by John Updike
The little throng sent up a wail Esau could not tell was terror or jubilation. The fire had gotten louder on the other side of the white kitchen door which led through a food storeroom into the crooked patchy corridor Hannah had led him down his first night here. There was heat under their feet, where the generator was, with all its stockpiled diesel fuel. Smoke was leaking up through the cracks. Jael had had a small daughter with Jesse’s fine reddish hair and wide brow and now that little girl stepped or was nudged forward away from the others and a rifle loudly, flatly spit and Jim lowered its muzzle with that bunched-up expression on his mouth people use when they make a small mistake or eat something distasteful. “She’s among the saints!” Jesse yelled. “She’s a dove on the mountains!”
The boys among the children had got the picture and were fighting their mothers, scratching and screaming; but the women, grimacing with eyes closed to avoid injury, were embracing these frenzied children with the fury of those who know what is best, who know the way to be saved eternally. The heat on the other side of the door was breathing, roaring, a beast chewing wood. The plaster overhead was dribbling sheets of dust and crumbs; the air was becoming dizzyingly strange, its oxygen going. One of the women still standing, scrawny long-nosed Mehetabel, who was another of the newcomers, insufficiently seasoned in faith, fainted on the floor.
A flock of sparkling dark immaterial bubbles descended into Esau, and he knew what to do. He felt his physical body existing within that electric hyperclarity that for years had come and gone in his head. “Zeb, give me that a second,” he said, holding out his hand, knowing that the other man in his rich-kid childishness would oblige.
Jesse saw the revolver in Esau’s hand now and jubilantly cried, “Take ’em to Heaven, Slick! Big Daddy needs his girls!” The woman foremost in the pack was Hannah. She held her infant in one arm and rested the other hand on the head of her toddler, to steady him. This two-year-old boy looked up at Clark with a thin-lipped wised-up smile that seemed familiar. Hannah waited to be killed, struggling not to cough in the thickening smoke. Her eyes were shut. Her freckles were like pinpricks of dried blood and her nostril-holes were taut.
Clark had always had a non-coöperative streak. “Slick,” he said to Jesse, “you fucker, I’ll give you Slick,” and shot the false prophet twice, once in the chest and the second time in the top of the head, where it was all bald, as the man doubled over. He had never liked looking at the supposed holy man’s bald pate, the way the shiny skin clung to the fitted plates of bone underneath like a turtle’s shell. He hadn’t liked his gold tooth either. Clark had time to wheel and plug Zebulun in his fat butterball gut and might have taken out Jim with the next shot but a surge of smoke got in the way. His blinded eyes burned; in all the rushing and screaming he seemed to hear Jim snicker apologetically. The rifle bullet struck him in the left shoulder, knocking him backward like an uncalled-for fist. The sensation was broader than he would have expected, and painless, in the first seconds, before it began to burn, all the way through the roots of all the nerves gathered with veins and gristle there, where arm intricately meets shoulder. He still had his gun arm and lifted it to get a bead on Jim with the Colt but the target ducked behind the other heads and melted backward in the intensifying smoke. The stunned women and children stared stupidly. Mehetabel was rousing. Jesse’s body had flung an arm around Clark’s feet so he had to kick it away. His pain was growing every second, taking over his body—his neck, his side—like a burning heart, and with it grew his towering anger; he had become a vessel of wrath. He yelled at the women, “For God’s sake, you idiotic bitches, get out! It’s over! Git! Git!” He cried with his inspired certainty, “Can’t you see, there’s nothing here any more! Those people outside are your friends!” He waved his gun in their faces and they scrambled toward the door, the children leading the mothers.
