CHAPTER 45 © Составление и оформление -el` Poison-, 2002.

CHAPTER 45

224 She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the CocaCola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955 the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain't more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race. Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn't seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear. She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother's womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother's Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninetythree, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator. She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She'd seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goingson of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered... and she wasn't up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother's legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She's got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages. Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams? She never saw him; she didn't have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her-spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the door post wasn't daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power. "Welladay," she said, and popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright, fine day, and no part of her body was giving her particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil. "God is great," Mother Abagail said, "God is good. Thank You for the sunshine. For the coffee. For the fine BM I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain't I the one? God is great...

225 Her coffee was about gone. She set the cup down and rocked, her face turned up to the sun like some strange living rockface, seamed with veins of coal. She dozed, then slept. Her heart, its walls now almost as thin as tissue paper, beat on and on as it had every minute for the last 39,630 days. Like a baby in a crib, you would have had to put your hand on her chest to assure yourself that she was breathing at all. But the smile stayed on.

Things had surely changed in all the years since she had been a girl. The Freemantles had come to Nebraska as freed slaves, and Abagail's own greatgranddaughter Molly laughed in a nasty, cynical way and suggested the money Abby's father had used to buy the home place-money paid to him by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina, as wages for the eight years her daddy and his brothers had stayed on after the States War had ended-had been "conscience money." Abagail had held her tongue when Molly said that-Molly and Jim and the others were young and didn't understand anything but the veriest good and the veriest bad-but inside she had rolled her eyes and said to herself: Conscience money? Well, is there any money cleaner than that? So the Freemantles had settled in Hemingford Home and Abby, the last of Daddy and Mamma's children, had been born right here on the home place. Her father had bested those who would not buy from niggers and those who would not sell to them; he had bought land a little smidge at a time so as not to alarm those who were worried about "those black bastards over Columbus way"; he had been the first man in Polk County to try crop rotation; the first man to try chemical fertilizer; and in March of 1902 Gary Sites had come to the house to tell John Freemantle that he had been voted into the Grange. He was the first black man to belong to the Grange in the whole state of Nebraska. That year had been a topper. She reckoned that anyone, looking back over her life, could pick out one year and say, "That was the best." It seemed that, for everyone, there was one spell of seasons when everything came together, smooth and glorious and full of wonder. It was only later on that you might wonder why it had happened that way. It was like putting ten different savory things in the cold-pantry all at once, so each took on a bit of the others' flavors; the mushrooms had a taste of ham and the ham of mushrooms; the venison had the slightest wild taste of partridge and the partridge had the tiniest hint of cucumbers. Later on in life, you might wish that the good things which all befell in your one special year had spread themselves out a little more, that you could maybe take one of the golden things and kind of transplant it right down in the middle of a three-year stretch you couldn't remember a blessed good thing about, or even a bad one, and so you knew that things had just gone on the way they were supposed to in the world God had created and Adam and Eve had half uncreated-the washing had gone out, the floors had been scrubbed, the babies had been cared for, the clothes had been mended; three years with nothing to break up the gray even flow of time but Easter and the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas. But there was no answering the ways God set about His wonders to perform, and for Abby Freemantle as well as her father, '02 had been a topper. Abby thought she was the only one in the family-other than her daddy, that was-that understood what a great, nearly unprecedented thing it was to be invited into the Grange. He would be the first Negro Granger in Nebraska, and very possibly the first Negro Granger in the United States. He had no illusions about the price he and his family would pay in the form of crude jokes and racial slurs from those men-Ben Conveigh chief among them-who were set against the idea. But he also saw that Gary Sites was handing him something more than a chance at survival: Gary was giving him a chance to prosper with the rest of the corn belt. As a member of the Grange, his problems buying good seed would end. The necessity of taking his crops all the way to Omaha to find a buyer would likewise end. It might mean the end of the water-rights squabble he had been having with Ben Conveigh, who was rabid on the subjects of niggers like John Freemantle and nigger-lovers like Gary Sites. It might even mean that the county tax assessor would stop his endless gouging. So John Freemantle accepted the invitation, and the vote went his way (by quite a comfortable margin, too), and there were nasty cracks, and jokes about how a coon had got caught in the Grange Hall loft, and about how when a nigger-baby went to heaven and got its little black wings you called it a bat instead of an angel, and Ben Conveigh went around for a while telling people that the only reason the Mystic Tie Grange had voted John Freemantle in was because the Children's Fair was coming up pretty soon and they needed a nigger to play the African orangutan. John Freemantle pretended not to hear these things, and at home he would quote from the Bible-"A soft answer turneth away wrath" and "Brethren, as ye reap so shalt ye surely sow" and his favorite, spoken not in humility but in grim expectation: "The meek shall inherit the earth." And little by little he had brought his neighbors around. Not all of them, not the rabid ones like Ben Conveigh and his half-brother George, not the Arnolds and the Deacons, but all the others. In 1903 they had taken dinner with Gary Sites and his family, right in the parlor, just as good as white.

226 And in 1902 Abagail had played her guitar at the Grange Hall, and not in the minstrel show, either; she had played m the white folks' talent show at the end of the year. Her mother had been deadset against that; it was one of the few times in her life when she let her opposition to one of her husband's ideas out in front of the children (except by then the boys were damned near middle- aged and John himself had a good deal more than a touch of snow on the mountain). "I know how it was," she said, weeping. "You and Sites and that Frank Fenner, you whipped this up together. That's fine for them, John Freemantle, but what's got into your head? They're white! You go hunker down with them in the backyard and talk about plowin! You can even go downtown and have a spot of beer with them, if that Nate Jackson will let you into his saloon. Fine! I know what you've been through these last years-none better. I know you've kep a smile on your face when it must have hurt like a grassfire in your heart. But this is different! This is your own daughter! What you gonna say if she gets up there in her pretty white dress and they laughs at her? What you gonna do if they throws rotten tomatas at her like they did at Brick Sullivan when he tried to sing in the minstrel show? And what are you going to say if she comes to you with those tomatas all over the front of her dress and asks, `Why, Daddy? Why did they do it, and why did you let them do it?'" "Well, Rebecca," John had answered, "I guess we better leave it up to her and David." David had been her first husband; in 1902 Abagail Freemantle had become Abagail Trotts. David Trotts was a black farmhand from over Valparaiso way, and he had come pretty nearly thirty miles one way to court her. John Freemantle had once said to Rebecca that the bear had caught ole Davy right and proper, and he had been Trotting plenty. There were plenty who had laughed at her first husband and said things like, "I guess I know who wears the pants in that family." But David had not been a weakling, only quiet and thoughtful. When he told John and Rebecca Freemantle, "Whatever Abagail thinks is right, why, I reckon that's what's to do," she had blessed him for it and told her mother and father she intended to go ahead. So on December 27, 1902, already three months gone with her first, she had mounted the Grange Hall stage in the dead silence that had ensued when the master of ceremonies had announced her name. Just before her Gretchen Tilyons had been on and had done a racy French dance, showing her ankles and petticoats to the raucous whistles, cheers, and stamping feet of the men in the audience. She stood in the thick silence, knowing how black her face and neck must look in her new white dress, and her heart was thudding terribly in her chest and she was thinking, I've forgot every word, every single word, I promised Daddy I wouldn't cry no matter what, I wouldn't cry, but Ben Conveigh's out there and when Ben Conveigh yells NIGGER, then I guess I'll cry, oh why did I ever get into this? Mamma was right, I've got above my place and I'll pay for it— The hall was filled with white faces turned up to look at her. Every chair was filled and there were two rows of standees at the back of the hall. Kerosene lanterns glowed and flared. The red velvet curtains were pulled back in swoops of cloth and tied with gold ropes. And she thought: I'm Abagail Freemantle Trotts, I play well and I sing well; I do not know these things because anyone told me. And so she began to sing "The Old Rugged Cross" into the moveless silence, her fingers picking melody. Then picking up a strum, the slightly stronger melody of "How I Love My Jesus," and then stronger still, "Camp Meeting in Georgia." Now people were swaying back and forth almost in spite of themselves. Some were grinning and tapping their knees. She sang a medley of Civil War songs: "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," "Marching Through Georgia," and "Goober Peas" (more smiles at that one; many of these men, Grand Army of the Republic veterans, had eaten more than a few goober peas during their time in the service). She finished with "Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground," and as the last chord floated away into a silence that was now thoughtful and sad, she thought: Now if you want to throw your tomatas or whatever, you go on and do it. I played and sang my best, and I was real fine. When the last chord floated into silence, that silence held for a long, almost enchanted instant, as though the people in those seats and the others standing at the back of the hall had been taken far away, so far they could not find their way back all at once. Then the applause broke and rolled over her in a wave, long and sustained, making her blush, making her feel confused, hot and shivery all over. She saw her mother, weeping openly, and her father, and David, beaming at her. She had tried to leave the stage then, but cries of "Encore! Encore!" broke out, and so, smiling, she played "Digging My Potatoes." That song was just a tiny bit risky, but Abby guessed that if Gretchen Tilyons could show her ankles in public, then she could sing a song that was the teeniest bit bawdy. She was, after all, a married woman.

