Origin of the Brunists

1

While the mine disaster reduced itself to numbers, repercussions, and causes, Eleanor Norton turned all her time — for school was closed of course — to a review of messages received in Carlyle and West Condon, reasoning that it was the Carlyle crisis that had driven them here, so a relevancy might well be expected. On the first page of each of her logbooks were the words, which she took from the apocryphal book of Baruch: “Walk in the presence of the light of this book, that you may be illuminated.” On a first reading, she found only familiar admonitions to live a deeper life and lessons in the cosmological verities …

A flower plucked, a fish’s leap: the distant star is tortured!

… preceded in Carlyle by simple warnings of imminent danger. But by Saturday she had read them all six times, and had begun to discover, beneath the placid surface, an emergent design of revelation. There was, for example, that peculiar reference of a year ago December to

… the one who is to come.

At the time, already harassed, she had supposed it to be merely another in the succession of warnings in Carlyle, for the “one” was to bring her suffering and injustice, and Domiron had urged her not to fear him. But now she remembered that she had received similar cautions three or four times in the past — she searched them out, astonished to discover the almost identical wording. Had she misread them all along?

Do not despair if One should come. Faith and truth have fled away, to be replaced by evil and violence and the lust for illusory things of the body. Oh men of the earth! only a cleansing can preserve you! Wash the earth from your hands and feet, and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!

Did this confirm her theory that the earth had formerly enjoyed a higher aspect of intensity? Was a cleansing to occur? And she, was she to be the agent? And then there was that exceedingly strange message, only a month old, that told her to

… look to the east! look to the west! the feet tug downward, but the spirit soars!

The east: the source of light, of course. The west … West Condon? And the tugging downward, was that the miners? These messages troubled her, yet consoled her as well; nevertheless, it was altogether clear that more remained to be revealed.

On Saturday night, learning that there was no longer any hope left for the men still in the mine and that the toll was fixed at ninety-eight, she opened her mind to the Teacher and received the following message:

As the body suffers, so is the mind cleansed. The seven starred image of life’s oscillation from abysses to cusps shadows forth in morning’s east, but a firmness is forthcoming. Is nine a number? Is eight a number? Lead men to numberlessness! In the earth a harsh tremor, above … an infinite repose. Avoid the illusory, the present accident of conjoined particles, and seek wisdom with love! For a time is to come, and the soul will swim in the vast and empty sea of enlightenment! Does the body tremble? Chastise it, mind, with mocking laughter! Domiron bids you!

She was disturbed to discover that this new message was largely composed of parts of old ones, but the new ordering of these parts not only provided her startling insights into the events of the moment, but also revealed to her how blind and complacent she had become. It was there all the time, and she had not seen it — had virtually refused to see it! And it was she who had accused Domiron of betrayal! And now other wonders came to mind: the frequent minor accidents she had suffered recently around the house, the disappearance of objects, the unseasonal autumn blizzards and the strange damp January, not to mention the increasing turbulence of the messages, the ruptured syntax and enigmatic juxtapositions, all a kind of static, as it were, electromagnetic countersignals from malfeasant forces. Customarily, Domiron instructed her through her right hand, though occasionally through her left, and, in certain urgent situations, directly through her voice.

By my light, thou shalt flee the darkness!

he had cried in her throat more than once.

She had attempted, over the years, to assist Wylie in attaining a communication with the higher forces in the universe, but, though he honestly tried, he had almost no success. Domiron explained privately to her that

… if even the faithful are few, how rare then the master!

and that passive natures, themselves noble and receptive, if not supremely spiritual,

may find subtler paths to wisdom.

In any event, it was common knowledge who Womwom (Domiron’s name for Wylie’s soul at the seventh aspect) once was — when the time was ripe, he would play his significant role.

Have faith! All that is, I am, I am all that never was. All that shall be, I have been.

Sunday, the eleventh, a thick fog pressed at her morning windows. Fog pleased her usually, misted the hard forms that so often deluded and misled her, provided fleeting images of the essential emptiness, but today it betokened her own uncertainties, her difficulties in finding the true way. It curled and wisped through the black branches of their tall elms, like her thoughts floating elusively through the stretched fingers of her mind. Now an object took shape, became an inference, a cipher for action, but then it faded behind the fog’s nervous curtain.

She sought a clarification to last night’s message, but none came. She considered it. Last night she had understood it, but now she wondered if it were really anything more than the customary exhortation to maintain spiritual discipline. She understood, of course, the next ascendant sign — now befogged! — but what of the forthcoming firmness? For herself alone or for others? Lead men, the message said. Was she to lead them to the “firmness” in the time that “is to come”? Or is the firmness merely the vernal closing of the cycle? Doesn’t the message in fact dismiss the mine disaster as irrelevant? The “harsh tremor” in the earth does not disturb the “infinite repose” above, in the higher aspects. And “the time to come” is nothing more than the soul’s return to its source, is it not? Was Domiron trying to tell her that her own death was near? But then why would he ask her to “lead men”? Or might it have to do somehow with the “One” to come? And why should he draw especial attention to the sun’s sign? A signal to free herself from the merely phenomenological, or was there a more destructive intent, a parabolic reference to former devastations upon the earth? And there were the numbers to be considered, the number of miners who perished, of course, ninety-eight, but if thought of in a series, nine and then eight, then the next number would be seven … but what of that? For it is to “numberlessness” he asked her to lead men.

She inspected the whole band and all channels, but neither radio nor television provided her clues, although the radio repeated frequently the toll of ninety-eight miners missing or dead. She copied down what names they gave, but they proved meaningless to her. Now, if something of cosmic significance were to happen, how would it be signaled? Isn’t a fire deep in the earth as telling as a prodigy in the sky? Perhaps, but there were few precedents. Of course, there was the evidence of lithomancy, and even the scales of fish had prophesied. Nevertheless, the message seemed to discount a cosmic event:

… an infinite repose.

Outside, the fog lifted, but the day remained overcast. Lunch came and went, but she had little appetite. Wylie napped after, then went for an afternoon walk — she had been greatly blessed: she knew she could never have survived the humiliations and suffering of the last fifteen years without Wylie’s belief in her. She read once more the past two years of communications, and struggled with the enigma of these present words. Impulsively, she counted them … ninety-eight! She started, counted again. Her heart raced. No doubt about it!

Lead men to numberlessness!

Of course! Domiron was trying to tell her to lead men away from … from a head-count of mortalities to his message! to the limitless and ununumbered truth of his word! “Does it matter these have died?” he was in effect asking. “Bring all to wisdom!” She nearly leapt for excitement! And it was in this state that she found herself when Wylie came back from his walk with a copy of the special edition of the West Condon Chronicle, announcing in headlines the miraculous rescue of Giovanni Bruno. “Wylie!” she cried. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it before you came back! Domiron told me!”

“What! You mean about the rescue?”

“Yes! It was all there! I wanted to shout it out, but I was alone!”

“But how—?”

“It started with the numbers. Nine and eight in a series. Next comes seven, and it—”

“Seven?”

“Yes, and it is seven that leads to numberlessness and to the One!” She was so excited she hardly knew what she was saying. Everything fit at last! It was happening! She even felt certain she had begun thinking about Bruno before Wylie came in.

“That’s funny,” said Wylie, as though disquieted.

“Yes, don’t you—”

“Eleanor,” he said softly, “there were other men trapped in a room with Bruno, but they died.” He paused, but his gentle blue gaze, aglitter with a kind of awe, was on her unwavering.

She lowered herself slowly to sit on the sofa. “How many?” she asked in fear.

“There were six others,” he said. “With Bruno, they made seven.” They said nothing more for a long time. There was much to consider.

A fine snow, more like frost, flecked the land overnight, and Monday dawned bright and cold. Eleanor dressed in warm wool and, after poached egg on toast, slipped on her winter coat and galoshes, fur cap, gloves and scarf and walked out to the mine, she had decided upon it last night, walked out, as it were, to the point of origin.

The town, as she passed through it, or at least this northwest segment of it, seemed strangely unaffected by the disaster that had rocked its very underpinnings and widowed so many of its houses. If anything, there was a fresh renewal, a mocking sense of gladness, brick and painted homes adazzle under the harsh blue sky, toys and bikes in a gay scatter, naked elms casting long graceful shadows on the gilt pavement.

But what was an exhilarating crispness in town became a bitter cold at its edge. Wind smarted her eyes, tears converting the blue radiance into a blurred and angry glare. She pinched the scarf up tight against her throat, but the cold blew through it. The mine road was rutted and her booted feet made poor progress on it. After about ten minutes, she stopped, looked back at the town behind her. She had barely begun. It would take her at least an hour, She faltered. What was the point of it, anyway? But something vital in her, something more than mere will, some deep-celled quality forged in some other life’s trial, pivoted her once more and thrust her forward down the old road to Deepwater No. 9.

The road, like the barren yellow-stalked fields, was of a brownish clay the color of bruised fruit. Short bushes grew wildly along the ditches to either side of her, and occasional tree sprouts stuck up like stripped switches, but desolation and death was mostly what she saw through her tears. Much of the time, she walked with eyes closed, her face a numb mask, the air gathering in icy pockets within her lungs. Her legs grew very weary, then indifferent, then seemed even to strengthen, discovering a needled warmth in motion. She walked head down, staring at her feet, counting the steps. She began to see the burdened feet of humanity, treading through their endless centuries of despair. Each gray-booted foot appeared before her like a birth, and died just as quickly as the other materialized to replace it, a ceaseless recurrence, and yet each step was different, unique, fell on different soil, angled away from hazards, delayed a moment longer or perished in a quickened stumble, and always, cushioned by soft earth or tormented by frozen corrugations, there was pain and, in spite of the progress … a loss. The voice beside her took her wholly by surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

“Can we give you a lift? It’s a cold morning.” Inside the old car there were two men, both in miners’ clothes. They looked to be Italians, the driver a large dark man, bold-jawed and perhaps intemperate, the other slender with a generous hooked nose and crinkly smile.

“No, no, thank you,” she stammered. “I … I’m just out for the walk.” How foolish that sounded! Timidly, she smiled.

“Are you sure?” asked the driver. He had a large voice, resonant and willful, but friendly. “It’s a pretty rough hike.”

“How much farther is it?”

“About ten, fifteen minutes more. You can see the small rise up there ahead, that hill. The offices and portal are just to the left.”

She could see nothing, but she nodded. “I’ll walk,” she said. “But thank you very much.”

They shrugged and left her. She watched the car lurch and rattle away from her, then turned her eyes once more to her feet. She had been close to something and had lost it, but still she could hold before her that which she had had and investigate it with her mind. The unthought thought that the men in the car had blocked was this: Though each step, each appearance and disappearance, was singularly unique, the spirit lodged in them was of an unalterable whole, inseparable from past steps, a part of future ones — it was not the mere passage of finite existences themselves with which one had to reckon, but with passage itself; motion, not the moving thing. And though opposites her feet — this, too, had been at the edge of her broken thoughts — though apparently isolate and contrary, at their source they were a single essence, there their duality disappeared. A triangle occurred to her, but something suddenly unpleasant about it repulsed her. She looked up, wearied of her feet, and discovered the mine buildings just ahead of her, crouched in a sparse grove of barren trees. To her right, distantly, a small rise, itself almost treeless. Above, a potbellied watertank that overlorded the squat buildings; beneath it, cars sat in a gravel lot, including that which had passed her. She was glad she had walked the whole distance, yet an edge of disappointment frustrated complete satisfaction: her meditations had not equaled the promise of the previous direct experience.

An odor of sulfur here, soot in the air, and near the buildings the sky seemed to yellow. Slate like black jasper crunched underfoot. Behind the watertower reared an insectlike structure, housed in at the top, about four stories high. She guessed it was where the coal was processed — was it sorted or cleaned or something? — for a chute yawned from it over railroad tracks. She stared at the building, letting its eccentric shape sear into her underconsciousness — there was nothing like it in her memory — while her thoughts sputtered and bubbled away. A line came to her suddenly from somewhere, she fumbled in her coat pocket, found paper and pencil:

Out of fog: new signals; in clarity: the gathering of … fog.

She seemed to wake, discovered for the first time there were people about her, mostly miners, motion was minimal, there seemed to be nothing happening, some glanced at her, but none paid attention. She sighed, secretly relieved, for the sense of awakening in public had startled her. She read the message. It did not seem to be from Domiron. Some lesser aspect probably. Of these, she trusted few, and doubted now. On the contrary, she reasoned, fog is a false emptying that adds interest to the mystified forms, while clarity, simplifying perception, liberated the mind from counteractive effort. Nevertheless, she pocketed the note … it was foolish to be too hasty.

Over one grimy brick office building, a wind sock jabbed rigidly. A northwest wind, and it pierced her thoroughly. The sock poked its signal at the nearby rise, which lifted its nubbed crest just over the fretwork of denuded trees to the east of the buildings. Too squat for a hill really: a hummock, a soft knoll. On a concrete wall, next to a steel door, she found a sign that read: CAUTION! NO SCUFFLING OR PLAYING! NO SMOKING! This is a Closed Light Mine — Smoking in or Carrying Smoking Materials into This Mine is a VIOLATION OF THE LAW! Scratched on the wall with coal was: Look! This Means You! with an arrow aimed at the word “Scuffling.” A few adolescent obscenities, cartooned nude women, male genitals, no clues. In red: JE$U$ $AVE$! Why don’t you? 1st Nat’l Bank. She counted the words on the printed sign: twenty-eight — it meant nothing to her. Four sevens. Well, so what? The first five words, true, contained a certain meaning applicable to her: to be careful not to become childish about this crisis, nor to seek unnecessary trouble; but, given the rest of it, it was probably merest accident. What was a “closed light mine”? She didn’t know. Were the lights enclosed, or was the mine defined somehow as “light”? Perhaps there was, in a sense, light trapped in the mine that needed now to be released. But all these directions seemed futile. And then, suddenly, beside the steel door, as though it were materializing, appearing there now for the first time, she saw a telephone! So certain was she that she had marched this bitter way to receive a message, that she impulsively lifted the phone off the hook and put it to her ear.

“Excuse me, lady, can I help you?”

She nearly dropped the phone in fright, fumbling returned it to its cradle, apologized to the tall miner beside her. “No, no! I’m sorry! I was only curious, and—”

The miner smiled. “Oh well, go ahead and listen, if you like.”

Eleanor calmed. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m just getting in your way, I’m afraid. I hope you’ll pardon me.” They exchanged smiles, and she walked away.

Unexpectedly, she came upon a Salvation Army canteen, still operating although the two women inside were packing things away into carton boxes. There was coffee, though, steaming hot against the chill in her, and they seemed delighted to have a customer. They apologized that the doughnuts were from Saturday, but, suddenly hungry, Eleanor accepted one anyway. It was rubbery and tough, sugarless, but sweet to her. When the women learned she was not herself a widow, had lost no one out here, they grew talkative, but Eleanor was too weak to listen. A sense of displacement was overtaking her; exhaustion threatened to buckle her knees. She sat on a wooden folding chair. She could never walk back again. The women told her that all the bodies had been recovered and were being prepared by morticians at the high school gymnasium. They described the hideous condition of some. Funerals tomorrow and Wednesday. They produced anecdotes of rescue, which Eleanor pretended to attend. Their hollow voices clucked and moaned at the horror. Well, did they think they would escape it? Sensational slaughter made people count death exceptional.

The two miners who had offered her the ride entered, and she asked if they might be going back soon; she would like to take them up on their offer. They laughed and said Sure, introduced themselves as Mr. Ferrero and Mr. Bonali. They had coffee first, and Eleanor received an account of Mr. Bonali’s escape from the disaster.

The ride back into town was surprisingly brief. On foot, it was a healthy hike, of course, but the cold wind had distorted the distance. She told the two men that she was a teacher at the high school, and Mr. Bonali, the driver, said he had thought so when she had told him her name, because he had a daughter, a freshman this year, who had mentioned her. Angela. Angie. Eleanor said, oh, of course, Angela Bonali, but she couldn’t bring the girl’s face to mind. Mr. Ferrero said it must be a tough job, he wouldn’t have the courage to face up to a pack of teen-age monsters every day. She replied that she enjoyed her work, but regretted the absence of spontaneity and receptivity in today’s youth. Of course, she didn’t mean Angela, she was only speaking generally.

“No, I know what you mean,” Mr. Bonali concurred. “She’s a wise kid, thinks she’s pretty smart. They all do.”

“Well, we weren’t angels,” observed Mr. Ferrero, and Mr. Bonali, laughter booming, agreed with that.

Eleanor explained to them that she had to pick up some papers to be graded in her office at the school, so they dropped her off there, although of course her purpose was to visit the gymnasium.

The mine company guards at the gymnasium door would not allow her to enter. Beyond their bulked shoulders she could see the dark cadaver lumps on the floor under army blankets, fewer than she had expected, white light raying in on them from the opaque windows back of the bleachers, dust hovering gloomily. On the basketball scoreboard: WEST CONDON 14, VISITORS 11. Eleanor rarely thought about numbers — she respected the numerologists, but the ever-present prime numbers were too vague to satisfy her — but, out of an old prejudice from childhood, multiples of seven always caught her eye. Seven, fourteen, twenty-eight, thir — well, yes! of course! the toll! incredible!

As though on cue, Colin Meredith appeared before her, a tall supple-limbed boy with guileless eyes and perceptive brow whom Domiron had led to her. His long blond hair, soft and silky, flopped loosely on his pale brow. He seemed extremely excited. Colin’s discipleship, if it could be called that, had thus far disappointed Eleanor faintly: he was too playfully interested still in flying saucers and green men from Mars to grasp the profounder truths of essence, transience, emanations, and reabsorptions. Nonetheless, the soil was fertile, his was an aristocratic spirit, and, though cautious (she suddenly thought of the sign at the mine!), she entertained large hopes for him. Now, he said he had been looking for her, had come here hoping to find her. “Mrs. Norton,” he gasped, once they had slipped out of earshot of others, “do you remember the message you gave me, the one from, from …”

“Domiron.” It was not to tell him, for he knew it well; only he feared yet to speak it aloud.

“Yes, the one that said about the long uphill struggle one must endure, out of — do you remember? — ‘out of the abyss of darkness,’ you said!”

She nodded, accepting his child’s awe, and saw that his true growth had begun. “I received perhaps the most important messages of my long life over this past weekend,” she told him solemnly. “Cosmic purposes of enormous significance are to be revealed to us soon. Can you visit me later this week?”

“Sure! Would Friday be soon enough?”

She smiled. “I hope so,” she replied.

Eleanor and Wylie returned home from the Tuesday mass funerals, depressed and, for her part, confused. So many deaths at once, the irregular and paradoxical messages she was receiving, the bitter weather — Eleanor was frightened, felt weak and light-minded before the challenge, but could not resist its excitement. She had tried to visit the rescued miner, Mr. Bruno, yesterday, but was told he had not awakened from his coma. She would try again tomorrow, if he lived still. Yet, she was sure he would. She understood at this point all too little, but she was convinced that Giovanni Bruno was somehow a part of it.

She hung up her coat, fixed sandwiches for both of them, but finally didn’t eat her own, decided first to read the evening paper. Wylie sank sleepily into the armchair. She felt a kind of peculiar dizziness as she reached for the paper. She glanced at the headlines — and started up, her heart pounding: not only had Giovanni Bruno recovered from his coma, but he had announced a visitation by what he called the Holy Virgin during his entombment! She had appeared to him, he said, in the form of a …a white bird!

A white bird! the image of the soul, the volatile principle, life itself! messenger of peace and prodigies! symbol through man’s story of spiritualism and sublimation! of thoughts and of angels! the color and creature of mystic illumination! ecstasis out of time and freed from space! “Oh Domiron!” she cried, and fell to the floor. “Let me have light!” She rolled onto her back, and the chandelier above her lit, swayed, expanded, burst into flame like a skyrocket.

She was on the couch. Her head throbbed. Wylie was leaning over her, patting her hand. She breathed as though against resistances. He withdrew the thermometer from her armpit, shook his head as he read it, gazed compassionately down upon her over the pale rims of his spectacles, his round chin doubling. “Over a hundred,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down a little.”

“Wylie … what happened?”

“You were reading the paper. Then you … you cried out, and, well, you sort of passed out.”

“Did you read about it?” He nodded. “Wylie, what did I say?”

He hesitated, looked away from her. “You said, first you said, ‘Domiron,’ and then, ‘Let me have light.’“

“Yes …?”

“And then you said: ‘Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.’“

“Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you think … what do you think it means, Wylie?”

“I … I don’t know, dear.”

“I do.” It had been on her mind since Sunday night, since Thursday, perhaps even before. “I must see Mr. Bruno tonight,” she said.

“Eleanor, please! You have a fever!”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing else does.” As she sat up, a chill vibrated through her. “I have to go, Wylie.”

He pressed his lips together, his eyes pained, but then he smiled. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

The heated rhythm of fever disturbed the uniformity of Eleanor’s perceptions, and what happened at the hospital had afterwards to be reconstructed. People, there were many, though she noticed few in particular. The clocking knock of heels on the marble floor. Whiteness, the antiseptic odor. A fat dark priest was there, old women. One of these, wizened and brown, gnarled with misery but not with great wisdom, was the rescued miner’s mother; she spoke no English. Eleanor, impelled by forces far greater than herself, had reached his bedside. He was gaunt and spectral, high-browed with hollowed eyes and fragile as she had known he would be, still passing, thought Eleanor headily, into substance. There were other women outside, a coarse mulelike woman named Mrs. Collins, whose husband, Giovanni Bruno’s working partner in the mine, had been killed by the disaster. One of the seven, Eleanor learned, and another chill rattled through her. Other widows, the Collins child — Eleanor knew the girl from school, a shy and weak-minded student. And Giovanni’s sister Marcella — when their eyes met, Eleanor discovered a friendship already eons old. “Wylie!” she had whispered. “The girl! She is one of us!” A remarkable innocence, so profoundly seated it could never be excised, opened wide her brown eyes, taught delicacy and gaiety to her ready smile, graced the motions of her limbs. The old woman said her boy had died and come back to life! Marcella translated it, her warmth transforming it, elevating it to essential truth. Marcella, like Eleanor herself, lived, she saw, in a responsive universe. By his bedside, Eleanor contemplated the strange and inexorable processes that had transported her here, suddenly envisioned the confused complex of her past as a series of concentric circles, each smaller and pulling toward the center … and wasn’t this the very sense of aspects?

Shards of old prophecies broke kaleidoscopically on her mind, as memories of old conflicts, old conquests, streamed out into pattern, rationally ordered. He opened his eyes and looked at her. A sudden terror gripped her: he was Italian, a Roman Catholic, a stranger, she knew nothing about him, a laborer in the mines, would he find her mad? Hostile faces of old crises appeared, floated, rippled over his gaunt face like watery masks, and if she were wrong …?

Ask and thou shalt be confirmed!

And, indeed, hadn’t Mrs. Collins all but confirmed it? That message had excited Eleanor, even though a reading of it was disappointing. A simple Christian admonition finally, which the Collins woman with equal simplicity equated to stale dreams of a Last Judgment. Eleanor could not help becoming impatient with the Christians and their adolescent clubbiness, their absurd dualities, concern with the physical body, their chosen-people complex … even though the Bible itself, before Domiron, had been her chief guide. Now, the woman believed that something — perhaps even the Second Coming — must happen on the eighth of February, finding this implication in her dead husband’s note, and she was bullish and tense and she had power. She led a group called the “Evening Circle”; Eleanor was invited to attend the Sunday night meeting, but, for the moment, on the pretext of precarious health, Eleanor declined. She understood clearly, in spite of her feverish state of mind, the threat that the Collins woman posed: it was the threat of ignorance. But, in any case, she had to agree with the woman, events of supreme importance were in the air, although the function and date hardly appealed to her, especially since they had never been mentioned by her own sources. Of course, Mr. Collins had been a preacher, it was quite natural that his imagery should be lower-class Christian (and misspelled at that!), he could not be blamed, and there was above all a prodigious, an awesome, coincidence of interest in Giovanni Bruno.

Ask and thou shalt be confirmed!

In that brief moment beside his bed, before they discovered her there and ordered her away, in that instant when he looked up at her, through her terror she drove the question: “Are you the One who is to come?” His eyes burned through her. His breath came shortly. He nodded. They found her leaning against the foot of the bed, eyes closed. Wylie explained calmly to them about her fever, and she apologized, saying she had come in here looking for a place to rest.

Marcella had invited them all to return Friday evening, but by Thursday, Eleanor could wait no longer. Though free from fever, she now suffered from a head cold and sore throat, and had stayed home from this first day of school. Messages since Tuesday evening had appeared one on the heels of another, and all arrowed upon the same incredible event, long foretold, but terrifying in its realization: Giovanni Bruno’s body had been invaded by a higher being! Contact had been established!

She had to take extreme care. So far as she knew, she was the only person alive who realized it, the entire burden of keeping the connection alive was on her shoulders — a foolish move and it was lost! She hardly slept, though feared sleeplessness that it might weaken her. She distrusted antibiotics: they muddled her, and she could not afford that now. It would be difficult, in the transpiercing of aspects there would be problems. Had it ever really happened before? Surely, but always there must have been final failure, the contact interrupted, its significance distorted, the agent body destroyed; and always the walls were built, introceptive minds buried behind the rubble mounds of power and dogma, the charismatic moment forgotten, misconstrued, the light hopelessly flickering out, extinguished by the terrible density of this earth. And now, over fifteen years of resolute intransigent preparation — no! more! centuries! — were coming to bear upon this delicate moment, visible within the fragility of human time and space! Every breath she breathed seemed fraught with peril, yet starred and eternal as well, each a cosmic breath. And no sooner had the connection been established, but from somewhere, from within, or from denser aspects, from something malefic in the universe perhaps, something she did not understand, there came resistance: fever, disease, attacks from all sides on her body, on her mind, confusion, a blurring of vision: so frail a fortress! She trembled, searching out a greater strength. Her mortality shadowed her, clung to her ankles … yes, she would die soon, she must make haste, a second lost and it was for nothing—she must go tonight!

The hospital stood on its vast acreage, distant from West Condon’s center, under a bright glitter of stars. Eleanor examined them hastily: all seemed in order. A glance at her watch told her Leo, invisible, was ascendant, not the most favorable of signs. Wylie panted along at her side, opened the hospital door for her.

Unhappily, Marcella and her brother were not alone, additional proof to Eleanor of the sudden gathering of malign forces, particularly since the intruder was a newspaperman, Mr. Miller of the local paper. She knew him not at all, but one glance warned her to be on guard. Her life had been so often disrupted by newsmen, she had come to regard the trade as itself an inherently evil one. He seemed courteous and intelligent, but a cruelty lurked at his mouth’s edges, and his smooth face’s manly mask did not conceal the ravenous gleam of his dark eyes. Yes, yes, she knew him. She spoke idly, stalling for time. What was she doing here? Hah! let him wonder to the end of his days! She sensed that he already had reached the girl and she was in danger. Yet, there was a well-disposed order to the man: she would watch and wait.

Wylie engaged Mr. Miller in aspects of the precomatose phase of carbon monoxide poisoning, and Eleanor, tense, but concentrating her tension in the grip on her damp handkerchief, asked Marcella about her brother.

Marcella looked at Eleanor’s glasses, at her graying hair: “You must be the lady my brother has been asking about,” she said.

Eleanor caught her breath. Her sore throat contracted. They went in. Apparently he slept, but then his eyes opened. When he saw her, he nodded, raised one hand weakly in recognition, dropped it, Marcella left them.

“Am I to call you Giovanni?” she asked. He nodded. “Giovanni,” she continued, seeking the direction, “from whence came you?” He did not reply. His eyes closed. “Giovanni!” she whispered anxiously — she must hold on to it! — “Giovanni!” Again his eyes opened. “Giovanni, did you come a great distance?” He nodded. “From another aspect?” He hesitated, then nodded. He trusted her! She licked her lips, tried to grasp the difficulties the other faced in communicating to her, kept her unwavering gaze locked on his. “Have you … have you any messages?” He did not reply, but continued to stare at her. So tenuous! She swallowed and felt them at her throat. “The white bird,” she ventured, “does it signal … a new life?” He nodded. “May I come often?” Again the nod. “There is time then!” she whispered, and at his nod a great relief washed over her. With time, she could do it. She felt the malignant bodies disperse and retreat.

Reentering to stand beside her, the girl Marcella watched. She seemed undisturbed, somehow even pleased. Wylie, she noticed, had also come into the room. The newspaperman was gone. Giovanni Bruno seemed weary, but she wished a confirmation with witnesses present. “Are you the One who is to come?” she asked. He nodded, shut his eyes. In a moment, he was sleeping. But it was done. Eleanor looked at Wylie and at Marcella, and saw that they had understood. In part, at least. The burden was lighter.

2

“One a them cutters makes the goddamn bugdust fly around like grass outa a electric lawnmower,” said Vince Bonali. In the mine, voices rose and fell peculiarly, bouncing off a face of coal here, disappearing down a channel there, going dead where it was dry, echoing near water. Miller walked in a slight crouch, the hunching slump of the adolescent feeling his new height: there was headroom down here, but it had to be taken on faith. Always, out in front, the roof seemed to cave downward. The lamp on his head, like the illuminative middle eye, shot its dull beam wherever he looked, was as jittery as his head was, steadied on nothing unless he could hold still, and that, plus the helmet’s weight, was giving him a stiff neck.

“What? The climb? Well now, Senator, that’s due to the slant in the layers. In these parts, they always dip toward the northwest.” Under the shelling of the miners’ bitching, Davis remained outwardly calm, gathering influence over the know-nots of the inspection party.

“I see. Uh, the northwest.”

“That’s right. If the seam is known to slope, why you always put the shaft in at the slope bottom. That way, the loaded cars run to the bottom of the shaft under their own weight and are pulled back up empty.”

“Oh yes. Very good.”

Any goddamn topic to free the mind’s eye from the hovering mass. There were splits in the roof, carvings, grooves, it was oppressively close, always tested Miller’s nerve, had since his first visits as a boy, but more so today in this mine that had seen so much violence, heaps of rubble here and there, an all too plentiful evidence of falls: Chicken Licken’s panic. He knew Ox Clemens’ urge to have a smoke, caught in this black hive of tight deep stalls, found his own fingers more than once at his emptied shirt pocket. On edge, he got a distorted view of things. The shadows pitched by the whitewashed timbers turned into black crucifixes. The equipment, pieces of wood, cable, rubble heaps, wallowed in their own shadows like mangled bodies, and he kept hearing falls, seeing dead ends ahead, smelling gas. As they pushed on, they encountered increasing disturbance, whole rooms spilling out their insides, fractured timbers, the men uneasy, feeling the roof, knocking at it gently, only Big Pete Chigi seemingly unconscious of the threat, wallowing and plunging like a big fat seal, willing to carry the earth above on his nose like a ball, if need be. Heavy equipment lay upended, cables swooped like streamers at a dance, chatter from several corners crisscrossing, varying in volume.

“… was sunk and put down in the coal in 1923. The coal was shot up on the solid, brung from all the …”

“No, we don’t use powder, always for a long time now we been employing compressed air, what you call …”

“… a slab there which should oughta be took down or else timbered.”

Names. Guys Miller had known, had interviewed, gone to school here with, guys he played baseball with in the summer. Bill Lawson. Tuck Filbert. Mario Juliano. There was still a sick sweet smell down here.

