I can't remember what he shouted. If I could only remember what he shouted, I'd understand why I'm standing here on the road, surrounded by snow-covered trees.
Reverend Thrower looked at his hands, and looked at the trees. He had somehow walked half a mile away from the Millers' house. He wasn't even wearing his heavy cloak.
Then the truth came clear. He hadn't fooled the devil at all. Satan had transported him here, in the twinkling of an eye, rather than let him kill the Beast. Thrower had failed in his one opportunity for greatness. He leaned against a cold black trunk and cried bitterly.
Cally walked into the room, holding the blades above his head. Measure was all set to get a grip on the leg, when all of a sudden old Thrower stood right up and walked out of the room just as quick as if he was trotting to the privy.
“Reverend Thrower,” cried Ma. “Where are you going?”
But Measure understood now. “Let him go, Ma,” he said.
They heard the front door of the house open, and the minister's heavy steps on the porch.
“Go shut the front door, Cally,” said Measure.
For once Cally obeyed without a speck of backsass. Ma looked at Measure, then at Pa, then at Measure again. “I don't understand why he left like that,” she said.
Measure gave her a little half-smile and looked at Pa. “You know, don't you, Pa?”
“Maybe,” he said.
Measure explained to his mother. “Them knives and that preacher, they can't be in this room with Al Junior at the same time.”
“But why not!” she said. “He was going to do the surgery!”
“Well, he sure ain't going to do it now,” said Measure.
The knife and the bone saw lay on the blanket.
“Pa,” said Measure.
“Not me,” said Pa.
“Ma,” said Measure.
“I can't,” Faith said.
“Well then,” said Measure, “I reckon I just turned surgeon.” He looked at Alvin.
The boy's face had a deathly pallor to it that was even worse than the ruddiness of the fever. But he managed a sort of smile, and whispered, “Reckon so.”
“Ma, you're going to have to hold back that flap of skin.”
She nodded.
Measure picked up the knife and brought the blade to rest against the bottom line.
“Measure,” Al Junior whispered.
“Yes, Alvin?” Measure asked.
“I can stand the pain and hold right still, iffen you whistle.”
“I can't keep no tune, if I'm trying to cut straight at the same time,” said Measure.
“Don't want no tune,” said Alvin.
Measure looked into the boy's eyes and had no choice but to do as he asked. It was Al's leg, after all, and if he wanted a whistling surgeon, he'd get one. Measure took a deep breath and started in whistling, no kind of tune at all, just notes. He put the knife on the black line again and began to cut. Shallow at first, cause he heard Al take a gasp of air.
“Keep whistling,” Alvin whispered. “Right to the bone.”
Measure whistled again, and this time he cut fast and deep. Right to the bone in the middle of the line. A deep slit up both sides. Then he worked the knife under the two corners and peeled the skin and muscle right back. At first it bled more than a little bit, but almost right away the bleeding stopped. Measure figured it must be something Alvin did inside himself, to stop the bleeding like that.
“Faith,” said Pa.
Ma reached over and laid her hand on the bloody flap of skin. Al reached out a trembling hand and traced a wedge on the red-streaked bone of his own leg. Measure laid down the knife and picked up the saw. It made an awful, squeaky sound as he cut. But Measure just whistled and sawed, sawed and whistled. And pretty soon he had a wedge of bone in his hand. It didn't look no different from the rest of the bone.
“You sure that was the right place?” he asked.
Al nodded slowly.
“Did I get it all?” Measure asked.
Al sat for a few moments, then nodded again.
“You want Ma to sew this back up?” Measure asked.
Al didn't say a thing.
“He fainted,” said Pa.
The blood started to flow again, just a little, seeping into the wound. Ma had a needle and thread on the pincushion she wore around her neck. In no time she had that flap of skin right back down, and she was stitching away at it, making a fine tight seam.
“You just keep on whistling, Measure,” she said.
So he kept right on whistling and she kept right on sewing, till they had the wound all bandaged up and Alvin was laying back sleeping like a baby. They all three stood up to go. Pa laid a hand on the boy's forehead, as gentle as you please.
“I think his fever's gone,” he said.
Measure's tune got downright jaunty as they slipped on out the door.
Chapter Fourteen – Chastisement
As soon as Elly saw him, she was sweet as could be, brushing snow off him, helping with his cloak, and never so much as whispering a question of how it happened.
Didn't make no difference how kindly she might be.
He was shamed afore his own wife, cause sooner or later she'd hear the tale from one of those children. Soon enough the tale would be all up and down the Wobbish. How Armor-of-God Weaver, storekeeper for the western country, future governor, got throwed right off a porch into the snow by his old father-in-law. They'd be laughing behind their hands, all right. They'd laugh him up and down. Never to his face, of course, cause there was hardly a soul between Lake Canada and the Noisy River who didn't owe him money or need his maps to prove their claims. Come the time when the Wobbish country was made a state, they'd tell that story at every polling place. They might like a man they laughed at, but they wouldn't respect him, and they wouldn't vote for him.