227

There were six more verses like that (some even worse) and she sang every one, and at the last line of each the roar of approval was louder. And later she thought that if she had done anything wrong that night, it was singing that song, which was exactly the kind of song they probably expected to hear a nigger sing. She finished to another thunderous ovation and fresh cries of "Encore!" She remounted the stage, and when the crowd had quietened, she said: "Thank you all very much. I hope you won't think I am bein forward if I ask to sing just one more song, which I have learned special but never ever expected to sing here. But it is just about the best song I know, on account of what President Lincoln and this country did for me and mine, even before I was born." They were very quiet now, listening closely. Her family sat stock still, all together near the left aisle, like a spot of blackberry jam on a white handkerchief. "On account of what happened back in the middle of the States War," she went steadily on, "my family was able to come here and live with the fine neighbors that we have." Then she played and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," and everyone stood up and listened, and some of the handkerchiefs came out again, and when she had finished, they applauded fit to raise the roof. That was the proudest day of her life.

She stirred awake a little after noon and sat up, blinking in the sunlight, an old woman of a hundred and eight. She had slept wrong on her back and it was a pure misery to her. Would be all day, if she knew anything about it. "Welladay," she said, and stood up carefully. She began to go down the porch steps, holding carefully to the rickety railing, wincing at the daggers of pain in her back and the prickles in her legs. Her circulation was not what it had once been... why should it be? Time after time she had warned herself about the consequences of falling asleep in that rocker. She would doze off and all the old times would come back and that was wonderful, oh yes it was, better than watching a play on the television, but there was hell to pay when she woke up. She could lecture herself all she liked, but she was like an old dog that splays itself out by a fireplace. If she sat in the sun, she went to sleep, that was all. She no longer had a say in the matter. She reached the bottom of the steps, paused to "let her legs catch up with her," then hawked up a goodish gob of snot and spat it into the dirt. When she felt about as usual (except for the misery in her back), she walked slowly around to the privy her grandson Victor had put behind the house in 1931. She went inside, primly shut the door and put the hook through the eye just as if there was a whole crowd of folks out there instead of a few blackbirds, and sat down. A moment later she began to make water and sighed contentedly. Here was another thing about being old no one ever thought to tell you (or was it just that you never listened?)—you stopped knowing when you had to make water. Seemed like you lost all the feeling down there in your bladder, and if you weren't careful, first thing you knew you had to be changing your clothes. It wasn't like her to be dirty, and so she came out here to squat six or seven times a day, and at night she kept the chamberpot beside the bed. Molly's Jim told her once that she was like a dog that couldn't pass a fireplug without at least lifting one leg to salute it, and that had made her laugh until tears spouted from her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. Molly's Jim was an advertising executive in Chicago and getting along a right smart... had been, anyway. She supposed he was gone with the rest of them. Molly too. Bless their hearts, they were with Jesus now. The last year or so, Molly and Jim were about the only ones who came out to the place to see her anymore. The rest seemed to have forgot she was alive, but she could understand that. She had lived past her time. She was like a dinosaur which had no business still wearing its flesh over its bones, a thing whose proper place was in a museum (or a graveyard). She could understand them not wanting to come see her, but what she couldn't understand was why they didn't want to come back and see the land. There wasn't much left, no; just a matter of acres out of the original large freehold. It was still theirs, however; still their land. But black folks didn't seem to care so much about land anymore. There were, in fact, those that actually seemed ashamed of it. They had gone off to make their way in the cities, and most of them, like Jim, came along real well... but how it made her heart ache, to think of all those black folks with their faces set away from the land! Molly and Jim had wanted to put in a flushing toilet for her the year before last, and had been hurt when she refused. She tried to explain so they could understand, but all Molly had been able to say, over and over again was, "Mother Abagail, you are a hundred and six years old. How do you think I feel, knowing you are going out there to squat down some days when it's only ten degrees above zero? Don't you know that the shock of the cold could do your heart in?" "When the Lord wants me, the Lord will take me," Abagail said, and she was knitting, and so of course they thought that was what she was looking at and couldn't see the way they rolled their eyes at each other.

228 Some things you couldn't let go of. It seemed like that was another thing the young people didn't know. Now, back in '82, when she had turned a hundred, Cathy and David had offered her a TV set and she had taken them up on that one. The TV was a marvelous machine for passing the time when you were by your onesome. But when Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet. They had argued that her dug well was shallow, and it could go dry if there was another summer like 1988, when the drought came. It was true, but she just went on saying no. They thought she had flipped her wig, of course, that she was taking coat after coat of senility the way a floor takes varnish, but she herself believed her mind was pretty nigh as good as it had ever been. She hoisted herself off the privy's seat, dusted lime down through the hole, and slowly let herself out into the sunlight again. She kept her privy sweet, but they were dank old places no matter how sweet they smelled. It was as if the voice of God had been whispering in her ear when Chris and Susy offered to see that she was put on the city water... the voice of God even way back when. Molly and Jim wanted to get her that china throne with the flush-lever on the side. God did speak to folks; hadn't He talked to Noah about the ark, telling him how many cubits long and how many deep and how many wide? Yes. And she believed He had spoken to her as well, not from a burning bush or out of a pillar of fire, but in a still, small voice that said: Abby, you are going to need your hand pump. You enjoy your lectricity all you want, Abby, but you keep those oil-lamps of yours full and keep the wicks trimmed. You keep the cold-pantry just the way your mother kept it before you. And mind you don't let any of the young folks talk you into anything you know to be against My will, Abby. They are your kin, but I am your Father. She paused in the middle of the yard, looking out at the sea of corn, broken only by the dirt road going north toward Duncan and Columbus. Three miles up from her house it went to tar. The corn was going to be fine this year, and it was such a shame that no one would be around to harvest it but the rooks. It was sad to think that the big red harvesting machines were going to stay in their barns this September, sad to think there would be no husking bees and barn dances. Sad to think that, for the first time in the last one hundred and eight years, she would not be here in Hemingford Home to see the time of the change as summer gave in to pagan, jocund autumn. She would love this summer all the more because it was to be her last-she felt that clearly. And she would not be laid to rest here but farther west, in a strange country. It was bitter. She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, and on the inside rim there was a deep depression where generations of young buttocks had set themselves down. Below the tire was a deep and dusty groove in the earth where the grass had long since given up trying to grow, and on the limb where the rope was tied, the bark had been rubbed away to show the branch's white bone. The rope creaked slowly and this time she spoke aloud. "Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I'd have you take this cup from my lips if You can. I'm old and I'm scared and mostly I'd just like to lie right here on the home place. I'm ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb's one tired shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done." No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.

