might be inscribed up there.

“Look,” Acker said, “I have no money left to buy hay or grain. What am I supposed to do?”

“You have money for whiskey,” Loren said. “You could have at least let the horse out of the barn. We didn’t have any snow cover until yesterday. It could have been grazing in the weeds up until then. Why did you shut it in a stall filled with shit?”

Acker’s thin-lipped mouth quivered at the corners.

“I was ashamed,” he said, and looked down at his shoes.

“Well, you should be. We all have feelings, but this comes down to plain cruelty.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to scratch a living out of the ground in these times?”

“I think so,” Loren said. “I feel for you and for the people like you who never imagined they’d end up living this way.”

“I’ll need that horse to put in my potatoes next year.”

“If I left him here with you, he wouldn’t be alive at planting time,” Loren said. “It’ll be dark in an hour. I’d better be getting along now.”

“You taking the horse?”

“Haven’t I made that clear?”

Acker started shivering and seemed to retreat inside himself. Loren felt sorry for him but he felt sorrier for the horse. He left Acker on the porch and started for the barn. He had trudged through the crusty snow about three-quarters of the way to the barn when he heard a commotion of footfalls behind him and then felt a blow across his back that pitched him forward clean off his feet. The muscle memory from his days as a midfielder on the Middlebury College varsity lacrosse team propelled him into a shoulder roll that brought him back up into a crouch facing Donald Acker, who stood a few yards away with the stub of a broken tree limb in both hands and the same blank expression on his moon face. Acker wobbled in his tracks and tossed aside the tree limb as if that would make him appear to be an innocent bystander. Loren lunged for it. As he did, Acker attempted to turn around and flee, but his shoe caught in the crusty snow and he toppled over sideways. A moment later Loren was on top of him with the tree limb pressed against Acker’s throat.

“Are you crazy?” Loren said.

“That horse is all I’ve got,” Acker said. His eyes had gone watery. Loren began to register the pain he felt from the top of his right shoulder clear down to his kidney.

“You hurt me, you asshole,” Loren hollered into Acker’s reddening face. He took one hand off the tree limb in order to smack Acker upside his head.

“Ow!” Acker yelled and commenced bawling, his features bunching in pain.

“Don’t give me any more trouble,” Loren said, smacking Acker again, harder.

“Are you gonna arrest me?”

Loren expelled a guttural bellow of exasperation.

“Get up and go inside your house,” he said, climbing off. “And don’t even think about showing your face while I’m still on the premises. Go on!”

Acker struggled to his feet and limped back to the house.

Loren found a lead rope and a halter hanging in the barn and brought the horse outside into the purple twilight where it seemed to blink in amazement. With the strength it had left, the animal followed Loren down Huddle Road and then onto Route 29 another mile back to town. Loren had determined to bring it over to Brother Jobe’s well-run stable adjacent to the old high school. He and the horse found a slow steady rhythm of progress that got them back into town in an hour. His shoulder and back ached and began to stiffen in the cold and he wondered what might have happened if Acker had had a firearm at hand. Loren did not have a pistol of his own and it occurred to him that he might think about acquiring one.

Main Street was dark and quiet on Christmas night and the new tavern was closed, but candles burned cheerfully in the windows of the houses around the corner on Van Buren Street. Here and there a parlor piano and singing could be heard and the horse’s step seemed to quicken a little at the sights and sounds of town life. Shortly, Loren and the horse arrived at the former high school. Several of the New Faith men were in the stable at that hour, having just brought in the dozen horses and several mules from their paddocks for the night. The scene inside was a welcome contrast to the squalor of Acker’s farm. Candle lanterns hung on the six-by-six posts along the center aisle, revealing a place of order, discipline, and human attention in soft golden light. The place smelled clean, more the aroma of hay than the odor of horse manure. The animals were busy eating from their mangers and glanced at the newcomer with interest as Loren led it down the aisle. The brothers helped settle the brindle into a stall and then led in a jennet donkey about half its size to keep it company. The donkey nuzzled the new arrival’s drooping head.