Outside, the crowd began to buzz again as Mrs. Zeigler’s party filed out of the house and across the road. There was much discussion and arm waving and head shaking when the two groups met, someone occasionally gesturing back toward the farmhouse. The buzzing grew louder, then gradually died away. At last, Mrs. Zeigler and her group set off down the road for town, accompanied by some of the locals. They trudged away dispiritedly down the center of the dusty road, lugging their shabby suitcases, only a few of them looking back.
Roy watched them until they were out of sight, his face still and calm, and continued to stare down the road after them long after they were gone.
About noon, a carload of reporters arrived outside, driving up in one of the bulky new methane burners that were still rarely seen east of Omaha. They circulated through the crowd of townspeople, pausing briefly to take photographs and ask questions, working their way toward the house, and Roy watched them as if they were unicorns, strange remnants from some vanished cycle of creation. Most of the reporters were probably from State College or the new state capital at Altoona—places where a few small newspapers were again being produced—but one of them was wearing an armband that identified him as a bureau man for one of the big Denver papers, and that was probably where the money for the car had come from. It was strange to be reminded that there were still areas of the country that were…not unchanged, no place in the world could claim that…and not rich, not by the old standards of affluence anyway…but, at any rate, better off than here. The whole western part of the country—from roughly the ninety-fifth meridian on west to approximately the one-twenty-second—had been untouched by the flooding, and although the West had also suffered severely from the collapse of the national economy and the consequent social upheavals, at least much of its industrial base had remained intact. Denver—one of the few large American cities built on ground high enough to have been safe from the rising waters—was the new federal capital, and, if poorer and meaner, it was also bigger and busier than ever.
Abner went out to herd the reporters inside and away from the unbelievers, and after a moment or two Roy could hear Abner’s voice going out there, booming like a church organ. By the time the reporters came in, Roy was sitting at the dining room table, flanked by Raymond and Aaron, waiting for them.
They took photographs of him sitting there, while he stared calmly back at them, and they took photographs of him while he politely refused to answer questions, and then Aaron handed him the pre-prepared papers, and he signed them, and repeated the legal formulas that Aaron had taught him, and they took photographs of that too. And then—able to get nothing more out of him, and made slightly uneasy by his blank composure and the remoteness of his eyes—they left.
Within a few more minutes, as though everything were over, as though the departure of the reporters had drained all possible significance from anything else that might still happen, most of the crowd outside had drifted away also, only one or two people remaining behind to stand quietly waiting, like vultures, in the once-again empty road.
Lunch was a quiet meal. Roy ate heartily, taking seconds of everything, and Mrs. Crammer was as jovial as ever, but everyone else was subdued, and even Abner seemed shaken by the schism that had just sundered his church. After the meal, Abner stood up and began to pray aloud. The brethren sat resignedly at the table, heads partially bowed, some listening, some not. Abner was holding his arms up toward the big blackened rafter of the ceiling, sweat runneling his face, when Peter came hurriedly in from outside and stood hesitating in the doorway, trying to catch Abner’s eye. When it became obvious that Abner was going to keep right on ignoring him, Peter shrugged, and said in a loud flat voice, “Abner, the sheriff is here.”
Abner stopped praying. He grunted, a hoarse, exhausted sound, the kind of sound a baited bear might make when, already pushed beyond the limits of endurance, someone jabs it yet again with a spear. He slowly lowered his arms and was still for a long moment, and then he shuddered, seeming to shake himself back to life. He glanced speculatively—and, it almost seemed, beseechingly—at Roy, and then straightened his shoulders and strode from the room.
They received the sheriff in the parlor, Raymond and Aaron and Mrs. Crammer sitting in the battered old armchairs, Roy sitting unobtrusively to one side on the stool from a piano that no longer worked, Abner standing a little to the fore with his arms locked behind him and his boots planted solidly on the oak planking, as if he were on the bridge of a schooner that was heading into a gale. County Sheriff Sam Braddock glanced at the others—his gaze lingering on Roy for a moment—and then ignored them, addressing himself to Abner as if they were alone in the room. “Mornin’, Abner,” he said.
