A History of the Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

scene.
    “He’s fine,” Mandy said. “See?” She hoisted the pack as if to show, then slid the rig onto her back again, aimed a broad false smile at Buddy, and hurried away in the direction of Mill Hollow.

F OUR
    Stephen Bullock, owner of the great five-thousand-acre farm (or “plantation,” as some called it) four miles west of Union Grove, where the Battenkill River emptied into the mighty Hudson, was a personality of byzantine complexity, of hard edges and melting sentiment, comfortable with reality but eager to improve upon it, a visionary, a dreamer. More than anyone in Washington County, perhaps, he actually enjoyed these new times better than the old—back when the juice of modernity ran through everything like God’s own adrenaline. He was much less nervous these days.
    Being the only establishment in the district with a small working hydroelectric installation, Bullock even enjoyed some of the residual comforts of the bygone age. He could play recorded music on a stereo system and run a washing machine. He could enjoy electric lights in his house—though replacement bulbs had become almost impossible to find anymore and they were something he was just not equipped to manufacture on the premises, unlike saddlery, distilled spirits, smoked hams, or the linen sailcloth he used on his own trading sloop, which went to and fro to Albany weekly to buy whatever goods might still be had from the outside world.
    Bullock’s farm ran on a different model than the farms of Ned Larmon, Ben Deaver, Carl Weibel, Todd Zucker, and Bill Schmidt, the other successful big landholders. These men had refitted their formerly modern operations on a mid-nineteenth-century basis, employing hired labor who lived in the nearby town and who reported for work every day as for any job. Bullock’s system was more like a seventeenth-century Hudson River Dutch patroonship, with feudal overtones. (His distant ancestor Joost van Druton, or Drooton, was granted just such a colossal holding of sixty-seven square miles, in the vicinity of Kinderhook, in 1648). Bullock’s people, as he called his workers and their families, lived on Bullock’s own property. Their relationship to Bullock and the land was more an entire way of life than a job. He’d allowed them to construct a village of their own and given them the materials to build with. Bullock didn’t care for religion, so there was no church, but he’d provided a community center building for his people that looked like a church, to be used for common meals, festivals, dances, weddings, funerals, and services of their own devising. It also contained a commissary or small retail operation where his people could purchase the goods that his trade boat brought in from receding precincts of the troubled wider world. His people called the building the grange, because it resembled a grange hall of yore, with tall stately windows, a grand front door dignified with pilasters and a fanlight, and a graceful cupola with a small dome painted in yellow ocher. A graveyard occupied a half acre beside it where, over recent years, victims of the Mexican flu, the encephalitis, and the general decline of advanced medicine were deposited to begin their journeys to the infinite.
    The living, who numbered sixty-three adults, had traded their allegiance to Bullock in exchange for food, security, purposeful work, and a sense of community on his property. Against the background of a society that had lost its bearings so completely, the future, for many of these people, seemed something worse than a broken promise—a dreadful, certain swindle. Bullock afforded his people not only shelter from a terrible storm of history but a practical faith in the continuation of an ordered existence, the prospect of remaining civilized. These were men and women who had had regular lives around the region and regular vocations: pharmacists, car dealers, bureaucrats, insurance reps, who had been left high and dry by the mighty