“… and I was standing there in the engine room, see, when the fuse on the …”

“… gas and smoke, bodies bleeding at the mouth and nose, but they wasn’t no other signs of …”

“Who? Bruno? No, we come on him and the others back there a piece, Tiger. I’m sorry. I thought you noticed.”

“Lemme see here the …”

“Well, yessir, that’s the rock dust. You don’t see it so clear on account of how it is coked over from the explosion.” Pedantic precision to Davis’ delivery in the effort to score as the present authority. Had his Dad sounded like that? “How’s that? Well, it’s usually mostly limestone. Should be the same specific gravity so as to rise in suspension with the coal dust, light in color to reflect light, nonhygroscopic so it don’t ball.”

“The pattern is always the same in these gassy mines,” the engineering professor in the party explained. “An accumulation of methane, ignition, usually by sparks off faulty machinery or by smoking, the explosion confined or extended in scope, depending on the effectiveness of the rock dusting.” No, that was his Dad, right to the point.

“What rock dusting?” Bonali’s voice came through loud and clear. The whole walk he had been edging in his gripes, but Davis had kept the inspectors’ ears, and Bonali himself, in spite of his reputation, seemed edgy, overcautious.

“Any inspector ever been down in this mine, they’ve bragged on the place looking like the inside of a goddamn hospital, Vince.”

“Which room, Davis? I take it you mean the morgue.”

The deeper they got, the blacker it got, the whitewashed timbers coated with soot and coke, the rock dust all but nonexistent — in Miller’s mind, as surely in most, the issue was settled, regardless of Davis’ rhetoric. The black walls sucked up the light from their lamps. Drip of water. Distant thump. Crickety-crick sound: scamper of rats maybe.

“… gob, rails, ties, props are piled too close to the track here, don’t you see?”

“All your stoppings has got blowed out by the violence, and so your air doesn’t …”

“… a spray stuff that helps some, but it don’t kill it all. Finally, you just gotta throw up and go on back to …”

“… as how they was apt to blow up the cable. You couldn’t hardly possibly see nothing, Professor, the machinery neither.”

“And, man, when my buddy seen all that shit flying around out there, why he commenced to plug her and put the brakes on, but …”

And then he was standing on the spot, before he understood properly where they were, that they had arrived at what was objectively referred to as “the ignition area.” Some contended for another room where drills lay with cap screws missing, while Davis and Osborne snorted at the electric arc theorists by drawing lines of force, declaring for ignition by cigarettes found alongside Clemens and Rosselli. Bonali, a little puffed up from his victories on the walk here, ridiculed: “You can’t light a fire with cigarettes, Davis.” But the absence of matches or lighter did not impress the inspectors. The former could have been consumed by the explosion, the latter picked up during rescue — or perhaps might still be in a dead man’s hands … it was doubtful anyone had checked.

What did impress the inspectors was that work had been going on in a squeezing area. An unnerving blue cap now crowned the yellow flame in the safety lamp. “Who declared this room safe?” a visiting UMW man asked angrily, and there were no answers, Osborne the night mine manager sneaking out of earshot, although Barney Davis did protest that the methane was normally vented out of the area, but since the disaster this section was now largely short-circuited. Besides, this face wasn’t being worked; Rosselli and Clemens must have slipped back here for the smoke, against orders. Nevertheless, most agreed: the area should have been sealed off. Miller followed the lead of others and put his ear to the face: soft buzz like a fine bubbling.

And here, in this tight black pit, which was crushed and shaken down, damp and dusty at once, in a gloomy intangible nimbus of CH₄, his legs cramped from kneeling, ducking, spine pinched, the air dead and stagnant, among furtive black faces mostly alien and isolate, Tiger Miller suffered for one febrile moment the leap and joy and glory of the state basketball championships — bright flash of meaning, a possible faith in a possible thing: that they could win! and there were globes of white light and wide-open space and a thundering excitement, a fast responsive body, patterns that worked, challenge, rescue, always a resolution, redemptions tested and proved in the scoring columns … a grace on him. Standing straight, he knocked his helmet against the roof: drums rolled funereally, blunt reminder, from the insensate earth, of the real.

“But the evidence?”

“Well, we first notice for soot and coke, Tiger, burnt fibers, paper, for polished surfaces. Here, you see how this rib has got rounded off? Well, that’s by coarse pieces flying by, and you can tell the direction plain enough.”

Coarse pieces of Oxford Clemens.

“And then, now look at this: see how the dust is streamlined here? The front side of this post is like sandblasted and then little eddy currents travel to the rear here — see? — and leave them little dust deposits. Way these here mines is cut up, the forces they go ever which way. But when you come on a point where all the forces go away from it in ever direction, why, you know something went off here.”

From this point, Oxford Clemens traveled off in ever which direction. They raked up the pieces and deposited them in a rubber bag. The bag was light and they guessed it was a little man. But the fingerprint expert identified the remains as not one but two persons, both once sizable. Clemens and Rosselli, like ultimate lovers cellularly conjoined, descended as one to their common grave.

“And look here, Tiger. You see how the materials here on the floor is all different sizes? Well, it makes sense, don’t it, that the coarser stuff is gonna get dropped first by the forces. And then it goes until you reach the dust point, and that is what is called sizing the materials. So, that’s the way you can tell how the flame and forces traversed along here….”

Expansion and white light, a thundering excitement: did Ox go out in a hot dream of the gilded past? It hardly mattered. Out was out. Miller chose not to size the materials too finely. He was giddy enough down here as it was. Kept feeling like he was walking around on a litter of human fatty tissue.

She heard them as a child, a voiced flutter of angels at her bedstead. Marcella, frail and often ill, watched for them, and they sustained her. But a hatred in the house frightened them away. Growing, she rediscovered them at the altar and in nature. No longer words, but whole sensations were what they brought her. An indivisibility to life, an essential sympathy: then, everything mattered. Giovanni heard them too. In truth, perhaps they were his, not hers. Of age, she lost them, seeking them. They fled from being understood. “It is grasped whole, Marcella, but never learned.” Thus, with tenderness and patience, Eleanor leads her back to her abandoned voices.

Voices. Out of mouths, over phone cables, on the streets, in his office, out of letters, from other papers, over the teletype. Day in, day out, they battered at Miller’s eyes and ears, throbbed convulsively through him, emerged at his fingertips as the West Condon Chronicle. Births and deaths. The forecast of snow, low pressure, high pressure, the unseasonable seasonable cold warm rainy dry front over front … process revealed. Twelfth Street under repair. Rotary’s district governor visits, is “favorably impressed.” Six or eight pages twenty inches deep by eight times wide, 960 to 1,280 column inches, upwards of 50,000 words of space, a decent novel, six days a week. Miller filled them up. Threats of war. Bingo at St. Stephen’s. Burglary in a supermarket. Cuts, heads, ads, syndicated features rescued him daily, but only from crisis, not from thrall. Afflictions, ball games, comic strips, and drunken drivers. The endless reiteration of sundered instants, grounded in the subject’s abject nature. He wanted to stop it, but once you turned it on, there was no turning it off. Grocers’ specials and Sunday services. Assassinations. High school prom. That’s where Miller’s January went. He didn’t want to see it go, but the next thing he knew, it was gone.

Always tomorrow’s deadline: but he no longer wished to lose today. Goddamn Clemens and his cigarette! The mine disaster had touched off something latently restless in him, and now he could not be satisfied. Miller felt rotten, edgy all the time. Snapped at Annie, wrote wearily, fell sullen at Mick’s. His stomach rumbled and burned and his gut softened and sank. But he had no time to think. The fleeting whimsy became a recurrent wish: he wanted to stop it. Should never have invented the written word. Kept folly hopelessly alive.

Hopelessly alive: epigraph of the day.

And as for folly, goddamn it, he hadn’t learned a thing. It took him a week to discover the classified ads Jones had planted, nearly on top of each other, in the Chronicle, and by then he was the last in town to do so:

FOUND: Lady’s wool cap. Intimate circumstances. Inquire in person to Chronicle editor.

LOST: One husband and one wool cap, same night. Reward for cap. Box “Woolly.”

They called him “the widow-warmer” in Mick’s and asked him if he’d collected yet the reward of the woolly box. He reminded them that, as St. James had said, the consoling of widows in their affliction was the stamp of a religion that was pure and undefiled, and, since he was the only one in the Christian crowd who had ever bothered to read the Good Old Book, no one knew enough to append: “and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

Stained and stung, daily abused, Miller sought relief — even a redemption of sorts — in the company of Marcella Bruno. At first, in the days following the disaster, he saw her almost daily on one pretense or another, almost always in connection with her brother. No problem that, for Bruno himself was news, nationally as well as locally: his escape story, white bird vision, precarious health, prolonged comeback, even his peculiar taciturnity. Miller’s own interest in the man soon dissipated: what he saw there was the browbeaten child turned egocentered adult psychopath, now upstaging it with his sudden splash of glory — a waste of time. But he made good copy, and Miller sold some of it nationally. With Marcella, it was another story. For one thing, she flattered the hell out of him, the way she looked at him. And there was a grace about everything she did, laughed, walked, turned. Bright, too. And she was beautiful. Coming or going, she caught a man’s eye.

But, finally, there was something that got between them. She lacked her brother’s laconic self-exaltation — open innocence was in fact the quality that best described her — but shared with him the old fiction of the universe as a closed and well-made circle. It ran deep in her, colored every phrase, and he began to hesitate in the pursuit of his obvious advantage: how did she in fact see him and what did she expect? There could be consequences he didn’t want. And he stopped being flattered by her affection when he realized how much she admired her nut of a brother. Understandable, of course: she was born into a family already centered around him, and all she had done all her life had been one way or another related to him. And there was the weight of racial habit, the deep-rooted Italian family traditions, especially those of the beleaguered immigrant families. Nevertheless, she was old enough to judge him rightly. Roman Catholic, too, but as with all mystics, a mild disdain for the establishment, and Miller had seen Giovanni go somehow cold and angry whenever Father Baglione, the local priest, showed up. No, mainly it was her child’s view of the plenum — until she accepted it as the mad scatter it was, they could never get beyond banalities and sex play. Did he want to get beyond? Apparently, though it surprised him, he did.

So, though caution braked his assault, he nevertheless kept the phone lines open, when with her did not reject and maybe even emboldened her long glances, and somehow felt certain that, sooner or later, they’d share a couch, whatever the circumstances of it might be. She, in turn, supposed his continuing interest in her brother, gave him status reports on his health, and talked of the people who came to see him. A recently arrived veterinarian named Wylie Norton and his schoolteacher wife were the most frequent visitors. Miller gathered that the Norton woman was a practicing medium of some sort, an automatist and old-fashioned sibyl. He had met the woman and found her harmless. More dramatic were the regular visitations of the Widow Collins and some of her Church of the Nazarene friends. These openly emotional but eminently practical people made an odd contrast with the introverted Catholic Bruno, though he welcomed them. It was mainly the accident of the work relationship between Collins and Bruno in the mine that now conjoined them. Collins, Miller learned, had accepted Bruno as his buddy out of Christian charity toward the rejected misfit, and maybe a little bit out of wonderment at rejection itself. Seeking sainthood, Reverend Ely Collins had probably been surprised that he had had it so easy. Collins, to be popular, must surely have touched more than once on the never-dead chiliastic expectations of the lower-class Christians, and so the violence of his death, the ambiguity of his final message, the singular rescue of his buddy, and, above all, the odd coincidence — if it was that, and it surely was not — of the white bird vision he shared with Bruno, now made these people — especially the suddenly widowed — wonder if something disastrous, perhaps worldwide in scope, might not be in the air. Their immediate fear, apparently, was the eighth of February. Their speculations amused Miller — who himself at age thirteen had read Revelations and never quite got over it — so he printed everything he thought might help them along, might seem relevant to them, amateur space theories, enigmatic Biblical texts, filler tripe on peculiar practices and inexplicable happenings elsewhere, as well as everything they wished to give him. Once the emotions had settled down and the widows themselves had established new affairs or found mind-busying work, their eccentric interests of the moment would be forgotten, of course. Which, in its way, was too bad. As games went, it was a game, and there was some promise in it.

Games were what kept Miller going. Games, and the pacifying of mind and organs. Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier. And so it was that, on his way out of the hospital on a Sunday night, first day of the runt month and the day before Giovanni Bruno was due to be sent home, gamester Tiger Miller, not a wee bit agitated in the fork after a quarter of an hour with Marcella, used his wanton freedom to reject impulsively an old precept about bedding down with the locals and picked up a nurse at the doorway, took her home with him. He had noticed her the night of the rescue, sandy-haired Tucker City girl, now more or less of West Condon, family a mixture of immigrant Englishmen and East Europeans, he learned, bright-eyed and quick to banter. Mainly it was her long slim waist and plump butt that had drawn and kept his eye; privately, he called her Happy Bottom, and, in bed later, she laughed gaily when he told her. What was something so great as this doing in West Condon? Only a fool would stop to ask.

3

They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God! They have provoked me to anger with their vanities!

Abner Baxter paced the front room fretfully Sunday evening, waiting for Sarah to get the children dressed for the family’s evening worship. His knuckled white fist belted the desktop, slapped at the open Bible, thumped into the back of an easy chair. “Strive thou, O God, with them that strive with me!” he whispered hoarsely. He paused before a large reproduction of the great bearded Peter, standing over the convulsing Sapphira, enemy of another day. White with righteous indignation, quivering with holy rage, swollen with the power of the Lord, the mighty Peter in one volcanic gesture had shown the true glory of God. “Why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” asked the caption.

Well, Sister Clara Collins’ “eighth of the month” heresy had harrowed them all, but Abner restrained his wrath, biding his time. He preached in the church on the faith of Enoch and Noah, Abraham and Moses, and let them read what they would into it. Time would do her in. But for now, she still had most of them with her, prideful and perverse as her foolish message was, and his duty to the Lord was to remain steadfast in the faith and wait for the woman’s inexorable fall.

Not that she’d challenged his right to the pulpit — it was rather that she didn’t seem to care about it. She attended his services, but seemed detached. Even in prayer, down on her knees before him, there was an arrogant willfulness about her that seemed to lift her above the others. And it was at her Wednesday Evening Circle where she most sorely vexed him. Their prophet and master in the Sunday pulpit, he was nothing at her Evening Circle. There, even that spineless chinless little fool Willie Hall had the presumption to contradict and interrupt him. Abner had counted on his wife Sarah assuming the leadership of the Circle, but once again that wretched woman had proven more burden than blessing to him. He’d upbraided her unmercifully for her faithless trepidation, but she only cowered and whimpered and begged that he forgive her.

And now tomorrow, the grand and triumphant homecoming for Mr. Giovanni Bruno! What a mockery! What an outrage! Why, even his own people knew him to be mad — how could Clara be such an imbecile? If she could only have seen that silly man, held naked and blubbering while his fellow Romanist Bonali read that poem—! No, she’d been blinded by her grief, had given in to her selfish whimsy, and only shock and punishment could now bring her once more to the true path. And this was Abner’s task. He cracked his palm with a razor strop, gazed up once more at Peter.

There was a knock: he ordered them to enter. Sarah and Francis came first, the others trailing reluctantly. And tomorrow there would be hosannas and dollars strewn like palm branches: the irony of it stuck in Abner’s flesh like cruel barbs. I, too, was saved! “Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in,” he cried aloud, and his family shrunk before him, “and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out!”

Bruno’s big homecoming was Ted Cavanaugh’s idea. There was a national — even international — focus on the man, why not put it to the whole town’s service? Already, Bruno had emerged as something of a town hero, a symbol of the community’s own struggle to survive, so why not make the most of it? True, as a hero, he was a little short on style maybe, but this town was long accustomed to making do with less than the best.

So Cavanaugh had talked to the Rotarians at their regular luncheon meeting, called the Chamber board together, conferred with Mayor Mort Whimple. They’d set 2 February as the date, since that was the anniversary of the town’s incorporation, even though Doc Lewis had said that might be pushing it a bit. A special statewide relief-fund drive for all the families of miners lost in the disaster had already been launched, and now Whimple had agreed to double the effort, enlarging especially on Bruno’s needs. Ted had got at the Jaycees through an employee at his bank and to the BPW and Eastern Star through his wife. His son Tommy had activated the youngsters at the high school, especially those of Hi-Y, Job’s Daughters, the Lettermen’s Club, and the like. Alderman Joe Altoviti had carried the project for Ted into the Knights of Columbus, Lombard Society, and the Eagles; Burt Robbins and Jim Elliott had worked on the Elks and the Legion; and Cavanaugh’s minister Reverend Wesley Edwards had involved the West Condon Ministerial Association. The Catholic priest was, as usual, more grudging, but he agreed to appear on the scene at least. Father Baglione was an old Italian whose loyalty to Rome, as much racial and provincial as organizational and pious, so outweighed any local considerations that he was really still a foreigner here. Didn’t even speak good English. Cavanaugh had been trying for years to get him promoted or some damn thing, get a young American fellow in here in his place.

Cavanaugh had also run into some resistance in the least-expected quarter: among Bruno’s fellow Italian coalminers. At first, he didn’t know what to make of it. Then, slowly, he had come to see that there was a kind of class embarrassment toward Bruno, and a certain amount of scarcely concealed resentment that if only one could have made it, it had to be someone like Giovanni Bruno. Unmarried. Belonged to no clubs, had no friends. Not active at the church. Maybe even a negative attitude there. Standoffish and peculiar. Well, Cavanaugh had made them forget that. He had pushed the idea that in the eyes of the world, Giovanni Bruno represented this generation’s victory over hatred and prejudice, and that they could all stand taller today, not because of who Bruno was personally or what he’d done, but because of the way others saw him. And, even more important, for the moment — no matter how arbitrary it might seem — he stood for West Condon, and they all had to help lift West Condon high!

He had written a couple articles more or less to that effect and had planted them in Miller’s newspaper. Not that it was easy: Miller was getting hard to get along with. There was a time when Miller would have written them himself and been all too glad to do it, but something had gone wrong. Tiger wasn’t panning out. Cavanaugh had thought, back when he first got Miller to come back here, that he’d get married, settle in for good, become a leader here, mayor for awhile maybe, or even better things. He had a good head, plenty of drive and spirit, and a big following. Should have been a sure thing. Instead, he couldn’t even make the goddamn paper pay off. Oh, he’d won a number of meaningless prizes, had sold some articles nationally, had introduced a lot of spectacular though finally pretty silly innovations in the Chronicle, most of which had long since been abandoned, but the paper was losing money, and, what was far more serious, Miller didn’t seem to give a damn.

Of course, Miller was a spoiled kid, only child, raised by his mother, pampered in school, and so his ego made it hard for him to blend in. Still given to adolescent just-for-the-hell-of-it storm-raising. His Dad was a mining engineer who was killed accidentally while trying to arbitrate a management-union struggle in the early thirties, a friend of Ted’s Dad, and maybe this had made Tiger grow up with that peculiar fascination for conflict — he always said it was what had led him into journalism as a career. Maybe Ted should have thought about all this before he encouraged him to come back and buy up the Chronicle, then loaned him the money to do it. From the day Tiger took that money, they’d been at odds. And he’d antagonized his best advertisers with tasteless stories, true or not, had ducked all responsibilities in the community, and had developed an annoying habit of mocking those very customs and traditions that most folks here revered. What was the matter with him? Maybe it was Jones’ influence. Cavanaugh didn’t know where the sonuvabitch had come from, but as far as he was concerned, he could move on any day. Jones’ irresponsible anything-goes virus could eat up a community, strike it with a kind of moral encephalitis, and goddamn it, Ted Cavanaugh wasn’t going to see that happen.

Miller’s private life was something less than exemplary, too, and now this latest scandal involving the Cravens widow had finally got Cavanaugh to wondering if Miller might not be best off leaving with Jones on the same train. Miller had a way of always getting his prick in the wrong place at the wrong time: Jesus! when was that guy going to grow up? It worried Ted, too, that his own son Tommy admired the man so. Came from the old days when young Tiger, as athletic hero and top student, was the town prince, but now Ted wasn’t sure what lessons Tommy might be learning from the man’s gathering ruin.

Still, on this project anyway, Miller had been cooperative enough, had run stories nightly, had done all he could to lure out-of-town — what Miller and now the whole town liked to call. “East Condon”—newsmen to the scene: the hotel was filled up Sunday night and there were even a couple national television cameras on the Bruno front lawn Monday morning. Bunting was up and a welcome sign on the front porch. Inside, neighbor women were giving the house a thorough cleaning. The outside had been freshly painted by high school students. Cheerful day, couldn’t be better. Ted had seen to it that schools and businesses would be closed for the morning, that the high school band would be on hand, and that the ceremonies would include a number of state dignitaries. Town spirit was the theme. Wes Edwards, for one, had a speech ready that was just the ticket: would call on everyone in earshot to join him in a pledge for community renewal. Edwards was a quiet intellectual guy, tremendous organizer, good golfer, moving speaker, a sharp cookie. Best they’d ever got here. Cavanaugh planned to get Bruno and his parents out of the ambulance and into the house as quickly as possible, let the girl represent the family in front of the cameras. Cute girl, shy but charming, just the right mixture of pride and humility.

Before things got under way, Cavanaugh stopped by the hotel, hospital, school, city hall, made sure everything was ready to go. Along the way, he learned whom Tiger Miller had slept with last night. Well, hell, why not? Might be just the girl he’d been needing all along. He’d have to check her out, not a local girl, but she looked good. In fact, at the hospital, where she worked, Cavanaugh looked twice and decided she looked very goddamn good. Lay of the Year at the Municipal Hospital. Inwardly, he grinned a wry grin. That damn Jones is getting to us all, he thought.

Vince Bonali woke Monday morning, before dawn, wound up in the sheets, face sweating, eyes wet with tears, breathing like a steamboat. He’d been down in the mine and the going was tough, he was beating his way through it, smoke, dark, things tripping him up—bodies? Oh God! God Almighty! The place was all turned around, everybody had bugged out on him, lamps flicking meaninglessly, distantly, sonsabitches wouldn’t listen! “Hey, you guys! Goddamn!” He’d sidled up somehow, pulled the lights nearer, got them going right. The head, buddy use your goddamn head! “Both ways!” he’d cried, felt like he had to shout. “That way some of us’ll be chosen!” Jesus! he hadn’t meant that, he’d meant some would get out—“Get out!” He’d separated them and they’d headed off. Yet, God, it seemed all wrong! What the hell was he doing? Lights blinking down unseen channels, cut off now — all gone! He was alone! But wait! He couldn’t remember which way he’d meant to go himself! Knew before, knew one of them was wrong, but which—? “Hey, Cokie! Ange!” Tried to change the scene, knew he’d done it all before, wasn’t real, but it only got worse. Then he saw Pooch — old Pooch Minicucci! “Hey, by God! I thought you’d bugged out on me, Pooch!” Jesus, he was glad to see him! “Come on, man, it’s you and me!” He’d get Pooch out now, just tear ass down the — but what the—? Jesus Christ! The dumb bastard was jacking off! “Oh no!” Couldn’t believe it! “Hey, Pooch! What are you doing, man?” The idiot was just squatting there on a heap of gob, eyes blank like mica, prick long as a damn timber, pulling himself off! “The old snake!” roared Ange Moroni in the washhouse, big laughter booming out, and Vince laughed, everybody was laughing, and for a minute he was out of there. “Cut half of it off, maybe he could talk plain!” Jesus, that was funny! Good old Ange — but no! There he was still: “Pooch!” Pooch’s jaw went slack, twitched like he wanted to talk only couldn’t. Whole face caving in like the bones were breaking, going dark, and bastard kept pumping away with his right fist. Never saw it stiff like that before, couldn’t even see the end of it, seemed to reach right up to the—“Pooch! I ain’t gonna say it one more time! If you don’t come, man, it’s your own goddamn fault!” Jesus! Maybe he’d loosen it all, bring the whole fucking mine down! Noise of topcoal splitting, some fell somewhere. Distant screams. Vince was running, trying to run, a shifting under his feet, hollow echoing emptiness, ears ached, hard to breathe, air thick as cotton — gas! Gas! Don’t think about it, just run, man! Couldn’t see the sides, couldn’t see the timbers, machines, couldn’t see a goddamn thing. But didn’t bump into anything, going like ninety, but somehow nothing got in the way. Felt stuff brushing by, tight spots here and there, pushed, turned, faked, okay, okay, buddy, racing to beat hell, just a — hot! hot as hell! smoke! what’s that? a glow! glow ahead! fire! Wrong way, oh my God! he’d been running the wrong goddamn way! No! No! Coming, it’s coming! tried to turn back. Couldn’t turn back. Heat! Done for! Done for! Turn! Turn, goddamn it! But hard, hard to get, to get swung around. He struggled. Things in his way now. Legs heavy, tired. Goddamn tired. It was too much for one man. At his back now. Done for. Legs flabby. Out of shape. Too late. Up against a wall. Thick. Oily, like soft clay. Trapped! Clawed his way into it. Air gone. Get through! Choked.

“It’s okay,” Etta said.

Vince unwound himself, still choked up, wiped his face with the sheet. “I’m sorry Pooch died,” he said hoarsely.

“Sure,” said Etta.

“Etta?”

Alongside him, her big hind end turned toward him, his wife grunted.

“Etta, I ain’t never going back down there again.”

And then he was able to sleep. Slept like a log. When he finally did wake up, Etta already had breakfast ready for him. Over his eggs, trying to remember his dream, he asked, “Where’s the kids? Angie off to school already?”

“No school today,” Etta reminded him. “Both she and Charlie were up early. I think they were going over to Tony and Emilia Bruno’s house. Their boy is coming home from the hospital today, you know.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s today,” Vince said. “Think I’ll drop over there too. They’re shelling out a lotta dough and maybe they’ll have some left over.”

Etta took that crack in grim silence. She was down to just about nothing in her grocery budget. But, by God, things would be different now. Once he’d got him a good job, never mind what, just so it wasn’t coalmining, they’d never have to fret these long layoffs again. He felt strong, left with his shoulders squared.

Townsfolk had already massed up on the Bruno front lawn when Vince arrived. Bright sun, though the day was crisp, holiday air. Shops, school, everything closed. Vince moved around, talking with old buddies, joking about Bruno. Still, there was nothing sour about it, and everybody was feeling good. Mort Whimple, the mayor, arrived in a new black Chrysler, accompanied by Father Baglione, some state politicians, and one of the Protestant ministers. TV guys dollied around on the sidewalk, shooting everybody. Jesus, the crowd was really big! Officials from the Red Cross, the UMW, the coal company, members of the city council, and representatives from other civic organizations pulled up behind the Chrysler. Vince said hello to his alderman Joe Altoviti, and they kidded around a little.

A sign on the mayor’s car said: GIOVANNI BRUNO — WEST CONDON SAYS — GET WELL SOON!!! Everybody cheered as Whimple, in his trademark tweeds and sportshirt buttoned at the neck, moved among them, flanked by the congressmen, the whole group smiling toothily in all directions. Whimple was a homely little guy, used to be fire chief, and before that a car salesman. Vince found himself with a big smile splitting his own face. A piece of the high school band arrived, tooted a bunch of marches on the lawn. Lot of excitement. Well, in spite of everything, by God, it was a great goddamn town, and when the chips were down—

Then a distant siren alerted them, drew shouts from the crowds. The band broke off, then started up again. The dignitaries, with self-conscious shrugs and private jokes nobody could hear, arranged themselves on the front porch, while the cops, Dee Romano, Monk Wallace, and old Willie, cleared the sidewalk. Vince helped. He felt a part of it. The sun shown bright and here in the crowd there was a warmth. A couple ladies appeared at the storm door, noses pressed on the panes, neighbor women. Probably had got the house ready. The band played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Vince saw Georgie Lucci’s face grinning at him, and he grinned back. Everybody was grinning. The siren was getting louder. All necks craned toward the siren now. It was like a distant cry of good cheer, yet an anxious one, too — always something of terror and the unexpected in the pitch of an ambulance siren.

Then it swung up, bright white. The music was loud and there was a lot of noise, a lot of enthusiasm. They brought Bruno out on a stretcher. Poor guy looked scared to death. Television cameras were grinding away. Vince saw Tiger Miller, the Chronicle editor, popping photos along with all the other newsguys, gave him the nod when he chanced to glance his way. Vince had not been too hot on this big show for Bruno, but Miller in his paper had made it seem almost reasonable. Bruno’s family, his folks and his kid sister, walked beside the stretcher. Vince hadn’t seen old Tony in years and he was shocked by what he saw. Trembling, a sickly white, nearly blind old man with a bandaged nose. Had to be helped along. And he used to be such a tough hard-fisted bastard. What was worse, the poor old guy had wet his pants. It was embarrassing, but people overlooked it. Tony’s wife was small and wizened, looked now like a lot of old ladies who had lived on too long.

The kid sister received the check, represented the family during the big ceremonies. She did a good job of it. And Vince thought, If everybody in the goddamn country is going to be looking at West Condon, it’s sure a helluva lot better to have her up there than her brother. He realized he still wasn’t too happy about its being Bruno. The speeches were full of praise for West Condon’s great community spirit and its stamina. Whimple, the congressmen, Ted Cavanaugh, the preacher, everybody scored the same theme. The band played the high school fighting song. Vince remembered with pride those team huddles, back when Ted Cavanaugh captained the squad and ran his famous offtackle plays over Vince, remembered the slaps, the spirit, the power, how they spat water and dug in their cleats and pounded away. Jesus, it’s a great place! he thought, and he knew then he was right in getting out of the mine, right in coming topside to play a real part, knew by God he’d make it.

After the ceremonies, everybody still milling around, not wanting to go home and lose this thing, Vince ran into Barney Davis, the mine manager. Barney asked him if he’d mind delivering the charity drive checks to Cravens’ widow and Minicucci’s folks. Vince said okay, make a nice farewell gesture.

“What do you mean, farewell?” Davis asked.

“I’m getting out.”

“What? You mean you’re quitting the mines?” Davis laughed. “Shit, Bonali, it gets in the blood. You can’t quit easy as that.”

“Yeah? Well, watch and see, Davis.”

Davis laughed again. “I’ll believe it when I see it in the Chronicle,” he said.

4

Once a day, six days a week and sometimes seven, year in, year out, the affairs of West Condon were compressed into a set of conventionally accepted signs and became, in the shape of the West Condon Chronicle, what most folks in town thought of as life, or history. Compactly folded into a soft, damp, aromatic pouch, it fluttered onto porches nightly, was gathered in by the several citizens to easy chairs and kitchen tables, there to open its petals like the proverbial lotus, providing, if not exactly wisdom, at least plenty to talk about and maybe a laugh or two. That its publisher and editor, Justin Miller, sometimes thought of himself as in the entertainment business and viewed his product, based as it was on the technicality of the recordable fact, as a kind of benevolent hoax, probably only helped to make the paper greater, for it was certainly true that although the Chronicle was as old as West Condon and as much father of the town as child of it, it was only when Tiger came home to take it over that it became a real institution.

Miller himself was something of a local institution even before that, having been the greatest athlete to pass through West Condon High School. Small towns like West Condon seldom reached the state basketball finals, but Miller had taken them there twice, to this day a kind of Golden Age to the town’s middle-aged and old-timers, a legend for the young: number 14: jersey retired. He had, meanwhile, captained both the track and baseball teams, edited the school paper, presided over his class twice, made mostly A’s, and, surprising no one, vanished from the premises immediately after graduation. Nobody asked why he left: anybody with any sense did. So, his extraordinary decision to return a few years later, giving up his freewheeling life as a correspondent in order to resuscitate the defunct Chronicle, had come like a breath of new life: hey! Tiger’s back in town! things are moving again!