“Mornin’, Sam,” Abner said quietly. “You here for some reason other than just t’say hello, I suppose.”
Braddock grunted. He was a short, stocky, grizzled man with iron-gray hair and a tired face. His uniform was shiny and old and patched in a dozen places, but clean, and the huge old revolver strapped to his hip looked worn but serviceable. He fidgeted with his shapeless old hat, turning it around and around in his fingers—he was obviously embarrassed, but he was determined as well, and at last he said, “The thing of it is, Abner, I’m here to talk you out of this damned tomfoolery.”
“Are you, now?” Abner said.
“We’ll do whatever we damn well want to do—” Raymond burst out, shrilly, but Abner waved him to silence. Braddock glanced lazily at Raymond, then looked back at Abner, his tired old face settling into harder lines. “I’m not going to allow it,” he said, more harshly. “We don’t want this kind of thing going on in this county.”
Abner said nothing.
“There’s not a thing you can do about it, Sheriff,” Aaron said, speaking a bit heatedly, but keeping his melodious voice well under control. “It’s all perfectly legal, all the way down the line.”
“Well, now,” Braddock said, “I don’t know about that…”
“Well, I do know, Sheriff,” Aaron said calmly. “As a legally sanctioned and recognized church, we are protected by law all the way down the line. There is ample precedent, most of it recent, most of it upheld by appellate decisions within the last year: Carlton versus the State of Vermont, Trenholm versus the State of West Virginia, the Church of Souls versus the State of New York. There was that case up in Tylersville, just last year. Why, the Freedom of Worship Act alone…”
Braddock sighed, tacitly admitting that he knew Aaron was right—perhaps he had hoped to bluff them into obeying. “The ‘Flood Congress’ of ’98,” Braddock said, with bitter contempt. “They were so goddamned panic-stricken and full of sick chatter about Armageddon that you could’ve rammed any nonsense down their throats. That’s a bad law, a pisspoor law…”
“Be that as it may, Sheriff, you have no authority whatsoever—”
Abner suddenly began to speak, talking with a slow heavy deliberateness, musingly, almost reminiscently, ignoring the conversation he was interrupting—and indeed, perhaps he had not even been listening to it. “My grandfather lived right here on this farm, and his father before him—you know that, Sam? They lived by the old ways, and they survived and prospered. Great-granddad, there wasn’t hardly anything he needed from the outside world, anything he needed to buy, except maybe nails and suchlike, and he could’ve made them himself too, if he’d needed to. Everything they needed, everything they ate, or wore, or used, they got from the woods, or from out of the soil of this farm, right here. We don’t know how to do that anymore. We forgot the old ways, we turned our faces away, which is why the Flood came on us as a Judgment, a Judgment and a scourge, a scouring, a winnowing. The Old Days have come back again, and we’ve forgotten so goddamned much, we’re almost helpless now that there’s no goddamned K-Mart down the goddamned street. We’ve got to go back to the old ways, or we’ll pass from the earth, and be seen no more in it…” He was sweating now, staring earnestly at Braddock, as if to compel him by force of will alone to share the
vision. “But it’s so hard, Sam…. We have to work at relearning the old ways, we have to reinvent them as we go, step by step…”
“Some things we were better off without,” Braddock said grimly.
“Up at Tylersville, they doubled their yield last harvest. Think what that could mean to a county as hungry as this one has been—”
Braddock shook his iron-gray head, and held up one hand, as if he were directing traffic. “I’m telling you, Abner, the town won’t stand for this—I’m bound to warn you that some of the boys just might decide to go outside the law with this thing.” He paused. “And, unofficially of course, I just might be inclined to give them a hand…”
Mrs. Crammer laughed. She had been sitting quietly and taking all of this in, smiling good-naturedly from time to time, and her laugh was a shocking thing in that stuffy little room, harsh as a crow’s caw. “You’ll do nothing, Sam Braddock,” she said jovially. “And neither will anybody else. More than half the county’s with us already, nearly all the country folk, and a good part of the town, too.” She smiled pleasantly at him, but her eyes were small and hard. “Just you remember, we know where you live, Sam Braddock. And we know where your sister lives, too, and your sister’s child, over to Framington…”
“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” Braddock said, but he said it in a weak voice, and his face, when he turned it away to stare at the floor, looked sick and old. Mrs. Crammer laughed again, and then there was silence.
