The next morning they awake to grim tidings. Not the writing on the wall, though there’s that, too. “Aw, Mom,” Mattie says after she swats him, “we only wanted to play Battleship and we ain’t got no paper.” “Any paper,” she says. “You ain’t got any paper.” “That’s what I said.” “Well, that ain’t no excuse to write on the walls. Now you take your erasers and see if you can’t get some of that off.” “Our erasers are all wore down.” “Well, lick it and wipe it with your sleeve.” Not that it matters much. They’ll be changing houses soon.
But the really bad news, discovered a moment later, is that everything has been turned off. No electricity, no gas, no water. Which means, among other grave consequences, that the toilet won’t flush. Isaiah who is headed in there now is going to be a very unhappy man. She goes door to door to the other houses in Chestnut Hills where people chased from the camp are living and finds it’s the same story. Everything shut down. They can’t do this. You can’t deprive a person of water no matter how poor they are. She urges them to join her in a march down to city hall to demand their rights. Only a few buy into this plan and most of them drop away before they get there. In the end she’s stuck with her own kids and a couple of yokels from Arkansas who can’t seem to get it in their heads that the Second Coming didn’t actually happen last month and they weren’t somehow left behind. Democracy’s a good thing, but it has its limits. On the steps of city hall, she also realizes she left Johnny at home. How could she have forgotten him? She sends Mattie to retrieve him and tells him to ask his father to bring them back here in the pickup because she might need his help.
The mayor’s busy, but he’s not so busy he can’t hear her out. Dot pushes aside the fat girl out front and storms on in. The boys from Arkansas follow her as far as the door. “What the hell is going on here?” the mayor roars out, and then she’s down to Mark and Luke. But it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t need numbers—right is on her side. She unloads her grievances on the mayor, a shady character if she ever saw one, telling him that she doesn’t know who’s responsible for the sabotage out there in Chestnut Hills, but it’s unconstitutional and has to be put right or there’ll be big trouble, and though he has been standing, he sits down again, wallowing a cigar around in his fat leathery cheeks, his beady eyes narrowing. She leans over and slaps her fist on his desk, reminding him that God is on her side and quite capable of serious devastation, and the mayor shrinks back into his leather swivel chair, nearly swallowing his cigar. At least she has his attention. He makes a circular motion around one ear and she thinks he’s calling her crazy and is about to pop him one, but then she realizes he’s signaling to the woman on the other side of the open door behind her to make a phone call. Probably to those clowns she met out at the pool yesterday. Little Luke has found a settee, something she hasn’t seen in a long time, and it excites her. She’s jumps up and down on it with gleeful yipping noises. Dot tells the mayor that children’s health and lives are at stake, and to illustrate the subject, she lifts Markie up and stands him on the mayor’s desk. Unfortunately, Markie uses that moment to let go again, puddling the scattered papers on the mayor’s desk, and she tells him that’s because with no running water they can’t use the bathrooms and now look what’s happened. The mayor can see what has happened. He’s on his feet again and looks ready to make a run for it. Mattie comes in just then, dragging a squalling Johnny. He says, gasping for breath, that Dad wasn’t home and he had to carry Johnny all the way here and he’s too heavy and he dropped him a few times. He doesn’t know where his father is, but probably he went to look for another bathroom—the one at home isn’t any good anymore.
The mayor, outflanked, relents. “Take her over to the utilities manager and get this sorted out!” he commands, probably heard clear across town.
His secretary doesn’t seem to know who the utilities manager is, being a typical underachieving government employee, but then she does know. Maybe the mayor mouthed something. Dot can hear the door slamming and locking behind her as they proceed down the hall. She carries Johnny now and drags along a reluctant Luke, who’s howling that she wants to go back and jump on the bouncy thing some more. They are led to a back room which seems to be part of the city clerk’s office. There’s a guy slumped behind a dusty desk looking three sheets to the wind. “The mayor said to take care of this,” the old girl squeaks and vanishes, not even explaining her case. Which Dot proceeds to do, though it’s clear not much is getting through. It’s still midmorning and this guy is gone for the day. Whatever she says, he just grins and winks. Consequently, the crisis she is describing becomes more of a monetary one, and what with her shouting and fist-banging and little Johnny crawling around on top of the desk and all three of the others now either whining or crying, he finally reaches blearily for his billfold, still grinning stupidly like she’s telling him a funny joke, fumbles for a dollar bill. She snatches the billfold from him, finds three tens, hands it back.
