World Made by Hand

Six

To get to the general supply, you had to go past the old high school at the edge of town on North Road. I was interested to see suddenly quite a bustle about the place. Several wagons stood before the main entrance, and men were off-loading things: furniture, trunks, crates, a big iron wood-fired cookstove with shiny chrome appointments. Another gang worked up on the roof. You could smell tar boiling from where I stood. Yet another crew was out in what used to be the parking lot, breaking up the asphalt with picks to feed the tar-boiling operation. In this weather, it must have been brutal work. A column of white smoke curled up in the breezeless air.

The old high school football field was in the process of being turned into a large garden. It had been returning to scrub in recent years anyway. The newcomers had done an impressive job of clearing the sumacs and other weedy trash. They had already plowed up the field and harrowed and raked it smooth. A dozen women were out there now in long skirts and straw hats, stooped over and inching their way up new rows planting seeds. It was a little late to be starting most vegetables. I hoped they knew what they were doing.

I paused on the road there watching at a distance for a while, fascinated by the scale of enterprise and wondering how it was organized. In my old corporate days, I was considered a good organizer. That’s what my job was mainly about, getting things done on time, pulling things together. I had a fascination with how people managed other people in the corporate world. In our world now, the freehold farmer was the new chief executive. The authority in town was a lot less clear-cut, to put it mildly, with the popula tion so diminished and no money to do anything and schooling reduced to the little church-affiliated academy that Jane Ann was in charge of. We musicians in the First Congregational submitted to the direction of Andrew Pendergast who ran the choir, the music circle, and the spin-off chamber ensemble. And of course the Reverend Loren Holder was in charge of the church itself, and most of the activities organized within it. It was not always so easy to understand or accept the authority of the God that our church was organized to honor, given all the hardships he had brought down upon us.

The people working over at the high school ignored me as I stood watching them from the road. There wasn’t any sign of Brother Jobe, but I supposed that all this activity was directed by him. I certainly wondered how these newcomers were going to fit into the life of our town. It was obvious that the balance of things was going to change with them around. I reflected on the possibility that it might be for the better, since at least they would set an example of cooperative labor, something we had gotten sloppy about, especially where the upkeep of the village was concerned. There would also be new blood in town, people with new skills, maybe some good musicians among them, perhaps even an eligible woman-but this led me into a rueful consideration of my relations with Jane Ann, which was something I could hardly bear to think about. I supposed that this outfit was a covenanted sect and you’d probably have to sign on with them to meet a woman, and no doubt they had a lot of special rules of behavior, and for all I knew maybe they followed celibacy like the old Shakers had. I did not see any children anywhere.

The old high school complex itself was a 1970s-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other schools around the nation from the period. Seeing the building usually made me deeply sad and even a little angry, the way that refrigerator in my garden did. Its vision of yesterday’s tomorrow seemed pitiful. Children like my Daniel and Genna had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in “smart” computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on the giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about it. Not because there’s something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that’s where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid. Thinking about all that got me so agitated, I took off up the road. Motion is a great tranquilizer.