And there were prodigies: the highway was widened by the state, two mines resumed operations awhile, and a new factory making plastic toys was established on the outskirts, though this operation later folded. The newspaper, of course, was great, if Tiger had anything to do with it it had to be great, won a lot of prizes, put West Condon on the map. The basketball team won the conference title and Tiger started up his semipro baseball club, never had a losing season. And whenever the town fell into the dumps, people looked to the Chronicle, counted on Tiger to pull them out, and he usually did.

So now their communal eye was on the Chronicle again. Deepwater No. 9, last mine in the area to keep operating, was closed since the disaster, and rumor was, it was going to stay that way. No new industry, business was poor, and people were moving out again. Hard winter. But was Tiger still with them? Most folks thought so, but there were bad signs. Rumor was that the paper was losing money, and Miller didn’t seem to care. Some of the Rotary Club meetings had been treated pretty unpleasantly, punch lines left out of speeches, names misspelled, that kind of thing. The traditional Christmas spirit had got knocked, too, when Miller started running parodies of the best-loved Christmas songs and gave the Yuletime charity activities almost no space at all. Some said, that’s the trouble with Miller, he keeps going soft just when you expect the best of him. A lot of jump, but not much of a miler. It was still a matter of town curiosity that Miller had led the basketball team to State his sophomore and junior years, but had been unable to get them past the regionals his senior year. Some said he was screwing around too much that year; others thought they saw “some spark go out of him,” as though he’d become just plain bored; others blamed the coach. And that was why, while most people saw his return to take over the Chronicle as a heroic kind of yea-saying, if not indeed an act of grace, there were those, even then, who wondered if Tiger might not simply have run out of wind out there in the world and returned to rest up awhile in a place where heroism was still possible without sticking to training rules.

And now, since the mine disaster, people wondered why this big play to the spookier side of the Bruno rescue and all those peculiar little squibs about religious eccentrics? Miller was a skeptic, didn’t go to church, everybody knew that: so why this sudden interest in so-called miracles and visions? When Reverend Wesley Edwards first came to town to take over the Presbyterian pulpit he had, prodded by some of his elders, sought to reactivate Miller’s interest in the church. Miller’s skepticism hadn’t bothered him, he was a skeptic in most ways himself, and in fact he’d got a kick out of arguing with that romantic rationalist. But there was no getting him back to church. Miller was an atheist, and a fundamentalist to boot, who couldn’t see past the end of his own flesh-and-bone nose, to put it politely. And then Miller had started throwing some of his own remarks back at him, and Edwards had realized he’d compromised himself in the course of their talks. So one day he had just taken the pipe out of his mouth and said, “Justin, make your peace with God, surrender to His will.” Miller had snorted, and that had been the end of it.

Then, on this otherwise calm sixth of February, a Friday when church news was customarily printed, there appeared, right on the front page in a small neat box, a paragraph which announced that the Evening Circle of the West Condon Church of the Nazarene would convene on Sunday evening at the home of Mr. Giovanni Bruno. “All interested townsfolk are invited to attend this very important meeting.” Edwards smarted. Nothing the Presbyterians had ever done had made the front page, not even his own election to the chairmanship of the Ministerial Association. What was Miller up to? Edwards sensed it: it’s me he’s after.

Actually, Miller had toned the story, giving Mrs. Clara Collins much less than she’d asked for, a bare announcement where she’d wanted a screaming banner. He’d just come back from Mick’s and his daily late-afternoon ration of hamburger-ash and beer the day before, Thursday, having left his assistant Lou Jones behind, regaling the boys with horror stories from the history of coalmining. Jones had a knack. He’d turned a grisly tale of management goons working over a hapless unionizer into a goddamn song-and-dance act that had had the whole klatch laughing and crying at the same time. Miller didn’t know much about Jones, he’d just turned up one day announcing he’d decided to seek his fortune with the West Comedown Comical. Miller had laughed and taken him on. There had been some hint of a job as an all-night disk jockey that he’d just involuntarily surrendered (“Obscenity was the uncouth charge,” Jones had said), but on the other hand that might have been several jobs back. Jones was, in brief, a complacent drifter, gifted with an uncommonly facile feedback system, making his way any way he could, keeping a perverse eye out and telling good stories about what he saw. Miller was glad to have him, and though his humor sometimes had a way of biting too deep, he generally enjoyed the guy.

Clara Collins had not only wanted more attention for her announcement, she’d wanted Miller to attend the Sunday night meeting. She’d jumped up when he entered, nearly knocking the chair over. Her purse had swung, sweeping a stack of copypaper to the floor. “I don’t mean to trouble ye, Mr. Miller, I only stopped by a minute—”

“No trouble, Mrs. Collins. Good to see you.” He’d picked up the copypaper, tossed it carelessly on the desk. “Sit down.” He’d hung up his coat, dropped into his swivel chair, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, but, catching her look, had tossed them on his desk without lighting one. The beer, as usual, had made him drowsy.

She’d sat awkwardly beside his desk, knobby knees apart, had glanced around nervously at a restless activity she was ignorant of. “We’re all meetin’ Sunday over to Mr. Bruno’s house,” she had said, boldly yet somehow whispering it. “We’d be honored ifn you could see fit to come.”

“That’s very kind, Mrs. Collins.” He’d suppressed a yawn, reached again for the pack, stopped himself. “But I’m afraid I’m tied up. Is there some special reason—?”

“Well, that’s jist it, Mr. Miller.” She’d straightened up, smoothing the plain print dress out over her broad thighs. He’d known of course what was coming. “Sunday’s the eighth of the month. Mebbe … mebbe it’s the end a the world!”

“Oh yes. Your husband’s note.”

So she’d explained again about that, had told him what had been happening at Evening Circle. He’d heard the pressman Carl Schwartz’ voice out front saying good night to Annie — like Lou, he called her Anus Poopa — and it had set him to thinking of Carl’s disaster story, the assault on Dinah Clemens. Miller could still picture vividly the room as it was the first time he went there. Aqua-blue with pink and white lily pads, the walls; bed an old iron antique, lumpy mattress, a single sheet stretched tautly on it. Dinah had a certain sense of order. There were pillows and blankets in the wardrobe, which she’d got out later. It had been Ox’s idea.

“Willie Hall? That’s the fellow who used to be Oxford Clemens’ buddy at the mine, isn’t it?”

She’d said it was, talked about Willie and his wife Mabel, Oxford’s late foster mother Marge Clark. Miller, watching Clara, had realized she had something in common with Dinah — not just the rawboned hillbilly part, but something attractive, too. Also had realized he was getting a hard-on. “It was Willie’s idea, Mr. Miller,” she’d said, “to meet at Mr. Bruno’s.”

“Why this Sunday, Clara, and not some other month?” Why had he called her by her first name, why the tenderness? Horsey woman, well along in years, tough reddish hands, not his type at all, and yet there was this throb between his legs. Maybe it was just the beer.

She’d told him why she was counting on February, but he could see she was troubled, not all that confident. He had listened to her voice, hearing Dinah Clemens. They’d gone the night they won the regionals. Five green guys ages fifteen to seventeen, Miller the youngest. Ox had taken them in the back door so they wouldn’t have to face any of the old guys in the bar who might recognize them. Ox had kept insisting that Tiger go with the one called Dinah. It was the one thing Ox had been set on, and Miller hadn’t seen the point in arguing. He’d assumed Ox Clemens knew better than anyone which one was best, and if it was all some kind of gag, well, hell, he didn’t have to go through with it. That in actuality it had been the very opposite, had been virtually an act of consecration, Miller hadn’t found out until they were climbing the back steps to her room, the girl telling him she’d heard so much about him from her brother. “And then I read about that there shepherd boy, Mr. Miller,” Clara had said, “and it all seemed to fit.”

“And you talked with—?” He’d realized then that he had a cigarette between his lips. What the hell. He’d lit up.

“I went by right after the meeting and asked, and his sister she said, sure, come along, we’ll be expectin’ you. Y’know, Mr. Miller, I think Mr. Bruno he already knows!”

“It’s possible.” When he’d glanced at the large shadowy space between her knobby knees, he’d been repulsed by a sense of a-sexuality there, yet the erection had kept drumming away. What was it? Was it plain sincerity that was exciting him? Or only the provocation of his waterjugs? He’d undressed by the bed. Dinah had hung her few clothes in the old wardrobe that leaned up against one aqua-blue corner, had frocked her strong freckled shoulders with a pink robe. Miller had looked at Clara’s shoulders: yes, she almost certainly had freckles there. “Will Abner Baxter be there?”

Clara had slumped a little, relaxing some of that raw aggressiveness, her taut belly briefly softening. “I dunno, Mr. Miller. I hope so.”

“Is he a real minister, or—?”

And she’d commenced to tell him about how one gets the call and gives testimony of it to the local church board, and he’d kept hearing Dinah telling a young kid who was asking all the wrong questions how a girl got to be a whore, and the difference between local preachers, district ministers, and elders. Her voice had had a husky soothing quality, all the harsh sounds of the words rounded off; it was rustic nasal from the mountains, all right, bluegrass in cadence and twang, but the warmth and kindness and earnestness in it were all her own. She’d rubbed his chest and abdomen. “You’re a good boy with my brother. I’m much obliged.”

“So Baxter still has to wait a year?”

“That’s right.” Clara had seemed confused. Her hands had pressed nervously on her thighs. Of course, if you thought the world was ending, what sense did it make to talk about next year? “Well, all we kin do, Mr. Miller, is hope for the best.”

Miller had swung around to his old Underwood, had run copypaper in, and had rapped out the one-paragraph box about her proposed meeting. “I can put that on the front page for you.”

“But do ye think it’s … enough?” He’d felt a shrinking.

“Any more than that, Mrs. Collins, and I’m afraid you’ll get a lot of people you don’t want.”

That hadn’t entirely satisfied her, and he’d felt like, with Dinah, trying again, but she’d finally agreed it was the best. When she’d left, Miller had called Happy Bottom at the hospital and, holding on, had made a date. Off at nine. They’d have sandwiches somewhere, spend the night at his place.

At home later, he’d just undressed to shower when the phone rang. It was Marcella, calling to tell him of the planned Sunday night meeting, and repeating Clara’s invitation to come. Her soft Catholic voice was something else: instead of cornfields, terraced gardens, secret and undiscovered. Yes, he thought, but no, the Nazarenes were too much for him, Baxter especially, that was a pose he could never fake. So he again refused but pretended great interest, and asked her to tell him afterwards all that happened.

Hanging up, the phone cord snaked momentarily around what Happy called his gaff — already starting to dance at the sound of Marcella’s voice and the vision of Happy here, soon, the speared whale, white tail flipping — then slipped off, just a touch, a taunt, just enough to bring his entire attention to bear briefly on that obstreperous machine, filament and didymous anther, feel himself that instant only an extension of the mechanism, accouterments of defense and motion: sperm carrier. It wasn’t sex that whipped him, whipped them all, it was the spook behind sex, that thing that designed him, reshaped him, waked him, churned him, thought for him even: Jesus, when was the last time he’d committed a wholly rational act! He felt the engine drive his legs to the bath, hoist him over the edge, felt his balls sensitizing his fingertips as he turned on the water, his prick reach for the soap, heard the tubes boil and sigh as the hot water struck and soothed. Wesley Edwards had once chided him for his “romantic attachment to rationalism.” Rationalism indeed! Christ! Old Edwards would laugh his ass off if he knew!

5

“God,” said Tommy Cavanaugh, alias Kit Cavanaugh, alias the Kitten, known in the bleachers and back seats as “the boy with the paws that refresh,” youngest son of the town banker, starting forward on the basketball team and class officer, owner at sixteen of his own set of wheels, “wouldn’t hurt people.”

Reverend Edwards argued that while God was surely just and benevolent, He was still capable of righteous punishment, and that sometimes when a man thought he was being hurt, he later found out it had been for his own benefit, as when a father chastises his son, for example, or when a coach makes you go to bed early at night. Everybody snickered at that, since it was already out in closed circles that Tommy had the very night before broken training rules to take Sally Elliott out parking at the iceplant. Bushwhackers had come on a scene of some disarray, the implications of which Tommy had not, though perhaps he should have, denied. “God is good,” said the minister in that talk-down tone of his that always bugged Tommy, “but sometimes He makes us to suffer experiences we might rather avoid. Remember the stories of Adam and Joseph, of Abraham and Noah. Remember that, as good as God is, this is a God Who could say to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is—’”

“I can’t believe all those stories,” said Tommy flatly. He looked around at the class and saw that they were with him. Usually Mr. Robbins or Sally’s Dad taught their Sunday school group, and then they talked sports. Reverend Edwards was an aggravation. For Tommy, though God was a distant elusive substance difficult to envision, He was nonetheless guardian of what was good in human affairs, a kind of president, as it were. “Anyway, you said we weren’t supposed to take them literally.”

“No, that’s right, but I didn’t mean you were to ignore them altogether either. Just reflect, fellows, how God made His own Son to suffer, and how He promises a terrible judgment upon those who turn away from Him.”

Tommy knew nothing of terrible judgments. He knew that God was generally satisfied with a token pledge of allegiance once a week, a more or less solemn pause to consider the moral virtues, and that anything more than that would suppose a pride in God only imaginable in men. He supposed that some day, after a happy life on this earth, he would pass an even happier eternity in God’s country, a place spatially distant but not entirely unlike West Condon. “All I’m saying is that I think if God wants us to believe in Him, He makes us believe, and if He wants us to do something, He knows how to get the job done without a lot of faking around. A coach is just a man, you know, he may be a pretty smart man, but he’s just a man, he doesn’t know everything, but God is, well, God is God!”

Reverend Edwards smiled, as the other guys giggled and wheezed. “That’s right, Tommy, but sometimes God may think that you learn a lesson better if you learn it by yourself. As the Bible says, ‘For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields—’”

“But why?” demanded Tommy, getting exasperated. “Has God got control over things, or hasn’t He? You know, if He has to pass signals to me by blowing up a mine and killing a hundred guys almost and then not bother to tell me why, well, He isn’t even much of a coach!”

“Well now, let’s not be impertinent,” scolded Reverend Edwards, no longer smiling, chewing on his lip like he always did when he got bothered. “As for all that seems evil in this world, you’re forgetting about the devil and—”

“That’s the other team,” interrupted Tommy. “I don’t play for them.” Again the convulsions of snorting and snickering. Tommy himself giggled without being able to hold back.

Reverend Edwards looked at his watch. “Well, fellows, I thing it’s about time …”

“One thing’s been bothering me, though, Reverend,” said Tommy, “and that’s about sin.”

“Well now,” said Reverend Edwards with a sly class-is-over smile, “have you been sinning, Tommy?”

Everybody laughed. Tommy grinned, accepting the laughter as praise, having in fact set himself up for it. “What I mean is, if God knows everything, even before it happens, and has all that say-so over everything we do, well, if we sin, it must be because He wants us to sin, and if He wants us to sin, then how is it sin?” He paused, a little breathless. “If you see what I mean.”

“Yes, I do, Tommy, though I’m afraid it gets us into the doctrine of predestination,” said Reverend Edwards gravely, again consulting his watch, “and I doubt we can cover all of that in the two or three minutes we have left. But let me say that, as Presbyterians, we do not believe that man is without free will. Perhaps, Tommy, God in His infinite wisdom has granted man the one freedom to turn away from Him, and that this is what is really meant by sin.”

“Oh yeah? Well, why would He want to do that?” Tommy asked, and when the minister showed no signs of answering, added, “I don’t know, I can’t see giving up something you already got or playing spooky games like that with people who are too stupid to know what’s going on. If it’s all so indefinite and weird and shaky like you say, well, that’s a pretty scary idea.”

“I think God is a pretty scary idea,” said Reverend Edwards softly, and he smiled. The bell rang and they all went outside, even though it was cold, eighth day of February, to horse around ten or fifteen minutes before they had to go to church.

“Comin’ at you, Kit!”

Tommy pivoted to receive the morning’s church program, wadded into a loose ball, as the guy who had pitched it made a hoop behind his back with his arms and faded like a football end. Tommy the Kitten mock-dribbled, wheeled, cupping the paper ball in the broad long-fingered hand that was his on-the-courts trademark, and hooked it gracefully through the receding hoop, bouncing it off the guy’s butt below.

“Hole in one, Kit baby!”

“Well, a hole in one is better than no hole at all,” Tommy gagged and they howled with laughter. Old standby of his Dad’s. His father was, in fact, at that very moment on the other side of the church lawn surrounded by the older guys. They were laughing and that meant his Dad had a new story. His Dad was a great storyteller, if not the greatest of all time, but he never told a sacrilegious joke, and he never told a story that made fun of West Condon. Those two things went together for his Dad: the community was sacred and religion was there to keep it so. For Tommy, both were pretty boring and restrictive, but he didn’t really mind either. If you really had to, there were ways of getting around both. The ice plant, for example, was outside the city limits. His Dad, he thought, had a few pretty old-fashioned ideas, but everybody’s Dad did. For one thing, he would always lecture Tommy that although property was in itself a kind of virtue, it carried with it an equal responsibility, and Tommy could never get it out of his mind that he would have the property, whether he was responsible or not.

“Hey, you seen Kit’s girl? She’s a real dog!”

“Whaddaya mean, man?”

“Haven’t you seen how she drops her pants whenever she sees his bone?”

“Ow!”

Another thing his Dad had told him was that the girls would only come to him as clean as he went to them, and he had found out that this wasn’t exactly true either. That little Elliott girl, for example, as far as she knew from the way everybody joked around about him, he was over in Waterton or had somebody in his back seat every night and had syphilis and everything else from so much sex, and yet there she was, letting him drive her right out to the ice plant last night, popping into the back seat with him, and, my gosh, not knowing anything about anything, just letting him do what he wanted to do, a complete dumb cherry, though really kind of nice, and only if he had known what to do, known for sure, why, he could have made her right then and there. Even as it was, they had had a pretty hot time, but finally he got a little scared. He was afraid of making a mess of things. One trouble was, he never felt like going out with a girl unless he could like her well enough to marry her, and if he liked her then he didn’t want to hurt her any way. Of course, Sally Elliott came from a good family, her Dad being the Chamber of Commerce secretary and all, so even if something did happen it couldn’t be too horrible. Yes, he was a darned kitten, all right, and the more he thought about it, the more it made him mad. Boy, Tiger Miller wouldn’t wait around — you gotta grow up, man!

“Hey, Kit! What’s worse than your old man with a jag on?”

Tommy thought. “I don’t know. Your girl with a rag on?”

“Naw!” the guy howled through the laughter. “Your old lady with a jig on!”

Tommy laughed with the others, but he didn’t like the joke. He was sensitive about “old lady” jokes ever since his Mom had got humiliated last year in the newspaper. It had really made his Dad sore, because he thought at first Tiger Miller had done it on purpose, and here he had been the one who had brought him back to West Condon in the first place and then to pull a rotten trick like that. Tommy had been badly upset by the event, since three of the people he loved the most were involved, but finally it turned out that Tiger probably wasn’t at fault.

Actually, though none of his buddies knew it now, Tommy had received his nickname upon Tiger Miller’s return to the town. He was about eleven or so when Tiger came home, and everybody said then that Tommy was going to be just like him, and they started calling him Tiger’s Kitten. Now it was plain Kit, and when anyone asked, he would say it was the girls who had started calling him Kit Carson, the Irrepressible Explorer. After graduation, he looked forward to playing on Tiger’s baseball team in the area semipro league. Even though Tiger was a pretty old guy now, he was still the best first baseman in the league and a regular.400 hitter. Tommy was glad he had learned to play shortstop, because they would have a chance to play together.

Tommy noticed Sally Elliott over by the vacated Sunday school building, staring over his way. “Excuse me, men,” he said, catching the wadded program and flipping it back into the guy’s crotch, “but my services are in demand.”

“Hey, Kit,” one guy whispered, “you getting some of that?”

“Well, uh, let’s say I’m looking into it.” He strolled out of their laughter and over toward the girl. Wow, just seeing her standing there so awkward heated him up — he hoped it wasn’t going to show. Man, it had to happen soon! And she was so nice, there was something really soft and great about her. If only she had known the score, and he — well, he knew what it was that held him back. Sometimes he envied those poor bastards with their nobody fathers. Man, they could do it in full public and it wouldn’t matter.

Charlie Bonali, making laborious toilet, listened to his old man in the living room bitching and moaning about his bad luck. Well, he was a goddamn failure and he wouldn’t admit it. Just about everybody Charlie knew was a failure and that was the goddamn truth, a bunch of saps. Everywhere he looked, nothing but saps. And his old lady was even worse, trying to drag him off to Mass and yap-yapping about the horrors of hell. Charlie had skipped Mass this morning and had had to take a lot of guff off her and he was still sore about it. Man! he’d sure got dropped by a pair of squares! Showered and shampooed, Charlie stood naked in the bathroom, rolling on deodorant and applying cologne. He cocked his dark brow and curled his thick lip down. “You handsome fucker!” he said and flashed a white toothy smile. Held it. Looked closer. Yeah, they needed brushing again.

Saps. God, the place was rotten to the core! Pray, pay, and get blown to hell. Jesus, when would they ever learn? Take the disaster. Okay, so his old man got out, but what the hell was he doing down there in the first place? And old Ange. There was a smart one. Thousand laughs, punch in the ribs, knew all the answers. Now he rots, burned black to the bone. Smart, very smart. And now what was Charlie’s old lady saying? That Uncle Ange was lucky: he’d been to confession the Sunday before. Charlie nearly laughed out loud. He could hear old Ange himself say it, it was Ange’s favorite line: “Lucky, my lily-white ass!” It was hard to figure. A dumb guy gets nailed up on a goddamn cross, and they all think that’s so great, they want to get up there and hang with him. What a bunch of misery-loving nuts! Man, that was one line Charlie Bonali was not going to stand in! He didn’t even know if he could stomach another Easter season around this dump. He had cleaned his fingernails and toenails with a brush in the bath, and now trimmed them with a clipper. He had one foot up on the stool, his bare ass to the door, when his kid sister Angie knocked.

“Aren’t you out of there yet?” she demanded. “You’re worse than a girl!”

“Come on ahead, if you’re in such a hurry,” he shouted back. He hoped to hell she would, she’d shut up then, and he stood a little straighter just in case she did.

“Not with you in there!” she huffed and went away.

He sighed, put his foot down, filed his fingernails. The old man was howling about all his hard work in the mines having brought him to nothing but a big fat dead end, a favorite crybaby routine of his these days, and how there was no justice in it. The old man was very hot on justice and injustice, and thought a man should get what he worked for. Jesus God, he was dumb.

Charlie fingered tonic into his wavy black hair, devoted ten careful minutes to a strand-by-strand arrangement of it. Damn hairline was edging back, he was sure of it. Work, my Jesus. Well, Charlie could tell the old man things. If a punk weighed in at a hundred pounds, could he play tackle on a varsity team? Hell, no! And take it from a big man. Some guys had it, some didn’t. So much for justice, old man. Now, the guys that had it, the smart guys, how did they get it? By being tough. None of your bellyaching about justice, man. If the other guy was born dumb or weak or sick or poor or old or unlucky, well, fuck him. Make him work for you, make him kiss your ass, that was the message from the cross. Charlie flexed his meaty shoulders, smashed his fist into his palm. Yeah, man. Snapped his fingers, the old sign for action.

He brushed his teeth, leaning up against the lavatory. The sleek pressure of the cold enamel delighted his rod and groin. As he looked down to spit, though, he saw that his belly ballooned out over the lip of the sink. Goddamn beergut, he was going to pot. He stared glumly at that pale bag, shaggily coated with curly black hair. Another sign of the bad times. All he did now was drink beer and sometimes pick up some middle-age stuff in one of the joints. They had to know a lot of tricks or he couldn’t even pop off, he was so depressed. He had to get out of here. Nearly all his buddies who graduated with him last year were gone now, and the ones who’d stayed were in worse shape than he was. The new high school kids looked like little babies, like that bitchy little runt of a sister of his, and the upper-class girls acted scared of him. Jesus, he was looking like an old man, that’s what. He sucked in his gut and whacked it hard with the butt of his hand. Have to toughen up, goddamn it! He whacked it a couple more times, then looked away irritably as it sagged again.

He pulled on his clean T-shirt and repeated the ritual of the comb. Couple of his buddies had joined the Marines. Shit, that sounded pretty stupid, but maybe he ought to, too. Something to tide him over until he found his way to the top. If he hung around here any longer he was going to go off his nut. By God, why not? He’d do it, he’d join the goddamn Marines and get away from his old man and his old lady, away from the bitching and nagging and away from the mines and West Condon and God and all his fucking paraphernalia. He flashed the smile. Yeah, man. Then, reluctantly, he pulled on his shorts.

Thou didst crush the head of the wicked,

laying him bare from thigh to neck…

One difference between Nathan Baxter and his father, now the Reverend Abner Baxter of the Church of the Nazarene, was that while his father believed in the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people (or anyway all saints), no matter how it had to be accomplished, and as Jesus Christ, he preached, had intended, Nat Baxter recognized no property rights at all. “Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” At the high school gymnasium the Sunday of the mine disaster, Nat’s eye saw and coveted a beautifully gnarled black hand that lay, carbonized and unattached, among the bodies and other refuse, and, covertly, his hand grasped it, stuffed it in a paper sack.

For a long time before, he and his little brother Paulie had played Batman and Robin, flying dangerously through the trees, destroying wild beasts, and doing God’s will amongst the ungodly. Bad guys were not always easy to come by, of course, and sometimes, to keep the game going, Robin himself had to display a streak of perversity, so he could be dealt with by the hard arm of the law, but there were usually some little kids in the neighborhood they could catch and tie up and bring to proper retribution. Or, if not, they could almost always talk their sister Amanda into it. She was ten and bigger than Paulie, but so weak that Paulie — Robin, that is — could usually catch her and pin her down by himself. The trouble was, she sometimes tattled, but that only added danger to their game, and whenever she did, she always knew she would get it double next time.

Paulie had grown a little too smart, though, about playing Robin; he seemed to consider that it was even better than being Batman. So one day, as a lesson, Nat had shot a real robin with his beebee gun and had made Paulie watch it die. “Me, Batman,” he had said, standing over the bird. “You, Robin.” The bird was still blinking its heavy gray lids, but it had stopped trying to fly. As Paulie, scared, squatted down close to see where the bird had been hit, Nat had placed his foot on the bird’s head and slowly crunched its skull in. That had stopped Paulie being cocky about the part he played, but also it had almost stopped the game altogether. Paulie was too big a baby all the time.

But finding the hand had solved all that. That Sunday, when he came home, he put on his sweatshirt, and pulling his left hand up into the sleeve, carefully fitted the left cuff around the wrist of the dead hand, holding it inside by the bone that stuck out. He left a note where Paulie would be sure to see it: Beware the Black Hand! and then waited until he had him alone in the bedroom to spring it on him. Paulie screamed and nearly fell into a frothing fit. Nat could hardly keep from giggling. Lowering his voice in imitation of their father’s, he warned Paulie to keep quiet about it; if he said anything to anybody, the Black Hand would get him. When, later that evening, Paulie got his peter whopped by their father’s razor strop, Nat told him it was God’s punishment because he had acted so scared he had almost given it all away. But, Nat said, he had proven himself, and now he could be the assistant to the Black Hand. What did he want to call himself? Paul suggested the Black Finger, but Nat rejected the idea: if they painted it black with ink, everybody would see it and ask about it. Paulie said, what about the Black Peter? That was where God had hit him, and you couldn’t see that. Nat agreed, provided Paulie would promise to be careful and wash it off every time before their mother gave them their baths.

So, after that, the Black Hand and the Black Peter stalked the neighborhood. It was a million times better than being Batman and Robin, because now they were on the other side, and they could do whatever they wanted to. They stole and put poop on porches and tortured victims and broke bottles and burned birds they shot in gasoline and one night they strangled Widow Harlowe’s cat. With ink, Nat drew pictures of the black hand on little pieces of paper, which they left behind whenever they completed a really good job.

They began making plans for initiating Amanda, but their father was home almost all the time now, what with the mine closed and the sermons he was always having to prepare, and they were afraid about her tattling. She was their father’s favorite, and he could get pretty rough if he thought she was being victimized. But then, one Sunday night early in February when he’d had the hand just about a month, both their parents had to attend some important church meeting called by Widow Collins in some man’s house, a wop man named Mr. Bruno, and they left Franny in charge. Nat now had the idea that his father did not like Widow Collins anymore, so he put her on the list for future visitations. Once their parents had left, their big brother Junior wandered off to town to play the pinball machines, and then one of Franny’s girlfriends came by and they went for a walk, so Paul and Nathan had Amanda to themselves. An opportunity like that could not be passed by. Pitilessly, the Black Hand and the Black Peter struck.

6

A month of anguish and ordeal. A month of hope. Oh, the upward straining! Oh, the despair of nonfulfillment! Rarely had conviction so wholly failed her. Struck down, Clara Collins wept. Hardship afflicted though her life had been, always there had been something, or someone, to comfort her, to guard her from grief’s last defeat. Always in crisis — even at the worst a month ago when Ely got killed, and earlier when Harold died in the war — she had discovered, through her enduring faith in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, new inner rivers of resolve. But now, in this strange house, in inexplicable legion with these strange persons, at this strange and empty hour — emptier than she had ever conceived an hour could be — of midnight, the midnight that cleft the eighth of the month of February from the new ninth, as Abner Baxter hurled his implacable curses and all her friends walked out on her, Clara suffered a total collapse of strength. Everything just dropped out. Even faith failed her. She could not pray. It was as though they had walked out taking her very spirit with them, and now the hollow shell of her could but sit, utterly powerless and forsaken, in this bewilderingly darkened Italian living room lit only by its irreverent television — sit whimpering like a lost child.

The hour had been striking still as she followed them out of Giovanni Bruno’s bedroom, through the dining room with its alien pungency, into the shrouded blink and rasp of the living room where the old father sat, foul-smelling and raking his throat, staring mindlessly at an old movie, followed them, held by a mere thread to the edge of the awful cliff, to the very door. Out they had marched, indignant, inflexible, even as though frightened, the Baxters and the Coates, all those people, the widows Lawson and Harlowe, the Willie Halls and Calvin Smiths, the Grays, Gideon Diggs, everybody, all the friends of the faith she had known and so devotedly served, even her truest friend Betty Wilson. Out! If only one could have—“Please!” she had whispered desperately to Betty, and Betty, crying shamelessly, had begged her forgiveness, then left with the others. The thread parted. She dropped, head spinning. Nearby: a sofa. It received her. There she wept.

And the worst of it was: she no longer felt Ely’s presence. Throughout this month of terror and trial, he had stayed by her side, had seemed closer even than he had been while living, had guided her, inspirited her, given her strength and singleness of purpose … and now he was gone. Gone! Ely! How? How had it come to pass? “Puffed up with conceit!” Abner Baxter had cried, passing through the door. Oh no, dear God, it was not so!