That night she dreamed she was mounting the steps to the Grange Hall stage again, a young and pretty Abagail, three months quick with child, a dusky Ethiopian jewel in her white dress, holding her guitar by the neck, climbing, climbing into that stillness, her thoughts a millrace, yet holding above all to one thought: I am Abagail Freemantle Trotts, and I play well and I sing well. I do not know these things because anyone told me. In the dream she turned slowly, facing those white faces turned up to her like moons, faced the hall so richly alight with its lamps and the mellow glow thrown back from the darkened, slightly steamed windows and the red velvet swags with their gold ropes. She held firmly to that one thought and began to play "Rock of Ages." She played and her voice came out, not nervous and restrained, but exactly as it had come out when she had been practicing, rich and mellow, like the yellow lamplight itself, and she thought: I am going to win them. With the help of God I am going to win them over. Oh my people, if you are thirsty, will I not bring water from the rock? I will win them over, and I will make David proud of me and Mamma and Daddy proud of me, I will make myself proud of myself, I will bring music from the air and water from the rock—

229 And that was when she saw him for the first time. He was standing far back in the corner, behind all the seats, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket with buttons on the pockets. He was wearing dusty black boots with rundown heels, boots that looked as if they had walked many a dark and dusty mile. His forehead was white as gaslight, his cheeks red with jolly blood, his eyes blazing blue diamond chips, sparkling with infernal good cheer, as if the Imp of Satan had taken over the job of Kris Kringle. A hot and fleering grin had pulled his lips back from his teeth into something close to a snarl. The teeth were white and sharp and neat, like the teeth of a weasel. He raised his hands out from his body. Both of them were curled into fists, as tight and hard as knots on an apple tree. His grin remained, jolly and utterly hideous. Drops of blood began to fall from his fists. The words dried up in her mind. Her fingers forgot how to play; there was a final discordant jangle and then silence. God! God! she cried, but God had turned His face away. Then Ben Conveigh was standing up, his face red and flaming, his small pig's eyes glittering. Nigger bitch! he shouted. What's that nigger bitch doing up on our stage? No nigger bitch ever brought music from the air! No nigger bitch ever brought water from the rock! Answering cries of savage agreement. People surging forward. She saw her husband stand up and attempt to mount the stage. A fist hit him in the mouth, bowling him over backward. Get those dirty coons in the back of the hall! Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else-Chet Deacon, by the lookswrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon! Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, and they all began to punch and pummel the struggling woman under the velvet drape. Mamma! Abby screamed. The guitar was plucked from her nerveless fingers and smashed to strips and strings on the edge of the stage. She looked wildly for the dark man at the back of the hall, but his engine had been set in motion and was running sweet and hot; he had gone on to some other place. Mamma! she screamed again, and then rough hands were hauling her from the stage, they were under her dress, pawing her, tweaking her, pinching her bottom. Her hand was pulled sharply by someone, yanking her arm in her socket. It was put against something hard and hot. Ben Conveigh's voice in her ear: How do you like MY rock of ages, you nigger slut? The room was whirling. She saw her father struggling to get at the limp form of her mother, and she saw a white hand holding a bottle come down on the back of a folding camp chair. There was a rattle and a smash, and then the jagged neck of the bottle, twinkling in the warm glow of all those lamps, was thrust into her father's face. She saw his staring, bulging eyes pop like grapes. She screamed and the force of her cry seemed to break the room apart, to let in darkness, and she was Mother Abagail again one hundred and eight years old, too old, my Lord, too old (but let Thy will be done), and she was walking in the corn, the mystic corn that was rooted shallow in the earth but wide, lost in the corn that was silver with moonglow and black with shadow; she could hear the summer nightwind rustling gently through it, she could smell its growing, wholly alive smell as she had smelled it all her long, long life (and she had thought many times that this was the plant closest to all life, the corn, and its smell was the smell of life itself, the start of life, oh she had married and buried three husbands, David Trotts, Henry Hardesty, and Nate Brooks, and she had had three men in bed, had welcomed them as a woman must welcome a man, by giving way before him, and there had always been the yearning pleasure, the thought Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man and how I love him to be sexy with me when he gets me what he gets me what he shoots in me and sometimes at the instant of her climax she would think of the corn, the bland corn with its roots planted not deep but wide, she would think of flesh and then the corn, when it was all over and her husband lay beside her the sex smell would be in the room, the smell of the spunk the man had shot into her, the smell of the juices she made to smooth his way, and it was a smell like husked corn, mild and sweet, a goodish smell). And yet she was afraid, ashamed of this very intimacy with soil and summer and growing things, because she was not alone. He was here with her, two rows to the right or left, trailing just behind or ranging just ahead. The dark man was here, his dusty boots digging into the meat of the soil and throwing it away in clouts, grinning in the night like a stormlamp. Then he spoke, for the first time he spoke aloud, and she could see his moonshadow, tall and hunched and grotesque, falling into the row she was walking. His voice was like the night wind that begins to moan through the old and fleshless cornstalks in October, like the very rattling of those old white infertile cornstalks themselves as they seem to speak of their end. It was a soft voice. It was the voice of doom.

230 It said: I have your blood in my fists, old Mother. If you pray to God, pray He takes you before you ever hear my feet coming up your steps. It was not you who brought music from the air, not you who brought water from the rock, and your blood is in my fists. Then she was awake, awake in the hour before dawn, and at first she thought she had peed the bed, but it was only a night sweat, heavy as May dew. Her thin body was shuddering helplessly, and every part of her ached for rest. My Lord, my Lord, take this cup from my lips. Her Lord did not answer. There was only the light knocking of the early morning wind at the windowpanes, which were loose and rattling and in need of fresh putty. At last she got up and poked up the fire in her old woodburning stove and put on the coffee.

She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been one to slight company and she didn't intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things-she forgot a lot these daysand misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail. The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson's henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send er an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift. "Blasphemy," she told herself complacently. "The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs." When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but sixteen was far behind her now. She set off at eight o'clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn't arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.

She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn't sweat much-there wasn't enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of-but by the time she'd reached the Goodells' mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.. She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. Her brogans with the yellow rawhide lacings shuffled in the dust. The sun beat down on her, and as the time passed, her shadow got shorter and shorter. She saw more wild animals that morning than she had seen since the twenties: fox, coon, porcupine, fisher. Crows were everywhere, squalling and cawing and circling in the sky. If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and Glen Bateman discussing the capricious—it had seemed capricious to them, anyhow- way the superflu had taken some animals while leaving others alone, she would have laughed. It had taken the domestic animals and left the wild ones alone, it was as simple as that. A few species of domestics had been spared, but as a general rule, the plague had taken man and man's best friends. It had taken the dogs but left the wolves, because the wolves were wild and the dogs weren't. A red-hot sparkplug of pain had settled deep into each of her hips, behind each knee, in her ankles, in the wrists she was using to support herself on the cane. She walked and she talked to her God, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, unaware of any difference between the two. And she fell to thinking about her own past again. 1902 had been the best year, all right. After that it seemed that time sped up, the pages of some big fat calendar ruffling over and over, hardly ever pausing. A body's life went by so fast... how was it a body could get so tired of living it? She'd had five children by Davy Trotts; one of them, Maybelle, had choked to death on a piece of apple in the back yard of the Old Place. Abby had been hanging clothes and she had turned around to see the baby lying on her back, clawing at her throat and turning purple. She had gotten the chunk of apple out at last, but by then little Maybelle had been still and cold, the only girl she had ever borne and the only one of her many children to die an accidental death. Now she sat in the shade of an elm just inside the Nauglers' fence, and two hundred yards up the road she could see where dirt gave way to tar-this was the place where Freemantle Road became Polk County Road. The heat of the day made a shimmer over the tar, and at the horizon was quicksilver, shining like water in a dream. On a hot day you always saw that quicksilver just at the end of where your eye could see, but you never quite caught up to it. Or at least she never had.. David had died in 1913, of an influenza not so very different from this one, which had wiped out so many. In 1916, when she had been thirty-four, she had married Henry Hardesty, a black farmer