“Hah!” he says and falls back into his chair, casting his grin upon the inside of his billfold.
“And tell the mayor to get those services turned back on or we’re going straight to the Supreme Court!” she yells and leads the kids out of there.
Little Johnny is a load to carry, but Dot decides to toss him over her shoulder and go blow some change from their windfall on ice creams as a reward for her loyal little army, and while walking down Main Street, remarking as she goes on the street’s boarded-up pot-holed post-Armageddon look, she passes a sorry-looking white-haired guy having a smoke outside a shoe store. “Looks like you got some ponies there need shoeing,” he says.
“Well, I got ten dollars,” she says and she shows one of the bills to him. “What can we get for that?”
“Come on in, have a look. Whole stock’s on sale. Should find something you like for that price.”
At first, all the shoes cost ten bucks each, but she says she can’t buy shoes for just one of them, so the price drops to five, and then, when she shrugs and starts to leave, three pair for ten. “Look,” he says, “I’ll even throw in a pair of baby shoes for the little one. It’s your lucky day. Line ’em up and fit ’em out.”
Baby shoes. She hadn’t even thought about that. First any of her kids have ever had. She picks out a pair that look a bit like his father’s work boots. Mattie and Mark are easy enough, liking everything they try on and wanting them all, but Luke has her eye on some pink slippers high up on the wall of shoeboxes. “Not your size, little girl. Try these,” the owner says, showing her a pair of patent leather sandals. But Luke is determined, it being her nature, and starts to climb the boxes, succeeding in bringing the whole lot tumbling down. The man’s right, they’re too big, but Luke wants them anyway. “I’ll grow into them, Mom.”
“When they fit, Lukie, I’ll buy them for you. For now, come and try on these sneakers.”
After that, Luke hates every pair she tries on, so finally Dot makes the choice for her, ignoring her loud, bad-tempered protests. Mattie and Mark are bringing down other stacks just for fun, trying to bury each other in falling shoes and boxes. “You know,” the man says with a sick smile, “you’re like somebody out of my nightmares.” She asks him if he couldn’t show a little Christian charity and lower the price enough to leave her change to buy ice creams for the kids, but by now, in his excitement, Johnny has pooped his britches again and the place is reeking and the store owner’s free hand is closing. “No,” he says, looking like he’s about to gag. “Out. Out!” He herds them onto the street, following them out, locks the door behind him, and hurries away. Probably to go spend up the ten dollars, she assumes, and she wonders if somehow she got cheated.
The boys are jumping up and down in their new shoes on their way to the corner drugstore for ice creams (maybe little Johnny can win them a few more concessions if she fumbles a while for change), but Luke, Dot discovers, has stolen one of the pink slippers, though not its mate, and she’s wearing it, dragging it along with a bare foot. She must ha
ve left the other sneaker back in the store. The boys have picked up some extra shoelaces, very colorful, probably for ice skates, and two shoehorns, which they seem to perceive as some sort of knightly weapon, attacking each other as they bounce along. She cuffs all three of them, reminding them that it’s a sin to steal. If the man hadn’t locked the store, she’d march them right back there. They’re probably making Jesus very unhappy—whereupon, there on the corner of Third and Main, Jesus himself makes a surprise appearance, rolling down the street in a sky-blue automobile, driven by an ethereal creature who could be the Magdalene herself, though with makeup on! Dot falls to her knees in the street, fearing the worst (they shouldn’t have stolen those shoelaces—“You see, Mattie, you see?” she cries), and she’s ready to let rip with prayers and confessions and talking in tongues, whatever it takes, but the Master drifts on by and turns the corner at the next block and disappears. She remains there on her knees in the empty street for a few minutes reflecting upon this apparition, wondering if she saw what she just saw, until her kids get restless and ask her to stand up. Come on, Mom, let’s go. They want their ice creams.
