The Harrows of Spring by James Howard Kunstler Read Free Book Online Page B

River beside a magnificent sycamore tree with a lit pipe in one hand and a silver flask of Mount Tom whiskey in the other. The pipe contained a mixture of tobacco and marijuana, both grown locally. Eighty feet below, white billows of river water dashed over the spillways of the dam built to power factories in the old times, beginning with a cambric mill that turned out officers’ dress uniforms for the Union Army followed by manufacturing ventures that made cotton shirts, cardboard boxes, wallpaper, and lastly toilet tissue. The early factories ran on direct water power; after 1899, they switched to hydroelectric. Nothing remained of these industrial works except some ragged fieldstone and concrete foundations and the dam itself.
    The damp air rising off the river felt soothingly cool on the doctor’s face. He had walked over to the river from the makeshift surgery in the carriage house where he maintained his medical office. He had spent much of the morning there removing an eleven-inch black locust splinter from a sawmill worker named Edward Tenant. The splinter had penetrated clear through the transverse abdominis muscle and perforated the ascending colon. Assisted by his wife, Jeanette, the doctor had scrupulously cleaned and sewn up the various layers of the wound and the patient was resting comfortably in the small infirmary on the second floor under the influence of the opium suppositories that the doctor manufactured himself from a supply of poppy gum that several local farmers produced for him.
    The catch was the doctor had no way of knowing whether Edward would develop fatal peritonitis and he had no antibiotics, nor did he have access to X-rays, CAT scans, ultrasound, or any of the diagnostic equipment he had been trained on years ago at Johns Hopkins. He just had to wait and see how God Almighty was disposed to the fate of Edward Tenant, and the doctor was not convinced that the deity existed, or was especially fair or generous if He/She/It did exist. It was bad enough to preside over the epidemics that swept the county like a drag rake over a field of dandelions, but he saw cases every week of common accidents and illnesses that would have been easily fixed or cured in the old times and now sent their unfortunate victims straight to the graveyard. The phrase not what I signed up for reverberated in his mind as he let out a plume of smoke and followed it with a gulp of the whiskey. The responsibility, he thought, was literally killing him. The smoke and the drink temporarily eased the pressure crushing his soul.
    Upstream of the dam hundreds of black, brown, and white Canada geese were marshaling on an eddy and making a conspicuous racket doing it. Flights of several dozen would land and others would take off as though the geese were practicing some sort of war game maneuvers. Airborne, they assumed the familiar flying-Vformation. The population of these geese had surged even before the old times ended as weather patterns changed. More of them wintered over than migrated now. The people of Union Grove killed and ate them as they could, but there were far fewer people than there had been a decade earlier and fewer of them had working firearms or factory-made ammunition. One townsman named Tommy Pernelle had affected to work occasionally as a market hunter with a gun he made himself that fired any kind of scrap metal and even pebbles, and occasionally he sold a brace of geese to Terry Einhorn. But then his dog died and he couldn’t find another retriever—the dog population being depleted even more than the human—and Tommy did not like going into the water to fetch the geese himself. Eventually Tommy preferred working in the comfort of Holyrood’s cider works to the life of a market hunter.
    Standing high above the river on Salem Street, the doctor watched the sqwonking geese below, realizing what a perfect disease vector they were for the next epidemic, and the arresting thought entered his