231 from Wheeler County up north. He had come to court her special. Henry was a widower with seven children, all but two of them grown up and gone away. He was seven years older than Abagail. He had given her two boys before his tractor turned turtle on him and killed him in the late summer of 1925. A year after that she had married Nate Brooks, and people had talked-oh yes, people talk, how people do love to talk, sometimes it seemed that was all they had to do. Nate had been Henry Hardesty's hired man, and he had been a good husband to her. Not as sweet as David, perhaps, and surely not as tenacious as Henry, but a good man who had pretty much done as she had told him. When a woman began to get a trifle along in years, it was a comfort to know who had the upper hand. Her six boys had produced a crop of thirty-two grandchildren for her. Her thirty-two grandchildren had produced ninety-one great-grandchildren that she knew of, and at the time of the superflu, she had had three great-greatgrandchildren. Would have had more, if not for the pills the girls took these days to keep the babies away. It seemed like for them, being sexy was just another playground to be in. Abagail felt sorry for them in their modern ways, but she never spoke of it. It was up to God to judge whether or not they were sinning by taking those pills (and not to that baldheaded old fart in RomeMother Abagail had been a Methodist all her life, and she was damned proud of not having any truck with those mackerel-snapping Catholics), but Abagail knew what they were missing: the ecstasy which comes when you stand on the lip of the Valley of the Shadow, the ecstasy that comes when you gave yourself up to your man and your God, when you say thy will. be done and Thy will be done; the final ecstasy of sex in the sight of the Lord, when a man and a woman relive the old sin of Adam and Eve, only now washed and sanctified in the Blood of the Lamb. Ah, welladay .. She wanted a drink of water, she wanted to be home in her rocker, she wanted to be left alone. Now she could see the sun glinting off the henhouse roof ahead to her left. A mile, no more. It was quarter past ten, and she wasn't doing too badly for an old gal. She would let herself in and sleep until the cool of the evening. No sin in that. Not at her age. She shuffled along the shoulder, her heavy shoes now coated with road-dust. Well, she had had a lot of kin to bless her in her old age, and that was something. There were some, like Linda and that no-account salesman she had married, who didn't care to come calling, but there were the good ones like Molly and Jim and David and Cathy, enough to make up for a thousand Lindas and no-account salesmen who went door to door selling waterless cookware. The last of her brothers, Luke, had died in 1949, at the age of eightysomething, and the last of her children, Samuel, in 1974, at the age of fifty-four. She had outlived all of her children, and that was not the way it was supposed to be, but it seemed like the Lord had special plans for her. In 1982, when she had turned one hundred, her picture had been in the Omaha paper and they had sent out a TV reporter to do a story on her. "To what do you attribute your great age?" the young man had asked her, and he had looked disappointed at her brief, almost curt answer: "To God." They wanted to hear about how she ate beeswax, or stayed away from fried pork, or how she kept her legs up when she slept. But she did none of those things, and was she to lie? God gives life and He takes it away when He wants. Cathy and David had given her her TV so she could watch herself on the news, and she got a letter from President Reagan (no spring chicken himself) congratulating her on her "advanced age" and the fact that she had voted Republican for as long as she'd had a vote to cast. Well, who else would she vote for? Roosevelt and his crowd had all been Communists. And when she turned the century, the town of Hemingford Home had repealed her taxes "in perpetuity" because of that same advanced age Ronald Reagan had congratulated her for. She got a paper certifying her as the oldest living person in Nebraska, as if that was something little children grew up hoping to be. It was a good thing about the taxes, though, even if the rest of it had been purest foolishness-if they hadn't done that, she would have lost what little land she still had. Most of it had been long gone anyway; the Freemantle holdings and the power of the Grange had both reached high water in that magic year of 1902 and had been declining ever since. Four acres was all that was left. The rest had either been taken for taxes or sold off for cash over the years... and most of the selling had been done by her own sons, she was ashamed to say. Last year she had been sent a paper by some New York combination that called itself the American Geriatrics Society. The paper said she was the sixth-oldest human being in the United States, and the third-oldest woman. The oldest of them all was a fellow in Santa Rosa, California. The fellow in Santa Rosa was a hundred and twenty-two. She had gotten Jim to put that letter in a frame for her and hang it beside the letter from the President. Jim hadn't got around to doing that until this February. Now that she thought about it, that had been the last time she saw Molly and Jim.

232 She had reached the Richardson farm. Almost completely exhausted, she leaned for a moment against the fencepost closest to the barn and looked longingly at the house. It would be cool inside there, cool and nice. She felt she could sleep an age. Yet before she could do that, there was one more thing she had to do. A lot of animals had died with this disease-horses, dogs, and rats-and she had to know if chickens were among them. It would be a bitter laugh on her to discover she had come all this way to find only dead chicken. She shuffled toward the henhouse, which was attached to the barn, and stopped when she could hear them cackling inside. A moment later a cock crowed irritably. "All right," she muttered. "That's good, then." She was turning around when she saw the body sprawled by the woodpile, one hand thrown over his face. It was Bill Richardson, Addie's brother-in-law. He had been well picked over by foraging animals. "Poor man," Abagail said. "Poor, poor man. Flights of angels sing you to y'rest, Billy Richardson." She turned back to the cool, inviting house. It seemed miles away, although in reality it was only across the dooryard. She wasn't sure she could make it that far; she was utterly exhausted. "Lord's will be done," she said, and began to walk:

