Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  “Isn’t nobody talking about it,” said the woman with lank hair in the same low tones, “but I know, because I seed. This here is shaping up to be a bizarre year, what I hear. Did you hear about that baby in them apartments down on Eleventh Street got chewed at by rats? Poor little thing’s mother had gone off and left it in the crib. What I hear, they taken it from her, for neglect, but it ain’t never supposed to be right. Its lips is gone.”

  Cally, eavesdropping, put syrupy canned pears (for the children) in her grocery cart and moved on before the conversation was done. Generally she loved to drift along the aisles of the store, a supermarket specter, so thin and so rootless in Hoadley that she had become nearly invisible. Hoadley women astonished her; in the supermarket they greeted each other with cries of joy and thick-armed, stumpy embraces that blocked the aisles for moments at a time, while other shoppers waited patiently—even if they had seen each other only a week before, nevertheless they embraced. Though hardly anyone ever thus accosted Cally, she liked grocery shopping; she loved to buy cartloads of belly-filling food for her family, dreaming of food as she did so, vicariously eating, and she loved to nibble at the edges of the community as well, listening to Hoadley women talk. The flood of their words and the trickle of their intellects invariably left her awed and aghast.

  But this time, this shopping trip, the chitterings of the women in the supermarket aisle reminded Cally too strongly of the conversing of the bizarre bugs in the woods just beyond the town. Bizarre, yes, it was indeed shaping up to be a bizarre year, so much so that Cally felt she could not listen any longer to the stout women with their casual tales of the routine horrors of Hoadley. These people, though perhaps not evil, were on familiar, shrugging terms with evil. She had heard them discuss the details of a rape-and-mutilation and the price of margarine in much the same tones. As if the devil himself was no more than another neighbor to keep an eye on. Cally knew that the tale of the man whose face had been eaten by his cats was true. Mark was in the Perfect Rest basement workroom as she shopped, intent with wax and photographs, trying to restore the man’s features for the burial. He considered this particularly decrepit corpse, gnawed and decomposing, the greatest challenge of his career, and Cally, though she was scarcely on speaking terms with him, had left the children with his mother so they would not disturb him—with Ma Wilmore, who had once told her one of those by-the-way tales of Hoadley’s incredible cruelty: how when she had been a young wife and pregnant with her first child, when she and Elmo were still living with the senior Wilmores on the farm, she had felt the labor pains start and wanted to go to her bed, but her mother-in-law wouldn’t let her; there were twelve pies to be made on that torrid August day for the field hands haying. Not until the pies were baked and the dinner served and the dishes steamily washed was the young mother-to-be allowed to lie down and the doctor sent for.

  The baby had been born dead.

  Somewhere in the underbrush just beyond Hoadley, babies with the bodies of cicadas wailed.…

  Cally loaded her grocery cart with bananas, cinnamon buns, toaster pastries. School was out, and the kids were home for the summer, which gave her plenty of opportunity to offer them treats and watch them eat. When she had filled the cart to above the level of its steel-wire sides, she turned toward the checkout, pushing hard, a featherweight waif trundling a world-size load, a breaker boy struggling with the coal trolley.

  Old Luther Wasserman, who cleaned the church, limped painfully in dank or chilly weather, of which Hoadley had plenty. He had told Cally once that his father had started him in the mines when he was twelve, and the first year a car full of coal had run over him, smashing his legs against the rails. And his father had refused to have the doctor set the legs, because of the expense. The boy had lain in bed until the legs mended on their own. “With no more care than if I was a barn cat,” old Luther had told Cally. “And they ain’t right to this day. I got pain all the time, and I hold Dad to blame. But he died coughing his insides out with the black lung. Maybe he done me a favor. At least I couldn’t go work in the mine no more.”

  Cally paid for her groceries and motioned away signs of assistance from the bag boy, wondering why the pimply kid offered; she wasn’t old, pregnant, ill or feeble—was she? The store bulletin board, along with for-sale notices and empty refund pads, carried a poster for home nursing care. By the doors, next to the video games, stood a blinking red machine that declared, “Check it out! How’s your health? Heart/stress analyzer measures basal cardiovascular rate and electrodermal response. Insert quarter, grasp handles.” Cally wheeled her overloaded brown bags past it and past the thin man who stood outside panhandling for the cancer association.

  She took the groceries home, and if home smelled of death, she did not notice. All of Hoadley smelled much the same.

  Commotion in the night, sirens, people in the street, woke Sojourner Hieronymus, and she sat up, swung her desiccated old feet over the edge of the narrow bed and stayed that way for a moment, letting the blood come to her head so she would not be dizzy and fall when she got up. The people from the hospital had been to see her, wanted her to wear one of them new inventions, a sort of electronic bracelet that would take her pulse all the time, and send them a signal if anything went wrong with her, and dose her with something to keep her alive till they got there. Century meter, they had called it, and they had a slogan: in the next millennium, everybody could live to be a hundred. She had sent him away. When it came time for her to die, she would die, and meanwhile she would live the way she always had, by the rules.

  Rules. People were such fools; if only they would follow the rules they would be safe, they could lead long and orderly lives such as hers. But they failed to follow the simplest rules. The young girls played ball like the boys, and got their new breasts bumped, and what happened? Thirty, forty years later they got breast cancer, sure as sunrise. Sometimes cancer of the ovaries, too. And it was their own fault.

  Sojourner said a quick prayer. After a seemly interval had passed she shuffled her feet into her waiting slippers, stood up and put on her dressing gown, buttoning it up to her neck, with the two nighttime braids of her long, gray hair inside; it would not do to have people see her with her hair down her back, even at midnight when they were all roused from their beds by fire. It had to be fire of some sort. In her darkened room she could see the orange glow on the black window glass.

  Holding on carefully, first to the handrail and then to the doorjamb, Sojourner went down her steep, narrow stairs (innocent of smoke detector; she would not have such a cowardly device in the house) and out onto her front porch. From there she could see what everyone was gawking at. In fact, it was in plain sight of all the town.

  Under the water tower, swinging from one of the horizontal struts, a limp thing all in flames—in spite of herself, Sojourner pressed her hand to her mouth. It looked like a human, hanging by the neck and burning up there.

  “Who is it, Mommy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it really a person, Mom?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what the police say.”

  Glad of neighbors to disapprove of, Sojourner turned her pewtery old eyes away from the burning horror on the hilltop and toward the voices in the street. There stood that little fool Cally Wilmore, with her two youngsters, letting them look at what was happening in the night. Irresponsible. Didn’t she know that the children should be in bed, no matter what was going on, unless it was their own house burning down? Cally wasn’t from Hoadley, hadn’t been raised right, but that was no excuse. The parents these depraved days were all alike; they let their children run wild. When she, Sojourner, had been raised, the child that gave trouble or disobeyed had its fingertips burned on the hot stove, a foretaste of hell fire, and cried for hours, and went to school with the pain and embarrassment of blistered hands to show that it had been punished. Children had been taught how to behave, back then. Sojourner would have raised well-behaved child
ren had Mr. Hieronymus given her any. She had married him hoping to have a good influence on him. But the man had been weak, irresponsible; he had killed himself with rat poison after only a few weeks of wedlock with her.

  Oona, in a wrap bathrobe sloppily tied, came out onto her porch next door, nodded her disheveled head and smiled and asked the questions appropriate to the occasion. Oona was a good neighbor, but lax in her housekeeping, letting the window curtains go unwashed year to year, and Sojourner believed she had spoiled her children. Certainly she spoiled her grandchildren. She hardly ever punished them, and punishment was the essence of learning what was right. Take toilet training. In Sojourner’s day, a child that messed its pants was sat in a tub of scalding water to be cleaned and taught. It usually hadn’t taken more than a few such lessons before the child learned, though now and then a child died. Its own fault, if it did.

  An unmistakable, stomach-wrenching odor of burning fat and hair and flesh reached Sojourner from the thing on the hilltop. She did not let it trouble her. She stood straight, taking the posture her mother had taught her, strong against fire, fires of hell, fires of discipline.

  “Phew!” yelled little Owen with boyish enthusiasm. “It stinks.”

  “Quiet,” Cally told him without raising her voice.

  “It does, Mommy! It smells like—”

  She shushed him by putting one hand over his mouth, and she leaned down to whisper in his ear. Sojourner saw a flash of pale skin and took another look, cocking her head like an ancient bird of prey, reptilian eyes glinting. The chit was standing out in the street in a negligee nearly down to her bosom, and the peignoir she had thrown over it concealed nothing, being open. Sojourner smiled, suffused with a quiet, happy sense of scandal. She intuited why Cally was wearing the filmy, low-cut nightgown, and she suspected it was doing no good. Mark had not come out to watch the fiery spectacle with her. It was no secret to Hoadley, the town with a sixth sense for people’s troubles, that Mark and Cally were quarreling. That was no reason, though, for Cally to show off what little bodily endowment she had to the whole town. She was likely to end up like the girl who had been raped. Not that frog-faced girl. Sojourner had heard whispers about the father doing it to that one, but that was not really rape; that was just incest. This girl, a pretty little goldilocks who had made the mistake of walking past the municipal building by herself, had been knocked down into the back stairwell by the parking lot and there beaten and raped. And once a woman got herself raped, she might as well brand a big black “R” on her forehead and have it done with. Nobody would ever look at her again without remembering what had been done to her. Sojourner knew what had been done to the girl who had been raped, in detail. She knew what three bodily orifices the rapist had used, and how often, and in what order. She knew the family. She knew how the girl had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown afterward. She had half a notion to tell Cally what might cure her of wanting her husband. The girl who had been raped had not wanted the conjugal act with her husband since, so Hoadley said. Moreover, Hoadley said (with a romantic sigh) that the husband planned to wait for as long as it took. Sojourner expected he would wait until he died. Once a woman understood what men were really like, she wouldn’t want “that” any more as long as she had an excuse. Sojourner had been honest to start with; she had never wanted “that” except insofar as it was unpleasantly necessary in order to procreate children (to be raised as a credit to the family, with all due discipline). And though the event had denied her the children, she had been just as glad when Mr. Hieronymus disposed of himself, especially as he had left her the house and wherewithal to live in it.

  The blazing thing hanging from the water tower had been doused, first fading to an indeterminate shape glowing ember-orange against the smoggy nighttime sky, dull as coal; then blackening to a sizable cinder gleaming watery white in the light of firemen’s lanterns. Cally, Sojourner saw, was talking to a man in a car, one of the firemen returning to the station, indecently stooping as she did so. Then she straightened, stepped back and waved and said to her children, “It wasn’t a person. It was a bear.”

  “A bear!” From the expression on young Tammy’s face, this was a more shocking and unsettling event than if it had been a neighbor. People killed each other routinely on TV, but bears were Paddington and Pooh and Theodore; bears were for hugging.

  “A bear. Somebody shot a black bear and put dungarees on it, hung it up there, poured gas on it and set it on fire. God knows why.” Cally saw Sojourner standing straight and gray on her shadowy porch, waved, then herded her kids back toward home and bed.

  Sojourner watched after her retreating neighbors, but her mind remained on the girl who had been raped, whom she no longer remembered by any other title but that. The girl had worked, she remembered, at the sewing factory. After the rape there had been an arrest, and after the arrest, while the girl lay in her hospital bed, a mob of women from the sewing factory had stormed the jail and demanded that the man be handed over to them. Some of them had kitchen knives, wanted to take care of him so he wouldn’t rape anybody again, and some of them had ropes, wanted to string him up from the water tower where everybody could see, though Sojourner doubted they would have set him on fire with gasoline. A nice touch like that they weren’t likely to think of. Still, it would have taught rapists a lesson if they had got their hands on the man. But the pigheaded police wouldn’t let the women have him. The man had been put away as mental. Just put away, with his pecker not cut off or anything. What was the good of just sending him away? Suppose he got loose, what might he do?