So utterly, so frankly and wholeheartedly, had she believed that the portentous thing was truly happening, that now it was as though it had happened and had left her behind, behind in the strange-scented emptiness with its blue flickering light and tinkling hollow voices. She had not doubted, no, indeed all her life had seemed to come to bear on this moment, all good Ely had taught her, and all the signs this month — especially his suffering — had insisted upon it. “For our light affliction, which is for the moment only, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory, because we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen!” So many indications of the Spirit at work! Ely’s message and the appearances to both him and his companion Giovanni Bruno of the mysterious white bird, then the startling coincidence of the story that appeared in the evening Chronicle—had not the whole world seen it? — about the shepherd boy who had been visited centuries ago by a white bird that had also changed into the Mother Mary, telling him then to lead a Holy Crusade. Even little Elaine’s innocent gift at Christmas of the small porcelain statue of Mary with the bleeding heart now seemed almost terrifying in its hidden portent. Then, too, there was poor Eddie Wilson with the broken back, suffering like Ely a saint’s end, dying in Sister Betty’s arms with Ely’s name on his lips and something like “God” before — and he had not even been near Ely in the mine! And what of the puzzling “black hand” slaying of Mary Harlowe’s cat? Was it not another sign? So clear! So foreboding! And how excited Willie and Mabel Hall had become when she showed them the note! Willie had turned pale as a ghost, told Clara he had stayed home from the mine that night just because it had been the eighth of the month. Oh, true! true!

And with such seeming irreversibility had it all proceeded! The Evening Circle meetings so well attended, so much spiritual excitement, the anxiety of all to learn — not even Brother Abner’s momentary sullenness could dull their zeal for the Lord and their eager faith in Ely! “Forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus!” Yes! yes! they had been as one! She and Ely had lived among them, mostly hardworking mining people, almost all their lives, and they had responded ardently to her call. Sorely afflicted, they had found hope in a faith renewed by love: her love and Ely’s. The eighth of the month! The moment had grasped them all, each and every one! Even Abner Baxter, swept by the current, had called on them all to “run with patience the race that is set before us!” and had preached in church on the faith of the prophets. Like a thunderclap of doom had come his inspired message the week before: “And by faith Noah, being warned by Almighty God concerning events as yet unseen, he took heed and, moved with a godly fear, prepared him an ark to the saving of his house, and by this he condemned the world!” Dear old Gideon Diggs had leapt right up in the church and cried out, “Lord! I believe!” And the whole congregation had stood with him and prayed as a body. And it was these who had come, rejoicing … and had left, reviling.

Why, it had not even been her, but Brother Willie Hall who, when informed that Giovanni Bruno was too weak still to attend their special February eighth meeting, had made the motion to assemble this night in the Bruno home. In spite of doubts expressed by Abner and a couple of the menfolk, Giovanni Bruno’s presence had seemed somehow crucial to them all. She had met him and so had reassured them that, though silent and in his illness withdrawn, he had shown himself no less profound and sensitive than Ely had so often said he was, and Betty and Mary had backed her up. But a Roman Catholic? No, he was not one, and she’d told them of his enthusiastic response to Ely’s teachings and had reminded them of his vision of the white bird—Ely’s white bird. Aye! Aye! Unanimously, they had agreed, and Clara had obtained that very night, from the man and his sister, the invitation. The way was made straight.

And then, finally, the best of all possible signs: almost none had stayed away, not even Abner and Sarah Baxter, and all had come with fear and great joy in their hearts. “The darkness is passing away and the true light already shineth!” But what was this? She had seen that there were no children, as if by agreement they had all been left at home, and if tonight were—? But it was Abner’s work, she had learned — what was it had turned so true a man? And Clara had prudently avoided making an issue of it. Meek Mary Harlowe had ducked her eyes on greeting, and Betty Wilson had seemed fretful, anxious to speak of something, but the press of time had not allowed it. A few moments, then, at the outset, of awkward silence and muffled introductions, the harsh unresponsive stare of Giovanni—“He’s got a fever,” Clara had alibied — and his sister’s gentle but faintly hostile shield, the aroma of medicine, of bedclothes, of something foreign, something like sin, yes, there was sin here, wine and television and tobacco and Roman Catholic pictures and crosses, and the sister, sensuous, too pretty really; and not to mention the long preliminary march from the front door through the living room with its disconcerting noises of senility and illicit entertainments even before getting to the bedroom, and then the Nortons — oh, why had they come? — he kindly enough and at first conversational, but that brittle icy woman, so openly annoyed, so imperiously silent, refusing to participate yet placing herself at the very head of Giovanni Bruno’s bed — what did she think they wanted? What did she fear?

But her people had crowded in and soon the room was as if the world and they as if its people, united in faith. A natural reticence at first, of course, but Clara had marshaled them quickly to her side. Emboldened by the truth she carried and the grace upon her, she had led them in opening prayer, beseeching and exhorting them to open their hearts to Christ Jesus and earnestly prepare His way. For in just such manner, behind shut doors, He had appeared to the Eleven, had He not? Yes! Yes! “Oh why are ye troubled? And wherefore do questionings arise in your hearts?” None rise, Lord! No! None! “For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night!” Yes! He comes! He is coming! “When folks say, ‘Peace and safety,’ then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall in no wise escape!” Come, Lord! Come! “Oh spirit of holiness, on us descend!” Their voices rose in fervent song. “But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief, for ye are all sons of light!” Amen! Amen! “For God appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ!”

How they’d worshiped! How they’d praised! Knowing not the form of the event, they sought only a readiness and a unity of spirit. Sister Tess Lawson, so slow to submit, had fallen to her knees to confess her sins. Ready, Lord! Clara, on her knees, had thought then of her friends in distant places, had begged God that He have mercy on them and others who could not be present. “In Him it is always yea!” Giovanni Bruno, too, though silent, had been ever watchful, joining them, she could see, in spirit, trembling faintly as they called in tearful joy upon the Lord. “For the Lord hisself shall come down from heaven above! with a shout! with the voice of the archangel! and with the sound of the trump of God! and the dead in Christ shall rise first!” After ten o’clock! Oh dear God! They sang, they prayed, they read. Brother Gideon stood and broke into inspired prayer, admonishing them to rejoice in the Lord always and in all ways, and to “put on the whole armor of God!” His melodic old voice rose and, falling all to their knees now, they chanted their amens. Clara, in her blur of terror and joy, saw in one brief alarming moment all the frustration and anger of the terrible powers of evil in the glittering eyes of Mrs. Norton — knew suddenly with whom she contended! “And, above all, take up the shield of faith, wherewith ye kin quench all the fiery darts of the evil one! and take the helmet of salvation — yes! and the sword of the Spirit! yes! which is the word of God! Oh sisters! hear me! brothers! pray! Pray at all times! pray in the Spirit! pray in the Glory! pray in the name of Lord Jesus! ‘If ye shall ask,’ He says, ‘if ye shall ask in my name,’ He says, ‘well, that will I do!’ And rejoice! rejoice in the Lord always! I say, rejoice!”

Eleven chimed the wall clock. They sang. “That Old Rugged Cross.” Her daughter Elaine, at her side, lifted her sweet timid voice in courage and pride. “Oh Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land!” Tears welled in Clara’s eyes. Oh, Ely! Ely! Ezra Gray called for repentance, and Sister Thelma Coates led them in a new wave of confession of love for the Lord Jesus. And Clara read Ely’s message aloud and Giovanni Bruno clapped his hands as though in benediction and even in that hard woman’s eyes the anger dimmed and Elaine called, “Oh Pa! Pa!” and Brother Abner, whom Ely himself had converted and baptized, even Brother Abner joined them then with all his heart. “Behold!” he thundered and they all praised. “The Judge standeth before the door! The coming of the Lord is at hand!” They shouted and wept. “Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, he will pass away!” And they clapped and cried in unison with him. “Come now, ye rich! Weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you!” Perspiration pocked his pale brow and his jowls shook with righteous fury. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God! And them that hear shall live!” Yes! We shall live! Mercy! “But woe to him who heapeth up what is not his own! him who getteth an evil gain for his house! him that buildeth a town with blood and establisheth a city by iniquity!” Woe! Woe! Yes, Brother Abner! Amen! Clara’s heart leapt: 11:45! “For, I tell you, he shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God!” Oh Lord, save us! Oh Brother Abner, tell us! “And he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb!” Abner paused to breathe and Sarah Baxter’s whimper trickled into the gap: “Have mercy on the children, Lord!” But Abner roared above her: “And the smoke of their torment goeth up forever!” Yes! We shall see it! “And ever!” Repent! Clara felt suddenly a something, a hand, gripping her elbow! Assured now, yet possessed with a holy fear, she turned: but it was only her little Elaine, tears washing down her pale cheeks, bravely smiling—

“But do ye beware, my friends, of false prophets, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ!”

Clara turned, looked, appalled. The room, as though itself a living body, shocked and terrified, fell silent, its whole breath caught. Abner Baxter stood, shook his head, the red hair wild as a lion’s mane, and glowered down upon her. No doubt: it was she he meant! Something empty and hollow bloomed and began to grow in her. Five minutes remaining still, and what was he—?

“But be not deceived: God is not mocked!”

“Abner!” She could hardly believe it. “Abner, they’s jist five minutes! Don’t close your heart agin the Spirit, Abner!” Her voice was hushed and faltered. “Ely said—”

“I tell you what the Lord says, woman! He says: ‘Woe unto the foolish prophets that follow their own spirit and have not seen nothing!’ Now you listen, Sister Clara! The Lord He has not sent you, and you’ve made all these here people trust in a lie!” He paused, this man blessed by Ely’s love and lifted up by Ely’s blood, paused: for the dread hour was near upon them.

“Who are you to judge another’s gifts?” asked a gentle voice with a calm, a mildness, strange to this awesome hour. With unbelief, Clara saw that it was Mrs. Norton who had spoken.

Abner Baxter glared, astonished, at the little woman by Giovanni Bruno’s bed. “You shall see for yourself!” he bellowed, and taking his wife Sarah brusquely by the arm, he turned to leave the room. At the bedroom door he halted, spun on them once more. “This day shall end and the false prophecy shall be disgraced! Do you hear me? You will be put to shame, Clara Collins, and so will they all who stay here with you!” And, with Sarah, he departed.

Roy and Thelma Coates hesitated just a troubled second, then followed them out of the bedroom. The clock began to strike the hour. “Wait!” Clara cried. “In the name of Christ Jesus, wait!”

But none had waited, not a one. With each throbbing chime of the midnight hour, they had stood and left her, slowly at first, uneasily, lacking conviction, then, as though somehow fearing to be in the house after midnight, more and more hastily, until at the end they were running, the men clumsily light-footed out of their mining boots, the women scraping and clacking their heels across the wooden dining room floor, carrying their coats, Clara running after, pleading, and Abner’s chastisements roaring back at her from the front door like a terrible tide she had to struggle against, until, with the last hollow knock of the hour, she found herself alone, alone and weeping like a child, betrayed, crushed down, and for a long time, as she lapsed lifeless on the sofa, the last peal of the clock echoed and resounded in her head like a mockery of trumpets. Alone. Alone and forsaken in a foreign place. Forsaken even … even by Ely.

The voice, then, was in the air, speaking, before she heard it. She stored its syllables in her despairing mind, then contemplated them. “Have you forgotten, Mrs. Collins, what the Bible says? ‘Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,’ it warns, ‘nor lose courage when you are punished by Him. Consider Him Who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.’” The woman stood in the open doorway between the living room and dining room, the light at her back, only a pale bluish flicker from the television playing on her face. Elaine crouched stricken near her against a wall, soft sobs barely audible breaking from her small chest like fitful punctuation. “Now, will you please come back? Giovanni has asked to show something to you.”

She lacked all strength to resist. Mechanically, walled in by her grief, Clara lifted herself from the couch, took Elaine’s frail shoulder, followed Mrs. Norton back, through the dining room, into the bedroom. It was empty, but the heat and odor of an anxious massing were still present. Giovanni lay, as before, on his bed, propped by pillows, but now a Bible — Clara’s own Bible — rested in his lap. With his finger, he was pointing to a passage. At Mrs. Norton’s urging, Clara approached him and read. It was the Gospel according to John, chapter one, verses ten and eleven: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not.”

“Giovanni, to whom do you mean this to apply?” asked Mrs. Norton. “To Mrs. Collins?” Giovanni Bruno nodded solemnly. “Indeed perhaps, each in his own way, to all of us here?” Something in her voice of awe, a kind of God-fear sound, when she spoke to him. And again he nodded. Mrs. Norton turned to her, and Clara observed now a patience, a compassion, in her face, a face, she saw instantly, that had known hurt and suffering like herself. “As Jesus is said to have told His disciples, Mrs. Collins: ‘If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.’ Marcella dear, is there any coffee?”

The girl smiled openly. “Yes, I’ll get some. Do you take cream or sugar, Mrs. Collins?”

“No, but Elaine—”

“We’ll bring everything.” The girl took Elaine’s hand, and together they went to the kitchen.

“I … I’m sorry,” Clara said, addressing no one in particular, except God Himself maybe. Her eyes were still full of tears, but she felt all cried out. “I don’t know. I don’t understand. I thought … but, well, you seen it. I jist don’t—”

“Giovanni Bruno, hear me!” The woman was again addressing the sick man, and again that hollow sound to it. Clara watched, not knowing quite what to make of it, yet fascinated just the same. “Is there any reason why … why nothing has happened tonight?” Again: the solemn affirmative nod. “Is it because … is it because there were perhaps hostile forces of darkness present?” Giovanni Bruno nodded. The woman relaxed, sighed, turned again to Clara. “It may be, Mrs. Collins,” she said, “that our night is not yet over.”

The two girls returned, smiling as though at something just said, Giovanni’s sister bringing the coffee, Clara’s daughter Elaine following with a tray of cups and cream and sugar. For the first time since the mass exodus, Clara was reminded of the other presence in the room: Mr. Norton, chubby and humble-spirited, stepped out of a corner and came over to accept a cup of coffee. He smiled cordially at Clara as he spooned three heaps of sugar into his coffee and added cream. “I hope you’re feeling better,” he said.

“I’m feelin’ a mite like a fool,” Clara confessed frankly.

He smiled again at that. “Well,” he acknowledged in a familiar drawl, “I don’t know anybody who has expressed himself more eloquently on being a fool for the truth than the apostle Paul himself.”

“Well said, Wylie!” avowed his wife, and Clara had to admit, too, that it was so. She sipped the hot black coffee, finding it good. The girl Marcella helped her brother, lifting a cup to his lips. He was apparently still very weak. It was a little curious how he had got ahold of her Bible, in fact. Elaine, sitting meekly by the Bruno girl, smiled over at her, and Clara smiled back. “Who is this Mr. Baxter?” Mrs. Norton asked. “Do I understand that he is the minister at your church?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Clara said. “Now he is.”

“But your husband was the minister before.”

“Yes.” She felt the tears returning, concentrated on the coffee.

“What does the Bible say, Mrs. Collins? I confess, I’m not very good at quoting it offhand. But doesn’t it say something about those who preach from envy and rivalry?”

“Yes, they’s something like that, I think. But you mean … you mean, you reckon Abner’s jealous of—? But Ely … he’s passed away, Abner ain’t got cause to—”

“True, Mrs. Collins, but you live still, and, through you, in spirit, lives your good husband yet. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes. Yes, I allow it is. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” For the first time, the vague hostile rumblings of the past month, especially those touching her leadership of Evening Circle, began to make sense to her. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before?

There was a silence, then, as they drank their coffee. Clara began contemplating the bitter walk home to their empty house. Mrs. Norton glanced over at Giovanni from time to time, and, absently, Clara soon found herself doing the same. What? Did she expect something? Marcella poured more coffee. And then the doorbell rang. Everybody started, looked wonderstruck at each other. Marcella went to answer … and returned with Betty Wilson!

Betty burst weeping into the room and came to take Clara’s hands. “Oh, I’m sorry, Clara! Lord, I jist don’t know whatever come over me! I was skeered is all! It was — oh, Clara, please, I’m—”

“That’s okay, Betty,” Clara said. “I almost felt like goin’ out on myself myself.” With that, everyone smiled a little, and Betty stopped her crying. “How about a cup of coffee?”

“Well, I …” Betty wiped her eyes, glanced around her now, uneasy in the presence of these strangers. “Ifn you think … ifn you think it’s all right …”

“Of course it’s all right, Mrs. Wilson,” Mrs. Norton said warmly. “We’re happy you have come back. It’s a very good sign.” Dr. Norton carried over a chair. Marcella brought coffee.

And then it happened.

Giovanni Bruno lifted his hand.

Mrs. Norton, with a gasp, flew to the foot of his bed.

Dr. Norton stood rigidly, expectant.

Marcella set the coffeepot down, slipped over by the bed.

Weak but yet resonant, Giovanni Bruno’s voice entered the still room for the first time: “The coming … of … light!”

Mrs. Norton drew a quick sharp breath. Clara stood, felt Betty and Elaine fearful at her side. “When?” asked Mrs. Norton.

There was a long pause. Giovanni’s eyes moved among them, returned to stare upon Mrs. Norton. “Sunday …” he said, “… week.” He dropped his hand.

Clara started to speak up, to ask what this was about, but Mrs. Norton held up her hand for silence. “The coming of light?” she repeated, and Giovanni nodded. “Sunday week?” Again, he nodded. “Giovanni Bruno, hear me! Is there anything … is there something more?” A pause. And then he shook his head no, the first time Clara had seen him do so. The movement made his hair splay out on the pillow, and Clara was astonished to see how really long it had grown. Mrs. Norton relaxed, but when she turned from the bed to face them, Clara saw tension and worry on her face still.

“What is it?” asked Clara, though she had already begun to grasp it. Though frightened, she was ready: she had been tested, she realized, and found true.

“I don’t know exactly, Mrs. Collins.” Then: “May I”—she fingered a small gold medallion that hung around her neck on a chain—“may I explain something to you?”

Clara nodded. She sat, in awe, but feeling Ely close at her side once more.

7

Vince Bonali stopped up at the Eagles one night for a whiskey, keeping nothing at home but beer these lean days. From the minute he walked into the place, he was reminded of old Angelo Moroni, and from then on he couldn’t get his mind off him. They had gone to school together, hunted women together, broken into mining and drunk together, were best men at each other’s weddings, had worked their ways up simultaneously to be facebosses out at Number Nine. And they had always teamed up to play pitch and pinochle. Ange with his hat tipped down to his nose, Vince deadpan with a mouthful of cigar, unbeatable goddamn combination: that was mainly what hit him when he walked in.

Sal Ferrero was shooting pool with Georgie Lucci. Vince carried his whiskey over, sat down on a stool to watch. They bandied sober hellos around. Sal and Angie and he used to make a trio, ever since Sal married Ange’s sister. In recent years, Sal only worked as a repairman in the mine, and in a different section at that, so they’d kind of split apart, but family functions always saw them together again, and he and Sal had seen a lot of each other since the disaster. Sal was a small wiry guy, kind of Jewish-looking, but a good goddamn man, knew how to joke around with the best of them, always on hand when help was needed. He was one of the first guys down into the mine after the explosion, told Vince later he’d mainly gone down to look for him and Ange. He’d found Ange, okay. Lucci was one of the four guys in Vince’s gang who’d panicked after the blast and run out without knowing where they were going. Lucci and his buddy Brevnik had lucked out. Lee Cravens and Pooch Minicucci had gone the wrong way. Tomorrow, Vince had to deliver the relief checks to their families. Happy Valentines. He didn’t look forward to it.

“Want in?” offered Sal, straightening up. He had just muffed a shoo-in on the ninespot.

“No, thanks,” said Vince. “I get a bigger charge outa watching the exhibition.”

“Then keep your eye on this’n, Vincenzo old culo,” growled Georgie down the length of his cue. With a soft thuck, followed by a tight pair of clicks, he pocketed both the nine and the fifteen, then proceeded to clean the table.

Sal plunked a half dollar on the table while Georgie was still lining up the last ball. “Never could do any good on Friday the thirteenth,” he said.

So it was, Friday the thirteenth.

“Find anything yet?” asked Georgie, leaning into his shot.

“Not yet.” Vince had found himself caught up in an odd sense of nervous exhilaration the past week or so, but it was starting to fade on him. What kicked it off was saying out loud what he’d wanted to say for thirty years: he was through with coalmining. He’d put in a couple applications around town, talked to different people, boasted how he was commencing the new life, fifty years or no. Everybody’d agreed that yes, by God, he was doing the right thing. Took a lot of nerve to try to learn new tricks when you were staggering into your second half century, too; they all appreciated that. In fact they sometimes harped on it so much, Vince would get a little jittery. Just what the hell could he learn to do? he’d ask himself; then, just as quickly, he’d shove the dumb question aside: let’s see what they ask him to learn first.

Georgie plucked the coin off the felt, emptied the far pockets as Sal racked. “I hear Guido Mello got on at the garage where Lem Filbert’s working,” he said, and chalked his cue.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Vince said. He’d tried there, asked too late. Awful lot of guys seemed to have the same idea he had.

Vince’s kids, the two still at home, Charlie and Angie, had showed right off they were pleased, had talked up the change, they made big plans for the future. Charlie, actually getting halfway friendly to him for the first time in the kid’s useless life, would flash his big toothy smile and ask from time to time what had turned up. Vince always returned the boy a healthy line. Give the kid a little ambition by example. Began to consider taking him fishing when spring came on, Charlie had never taken an interest like the other boys, go upstate for a couple days maybe, sleep out. If he’d just stop snapping his goddamn fingers.

Georgie broke the racked balls with a tremendous splat. Vince himself preferred to break soft, but Lucci liked the wide-open game. “Pretty big show last week,” Lucci said.

“Yeah?” asked Vince mechanically. Heard some cards rattling loosely against each other over near the bar, then the flick flick flick of the deal. Caught himself glancing around for Ange.

Lucci, trapped in the wide scatter of balls, had to use two cushions to get at the one, sitting like a pale orange near a sidepocket. He escorted the ball with twists of his hips, grunts and Italian obscenities, but missed just the same. “Yeah,” he said, picking up the chalk. “I think the least our Big Number One Hero could’ve done is share some of that fucking loot with his old buddies.”

At first, Vince didn’t know what the hell Lucci was talking about. Wasn’t paying attention. “Oh, you mean Bruno,” he said after a moment. “Well, buddy, those are the breaks.”

Sal stared across the green expanse of the table toward Vince, then looked down as though studying his shot. Vince knew what it meant. Sal was feeling it, too. Things were upsidedown. Self-consciously, Vince swallowed down his whiskey, moseyed back to the bar for another.

He leaned on the bar awhile, staring glumly into his sweating glass, wondering why the hell he didn’t just go on home. Felt out of place. Like an old man at a kids’ party. What was wrong? He had tried to talk it out with Etta, but she never said anything. That’s the way she was, he hadn’t expected otherwise, been just like that for the thirty years they’d been married. She’d absorb his harangues and projected joys into her big-spread 300-pound body, return some little joke or other, then leave him to make his own decisions. True, he sometimes wished she’d turn on a little enthusiasm once in awhile, but on the other hand, whenever the kids with their interminable questions began to get to him, it was a large relief to have her friendly silence around.

They had both of them broken all the old family traditions, Etta the German ones, Vince the Italian, when they got married. Her folks over in Randolph Junction weren’t so bad, though they hardly ever got over to see them, but Vince’s old man had nearly pitched him bodily right out of the goddamn house when he found out. Finally, things had settled down, of course, as they always do. Etta was Catholic at least, helluva lot better one than Vince or most of his family for that matter, and that had made it easier on Mama. She worked hard, had got all the kids through their catechisms and their schoolwork, kept them clean and looking neat even through hard times — and they’d known plenty — never failed to keep hot food in the whole family. So, eventually, his family had got used to her, made stale jokes about the difference between potatoes and pastas, even slipped and spoke Italian at her sometimes, and then they’d all laugh. Underneath, it probably pissed Etta off a little, Vince figured; she was still a German, even if her name did come to be Bonali, and it seemed like sometimes she got the idea they did it as a kind of insult. But Etta had decent manners, always knew when to take it easy; really, by God, they got along fine. And he felt troubled now that he couldn’t give her more to hope for in her old age.

When they married, Etta was a pretty exciting catch, tall and ripe-bodied and country fresh, though making a family had quickly ballooned her into the big woman she was now. Together, the two of them had brought off seven kids, all of them still alive and all well reared — well, all but Charlie maybe. The first five were married, living in different parts of the United States, and Angie, the youngest, was still in high school. It was Charlie who really burned Vince’s ass, just swaggering around all day, snapping his fingers, cracking his knuckles, dangling a butt in his thick lips — but still, goddamn it, Vince understood. He understood how it was to grow up in a house where the old man was out of work half the time and where there didn’t seem to be any real future. As Charlie himself had put it, hurting Vince more than the kid knew: “You saw how Ange got it. That’s the real future, man!”

A chair scraped behind him, someone called out his name. Vince took a drink, lazed around, keeping one elbow on the bar. Rattle of cards. “Chair open, Bonali,” came the twang. Chester Johnson, toothy hillbilly, another guy from Vince’s shift, but a different part of the mine. They were all hanging around up here, Jesus, the whole damned mine. What there was left. Johnson fluttered the cards in a loose-wristed shuffle. “Wanna sit in as my partner a hand or two?”

No, thanks, Vince thought, but there was something in the soft tease of the shuffle, persuasive presence of jacks in that thin deck, that could set the moment aright if not the times … and next thing he knew, he found himself straddling an old metal folding chair, staring half-blind at harsh little cardboard faces who this night said just nothing to him. Johnson kept yakking away, couldn’t keep his goddamn mouth shut five seconds, talked off every play he made, kept overbidding. Vince lit a cigar, glared through the hovering smoke at Johnson.

“What really grinds my ass,” Johnson was whining, “is that outa ninety-eight possible guys, that fuckin’ crybaby had to be the lucky dolly.”

Vince looked up sharply. The other two guys said nothing, stared at their cards. So at least he wasn’t the only one, that was plain. He’d been feeling guilty about his resentment at the fanfare surrounding Bruno, but maybe if the other guys like Lucci and Johnson felt like he did, there was cause. Still in his miner’s clothes, still black with that stinking soot, Vince had made his visit that night to the gymnasium, had gone there to see Ange Moroni’s cadaver. One of four long black lumps laid out side by side with a fifth in a rubber bag. On a tarp on the basketball floor. Ange’s uppers were missing, black eyelids half open, showing a watery white stuff below that didn’t look like eyeballs. Vince, though he rarely did now, had prayed for Ange. And for himself and all the other guys.

“Jesus, Bonali!” cackled Johnson. “You remember that fuckin’ poem?”

“Three,” snapped Vince, cutting him off. Both red jacks.

“Aw, four,” Johnson drawled, topping him. Tipped his scrawny head one way, then the other, shrugged, grinned. “Spades, I reckon. Sure hope you got the jig, buddy.” They went down fast. Vince shuffled, cracked the cards roughly. “They makin’ all this big fuss, but shit, I bet he never knowed what hit him.” Johnson pushed on, the others nodding absently. Theme of the week apparently. Harsh nasal voice that pricked the ear: “Too many good goddamn guys got it.” Vince’s hands shook as he dealt the cards around. Johnson watched. “Guys like old Lee Cravens and old Ange Moroni and—”

“One good thing about Moroni,” Vince butted in. “He knew how to keep his fucking mouth shut in a card game.”

Johnson leaned back on two chair legs, stared at his cards a moment, then flipped them down on the table. “I dunno, boys, I think I’ve had enough,” he said, flicker of a grin crossing his wide lipless mouth. “Air’s got a mite sour.”

“Suits me,” said Vince, and shoved his chair back. Tossed down the rest of his whiskey, walked out. Friday the thirteenth. Felt rotten, really rotten. Hated Johnson, hated Bruno, hated even himself. Down the hill, man. “What a fucked-up world!” he muttered.

Even with the welcome money in his hand, Vince got no fun out of the idea of visiting the Minicucci and Cravens homes next morning. Stirring up the ashes, that’s all. He’d seen nearly all of the families at the mass funerals about a month ago, had steered clear of them since. Just didn’t feel comfortable, didn’t know what to say, knew they couldn’t help but resent that he had got out.

Pooch wasn’t married — as old Ange used to say: why waste all that artillery in just one little mousehole? — but his folks more or less depended on him, so the charity committee had awarded them a full share of the money. Vince tried to take care of the business out on the front porch, but they dragged him on in, said it was too cold, sat him down in one of their overstuffed chairs, gave him wine, talked about Pooch and how he’d looked so fine at the funeral, and how badly they did need the money.

The room was overheated, bore that weighted odor of old people, old food, old dust, made Vince recall his Mama the last couple years before she died. Vince only understood about half the Italian. Slipping away from him. The old woman sucked her dry withered lips, spoke of God’s ominous ways, how important it was to be ready at all times, one never knew, un giorno o l’altro, life was brief and inscrutable. Vince nodded gravely, growing sleepy. Si, una bolla di sapone, he acknowledged, a soapbubble, his Mama’s pet commentary on life in this world. Vince fidgeted in the chair to keep awake, covered up best he could, finally had to admit he hadn’t been to Mass in over three years. Tre anni! Ever since the kids had grown up, he said, but, yes, she was right, he figured to get started back, you never knew, any moment, a qualsiasi ora.

“Ecco il momento!” the old woman said, wagging her finger. And as she rattled on, Vince remembered his old blind grandmother telling him about hell when he was a boy. She was an expert on hell. If Vince ever ended up there, he was sure he’d find his way around, she’d imbedded forever in him a mental map of the place. He had nearly forgot, but now he found he was missing not a word of the old lady’s Italian, it was all there, he felt once more the claws on his flesh, the pincers plucking out his nails, foul mouths sucking out his eyes. Rapt but edgy, a boy again, he listened. The dwarfish television set pitched a silent nervous image into the room. Pooch’s old man was nodding off. “Tre anni!” He apologized, thanked her for the wine, left somehow oddly grateful.

But in West Condon’s old housing development, hell lost its charm, turned gray, and he grew old again. Old and tired and cold. He’d got overheated in the Minicucci living room, and the cold was bitter. Get this over with, get home, take a hot bath. Wanda Cravens met him at the tattered screen door with a baby in her arms, toddler hanging on from below. Another kid whined somewhere inside. Never a very big girl, she now seemed more drawn than ever. Must not weigh even a hundred pounds, Vince thought. He felt sorry for her, glad he was bringing some money. He told her what he was there for, and she asked him on in.

Her living room was a wreck of cluttered junk, far from clean, far from warm, winter crawling across the bare floor, cockroaches scrambling alongside the wallboards. It looked more like a house after somebody had moved out than a place someone was living in. Vince found an arm of a waddy chair he thought would hold him, sat down gingerly against it. Wanda dropped the baby and toddler on a ragged throw rug in a corner with the cockroaches, shooed the older one, boy about three or four, on out the door, turned wearily toward Vince. She sure had it tough, okay. With a thin white hand, she pushed back a snarl of sandy-colored hair from her forehead, accepted the check he held out to her. They exchanged only a few words. Her voice was thin, had a hopeless lost distance about it.

“I’m sure you can use it, Wanda,” he said clumsily.

She stood in front of him, a wooden table behind her. She sighed, nodded, then turned around, shoved aside the gray heap of clothes on the table, laid the check down, leaned over to examine it.

Vince tried to come up with a couple remarks about what a swell guy he’d always thought Lee was, dependable and goodnatured, but her dress, the starch out of it, hung with limp descriptiveness over her small hips, and talk about old Lee seemed weirdly irregular. The back of her left thigh touched his knee. “Lee was one of the greatest guys I ever worked with, Wanda,” he said, confused by the silliness of it. “It was a honor …” She leaned further over the table onto one elbow, closed her eyes, rubbed them. Jesus, the poor kid! Her back trembled. Her legs were apart and the dress, folded wispily down the cleft of her buttocks, vibrated gently with her crying. If that was what she was doing. Vince stood up, unavoidably against her, laid his broad dark hand on her back. The bone was right there, hadn’t felt a back like that for years. “I … I guess I’d better be shoving off.” But she butted back against him with a kind of sob, and he thought less about shoving off. His fingers slid to her waist and she curled around like an old routine into his arms, gazed sadly up at him. Her eyes were a little red, but probably from the rubbing, he got the idea right away she was faking it. Thing that surprised him most was how he was staying so goddamn cool. Felt keyed up, okay, but like a spectator caught up in some movie.

