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

just gallop around.”
    “Horses are very dangerous. What do you know about horses?”
    “I rode one to Albany and back last summer. And then up to Hebron and back in October on one of Tom’s saddle horses. They were both well behaved.”
    “How did you like it?”
    “I guess I liked it pretty well. I like the smell and the feel of them. I like that they’re alive like us, with personalities.”
    “I liked that about them too.”
    “Down in Albany we got shot at, you know. We rode through that.”
    “It must have been a very good horse,” Britney said.
    “I thought I would get a cart for carrying my tools.”
    “Don’t you usually leave your tools on the job?”
    “Maybe it’s childish but I just want a horse.”
    “It’s not like a car,” Britney said again.
    He finished his supper plate in ruminative silence, his thoughts once more turned on the murder scene. Britney cut the wicks on the finished candles she had dipped and began putting them away in a chestnut drink cabinet that had belonged to Robert’s grandfather, an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut. In the old times, Robert had housed his stereo amplifier and CD player in it.
    “I’m going to wash up,” Robert said. Britney had put a pail of water on the woodstove as she did every night for their ablutions. The town water system still worked, miraculously, because it was gravity-fed from an old town reservoir at an elevation on a low shoulder of Pumpkin Hill. Robert carried the steaming pail upstairs with a rag around the handle.
    Not long after Robert retired to the bedroom, Britney came in from her own turn in the washroom and looking in on her sleeping daughter. Robert was reading by candlelight, his usual habit. It was a biography of Stalin. Britney wore a flannel nightshirt with her hair down. She smelled of lilac. Her compact, muscular physical presence excited him. He put down his book and watched her maneuver around the bed to her side. They had evolved a comfortable protocol for sexual activity in the months since Britney moved into the household. On the nights when she was interested in lovemaking, she always made a little show of removing her nightclothes before turning up the covers. This night, she just climbed quickly into bed.
    “I realized something tonight,” Robert said. Britney turned to look at him through her eyelashes with her chin down, thinking she was going to be criticized about her opposition to getting a horse. “It was at music practice. Bonnie Sweetland sang a solo verse on ‘Away in a Manger.’ Not having microphones has changed everything about music. People sing differently now.”
    “Why do I get the feeling that there’s something else on your mind tonight?” she said.
    After an awkward moment of hesitation he told her what had happened in Mill Hollow that evening.

N INE
    When Andrew Pendergast returned from the exhilarating and exhausting Christmas practice, and the subsequent march to the murder scene in Mill Hollow, he noticed that his front door was not quite closed. It gave way inward, creaking on its hinges, as he made to turn the knob. The spice of his balsam Christmas tree carried another note on its broad raft of fragrance, a sweet-rotten odor like a dead squirrel in the ancient walls. He had been careful every summer to patch all the spots under the eaves where they had invaded in decades past. The heavy front door closed behind him with the solid, definitive thunk of well-fitted latches. The darkness and silence of an unelectrified house closed in on him. He reached with assurance toward a mahogany stand beside the door for the candle holder that lived there and one of the matches that lived beside it in an antique glass tumbler, which, in daylight, was a very subtle shade of violet. He struck the match on a piece of slate placed there for that purpose and lighted the candle. The nimbus of light blinded him for a moment, and in that moment someone across his living room began to sing in a reedy