Oh, Lord! Jeremy thought dejectedly.
"—but when your Momma died she gave you over to my care, and the Lord knows I've cared for you as a father ever since. I will not have you flout my authority at every turn the way you do. I simply will not stand for it!"
"Jesus, Uncle Fred, I only—"
"Do not blaspheme, young man!"
"—went to New York to see Simon's concert with Lucas and Karyn. I mean, good grief! I'm not a ten-year-old, you know!"
Reverend Wilkes glanced momentarily at the other two occupants of the back seat, as Floyd Proctor slowly drove the car back onto the roadway and began the short drive to Bradford. "I have told you time and time again that I do not want you to have anything to do with that blasphemous nonsense! You know full well that if you had told me about this beforehand, I would have forbidden you to go!"
Jeremy grinned sheepishly. "That's why I left you a note, Uncle Fred."
"And don't take that tone of . . ." He stopped and studied Karyn for a moment. "You pregnant, girl?"
She blushed. "Uh, yes. Yes I am, Reverend."
He looked at Lucas. "You going to marry this girl, Lucas?"
Lucas did not reply, choosing instead to stare out the window at the rows of pine trees which were drifting slowly by. Karyn answered hastily, "Oh, maybe we will, maybe we won't. We haven't decided yet. But we'll be together like for good, you know?" She smiled sweetly at the old man.
Wilkes turned to Floyd. "You know 'bout this, Floyd?"
Floyd Proctor nodded his head slowly. "Yup. Didn't say nothin' 'bout it, though. Just another thing for me to be ashamed of." He rolled down the window and spat a wad of tobacco juice. "One damn thing after another. Thank God my Bessie ain't alive to see all of this. My son hoppin' around on a stage like some damned fairy, talkin' all that Devil garbage, my grandson nothin' but a low-life bum, his girlfriend nothin' but a—" He stopped, being from a generation of men who did not disparage women to their faces, regardless of the low esteem in which the woman in question might be held. "Thank God for Rowena, that's all I can say."
"Amen to that," Wilkes nodded.
"She's worth twice of all three of you put together," Floyd said bitterly, his eyes fixed on the road before him and his hands grasping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white against the corroded metal.
"I agree," Jeremy said. "She's a dynamite chick."
Reverend Wilkes shot him an angry glance. "You just remember that she isn't some floozy from New York. You keep your hands off that girl." The implicit contrast between Rowena and Karyn was not lost on the latter, and she flushed slightly.
"Hey, look, I really like Rowena, Uncle Fred, I really do!" Jeremy said earnestly.
"Yes, I know you do, and you just keep your hands to yourself!" He turned to face the front of the car and gazed out the window as fixedly as Floyd. "Generation of vipers," he muttered. "Generation of vipers."
They drove along in silence, the uneasy atmosphere hanging over them like a cloud. Karyn made a few attempts at conversation, but a few desultory grunts were all she could elicit, and she soon ceased her efforts. They all sat in uncomfortable silence as the car chugged slowly into town.
Bradford, New Hampshire, was well on the way to becoming a ghost town. Resting serenely in the river valley which separates New Hampshire from Vermont, thirty miles north of the Dartmouth College town of Hanover, far inland from the coastal city of Portsmouth, removed by distance and mentality from any hint of industry, trade, or tourism, Bradford seemed to lack any economic or demographic raison d'être. It was surrounded by farms—dairy farms, corn farms, truck farms, subsistence farming—worked by simple, rugged people, none of whom had any need of the small town, all of whom were in closer proximity to other towns in other directions. It was the presence of the river which had engendered the construction of a mill on its banks in the 1680s by Thomas Bradford, grandnephew of the great William Bradford who had chronicled the voyage of the Mayflower, and the town had grown around the mill almost coincidentally.
Bradford had become a small, settled community by the early 1700s. Today there were telephone poles, paved streets, a gasoline station, and an occasional television antenna thrust-lug up into the gray October sky, but if one could ignore these modern innovations one could feel very much as if it were still 1700 in Bradford. The town had changed very little in the nearly three hundred years since Elizabeth Proctor, having resolved with typical Yankee stubbornness to put the horrible events in Salem behind her, had remarried and moved here from Massachusetts with her new husband and the two children she had borne her late husband John. The large white house which she and her new husband had built in the hopes of becoming innkeepers was still referred to by the locals as the Old Proctor Place, even though her new married name had been Robbins. She had lived and died in that house, and successive generations of Proctors had followed suit, eking out bare livings as innkeepers, supplementing their incomes as best they could by working the small farm, little more than a large garden really, which stretched out behind the inn away from the town's street. Not the town's main street, but the town's street. It had but one.