He stepped over Jesse’s arm in its red flannel sleeve and then across the fallen little girl with the back of her beribboned head blown off, the long stain flowing out of her flaxen hair surprisingly brilliant, like DayGlo paint. The nailheads in the floor glinted, hot to the eyes. He kneeled on one knee, tucked his pistol under the armpit of the ruined arm, and with the other fit the gas mask to his face. It stank of rubber and the camphorish chemical filter, and had a greenhouse quiet inside, with murky plastic lenses for the eyes. It reminded him of a virtual-reality helmet, with reality’s imperfections computer-corrected. The brief torment, and then green cool Paradise, did Jim really believe that? A level head, a high-school teacher, he should know. Back beyond where Jim had disappeared in the smoke, the panelled white door into the storeroom was surrounded by a scarlet line of fire, neat as a mechanical drawing, and at each step Clark took toward it the heat on his face went up a notch. But it was the way he had to move, deeper. There was nothing for him on the outside now, just hassle, and embarrassment for Mother. Whoremongers, sorcerers, the whole pack of supercilious shits. He wasn’t worried; the living God had laid hold of him, the present-tense God beyond betting on. His shoulder was screaming, outraged and paralyzed. Esau’s beard, below the mask, was burning, each exposed hair curling up with a tiny crisping sensation. His breath was coming back to him suffocatingly. Even through the chemical filter, the smoke was palpable, like a fine rich coke being stuffed very fast up his nostrils, down his throat, into his eyes. His head was losing its ability to make pictures. The second death, when had the first been? The Lamb shall overcome, how could a Lamb overcome, by letting Its throat be slit? That vast indignant beast with seven heads was whuffing and beating on the panelled white door as if entitled to admission. Esau was a cunning hunter. He had a twin, somewhere in the smoke. He heard a noise, soft but pointed, over where the cups and plates used to be: a cup settling on a saucer or a twig snapping in the fire or the bolt of a rifle being stealthily slipped back. Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.
Then there was no more pain, but for the briefest burning edge, like the crinkly orange margin that consumes the paper of a cigarette in advance of the growing tobacco ash.
Lower Branch was the lead story that night on all three networks and on Fox and CNN. Alma heard about it on her Jaguar radio as she was driving from her English-accent lesson over on Fountain Avenue near Flores to her facial on Hollywood Boulevard beyond Cahuenga. She believed in facials as the way to keep natural flexibility after several lifts. She was very anxious after The Sharpened Knife not to be typecast as a crone but to be eligible for senior romantic roles, of which there were going to be more and more: look at Cocoon and On Golden Pond. Her heart came into her throat as she heard this bleat of news but she wondered if her reaction was sincere; she checked her face in the rear-view mirror to see how actressy she looked. No, her sudden shocked haggard look was genuine. The color had bleached out of her face, an effect you could never fake. She turned right on La Brea and sped home on Santa Monica Boulevard; she brushed past Conchita, who was flirting with one of the wetback lawn men in the front yard. “Call Annette and cancel my facial,” she told her in passing. She turned on CNN, where the news was continuous. When she had watched enough to know how real her problems were she closed her eyes and tried to sort them out.
There was no way to avoid going, when she had just been there. There would be charred bones or teeth to identify, legal forms to sign, reporters to fend off but not offend. Caleb must come and meet her in Colorado; she just couldn’t face Patrick again, he had become an oppressive bore, laying claim to her the way no actual lover would, somehow making her whole life feel seedy and shameful. Caleb would be staunch and understated and wonderfully Bostonian with rude intrusive types. But she hadn’t been enjoying their conversations lately; there was always his reproach, stated or implied, that she wasn’t living with him there in Brookline, in that stifling big house, among those stuffy people. It would mean giving up, ceasing to act, when she knew she still had a career here—oh, not like it was in the old days, those days of the studios just pouring them out will never come b
ack, but films are being made, these video stores have created a whole new market, and the overseas audiences love to see the American old-timers, there is an imperial nostalgia at work. Not that she was an old old-timer, having just turned sixty last Valentine’s Day. Yes, she must call him, she needed him now, and she could count on the gravity of it all to keep him from being too reproachful and clingy. Poor little Clark. He tried so hard as a baby to be good, working on how to nurse, to crawl, to walk, to talk, to be a person. Perhaps she had been just too much mother for him. She saw his solemn square infant face peering up at her out of the crib, freshly awakened and trying to focus away from his dream; how puzzling dreams must be to their little brains, trying to grasp the real world. Tears achingly welled from beneath her closed lids. While her eyelids were still shut she prayed in the blood-tinged darkness they made, Thank you, Lord, for letting my son become a hero at the end.