The sun was shining in the window of the guest bedroom, where she had lain down and fallen asleep as soon as her brogans were off. For along time she couldn't understand why the light was so bright; it was much the feeling Larry Underwood had had upon awakening beside the rock wall in New Hampshire. She sat up, every strained muscle and fragile bone in her body crying out. "God A'mighty, done slep the afternoon and the whole night through!" If that was so, she must have been tired indeed. She was so lamed up now that it took her almost ten minutes to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom; another ten to get her shoes on her feet. Walking was agony, but she knew she must walk. If she didn't, that stiffness would settle in like iron. Limping and hobbling, she crossed to the henhouse and went inside, wincing at the explosive hotness, the smell of fowls, and the inevitable smell of decomposition. The water supply was automatic, fed from the Richardsons' artesian well by a gravity pump, but most of the feed had been used up and the heat itself had killed many of the birds. The weakest had long ago been starved or pecked to death, and they lay around the feedand droppings-spotted floor like small drifts of sadly melting snow. Most of the remaining chickens fled before her approach with a great flapping of wings, but those that were broody only sat and blinked at her slow, shuffling approach with their stupid eyes. There were so many diseases that killed chickens that she had been afraid that the flu might have carried them off, but these looked all right. The Lord had provided. She took three of the plumpest and made them stick their heads under their wings. They went immediately to sleep. She bundled them into a sack and then found she was too stiff to actually lift it. She had to drag it along the floor. The other chickens watched her cautiously from their high vantage points until the old woman was gone, then went back to their vicious squabbling over the diminishing feed. It was now close to nine in the morning. She sat down on the bench that ran in a circle around the Richardsons' dooryard oak to think. It seemed to her that her original idea, to go home in the cool of dusk, was still best. She had lost a day, but her company was still coming. She could use this day to take care of the chickens and rest. Her muscles were already riding a little easier against her bones, and there was an unfamiliar but rather pleasant gnawing sensation below her breastbone. It took her several moments to realize what it was... she was hungry! This morning she was actually hungry, praise God, and how long had it been since she had eaten for any reason other than force of habit? She'd been like a locomotive fireman stoking coal, no more. But when she had parted these three chickens from their heads, she would see what Addie had left in her pantry, and by the blessed Lord, she would enjoy what she found. You see? she lectured herself. The Lord knows best. Blessed assurance, Abagail, blessed assurance. Grunting and puffing, she dragged her towsack around to the chopping block that stood between the barn and the woodshed. Just inside the woodshed door she found Billy Richardson's Son House hanging on a couple of pegs, its rubber glove snugged neatly down over the blade. She took it and went back out. "Now Lord," she said, standing over the towsack in her dusty yellow workshoes and looking up at the cloudless midsummer sky, "You have given me the strength to walk up here, and I'm believin You'll give me the strength to walk back. Your prophet Isaiah says that if a man or woman believes in the Lord God of Hosts, he shall mount up with wings as eagles. I don't know nothin much about eagles, my Lord, except they are mostly ugly-natured birds who can see a long ways, but I got three

233 broilers in this bag and I should like to whack off their heads and not m'own hand. Thy will be done, amen." She picked up the towsack, opened it, and peered down. One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep. The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much. It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime. The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat. Abagail plucked one out and laid it across the block before it knew what was happening. She brought the hatchet down hard, wincing as she always had at the final mortal thud of the blade biting through to wood. The head fell into the dust on one side of the chopping block. The headless chicken strutted off into the Richardsons' dooryard, blood spouting, wings fluttering. After a bit it found out it was dead and lay down decently. Broody hens and New York Democrats, my Lord, my Lord. Then the job was done and all her worrying that she might botch it or hurt herself doing it had been for nothing. God had heard her prayer. Three good chickens, and now all she had to do was get home with them. She put the birds back into the towsack and then hung Billy Richardson's Son House hatchet back up. Then she went into the farmhouse again to see what there might be to eat.

She napped during the early part of the afternoon and dreamed that her company was getting closer now; they were just south of York, coming along in an old pickup truck. There were six of them, one of them a boy who was deaf and dumb. But a powerful boy, all the same. He was one of the ones she would have to talk to. She woke around three-thirty, a little stiff but otherwise feeling rested and refreshed. For the next two and a half hours she plucked the chickens, resting when the work put too much misery into her arthritic fingers, then going on. She sang hymns while she worked-"Seven Gates to the City (My Lord Hallelu')," "Trust and Obey," and her own favorite, "In the Garden." When she finished the last chicken, each of her fingers had a migraine headache and the daylight had begun to take on that still and golden hue that means twilight's outrider has arrived. Late July now, and the days were shortening down again. She went inside and had another bite. The bread was stale but not moldy-no mold would ever dare show its green face in Addie Richardson's kitchen-and she found a half-used jar of smooth peanut butter. She ate a peanut butter sandwich and made up another, which she put in her dress pocket in case she got hungry later. It was now twenty to seven. She went back out again, gathered up her towsack, and went carefully down the porch steps. She had plucked neatly into another sack, but a few feathers had escaped and now fluttered from the Richardsons' hedge, which was drying for lack of water. Abagail sighed heavily and said: "I'm off, Lord. Headed home. I'll be going slow, don't reckon to get there until midnight or so, but the Book says fear neither the terror of night nor that which flieth at noonday. I'm in the way of doing Your will as best I know it. Walk with me, please. Jesus' sake, amen." By the time she reached the place where the tar stopped and the road went to dirt, it was full dark. Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell's cowpond. There was going to be a moon, a big red one, the color of blood until it got up in the sky a ways. She sat down to rest and eat half of her peanut butter sandwich (and what she would have done for some nice black-currant jelly to cut that sticky taste, but Addie kept her preserves down cellar and that was just too many stairs). The towsack was beside her. She ached again and her strength seemed just about gone with two and a half miles before her still to walk... but she felt strangely exhilarated. How long since she had been out after dark, under the canopy of the stars? They shone just as bright as ever, and if her luck was in she might see a falling star to wish on. A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover's face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that— Your blood is in my fists. There was a sudden sharp tug at her sack, making her heart jump. "Hi!" she shrieked in her cracked and startled old woman's voice. She yanked the bag back to her with a small rip in the bottom.

234 There was a low growling sound. Crouched on the verge of the road, between the gravel shoulder and the corn, was a large brown weasel. Its eyes rolled at her, picking up red glints of moonlight. It was joined by another. And another. And another. She looked at the other side of the road and saw that it was lined with them, their mean eyes speculative. They were smelling the chickens in the bag. How could so many of them have crept around her? she wondered with mounting fear. She had been bitten by a weasel once; she had reached under the porch of the Big House to get a red rubber ball that had rolled under there, and something which felt like a mouthful of needles had fastened on her forearm. The unexpected viciousness of it, agony jumping redhot and vital out of the humdrum order of things, had made her shriek as much as the actual pain. She had drawn her arm back and the weasel had been hanging from it with her blood beaded on its smooth brown fur, its body whipping back and forth in the air like a snake's body. She had screamed and waved her arm, but the weasel had not let go; it seemed to have become a part of her. Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mailorder catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, then just twelve, tearing around the clearing where the barn was to shortly go up, the brown weasel hanging down from her arm like a stole with its back paws digging for purchase in the thin air. Blood had fallen onto her dress, legs, end shoes in a pattering shower. It was her father who had acted first. John Freemantle had picked up a chunk of stovewood from beside the chopping block and had bawled: "Stand still, Abby!" His voice, which had been the voice of ultimate command ever since her babyhood, had cut through the yatter and babble of panic in her mind when probably nothing else could have done. She stood still and the stovelength came whistling down and a jolting agony went all the way up to her shoulder (she had thought her arm was broken for sure) and then the brown Thing which had caused her such agony and surprise-in the horrid heat of those few moments the two feelings had been completely interchangeable-was lying on the ground, its fur streaked and matted with her blood and then Micah jumped straight up into the air and came down on it with both feet and there was a horrid final crunching sound like the sound hard candy made in your head when you crunched it between your teeth and if it hadn't been dead before, it surely was then. Abagad had not fainted, but she had gone into sobbing, screaming hysterics. By then Richard, the oldest son, had come running, his face pale and scared. He and his father exchanged a sober, frightened glance. "I never saw a weasel do nothing like that in all my life," Jolm Freemantle said, holding his sobbing daughter by the shoulders. "Thank God your mother was up the road with them beans." "Maybe it was r—" Richard began. "You hesh your mouth," his father rode in before Richard could go any further. His voice had been cold and furious and frightened all at the same time. And Richard did hesh his mouth-closed it so fast and hard, in fact, that Abby had heard it snap shut. Then her father said to her, "Let's take you on over to the pump, Abagail, honey, and wash that mess out." It was a year later that Luke told her what their father hadn't wanted Richard to say right out loud: that the weasel must almost surely have been rabid to do a thing like that, and if it had been, she would have died one of the most horrible deaths, aside from outright torture, of which men knew. But the weasel had not been rabid; the wound had healed clean. All the same, she had been terrified of the creatures from that day to this, terrified in the way some people are terrified of rats and spiders. If only the plague had taken them instead of the dogs! But it hadn't, and she was Your blood is in my fists. One of them darted forward and tore at the rough hem of the towsack. "Hi!" she screamed at it: The weasel darted away, seeming to grin, a thread of the bag hanging from its chops. He had sent them-the dark man. Terror enulfed her. There were hundreds of them now, gray ones, brown ones, black ones, all of them smelling chicken. They lined both sides of the road, squirming over each other in their eagerness to get at some of what they smelled. I got to give it to them. It was all for nothing. If I don't give it to them, they'll rip me to pieces to get it. All for nothing. In the darkness of her mind she could see the dark man's grin, she could see his fists held out and the blood dripping from them. Another tug at the bag. And another. The weasels on the far side of the road were now squirming across toward her, low, their bellies in the dust. Their little savage eyes glinted like icepicks in the moonlight. But whosoever believeth on Me, behold, he shall not perish .. for I have put My sign on him and no thing shall touch him... he is Mine, saith the Lord...

