I always knew that place was ready to blow up, the old farmer said. You going out there Fox?
Got to stay here, the policeman said.
You want to go? We can watch the body for you.
No thanks.
You’re a good boy, Luella said.
Stay away from Miller Farm, that’s my creed, the old farmer said. They got a stash of arms big enough to blow up the Pentagon. Christ I don’t even drive out Rib Rock no more.
Afraid they’ll shoot you, Chet?
Moral infection, the man said, the devil’s out there. Stay away, my advice. He noticed Harry. No offense, he said.
He’s just a visitor, Luella said. He knows people there. How come you know them? she asked.
Harry didn’t want to answer but not answering would give offense. One of them got involved with my daughter, he said. It’s over now.
Ah they reach out their tentacles and snare the kids, the farmer said. Brainwashing, you gotta protect your young folks.
Not my young folks, the laborer said.
It’s like bringing the worst ills of Ohio into our community, the old farmer said. Drive by shootings and skinhead militias arming to blow up the government and take over.
This ain’t a militia, the younger farmer said. What I heard, this is more like a religious community.
Luella looked at Harry. Are you worrying about your daughter’s friend? she said.
You can look at him if you want, the policeman said.
No thanks. Harry couldn’t stand it any more. Excuse me I better get going. He went back to his car.
Take care, the young farmer said. Be careful in Ohio.
Harry was thinking so loud it came out as spoken words in the car. Where am I going? Now what do I do? Look for him. Where can I find him? Miller Farm. What will I do if I find him? It’s too late, he’s dead by now. Don’t jump to conclusions. Who else would come along and shoot a Millerite on a street where nothing like this has happened in thirty-six years? He’s doomed. Goodbye Nick. Thought I could save you, sorry. Catch him, teach him, teach him what, his doom? Too late.
Going to Miller Farm was like Nick going home. Home is sleep. Whatever it is, Harry, thinking so hard he was not thinking at all, drove out Rib Rock Road toward Miller Farm. At the point where Rib Rock enters the woods and starts to climb, he heard the next fold of trouble wrapping him like a cabbage leaf, the alienating sound of a police siren in the trees. The howl of the law rising out of Rib Rock like steam, then flashing lights behind scaring him into full stop in the ditch while the sleek car tore past up the hill into the still deeper woods ahead. Sirening the foxes and squirrels, screeching the skunks and raccoons, outshrieking the hermit thrushes and white throated sparrows. A side effect of the news he had already heard, trouble at Miller Farm, like the swell from a hurricane miles away but coming closer. The sirens and armed forces of the world chasing Nick.
He waited in the ditch, opening his air-conditioned window to let the siren recede and another siren came up behind him, a new wild bird in the spring. This too got louder and burst into view through the trees with flashing lights heading to whatever it was. Again he waited for the sound to fade and disappear and the forest silence to return, hoping to hear some bird voice, running water, falling twigs, leaf rustle, to reestablish himself before leaving the ditch and crawling back onto the road.
Ten minutes of whatever it takes to get out of the woods at the top where Rib Rock flattens out between fields and he could see ahead one of those flashing police cars stopped at the side of the road like an enameled calico turtle. Parked by the Miller mailbox where the drive goes in. He stopped behind it.
The police car was empty. It blocked the entrance to the Miller drive with its lights flashing. He figured it was intentionally blocking the way and the policemen themselves were down in the compound.
He sat a while in his car, while the lights in the police car buzzed his eyes. He turned off his engine and listened. What he heard was veins and arteries. He got out of his car, taking his keys. Walked up to the police car and looked in. A newspaper on the seat. The car would have been easy to steal. He looked at the gate and the electrified fence and still thinking in spoken words said, What should I do?
Walk in, he replied. The gate behind the police car was shut but not locked. He opened it, trespassing, and walked down the drive toward the woods. The distance looked greater when he was on foot. As he walked he listened for news. Mostly he heard his thoughts saying Jesus are you scared? Making every thought loud to prove he was alive, so the birds in the field could hear. Imagining rather than seeing meadowlark, bobolink, red-winged blackbird. The villainous cowbird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. Telling the birds in his out-speaking thought, we’re just going down to Miller Farm to see what’s going on. If we see any trouble we’ll retreat. I am looking for Nicky Foster. My young mostly innocent but murderous friend, to make sure he’s all right and had nothing to do with the crime wave that has alarmed the people of Wicker Falls. The good people of Wicker Falls.
Explaining further: You’d do this too if you recognized the power you had over such an innocent yet deformed young person. Responsibility for the power of years teaching the young how to think for themselves. Opportunity not only to make a moron think and a madman sane but to save lives, an opportunity that doesn’t come to just any professor in a lifetime.
Yet if the madman has chosen through stubbornness to doom not only his victim and himself but this whole community of believers whose gullibility I may scorn but whose goodness I would never question, it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault, Harry said to the birds as he descended toward the clearing.
He heard a car straining up the hill from the compound. A large black luxury car reeking elegance, Cadillac or Lincoln. He stepped onto the grass to let it pass. The driver looked at him, an old woman. The car stopped, she opened the window, called, Harry, get in. Hurry.