Her tiny chest heaved a little against him. “Vince!” she whispered, and it could have meant just about anything. Gentle-boned face, eyes a little close together like old Lee’s, cheeks dotted with mudcolored freckles, mouth a soft thin line with a slight overbite, her teeth a bit — They kissed. Vince yanked her in tight against his hard and heated body, clutched the whole of her ass with one big hand, went grabbing down for the lean thighs, felt the taut flesh snap back at him through the wilted cotton, a tautness he’d nearly forgot in women. Wished he still had the little finger on that hand, felt like he was missing something. She broke away, buried her face in his chest.

He looked down at her hair, coarse and dry like yellowed grass. An act, he thought, but he said, “I’m sorry, Wanda, this is all wrong. Hell, I’m not the kind of guy ever to …” He tried his damnedest to think of old Lee, that swell guy, but just couldn’t bring him well to mind, smelled the hair, odor of sweet soap, reluctantly let go her neat cranny, but she held on to him.

“Don’t leave me, Vince!” she whispered.

“Wanda, listen—”

“Vince, I’m so terrible alone, you cain’t know how it is for me!” That sounded real enough. The toddler had left the baby squalling on its back in the corner, had crawled over to where they stood embraced, and now had a grip on Vince’s pant leg. “Vince, it’s Valentine’s Day!” she whispered into his mouth, then jammed her lips against it, her hand pulling mightily on his fly. He jerked up her dress, drove his hand down between her thighs as the three-year-old banged in through the front door, letting in a sharp gust of winter.

Charlie announced that night he had joined the Marines. They were sitting in the living room watching television, Vince and Etta, and Vince said, “If you’re gonna butt in on the program, why don’t you tell us something important?” Both he and Etta made a lot of wisecracks about the Marines being the right place for a shaggy zootsuit bum like him, and Charlie wised back that at least he’d get a decent meal now and then, and he wouldn’t have to sweat getting nagged at every five minutes. Vince snorted, said he sure had a helluva lot to learn about the Marines. Charlie shrugged, tucked a butt in his mouth, moved out the door snapping his fingers. Vince watched him parade out, then turned to Etta to remark what a useless cocky grandstander that boy was, but checked himself just in time. Etta was crying. “Hey! what’s the matter, chicken? Was it something Charlie said? I’ll go—”

She shook her head. “I don’t care how bad they are, Vince,” she whispered through her tears. “I just hate to see them go.”

Angela came in from her bedroom where she’d been doing her homework. Music from her radio piped in to muddle with the television. “What’s Mom crying about?” she demanded.

Vince stammered a moment before he realized he wasn’t guilty of anything, then said, “Nothing, baby. Go on back to your studies.”

“I believe I have a right to know,” she insisted.

Vince supposed she’d got the line out of some goddamn movie. That girl could get under a man’s skin sometimes. “It’s just that Charlie is going into the Marines, and your Mom—”

“Oh, is that all! Well, that’s hardly something tragic! I’d say it was good riddance of bad rubbish!” She clamped her pencil between her neat white teeth, then apparently thought better of it and fitted it carefully over her ear, fiddled with a hairpin. There was a pause, filled only by an overemotional argument on TV and music from Angie’s radio that sounded to Vince like some guy having a public orgasm. Etta checked her sniffling, smiled feebly at Angie, and the girl went back to her room.

Vince walked over, patted Etta gently on the shoulder. “Care for half a beer?” She shook her head. Vince figured maybe they ought to try to work something up tonight, been a long time and he felt she deserved a share of his rediscovered potency. But later he fell asleep watching an old movie on the set, and when he woke, Etta had already long since turned in.

One night in bed with Wanda not long after that, he happened to mention that he had a boy going into the Marines. “You already got a boy growed up, Vince?” she asked absently.

He swallowed, felt it shrivel. “Yeah,” he said. Decided not to mention the other six.

At the bus station on Ash Wednesday, last week of the month, they made stale jokes about the snowstorm predicted and how Charlie, the lucky bastard, was headed south. Vince noticed how much taller the boy looked all of a sudden, and then, trying not to be nervous, said good-bye to Etta instead of Charlie. And from then on, there were just the three of them in the old house.

8

March tore into West Condon on a sudden savage snowstorm. The lawyer Ralph Himebaugh, brooding over the sinister state of affairs in the world, pushed through the swirling drifts, fur-capped head down butting the wind, feet secure in heavy galoshes, but still cold, cold to the bone. In the whine of wind and snow, there was little to see or hear. Ralph was a man removed, and it was as though the world were remarking the continuing aggravation of his isolation, as though nature herself were persecuting him, the victim, the sacrifice, the outcast. Disaster whistled at his wraps and portents stung his ears.

Discord, famine, war, cruelty, deaths, rape — couldn’t the fools see it? Every day, mounting, tragedy upon tragedy, horror succeeding horror, oh my God! It was too plain! Yet their blindness was a part of it, was it not? For years it had been clear to him, the pervasive current of mantling terror, discernible through the scrim of false and superficial reportage, and for years now he had kept records of its progress, scrapbooks of calamities and disasters, deathtoll lists, maps of its movements. Everything about it absorbed him: the scope, the periodicity, the routes of passage, certain correlativities, duration and instantaneity, origin and distant derivative effects, expenditure of energy, parallelisms and counteractions, and, above all, its wake of mathematical clues. Oh, he was wise to have done so! For although at the outset the incredible complexities had pitched him into a hell of confusion and despair, by disciplining himself, by literally chaining himself to the task and pummeling himself to greater wakefulness, he had at last mastered the necessary technology. No, it had been no delusion, not at all! Almost immediately, he had discovered the steady intensification of the disaster frequency, the irreversible course toward cataclysm.

Suddenly, as his own mind was on the terror, a car fluttering through the snow about a hundred yards away went into a spin. Ralph stood transfixed, appalled, as the black machine, mindless, yet possessed by its own inner necessities, lazed through wide chaotic circles in the unbounded street, then bumped up and stopped against a telephone pole that reared out of the shifting snow like a black cross. Oh my God, my God! How much time? A man got out, startling Ralph. He had somehow forgot to expect a man. Ralph felt the old impulse, the impulse to flee, but he overrode it; the recent years, while sobering, had engendered a new kind of courage. It was what emerged and took over, he supposed, when the old irrational constructs of hope and their false comforts were cut away. He stumbled through the snow toward the man, wind nearly blinding him.

The man looked up, smiled, shook his head. “Damn!” he said. “Just like a merry-go-round!”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” The man laughed nervously. “But I’m gonna leave her stuck right where she’s at and walk the rest of the way. Boy! She really come in like a lion, didn’t she?”

Ralph nodded, but did not return the stupid smile. The man’s indifference to the experience angered him. They shook gloved hands, and the man left him. His heart still racing, Ralph considered the car and the pole. When the man was out of sight, Ralph glanced about to assure himself of the snow’s effective screen, then kicked a dent in the door. “Goddamn you!” he whispered. The rest of the walk home, the machine coiled and spun in maddening sweeps before his eyes.

On his porch, he mechanically checked the mailbox, then remembered it was Sunday. He tugged off the galoshes and stepped inside to greet his cats, Grendel, Nabob, Melpomene, Nyx, and Omar. They were hungry and so attended his presence. Nabob twisted and coiled, rubbing against his moving leg. It was not love. Their emotional range was between indifference and pure hate. He could accept that, yet at times it hurt him, for, against his will, he could not help loving them. He turned into the kitchen and Nabob nearly tripped him up — he brought his foot down on a paw. He removed hake from the freezer and put it to boil. He poured them some milk, but they lapped at it distractedly, their minds on the fish. Nyx sulked. He slipped her a piece of chicken liver. Nyx was a big pure-black animal with a long straight nose. Ralph feared her. “You hot black bitch!” he whispered at her.

While the fish thawed and cooked, he sat down at his desk in the front room and recorded the car accident in the P.O. — Personal Observations — journal. While constructing an essentially objective system, Ralph did not entirely reject subjectivity from it: the mere fact that it was he who had assumed the responsibility of this task was in itself a subjective element, and he recognized it. It was not proven, after all, that the force was mindless — the purity of its mathematics would in fact argue the contrary — and were it not mindless, he could well expect to be regarded as its enemy. He unwrapped last Sunday’s Guardian and Times, sent to him airmail, clipped out pertinent articles, recorded data from them.

The cats protested. He returned to the kitchen, poured the boiling water into the sink, dumped the fish on the cats’ plate. With his foot, he blocked Nyx’ approach to the plate, made sure the other four had got their share. She clawed his ankle, but he laughed and held her back a little longer. “One day …!” he warned her.

At his desk once more, he withdrew his scratchpad, did some hurried calculations. Still, the augmentation, the emergent numerical pattern, the cyclical behavior. Incredible! He sighed, chewed meditatively on the pencil, then began the task of carrying his figures all the way out. No, there was no escaping it. At the present rate of severity increase, mankind would necessarily be overcome within the next six or seven years. Six or seven years! Meticulously he rechecked his figures, and with graph paper he described a varied set of conceivable curves based on the slightly different scales he used in the different journal categories. And each time, it resulted in the same forecast — or suggested an even earlier date. Grotesque! It would be grotesque!

This had happened before, of course, signs leading to the immediacy of catastrophe, and dates had in fact been passed, but always he had uncovered some fundamental error in the schematism itself, some critical factor omitted in ignorance from his computations. For example, at the very beginning he had simply listed all events as numerically equal, an appalling lack of sophistication that now amazed and embarrassed him in retrospect. But time and error had brought wisdom. Now, he was convinced, the system could not be more complete. There was no hope in it, given the human condition, for omniscient finality, to be sure, but it had to be taken seriously.

The phone rang, startling him. What now? But it was only Jim Elliott, the Chamber of Commerce secretary. He was working at home on the new industrial brochure and needed information on certain zoning ordinances, which of course Ralph had at the office, not here at home. Elliott was a stupid arrogant ass. Himebaugh explained the problem. “But listen, Jim, if you really need the ordinances, I’ll go get them for you.”

“Aw hell, no, Ralph! Not out in that fucking mess. I just thought you might, you know, have them at hand, or something.”

“No, but I really don’t mind. It is a nasty day, but—”

“Don’t think twice about it! Anyhow, there’s a game on TV, and I’m sick of this goddamn brochure anyway. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Well, if you insist. But do come in the first thing tomorrow. You know I wish to help all I can. How’s your family?”

“Oh, everybody’s fine, thanks. Fat and lazy. Sally’s sore at me because I wouldn’t let her go out in the storm to a movie, but I think she’ll get over it.”

Ralph chuckled cordially, chewed irritably on his pencil. Would the fool never shut up? He and the mayor were the two men Ralph hated most in this stupid town. They never wearied of imposing on his good will with their infantile little games and incredibly insignificant problems. And, God, they monologized without cease. Now it was that hateful brochure. And it was useless, utterly useless. They would never recover from the mine disaster, of that Ralph was sure. But what good would it do to tell them? They were all sick.

“See you tomorrow then, Ralph.”

“Yes, I’ll keep the day entirely free for you, Jim. Give my best to your good wife.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that. Hang loose, now!”

Ralph laughed lightly, as he supposed he was expected to do, and cradled the receiver. The idiot! The cats, fed, had composed themselves about the house. One of them scratched in the sand in the pantry. Ralph stood at a window and gazed out on a gradually darkening world, vanishing under the deadweight of snow. The wind had diminished, but the snow still sifted down heavily. There would be accident suits and insurance claims.

He poured himself a snifter of cognac, brushed Omar out of the armchair, and curled up moodily in it, alongside his several scrapbooks and records. He started back about seven years, flipped slowly through, disaster after disaster, pausing meditatively at unusually significant events or peculiarly grotesque ones, letting his mind drift unanchored through the accumulating morass of woe and rot and grief. Slowly the black shape grew. It came to bear, as it had every day for nearly two months, upon the explosion at the Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, seemed to hover like thick black fumes over that ravaged pit. What did it mean, why was it that single horror so impressed him? He knew full well it was purblind to place exaggerated emphasis on one event merely because of its proximity, yet he could not rid his mind of the possibility that this disaster, this one in particular, provided him, him in particular, some vital urgent message: as though — as though he had been the intended victim and had in some incredible manner escaped, and now he had one more chance, one more chance to find the way out, to discover the system that would allow him to predict and escape the next blow.

The number ninety-seven, the number of the dead, was itself unbelievably relevant. Not only did it take its place almost perfectly in the concatenation of disaster figures he had been recording, but it contained internal mysteries as well: nine, after all, was the number of the mine itself, and seven, pregnant integer out of all divination, was the number of trapped miners. The number between nine and seven, eight, was the date of the explosion, and the day of the rescue was eleven, two one’s, or two, the difference between nine and seven. Nine and seven added to sixteen, whose parts, one and six, again added to … seven! Sixteen was, moreover, in the universe of the line, a fourth-dimensional figure, hardly less important than sixty-four, one more than the product of nine and seven. That product, sixty-three, also added to nine. And yet there was more: Though the acceleration curves for, as an example, energy expenditure and estimated cellular destruction were not the same, yet all of his curves tended to approximate the common parabola produced by the graph of y = x², on which, as the value of x is increased by one in a series of whole numbers, the value of y increases as the square of the numbers in that series, and the value of the difference between the successive lengths of the accelerating y ordinates forms a series of odd numbers increasing at the rate of two units between each whole number in the original x series. When the unit value of x has reached three — the quotient of sixty-three divided by twenty-one, the number of the day within the tenth sign on which rescue took place! — the related value of y becomes nine and the difference between that value and the succeeding one of sixteen is seven! It was through this astounding discovery that Ralph had been able to place himself with certainty upon the present moment of the parabola, lacking only a final calculation of the value or values of the single x unit. When he had that, he knew he would be invulnerable! And it was not beyond his grasp, for he was slowly learning to measure the area under the several parabolas, and the area-function sooner or later would lead him to the ordinate-function, provided only he could finally expurgate these area measurements of all arbitrary components, which he believed his current project of graph overlays would eventually do. His head spun. He uncurled, poured another snifter of brandy, watching Grendel licking her genitals. Suddenly infuriated, he doused her with the cognac; she started, scampered under the couch. Only Nyx could do that and not nauseate him. He poured another snifterful.

And then there was ninety-seven plus one: the infamous product of seven and fourteen. For years he had resented the emphasis placed on the number seven, supposing it to be the consequence of stupid obedience to the religionists’ texts. Only late in life did he discover that these infantile texts were actually corruptions of older and infinitely more precise, infinitely less adulterated writings, now lost, and he now willingly suffered through the garbage in search of the sources, now willingly respected the generative powers of numbers like one and seven and twelve and fourteen. Plus one: Giovanni Bruno. Who was he? Why was it he? John Brown! The very anonymity lent an unreal — or, rather, a superreal—odor to the occasion, a kind of terror, the terror inevitably associated with voids, infinities, absences, facelessness, zero. For seven weeks now, he had been contemplating a private conversation with the man. Ralph paced the living room. Perhaps he should go tonight. Yet, so much was at stake. His entire reputation in West Condon, for one thing. Nevertheless, a night like tonight, who would be out in it? Who would there be to see him coming and going? And, if apprehended, he could always explain himself in terms of some obscure legal matter. Even a will or something; God knows, the man should have a will. But how would he explain himself to Bruno himself? No, it was better to wait, to be certain, to have the questions precisely formulated. He poured more cognac, again stroked Omar out of the armchair, curled into it now with a thin jacketless book. He tried to read it, but could not concentrate. Why was it so famous? It was a pack of emotional ignorant ravings! He threw it down. The destroyer, damn it! The destroyer! They all saw it, but could not face it. Oh, the cowards! Oh, the disgusting yellow pigheads! Oh, the sniveling pissants! He again paced, cursing them, and drank his cognac. Precious ninnies! Asses! Babbling little chickenshits!

Mel came tearing through the room, Nyx at her heels, and they rolled and tumbled, bounded and raced. He shouted, but they ignored him. They tangled in the cord of his desk lamp, brought it down with a crash. Separately, they scampered, but not before he had grabbed the broken lamp and brought it down punishingly on Mel’s sleek haunches. They hid. He crouched on his hands and knees, struggling to breathe. The room seemed to be afloat. He spied Nyx. With the lamp, on all fours, he stalked her. She curled her lip, emitting a kind of vicious snorting hiss. In his hand, the broken lamp shook. “You goddamn nigger whore!” he snarled. But he couldn’t hit her. Dizzily, he stood. He got a broom, swept the broken glass into a dustpan, emptied it into the wastebasket by his desk. His hands were quaking uncontrollably. Better read something, something to forget about it, he thought, but then decided on a warm bath instead.

The water at least was hot and soothing. He lay in the tub, closed his eyes, struggled to free his mind from the terror — Was that how it would get him? Sink into his mind like a fungus? The bubbles were fragrant and oily. He let the hot water trickle into the tub to raise the temperature. It burned his toes, crept up past his ankles, advanced like a living thing toward his fork. “Destroy me!” he whispered, but it was only ritual. His mind was still in the living room, still with the graphs, still with the mine. He sat up, the water boiling hot now around his hips, and sipped cognac. “Mel!” he whispered. “Grendel!” But he got no response. He lay back. It was hot on his back and chest, and he flinched, but he stayed down. He tried to imagine the room, the fat mindless beast stalking her, circling, observing her from every angle. “Your brother deserved to die!” he hissed. He was breathing heavily, stroking, clawing, but still his mind refused to participate, still it watched him coldly, contemptuously, faintly disgusted. He sat up and turned off the hot water. In spite of a gathering nausea, he finished the snifter of cognac. He rested his head on the edge of the tub. “Oh, damn you!” he cried. He grew uncomfortable. Hastily, he soaped his armpits and genitals, rinsed, and got out.

He dried himself before the mirror, slipped into his lounging robe, returned to the living room for a cigarette. He decided to eat something, but poured more cognac instead. He pulled the blinds, turned on lights. Outside, it was dark, still blustery. He curled into the chair, patted his lap, and Mel hopped up, made herself comfortable. On her haunches, a streak of still-fresh blood. “Poor little sister!” he said, stroking her gently. Tears came, and he sniffled. He would kill Nyx someday. Yes, he would! Mel’s fur was silky against him, but she fidgeted. Smell of soap, probably. Yet he felt too weary, too wretched, to bother to go get the fish oil. He sighed, shuddered. “Oh God!” he whispered, then grew suddenly angry. “What’s the matter with you?” he cried.

He jumped up from the chair, flipping the cat to the carpet, and strode into the bedroom to dress. Enough of this babying around! He’d go tonight! To hell with the risks! He had to see Bruno and get this thing straightened out, and right now. Tonight!

9

Snow pyramided the old Chevy and drifted deep in the streets, so Miller walked over, feeling faintly ridiculous. Hark ye to the White Bird. Oh boy. In the wind, he chainsmoked, lighting from the butt end of the old the new. The snow flew, though he could see, during lulls, that not much new snow was falling. Maybe no one else would show up. There was that to hope for.

Many reasons, but all of the inopportune instant with no time to think them out, had prompted him to accept when Marcella had called to invite him: the germ of a salable story, his own everlastingly perverse amusement with eccentricity, and so on, but mostly, he supposed, it was a kind of sudden gamy wish to raise a little hell. West Condon was going stale on him, needed a spectacle. Moreover, he had been standing nude and elegantly if awkwardly protracted, having been drawn to the phone from under knowledgeable hands, and had too self-consciously seen himself as for the sweet moment suspended between two female hungers (Golgotha: that timeless ubiquitous image!). Happy Bottom, with characteristic impatience, had lobbed a pillow, bringing down his tacked-up list of ever-ready phone numbers: hastily, then, he had acceded to the request of one thief, not to forfeit the voracity of the other.

House lights laid down luminous trapdoor patches on the snow here and there, but mostly, on the walk to the Brunos’, there was just a darkness and a lot of blowing snow. A leonine first of March: which led to the possibility it might go out with the Lamb. Miller laughed, stepped up his pace, enthused once more by the chance to look in on these types. After all, they needed him, for he believed he might have been indirectly responsible for having set the date. Marcella had called him the day after Clara Collins’ eighth of February pageant to tell him all that had happened and what her brother had said, though this time she’d asked him not to print it. They were planning to meet again the following Sunday in response to her brother’s pronouncement, she had said, but Miller, already committed with Happy for that night, had suggested an alternative reading of “Sunday week”: a week of Sundays. He had had vaguely in mind seven weeks from the eighth, but it had apparently got interpreted finally, by way of Eleanor Norton’s arcane sources, as tonight, seven Sundays from Bruno’s rescue.

Marcella, who was the other and no doubt most telling reason for his coming, met him at the door, stood backlit by a dull hall bulb while he struggled with his boots. He tossed them with the others — he would not be alone — and flicked his cigarette out into the drifts, brushed the snow from his shoulders, entered. Marcella closed the door behind him, turned toward him, touching an index finger to her lips for silence as she took his coat. Her blouse, even in this poor light, was incredibly white. Alive. With it, she wore a coffee-colored skirt, pleated, a little juvenile maybe, but he was too caught up in the way her gently molded hips disturbed the pleats’ verticals to want it otherwise. She stretched up to toss his hat on the shelf above the coats, causing a new play of lights and shadows in the blouse. He touched her elbow gently, took the hat, laid it on the shelf, had the pleasure of her forearm’s lingering slide down through his fingertips. He’d forgot, in all the grosser scrabblings, that he could still enjoy things like that. He smiled down at her, feeling four-handed without either the camera or a body trained to his touch. “Am I late?” he whispered.

“No,” she said. “Mrs. Collins isn’t here yet. The others are in my brother’s room. I don’t think they’re tremendously happy you’re coming. They seem awfully afraid of publicity or something, I don’t know why.”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’ll be careful.”

She led him through the living room, behind her old father Antonio slumped in a chair before the television screen, coffee can on the armrest beside him: homemade cuspidor. On the screen, three splay-pelvised girls dressed in animal skins did a kind of warped jazz ballet, the cheap set stunting their legs. Gabriel’s sisters, no doubt.

A large fancy cake sat on the dining room table, neatly encircled by plates, forks, cups, spoons, and napkins. He asked with a gesture if she had made it, and Marcella replied with a smile and a nod that she had. An antique cut-glass chandelier with electric candles, overbearing in this simple room of simple things, provided the light, left the room virtually shadowless except right under the table. Marcella showed him to a door leading off the back of the dining room: the downstairs bedroom which had been her brother’s since his return a month ago from the hospital. She knocked. Miller licked his lips. The game was on.

The door cracked open. “What is your message?” inquired a hushed male voice, so faint Miller barely understood it.

“Hark ye to the White Bird,” Miller replied, and then Marcella echoed him. The door opened, and they were admitted.

First thing he saw was Giovanni, sitting halfway up in bed, supported by a mound of pillows. He wore dark pajamas that exaggerated his pallor, had two or three blankets piled up on him to the waist. He turned his head — one thought of it more as a mechanical toy than a living man’s head — to look as Miller and Marcella entered. The others in the room did the same: pivoted silently toward them. The room was lit by a nightlamp beside the bed and a few candles placed about; aroma of tallow. At a small table near the foot of the bed, facing the door, sat Eleanor Norton, the high school teacher who had become Bruno’s spiritual counselor, and across from her, a squat pillowy woman in a cheap shiny dress. Black: must be one of the disaster widows. But which? When she turned to peek at him over her shoulder, he found her face familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Two young boys sat stiffly in chairs next to the far wall. The doorkeeper, of course, was Eleanor Norton’s husband, Dr. Wylie Norton. And it was very quiet.

“Good evening, Mrs. Norton, Dr. Norton,” Miller said into the silence. “How are you feeling, Giovanni? Much better, I hope.” He smiled at the others, added with measured concern, “I hope I haven’t interrupted any …”

“Not at all, Mr. Miller.” Wylie Norton smiled, extending his hand. “We’re glad you’ve come!” With Norton’s welcome, there were traces of relaxation all around. The two boys stood, came over, were introduced by Norton as Colin Meredith and Carl Dean Palmers, seniors at the high school. They were both shy, slow to commit themselves in any way, but Miller spoke frankly with them, and they were soon friendly. Meredith was a tall gangly boy with loose blond hair, a pink flush to his cheeks, tendency to stoop as he walked; Palmers was shorter, stockier, had a bad case of acne, seemed more mature, more aggressive. Miller noticed Palmers’ missing tooth and asked if he were the Palmers who played guard this year on the varsity football team. The boy grinned awkwardly and nodded, obviously pleased to have been recognized.

The name of the other one in the room came suddenly to mind, and he turned to the plump widow. “Mrs. Wilson, I’m Justin Miller. I don’t know if you remember me, but we—”

“Oh, yes,” she said quickly, kittenish little whimper of a voice. “You wrote up such nice things when I lost … when I lost …” And she began to pucker up.

“Now, now!” intervened Eleanor Norton. “Please remember, Mrs. Wilson, we must all stand firm!” She glanced up sharply at Miller, partly accusing, partly as though seeking — but seeking what? Some kind of signal, or—?

Miller nodded firmly. He thought of saying something like “I’m sure that’s how Eddie would want it,” but it was just too cornball, he might start grinning, so he kept silence. He let his gaze lift past the two women toward Giovanni, fixed, he hoped, with an adequate awe. For the moment, at least until he understood better what was going on, what had happened, what was expected, it was the best he could do for Mrs. Norton. On the wall over the headboard of the bed, there was a crucifix. Other things framed here and there. What looked to be an old wedding portrait of Antonio and Emilia: something of the old woman in Marcella, all right.

“We have been discussing certain instructions, Mr. Miller,” Eleanor Norton said suddenly. She had a precise gentle voice that cut cleanly through the silence. “Instructions from … from the worlds beyond us.” She paused. Miller, coming back to the table, noticed now the book open on it between the two women, a blank book, bound, the kind used for record-keeping. “These are messages received over the recent weeks from … from them, by way of extrasensory perception.” Miller didn’t know what to say to that, so he merely returned, unsmiling but genuinely attentive, her gray-eyed gaze. This, he knew, was his worst test. Marcella’s soft proximity bolstered him, yet he felt vaguely uneasy about her presence, witness to this act of his. “We are anxious, all of us, to comprehend what we can from them, and we are quite naturally … pleased, Mr. Miller, to have with us in our endeavors the sincere interest of all fellow beings whose motives are pure and who will … that is, who will participate in our meditations in a spirit of hope and honesty and … in a positive spirit, let me say.”

“Of course, Mrs. Norton. Let me—”

“But do understand, we are not like … like evangelists, Mr. Miller. Quite the contrary. We believe in quiet unpretentious and unadvertised gatherings.”

“Sure,” said Miller. “I can understand that you’re concerned about my being a newspaper editor. But I can assure you, Mrs. Norton, that my interest here has nothing to do with my paper, and I’ll never publish anything in it unless you want me to. Unless,” he added, feeling adventurous and addressing the whole room, “we all do.”

The doorbell rang. “That must be Mrs. Collins,” Marcella said, and left him to stand alone. Miller watched her go, moving lightly, a spontaneous gladness seeming to lift her up. She glanced back at him from the door and they exchanged smiles, surprised at each other’s attention.

Miller pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, turned to offer one to Wylie Norton, standing beside him, but Mrs. Norton came up, put her hand over his pack: “Please, Mr. Miller. No smoking.” And she turned her head significantly toward Bruno, who watched them darkly.

“Of course,” he said, returning the cigarettes to his pocket. Here but a couple minutes, and he’d already forgot that the sick miner was even in the room. As for Mrs. Norton, she seemed jumpy and peremptory, but Miller guessed it was at least partly due to Clara Collins’ imminent arrival. Eleanor had had Bruno — and Marcella, too — entirely to herself until three weeks ago when Clara Collins appropriated him to her own vision. The February eighth show, as he understood it, was a kind of emotional steamroller, with Eleanor Norton finally outlasting them all and obtaining a tenuous kind of intellectual control over Clara.

After four times through the white bird routine, more ridiculous than ever from this side of the door, the widow Clara Collins strode noisily in with her daughter Elaine, the coalminer Willie Hall, and a woman who turned out to be Mabel Hall, Willie’s wife. Miller had had no idea the Halls would be here, Marcella hadn’t mentioned them, yet he wasn’t surprised, recalling his interview of Hall, Oxford Clemens’ buddy, just after the disaster. Hall, he remembered, lived by hunches.

The Halls were introduced to everyone. Talk was about the snowstorm. Some took it as a portent. The boys, also new here apparently, were introduced to Clara and Elaine, though Carl Dean said he recognized Elaine from a study hall they had together. While Elaine, hand covering her mouthful of bad teeth and small shoulders hunched, received shy attention from Meredith and Palmers, her mother swung horsily around the bedroom, greeted Bruno, the Nortons, Betty Wilson, never waiting for a reply. She seemed intent, nervous, self-important, yet respectful. She lugged a large shiny patent-leather handbag out of which she now pulled a man’s handkerchief, blew her nose stoutly. As she strode long-legged — Miller thought of trotters — over to him, he realized she was nearly as tall as he was. Then he saw that she was wearing heels tonight. White ones, odd for midwinter. Nylons, wrinkled, sparkled above the ankles with melted snow. “It’s a good thing you come,” she said to him, and he understood immediately that he would suffer no challenges from her. Somehow from the beginning, maybe because of his interest in her husband and the note, she had clearly supposed him friendly to any cause of hers. “We need folks like you here.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come before,” he said.

“Well, maybe jist as good you didn’t.” Trace of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “We had a couple purty rough nights. But this’n’s apt to be a mite better.” The Halls tittered nervously.

Miller asked about the meeting on the eighth, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it, except to repeat Bruno’s six-word message. As for the small and uneventful gathering on the fifteenth, she only shrugged, said that Mrs. Norton had received a “kinder prophecy like” that something was sure to happen this night, the first of March. Something, uh, final? Nope. “It ain’t the eighth.” He pursued further the matter of Mrs. Norton’s talents, seeking skepticism, but saw clearly that Clara was impressed by them, thought Eleanor “a fine Christian woman,” believed that it was God who had brought them all, each with his different gifts, together. “She’s been a great comfort to me, Mr. Miller, and she’s taught me more about the Holy Bible than I ever knowed before.” He wondered if she’d changed her mind about the Second Coming, but before he could ask, she was gone, trotting away from him as abruptly as she had come, her feet broad and knobby in the white pumps.

Marcella stood at his side, and in the moment they had together he asked her what exactly they were expecting tonight. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps … the coming of light.” Was that irony he heard? Was she, like him, having fun with all this? He wished to know what she meant, but feared to risk too much. Instead, he asked her why she had told him that tonight’s password was designed “to keep out the Baxters.” Did Abner Baxter have something to do with it?

“He’s the one who hates Mrs. Collins. He’s the man who turned all her friends against her and made his own wife the president of Mrs. Collins’ Evening Circle.”

“Was he here on the eighth?”

“Yes. He’s a fat man with red hair and a furious temper.” She made funny puffing gestures of fatness and fury. “He made everybody walk out and leave her alone. He’s with the enemy.”

“The enemy? Who are they?”

“Why,” she said with a smile, as though surprised he should ask, “the powers of darkness.”