It was the death of his plans he was facing, and his wife just had too much of that Miller family look about her. She was pretty enough, for a frontier woman, but he didn't care about pretty right now. He didn't care about sweet nights and gentle mornings. He didn't care about her working alongside him in the store. All he cared about was shame and rage.
“Don't do that.”
“You got to get that wet shirt off. How'd you get snow clear down your shirt?”
“I said get your hands off me!”
She stepped back, surprised. “I was just–”
“I know what you 'was just.' Poor little Armor, you just pat him like a little boy and he'll feel better.”
“You could catch your death–”
“Tell that to your pa! If I cough my guts out, you tell him what it means to throw a man in the snow!”
“Oh no!” she cried. “I can't believe Papa would–”
“See? You don't even believe your own husband.”
“I do believe you, it just ain't like Pa–”
“No ma'am, it's like the devil himself, that's what it's like! That's what fills that house of yours up there! The spirit of evil! And when a body tries to speak the words of God in that house, they throw him fight out in the snow!”
“What were you doing up at the house?”
“Trying to save your brother's life. He's no doubt dead by now.”
“How could you save him?”
Maybe she didn't mean to sound so contemptuous. It didn't matter. He knew what she meant. That him having no hidden power, there wasn't a thing he could do to help anybody. After years of being married, she still put her faith in witchery, just like her kin. He hadn't changed her a bit. “You're just the same,” he said. “Evil's in you so deep that I can't pray it out of you, and I can't preach it out of you, and I can't love it out of you, and I can't yell it out of you!” When he said “pray,” he shoved her a little, just to make his point. When he said “preach,” he shoved her harder, and she stumbled back. When he said “love,” he took her by the shoulders and gave her such a shake her hair broke right out of the bun she'd made of it, and fluttere
d around her head. When he said “yell,” he knocked her back so far she stumbled down on the floor.
Seeing her falling, even before she hit the floor, he felt such a shame go through him, even worse than when her father threw him in the snow. A strong man makes me feel weak, so I go home and shove around my wife, what a big man that makes me. Here I been a Christian who never hit or hurt a man or woman, and I knock my own wife, flesh of my flesh, right down on the floor.
That was his thinking, and he was about to throw himself on his knees and bawl like a baby and beg forgiveness. He would've done it, too, except that when she saw the look on his face, all twisted up with shame and rage, she didn't know that he was angry at himself, she just knew that he was hurting her, and so she did what come natural to a woman who grew up like she did. She moved her fingers to make a fending, and whispered a word to hold him back.
He couldn't fall on his knees before her. He couldn't take one step toward her. He couldn't even think of taking a step toward her. Her fending was so strong he staggered back, he headed for the door, he opened it and ran outside in just his shirt. Everything he'd been afraid of came true today. He probably lost his future in politics, but that was nothing compared to this: his own wife did witchery in his own home, and she did it against him, and he had no defense against it. She was a witch. She was a witch. And his house was unclean.
It was cold. He had no coat, not even his waistcoat. His shirt was already wet, and now it clung to him and froze him to the bone. He had to get indoors, but he couldn't bear to knock on anybody's door. There was only one place he could go. Up the hill to the church. Thrower had firewood there, so he'd be warm. And in the church he could pray and try to understand why the Lord didn't help him. Haven't I served you, Lord?
* * *
Reverend Thrower opened the door of the church and walked slowly, fearfully inside. He could not bear to face the Visitor, knowing how he had failed. For it had been his own failure, he knew that now. Satan should have had no power over him, to drive him from the house that way. An ordained minister, acting as the emissary of the Lord, following instructions given to him by an angel– Satan should not have been able to thrust him out of the house like that, before he even knew what was happening.
He stripped off his cloak, and his topcoat as well. The church was hot. The fire in the stove must have burned longer than he expected. Or maybe he felt the heat of shame.
It could not be that Satan was stronger than the Lord. The only possible explanation was that Thrower himself was too weak. It was his own faith that faltered.
Thrower knelt at the altar and cried out the name of the Lord. “Forgive thou my unbelief!” he cried. “I held the knife, but Satan stood against me, and I had no strength!” He recited a litany of self-excoriation, he rehearsed all his failures of the day, until at last he was exhausted.
Only then, with his eyes sore from crying, his voice feeble and hoarse, did he realize the moment when his faith was undermined. It was when he stood in Alvin's room, asking the boy to confess his faith, and the boy scoffed at the mysteries of God. “How can he be on top of something that ain't got no top?” Even though Thrower had rejected the question as the result of ignorance and evil, the question had nevertheless pierced his heart and penetrated to the core of his belief. Certainties that had sustained him most of his life were suddenly split through by the questions of an ignorant boy. “He stole my faith,” said Thrower. “I went into his room a man of God, and came out as a doubter.”
“Indeed,” said a voice behind him. A voice he knew.
A voice that now, in his moment of failure, he both feared and longed for. Oh, forgive me, comfort me, my Visitor, my friend! Yet do not fail also to chastise me with the terrible wrath of a jealous God.