And that one Bradford street was a slice of the old colonial world preserved for an age which could neither understand nor appreciate it. If a visitor, more than likely a misdirected motorist, were to turn from the highway and drive into Bradford, the first sight which would greet him would be the grubby old gas station which had been built in, and unrepaired since, the days of the Great Depression. It was the town's sole acknowledgment of the twentieth century, for from that point on the observer would be moving into the colonial past. A few simple white wooden homes lined the street, and the large grange hall, painted red as a barn, rose up in their midst.
Beyond that were a few more houses and then a fork in the road. The left hand of the fork, which sloped suddenly downward, would carry the visitor to the old wooden bridge beside the ruins of the old mill and thence across the river toward Piermont, Vermont. The right hand of the fork moved rapidly into the center of Bradford, and just as rapidly out of town completely.
Just beyond the point of the fork on the right-hand side of the street stood the old Proctor home, a large but still uncomplicated building of red brick and whitewashed pine, two stories high and girdled by an ample lawn. In the midst of the lawn stood a gnarled old oak tree, its twisted branches and sloping trunk seeming to bend under the weight of the centuries. Directly across the street was a smaller building, the downstairs of which had been a combination of post office, general store, and barber shop back in the days when there were still enough people living in Bradford to warrant such things, the upstairs of which served as the parsonage for the church.
The church itself, entitled simply the Bradford Congregationalist Church, stood removed from the parsonage by a broad, tree-enclustered field, with a similar expanse of land on its far side which separated it from the few remaining houses on the outskirts of town. The church was indistinguishable from a thousand other such buildings in New England, with its single spire reaching high into the sky, resolving itself into a weather vane in deference to the Puritan abhorrence of symbols, with its line of high, square-bottomed, round-topped windows flanking each side, with its sturdy, broad oak doors contrasting starkly with the gleaming white wood of the rest of the building.
The old cemetery faced the old church from across the street, and the weather-beaten stones of granite and marble and rotted limestone and decaying wood testified to the continuance of families, for the names Bradford and Proctor and Sloan and Robbins and Wilkes abounded. Beyond the church and the cemetery stood a few more houses, and then there was nothing but a narrow road stretching of into the dense New Hampshire forest.
It was an old town, a dying town. Reverend Wilkes still held his Sunday service for the half dozen old folks who attended, and Jeremy still kept the church clean and cared for at his uncle's command; the Proctors still lived in the old inn; and a few of the old houses w
ere still inhabited; but people had been moving away from Bradford for a generation. There was little there to hold them.
Floyd Proctor pulled into the dirt driveway beside the old inn which had been his family's homestead for the past three centuries. He switched off the ignition and said sarcastically to Lucas, "It's pert' near four o'clock. Your father should be awake by now." To Wilkes he said, "Been asleep all day. It's tirin' bein' a fool."
As they all climbed out of the automobile, Wilkes began to walk across the street toward the parsonage, saying to Jeremy, "You come home right now, boy. I got a few things I'd like to say to you in private."
Spare me, Jeremy thought, but he said, "I'll be home soon, Uncle Fred. I want to see Rowena first."
His uncle glowered at him. "You remember what I said to you, boy!"
"Yes, Uncle Fred." God, what a pain in the ass! Jeremy walked around the corner of the house and, as he had hoped, found Rowena Proctor sitting on the old wooden bench beneath the gnarled old tree on the side lawn. He smiled as he approached her, astounded as always at her loveliness, aware as always of the quickening of his heartbeat in her presence.
Rowena did not see him at first. She was sitting with a book in her lap, absentmindedly stroking her calico cat, Pistopheles. She had named the cat Pistopheles as a way of expressing her dislike of her father's Satanism act, but the pun on the name Mephistopheles was lost on everyone. Rowena was the only member of her family who had ever paid any attention in school, and was thus the only one who had ever read Faust.