In Bethesda, Maryland, Daniel Wilmot had tuned in the news to go with a bourbon before dinner. He and Bophana and their four children—Sotra John, Emily Bopha, Esther Sisopha, and Norodom Clarence—had been called back to Washington, now that the Cold War was won, and he was given a desk job in the Middle Eastern section, trying to figure out how to keep Saddam Hussein as a burr under Iran’s saddle. Bophana had caught the same news on the television set in the kitchen and came into the study and touched Danny on the shoulder, and then on the little scar on his forehead, a trace of the childhood forever out of her reach. He rubbed his cheek against the back of her thin golden-brown hand, without taking his eyes off the images of leaping flames, of maneuvering M60A1s, of FBI spokesmen grimly explaining that their plan had been sound and their intentions the best. “This boy the same you said was loser?” Bophana asked in her lovely chiming English, so much gentler than her guttural, voluble Khmer.
The commercial came on, and Danny straightened his head and stretched his long legs and took another sip of his bourbon. “Well, I’ve been wondering lately if losing and winning are as different as we like to think. I liked Clark, the little I saw of him, passing through L.A. in the Seventies. He liked me, was the funny thing. Not everybody does. He struck me as a needy little guy, not quite knowing what was up. I told him what I thought was up, but I guess he needed more. That sounds pompous—of course he needed more. There’s never an end to needing. We beat the Communist pricks and now the world is full of other pricks.” He lit a Merit.
“Shall I feed kids while you call sister?”
“I guess I should call her, you’re right. But no rush, let’s all eat together. If I know Essie, she’ll make a big production of it.”
Teddy hadn’t heard his daughter sob that way since the time she messed up the Miss Delaware Peach contest, and maybe before one of her divorces, the first or the second. Em and Mother had been alive then and they had handled it. He hoped this time he said the right things—he didn’t always know what was going to hop out of his mouth these days. People he’d known all his life, and face to face with them downtown he can’t think of their names to save him, just sees in his mind what their front porches looked like, and their old-style wooden storm doors, and their cocoa or stippled-rubber welcome mats. It shook him up, too, a Wilmot shot to death and charred to cinders out in some Godforsaken nowhere out west. They could save some transportation and bury him next to Jared and that brother of Em’s nobody ever heard from once he took off. Or maybe the Siffords had and never told. They were a strange pair, those two, acting like they had something to hide whether they did or not. How they ever came up with that angel he married Teddy could never figure out. Families are mysterious things.
He usually got enough national news on the six o’clock out of Wilmington on Channel Twelve; what they don’t tell you wasn’t generally worth knowing. How grieved Dad used to be by the paper, all the terrible items in it, and the world then wasn’t anything like as bad as it is now. People still held themselves to standards. All the men, even factory hands, wore bowlers or, in summers, straw hats. Even here in Basingstoke, you could walk every street in town and never come to a locked door—just toss the magazines and parcel post inside, though it was against strict regulations. In a place small enough so the people have to meet each other face to face you don’t need all the regulations. Simple human decency and self-respect should do it. That’s pretty much gone now, with the world so full of handy excuses. Kill a man one day and plead insanity the next.
But tonight on account of Clark—poor boy, he used to come down on the bus from St. Andrew’s starved for a little home cooking and plain talk, he never tired of hearing about his mother as a girl—Teddy turned on the six-thirty national news as well, on Channel Three, the NBC affiliate good old KYW, that he had been listening to on radio since those old crystal sets with the headphones. Seth Addison had had one. Of the three network anchors Teddy preferred Brokaw; he was the youngest, and though he swallowed a lot of his words he seemed to suffer with the news most sincerely, and there seemed to be fewer commercials about denture fixatives and hemorrhoid medicine and these feminine-incontinence pads, as though anybody who took an interest in the world’s news had to be on their last legs, not able to keep their own juices in.