He smiled in return, but it made her stop smiling, and that confused him. “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny,” he said to cover for his smile, “that a redheaded preacher should be the devil’s advocate?”

“If you saw him, you wouldn’t think so,” she said, and there was no smile at all.

Elaine Collins and Carl Dean Palmers had become engrossed in a quiet argument about religion. Colin Meredith, severed, walked over to join him and Marcella. Affected, the boy’s walk, but not effeminate exactly. The nice child, the ever-willing friend, the shy young man who would fade into the shy old bachelor, fastidious, moody, kindly, especially toward small children. He explained that he had known Mrs. Norton for several months, that she had been helping him establish contact with superior spirits. He had introduced his friend Carl Dean to her, and although Carl Dean was skeptical at first, they had both come to have a lot of faith in her. She was extremely sincere and intelligent and unselfish, and she had done a great deal for him, not so much yet for Carl Dean maybe, but she had made a whole new person out of him, leading him away from the love of earthly things to love of things of the spirit. He had brought an end to all his bad habits, and had even discovered that sometimes he did attain to a kind of communication with the other world. Well, maybe not exactly a communication, but something very much like it. It took literally hours and hours of meditation and humility and self-searching and seeking without thought, but once in awhile something happened, something really unbelievable, it was like — like a light turning on inside. Afterwards, after this kind of terribly exhilarating experience, he couldn’t explain it, or even describe it, it was beyond the capacity of human language, like Mrs. Norton always said. But, really, it was wonderful, a truly extraordinary experience — but then, Mr. Miller probably already knew what he meant. Beside him, Marcella nodded for him; she seemed pretty caught up in what this silly kid had to say. Also, Meredith said, he sometimes received — like Mrs. Norton, through his right hand — messages from his dead mother and father, but that was mainly thanks to another woman he had known a couple years before in the orphanage; Mrs. Norton didn’t seem too excited about these writings from his parents, though of course she said they were surely true. She herself, she had told him, had received her very first communications from recently dead earth people, or spirits that assumed their parts. Now, with her help, he was learning how to achieve much greater things.

Willie and Mabel Hall came over, disrupting the boy’s monologue. Marcella excused herself, left the room. “Well, as the Good Book says,” said Willie Hall, “‘the poor has good tidings preached to them!’” Hall looked at no one when he spoke, just gazed off and let fly.

“You know the Bible well?” Miller asked.

“And ‘somethin’ greater than the temple is here!’“

Mabel Hall, though not too big, outweighed her husband by a good thirty pounds and had a couple inches on him, but Miller’s first-sight estimate of her as the muscled tyrant proved far from the case. She was as submissive as Willie was impulsive, as mute and secretive as he was loquacious.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hall, but what do you think is going to—?”

“As the Good Book says, Mr. Miller, ‘in malice be ye babes, but in mind be men!’ And ‘many are called, but few are chosen’!”

It was useless, so Miller gave it up.

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong—” Marcella came in and announced that refreshments were ready. She smiled over at Miller, and he winked in return. Everyone stood and moved with polite gestures toward the dining room, sweeping Marcella in ahead of them. All but Giovanni, of course: he watched them exit, expressionless. His eyes were what you noticed: glittering, black, restless, the flesh around them sunken, making them seem to protrude abnormally.

Miller held back, let the others go ahead, and he saw, as he’d more or less anticipated, that Eleanor Norton was also delaying, fussing with her logbooks. When the others had filed into the dining room, she approached him. “I saw you were talking with Mrs. Collins.”

“Yes, for a moment. I must say, she seems very impressed by you. She says you have been a great inspiration to her.”

Mrs. Norton sighed, absently rubbed a small medallion that hung from her neck on a chain. “She’s a sincere woman, Mr. Miller, but … a frightful amateur.” She smiled up at him, accepting the sympathetic smile he returned her. “Tell me,” she continued without transition, “do you believe in communication with spiritual beings at higher levels?”

Marcella had explained enough of what had happened until now to prepare him somewhat for tonight’s experience, and he had even half expected this woman’s very question, yet when she put it directly to him, he discovered he didn’t have an answer for it. He reached again for his cigarettes, checked himself just in time. Chatter trickled in irrelevantly from the dining room. Giovanni looked on from his bed. “It’s a subject,” he managed finally, “in which I have long had a serious interest, Mrs. Norton.”

“Good,” she said simply, apparently accepting that, lame as it was. “Oh dear, we really have so much to do!” She focused on some great distance, sighed. “I do hope we shall be ready!”

He ventured: “For what, Mrs. Norton?” All he had picked up so far was that she claimed to be able to receive messages, through writing and sometimes, in emergencies, through her voice, from superior spirits, spirits at what she called “higher aspects of intensity,” and that now she had reached the seventh such aspect, perhaps the last, whence she received periodic communiqués from a teacher known to her as “Domiron.” This Domiron presumably existed, not exactly in a different place or a different stellar system, but somehow in this same space, but at a different density level, as though his atoms were lighter or something.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, after a pause. “I hope …” But her voice trailed off. She glanced at her watch, and he instinctively checked his: 8:50. “Mr. Miller?” She looked up at him. He guessed her eyes to be gray or gray-blue, though in this dull flickering light he couldn’t tell for sure. But they had that faded, indistinct, introspective quality of gray eyes. “Do you believe that Giovanni Bruno was miraculously rescued from the coalmine disaster?”

“Yes, I do.” No more hesitations, boy.

“I don’t.”

“Really? But—”

“I am convinced, Mr. Miller — more than that: I have received specific information on the matter — Giovanni Bruno perished in that mine disaster!”

What could he say? From over her small graying head, Giovanni Bruno’s eyes shone at them, as though … as though he were assenting, inciting her. “But then, how—?”

“His own mother has confirmed it. She said she saw him dead. And everyone has agreed on one thing: that this is a very different man now from the one they all knew as Giovanni Bruno.”

“Then you think—?”

“Not think, Mr. Miller! This kind of insight is never achieved by thinking!” She seemed suddenly angry. He realized that, for all her modest manner, there was something ever seething underneath. She frowned, as a mother might at a forgetful child, then continued matter-of-factly: “Giovanni Bruno died and his body is now inhabited by a superior being. This is the meaning of the … the vision of the white bird.”

At a loss, he replied, “I see,” and then, in the ensuing silence, added, “Well, I’m certainly learning a great deal!”

She assented. “We all have much to learn,” she said.

“And Mrs. Collins?”

A barely perceptible little sigh of exasperation, a pause. “We felt extremely fortunate that Mrs. Collins joined us three weeks ago. There is every reason to believe that the … the being, let us say, the being now struggling to establish communication with us through … through the body and person of Giovanni Bruno”—a thoughtful hesitation, a brief glance Bruno’s way—“might originally have intended to utilize Mrs. Collins’ husband.”

“But why do you think—?”

“The … the condition …”

“Ah. And does Mrs. Collins herself …”

Again the impatient sigh. “Grasp it? I don’t know, Mr. Miller. I hope so. But she is slow to learn, is overemotional and impulsive. And she is too hemmed in, I am afraid, by her own … her own prejudices, if I may so speak.”

“Her Christianity.”

“Yes. I have had to employ all the frightfully dull simplifications and bumbling writings to which she is accustomed in order even to communicate — I hope I don’t offend you …?”

“Not at all.”

“Righteousness and salvation, the so-called Second Coming, the terribly overworked parable of the Cross, angels and devils and sin—sin! Good heavens! Finally, Mr. Miller, we are all of us emanations of the world soul, are we not? Ultimately we all partake, like it or not, in what is commonly called the divine, and the only conceivable sin in such a case is to be willfully ignorant of one’s proper condition. Isn’t that so?”

He assented, remarking privately that that was not unlike the line by which he often made out with the reluctant.

“But what can I do? And I simply cannot share — that is, we cannot share — her morbid expectations. I admit, it is possible, at least another thing somewhat like the disaster she expects is possible, but, well, there is a logic to everything, Mr. Miller, even the irrational, don’t you think?”

“By all means.”

“I have received no single message to confirm such an extreme interpretation, though it is true, there have been hints implying something of cosmic importance….” She gazed off, her mind momentarily elsewhere, bit her lip. She seldom let go her grip on the medallion. “Mr. Miller, I cannot believe that my … my sources …”

“Domiron, I think you—”

“Why, yes! How did you know?”

He perceived an answer that would really bowl her over, but he passed it by. “Marcella mentioned …”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” She looked up at Miller, her schoolmistress sternness melting for a moment. “She’s a truly marvelous pupil, so kind and sincere, the finest in all my years as … as a teacher. We’re deeply fond of her, Wylie and I. And she is making such extraordinary progress!”

Inwardly, he frowned at that but said, “She’s a wonderful girl.”

“Yes, yes, she is.” Fadeout again.

“Mrs. Norton, I’d like to arrange for, sometime at your convenience, of course, some private instruction, too, if I may.”

“Of course, Mr. Miller,” she said, then added gravely, “It is my duty for those who ask.” She cast a glance toward Bruno, then turned to enter the dining room.

“Oh, and Mrs. Norton, what do you think, what do you believe Giovanni Bruno — or the voice within him — meant by ‘the coming of light’?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, looking at him quizzically. “But we shall know tonight. Shouldn’t we go in? I’m afraid there’ll be no cake for us.”

The coming of light! Do none of them perceive it so well as she? So plain! Her knife licks into the cake, his cake, light dances on the blade, on the frosting’s glaze, spoons reflect it, eyes sparkle with it, light decorates her laughter, her motions flow in it. Are not their pasts so shadowed as hers? Does not a storm blow through their present? Do not their morrows flash with promise? Is not this very room bursting with light? Are they blind? Are they all so old? Need they their terrors? Must they distort it? Oh, come! she cries. Yes, there is plenty for all! for seconds! take more! Gaily, she serves, pours, helps, hands, gives … gives!

Around the table a cheerful tumble of voices, forks clicking plates, compliments on the cake, modest pasts in halting revelation, the boys talking basketball and animal care with Wylie Norton: could be a party anywhere. Willie Hall, his jaws in motion as always, but now with cake damming the sound, listened, eyes asquint, to Eleanor Norton. Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Hall sat fatly on chairs, overlapping the edges, nibbling at the cake, Mrs. Hall whispering furtively into Mrs. Wilson’s ear. Miller located Marcella behind the broad shoulders of Clara Collins, delivering cake to Elaine. He maneuvered so as to catch her eye, showed her his empty hands. She smiled, stretched over the dining room table, starched blouse snapping taut, under the yellow — almost amber — glow of the chandelier, sliced him a wide wedge, laid it neatly on a plate. He knew it was unwarranted, but he couldn’t rid his mind of the idea she had baked the cake especially for him. Anyway, why not think of it that way? Watching her was a feast in itself. More than anything, it was her poise, her unfailing delicacy of movement, her radiance, open smiles, frank gazes, all without visible effort, operating on some internal principle of — well, he was tempted to say Joy. But maybe that was merely an instance of transference. Certainly he felt like blowing the goddamn roof off. She brought him the cake and a cup of coffee. “I don’t suppose you take cream or sugar.”

“No.” He smiled, a little surprised at the way she’d said it. He could hear some thin music trickling in from the television. He motioned toward it. “We can’t escape it, should we join it?” Wanted it to sound natural, but it didn’t: could almost feel the goddamn whiskers sprouting and bristling. He expected the worst.

But she smiled and said, “Okay. Let me get some coffee.”

In the darkened living room, they leaned back against a wall, just inside the door to the dining room, facing the television set. Her father sagged in his chair between them and the screen, his back more or less to them, snorted restlessly from time to time, ran his old white hands trembling through his thinning hair. There was no bandage on his nose tonight, and the large sores showed black when they caught the bluish-white glare of the television.

Miller, sipping coffee, looked down at the clasp on Marcella’s head. He couldn’t distinguish the outlines of the televised picture exactly, but the motion of the screen was reflected in it. Nervous back-and-forth twitches of light. Her hair had a fresh smell that reminded him vaguely of some distant event, something beyond his mere recollections, some fragrant imprecise time he had possibly never really known. A lock of her hair had come loose from the clasp, arched out now over her smooth forehead. She looked up and, not smiling, held his gaze. He lowered the cup. A strange thought intruded and he wondered where it came from and if it were truly a thought or already an irrevocable decision. She had large wideset sensitive eyes, he knew them to be brown, a small fine-boned — and, in sudden need, their mouths drew together, he felt her warm breath flickering over his lips just before they touched hers — and it was only a touch, a brush: plain unskilled reception, and he thought, I’m the first to come here! She held his gaze as he leaned away and they were both still for a moment. Then she smiled. Her smile broke the last bolts. He watched her dancing through his once-gloomy house.

“Here,” she whispered, and took the plate out of his hand, set it on a table a few feet away, put her cup there, too, returned to his side. She took his free hand, clasped it firmly but not in ownership exactly, a kind of eager gratitude, affirmation, and she leaned against him. He knelt, set the cup on the floor, lifted his eyes the full length of her young body, all those subtle curves of thigh and belly, and as he rose to — he thought coolly — enrich her experience, the doorbell sounded. He started, and she laughed gaily. “Excuse me,” she said, and her amused smile tweaked him faintly. “You giddy adolescent ass!” he accused himself as she walked away, but he had to grin. Goddamn, he didn’t know when he’d been so wildly high!

When Marcella came back in, she was with Ralph Himebaugh! Miller almost laughed aloud. What a night! Himebaugh! Ralph didn’t see him at first, kept his coat on, fur cap in hand, peered anxiously into the shadowed corners, blinked, twisted his cap, man being chased, nodded at old Antonio in the chair, who of course ignored the newest intruder as he had ignored them all, bumped into Marcella who had paused, squinted at the television as though seeking a clue there, eyes flicked across Miller, frowned toward the lighted dining room and its noises, whipped back on Miller, and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Evening, Ralph,” said Miller, smiling.

“My God!” stammered Ralph. “M-Miller, you—? Is that—? What — My heavens, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know, Ralph. It’s not certain. Step in and have some cake.” Couldn’t hold back the grin, flowed all over his goddamn face; hoped it looked like welcome only.

Himebaugh finally summoned the will to take another step, squinted anxiously over his shoulder once more at the old man, then again at Miller, hurried on at last into the dining room, still twisting hell out of his cap. Miller hoped Marcella would linger behind, but of course she didn’t, so he picked up his cup from the floor and followed them in. What the hell, he reasoned, there would be time now. Don’t push it.

Himebaugh was introduced to all present and, in snatches, to the general purpose of the congregation. He seemed dazed, eyes dilated still from the dark walk over, ears bright red from the cold, flabby old lips moving foolishly, unable to understand the whirl around him. A lot of commotion, as a matter of fact, in spite of the group’s professed caution. Miller didn’t quite understand it himself. Ralph stammered something inanely aimless about a will, finally blurted out he had come to see Bruno, a personal, that is to say, only a routine visit, in order to discuss his, er, his, let us say, press releases (hopeful glance at Miller), how’s that? Vision? Yes, his vision, and chose tonight by merest accident, well, not by merest accident, but he had had no idea, none at all, that there would be, that so many people, that is to say, and he almost turned back because of the snowstorm. He removed his coat, gave it to Marcella without even observing who took it, unlocked the fur cap from his hands and thrust that at her, too. She left the room with them. Himebaugh accepted a cup of coffee, turned down the cake.

Miller turned to pursue Marcella into the privacy of the hallway, but Eleanor Norton intercepted him. Her face had paled, her eyes were pinched from below with anxiety, a kind of horror or foreboding. Perspiration on her forehead. Miller assumed concern. Clara Collins loomed, alarmed, at their side. Mrs. Norton looked up at the two of them, first at one, then at the other. “Don’t you see?” she whispered. “He is the twelfth! The circle is complete!” And she moved away again, spreading the word.

An uneasy silence sank into the room. Himebaugh plunked three or four spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, stirred, spoon scraping the china. His hands trembled. Everyone watched. He glanced around anxiously at all the eyes as he sipped the coffee, his dark shaggy eyebrows arched up at the middle, asking What? What? his eyes popping with shock. Since a boy in school, Miller had known the old guy but had never seen him in this light. And in this snowstorm, with nothing to go on — Alongside Miller, Clara Collins, breathing noisily, clenched and unclenched her fists.

“Perhaps,” announced Eleanor Norton ominously, “we should return to Mr. Bruno’s room.”

Miller could hear, from the living room, guns and horses’ hoofs, tinny shouts of mock anger, soul-legend of the nation, and then the clanging voice of an announcer telling where good tobaccos come from. It was probably permitted to smoke out here, and he’d forgot. Marcella was cleaning off the table. He asked her softly what Eleanor had meant by “completing the circle.”

Marcella thought a moment, then said, “Well, there were six of us before, not counting Giovanni, and we were all supposed to bring somebody tonight. But Mrs. Wilson’s guest couldn’t come because of the bad weather or something.” She smiled up at him, returned to stacking plates. He started to help, but she shook her head, nodded toward the bedroom. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

She carried the plates into the kitchen, and Miller took advantage of his momentary solitude to enjoy a prolonged unobserved regard of the easy cadence of her hips. Where Happy Bottom pinched in at the waist, bulged tremulously in the buttocks, Marcella tapered finely, arched firmly. There was a conscious challenge, a proud taunting thrust to Happy Bottom’s stagy shamble; Marcella swung loose-limbed and light of heart, stunning but chaste. Difference between a hurdy-gurdy and a pipe’s soft capriccio. But he liked both.

He was the last but for Marcella into the bedroom. Wylie Norton eased the door shut behind him. It was 10:45. Eleanor Norton posed priestesslike at the foot of Bruno’s bed. Bruno sat as he had sat before, staring out straight in front of him, and thus, as she had planned it, at Mrs. Norton; his dark scooped-out eyes, though, now seemed blank and unseeing. Worn out probably. The others gathered around his bed: Wylie, Clara, young Meredith, the Halls, Betty Wilson. Marcella entered quietly. She touched Giovanni’s head, measured some medicine in a teaspoon, offered it to her brother, who accepted it without expression. Carl Dean Palmers and Elaine Collins hung back slightly, she in shyness, he as if hesitant to commit himself. Himebaugh, still carrying the coffee, tiptoed over beside Miller. He was breathing rapidly, abjectly terrified. The cup rattled on its saucer. His eyes blinked with a kind of nervous tic. “Wh-what for God’s sake is it?” he rasped.

“Relax,” Miller whispered. “Watch and see.” He nodded toward Eleanor Norton.

Mrs. Norton now lifted her slender arms slowly before her, a kind of benediction, as it were. He understood well enough her task: she had called this thing and was under pressure to produce; if she didn’t, she’d likely lose the mace. “Hark ye to the White Bird!” she commanded, shattering the silence and causing some to start. Himebaugh caught his breath sharply. “Giovanni Bruno! The One to Come!” The widows and Mrs. Hall whispered mewing amens. “We look to the east! We look to the west! The feet tug downward, but the spirit soars!” She had a fine voice, strong and clear. “A firmness is forthcoming! A cosmic repose! Hark ye! We avoid the illusory to seek wisdom with love! For a time, we know, is to come, and the soul will swim in the vast and empty sea of enlightenment!” Betty Wilson had begun to whimper softly. Elaine and Carl Dean had joined the group at the bed. Slowly, Himebaugh edged away from Miller’s side toward the others. “So hark ye, hark ye to the White Bird of wisdom and grace!” At this familiar angelus all the Nazarenes, in Pavlovian response, amenned. “From out of the abyss of darkness, lead us to light!”

Colin Meredith caught his breath. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but nothing came out. Instead, it was Clara Collins who cried out, “Hear us, oh God!”

“In the name of Christ Jesus!” added Willie Hall as though reciting, apparently emboldened by Clara’s cry. “As it says—”

“Hark ye to the White Bird!” Eleanor demanded, her voice pitched up a notch.

Clara, undaunted, or maybe ignorant of the other woman’s meaning, opened her mouth to speak again, but just then Giovanni Bruno lifted one hand and brought a sudden hush down on all of them. They waited. “The tomb …” he said, and it was weird how the sound emerged as though forged in some inner and deeply resonant cavity, then heaved whole through his open but utterly passive mouth, “… is its message!” Hand down.

Message, tomb: all eyes turned on Clara Collins. “Oh God!” she screamed, thrusting high her husband’s note. “The Day of the Lord is at hand!”

Betty Wilson bubbled into tears, plumped to her waddy knees, commenced to pray wildly. Eleanor Norton had paled, seemed confused, unbelieving: betrayed. Wylie watched her. Himebaugh, beside himself with panic, shrank back, found Miller’s side.

“I say, the day of salvation is upon us!”

“Yes, Lord!” chorused Willie Hall. His wife sank apprehensively to Betty Wilson’s side, and Elaine Collins knelt dutifully behind them. They chanted amens and their voices rose, and now the boys joined in.

“We must walk with God and believe!” cried Clara. “We must listen always to the white bird in our hearts! Abide in grace! The Son of God, He is comin’! We will stand—”

“Caution!” cried Eleanor Norton with tremendous power.

Even though he’d been expecting it, having realized that Clara was quoting her husband’s message and was now nearing the controversial phrase about the eighth of the month, nevertheless, like everyone else, Miller started. Clara stood transfixed before the other woman’s intensity. Betty Wilson began to whimper again, and Clara shushed her. Silence, troubled and fearful, settled, out of which the heavy breathing emerged like an invisible animal. Miller, seeking concealment, too tall to stand alone in the room without notice, found a corner chair and edged back into it. Himebaugh stood marooned in the room’s middle. The poor sonuvabitch, Miller knew how he felt and supposed he could rescue him, but was having too goddamned good a time to want to break the spell. Jesus! Lou Jones should be here! He’d love it!

“Mrs. Norton,” said Clara submissively, almost tenderly, “lead us to light!”

Eleanor turned stiffly to the chair at the foot of the bed, slowly sat down upon it. Wylie watched, frowning worriedly. No one talked. All looked on. Mrs. Norton stretched her arms forward. She placed her hands on the table, palms down, thumbs touching, fingers spread apart. She stared, breathless, at the opposite wall, and for several tense minutes nothing happened. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, her lips began to move. There was no sound except for a little hissing noise that came from them. Then it stopped. Her lips closed. Her eyes widened as though focusing on some extreme distance. The candlelight beamed off her gold medallion like a tiny sun trembling there on her dark dress. Her mouth fell open and a strange almost masculine voice emerged. Her lips closed down around the sound, almost a gargling, and produced:

“Hark ye to the new voice among ye!”

The invisible animal gasped. Eyes turned. Himebaugh came into focus. Miller leaned forward in his chair, pressing his cheeks into the palms of his hands, his hands in a kind of prayer position. A laugh leaped in his diaphragm, but he was now Ralph’s backdrop, the eyes on Ralph saw him, so he managed to keep his face poker-stiff. Himebaugh, the poor fucker, literally shook. His body seemed to shrink, his clothes to bag. His cup tinkled in its saucer. Eleanor Norton collapsed on the tabletop. A great act, but — Miller glanced quickly at the other faces — was he the only one who knew she had failed? Wylie stepped over, patted his wife’s hands. He knelt beside her, looked back over his shoulder at Himebaugh. Marcella stood, pressed against the wall at the head of her brother’s bed. Now, for the first time, she saw Miller again, and as though in imitation of him, she brought her hands together before her face. Her eyes sparkled … goddamn it, were there tears?

“I came,” said Himebaugh suddenly, his precisely mannered voice now half growl, half squeak, “if you must know”—he swallowed—“in fear of … of the destroyer!”

“Oh dear Jesus!” wailed Clara Collins, and dropped like a brick to her knobby knees: kawhump! Again the Nazarenes took over. Christ, they were irrepressible! Miller had to admit, though, that Himebaugh had, under the circumstances, performed well.

Eleanor Norton came around, opened her eyes, appeared lost. “Mrs. Collins!” she appealed, stumbling over to her. “Come! Tell me what happened!” She led the widow to the dining room, apparently eager to learn, but effectively — at last — breaking up the revival meeting. The two boys began to argue quietly, Wylie engaged Willie Hall in talk, and with these distractions the rest of the Nazarenes lost their zeal. Soon the room was full of chatter and motion again, and Miller felt free to leave his lair.

He slipped quietly from group to group. Everyone had his own opinion about the meaning of events. Wylie Norton seemed upset, but Miller couldn’t pin him down on anything. Norton was a heavy sad-eyed fellow with glasses on the end of his nose, so suppressed and polite a voice one had to lean far forward to understand him. Willie Hall quoted the Bible irrelevantly, seemed to have seen nothing that happened, proved to be little more than a desensitized loudspeaker, emitting endless textual nonsense from his self-enclosed inner world. Miller guessed that nothing in the world would really surprise the man.

Mrs. Norton returned, sought written explication from Domiron, but finally gave it up when few attended her. Himebaugh shrank to a corner and stared at Bruno. Miller wondered at the message, socalled, with which Bruno had so dramatically torched the meeting. The tomb is its message. Meaningless, yet loaded. He remembered that tomb was probably the word that rhymed with womb in Bruno’s lost poem, Bonali had finally remembered that much. Had Bruno really had Ely Collins’ deathnote in mind, though, as everyone assumed? Miller doubted the guy even understood there was such a note, wondered if he even grasped the brute fact of Collins’ death. Then, what was he getting at? If the guy were rational, he might have been responding to the night’s question: What is the meaning of “the coming of light?” with the answer: Death; or: Christ’s resurrection. But was Giovanni Bruno in any sense rational? Miller frankly thought not, not from what he’d seen so far. No, the more likely explanation was that he had heard something more or less like that from Mrs. Norton, or from others here tonight, and had produced his own abbreviated paraphrase. Miller decided he would spend some time with Mrs. Norton’s logs as soon as possible.

The two widows discussed Bruno’s grace with Mabel Hall. Clara insisted that God was indeed speaking through him—“The Spirit has took on flesh!”—and the others, though eyeing him uneasily, had to agree: it all seemed to fit, just like Ely had said. Colin Meredith was sniffling, his long-lashed eyes damp and reddened, and Carl Dean Palmers seemed irritated with him, looked embarrassed when Miller passed by. He ducked his head from the others and whispered, “I don’t see it, Mr. Miller. They’re making a lot outa nothing.”

Restlessness grew, more shifting between groups. Something unimaginable was to have happened by midnight, and now only some twenty minutes or so remained. Miller joined Marcella near her brother, but before he could ask her, she asked him. He said he didn’t know, didn’t know what to make of it. Eleanor Norton sat studying her logbook. Miller supposed she was preparing now to find the buffer message to explain why the undefined event did not occur, or how it did take place but was not properly grasped by all.

Marcella, beside him, spooned more medicine into her brother. Miller’s main wish now was to have another moment alone with her before the night’s program was over. He watched her bent back, fascinated by the narrowness of the white blouse on her shoulders and the single starched pleat, now opening down her back as though to smile. He felt he was at the brink of some fundamental change, and, strangely enough, he welcomed the sensation. Bruno himself was obviously exhausted. His long high-domed face, gleaming with a clammy perspiration, sagged, and he slumped lower and lower into the pillows. A feverish glow still lit his eyes, but his day was just about done. As Marcella leaned back to cap the medicine bottle, the curve of her hip bumped Miller’s thigh: she looked up, smiled.

Footsteps!

All started, stood, stiffened. Anxious glances, eyes agog. Short breaths. Frowns. Was this it?

“Mama,” Marcella explained. “She’s come down to turn off the television.”

Everyone relaxed some. Miller longed for a smoke. Soon. He considered that it was curious Bruno’s parents did not participate here. Just too old, probably. Carl Dean sighed, an undisguised protest — and then the whole house was rent with a terrible throaty scream!

For a moment, in group terror, no one moved.

Then, almost simultaneously, Miller and Marcella turned and ran for the door, then on through the dining room to the front room. In confusion and with frightened shouts, the others stumbled and clattered behind.

The living room was dark, as before, but for the television screen. There, a man on a dark horse pulled a kerchief up over his mouth, turned to his two companions and said, “There he comes!” Emilia Bruno whined insanely. Stiff upright in his armchair in front of the television sat Antonio Bruno. He was dead.

Lights came on. People cried, “What is it?” Miller heard himself explaining it. It was Clara Collins who first lost control. She fell in a kind of sobbing fit to the floor, calling out her dead husband’s name. Elaine started bawling. Others cried then, kept shouting, hurrying in, hurrying out. Marcella, in tears, ran back to her brother’s room. Miller trailed a short distance behind, arrived to find her weeping quietly on the edge of the bed. “Go with Mama,” Giovanni whispered, his plain voice altogether unlike that which had uttered the message. His eyes were perhaps a little wider awake, but otherwise he was the same as before.

Miller stood unobtrusively in the shadows by the door. Marcella passed him on the way out, but didn’t see him through her tears. Bruno stared at nothing. Was he smiling? In the dining room, Carl Dean was stammering, “If, if, why, if this d-don’t beat all!” Colin said, “I told you so! I told you so, Carl Dean!” They were both very white. On a chair, Betty Wilson slumped waddily. “Oh my God!” she whimpered softly. “I didn’t think it’d be like this!”

Ralph Himebaugh and the Nortons stood in the dining room on the other side of the table from Miller. He could still hear Emilia Bruno and Clara Collins keeping it up in the living room, and it looked like the Halls were in there, too. Eleanor Norton held her small face in her hands, gazed upward toward the cut-glass chandelier. For some reason, people all turned toward her. Well, had she not, by calling this meeting tonight, prophesied its denouement?

Marcella, her face streaked with tears, but outwardly calm and protective, led her old mother out of the front room, started toward the stairs in the kitchen with her, paused. The Halls, holding each other up, stumbled in, she weeping, he talking to himself.

After a long while, Eleanor lowered her hands. “Death as a sign,” she said gravely, her voice breaking, seeming very old, “can mean only one thing.” She hesitated, as though afraid to continue. A small sob caught in her chest. “The end of the world!”

“Oh no!” cried Himebaugh. “I–I thought so! I knew it! It’s what I thought all the time! It’s why I came!”

Clara Collins stood, shaken, big square-jawed face wet with tears, hair snarled, heavy mouth agape, in the living room doorway. “Yes!” she gasped. “The eighth of the month!”

Well, not the eighth, of course. Elan, Domiron, the One to Come, and time itself soon took care of that. But the course was set. And Tiger Miller had his game.

10

With the storm that hit West Condon the first part of March blew in the first distinct rumors that Deepwater Number Nine was going to be closed down. As soon as the rumors started circulating, Vince Bonali knew, goddamn it, he wanted to go back down. If you were born to be a coalminer, there was no point in fighting fate. A kind of anxious humor swept around town. Everybody made a big joke about how bad the air was up on top and how when they took baths these days they felt like they were wasting water. And then on Monday, the second, old Sal Ferrero slipped on the ice in front of his house and broke his arm, and that got everybody cracking how they wanted to get back down in the goddamn mine where it was safe.

So, as soon as the roads were cleared, Vince drove around to a few of the mines in neighboring counties. He put in his chit with the offices, looked up relatives, chewed over the situation with union bosses, but it was anything but encouraging. Got an earful of sympathy, of course, but he found a helluva lot of other guys out of work, just like himself. Bad as it was, though, he discovered that at least a half dozen guys from Number Nine had got on at other mines: goddamn it, he had started too late! Too late!