“Chastise you?” asked the Visitor. “How could I chastise you, such a glorious specimen of humanity?”
“I am not glorious,” said Thrower miserably.
“You're barely human, for that matter,” said the Visitor. “In whose image were you made? I sent you to bring my word into that house, and instead they have nearly converted you. What do I call you now? A heretic? Or merely a skeptic?”
“A Christian!” cried Thrower. “Forgive me and call me once again a Christian.”
“You had the knife in your hand, but you set it down.”
“I didn't mean to!”
“Weak, weak, weak, weak, weak.” Each time the Visitor repeated the word, he stretched it longer and longer, until each repetition became a song in itself. As he sang, he began to walk around the church. He did not run, but he walked quickly, far faster than any man could walk. “Weak, weak…” He was moving so fast that Thrower had to turn constantly just to keep him in sight. The Visitor was no longer walking on the floor. He was skittering along the walls, as smooth and fast in his motion as a cockroach, then even faster, until he became a blur, and Thrower could not keep up with him by turning. Thrower leaned on the altar, facing the empty pews, watching the Visitor race by again and again and again.
Gradually Thrower realized that the Visitor had changed shape, that he had stretched himself, like a long slender beast, a lizard, an alligator, bright-scaled and shining, longer and longer, until finally the Visitor's body was so long that it circled the room, a vast worm that gripped its own tail between its teeth.
And in his mind Thrower realized how very small and worthless he was, compared to this glorious being that sparkled with a thousand different colors, that glowed with inner fire, that breathed in darkness and exhaled light. I worship thee! he shouted inside himself. Thou art all that I desire! Kiss me with your love, so I may taste your glory!
Suddenly the Visitor stopped, and the great jaws came toward him. Not to devour, for Thrower knew he was unworthy even to be consumed. He saw now the terrible predicament of man: he saw that he dangled over the pit of hell like a spider on a slender thread, and the only reason God did not let him fall was because he was not even worthy of destruction. God did not hate him. He was so vile that God disdained him.
Thrower looked into the Visitor's eyes and despaired. For there was neither love, nor forgiveness, nor anger, nor contempt. The eyes were utterly empty. The scales dazzled, scattering the light of an inner fire. But that fire did not shine through the eyes. They were not even black. They simply were not there at all, a terrible emptiness that trembled, that would not hold still, and Thrower knew that this was his own reflection, that he was nothing, that for him to continue to exist was a cruel waste of precious space, that the only choice left to him was to be annihilated, uncreated, to restore the world to the greater glory it would have had if Philadelphia Thrower had never been born.
* * *
It was Thrower's praying that woke Armor up. He was curled up by the Franklin stove. Maybe he stoked that stove a mite too hot, but that's what it took to beat back the cold. Why, by the time he got to the church his shirt was solid ice. He'd get more charcoal to pay back the parson.
Armor meant to speak right up and let Thrower know he was there, but when he heard the words that Thrower was praying, he couldn't find no words to say. Thrower was talking about knives and arteries, and how he should've cut up the enemies of God. After a minute it came clear: Thrower hadn't gone up there to save that boy, he'd gone up to kill him! What's wrong around here, thought Armor, when a Christian man beats his wife, and a Christian wife witches her husband, and a Christian minister plots murder and prays for forgiveness cause he failed to commit the crime!
All of a sudden, though, Thrower stopped praying. He was so hoarse and his face so red that Armor thought he might have had the apoplexy. But no. Thrower lifted his head like he was listening to somebody. Armor listened, too, and he could hear something, like people talking in a windstorm, so you couldn't never hear what they were saying.
I know what this is, thought Armor. Reverend Thrower's having himself a vision.
Sure enough, Thrower talked, and the faint voice answered, and pretty soon Thrower starte
d turning around and around, faster and faster, like he was watching something on the walls. Armor tried to see what it was he was watching, but he couldn't never make it out. It was like a shadow passing across the sun– you couldn't see it coming and you couldn't see it go, but for a second it was darker and colder. That's what Armor saw.
Then it stopped. Armor saw a shimmering in the air, a dazzle here and there like when a pane of glass catches the sunlight. Was Thrower seeing the glory of God, like Moses saw? Not likely, looking at the parson's face. Armor never did see such a face as that before. Like a man's face might look if he had to watch his own baby being killed.
The shimmering and dazzle went away. The church was quiet. Armor wanted to run to Thrower and ask him, What did you see! What was your vision! Was it a prophecy?
But Thrower didn't look much like he wanted to answer questions. That look of wishing to die was still on his face. The preacher walked real slow away from the altar. He wandered around among the pews, bumping into them sometimes, not watching or caring where his body went. Finally he ended up by the window, facing the glass, but Armor knew he didn't see nothing, he was just standing there, his eyes wide open, looking like death.
Reverend Thrower lifted up his right hand, the fingers spread, and he laid his palm on a pane of glass. He pressed. He pressed and pushed so hard that Armor could see the glass bowing outward. “Stop it!” shouted Armor. “You'll cut yourself!”
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