By the time they get home, Johnny has lost one of his new shoes. Well, give him a change and walk back and look for it. Not something anyone else would want one of. But there are new locks on all the doors; they can’t get in. Locks are no problem for Isaiah, but he’s not here—the truck’s gone—so she breaks a window and passes Mattie through, and he opens up from the inside. Someone has taken all their stuff. The cots are still there, but without mattresses or bedding. Their clothes, collected possessions, the children’s toys, kitchen utensils, the hotplate and electric fan, everything, stripped away. They have not bought any of these things, but still they miss them and feel like anyone else feels who has been robbed. It has happened to others in the neighborhood, she discovers. There have also been some forcible evictions. Some of the men, they say, had on uniforms or parts of uniforms, but they didn’t look like city police. In fact, a couple of them wore bandannas on their faces like cattle rustlers in the movies. One of them was recognized as that big fellow from the church camp, so everyone knows who’s behind this. One of the neighbors has been out to see Reverend Baxter and says they were raided overnight and many had their tents dragged away and ripped up. In protest, Reverend Baxter has cut the wire fence and installed himself in the middle of the new campground, with others positioned around him like encircling wagons, including people from town, and he welcomes all who’d like to come and help defend him. Many say they plan to go there.
Isaiah returns and she shows him what’s happened and maybe he’s angry and maybe he’s not. Always hard to tell with Isaiah. He goes to work. He removes the locks and drops them in his tool box, and he does the same for other people who are still locked out. He taps a light pole directly for electricity supply and spends a good hour making the connection childproof. When it’s connected, he turns on every light in the house even though it’s still day. He visits the city dump and finds some of their stuff recently deposited there, including their mattresses, or some mattresses anyway, as well as some new things. A toaster, for example. Now all they need is some bread. He has also come back with a load of gallon bottles, milk jugs, and gas cans, and he and a couple of the men take these to a public fountain and fill them up, using the water to fill toilet tanks and allow everyone to flush. Praise God, they say.
As the day wanes, the neighbors gather in the Blaurocks’ front yard, bringing along scraps of food to be cooked or warmed up on the recovered hotplate and shared around. The chosen people. Dot sends Mattie to the neighborhood grocery store to buy five loaves of white bread so everyone can have a slice of hot toast, setting aside one loaf for herself to help allay the hunger the day’s exertions have brought on, and Isaiah goes to the pop machine in the movie house and gets cold drinks for everybody with his magic slugs. He had also brought a broken floor lamp from his dump run, and he now wires it up and sets it in the yard—a heart-warming thing to see there, a lonely beacon against the encroaching night. It provokes a round of preaching, praying, and gospel singing. Someone offers up a prayer for Reverend Baxter in his stand against the Powers of Darkness, and everyone joins in. Dot tells them all about her visit to the mayor and her encounter with Jesus on Main Street, and that leads to more prayers and the trading of miraculous visitation stories and speculations about the end times so near upon them, including the opinion that they have already begun, about which Dot is less skeptical than she was before. Little Luke comes shuffling up in her pink slipper and for no particular reason puts her arms around her, takes her thumb out of her mouth, and gives her a sleepy kiss on her cheek. The boys are already in their beds; Luke’s always the last to quit. Isaiah lifts her up gently and carries her into the house. The way Isaiah has got things done this evening, God bless him, has Dot excited. Later she’ll warm up some water on the hotplate, have a quick sponge bath, and then, praise the Lord, it’s a bit of the old garden of Solomon.
III.4
Friday 5 June – Sunday 7 June
“They’re back! Ben and Clara!” It’s Willie Hall, banging on their cabin door. “Let the saints be joyful’n glory, let ’em sing out loud ’pon their beds!” And he’s off to wake up the rest of the camp with his momentous news.