All day, the old car lapped up the long stretches of greasy asphalt, and all for nothing. Passed a lot of strip mines along the way, whited over with snow, and they depressed him all the more. Not only fucked up the countryside, but they meant fewer jobs, too, and jobs he didn’t know how to handle. And now all this talk about gasification of coal beds — he swore and slapped the steering wheel. “Come on, God! Get me outa this one!” he said out loud. Vince had always imagined God as a tough dark old bastard who lived a good ways off, but had a long rubbery arm, spoke street Italian, gave the sonsa-bitches their due, and for some inexplicable reason had a peculiar fondness for Vince. His vision hadn’t changed much, except he was beginning to suspect God maybe had come to lump him in with the sonsabitches.

Talking to God made him recollect the joke or something he’d been hearing around town about the end of the world or an invasion from Mars or some goddamn calamity due up next weekend. Boy! what was the matter with this town? As far as he could make out, it had something to do with that nut Bruno again, or maybe it was just that everybody assumed it. Well, that just went to show what a smart cookie that Father Baglione was. Bonali had never given the old priest too much credit, but a couple months ago when all the old gossips at the church had wanted to canonize the guy because of his so-called visitation, the old man had just chewed his cigar and kept his peace. From what Etta had found out, it wasn’t long before these same old women were getting shunted out of Bruno’s hospital room and told, in effect, to go to hell. And now the end of the world! Man, what next? Well, what the hell, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea at that — might be a relief to have done with this moronic business once and for all. He laughed at the idea of the world going up in a puff of smoke. Then he remembered he wasn’t ready, saw again the unblinking stare of Pooch Minicucci’s old lady. Sunday, for sure, he was going to keep his resolution and tag along with Angie and Etta to Mass, get himself on the right team again.

At home, beat down and depressed, he dropped into a chair facing the TV. It was off, but he didn’t feel like turning it on. Etta came in and sat down on the sofa near him. The fatness and silence of her presence irritated him all the more, but, hell, she didn’t have it easy either. He got to talking out loud, said the way things were going, it sure didn’t look to be a very hilarious goddamn thirtieth anniversary for them this year, did it? and how he figured they were really done for. Why was it turning out like this? Thank God, they still had the old house, but, shit, they’d probably have to mortgage that, too. And then, all of a sudden, he saw Etta was crying. He got half out of his chair, took her hand, said not to cry like that, he was just mouthing off, hell, things’d work out, they always did. But she handed him a letter.

He glanced at the envelope: from their oldest boy, Vince Junior. He was working out on the Coast, worked on airplanes. Vince supposed something terrible must have happened, one of the grandkids or something, and, Jesus, just now—! He was almost crying and he hated to look inside. But when he opened it, there was a nice friendly letter and scribblings from the grandkids and a check for $300. The boy said he figured things must be a little close, what with the mines closed down, and, since he had a little extra, he was sending it along, keep beer in the icebox and Angie in pretty clothes, and so on, have a happy anniversary, and to let him know if they needed more.

“Jesus, Etta,” Vince said. “That sure was nice of Junior, wasn’t it?” And he got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

Vince had always gagged along with the rest about getting old, but nowadays he found it hard to smile, found that cracks about his fifty years only made his stomach turn. Couldn’t land a new job and he began to see it wouldn’t even be easy to get on at the mines now. Trouble was, though he hadn’t wanted to admit it before, people hardly ever hired a new man old as Vince was. He could do the work of five or six young guys, understand, especially in the mines, he had the basic skills down and that’s what really counted these days, but, hell, it still didn’t matter. It was just the dumb attitude these people doing the hiring took. Vince hated even to look into a mirror. A thick gray depression was crowding down all over him.

One Tuesday at Wanda’s — he’d fallen into the consoling habit of passing afterdark Tuesdays there — when there wasn’t much to do but talk, he tried to explain it. He had been feeling his goddamn half century all day, and now, mainly because before coming over he had got a little too tanked up at the Eagles, he couldn’t seem to stiffen the old pecker up enough to get the trick done, and that made him all the more miserable. “Wanda, I have to tell you, I’m getting old,” he confessed simply. He was goddamn sorrowful. The hall light was on, just outside the bedroom door, and it spread a harsh sallow glare over their side-by-side bellies.

“It sure is somethin’ how time gits on,” she replied. She sounded worn out. Life was no picnic for her either, goddamn it.

“It sure is a tough solution to worry about. I just don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do.” His tongue was thick. Room was slipping a little toward the left. And he’d never felt so weak and shriveled. “The future looks to me just like a big goddamn empty hole, Wanda.”

She yawned. Her breasts filled up a little, and then slid off to each side again like wobbly little airbubbles. Then she giggled.

“No, listen! I mean it, Wanda! What’s gonna come of me?”

There was a long idiot span of silence, filled only by the squeaky sucking noises that the baby in the crib at the foot of their bed was making on his bottle. Wanda dug at one ear with her finger. The coarse pale hairs of her crotch poked up like dry weeds, pitched long sharp shadows across her right groin. He felt dizzy. He closed his eyes. And finally she said, “Vince, hon, d’you believe in talkin’ with spirits?”

11

What does it matter that secrecy has been decreed? the Spirit is made manifest by signs. Else, how account for the uprooting of the widow Mrs. Wilson’s hollyhocks, excrement on her front porch, a signature from the “Black Hand”? Or the theft of the widow Mrs. Lawson’s porch swing, the dead rat left on her window ledge? The inexplicable death of the coalminer Mr. Hall’s young bird dog? The town veterinarian Dr. Norton diagnoses: internal bleeding. Or how explain the suddenly fierce gossip of the dour old women in the nave of St. Stephen’s? “Fatti del diavolo!” Or the revival of St. Peter gags in clubs and bars and on church lawns Sundays? Or the excited nonsense of boys in high school locker rooms? “Gee whiz! the end of the world already, and me almost a virgin still!” How else shed light on the anonymous phonecalls received at the home of the coalminer Mr. Bruno? the appearance in the city newspaper of strange tales of medieval seers and wizards? the inflamed preachments against heresy from the pulpit of the Church of the Nazarene?

Or who can say why else this town’s collective fate darkens so? The last of the area mines seems sure to close. The streets of the business sector grow desolate. Glumly, the shopowners visit each other. The mayor declares a one-month moratorium on parking meters to encourage downtown trade. The winter is bitter and long. The families of ninety-seven dead coalminers huddle around old habits, their empty futures hovering like birds of prey. Some marry again, some leave. Most wait, not knowing for what. Young people desert, breaking up families. A motel closes. The basketball team loses. A strange virus cripples half the community. The whole town seems to age overnight. Children grow rebellious. TV reception is often bad. A dance at the Eagles is canceled. People die. The rate of harassment crimes rises.

Who is the “Black Hand”? Opinions vary. Italians, including the Police Chief Dee Romano, fear the revival of old blood enmities, of old extortions and death by night, but, strangely, few Italians are struck. Some blame out-of-towners, even rival cities. Others the Klan. A maniac. Communists.

The mayor recognizes the adolescent style: some high school prankster.

Coalminers observe uncomfortably that the victims are usually coalminers or their families. Not even widows in mourning are exempted. The Nazarene pastor Reverend Baxter, his own congregation often the prey, passes thundering judgment upon false prophets and apostates who, with their black signature and foul deeds, confess their allegiance to the Devil. “These here people they are murmurers! they are malcontents! they are walking after their own lusts! ungodly folks turning the great grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying our only Master and Lord, Christ Jesus! These here people, I tell ye even weeping, they are the enemy of the cross of Jesus! Their end it is perdition! their god it is the belly! and they do glory in their shame!” Rumors of Black Masses.

Actually, a clandestine high school club or gang, not just a single boy, the mayor explains to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce board members.

The schoolteacher Mrs. Norton attributes the attacks to “the powers of darkness,” and when the widow Mrs. Collins contends it can only be the work of “Baxter’s people,” Mrs. Norton reminds her that the specific agents utilized by the dark powers are less significant than a recognition of the existence and activity of the powers themselves. To friends in private, Mrs. Collins admits frankly that she doesn’t understand what Mrs. Norton means, and she sits up nights hoping to catch one of the “people” redhanded and prove her point.

The mayor announces in the city newspaper, the West Condon Chronicle, that the frequency of the recent “Black Hand” incidents makes it clear that it has become a new teen-age fad, a game, and he asks cooperation from all parents. With that, it does in fact become a teen-age fad, proving the mayor a prophet if not a consummate analyst, and culminates with a “Black Hand Blast” up at the youth center, which is converted at the last moment by the adult supervisors into a “Black Magic Party,” and, as usual, is not much of a success.

“Black Hand” phonecalls tie up the circuits, and letters from same arrive daily at the newspaper office, city hall, private homes. When the newspaper releases the report of two other signatures, the “Black Peter” and the “Black Piggy,” it sets off a rash of new calls and letters, etc., by everything from the “Blackhead” to the “Black Bottom.” “The Black Maria.” “The Blackboard.” “The Black Widow.” “The Blackball.” “The Black Armpit.”

Yes, the mayor admits with a rueful sigh when the suggestion is put to him by several civic leaders: it is really a reflection of the town’s whole general deterioration, and is at the same time contributing to it. A community-wide moral problem. Monstrous. A cancer. Something has to be done, says one. The mayor agrees. A little common sense, says another.

At the city hospital, a nurse, idle, picks up the telephone, waggles it indecisively in her hand a moment, glances down the empty corridor, sighs, finally dials a number.

“West Condon Chronicle.”

“Is Mr. Miller there, please?”

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“The Black Hand.”

“!”

“Hello?”

“Just — just a moment, please.” Clump clump clump. “(Mr. Miller! it’s some woman says she’s the Black Hand!)”

“Hello, Miller here.”

“This is the Black Hand.”

“Hello there, Black. What a nice voice you have.”

“Do you know why my hand is black?”

“No, why?” Scratch. (Lighting a smoke.)

“Blackness, you will agree, is the absence of light.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“But what is light?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Light is the radiant energy which enables the corresponding organs to perform their proper function. It is transmitted by an undulatory or vibrational movement, the velocity of which, uh, need not concern us here.”

“Aha.” His loose laugh. Makes her catch her breath.

“Tiger?” She rubs her nose to block a sniffle. “My whole me is going black!” She swallows. Don’t get sappy.

His easy laughter trickles through the wires, makes her relax again. Anyway, she hasn’t made him mad. “I’m sorry, Happy. But what more can I tell you? I’m up to my ears in this goddamn project and it just doesn’t give me a minute.”

“Is it about these people who think the Last Judgment is about to happen?”

“How do you know about that?”

“I’m probably the last dope in town to find out. One of my hernia patients told me all about it.”

“Well, yes, that’s it.”

“Any pretty girls?”

Laughter. Too quick. “Nothing but old widows.”

“Unh-hunh. Well, when’s Jesus going to come and get it over with, so I can see you again?”

Laughter again. He likes to laugh. He has told her that no one else makes him laugh so much, laugh so well. “Middle of April or thereabouts, I think. It’s not sure.”

“A whole month!” She pauses. “Listen, Tiger, can I anyway write letters to the editor?”

“Sure.” A little awkwardly. “Listen, Happy, I mean it, I really am sorry. I warned you, though, I had a knack for getting hung up like this. But it can’t last much longer, God knows I’m getting sick of it, and then we’ll see if we can’t do something about that poor hand and so on of yours.”

“It won’t be easy. It’s very very black.” That laugh. “Especially the so on.” She nibbles at the phone cord, hating to let go of him. Any excuse. “But if I write the letters, will you at least bring me the postage?”

A hesitation. “Sure.”

“Cross your black heart and hope to die, never to rise again?”

A pause. “Listen, if my office girl weren’t listening in, I’d even promise to take it out for you and drop it in the slot.”

The nurse giggles, rubs her nose. “Beware then,” she hisses, “for the Coming is at hand!”

“The Black Hand, I assume,” he replies, and, giggling, she hangs up, runs paper into the typewriter beside her.

Common sense. Common sense tells the former coalminer and now small-time farmer Ben Wosznik that where there’s an effect, there’s a cause. Sometimes more than one. A good fertilizer and crop rotation bring on a good harvest. But planting by the almanac helps, too. Maybe somebody’s cigarette caused the disaster that killed his brother, maybe not. The cigarette might have been only a part of it. Now they are having bad times. Common sense tells him it’s no accident, nothing is. He hears about the man who says the world is coming to an end. The man survived the disaster and everybody else, including Ben’s brother, died. Has to be a reason. There always is. Maybe there was more oxygen where he was or maybe he had more resistance. Maybe both. Maybe more. Common sense tells him it’s smart to go see what the man has to say. Can’t hurt. Might change his life. Might save it.

Taking a shower at the high school, Tommy (the Kitten) Cavanaugh kids Ugly Palmers. “Ugly, if you think the world is coming to an end,” he says, “what are you wasting your time here at this jail for? You gonna need American history up there?”

Ugly, soaping his feet, turns crimson. He never really blushes, his acne just flares up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. A short guy, kind of a tube, small hump in the shoulders, almost no butt at all. Pretty well hung, though.

“Aw, come on, Ugly, don’t kid me!” Tommy winks at a couple other guys at nearby lockers, lathers up his belly. “The little Collins girl told me all about it.”

“You leave her out of it!” Ugly yells, going red halfway down into his chest. Boy, he is suddenly mad as all get out! Just a lucky guess, too.

Tommy figures he could whip Ugly, but he doesn’t want to get into anything down here, so, as though to soak better, he pivots under the hot spray until he has his butt to the guy. Never shoot a guy in the back. His Dad has a dirty joke about it. A couple guys are grinning, looking on, so he winks again. “Well, so what’s the story, Ugly? Is it really gonna happen, or isn’t it? We need to know, man!”

“What’s it to you, Moneybags?” Really sore, all right.

“Well, gosh, Ugly, I don’t wanna go to hell, do I?” He gets some snickering on that, but not much. Most of these guys are scared of Palmers. He hears Ugly’s shower turning off, decides it might be better politics to face the guy. He assumes a modest grin, and, working the soap between his legs, turns, just as Ugly slaps flatfooted by.

At the edge of the showers, where the lockers begin, Ugly spins around. “I suppose you just think that this is all just a buncha nuts!” he blurts clumsily.

“Who, Ugly?” Tommy counters, blinking innocently.

“You know who.”

“No, listen, Ugly, we don’t know anything. You gotta save us, man!”

Palmers hesitates, his jaws working. “Okay, smart guy, I suppose you never heard of Tiger Miller.”

This time the blink is real. “Sure I know Tiger Miller,” Tommy says. “You’re not trying to kid me that he comes to your meetings.”

“He sure does!” Ugly snaps, gloating now, though his acne is still a bright vermilion.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Wanna bet?” Ugly thrusts out his hand. “C’mon. How about a thousand dollars?”

“How you gonna prove it?” This thing is rankling Tommy now. He wishes he hadn’t brought it up.

“Come and see for yourself.” Ugly is grinning. “C’mon. A thousand bucks. Your old man’s got the money.” He pokes his hand toward Tommy’s midriff.

“I’ll bet a quarter.”

“C’mon. A thousand bucks. Put up or shut up.”

“Okay, Ugly, I believe you. But that’s just one. Who else?”

Ugly backs down. “Lotsa people,” he says.

“Yeah? Like who?”

“You gonna soap that little thing all day?” Trying to get out of it. “Like who, Ugly?”

Outwardly, the signs are few. Intimately, the message radiates. At a meeting, ministers are warned. Over Cokes, a talent is described. In a bed, someone is invited. A child overhears his parents denounce an old friend. A priest, making a house visit, is bluntly turned away. An impeccable lawyer becomes irascible and unreliable. At an evening meeting of a Baptist youth group, “what if” questions are posed. Chiliastic warnings appear among the graffiti of boys’ rest rooms. MARCH 8. Erasure. MARCH 21 (in ink). Rotarians are informally entertained by a Presbyterian minister with new rumors. The newspaper, except for anonymous letters to the editor, is silent, but the editor is known to be intently absorbed in a new “project.” A neighbor darkens her kitchen and sits by the window. Observes the furtive arrivals. The sinister preparations. The burning candles. The sheets hung over the windows. Hears the screams. Who knows how the old man died?

The banker, phone cradled between jaw and shoulder, draws a square on his tablet. A cross inside the square gives him four small squares. Two diagonals: eight small triangles. He blacks in alternate ones with a vertical stroke. Then the remaining ones with a horizontal stroke. To one corner of the now all-black square, he attaches the corner of another large one, adds in the cross and diagonals. On the other end of the line, the high school principal is saying, “She’s just a substitute teacher, of course, but one of the finest we’ve ever come across. I’m glad you brought her name up, Ted. I wanted to mention her before, but she doesn’t have a certificate yet. With the board’s approval, of course, we hope to—”

“Unh-hunh. Well, don’t do anything too definite just yet, John. We want to—”

“No, no, of course not! Is something wrong?”

“No, I don’t think so. You know. We just want to run a routine check before we commit ourselves.”

“Something in the past?”

“Can’t be sure, John. Just want to be careful, that’s—”

“Of course, I had no way of knowing, Ted. I felt she qualified professionally, and, ah, but of course, I’ll wait to hear from you.” The original square, blacked in, has another square, comprising eight triangles each, attached to each corner.

* * *

The police are summoned by the Reverend Abner Baxter, irate. The city mayor Mr. Whimple is present during the call, so he accompanies two of his police, Mr. Romano and Mr. Wallace, to the Church of the Nazarene. Boxy building with artificial brick siding. Smell of mildew inside. Seething with rage, the redheaded preacher leads them to his pulpit, a plain rostrum on a one-foot stage, and, with a trembling white finger, stubby and fuzzy with fine red hair, directs their attention to the floor behind the lectern. The city mayor and the two policemen stare down at the little heap of feces. “Sacrilege!” the minister thunders. “Desecration!” And commences an oration on the theme.

The police chief Romano stoops and extracts a half-buried note, holds it between fingertips at arm’s length. The three men study it. THE BLACK PIGGY. “Looks more like a toe to me,” drawls Romano, his other hand resting nervously on the butt of his gun.

“Seems to be operating independently now,” observes the mayor.

The preacher whirls on them, red with wrath, and demands they remove their hats. “This is the house of the Lord!”

Sheepishly, the three do so. The policeman Wallace, abashed, stoops as though to inspect the feces. The other policeman and the mayor also stoop.

“There!” roars the preacher, pointing to an open window, through which, no doubt, the Black Piggy has come and gone. He marches over to secure it.

“Looks like baby shit,” Wallace whispers. “Whaddaya think, Mort?”

“I dunno, looks like it,” the mayor acknowledges in a hushed voice. “Whaddaya think, Dee?”

“Whaddaya asking me for?” Romano whispers in reply. “I don’t know nothing about shit.”

“Lemme see that thing. No, just hold it out there. Does look a little like a toe, all right.”

“I dunno, Mort,” drawls the police chief hoarsely. “Maybe we oughta call the FBI.”

Ben comes on a Friday night. Like a gift. The widow Betty Wilson knows the minute he walks in that he’s that strange dark man Mabel Hall found in her tea leaves, that “man of honor.” All night, in her breast, there is a flutter like a caged bird, like a fish in a net.

It is an exciting meeting because when they arrive they find the Bruno front room all fixed up like a church sort of, the television in the bedroom, and Giovanni sitting up in the living room armchair, the one his father died in. So pale! it frightens Betty even to look at him, so she hardly ever does, but when accidentally her eyes do happen to light on him, he is almost always staring straight at her, and that scares her all the more. But the room is very nice and they are all pleased, especially Clara, who has been using her own house for Sunday services for folks who don’t want to go hear Abner Baxter. There’s a little table fixed up with things like old Mr. Bruno’s gold pocketwatch and so on, and Mr. Himebaugh asks everybody to bring something to the next meeting that is precious to them to include there. Betty thinks right away of Eddie’s dentures, which she still to this day has kept in a glass on the dressing table by her bed in memory of him, but instead she decides she will bring his war medals. Mr. Himebaugh asks for Ely’s last note to hang there in a pretty frame he has brought, and Clara hates to give it up, but she is honored, too, and they all have a little ceremony there, putting it in the frame, and Mrs. Norton reads it to all of them so nicely.

Well, just then, in the middle of all that excitement, the doorbell rings. Mr. Norton says it is somebody who doesn’t know the password, and they are all afraid it is some dirty trick again. Mr. Miller gets up and goes out there. Whenever they have trouble, they always depend on him, such a fine strong young man, even if he isn’t too religious. When he returns, he brings this man in with him, and the man says his name is Ben Wosznik, and that’s when Betty’s heart starts to sputter around so. She looks over at Mabel and Mabel looks back at her. It is he. She was afraid the stranger might be Mr. Himebaugh, and now her fear is relieved. He says he has heard so much about them and he read the letter in the newspaper that said everybody was welcome (that was Clara’s letter), and, well, here he is. He is big and thick-shouldered and has black burry hair and heavy brows and kindly eyes and a man’s broad smile that creases his tan cheeks in many folds. He used to be a coalminer, he says, though now he is just sort of a farmer. He knew all their husbands. He says he always admired Ely Collins and is glad to know that Mrs. Collins is here. His brother who used to live with him was also killed in the disaster, he says. No, he says, he isn’t married.

The Girl Fried Egg of the West Condon Chronicle, opening her editor’s Saturday morning mail, discovers an envelope bordered in black. A death! she gasps inwardly, and eagerly opens it, but is disappointed by its unsigned contents. Doesn’t even understand it. She shows it, perplexed, to Mr. Miller. He smiles inexplicably and instructs her to pass such envelopes on to him unopened henceforth. She sighs, feels for some reason like crying or something. So much has been happening lately which she doesn’t understand.

The terrifying cataclysms anticipated as a prelude to the Last Judgment actually did not take place. No explanation was given; perhaps they were merely overlooked in the press of last-minute details. Whatever the reason for it, however, their absence helped provoke a universal apathy to the event which even the prospect of sensational personal revelations failed to dissipate. It improved tempers only slightly that the affair, held in April, was moved from Jerusalem to West Condon, which, sitting like a mote on the fat belly of the great American prairie, was properly thought to be, like God Himself, utterly remote from anything human.

• • •

No one had anticipated that the Judgment would prove such a complex business, least of all the Organizers Themselves. After one frustrating day of hearing the petty petitions of the condemned, the Supreme Judge was heard to mutter: We shoulda pulled this goddamn thing off a long time ago. It began to appear that the process might prove interminable, but finally a stopgap solution to the increased cramming of the judicial calendar was found in condemning all politicians, welfare workers, postal employees, physicians, and journalists forthwith. Not without bitter protest, of course: Someone has to keep the world going, they wept. Therein, replied their Judge, lies the seed of your damnation….

“But you aren’t listening to me, Reverend Edwards,” Tommy interrupts. Kit Cavanaugh is at his best when playing their own game with preachers and teachers. He is famous for it. Not that he doesn’t respect them. He does. But it’s so easy to string them along, he can’t resist it. Snickers, like those he hears now, are his best reward. “I asked you if the Last Judgment could happen here and happen now, and you said it was not impossible, and so I asked you, then what would it be like? I don’t think it’s gonna happen either, I mean, I agree with you, Reverend Edwards, but what I’m saying is if it happened, what would happen?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Tommy. And God would probably consider the question an impertinent one.” The minister is a little bit riled.

“Like here in the Bible, see, it talks about all kinds of dragons and tremendous beasts and things. Would we get to see some of that?”

“I don’t think I would interpret all that too—”

“And what about that poor, uh, prostitute? Boy, she really gets it! That must be something to see!” Rolling in the aisles.

“The harlot is an image of a city, Tommy, of a literal historic enemy, and, ultimately, of all the enemies of Christ.”

“And all that blood everywhere—whoo!” Tommy shudders visibly and gets a new rise in the suppressed hysterics.

“But now you’re not listening to me. The Book of Revelation teaches us simply that Christ will have the final victory over all forms of evil. Instead of worrying about dragons, young man, which is an idea that no longer has much meaning for modern man, you should be worrying more about the salvation of your own soul. That’s what this story is trying to tell you. That each man, to find salvation, must, in a sense, pass first through a kind of terror—”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy nods studiously, gazing down at his open Bible, reading not it, however, but what he has concealed there. “I see what you mean.” A pause for effect. “Is that what happened to you, Reverend Edwards?”

The minister blushes before the ducked snorting heads of the boys’ Sunday School class. “Something like it,” he replies bluntly, glancing at his watch.

“All I can say is I get the feeling here that God really hates us. Man, it’s really murder!”

“He hates evil, Tommy.” The minister relaxes slightly. “And He no doubt hates impudence.” Freed, the boys laugh openly. “I see you’ve read Revelation well. Have you bothered to read the rest of the Bible?” More laughter.

“Nope. This was enough to scare me!” The bell rings. The minister leaves hastily to dress for the main service. The class erupts into horselaughs. Tommy preens on them a moment, then ducks out. Must see Sally Elliott, make a date. An eight-page comicbook, concealed in his Bible, has told him at last all he wants to know.

Sunday night, March fifteenth, is a sad night, and everybody is very depressed. Just one week ago, on the eighth, when they thought it was the End, there were so many folks. Gideon Diggs was here, and the Calvin Smiths, and Tess Lawson came and Wanda Cravens and two high school girls and Mary Harlowe, so many. And now they’re just about back where they started. Only Wanda, Mary, and Tess have stayed on, and now there’s Ben Wosznik with them. Betty Wilson knows how bad the others are feeling, and she’d like to cheer them up somehow, but she feels as awful as they do. Besides that, Clara and Mrs. Norton aren’t getting along tonight. Clara insists now the end is coming on April 8, and Mrs. Norton is saying, no, it will be next Saturday, March 21, but nobody really knowing. Trouble is, as Betty knows well enough, Sister Clara talks too loud. And then Sister Tess Lawson gets angry with both of them and calls them both spooky and just walks right out of there. Somehow that kind of frightens them.

Then, as if things aren’t bad enough, they start getting the phonecalls again. Seems like it’s always worse on Sunday nights. That poor child, the Bruno girl, that she should have to suffer such abuse! Clara says they ought to just take the phone out, but Mrs. Norton says, no, you never know in what manner or by what means enlightenment is to be received. One night, after midnight, for example, they all sat for an hour watching “snow” on the TV because Mrs. Norton was convinced some message was going to appear there. Trouble is, Mrs. Norton has too many different ideas at once. But now even their old friend Brother Gideon calls and asks them to forget their foolish ways, and then Cal Smith calls saying the same. Mrs. Norton tries to receive an explanation in her book, but the phonecalls make it impossible. And Giovanni Bruno isn’t any kind of help either. He seems kind of sick. Maybe he’s been getting up too much.

Finally, Clara takes the phone off the hook and says flatly the sources will just have to get through some other way tonight, and Mrs. Norton pinches her mouth in, but she doesn’t argue. Sometimes you can see when it’s best not to argue with Clara. And then, just as everybody is feeling so awful and nobody is talking for fear of making somebody mad or something, why, like a miracle, Ben Wosznik starts to sing. His soft vibrant baritone floats out over their despair like an embrace from Jesus and they all listen. Betty closes her eyes.

“Ama-azi-i-ing Grace, ha-ow sweet the-e saound,

Tha-at saved a-a-a wretch la-ike me!

I–I wu-unce wa-a-as lost, bu-ut naow I am faound,

Wa-as blind, bu-u-ut naow I–I see!”

As he sings, he touches them, touches her. Tears come. The great hymn and the great voice pierce to the very core of her being, where now she sits, withdrawn, in the dark, for her eyes are closed, in the saddest joy she’s ever known. Her childhood, her mother, church camps and revivals, damp spring nights and cold winters by a coal-stove, snow on her father’s mining boots, Eddie and the war and the mines, all her dear friends, her children scattered over the world, trees lit for Christmas and the pink frock she danced in, prayer and love and Ely and Jesus, all her life seems like a beautiful instant, miraculously captured in the divine moment of this song, this man’s voice. Slowly, as though under its own power, out of the dark core, her own voice emerges, gentle, tempered, truer than she’s ever heard it, to harmonize in a tender humming plaint behind his radiant refrains:

“‘Twa-as Grace tha-a-at taught my-y heart to-o fear,

A-and Grace my-y-y fear re-elieved;

Ha-ow pre-ecio-ou-ous did tha-at Grace a-appear,

Thee-e haour I–I-I first be-elieved!”

And there are sighs as they sing and soft amens and she knows Ben is watching her, but her eyes will not open. She can hear Wanda Cravens sniffling, thinking of how Lee used to sing that song in his sweet tender tenor, and Clara crying softly in a kind of faint almost, on account of it was Ely’s favorite hymn. And now, at the chorus, they all join in, filling the room with their harmony, though it is she and Ben Wosznik who lead them. Even Mr. Miller and the little Bruno girl sing, and finally the Nortons. It is beautiful. It is the most beautiful moment in Betty Wilson’s life …

“Ama-azi-i-ing Grace, ha-ow sweet the-e saound,

Tha-at saved a-a-a wretch la-ike me!

I–I wu-unce wa-a-as lost, bu-ut naow I am faound,

Wa-as blind, bu-u-ut naow I–I see!”

The hotelkeeper Mr. Fisher and the Chamber of Commerce secretary Mr. Elliott whuff into the hotel coffeeshop through the lobby door Monday morning, the sixteenth, and there discover the city editor finishing his morning coffee.

“Hello, Tiger!” greets the Chamber secretary with a clap to the trenchcoated shoulders. “Say, what do you know about Ralph Himebaugh?”

“What do you mean?” The editor stands, hands a dollar across the counter. Doris the waitress fumbles with his change, drops a quarter into the dishwater.

“Well, I don’t know, the guy’s been kinda peculiar lately. Promises to work with me on the industrial brochure and we set up dates and he doesn’t show up. When I call him up at home, he always puts me off and hangs up. Now, that’s not like old Ralphie.”

The editor shrugs, while the waitress fishes in the dishwater. “Beats me, Elliott. Why don’t you—?”

“Aw, shit now, Miller!” rattles the old hotelman, pink jowls folded into a kind of grin. “What we wanna know is has that old sonuvabitch got hisself mixed up somehow with this troop of religious monkeys over at that wop miner’s house?”

“How should I know?” The editor smiles innocently. “Why don’t you just ask Ralph the next time you get him on the phone, Jim?” The waitress comes up with a bottlecap.

“That might embarrass him,” the Chamber secretary says. “I don’t want to get him teed off at us or nothing. We’re just, you know, curious. That’s all.” Wide greeter’s grin.

“Listen, Doris, goddamn it! Just give me another quarter!”

“You won’t tell, hunh?”

The editor pulls out his cigarette pack, finds it empty, crumples it, tosses it in the pecan jug, bringing an indignant glower to the hotel-man’s face. “What makes you think I even know anything about those—?”

“Well, for one thing,” growls the hotelman with a smirk, “you got a Chevy with a license ending in 7241.”

The editor laughs. “Okay, I admit, I’ve been trying to see what’s going on over there, but they’re pretty secretive. I—”

“Listen, Tiger,” the Chamber man butts in, grinning as always. “Will you tell me I’m wrong? I say Ralphie is one of them. Do you say he’s not?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“Okay, that’s good enough by me. He’s in it.”

The old hotelman cackles.

The editor shrugs, reaches over the counter, and appropriates a pack of cigarettes from the display there. “Keep the quarter, Doris,” he says. “Tip from your boss.”

“The hell you say!” grumbles the hotelman, and goes behind the counter to help fish for the coin.

