World Made by Hand

Two

We walked the next mile in silence. The brilliant salmon-colored sky turned to a yellow-gray clotted pudding as darkness came on. I wondered what the weather would be like. You never knew in advance anymore. A warm breeze had come up, and I surmised it would be hotter tomorrow.

“What are you going to spend all that money on?” I said finally.

“It’s not like I wanted to sell them,” Loren said.

“Then why did you?”

“You saw how he was. Might as well have been a holdup.”

“Well it looks like you’ve suddenly got some competition in town.”

“The church isn’t a business.”

“I don’t know about that. Sometimes it seems like the only business left.”

“That’s why you should take my idea seriously,” Loren said.

“Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“I want you to go look through the building with me.”

“All right.”

“It’d benefit everybody.”

We hiked past the raggedy commercial strip that used to mark the eastern built-up fringe of town, but the town had shrunk back into itself. The strip mall stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything else worth scavenging was stripped out. A fragment of the plastic Kmart sign remained bolted to the facade-the piece that saidart. The irony did not move me. I wasn’t sorry that it was out of business, but I was sorry that the remnants were still there.

“Did you notice the girl?” Loren said.

“Of course I did.”

“Kind of young, didn’t you think?”

“Maybe she was his daughter.”

“Didn’t look a bit like him,” Loren said. “How can they come in here and buy the school and we don’t even know about it?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Dale made a deal on his own.” Dale Murray was our mayor. The apparatus of our government had fallen way off, along with the population. It was Dale and a drunken constable for the most part, and a magistrate who said he wouldn’t do the job if elected-before he was elected. Sometimes things just happened and then you heard about it. Mostly nothing happened. “The school was just sitting there, rotting,” I said.

“It must be worth something,” Loren said. “I don’t like giving up on the idea that we might need it again in the future.”

“It’s your nostalgia working overtime.”

“Well, it bothers me. And more to the point, I’m not sure I like that fellow,” Loren said. “Why did they have to pick this town?”

“People are on the move again. We should expect it. Maybe some of them will break off from his bunch and come our way.”

“I doubt it. Those sectarians are tight as ticks.”

“We’ll see. It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what kind of country it is anymore,” Loren said, “and neither do you.”

We hiked past the burned-out hulk of the old wholesale beverage center.

“Do you want any of these trout to take home?” I finally said, offering my creel to Loren.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m just going to put them in the smoker. Go ahead. Take two.

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Tell Jane Ann I appreciated the wine.”

By now, we’d entered the town proper. The streetlamps were off, as usual. Many of the houses we passed were dark. I would venture that the population here was down by three-quarters. The safety net for the elderly had dissolved, with so much else, and since a disproportionate number of houses in town had been owned by older folks who had died off, many were now vacant. It was nice to see the Copeland kids running around playing in the yard beside their big old place, with candles burning inside, welcoming and homey. Jerry Copeland was our doctor. He was a GP but he had to do it all, becoming an excellent surgeon by necessity. The hospital in Glens Falls had closed after the flu killed more than half the staff. Jerry had trouble getting medicines and supplies, but he was also resourceful. His wife, Jeanette, was an able assistant and a dazzling soprano. Their boys were polite and well behaved. Being so few in numbers, children no longer enjoyed solidarity in rebellion, and our society was too fragile to indulge much symbolic misbehavior. The flu had carried off Jerry’s youngest, a girl named Fawn. There was nothing even he could do.

We eventually came to Loren’s parish house next to the big white wooden church on Salem Street. The church was in excellent condition because those of us who remained did not have diversions like television or recreational shopping anymore, and the church had become our get-together place in a way churches had ceased to be for generations. So we took care of it. We worked on it and we kept it painted, though of course paint wasn’t what it used to be either. We made it ourselves out of slaked lime, milk, and chalk.

I gave Loren two nice trout of my five and we said goodnight.

My house was a block and a half past where Linden Street met Salem Street. On nights like this the surface normality of smalltown America overwhelmed you with sadness. Here and there a candle glowed in a window, but people worked hard and were likely to turn in when the sun went down, so it was difficult to tell occupied houses from vacant ones. My own house was haunted by the ghosts of my family: wife Sandy, gone from an outbreak of encephalitis, daughter Genna, taken by the flu, and son Daniel, who left home and did not return. The sight of the place plunged me into memory and feeling no matter how many times I came upon it.

Just as things were starting to fall apart, Sandy had painted the house a gray-violet with sage green trim. She was a stickler for quality materials, and the paint had stood up well in the years since. The house was built in 1904 in the arts-and-crafts style, which was a romantic reaction to the juggernaut of industry, and perhaps because of that it worked well under these new conditions of austerity. The front porch was deep and graceful, though I had lately been using it as a woodshop in the warm part of the year. Inside it was generous for a bungalow, with four bedrooms in all, and it had many fine touches, including oak wainscoting, a cozy inglenook beside the fieldstone fireplace, built-in bookshelves everywhere, and graceful windows with arched sashes that still slid beautifully and closed snugly after more than a hundred years.

I lost Sandy and eleven-year-old Genna in two successive years. Daniel was thirteen when his sister passed away and nineteen when he set out from here, which was two years ago, and I wished I knew whether he was alive and well, and where he had gone and been to, but there were no more phones or mail as we once knew them. I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now.