Billy Don pulls on his jeans and steps out into the drizzly June morning. A dismal day but bright in promise. They’re back. He’s surprised how good it feels. The camp has a rich murky smell. Funky. One of Sally Elliott’s words. So different from the sweet toasty fragrance of dry warm days. Although there’s something oddly exciting about this dense odor, something suggestive, almost sinful (it’s the earth, Sally would say with her little one-sided grin—the earth is naughty, Billy Don), he’s always glad when it lifts, especially after it has sunk in for several days. Billy Don likes the sun. Dusty baseball weather. Weather for lighter hearts. He feels it’s the weather they now deserve with the return of Ben and Clara.
They must have rolled in overnight. Billy Don parked his Chevy down there yesterday at suppertime, after his midweek mail run, having met with Sally over ice creams and suffered his weekly dose of chagrin, doubt, and embarrassed longing, and he had paused to stare, as he often did, at the deeply indented space in the lot where their big house trailer had so long stood, anchoring the camp, thinking then, as often of late: Something has ended.
But now, as soon, renewed. Born again: Sally’s T-shirt. A sucker. Yes, he can’t shake his “appetite for hope,” as she calls it. He wants to believe. In the way that Ben and Clara do.
He sees other believers, full of smiles, emerging from the dripping trees, some under umbrellas, coming up into the Main Square: Wayne Shawcross and Ludie Belle; Welford Oakes; Hazel Dunlevy. Mrs. Edwards steps out on her raised porch next door, Colin, still in his underwear, peering over her shoulder with his usual look of giddy alarm. “We’ll wanta spruce things up, Billy Don,” Wayne shouts, grinning broadly. He’s wearing his bib overalls over a pajama shirt. Such a nice guy. Billy Don gives him a thumbs-up. He loves these people. “Take ’em on the grand tour! Show ’em what we done!” Old Uriah appears, Travers, Hovis, all trailing after Willie Hall, Cecil and Corinne Appleby hand in hand, the whole camp gathering, Willie hollering out: “And, glory be, they returned from searching out the land after forty days, Numbers 12:25! Hallelujah!” And there’s laughter and some congenial amen-ing, and Ludie Belle says: “Come along now, I’ll put some breakfast on! Wanda, go fetch up some fresh eggs from the coops! Davey, you scoot along with your mama and help out! Afterwards, Hazel, let’s us go shoppin’ for sumthin nice for lunch.”
Back inside the cabin, Billy Don finds Darren still in his shorts, hastily clearing off his worktable. He tells him the good news, and Darren snaps back: “I know. Why do you think I’m cleaning up here?”
“I suppose we’ll have to make the beds.”
“I suppose we will.”
Darren is clearly not as happy about the return of Ben and Clara as
everyone else. He has been the center of attention and getting his way of late, and that’s likely to change. Or else it’s just him Darren’s cross with. Billy Don has remained skeptical about the voice in the ditch, to say nothing of his roommate’s fascination with Mrs. Edwards’ dark angels story and Colin’s crazy nightmares, which Darren believes to be windows onto the sacred, even if they have to do with killing and eating people. Now he has been finding signs that presumably pointed straight at Carl Dean Palmers’ traitorous attack but that they’d failed to decipher until it was too late. Billy Don had guard duty with Pach’ a couple of nights before everything happened, and Pach’ did say things like they both had to learn to knock women off their pedestals, that they weren’t worth it, and he told Billy Don about brutal fights he’d been in in which somebody might have been killed or at least crippled, but he also said at least there was the van. It was the one thing he had in this world, and though it was hard to tell what all was in there after it got burned, it seemed like just about everything he owned, including his driver’s license. When Billy Don pointed that out to Darren, Darren only said: “Don’t be naïve.”
As for those voice-in-the-ditch tapes, Billy Don has listened to them more than anyone other than Darren himself, and he’s pretty sure things are missing now from when he first heard them. Tiny snippets that might have muddied the clarity of the emerging “message.” When he asked about this, Darren looked surprised and said that if anything was happening on the tapes, then it must be the Lord’s doing and Billy Don should try to remember what has dropped out because what’s no longer there might be more important than what remains. Or maybe it was the Devil’s doing, Billy Don said, and Darren, without blinking, said that was possible, but, if so, that made trying to remember what has vanished even more important.
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