She had become a good student almost by default. The reputations of her father and brother had preceded her, and from the time of her childhood onward she had found herself largely friendless, as the parents in the other towns which supported the county schools forbade their children to associate with her. Her brother had been expelled from high school for selling drugs, and was generally known to have gotten at least two girls pregnant. Neither charge had been proven, of course, and the police and courts were never involved; but schools need less proof as a prelude to action than do the civil authorities, and Lucas was promptly expelled. It did not bother him in the least.
And her father's exploits were of course known to all. Rock stars were all junkies, everyone knew that and Simon was a devil-worshiper to boot. Rowena came from bad stock, bad seed, the locals assumed, and she was ostracized. She had gone out on dates, of course. Her long, white blond hair, crystal blue eyes, flawless skin, and fetching figure had turned more than one head in high school; but she had been asked out only by boys who had assumed that, as Simon Proctor's daughter, she would be easy, which she was not. Only Jeremy had treated her with respect and genuine affection, and for this reason more than any other, she had fallen in love with him with that passion which only uncritical and unreasoning adolescence can experience. Their love was pure, joyful, unsullied. It made Lucas and Karyn sick.
Rowena looked up from her book and saw Jeremy approach. She flushed with happiness and rose to meet him. "Hi," she said. "I'm glad you're back." Pistopheles regarded them both indifferently.
"Yeah, me too," he said, grinning. "I missed you. Wish you'da come with me." He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the lips. She returned his kiss. It was a nervous, uneasy, unfamiliar gesture for them both. His appearance was one of worldliness and a jaded hedonism, but it was a facade, and Rowena knew it. He was as shy and inexperienced as she in affairs of the heart, and his attempts to give an impression to the contrary deceived no one who knew him. It had taken him over a year to work up the courage to kiss her in the first place, and he still felt that she was letting him get away with something.
"I wish you had stayed here with me," she replied. "I can't stand my dad's concerts. It would have been nice if you could just have stayed here, without Lukie or Karyn." She eyed the brown package he was holding. "What's that?" Is it for me? she thought hopefully.
"Oh, I bought this in Manhattan for your father."
"For Daddy? That's nice." She was disappointed.
Jeremy reached into his pocket. "And I bought this for you, Row." He handed her a small square box, feeling delight as her eyes went wide and her smile broadened.
Rowena tore open the wrapping paper and flipped up the hinged top of the box. It contained crescent moon earrings, golden with two ruby inlays on each. It was not really gold, and the rubies were glass, but that was of no consequence. "Oh, Jeremy, they're lovely!" she gushed. She rose up on tiptoe and kissed him again on the lips, thrilled by her own audacity
"Oh, shit, ain't that just so fuckin' sweet?"
She blushed at the sound of her brother's voice and nervously distanced herself slightly from Jeremy. "Lucas." She nodded, an acknowledgment of his presence more than a greeting. "Hi, Karyn."
"Hiya, kid," Karyn replied pleasantly. She had nothing against Rowena, though she found her virginal propriety a bit irritating.
"Hey, where's the old man?" Lucas asked.
"Daddy or Gramps?"
"Dad," he replied. "I just got a lift from Gramps. It was lots of fun, let me tell you!"
"Daddy's still asleep," Rowena said, picking her schoolbooks up from the bench. "He got in real late last night, and he's still resting up." Her movement startled the cat, who jumped to the ground.
"Aw, poor guy!" Lucas dripped. "Son of a bitch didn't even wait around long enough for us to find him and we had to hitch all the way back up here." Pistopheles began to rub her neck against his leg.
"Did he know you were there?" she asked.
"No, we were gonna surprise him." He pushed the cat roughly away.
Rowena sniffed impatiently. "Well, what did you expect, Lucas? If Daddy'd known you were in New York, he would have waited for you. I mean, good grief! He's not a mind reader!"
"Maybe he is," Lucas grinned maliciously. "Warlocks have lots of powers."
This irritated Rowena, which is of course why he said it. "Stop it, Lucas! I mean it!" she added over his snickering. "Daddy's just an entertainer, and you know it!"