Lena. She looked a hundred years old.
The gate’s blocked, he said.
She looked ahead. What’s that car doing there? she said.
She looked as if she were fighting off a stroke, if a person can fight off a stroke.
That’s the police. They’re blocking the entrance.
Tell them to move. She blew her horn.
There’s no one there.
How can I get out?
You can’t.
Oh help me, she said. How did you get here?
That’s my car out there.
Can we go in it?
Yes, if you want to. What’s going on?
Never mind. She got out of her car. Come on, she said. Quick.
Are you just going to leave your car? he said.
I’ll leave a note. I’ll pick it up later.
Why are you so eager to leave? he said.
Get out of here first.
He followed her to the gate. He didn’t want to go without finding out about Nick. I’m looking for somebody, he said.
Not now, she said.
He opened the gate for her and she went to his car. Are you staying anywhere? she asked.
The Sleepy Wicker Motel.
Take me there.
He held the door while she got in his car.
Are you going to tell me what happened? he said.
The world just ended, she said. She looked white and withered. Just get going, won’t you please?
24
Lena Fowler Armstrong
It was Harry Field and he drove me in his car down Rib Rock Road through Wicker Falls to the Sleepy Wicker. What happened? he said. He was impatient, I shocked. Give me time, I said.
You didn’t tell me Miller had only one eye, I said.
I didn’t notice, he said.
(That’s how I knew he was God, when I saw his one eye. It was big when I approached, full of the brutal universe contradicting the sweetness of his smile. But when I looked from the big eye to the other, I saw the big one was dead, made of glass, the live eye was the other. That’s
how I knew Miller was God.) You never noticed his glass eye, I said.
He said Miller had his back to the light. What happened back there? he asked. Why did you say the world just ended?
Give me time, I said. I told him why I went to see Miller. (I went because Harry was all scoff and scorn. The force of his negative thoughts crossing my field reversed them to positive. I went to Miller propelled by Harry’s solar wind.) I was mad at you, Harry, I was mad.
So I wrote to Miller. Miller Farm, Wicker Falls, New Hampshire. Obsequiously polite, asking for the right to visit. I told him I wanted to meet God, and he invited me to come. So I went. (I took the Lincoln and drove. I reached Wicker Falls in the evening and stayed at the Sleepy Wicker Motel. I called from the motel and announced myself and they told me they’d send a man in the morning to direct me.)
Lena, Harry said. The world just ended. There’s a police car blocking the entry. A policeman in Wicker Falls said somebody was killed, and somebody else was killed in Wicker Falls. Will you please tell me what happened?
I’m telling you, I said.
Can you jump to the end, and then go back to the beginning?
The end? I said. The end is the end.
What do you mean?
The end is they killed him.
Killed who?
I couldn’t say it, but I did. God. They killed God.
Miller? They killed Miller?
That’s what I meant, yes. The car continued to bump down Rib Rock Road.
The space represents the story’s impact. The story is a tragedy.
Who killed him?
That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I loved him and they killed him, I said through my tears.
That shut him up. It shut us both up while the car rumbled into Wicker Falls and then zip down the highway toward the motel.
I loved him, Harry, I said.
He looked gloomy and didn’t speak.
I said, I presume you’ll insist on getting me a room of my own at the Sleepy Wicker?
That would be best, he said.
With no point in getting mad anymore, though you wonder why he keeps pursuing me if he doesn’t want me when he has me. Why else did he come all the way to Wicker Falls?
After a long time he said again, Tell me what happened.
Here’s what I told him. The man sent from Miller to direct me, this stereotype, farmer with felt hat, long mustache, red chest where the buttons open in front, I followed his pickup truck, driven like a tractor crawling up the country road into the woods and across the field and down to the compound, which fit Harry’s description well enough. A woman on the porch of the Victorian house said wait inside. Waited on the sofa by the big staircase while people went in and out, up stairs and down, wondering if I would recognize Miller from his description, a face like Emerson, hair like Liszt. Tableware clacking, which made me think of lunch, so I went out. I saw the building Harry had called the altered barn and through its open doors two long tables with people coming in to eat. I asked a boy in an apron if Mr. Miller was here. I should have recognized him without being told. As I approached (across the length of the room) I saw that an accident had befallen the Emersonianism of his face and realized it was the enlargement of his eye. It was a single eye and I almost stopped. He looked at me with that enormous universal eye blasted (I thought) by the same electricity that created life. He stared at me and I faltered. The woman on his left beckoned me and Miller bowed his head with a smile.
When I looked next I realized the awful eye was false. Dead. The live eye was the other, shrewd, partially concealed under the eyebrow. That was the eye that saw me, and when I switched from the false glass to it I recognized divinity. Next to the false display, concealed by it, the real thing.
I told Harry my belief. (God looks through every living eye. If you look directly into someone’s eye you’ll see and be seen by God. You see him fleetingly, God dispersed. Miller’s false eye led me to God concentrated. It deceived me until the falsity made me look at the live eye next to it. From then on the glass was merely an advertisement to warn that I was in the presence of God’s Eye, not where I thought but shrewd and observant in the shade. When I found this live eye with God looking through, I saw God concentrated.)
