A History of the Future by James Howard Kunstler Read Free Book Online

boy. His discovery that the boy’s body felt very cold sent a bolt of fear through him that seemed to explode in his head like a bomb. He put the candle down on a nearby sideboard, lifted Julian out of the crib, and held him to his chest. The boy’s head lolled lifelessly, and his face, bundled in his colorful knitted wool hat, looked ashen gray.
    “Mandy!” Rick called across the room. Then again, with more urgency, “Mandy!”
    As he wheeled around, he heard her stir. The bedsprings groaned. The floorboards creaked. A dark shape arose in the dim light. Then, Mandy hurtled across the room, shrieking like a raptor, and plunged a nine-inch cook’s knife into a soft space between her husband’s sternum and rib so that the blade neatly sectioned the right atrium of his heart and severed the pulmonary artery. Rick dropped Julian and fell backward onto the crib that he had made himself out of cherrywood in the months preceding the baby’s birth. He had no clear sense of what happened to him in the elongated moment when the crib splintered beneath him and he came to rest on the floor at the sudden end of his life. He certainly did not hear the keening wail that Mandy emitted as the blood ran out of him, which soon drew several neighbors to the house.

S IX
    Christmas music practice at the Congregational Church was reaching its triumphal climax with the concluding song of this year’s program: “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” with Andrew Pendergast directing the choir in its soaring invocations of Come and worship, worship Christ the newborn king in place of the latin Gloria in excelsis deo and all the musicians variously pounding, blowing, and bowing away on their instruments in a transport of yuletide jubilation. It is true that a certain amount of cider had been consumed during the two hours of rehearsal, courtesy of Dan Mullinex, flutes and clarinet, who happened to be the ramrod at Holyrood’s cider works and who brought a keg of 12 percent alcohol “farmhouse draught” to the proceedings. Platters of cakes, sweetmeats, meringues, and cookies also had been brought and devoured in the course of things so that the twelve musicians and twenty-two chorale members were well sugared too. Spirits ran high. An old Harmon top-loader stove warmed the big community room aided by the body heat of thirty-four people. And the room was well lighted by the standards of the new times with a central eighteen-taper chandelier and candles deployed wherever a musician or chorale member needed to read sheet music.
    Charles Pettie, bass fiddle, proprietor of the Battenkill creamery, a modest man of forty-eight years renowned for his way with fresh cheese and a knowledge of music theory second only to Andrew Pendergast, could not contain his agitation.
    “That’s too damned bombastic for a finale,” he said to Robert Earle, first fiddle, who had risen from his seat.
    “What would you prefer?”
    “‘I Will Bow and Be Simple,’ a cappella,” Pettie said.
    “We do that early in the set.”
    “I’m saying move it to last.”
    “It’s kind of austere for a Christmas finale.”
    “It’s sobering. And the tone’s right,” Charles said. “Times being how they are.”
    Robert was about to argue when a commotion erupted at the far end of the big room. There were screams and shouts of “murder” and “come quickly,” and it turned out that Don Burkhardt, a farm worker on Deaver’s place and a Mill Hollow denizen, had responded to Mandy Stokes’s wailing. He and several neighbors had discovered a scene of bloody mayhem upon entering the house and, being twenty-four years old and a swift runner, Don was sent by the others to fetch help. The musicians now put their instruments down, grabbed their coats and hats stashed in every corner, and moved as a mob out the door. The Reverend Loren Holder prevailed on several of the older women to stay behind and mind the lighted candles and the woodstove so the Congregational Church