Braddock kept his face turned down for another long moment, and then he put his hat back on, squashing it down firmly on his head, and when he looked up he pointedly ignored the brethren and addressed his next remark to Roy. “You don’t have to stay with these people, son,” he said. “That’s the law, too.” He kept his eyes fixed steadily on Roy. “You just say the word, son, and I’ll take you straight out of here, right now.” His jaw was set, and he touched the butt of his revolver, as if for encouragement. “They can’t stop us. How about it?”
“No, thank you,” Roy said quietly. “I’ll stay.”
That night, while Abner wrung his hands and prayed aloud, Roy sat half-dozing before the parlor fire, unconcerned, watching the firelight throw Abner’s gesticulating shadow across the whitewashed walls. There was something in the wine they kept giving him, Roy knew, maybe somebody’s saved-up Quaaludes, but he didn’t need it. Abner kept exhorting him to let the Peace of God into his heart, but he didn’t need that either. He didn’t need anything. He felt calm and self-possessed and remote, disassociated from everything that went on around him, as if he were looking down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope, feeling only a mild scientific interest as he watched the tiny mannequins swirl and pirouette…. Like watching television with the sound off. If this was the Peace of God, it had settled down on him months ago, during the dead of that terrible winter, while he had struggled twelve hours a day to load foundation stone in the face of ice storms and the razoring wind, while they had all, wetbacks and brethren alike, come close to starving. About the same time that word of the goings-on at Tylersville had started to seep down from the brethren’s parent church upstate, about the same time that Abner, who until then had totally ignored their kinship, had begun to talk to him in the evenings about the old ways….
Although perhaps the great dead cold had started to settle in even earlier, that first day of the new world, while they were driving off across foundering Brigantine, the water already up over the hubcaps of the Toyota, and he had heard Toby barking frantically somewhere behind them…. His dad had died that day, died of a heart attack as he fought to get them onto an overloaded boat that would take them across to the “safety” of the New Jersey mainland. His mother had died months later in one of the sprawling refugee camps, called “Floodtowns,” that had sprung up on high ground everywhere along the new coastlines. She had just given up—sat down in the mud, rested her head on her knees, closed her eyes, and died. Just like that. Roy had seen the phenomenon countless times in the Floodtowns, places so festeringly horrible that even life on Abner’s farm, with its Dickensian bleakness, forced labor, and short rations, had seemed—and was—a distinct change for the better. It was odd, and wrong, and sometimes it bothered him a little, but he hardly ever thought of his mother and father anymore—it was as if his mind shut itself off every time he came to those memories; he had never even cried for them, but all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see Toby, or his cat Basil running toward him and meowing with his tail held up over his back like a flag, and grief would come up like black bile at the back of his throat….
It was still dark when they left the farmhouse. Roy and Abner and Aaron walked together, Abner carrying a large tattered carpetbag. Hank and Raymond ranged ahead with shotguns, in case there was trouble, but the last of the afternoon’s gawkers had been driven off hours before by the cold, and the road was empty, a dim charcoal line through the slowly lightening darkness. No one spoke, and there was no sound other than the sound of boots crunching on gravel. It was chilly again that morning, and Roy’s bare feet burned against the macadam, but he trudged along stoically, ignoring the bite of cinders and pebbles. Their breath steamed faintly against the paling stars. The fields stretched dark and formless around them to either side of the road, and once they heard the rustling of some unseen animal fleeing away from them through the stubble. Mist flowed slowly down the road to meet them, sending out gleaming silver fingers to curl around their legs.