235 She stood up, still terrified, but now sure of what she must do. "Get out!" she cried. "It's chicken, all right, but it's for my company! Now you all git!" They drew back. Their little eyes seemed to fill with unease. And suddenly they were gone like drifting smoke. A miracle, she thought, and exultation and praise for the Lord filled her. Then, suddenly, she was cold. Somewhere, far to the west, beyond the Rockies that were not even visible on the horizon, she felt an eye-some glittering Eye—suddenly open wide and turn toward her, searching. As clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud she heard him: Who's there? Is it you, old woman? "He knows I'm here," she whispered in the night. "Oh help me, Lord. Help me now, help all of us." Dragging the towsack, she began to walk home again.

They showed up two days later, on July 24. She hadn't got as much done as she would have liked in the way of preparations; once again she was lame and almost laid up, able to hobble from one place to another only with the aid of her cane and hardly able to pump water up from the well. The day after killing the chickens and standing off the weasels, she had fallen asleep for a long time in the afternoon, exhausted. She dreamed she was in some high cold pass in the middle of the Rockies, west of the Continental Divide. Highway 6 stretched and twisted between high rock walls that shaded this gap all day long, except from about eleven forty-five in the morning until about twelve-fifty in the afternoon. It was not daylight in her dream but full, moonless dark. Somewhere, wolves were howling. And suddenly an Eye had opened in all that darkness, rolling horribly from one side to the other while the wind moved lonesomely through the pines and the blue mountain spruce. It was him, and he was looking for her. She had awakened from that long, heavy nap feeling less rested than she had when she lay down,—and again she prayed to God to let her off, or at least change the direction He wanted her to go in. North, south, or east, Lord, and I'll leave Hemingford Home singing Your praises. But not west, not toward that dark man. The Rockies ain't enough to have between him and us. The Andes wouldn't be enough. But it didn't matter. Sooner or later, when that man felt he was strong enough, he would come looking for those who would stand against him. If not this year, then next. The dogs were gone, carried off by the plague, but the wolves remained in the high mountain country, ready to serve the Imp of Satan. And it was not just the wolves that would serve him.

On the morning of the day her company finally arrived she had begun at seven, lugging wood two sticks at a time until the stove was hot and her woodbox full. God had favored her with a cool, cloudy day, the first in weeks. By nightfall there might be rain. The hip she'd broken in 1958 said so, anyway. She baked her pies first, using the canned fillings from the shelves in her pantry and the fresh rhubarb and strawberries from the garden. The strawberries had just come on, praise God, and it was good to know they weren't going to go to waste. Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life. A blueberry pie, two strawberry-rhubarb, and one apple. The smell of them filled the morning kitchen. She set them on the kitchen windowsills to cool as she had all her life. She made the best batter she could, although it was hard going with no fresh eggs-there she'd been, right in the henhouse, and she had no one to blame but herself. Eggs or no, by early afternoon the small kitchen with its hilly floor and faded linoleum was filled with the smell of frying chicken. It had gotten pretty toasty inside and so she hobbled out to the porch to read her daily lesson, using her dog-eared last copy of The Upper Room to fan her face.

The chicken came out just as light and nice as you could want. One of those fellows could go out and pick her two dozen butter-and-sugar ears of corn, and they would have themselves a good sit- down feed outside. After the chicken was put on paper towels, she went on out to the back porch with her guitar, sat down, and began to play. She sang all her favorite hymns, her high and quivering voice drifting into the still air.

236 The music sounded so fine to her (even though her ear had failed to a degree where she could never be sure her old git was in tune) that she played another hymn, and another, and another. She was settling down to "We Are Marching to Zion" when she heard the sound of an engine off to the north, coming down County Road toward her. She stopped singing but her fingers continued to twiddle absently on the strings as she cocked her head and listened. Coming, yes Lord, they found their way just fine, and now she could see the spume of dust the truck was throwing as it left the tar and came onto the dirt track that stopped in her dooryard. A great, welcoming excitement filled her and she was glad she had put on her for-best. She put her git between her knees and shaded her eyes, although there was still no sun. Now the engine sound was much louder and in a moment, where the corn gave way for Cal Goodell's cattle wade Yes, she could see it, an old Chevrolet farm truck, moving slow. The cab was full; four people crammed in there by the looks (there was nothing wrong with her long vision, even at a hundred and eight), and three more in the truckbed, standing up and looking over the cab. She could see a thinnish blond man, a girl with red hair, and in the middle... yes, that was him, a boy who was just finishing up learning about being a man. Dark hair, narrow face, high forehead. He saw her sitting on her porch and began to wave frantically. A moment later the blond man copied him. The redheaded girl just looked. Mother Abagail raised her own hand and waved back. "Praise God for bringin em through," she muttered hoarsely. Tears coursed warmly down her cheeks. "My Lord, I thank You so." The pickup, rattling and jouncing, turned into the yard. The man behind the wheel was wearing a straw hat with a blue velvet band and a big feather tucked into it. "Yeeeeee-haw!" he shouted, and waved. "Hi there, Mother! Nick said he thought you might be here and here you be! Yeeeeee-haw!" He laid on the horn. Sitting with him in the cab was a man of about fifty, a woman of the same age, and a little girl in a red corduroy jumper. The little girl waved shyly with one hand; the thumb of the other was corked securely in her mouth. The young man with the eyepatch and the dark hairNick-jumped over the side of the truck even before it had stopped. He caught his balance and then walked slowly toward her. His face was solemn, but his eye was alight with joy. He stopped at the porch steps and then looked around wonderingly... at the yard, the house, the old tree with its tire swing. Most of all at her. "Hello, Nick," she said. "I'm glad to see you. God bless." He smiled, now beginning to shed his own tears. He came up the steps toward her and took her hands. She turned her wrinkled cheek toward him and he kissed it gently. Behind him, the truck had stopped and everyone got out. The man who had been driving was holding the girl in the red jumper, who had a cast on her right leg. Her arms were linked firmly around the driver's sunburned neck. Next to him stood the fiftyish woman, next to her the redhead and the blond boy with the beard. No, not a boy, Mother Abagail thought; he's feeble. Last in line stood the other man who had been riding in the cab. He was polishing the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses. Nick was looking at her urgently, and she nodded. "You done just right," she said. "The Lord has brought you and Mother Abagail is going to feed you. "You're all welcome here!" she added, raising her voice. "We can't stay long, but before we do any moving on, we'll rest, and break bread together, and have some fellowship one with the other." The little girl piped up from the safety of the driver's arms: "Are you the oldest lady in the world?" The fiftyish woman said: "Shhhh, Gina!" But Mother Abagail only put a hand on her hip and laughed. "Mayhap I am, child. Mayhap I am."