Lucas turned to the house and cupped his hands around his mouth. "HEY, DAD!" he shouted. "WAKE UP! JEREMY'S GOT A PRESENT FOR YOU!"
"Lucas, cut it out!" Rowena commanded. "If he's still sleeping, leave him alone."
Simon Proctor, bleary-eyed and disheveled, opened his bedroom window and looked down at the three young people. "Good morning," he said, feigning cheer.
"It's late afternoon, Daddy," Rowena called up to him. "I'm sorry we woke you up."
"Come on down, Dad," Lucas said. "Jeremy's got something for you, and I'm tired of wonderin' what it is."
"Yeah, yeah, okay," Simon mumbled. "Hold on. I'll be down in a minute." He disappeared back into his bedroom, shutting the window behind him.
Karyn walked over to the bench and sat down, yawning. "Jesus, what a day!"
Rowena sat down beside her. "How are you feeling?"
"Oh. I'm okay." She grinned, patting her belly. "Little bastard's gettin' bigger."
Lucas took out a cigarette and lighted it. "I still don't know why you don't get an abortion. I mean, shit, neither of us wanted this to happen."
"I don't want another abortion," she countered. "This time I want the kid."
He shrugged. "Up to you. Just don't start thinkin' about you and me startin' to play Ma and Pa on the farm or nothin'."
Karyn glanced at Rowena and grinned as if to say "We shall see." Rowena returned her smile. I have to get along with this bimbo, she thought. She's probably going to be my sister-in-law.
Simon Proctor opened the side door of the old inn and walked briskly over to them. He held open his arms and Rowena rushed into them. He hugged her to him tightly, lifting her from the ground and swinging her back and forth a few times. "Hello, baby. I'm sorry I wasn't up to take you to school this morning."
"That's okay, Daddy," Rowena said, hugging him back. "I knew you needed sleep, so I didn't want to wake you up."
He released her and extended his hand to his son. "Lucas. Where were you last n
ight? I got in about four in the morning and you weren't home."
"No, Dad, I was in Manhattan. We went to your concert last night."
"You're kidding! Why didn't you—" Then he realized that he had fled from the concert as if from a plague. "Oh, shit! How did you get back?"
"We hitched."
"Oh, shit!" he repeated. "I'm sorry, kids. You should have let me know you were there. I would have waited for you."
"Hey, no problem," Lucas said casually. "We got here okay. No big deal." He looked over at Jeremy. "Well?"
Jeremy Sloan walked forward. "Hiya, Simon," he said, grinning and extending his hand. "I got a present for you."
"Well, isn't that nice!" Simon Proctor said, shaking the proffered hand. "You shouldn't have done this, Jeremy. You can't afford it." He took the rectangular object which Jeremy held out to him, and as he began to unwrap it he said, "Hello, Karyn. How are you doing?"
"Just fine, Mr. Proctor, just fine," she replied. She and Lucas had been with each other for nearly two years, but Simon Proctor still made her a bit uneasy. The fact that he was a famous rock singer had impressed her from the start, and she was still uncertain how much of his Satanism image was a show and how much was rooted in reality. Lucas, Jeremy, and Rowena had all told her that the whole thing was an act, but she had her doubts. He was just so convincing when she saw him on stage, as she had frequently over the past two years.
Simon finished unwrapping the package and stood silently for a moment, examining its contents. In his hands he held a very old book, bound with soft leather. He opened it gently, fearing that its age might cause him to damage it. He gazed at the cover page and his eyes widened. "Jeremy, where did you get this?"
"A book store in Greenwich Village," he said proudly. "The guy there didn't even know what it was, so he didn't charge me a whole lot for it. I figured you'd like to have it. Maybe you can use it in your show or something."
"What is it, Dad?" Lucas asked, looking over his father's shoulder at the book.
"It's an old copy of the Caerimoniae Stupri Mortisque," Simon replied. "The old book of witchcraft that I've used for some of my bits. Used it for the film, also." And had it ridiculed by that son of a bitch professor on television too, he thought glumly. What had he called it? A collection of foolishness concocted by an early nineteenth-century, self-proclaimed druid in Wales, wasn't it? The words, indeed the entire talk show, seemed burned upon Simon's memory. But what he said to Jeremy was, "Well, thanks an awful lot. This is a beautiful gift."
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