The sky was graying to the east, where the sea slept behind the mountains. Roy could imagine the sea rising higher and higher until it found its patient way around the roots of the hills and came spilling into the tableland beyond, flowing steadily forward like the mist, spreading out into a placid sheet of water that slowly swallowed the town, the farmhouse, the fields, until only the highest branches of the trees remained, held up like the beckoning arms of the drowned, and then they too would slide slowly, peacefully, beneath the water….
A bird was crying out now, somewhere in the darkness, and they were walking through the fields, away from the road, cold mud squelching underfoot, the dry stubble crackling around them. Soon it would be time to sow the spring wheat, and after that, the corn….
They stopped. Wind sighed through the dawn, muttering in the throat of the world. Still no one had spoken. Then hands were helping him remove the old bathrobe he’d been wearing…. Before leaving the house, he had been bathed and anointed with a thick fragrant oil, and with a tiny silver scissors Mrs. Reardon had clipped a lock of his hair for each of the brethren.
Suddenly he was naked, and he was being urged forward again, his feet stumbling and slow.
They had made a wide ring of automobile flares here, the flares spitting and sizzling luridly in the wan dawn light, and in the center of the ring, they had dug a hollow in the ground.
He lay down in the hollow, feeling his naked back and buttocks settle into the cold mud, feeling it mat the hair on the back of his head. The mud made little sucking noises as he moved his arms and legs, settling in, and then he stretched out and lay still. The dawn breeze was cold, and he shivered in the mud, feeling it take hold of him like a giant’s hand, tightening around him, pulling him down with a grip old and cold and strong…
They gathered around him, seeming, from his low perspective, to tower miles into the sky. Their faces were harsh and angular, gouged with lines and shadows that made them look like something from a stark old woodcut. Abner bent down to rummage in the carpetbag, his harsh woodcut face close to Roy’s for a moment, and when he straightened up again he had the big fine-honed hunting knife in his hand.
Abner began to speak now, groaning out the words in a loud, harsh voice, but Roy was no longer listening. He watched calmly as Abner lifted the knife high into the air, and then he turned his head to look east, as if he could somehow see across all the intervening miles of rock and farmland and forest to where the sea waited behind the mountains…
Is this enoug
h? he thought disjointedly, ignoring the towering scarecrow figures that were swaying in closer over him, straining his eyes to look east, to where the Presence lived…speaking now only to that Presence, to the sea, to that vast remorseless deity, bargaining with it cannily, hopefully, shrewdly, like a country housewife at market, proffering it the fine rich red gift of his death. Is this enough? Will this do?
Will you stop now?
MACHINES OF
LOVING GRACE
DAWN WAS JUST beginning to color the sky. She huddled inside the small bathroom—door closed, bolt slid and locked—sitting on the toilet lid and hugging her knees. Her head was tilted and hung down, chin almost on breast, and her eyes were nearly closed. She had wrapped her hands around her ankles. Her fingers were turning white. There was no noise in the empty apartment, not even the scurry of a cockroach. She had stopped crying hours ago.
There was noise beyond the window on her left, beyond plaster and glass, outside the vacuum of bedroom-kitchen-livingroom-guestroom-bath: a frozen automobile horn had been honking steadily for the last hour, occasionally traffic whined on the asphalt below, earlier in the evening there had been radios in nearby buildings, tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations and fading one by one toward morning. She didn’t pay any attention to these noises. The silence inside her apartment was too loud.
She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, let her legs uncurl. One of them had gone to sleep, and she stamped it softly, automatically, to restore circulation. The floor was cold under her bare feet. Gooseflesh blossomed along her arms and she ran her hands down over them to smooth it. She had put on a new half-slip for the occasion. She shifted her weight; the toilet lid had been chilly at first, but now it had grown hot and sticky with the heat of her body. She leaned in closer to the hotwater pipe that descended from ceiling to floor—it was still warm to the touch. The dull paint had flaked off it in jigsaw pieces. There was a dingy gray toilet brush leaning against the base of the pipe. The bristles were broken and matted down. All this without thinking at all.
Morning Child and Other Stories Page 23