Farrah sat down with him, though he told her she could do up the dishes and run home. Farrah was Loretta Whaley’s granddaughter, from the older of her two firstborn boys, born close enough to be twins; those Whaleys and Bachellers make quick generations. The boy married one of the Ingraham girls. Farrah was thirteen, old enough to come cook an old man’s supper, everybody agreed, most of them just popped into a microwave anyway, now that her mother was taking night classes in computer science.
They sat down together, Teddy in the blue easy chair he had just about worn the color out of in the seat and the arms, and little Farrah with her tidy Whaley mouth and apricot Bacheller hair in the velvet wing chair with the curved legs and matching velvet stool Em used to rest her poor leg on. Some nights he gets to watching the comedies, one after another; they run together as he bobs in and out of sleep, and it’s as if Em is sitting right there, if he doesn’t make a mistake and turn his head and look.
Many of the clips had been shown on the local news, so it was like watching a movie twice, a silent movie even, because Farrah had tuned it to suit herself and he was hard enough of hearing to miss a lot of the commentary. There were the military vehicles, the same green as in Vietnam and before that. Photos of this Smith madman as a round-faced young farmer boy and then talking and waving his arms in some interview they flattered his craziness with. He looked a little like Harlan Dearholt that used to be big in Dad’s parish—favored the same kind of little eyeglasses. Quick still photos of Clark and Essie from ten, twenty years ago, posing as mother and son out there in Hollywood, and then some group photos of the other poor deluded souls. Pictures of the old farmhouse with its wings, and then pictures of it burning like a stack of kindling soaked in gasoline; it made your stomach hurt to think of people in there. A commercial about a cruise ship that looks like a New Year’s Eve party, with this big-mouthed woman singing how you should see her now. Then Brokaw earnestly mumbling and close-ups of the skinny guilty-looking man who was shot trying to get out but would live, and then one of the women, with a freckled face, describing the shooting that had taken place inside and how Clark had done it to save them all. Then a concluding zoom of the four or so women with smoky faces coming out of this storm hutch like they’re scared they’re going to be shot, then stepping into the open, squinting, blinking as if just waking up, carrying or holding on to the hands of their children, too many to count. The children.
Afterword
For invaluable help with the particulars of this novel, I thank Herb Yellin, Emily and Gregory Harvey, Carole Sherr, Elaine Burnett, Theodore Vrettos, Stephanie Egnotovich and Davis Perkins of the Westminster John Knox Press, Clifford S. Wunderlich of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Yvonne Lavelle and Paula E. Rabkin of the United States Postal Service, Jeffrey W. Gmys and Kwaku Amoabeng of th
e Paterson Free Library, Dennis Santillo, Norma Harrison, Robert Atwan, Steve Golin, Rodney Dennis, Ray and Joyce Smith, Peter and David and Cindy Gordon, Ray Maguire, Hugo Weisgall, Arthur Griffin, Donald Burt, Frederic R. Bernhard, Cyril Wismar, Barbara Platt-Hendrin, Mary Yuhasz, Paul L. Singer, Diana Waggoner, Kathy Zuckerman, William Koshland, Judith Jones, and the ever-obliging staff of the Beverly, Massachusetts, Public Library.
The following books were especially useful: The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913, by Steve Golin; Delaware: A Bicentennial History, by Carol E. Hofecker; Greenhouse Gardener’s Companion, by Shane Smith; Cinema: The First Hundred Years, by David Shipman; The Story of Cinema, by David Shipman; A Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson; The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz; One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, by Jeanine Basinger; American Cinema: Hollywood at Sunset, by Charles Higham; The Hollywood Story, by Roy Pickard; The Columbia Story, by Clive Hirschhorn; A Million and One Nights, by Terry Ramsaye; Grace, by Robert Lacey; Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, by Fred Lawrence Guiles; Doris Day: Her Own Story, with A. E. Hotchner; King Cohn, by Bob Thomas; Acting in the Cinema, by James Naremore; Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet; Mad Man in Waco, by Brad Bailey and Bob Darden; Inside the Cult, by Marc Breault and Martin King; Religious Cults in America, edited by Robert Emmet Long; Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis.