Wozny had opened the meeting intending to play the part of the rumor-scotcher, the level-headed, public-spirited leader paternally telling the citizenry to be calm and law-abiding. But the proper politician takes credit as credit comes. Wozny was equally pleased to find himself the nominal head of a righteous crusade. With rising excitement he realized that someday he, a Protestant, might be able to run for mayor if he could keep himself in the good with Protestants and Catholics both. He said, “How about Father Leopold and Reverent Berkey?”
It was settled, of course, after the formal meeting was over. The more important the matter, the less was actually said at the end. There were a few grunts and a soundless chorus of nodding, and it was understood that someone, eyed but unnamed, would speak to each of the divines, and that something was to be done about Ahira.
The priest came to the park in full liturgical regalia, in cassock and embroidered, lace-edged surplice, his heavy pectoral cross glinting on his white bosom, the symbols on his stole glimmering gold in the dusk. He progressed like a battleship under billowing sail, and in his wake an altar boy in alb and cincture swung a thurible giving off the smoke of consecrated incense to drive away demons. At the priest’s side walked the Brethren pastor, hollow-chested and craterous of face, in soot-black suit and severe tie, black zippered Bible in hand. Behind the holy and ecumenical duo, but keeping a cautious distance, crowded the town council members and a few other clergy, nuns and church hangers-on, including Pastor Berkey’s secretary (decently attired in skirt and sensible heels), Cally Wilmore.
The assembled misfits stared when they saw this strange congregation approaching, but Ahira laughed out loud, a lovely, ringing laugh out of her proud and lovely mouth.
The priest sketched the sign of the cross in her direction. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he and the Protestant pastor intoned in unison.
“In the name of the earth, and of the moon, and of the stars!” Ahira shouted back, still laughing. “You people can do nothing against me.”
Father Leopold carried an Occasional Service Book containing a text for exorcism, which he began to read in a droning voice, to no effect except that Ahira stopped laughing and listened with her head cocked catwise, smiling. “Old man in drag,” she interrupted after a while, “I like your dress. Where could I get one like it?”
The grim-faced Brethren pastor was growing angry, and impatient with the priest’s droning. “Witch of Satan!” he shouted with thunder force, “Begone from this place!”
“The best lack all conviction,” said Ahira quietly, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Listening, Cally Wilmore startled like a deer, completing in her mind Yeats’s next lines: Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Yet Ahira veered away from prophecy into mockery. “Old crow,” she jeered at Pastor Berkey, “why don’t you wear a pretty dress and a necklace, like your friend?”
The individual in question lifted his Bible, directing its cross-embossed cover toward the enemy, and shook it at her—or else his hand shook with fury, as did his voice. “This is my clothing, my shield, my armor!” he cried. “This, the cross of Christ and the word of God!” It was a dramatic moment, and the priest did not wish to be left out. He abandoned his droned exorcism and lifted his pectoral cross in his hand, stepping forward. The Protestant minister was quick to step forward as well. Ahira addressed them sweetly.
“You two righteous fools,” she said, “don’t you know why you can do nothing against me? It is because you are a pair of frauds.” Her voice rang out over the listening crowd. “You pretend to come here in ‘Christian love,’ but you hate each other.”
Her people, the misfits, stood gathered around her feet, their numbers sufficient to fill the park, and none of them had deserted her, though many of them had flinched back from the pastor, the priest and the attendant pillars of Hoadley.
To the two divines Ahira said, “I know what you have called each other in your prayers.”
They shouted at her, the one in English, the other in Latin, their mixing voices incomprehensible. Ahira spoke nearly in a whisper, yet her words carried throughout the crowd.
“All you fat-ass normals in this smug town, listen to me: there is not one of you fit to face me. Not one pure of heart. Hypocrites.” Ahira included all the intruders in her glance. “I know your secrets. I know how you fondle yourselves in the dark. I know which ones have latches on the outside of the bedroom closet door, and where you keep the whips and shackles. I know which woman sucks her little boy to give him a hard on. I know which man locks himself in the bathroom to sniff his daughter’s underthings waiting for the laundry there. I know which men go to whores, and which ones go to other men, and I know which ones love their neighbors, and which ones love other women. I know which man likes to touch little girls. I know which man likes to beat little girls. I know which men have done rape and gotten away with it, and which woman has done murder and gotten away with it, and which one of you has killed animals and set them afire, and would love to do the same to neighbors.”
The crowd of the righteous had gone utterly silent, the council members and churchgoers and pastor listening intently to a soft, low, shocking voice, even the priest leaning forward to hear, and in the dusk above the grass of the park the bronze horseman sat silent, immobile, impotent, and the many fireflies winked slowly, like the myriad eyes of God—or the devil. One or the other, Cally Wilmore thought hazily, was in Ahira. What God knew, this woman seemed to know. Or what the devil knew, for why should the knowledge of the devil be any less than that of God? Though, thank God or the devil, Ahira had not mentioned mayapple or a love god like white sugar or Cally’s own humiliating secret.
There had to be at least one pure and courageous person, one Galahad in Hoadley.… Mark? No, Mark was just an ordinary, whining man and no savior, at least not for her, though half the town looked to him as their white knight—but there had to be at least one truly good person, Cally thought. Reverend Berkey? She would have sworn Reverend Berkey was a saint, yet even his ascetic back, to which she looked, appeared bent, rusty black and defeated. What was his weakness? Did everyone, everyone in the whole world, have a dark secret and a hidden shame?
“Not one of you is fit to face me,” said Ahira.
The priest, the ship of the church, who had been listing badly, straightened and swelled, his sails full of stung pride. “Insolent sprout of Satan!” he intoned. “The might of the Lord God Omnipotent—”
“Is not in you. Is as nothing, compared to the might of those your God has trampled into dirt. Watch, priest.” Easily, casually, Ahira reached over the gazebo railing and touched the misfit who stood closest to her. It was the bald girl, who screamed, not in fright or pain, but in sheer startled ecstasy, for the touch of Ahira’s hand put hair on her afflicted head: richly curling, shoulder-length fawn-brown hair, properly accessorized by eyebrows and eyelashes in the appropriate places. Her undistinguished face, awash in hair and alight with joy, looked very nearly beautiful. With a gentle hand Ahira turned her to face the onlookers.
“Can you do this, priest?”
A gasp and babble had gone up from the crowd, but the priest did not add to it or silence it; he seemed unable to speak. He had witnessed a healing, a miracle. The devil could quote Scripture, but only prophets and saints and messiahs were supposed to be able to do what he had just seen done.
“And the Antichrist,” Ahira added pleasantly, as if she had heard his thoughts. Like Jesus coming down from the mount she came down the gazebo steps to the bottom one and beckoned the erstwhile-bald girl to her side. With the same offhand but tender grace she lifted the plenitude of hair at the youngster’s temple. There, just at the zygomatic arch, showed a dark red mark.
“All of you whom I touch must wear my mark,” she said, her eyes not on the intruding townspeople but on her own people, the misfits. Her glance on them, soft as twilight
. “You are my people, and my mark is the seal of our bond. Who wants to come to me and be healed?”
Already they crowded around.
The bent woman straightened, and smiled, and wore a dusky mark on the side of her thin face. The blind man threw down his white cane, tore the paper bag off his head, and he was handsome with seeing eyes and a dark, romantic scar. The woman who was so fat she could scarcely move laughed and cried; her dress dragged to the ground from her new, thinner shoulders, and even her shoes no longer fit her. She pushed her hair back from the burning mark and wore it proudly. The man with stumps stood on legs again, and yelled aloud like a football player running in the winning touchdown, and leaped about the park with fists in air, shouting. His plain face bore Ahira’s mark.
Priest and pastor and most of their followers turned and left, silent, too horrified to converse, doing their best to censor from their minds what they had seen. Magic, they told themselves, an illusion, like on TV. Had to be. There was nothing like any of this going on elsewhere; the world was circling in its same old rutted round. Therefore what had happened could not have happened, or how could Hoadley go on with its routine, its stagnation, its life? They would not make anything they had seen real by conversing of it.
They left, but Cally Wilmore stayed, keeping to the outskirts of the crowd, picking crumbs and sweet specks of icing from the edge of some huge forbidden ceremonial cake. She saw Ahira touch people who seemed to have nothing wrong with them, putting on them her mark—was it blood, or fire, or wine? In the nightfall streetlamp-and-firefly light Cally could not decide. But she saw the smiles, shouts, sometimes glad tears of those who received the mark, and knew that Ahira had healed something in them.
The green girl (made that way by jaundice plus a prescription drug overdose) came, and her skin returned to the Dresden shepherdess beauty she had been born with, and she wept. Garrett came to Ahira, received the mark and a subtle change in his head, his face, the mind behind the face, and he pulled out of his pockets hundreds of dominoes and tossed them black-flashing into the air, and left them where they landed. Barry Beal came to Ahira with him. But Ahira looked at Barry—watching, Cally could not understand the look. Something of the lover in it, but also something of scorn. Ahira would not touch him.
She told him, “You are mine the way you are. You wear my mark large, and you wore it before any of the others.” Ahira’s voice rang out into the dark and hubbub as she gave the accolade, and Cally saw Barry Beal straighten, his particolored face parted again with his wide smile, quartered, as if he wore a harlequin mask. Tall and cocky he stood, proud to be Ahira’s possession, proud of his birthmarked face for perhaps the first time in his life.
Cally looked at broad-chested Barry Beal, and thought of Eros in the forest and her own sullen Mark home in his house of death, and felt the ever-present ache in her gut grow harder. As if she belonged there she went and took her place in line.
Close to the strange woman Ahira, very close, Cally could see only beauty. But though she could not find a flaw in that poreless glowing veneer of flesh, she knew if for what it was: somehow, a living mask. She knew it because she stood close enough to smell Ahira amid the stale-beer and bird-cage odors of the misfits. And though Ahira did not smell strongly, what odor Cally discerned belonged to Hoadley.
When Ahira’s chamois-soft hand reached toward her, Cally stopped it with a frail, defiant gesture.
“No, thank you,” said Cally. “I just wanted to look at you. I wanted to see what sort of woman would kill an animal and hang it up and set it afire.”
Ahira reacted with a faint smile. “But I did not do that,” she said. “One of you did it.”
Cally felt unease crawl like a mouse through her puny shoulders. The woman was telling the truth; she felt it. “But the rest of it,” she challenged, “Mrs. Zepka and the naked man and the—” At last she knew what to call them. “—the hungerbabies, you did.”
Ahira’s smile quirked a shadow wider in qualified assent. “Hoadley helped me,” she acknowledged. And only after she spoke did Cally feel the profound depth of the understanding between her and this—this unnatural woman, this ungodly beauty, this frightening fetch. Ahira had known of what she spoke. What else did Ahira know about her? What was Ahira? It did not matter. To the marrow of her nearly-fleshless bones Cally knew the most important thing about Ahira.
She whispered, “You mean to end us. End us all.”
Ahira’s smile faded into the tender-eyed frown of concern. “Cally,” she said, though no one had told her Cally’s name, “let me touch you, let me stop your hurting, let me put my mark on you. You are one of my people. You must be, or you would not understand.”
Her exquisite hand lifted again, and Cally watched it for a moment, fascinated, almost assenting, before she stepped back in horror.
“You!” she accused. “You mean to destroy Hoadley.”
Ahira smiled again, the same dusky-soft smile. “I will not need to,” she said. “You will do it.”
Tingling with fear and anger and eerie insight, Cally used her strongest weapon. Ahira was not the only one with unaccountable knowledge and the poetry to couch it in.
“O rose,” Cally breathed, “thou art sick. The invisible worm—”
White fire flared up. Ahira had turned to embodied lighting, and fury spun off her with sirocco force. “Get away from me!” Her voice crackled, a thunderbolt out of the darkness.
