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

Sophie, pronounced “inedible.” The staple in the new times was corn bread and many dishes were made around it, for instance the so-called pudding that Britney cut a big oblong of and put on a plate for Robert, with pickled garden vegetables and a side of fermented cabbage spiced with hot peppers, garlic, and green onions, not unlike the Korean kimchi that had been catching on in America just when things fell apart. Britney’s pudding this evening was a savory baked dish of day-old corn bread, eggs, cream, kale, onions, and leftover duck, of which she had used everything but the quack.
    Robert seated himself next to the stove in a hoop-back rocking chair built with his own hands out of maple, oak, and poplar the month after his daughter Genna died of encephalitis at age eleven. It had required all his attention to build it correctly.
    “You know, we could get a horse now,” Robert said.
    “Why would you want to get a horse?”
    This brought him up short. He wondered for a moment if Britney was being snarky with him, but this was not her way.
    “I have quite a bit of hard money due. Enough for a horse.”
    “You could always rent a horse from Mr. Allison,” she said. Tom Allison had been a vice president for administration at the county community college in the old times. Now he ran the town livery, a business he had to improvise because the model for running it hadn’t existed in a century. He rented out carts and wagons as well as saddle horses. In the new times most people not involved with the transport of goods did not have to go anywhere.
    “I’ve wanted a horse for a long time,” Robert said.
    “It’s not like having a car where you can just leave it sit until you need it,” Britney said. “You have to care for them constantly. And they get sick fairly often.”
    “What do you know about horses?”
    “I half-leased a palomino named Josie when I was twelve and thirteen. That is, my mom did for me. Josie got Lyme disease and we had to pay the vet bills. On top of everything else. All the routine stuff.”
    “I didn’t know you rode horses.”
    “There’s probably a lot we don’t know about each other,” Britney said.
    “I guess so.”
    Britney poured Robert’s hot milk into a mug, stirred in a golden glob of honey, and finished it with a liberal shot of rye whiskey. As she brought it over to him, she tried again to get him to look at her. He actually closed his eyes as he took the mug and savored the first gulp of the warm, sweet beverage and felt it go to work in his belly.
    “Oh, that’s good,” he said, still avoiding her gaze. “At least there’s no more Lyme disease since people jacked all the deer.”
    “There’s always something going on with a horse,” Britney said. “And the vet doesn’t have what he used to have to deal with it.”
    When she brought his supper plate over to him, Robert finally looked right back at her. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought you would be thrilled at the idea of getting a horse.”
    “Sorry,” she said.
    “I thought Sara would like to have a horse to ride.”
    “I wasn’t so crazy about it. Mom pushed me into it because the real well-off girls in town rode horses.”
    Robert savored his first bite of the duck and kale pudding. Nobody in town had a horse except for the farmers and Tom Allison, Dr. Copeland, and Terry Einhorn the storekeeper. These were the well-off in the society of the new times. Robert wondered whether he was considered well-off. He was getting by. He was paid in hard silver for his work. He had plenty of firewood and food. So many others were not doing so well and had little prospect of it. But the plain fact was, he liked riding a horse and he still wanted to have one. You could go places.
    “What kind of riding did you do?” he asked Britney.
    “Dressage, it’s called. Fancy steps. Like dancing for horses. I didn’t like it. I just wanted to gallop around and we weren’t allowed to.”
    “Sara could