  Sojourner sighed for what might have been and for the foolishness of humankind, took one last look around the quieting town, then before going indoors turned her eyes heavenward and surveyed the moon. A ring around it. Bad weather coming. Weather hadn’t been right, hadn’t been the same since the confounded government and the know-it-all scientists had messed around with the moon.

  “What I mean,” said borough council President Wozny, “we got to find out who is doing this all.”

  Like everyone else in Hoadley, he had found the night of the blazing bear oddly unsettling. Something about the incident seemed like a threat. More than a threat. Deviant. Sick. So much so that he had called a special meeting of the town council to address the problem, if there was one.

  “Isn’t it a police matter?” Council Secretary Zephyr Zook challenged. Looking at her, Wozny knew why some of these daunting old women still wore those long-out-of-date, rhinestoned wing-shaped glasses; they glinted hard and sharp as spearheads.

  “It’s a matter for all concerned citizens.” The president, who planned to seek re-election in the fall, looked around nervously, not sure whether he would come out of this meeting with his prestige enhanced or ruined. “It’s everybody’s concern when there’s rumors like there been.” Council President Wozny let his voice sink to a dark and serious tone. “What I mean, there might be a panic if we don’t do something. Everybody been seeing and hearing strange things. I hear there’s talk about a witch been doing things.”

  The response was far more forthright than he expected. “If there is a witch,” an outspoken old German snapped, “it’s easy to tell who. That Ahira woman.”

  The council had discussed Ahira at a previous meeting—or, rather, not at the council meeting itself, but at the real meeting of minds in the parking lot afterward—much as it had discussed barking dogs, without reaching any conclusion. The attitude of most upstanding Hoadley citizens toward Ahira was to ignore her as a nuisance and hope she would go away. The council had adopted the same attitude up until Gerald Wozny had mentioned witchcraft. Neither council nor president remembered in any conscious manner that the witchcraft idea had been brought before them first by Shirley. They had discounted her, and therefore regarded the concept as their own.

  There followed one of those peculiarly circuitous and nonparliamentary discussions characteristic of governing boards of the town. The more important the matter under d
iscussion, the less likely it was that a formal motion would be made. Herd instinct prevailed in Hoadley. No one wanted to stand apart from the crowd; therefore courtesy demanded that no member be required to ascend to the block and assume the neck-out position. Moreover, the tacit rule was that the council as a whole would not care to stand on record concerning any matter that was likely to come back to haunt it. Witch hunting qualified splendidly as such a specter. Zephyr Zook, finding in the nebulous swirl of talk no statement on which to hang her note-taking, laid down her spiral-bound notebook and Bic pen while the council, like a convocation of starlings, began without any discernible leadership to move in unison.

  “Take her in for vagrancy?”

  “What I mean, didn’t none of this start to happen till after she come here.”

  “Police say they can’t do nothing.”

  “They could, but they don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to get in a pissing contest with a skunk, what I mean.”

  “Can’t blame them. Look what happened to Reverent Culp.”

  “Coroner said that was heart attack.”

  “It don’t matter. She done it to him all the same.”

  “No great loss.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Two of a kind, what I say.”

  “Seems to me Father Leopold might could do something about her if we asked him.”

  “What I mean, a town can’t go letting a witch walk around like regular people.”

  “What about Reverent Berkey? We could get Reverent Berkey to go talk to her.”

  President Gerald Wozny sat by and nodded and tried not to let his mouth come open like that of a mutt hanging out a car window. He had never known the council to move with such speed. Within the single evening Ahira had been reclassified from annoyance to public enemy, from a gnat to a pestilence-carrying rat to be driven out or extirpated. In fact, the main problem was likely to be one of choosing the appropriate exterminator. Roman Catholics out-numbered Protestants, on the council, as they did in Hoadley proper, but simple majority would mean a vote, and a vote would mean a motion, on the record and therefore unthinkable. An accord had to be reached.