She got them to spread her red-checked tablecloth on the far side of the apple tree and the two women, Olivia and June, spread the picnic lunch while the men went off to pick corn. It was short work to boil it up, and while there was no real butter, she had plenty of oleo and salt. There was little talk during the meal-mostly the sound of chomping jaws and little grunts of pleasure. It did her heart good to see folks dig into a meal, and these folks were doing her spread full justice. It made her walk to Richardsons' and her tussle with those weasels seem more than worthwhile. It wasn't that they were hungry, exactly, but when you've spent a month eating almost nothing that hasn't come out of a can, you get a powerful hunger for something fresh and just cooked special. She herself put away three pieces of chicken, an ear of cons, and a little smidge of that strawberryrhubarb pie. When it was all gone, she felt as full as a bedtick in a mattress. When they. got settled and the coffee was poured, the driver, a pleasant, open-faced man named Ralph Bretner, told her: "That was one dilly of a meal, ma'am. I can't remember when anything hit the spot so good. Thanks are in order." The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded. The little girl said, "Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?"

237 "I think you'd be too heavy, honey," the older woman, Olivia Walker, said. "Nonsense," Abagail said. "The day I can't take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina." Ralph carried her over and set her down. "When she gets too heavy, you just tell me." He tickled Gina's face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. "Don't tickle me, Ralph! Don't you dare tickle me!" "Don't worry," Ralph said, relenting. "I'm too full to tickle anyone for long." He sat down again. "What happened to your leg, Gina?" Abagail asked. "I broke it when I fell out of the barn," Gina said. "Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life." She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled. Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all. "God's mercy," Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl's hair. Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She'd been playing in the hayloft of her uncle's barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail's dress). Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness. "Course it was," Abagail said. "If you'd missed her, she would have just pined away." Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy. "I'll take her now," Olivia Walker said. "Put her in the little room at the end of the hall," Abby said. "You can sleep with her, if that's what you want. This other girl... what did you say your name was, honey? It's slipped my mind for sure." "June Brinkmeyer," the redhead said. "Well, you c'n sleep with me, June, unless you've some other mind. The bed ain't big enough for two, and I don't think you'd want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there's a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain't got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess." "Sure," Ralph said. Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back. "Maybe the old ways are best," Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled. "I mean," Dick went on a little defensively, "that's the first home-cooked meal I've had since... well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now... she was one hell of a good cook. She..." He trailed off blankly. Olivia came back in. "Fast asleep," she said. "That was a tired girl." "Do you bake your own bread?" Dick asked Mother Abagail. "Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain't yeast bread; ail the yeast has gone over. But there's other kinds." "I crave bread," he said simply. "Helen... my wife... used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy." "Tom Cullen's tired," Tom said abruptly. "M-O-O-N, that spells tired." He yawned bone-crackingly. "You can bed down in the shed," Abagail said. "It smells a bit musty, but it's dry." For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa. "I guess you got your campin gear?" she asked them.

238 "All kinds," Ralph said. "We'll be fine. Come on, Tom." He stood up. "I wonder," Abagail said, "if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph." Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn't talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled. "Could you get me that mattress?" June asked softly. "Nick and I will get it," Ralph said, standing up. "I don't want to go out in that back shed all by myself," Tom said. "Laws, no!" "I'll go out with you, hoss," Dick said. "We'll light the Coleman lamp and bed down." He rose. "Thanks again, ma'am. Can't tell you how good all this has been." The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dickneeding only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thoughtwent out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen. "Mind if I smoke, ma'am?" Ralph asked. "Not so long as you don't tap ashes on the floor. There's an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you." Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face. She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn't been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells. "Ma'am?" She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely. "Nick says..." Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed. "Go ahead." "His note says it's hard to read your lips because—" "I guess I know why," she said. "No fear." She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit. She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water. "Lord God I have suffered," Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in. "We got to talk," she said. "You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out." "Well," Ralph said, "it ain't me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I've raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he's in charge." "Is that right?" she asked, looking at Nick. Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do. "It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don't know." "We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here," Ralph said. "Day before yesterday, wasn't it, Nick?" "We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together." "Have you seen any other folks?" she asked. "No," Nick wrote. "But I've had a feeling-Ralph has, too-that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what's happened." She nodded. "Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together."

239 "Why did you come here?" Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly. Nick wrote: "I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you `grammylady' long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing." "Bless the child," Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. "You?" "Once or twice, ma'am," Ralph said. He wet his lips. "Mostly what I dreamed about was just... just that other fella." "What other fella?" Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she'd gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers' teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women... and one little girl. The two circled words were: dark man.

240 "Maybe he's not real," Nick wrote. "Maybe he's just..." He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: "... the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we're afraid we might do." Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn't much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn't really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle-and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn't true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner. She said: "You dreamed of me. Ain't I real?" "And I dreamed you. Ain't you real? Praise God, you're sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he's as real as you are." Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. "He ain't Satan," she said, "but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old. "The Bible, it don't say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people-for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn't be surprised if that was what was on for us. "He's west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he'll come east. Maybe not this year, no, but when he's ready. And it's our lot to deal with him." Nick was shaking his head, disturbed. "Yes," she said quietly. "You'll see. There's bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends." "I don't like any of this," Ralph muttered. "Aren't things hard enough without this guy you and Nick are talkin about? Ain't we got enough problems, with no doctors or electricity or nothing? Why did we have to get stuck with this damn doorprize?" "I don't know. It's God's way. He don't explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle." "If this is His way," Ralph said, "why, I wish He'd retire and let somebody younger take over." "If the dark man is west," Nick wrote, "maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east." She shook her head patiently. "Nick, all things serve the Lord. Don't you think this black man serves Him, too? He does, no matter how mysterious His purpose may be. The black man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God, and God wants you to treat with him. It don't do no good to run from the will 4f the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast." Nick wrote briefly. Ralph studied the note, rubbed the side of his nose, and wished he didn't have to read it. Old ladies like this didn't cotton to stuff like what Nick had just written. She'd likely call it a blasphemy, and shout it loud enough to wake everyone in the place, too. "What's he say?" Abagail asked. "He says..." Ralph cleared his throat; the feather stuck in the band of his hat jiggled. "He says that he don't believe in God." The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion. But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. "Bless you, Nick, but that don't matter. He believes in you."

They stayed at Abby Freemantle's place the next day, and it was the best day any of them could remember since the superflu had drawn away, like the waters going down from Mount Ararat. The rain had stopped sometime during the early hours of the morning, and by nine o'clock the sky was a pleasant Midwest mural of sun and broken clouds. The corn twinkled away in all directions like a ransom of emeralds. It was cooler than it had been for weeks. Tom Cullen spent the morning running up and down the rows of corn, his arms outstretched, scaring up droves of crows. Gina McCone sat contentedly in the dirt by the tire swing, playing with a large number of paper dolls Abagail had found at the bottom of a trunk in her bedroom closet. A little earlier, she and Tom had had a pleasant game of cars and trucks around the Fisher-Price garage Tom had taken from the five-and-dime in May, Oklahoma. Tom did what Gina wanted him to do willingly enough. Dick Ellis, the vet, came diffidently to Mother Abagail and asked her if anyone in the area had kept pigs. "Why, the Stoners always had pigs," she said. She was sitting on the porch in her rocker, chording her guitar and watching Gina at play in the yard, her broken leg in its cast stuck out stiffly in front of her.