Cally departed like a dried leaf blown away before the force of that storm. If she had been in boots—but she was not. She scurried homeward, hating the skirt, the insubstantial shoes that would not let her stride out, strike out. In something other than her Hoadley-approved clothing—the uniform that crippled heart and soul and mind as much as body—on her own terms she could have been a worthy antagonist to Ahira, she felt sure of it.
What had Ahira meant by that last odd pronouncement? “You will do it.” She, Cally, would drive Hoadley down into the pit?
Pit? What pit? And of course Ahira had not meant that. She meant people in general. It was a joke, the sick joke of a starved mind, Cally’s own. Cally’s lips twitched back from those skull protrusions called teeth, and she smiled.
CHAPTER NINE
Tammy had just that warm early summer hit upon an ability to produce a liquid flute-note sound between her lips. The new knack pleased her no end. All day every day she went about her arcane preadolescent business whistling melodiously but randomly, like a yellowthroat warbler, and she softly whistled herself to sleep at night. The fluid, atonal sounds of the child’s rapt self-possession touched off in Cally a rush of yearning affection. Tammy had been her first baby, and Tammy was growing up.… Tammy seemed like the one right thing in her life at the time. Everything else seemed to forebode. And nothing was ever again going to be right with Mark, she felt. Some devil in her would not let it be. She could have swallowed her anger and smiled through her teeth and made up to him with food offerings and conciliatory words and tears, as Hoadley wisdom advised, as Cally’s hungry heart urged her to do, as she had often done before. But some new and obdurate self-will would not let her do it this time. She had stayed home from church on Sunday—because the hard pews hurt her increasingly bony body, but she would not say as much—she had put a face of defiance on the act, and had sat out on the apartment porch reading the newspaper while the churchgoers passed, for no reason except to shock Hoadley and annoy Mark.
Locating Tammy by the constant stream of her whistling, and Owen by the gunfire bursts of the morning cartoons he watched on TV, Cally called both children and got them moving out the apartment door and down the sidewalk toward Ma Wilmore’s house. She was going to leave them there while she went riding. Every day since her most recent quarrel with Mark she had gone riding for hours, dawn, dusk, high noon or after dark in the moonlight, sometimes two or three times a day, and sheerly by constant riding she had reached an accord of sorts with her rebellious black horse, though that was not the reason she went.…
Passing Sojourner Hieronymus’s stark gray house, she greeted the old woman on the porch with no more than a wave of one attenuated hand, flouting the convention that she must stop and talk. She did not care any longer what anyone thought of her. Least of all that stubborn Mark. She would go riding amid the delectable hills, she would enjoy her life, what was left of it, and to hell with him and all of them.
Owen aimed his forefinger at Sojourner and made pistol-shooting noises at her; Cally did not attempt to stop him. Tammy skipped past the gray porch, her soft hair bobbing, and whistled notes as liquid as her gazing eyes.
With percussive force, as if someone had struck a bell of clay, Sojourner’s voice rang out: “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to bad ends!”
Tammy smiled the brave smile of a good, forgiving child, and skipped on, whistling. Cally called ironically, “Right.”
Then, three strides down the pavement, she turned her eyes to her daughter and felt her heart shiver.
The change was so subtle, perhaps only a mother’s glance could have caught it, the scrutiny of a mother as intent and besotted as she. Cally saw. What had a moment before in Tammy’s wide-eyed gaze been that peculiar blend of sweep and focus, of essential wildness and fierce dependence, of fawn and fox cub, that we call innocence—it had all turned to something … other. Tammy whistled and looked back at her mother thoughtfully, like Eve calling up the serpent for his sup of milk.
“No,” Cally whispered.
“No, what?” Tammy wanted to know. Her voice, piping and bratty, sounded much the same as ever.
“Nothing.” Cally hurried both kids to her in-laws’ place and left them there, taking no time to exchange courteous pleasantries with Ma Wilmore. Heading home, she took the back alleyway so that she would not have to deal with Sojourner, and she ran, her riding boots thudding on the asphalt. A bizarre, feverish, unnatural energy filled her, though she had not eaten more than a few mouthfuls of food in days.
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