He said, Do you want to interview me for the papers or do you want to sit at my feet?
I told him I wanted to give myself to God.
How do you propose to do that? he said.
That depends on what God wants from me.
Then you want to see me in private.
Yes.
Have lunch first. Sit at the end of the table. When you have finished ask the boy to show you to the guest room and wait there. It will be a long wait so you’d better have something to read unless you’d rather pray. I’ll come to you.
I waited all afternoon. Eventually I heard a bell and saw people returning to the altered barn. A woman invited me to the dining room. Do you think he’s forgotten? I asked. Patience, she said. She had a long braid down her back like a guitar player. I returned to the dining room. I saw Miller across the room. From this distance I could not see the disfiguration of his eyes, and he looked like any farmer, animated and jovial.
He left before I was finished. I hurried after him, heading toward the woods. I haven’t forgotten, he said. Wait for me.
I returned to the guest room, and the light faded. The guest room had a bed and a small table with a clock, a single wooden rocking chair, a faded glass-framed picture showing a child looking at her reflection in a pool. The window was open with a screen outside. I heard spring birds in the woods. Music somewhere, a radio, a cottage door shut. Footsteps, but mostly the house was still. I read by the bedside table while I waited.
He came after ten. I heard the quick step, then a knock on the door, like a doctor entering the consultation room. He wore a dark blue robe like a cheap magician. I saw the false advertising eye before I found the godlike real one.
You stayed?
You told me to wait.
He looked me over. How old are you? he said.
Seventy.
You don’t need to stay if you don’t want to.
I wanted to see you, I said.
You’ve done that.
I wanted more.
You want me to see you?
Why yes, I said.
If you stay the night you’ll need your luggage. I’ll send Jeff for it. What do you need?
Just the bag in the trunk.
Give me your car keys and he’ll bring it. Go to bed. I’ll be back.
Are you going to visit me in my dreams?
God don’t fool around with dreams, he said.
Jeff brought my bag and I got ready for bed. I showered and perfumed and made up my face. I sat in bed by the lamp and pretended to read.
Waiting for my lover. The worldly cynical half of my soul laughed. This was not a question of being deceived. I did wonder which came first, the gratification of lust or the pleasure of suckering me. I estimated Miller to be sixty. Does he like seventy-year old women? Or all women? Will he have to overcome repugnance to make love to me?
He came back in the blue robe and sat in the chair beside the bed where I was propped up. What do you want to say to me?
I hear you call yourself God.
Do you believe me?
I do and I don’t, I said. Were you born with a glass eye?
He smiled and did not reply. Do you want me to overwhelm you? he said. Watch. He leaned over me, supporting himself with his hands, one on either side, his face looking down at me close.
Look me in the eye. Not the glass one.
I giggled. Are you hypnotizing me?
Do you want to be hypnotized?
I want to know what I am doing.
Then look in my eye.
He removed the blankets that were covering me. You were waiting for me, he said. He opened his robe and there he was, ready for me as I was for him. Look at me, he said.
He descended.
I felt him and I thought, filled with God. I had forgotten how good it could be. This guy was a charlatan, a fake, I knew that because he knew it, charlatan, fake, mere man. It makes no difference, though, and that’s the point. Even a charlatan can be God, which I suspected when Harry first told me about him and knew for certain when I saw the false eye leading to the real eye, and confirmed in my body when I felt him in me.
That’s what Harry can’t understand. For him it’s one or the other. If he’s God he can’t be fake. If he’s fake he can’t be God. But of course he’s fake. He’s God in spite of that and when he surged, I fell in love with Him all over again.
He lay beside me afterwards and spent the night. My wives don’t mind, he said. Of course he has wives, the old rooster, taking his pleasure, why shouldn’t he?
I said, You like me in my seventy-year disguise?
Seventy is beautiful, he said. God is in you too.
Just not to the same degree, I said in my sarcastic mode. He didn’t mind. He knows what I think.
Eventually he slept. I looked at him on his back with his open mouth, his breath clacketing like the gear works of an old farm machine, and I said, God is sleeping too. I knew what I was doing. Pretending, as good as real, I’ve been pretending all my life. I have pretended all my beliefs, my devotions, spirits, mediums and horoscopes. My Gods. Everything I ever believed was pretend, nothing else is possible. My marriage, which I pretended for forty years. Love, often. My home and family with my children. I planned to tell Miller when he awoke. Harry too, because I suspect he pretends his things as deliberately as I pretend mine. His pretense is logic, rational argument based on a prior pretense, whose premises he never questions. Let us suppose, if this, then that. I admired the audacity of the man who pretended to be God, believing in his pretense like any other person, so I went along with it, a good story. Lying awake while God slept, I pretended to debate the question of moving here to live, which would be a strong gesture but would mean leaving Anchor Island. I decided to ask his advice in the morning and was already thinking up ways to become a member of Miller Farm without giving up Anchor Island.
He got up early. Work to do, he said. I went back to sleep. I woke later full of love with the tenderness of Godly flesh remembering itself inside me.
Disciples Page 23