241 "Think any of them might still be alive?" "You'd have to go see. Might be. Might be they've bust down their pens and gone hogwild." Her eyes gleamed. "Might also be I know a fella who dreamed about pork chops last night." "Could be you do," Dick said. "You ever slaughtered a hog?" "No, ma'am," he said, grinning broadly now. "Wormed a few, but haven't slaughtered ary hog. I was always what you'd call nonviolent." "Do you think you and Ralph there could stand a woman foreman?" "Could be," he said. Twenty minutes later the three of them were off, Abagail riding between the two men in the Chevy's cab with her cane planted regally between her knees. At the Stoners' they found two yearling pigs in the back pen, healthy and full of beans. It appeared that, when the feed had given out, they had taken to dining on their weaker and less fortunate pen-mates. Ralph set up Reg Stoner's chainfall in the barn, and at Abagail's direction, Dick was finally able to get a rope firmly around the back leg of one of the yearlings. Squealing and thrashing, it was yanked into the barn and hung upside down from the chainfall. Ralph came out of the house with a butcher knife three feet longThat ain't a knife, that's a regular bayernet, praise God, Abby thought. "You know, I don't know if I can do this," he said. "Well, give her here, then," Abagail said, and then held out her hand. Ralph looked doubtfully at Dick. Dick shrugged. Ralph handed the knife over. "Lord," Abagail said, "we thank Thee for the gift we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Bless this pig that it might nourish us, amen. Stand clear, boys, she's gonna go a gusher." She cut the pig's throat with one practiced sweep of the knife-some things you never forgot, no matter how old you got-and then stepped back as quick as she could. "You got that fire going under the kettle?" she asked Dick. "Nice hot fire out there in the dooryard?" "Yes, ma'am," Dick said respectfully, unable to take his eyes from the pig. "You got those brushes?" she asked Ralph. Ralph displayed two big scrub brushes with stiff yellow bristles. "Well then, you want to haul him over and dump him in. After he's boiled awhile, those bristles will scrub right off. After that you can peel old Mr. Hog just like a banana." They both looked a trifle green at the prospect. "Lively," she said. "You can't eat him with his jacket on. Got to get him undressed first." Ralph and Dick Ellis looked at each other, gulped, and began to lower the pig from the chainfall. They were done by three that afternoon, back at Abagail's by four with a truckload of meat, and there were fresh pork chops for dinner. Neither of the men ate very well, but Abagail put away two chops all by herself, relishing the way the crisp fat crackled between her dentures. There was nothing like fresh meat you'd seen to yourself.

It was sometime after nine o'clock. Gina was asleep, and Tom Cullen had dozed off in Mother Abagail's rocker on the porch. Soundless lightning flickered against the sky far to the west. The other adults were gathered in the kitchen, except for Nick, who had gone for a walk. Abagail knew what the boy was wrestling with, and her heart went out to him. "Say, you're not really a hundred and eight, are you?" Ralph asked, remembering something she had said that morning as they set out on the hogslaughtering expedition. "You wait right there," Abagail said. "I've got something to show you, Mister Man." She went into the bedroom and got her framed letter from President Reagan out of the top drawer of her bureau. She brought it back to Ralph and put it in his lap. "Read that, sonny," she said pridefully. Ralph read it. ".. occasion of your one hundredth birthday... one of seventy-two proven centenarians in the United States of America... fifth oldest registered Republican in the United States of America... greetings and congratulations from President Ronald Reagan, January 14, 1982." He looked up at her with wide eyes. "Well, I'll be dipped in sh—'' He stopped, blushing and in confusion. "Pardon me, ma'am." "All the things you must have seen!" Olivia marveled. "None of it's very much compared to what I've seen in the last month or so." She sighed. "Or what I expect to see." The door opened and Nick came in-conversation broke off as if they had all been marking time, waiting for him. She could see in his face that he had made his decision, and she thought she knew what it was. He handed her a note that he had written out on the porch, standing by Tom. She held the note at arm's length to read it. "We'd better start for Boulder tomorrow," Nick had written.

242 She looked from the note to Nick's face and nodded slowly. She passed the note on to June Brinkmeyer, who passed it to Olivia. "I guess we had," Abagail said. "I don't want to any more than you, but I guess we had better. What made up your mind?" He shrugged almost angrily and pointed at her. "So be it," Abagail said. "My faith's in the Lord." Nick thought: I wish mine was.

The next morning, July 26, after a brief conference, Dick and Ralph set off for Columbus in Ralph's truck. "I hate to trade her ins" Ralph said, "but if it's the way you say it is, Nick, okay." Nick wrote, "Be back as soon as you can." Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows-an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring. "You're in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion's mouth, Nicky." Nick wrote: "Have we got anyplace better to go to?" "That's true. It's no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don't hardly feel right unless he's lookin forward, you ever notice that?" "Okay." Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. "Dick, you ready to take a ride?" Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. "Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!" "Come on, then," Ralph said. "Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain't caught a crow yet! Better let me brush you off." Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn't they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being. "See you, Nicky," Ralph said, and climbed up behind the wheel of the Chevy. "See you, Nicky," Tom Cullen echoed, still grinning. Nick watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate's panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest. "What does it say?" she asked. "It says, `We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen's Band Channel 14,' " Olivia read. "What does that mean?" June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail's driveway. He buried the bottom three feet of the picket. Nothing but a big wind would knock it over now. Of course there were big winds out in this part of the world; he thought of the one which had almost carried him and Tom away, and of the scare they'd had in the cellar. He wrote a note and handed it to June. "One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time." "Oh," Olivia said. "Smart." Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled. The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them. If that's the way you say it is, Nick, okay. They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn't even begin to understand why. You couldn't take orders from a deaf-mute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spearcarrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play. I knew when I saw you. It's you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart...

243 No, I don't accept that. I don't accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags. He would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn't want to believe that, either... but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn't want to be their leader. It's you, Nick. A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn't anymore. She was smiling down at him from her armless rocker. "I Was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression," she said. "Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It's true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in nineteen and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago." "Those were good days, Nick-most of em were, anyway. But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord. My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that's all that's left. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t'wouldn't be the same, somehow." Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply. "Brothers don't always work so well together; they almost always fall to squabblin. Look at Cain n Abel! Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fieldhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together, but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now." She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully. Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they'd take a little more to pay it off, and I'd come out here to look at the part that wasn't my own anymore, and I'd cry over it like I'm crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that's how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they'd taken everything but this little piece o scratch that's here. Big o them, wa'n't it?" He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her. "Oh, Nick," Mother Abagail said, "I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. `Abby,' the Lord says to me, `there's work for you far up ahead. So I'll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I'll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you'll walk the earth. I'll let you see your daddy's Ian taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love best and you'll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That's My will, Abby,' says He, and `Yes, Lord,' says I. 'Thy will be done,' and in my heart I curse Him and ask, `Why, why, why?' and the only answer I get is `Where were you when I made the world?'" Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig. "Help me along, Nick," she said. "I only want to do what's right." He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.

Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a pushboard on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van. "There's a helluva nice CB in that wrecker," he told Nick. "Forty-channel job. I think Ralph's in love with it." Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail's eyes noted the way Ralph squired June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted. "So when do we go?" Ralph asked. Nick scribbled, "Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?"

244 "Yeah," Ralph said. "I had it on all the way back. Horrible static; there's a squelch button, but it doesn't seem to work very well. But you know, I swear I did hear something, static or no static. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I'll say the truth, Nicky, I didn't care for it much. Like those dreams." A silence fell among them. "Well," Olivia said, breaking it. "I'll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row." No one did. And by one o'clock the camping things—and Abagail's rocker and guitar-had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove westbound on Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord's will and His will would be done. The Lord's will would be done, but she thought of that red Eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.