In his office, the editor discovers in the morning mail further messages from the lady Black Hand …

The Mayor of West Condon, upon being asked why, when the moment of the Judgment arrived, he was discovered by the Angel of Death masturbating in his own bathtub, replied that the Chief of Police was using the official one at City Hall. Although there was general laughter, the face of the Divine Judge remained utterly immobile. I, too, have a sense of humor, He said when the laughter had subsided, and, in demonstration of it, He forthwith dispatched all who had laughed to hell and sent the Mayor to heaven, thereby depriving him forever of his audience.

• • •

The Pope, justifiably fearing the worst, slipped away from the proceedings and approached the Gate with his own set of keys, forged through the centuries. Yes, they worked! Just as his predecessors had always claimed! St. Peter seemed to be on the nod, so the Pope shut the Gate quietly behind him, signed the register, and tiptoed on down the path. Hee hee hee! Everything was just as he’d thought it would be, everything! Except, of course, for the strange peculiarity of St. Peter’s three heads.

• • •

A famous lawyer was brought before the Divine Court and accused of sodomy. When asked what he had to say to that, he stammered in apparent incredulity that he was not guilty. Of course, replied his Judge, but if you were guilty, then what would you say? Thus challenged, the lawyer delivered an eloquent and moving defense, no doubt the greatest performance of his career, and it was not without effect. Under all precepts of orthodoxy, his Judge said leaning toward him, you would have condemned yourself to eternal perdition with this address. So enchanting was it, however, we might yet offer you one final path to salvation….

“Hello, Ralph! Ted Cavanaugh here. How’s it going?”

“Oh. Hello, Ted. Fine, fine. Yourself?”

Loose chuckle. “You’re sure a hard fellow to find these days!” The five blacked-in squares form an X of sorts. This X is converted to a diamond by adding four new squares: top, bottom, and two sides.

“Yes. I’ve been … busy. Eh, how’s the wife?”

“Wonderful, Ralph. Matter of fact, she was just remarking at dinner yesterday that it had been a long time since we’d had you over.” More casual laughter. “I think she sees herself as a kind of patron saint to all bachelors.” The four new squares touch the four outside blacked-in squares at two corners each: that is, a sort of checkerboard pattern is emerging. “What do you say to tomorrow night?”

“That’s very kind, Ted. But I’ve, uh, been a little under the weather. Flu. I wouldn’t make a very good guest, I’m afraid.”

“Oh? Sorry to hear that! Listen then, how about next—?”

“Ted … maybe you’d better, eh, let me call you.”

Four crosses, eight diagonals: thirty-two new small triangles. The banker frowns. “Ralph … Ralph, you know how much we all think of you here. We’d hate … believe me, it’s simply out of personal concern that I bring it up … but we’d hate to hear that you, that you got mixed up somehow — Ralph? Ralph?” In the uppermost square of the diamond, half the triangles have been blacked in with vertical strokes.

Reluctantly, smelling warmly of winter hay and afterbirth, vitamin D and hogsweat, Womwom the guardian of holy places, no less than the living reincarnation of Noah, and compassionate apostle of Kwan-yin, drives back toward West Condon, returning from outlying calls. There is an unwanted commitment there of which the country frees him. Not that nature is beautiful, certainly he has never thought so, only that, as pure process, it absorbs all catastrophes, relaxes him when the paradox of his own ego terrorizes him. Unlike Elan, he has never succeeded in neutralizing it. What does he want? He doesn’t even know. But the point is, out here in the country, he doesn’t care.

Signs. Womwom has been having to make his own breakfast. Not that he minds, but it is symptomatic. Elan gazes the mornings long out on the snow, on the rain, on the sun, on the wind, and finds words like “structural dissolution” and “the coalescence of polarities” leaking out her fingertips. He has heard them before, knows what must surely follow. Again. But not just again. Something new this time. Of course, it’s obvious what it is. It is the unprecedented participation of the Other. There have been large groups before, but the nucleus has always been his wife. Now, several nuclei seem, as though by accident, to have become attached, forming an almost organic something larger than any of them, and though his wife is still its most important member, she is now, for the first time, truly a member, depending on the others as they depend on her. If there is a center, of course, it is Giovanni Bruno, the One to Come. Little matter that he is so enigmatic a figure, Elan has led Womwom to expect such a mystery at the middle, but the point is, this abstract thing which has dragged them through the years is now suddenly upon them, and what he never expected is that the core thing should be outside his wife herself.

West Condon pep talk and sales pitches appear on billboards, defiantly tawdry above the patches of crusty snow, signaling the town’s proximity. Working hard these days. Has to get what he can. He is not an avaricious man, anybody can tell that by a single glance, but always they need it. Money. And never more than at times like these. And so he has to push, though he has no heart for it. Of course, he enjoys his work, but, as his wife has always said, he is too much an artist. Wastes whole days in the country, and meanwhile the easy money is in town. Sick dogs. Dogs with worms. Worms! A farmer bets on value when he calls a vet. Pet owners care nothing for economics. Keeping a pet is an affront to thrift in the first place, not to mention that it’s an affront to nature to boot. So, they pay up. “Ten bucks? Sure, Doc!” Beaming grab for the pocket. And little brats gazing raptly on, learning patterns that will make successes out of medical frauds for generations to come. Leeches. Why can’t he be a happy leech like the rest? An artist. Well, he is. But times of stress push him and he undertakes, against his own nature, the disagreeable.

Indications of West Condon can be seen a couple miles outside of town: a steeple or two, some smoke, and so on. But the town itself springs into being only at the city limits. There’s just enough soft roll to the land around, a settling over the coal beds, that no great distances can be seen from ground level. Then, too, things block the view — trees, humps of raw land shoveled up by strip-mining, barns and motels and the like, the usual brash fungi of billboards — block the view or flick distractingly in front of it, such that the city limits sign is a kind of guarantee you have made it, a lever you trip in passing that pops the town out of the yellow soil like a jack-in-the-box. Nothing special about it. Town like many they have lived in. But he likes it, has liked them all, and here in West Condon, as the only fully qualified veterinarian, he is especially needed. So, he feels an urge today, tripping the lever and feeling the town spring up to embrace him, to drive his roots in so deeply here that no crisis could ever tear him out.

At home, his wife is seated at the kitchen table, as usual, with Rahim the lawyer. Papers, logs, graphs, tools out in front of them. Late afternoon sun glows there. “Wylie!” she exclaims when he enters. “Giovanni said: ‘A circle of evenings’—of course! It means another seven Sundays! And seven Sundays after the first of March is the nineteenth of April: the last day the sun is in the sign of rebirth!” Rahim, excited, is frantically constructing new graphs.

“That’s good, dear,” Womwom says with a smile, and he goes in and lies down on the couch. The nineteenth of April.

But he has work to do. Can’t waste a minute. He gets up and goes out to straighten up his garage-office. Things are in a mess. The more he cleans, the worse it seems to get. He shows a fellow there through the pens, where he is growing worms, using dog intestines as hosts. Important experiment. Many of the worms are, as though magnified, snake size, but their morphology is strictly vermicular. “Lyttae,” he puns, but he sees the fellow fails to grasp this. A scorpion has got in and killed his best worms. Carnage. It is grotesque. Afraid of the tail, he kicks it in the head. The scorpion’s legs, detached by the blow, twitch in death throes, look almost like chicken claws. The head wanders about autonomously. “Make the best of it,” he cautions himself, and attempts to study the scorpion’s incredible head. But it terrifies him. The fellow is gone. Wylie is alone. With the dead worms and the scorpion head. It seems to be enjoying itself. He is afraid to kill it.

“I’m cold, Tommy,” whimpers Sally Elliott at the ice plant. A thawing rain drums the roof of the big Lincoln, securing them from parents, police, and bushwhackers. Tommy has found that girls jump in the back faster when he uses his Dad’s Lincoln instead of his own jalop. Something psychological. “Somebody’ll come and catch us.”

“Use a little common sense, Sally. It’s Monday night and it’s raining pitchforks. Nobody’s gonna come.” He has talked the slacks off her, but not the panties. He kisses her neck, strokes the sleek flesh of her tummy. Boy oh boy, does it feel good! “I told you I know what I’m doing,” he whispers. He insinuates his fingers under the elastic band, slithers toward whatever it is that’s down there.

She twists away, curls up in one corner, staring out at the rain. “Tommy, please, let’s go home.”

She wants you to do it, she just doesn’t want to feel guilty, wants you to make her do it so it’s not her fault. He sets his teeth. “Listen, Sally, if it was the end of the world tomorrow, I mean really, if this was our last, like our last chance, would you let me do it then?” He is on his knees beside her, staring at her almost edible everything. Sheen off the silk panties. White as a ghost.

“Why do you talk like that, Tommy? Do you believe that?”

“No, I just mean, if.” Boy, she’s dumb! She deserves it! If he can just get her down on her belly somehow.

“I guess so,” she says then, surprising him.

“Sally!” he whispers, kissing her ear. He moves in. “You’re beautiful! You’re Eve!” His own mark of Adam, so taut and prickly he almost wants somebody to bite the end off, prods her softly in the side.

That scares her and she jumps away, scrambles for her slacks, pulls them on. But anyway she finally sees what he’s got. He figures she’s pretty impressed, because she forgets about being mad and gets cuddly again on the way home. “If the end of the world does come,” she whispers, “will you hold my hand all the time?”

“Sure,” he smiles. Hey, this Judgment thing is pretty rich, he decides, and can be mined for more. He’ll have to plan it out. Meanwhile, he lays hold of a plump breast and says, “We’ll have to practice, though.”

Rain falls. Clerks are laid off. A creek outside town overflows its banks. A three-hour power failure blacks out the town. A nice old lady rolls down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck. Signs all, and the signs are bad. And on the door of a stall in the boys’ rest room at the high school: APRIL 19. Carved with a knife.

“Mrs. Norton, this is a friend calling.”

“Why can’t you people leave us alone?”

“I’m not calling to trouble you, Mrs. Norton, let me assure you.” The diamond shape has reverted once more to a square, a large checkerboard, composed of twenty-five smaller squares, thirteen of which contain eight small triangles each, all blacked in, although the alternating vertical and horizontal strokes preserve the separate identity of each triangle. If the light is right. “Why I called was simply to tell you that I have good reason to believe you have a, shall we say, a pretender, in your midst, who may in fact mean you considerable harm.” The other end of the line remains silent. Diagonals are passed through the white squares giving them four triangles each. “And perhaps harm to our community as well. I speak of Mr. Justin Miller. I am sorry to say that I fear his intentions may be opportunistic ones.”

A prolonged pause. Then, snappishly, “We have long been aware of that. Thank you for your interest.”

The common sense thing to do, the mayor reasons, is to tell those people to stay home, they’re creating a public disturbance. Neighbors are complaining about the noise. But he hopes it will just solve itself somehow like the “Black Hand” thing, which has at last died out. Everybody seems to be out after his neck as it is, blaming him for the town’s troubles, even for bad business and power failures, when there’s just nothing he could ever do about it, and he doesn’t need any more enemies, even crazy ones. He pretends he has solved the “Black Hand” affair, hinting that the boys involved may well come from well-to-do families in town, and he has seen fit to bring it quietly to an end his own way. People say that’s good common sense. He even starts believing it himself. Sometimes he wishes he was back in the fire department.

Four men, all Italian Catholics, play pitch at the Eagles. The first, thumbing his cards into order, says, “It’s common sense. I’m not exactly cheering my ass off, I can’t even sleep nights. But that mine ain’t never gonna open up again. I pass.” The second man bids two, as the first codas, “That’s all I’m saying. Anybody with any common sense can see it’s never gonna open up again.”

“Common sense!” snorts the third, partner of the first. “To hell with common sense! Listen, if that mine closes, I’m dead. I can’t let myself think that. I gotta believe it’s gonna open up, or I’d go off my bat. There’s some things, buddy, common sense ain’t no good for. Three.” The fourth man passes.

And more signs. Elan the teacher senses estrangement from the rest of the faculty at school. The principal, while by no means hostile, forgets now to smile, does not mention the permanent appointment. Students grow lax in their homework, seem amused at her austerity. Her two boys suffer endess humiliation and she must pretend detachment.

Up early one morning, the skies broken up for a change, she takes a stroll before going to school, passes a small frame church with yellow brick siding. Outside, a signboard reads:

GAL. 1.9: If any man preacheth unto you any good gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema!

She shudders, recognizing she has wandered into an alien place. A redheaded boy sits on the steps eyeing her coldly, cradling a root or something in his lap. Can he know who she is? She hurries by, feigning interest in something across the street.

At school, there is an obscene drawing on her blackboard. Supposedly an angel, or so it seems, it nevertheless possesses two stringy bare breasts, buckteeth, large spectacles, and frizzy hair. From its naked bottom rises a flag that reads: REPENT! Below the figure: ST. ELLIE. The children are hysterical, their faces buried in books. Elan, suddenly near tears, feels utterly helpless. Her back is to the students, and she cannot turn to face them, nor can she bring herself to erase the angel.

Her two boys enter then, Karmin and Ko-li. They stand and stare. Karmin slams his books to a desk, marches to the board, and erases the drawing. “Boy!” he shouts out. “Whoever did that is really rotten!” His face is afire with righteous anger. “If he’s got any guts, he’ll go outside with me right now!”

Elan is to confront with courage and inward serenity the history that is to come and to comprehend with grace the bitter obligement of suffering. “Thank you, Carl Dean.” Wash the earth from your hands and feet and cast your eyes to the limitless stars. “Now, please take your seat.” She is able at last to face the class. The giggling diminishes. Some blush. By my light, thou shalt flee the darkness.

Kit Cavanaugh, cruising back into town from the ice plant with Sally Elliott, is sore. Boy oh boy, how can any guy get so far and not get in? He must be the biggest idiot, the biggest chicken, in the whole United States. It was so beautiful, that whole Last Judgment line, they were already off the earth and flying, man, stretched out there near-naked in the back seat of the Lincoln. Boy, there were flames everywhere! Her skirt was up, her blouse off. He slipped from her embrace to ease her panties down. And he was just ogling that fantastic black place below her bum and wedging his nervous fingers down inside there, when he heard Sally talking to herself.

“What’d you say, Sal?”

“I’m praying.”

“Praying! Whatcha doing that for?”

“I’m praying to Jesus not to let you do anything wrong, Tommy. If it’s gonna be the Last Judgment, I don’t want you to go to you know where.”

He thought she must be kidding, but there were tears running down her nose. “Aw, Sal,” he said, and took a last hungry look at the bum. He already had the rubber on: what a waste! Glumly, they headed for home.

The trouble is: how do you keep kissing them and get on top there at the same time?

“Tommy! Look at that!” Sally cries now.

He’d almost driven by without noticing, but now he sees the big gang of people. “My gosh! it’s a big fight!”

“Don’t stop, Tommy!”

“I’m just going slow to see. Hey! there’s old Ugly Palmers! Hey! look at him go! Man!” Maybe it’d be a pretty even fight at that, him and Ugly. “Say, you know what, Sal? That must be Mr. Bruno’s house! The guy who says it’s gonna be the Last Judgment!” Sally squeezes toward him. “Holy cow, wait’ll Dad hears about this!”

“Tommy, please don’t stop! I’m afraid!”

“But, gee, I think I oughta help old Ugly out. They’re ganging up on him.” Doesn’t mean to, though. Just whip old Sal up a little bit.

Suddenly, a window breaks with a tremendous crash. People start to run. “Tommy!” Sally screams. He guns it out of there, shaking just a little bit. Ho-lee cow!

In front of Sally’s house, they get in a hot clinch. Sal is trembling, sort of. Man, if he could just keep her mouth stopped, he could do it, just hold the kiss until he was in there. But how would he do that without breaking her neck? Something is wrong.

It is the last day of winter, the twentieth of March, a morning heavily overcast like many of late, and Betty Wilson is going to Mabel Hall’s. She slips out the back door, so Sister Clara, who lives down the block, is sure not to see her, past her torn-up hollyhocks and Eddie’s old bird dog nosing at a corner of his pen, and goes to see Mabel, knowing, though nothing has been said, that the other girls, anyway Mary Harlowe and probably Wanda Cravens, will come there, too. A new element has been added and now it must be appraised. Cards will be consulted, or else tea will tell what otherwise might be missed.

Like when Mabel saw “an evil event” and “love destroyed” in January, and she even says now she made Willie stay home that dreadful night, and who can say it isn’t so? it’s possible. And certainly it was Mabel who saved them all from despair when the Judgment failed to come the eighth of March like Clara had said, and it was Mabel who found “the man of honor” that knocked on their door just one week later. As for the eighth, they had met at Mabel’s the Wednesday before, and she had foretold it: “adversity,” “deception,” and “vain expectation.” So, in a way, they knew it all along, all the girls, knew it wouldn’t happen that night. Sometimes, in the excitement of a meeting, or when Clara was telling them how it would be, how they would see Ely and Eddie and Hank and all of them again, they forgot, and then the end was surely coming that night again, the eighth. But probably, deep down, they all knew a postponement had been ordained. Of course, Mabel was very close to that Norton woman these days, and, though they all believed Mabel, they listened to her with two ears, as it were, and she was certainly very quick a couple days ago to find the nineteenth of April in her cards, where it had never been before. Clara could be, in a way, wrong, and she could be stubborn in her wrongheadedness, but Clara could always be trusted. Betty never doubted for a moment a single word Brother Ely ever spoke in his entire life, he was truly the greatest man she ever knew, maybe even a living saint, nor does she nowadays doubt a single thing that her best friend Clara says, but sometimes, well, the same word can mean twenty different things, that’s all. Of course, Mabel is a little batty sometimes and she probably wouldn’t recognize the Coming in her cards if she saw it there, there’s that to consider, but one would at least have expected something like “a long journey” or “an unexpected visitor”—not even to mention the awesome trump twenty — and not “vain expectation.” So, they probably knew. Not the eighth of March, not yet. Mabel always used to read tea leaves, but more and more she has been turning to the cards, ever since she bought that fancy set in Mr. Robbins’ dimestore.

Now, the new element is the hill. “The Mount of Redemption.” They are going out there tomorrow night, since Mrs. Norton thinks something still could happen the first day of spring. It all started last night when Abner Baxter led his people over to sing revival songs on the front lawn at Giovanni Bruno’s. He gave them no peace now. Only this time, Sister Clara shot right out there and shook a finger at Abner and said, “Abner Baxter, you’re only doing this on account of you’re afraid it might be true!” It made Betty so proud, it was just like Ely was back with them again. Oh, and there was a lot of shouting and Mr. Miller took pictures because he said he wanted to humiliate them and they all sang as loud as they could, everybody singing different songs, and Mrs. Norton wanted everybody to come in and lock the doors. Willie Hall wanted to go home right then, only Mabel made him stay. Mr. Himebaugh went upstairs to the bathroom and never came down for a whole hour.

Abner Baxter raised a terrible fuss then and shook his fist and said the power of the Lord was upon him and somebody started throwing rocks and then Ben Wosznik walked out there and he said, “Now, who threw them rocks?” and Roy Coates said back, “What’s it to you?” and that high school boy who’s taken such a shine to Clara’s daughter went out there and Dr. Norton, too, and it looked like there was going to be a big fight. And Ben said, “Well, I just don’t think that was a very Christian thing to do!” and Roy said, “What do you wops know about Christians?” even though Ben wasn’t a wop, isn’t even an Italian. And the Palmers boy said nobody was going to call a friend of his a wop, and he cocked back to take a poke at Roy, but Ben held him back and said they had to turn the other cheek like the Good Book says and then Roy Coates hit him. Right in the eye he had just turned. They all went running out to help Ben and the Palmers boy was swinging at everybody and Mr. Miller was taking pictures and Mrs. Norton started crying that the police were coming and a rock smashed the porch window and the Baxter people all ran away.

So they went back in, creeping like they were guilty of something awful, but they didn’t know what, and everybody was nervous and upset and crying, and poor Ben, his eye was swelled up and his nose was all bloody, and Wanda Cravens was dabbing it with a wet dish-towel, Betty wanted to help, was hurt that Sister Wanda was doing it, but was just too weepy and trembling. The Palmers boy, though, said he hit at least five of them and he showed off his bruised fist to little Elaine to try to stop her crying so. Dr. Norton felt it and said he didn’t think any bones were broken. And then the police did come, but Mr. Miller went out and sent them away.

For some reason, then, they all started watching Giovanni Bruno, or whoever he is. Something special was coming. He was still in the armchair, wrapped in blankets, just like always, like nothing had happened, even though the window in front of him was all broken in, but he was jittery, scratched all the time at the arms of the stuffed chair, darted his peculiar eyes around so, Betty grew a little frightened. And suddenly he lifted his hand and said: “Mount of Redemption!” And after that, Mr. Himebaugh came down from the bathroom.

“Mount of Redemption.” What in the name of heaven could it mean? Always riddles! Just like with “Sunday Week” and “A Circle of Evenings.” Betty complained one night to Mrs. Norton about it, how the spirits never said things plain, but Mrs. Norton said of course they talked plain, it was just that we weren’t always smart enough to understand them, and that’s why we have to study and work hard. Betty knew that, she’d known that all her life, every preacher she ever knew said so, but she also knew she’d never be smart enough, and that made her feel sad, made her feel cheated, and sometimes, God help her, even made her angry at the spirits. “Mount of Redemption.” Mrs. Norton said it must mean some place, perhaps where they must await the Coming, but she was utterly perplexed about where. But then Clara jumped right up like something had stuck her and cried out, “Why that there hill out by Number Nine! You know, that one right over where we worked!” And what got everybody so terribly excited was how Clara said “we” instead of “you” or “they” so spontaneous like. Mrs. Norton was so wrought up she was almost weeping, and she cried, “It’s your husband! He has reached you!” And poor Clara, she was trembling all over and had to allow it must be so — where else could it have come from? And so they all prayed and sang and had goosebumps about it, and Mrs. Norton received a message.

And that is why Betty is going to Mabel’s, because she wants to know what it means. Is it still going to happen? Will it happen out there at the mine? Will it happen in April? Will something happen tomorrow night? But mostly, to tell the truth, Betty really wants to know more about the dark stranger, the man of honor, who has entered her life. It starts to sprinkle.

It was widely assumed that Christ would preside at the Final Judgment. Imagine one man’s astonishment, therefore, when he found himself confronted by his first wife instead. Well, he smiled with an insouciant shrug upon recognizing the old girl, you can’t win them all. Don’t be ridiculous, admonished his Judge; the one fault of which the Divine can never be accused is the perpetration of a bad joke. You have said it, the man replied.

• • •

A middle-aged woman, in the flash of total insight granted those at the Last Judgment, discovered that the intense jealous hatred she felt toward all humanity, male and female alike, was not really due to the corruption of her soul by the Devil, but to the embarrassment her flat breasts always caused her. She was therefore only mildly surprised, when, upon being arraigned, she was accused only of the sin of having failed to exercise her breasts properly. When she protested that her fault was hereditary, that her mother also had had small breasts, her Judge replied that that was hardly a defense, that as a matter of fact, her mother had preceded her to hell.

• • •

Most souls lost all hope for salvation when, upon being asked, they remembered their names. Thus it was that a sad-eyed old drunk, forgetting his in the confusion of the moment, received, perhaps by mistake, the earth as a gift.

• • •

Bankers and businessmen, as the whole world could have predicted, were, without exception, condemned. Go directly to hell, the Divine Judge would roar upon being confronted by one of them; do not pass Go, do not collect $200. The egalitarians were also sent to hell, of course, but they were allowed to collect the money. Sometimes, even the Divine Mind is scrutable…

“West Condon Chronicle.”

“Mr. Miller, please.”

“Whom shall I say—?”

“It’s the Black Hand again.”

“Oh. Well, madame, Mr. Miller cannot talk to you. He is a very busy man, and he doesn’t have time for your sort.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“(Who’s that, Annie?) (Oh, it’s just that crazy lady who keeps calling up saying she’s the Black Hand. I already told her to—) (That’s all right, Annie. I’ll take it.) Hello, Black Hand.” Scratch. Drag. “(Annie, get off the phone!)” Click. “Say, I always knew you were hilarious, Happy, but I didn’t realize you were such a goddamn genius. If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to run your Judgments in our Good Friday issue.”

“I’m not looking for fame, Mr. Editor, I’m looking for the payoff.”

“And the poor unendowed ladies! You are indeed pitiless!”

“Just cleaning out the competition. Is Annie a cute girl?”

“Oh yeah, very. Certainly not hellbound by your rules.”

“Oh?” She’s not quite sure how she’s supposed to take that. Calls for a visit. “You already owe me a fortune in postage, you black heel.”

His laughter. “You’re right. Listen, I promise, I’ll at least stop out to see you a minute, if not today, tomorrow at the latest.”

A pause. She ought to forget it, not mention it, but she says, “Say, Tiger, is it true about all those wild orgies you’re having over there with those Christians?”

He laughs. “Sure, it’s great! Just me and Johnny Bruno and an ecstatic houseful of naked old widows!”

“I heard some of those widows weren’t so old.”

“What do you mean?”

What is it makes her open her big mouth? She hesitates, then says, “Oh, a guy called. Said he was a friend and told me things he thought I’d like to know. About Mrs. Cravens, for example.”

“Oh yeah? Sounds like some friend. Listen, Happy, that’s a lot of crap, there’s nothing there. I don’t know why anybody’s so goddamn adolescent as to—”

“He said he thought I might be able to persuade you to get out of that group and away from that woman, be better for me, for you, and everybody else. He said.”

“Well, he’s got it all wrong, whoever the hell he is. Besides, that woman’s got the melancholiest bottom I ever saw.”

“You’ve had a good look?”

“Sure. At all the orgies.”

Womwom pours orange juice, boils eggs, makes toast. Elan, gazing out on the rain, eats distractedly. “Wylie,” she says, looking up at him, her pupils shrunk to pinpricks by the long look at too much light, “do you remember how, after the powers of darkness had chased us from Carlyle, we could not remember who the fourth man was?”

“Yes.”

“Do you recall what he looked like?”

Womwom munches toast meditatively. “Not very well.”

“He was dark, Wylie, and rather tall. I remember how his glittering eyes frightened me so.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s so.” He doesn’t remember.

“Wylie … I think I know now who he was!”

It is Friday, the day for fish. It is March, the month of the fish. The destruction of the world by water, the dissolving of prevalent structures, the liberation from things merely seen or touched. The fish. The unconscious. The cyclic renovation. Fertility of the spirit. “Come ye after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Mana’s closed and perfect circle, a gift from her childhood, assumes a new dimension, a new beauty. Elan’s primordial energy now whirls upon it through measurable phases. The soul is spun upon it, falling now into matter, climbing now toward its source, wriggling through the twelfth moment toward its rebirth. Unity fragments into multiplicity upon it, multiplicity reassembles itself to unity. All is in it, on it, leaping, turning, cavorting, promenading, falling, climbing … swimming. The fish. She consumes it. Defeat? Reclusion? Negation? No! Mana awaits with excitement and with certainty her turn on the wheel, her inexorable rebirth! Outside, it rains. Dissolves.

Rain. The banker stares out on it from his office window on the second floor. It reflects his own depression. He remembers how, after the war, there was so much hope here, so much promise. And now it’s all going sour. “You’re not in the nineteenth century, son,” his Dad told him, dying. “Get your money out of here. Coal’s on the way out.” But he couldn’t. It was home. Not that he’s in any real financial trouble, he’s hedged properly on all bets. But that’s not the point. This is his home and his home is sick. He believes it is really a matter of spirit. Ted Cavanaugh has faith in the spirit, or, as he puts it, in will. A community of men of good will: his ideal.

So, he has been looking for something to stimulate the community spirit again. Something they could all believe in, rich and poor, miners and merchants, Italians and gentiles. Working together, they can make West Condon as great as any town in the United States, he’s convinced of that, highblown as it may sound. But something has to provide the spark, something has to unite them. This little cult at the miner Bruno’s house occurred to him as an idea, but it seemed too negative. Tried to work up a Special Commission on Industrial Planning. Not much interest. Searched for new industry. So far, nothing: bad labor history. He tried at least to keep the mine open. He offered money. He couldn’t offer enough. It’s not official, but he knows they will close it. And so, he is back at the cult. It has given him an idea. A committee. Communal exercising of a little common sense. Start with it as a specific problem, get the town enthused, as many people into the thing as possible, then subtly convert it into something positive, a kind of all-community WPA and sales team, so to speak.

But, on principle, he just can’t fight anybody else’s religion, no matter how absurd it is. They had to do something first, hopefully something offensive. And now, what do you know, that old Wobbly agitator Red Baxter has done it for them. For him. Created that old vacuum, the filling of which is every American’s first nature: the need for a third force.

He picks up his phone, dials. The checkerboard on his pad is now, virtually, one huge black square, though, within the blackness, a pattern is still discernible. “Hello, Maury? Maury, this is Ted calling. I’m getting in touch with several of the fellows, ones I can count on. I’ve just been thinking, Maury …”

So, unobtrusively, the point of no return is passed. No one has expressed it, yet everyone knows it. Nor can any really doubt that this knowledge is now general, distorted in places perhaps, but widespread. Rahim — barrister, adviser, procurator, scrivener, sacramentalist, mathematician, and historian — is the last to concede it. He continues to press for secrecy, but observes that it is futile. On the streets of West Condon, he is avoided. Ugly phonecalls are received. Letters. Well, good riddance to the fools! Soon enough, it will be his turn to laugh! Hah!

He shuns the common meeting places, spends less time at his office, takes no new cases. He catches up on his filing, ridiculous task, of course, yet an old habit here impels him. His cats still give him solace, but more and more he is passing his days with Elan or at the Bruno house. He is quick to perceive the weaknesses of the others, of course, but the very lack which he fills — almost, one could say, with mathematical exactitude — is, as it were, the final proof of the veracity of his calculations. Thirty days.

Rain keeps him home this noon. No matter. Rain is just too appropriate today, and Elan would be passing out cheap zodiacal preachments again. How she dupes them with that nonsense! Still, to be honest, it is really only the harmless residue of her core genius, and Rahim supposes she must find excess in him, too. But this will be no moral victory, it will be a cold victory of the human mind. He has tried to explain that to the others, but they refuse to grasp it. Except for little Mana perhaps. There, there is still hope. Thinking of her makes him curse the rain that keeps him home. Perhaps he should go anyway. Her room, though she doesn’t know he’s been there, delights him. It has a charmingly eccentric shape, walls turned and cornered to fit the needs of adjoining rooms, part of the ceiling aslant from the roof’s angle, one large window nearly floor to ceiling … it is perhaps its lack of logic that most appeals to him. But, no, it is always awkward, he has no clear purpose there, and he still, in spite of the total breakdown in security, resists the daytime visits.

He removes his streetclothes, dresses in the new piece of silk underwear and his own lounging robe, curls up meditatively in the living room armchair with a snifter of brandy, listens to it rain. The cats rub by, but he deflects their efforts to hop up. Thirty days! Sipping the brandy, he passes his hand over the silk, her silk, and contemplates the End. Hah! It will be lovely! It will be grotesque!

Two of the girls, Mary Harlowe and Lucy Smith, are already in Mabel Hall’s kitchen when Betty Wilson arrives, running in from under the rain, and the cards, stacked, are on the table. Lucy is explaining how she has begged and begged her husband to take her back to Bruno’s, but how Calvin is afraid of Abner Baxter. Lucy doesn’t say “afraid,” of course, she says “swayed,” but the other three know what she means. She tells them that everybody at the church is just disgusted with both the Baxters, how Abner and Sarah just stole the Circle right away from Clara and nobody could do anything about it, and how stupid Sarah Baxter is. Mabel informs Betty they have just been reading the cards, and Lucy and Calvin will join them again one day. They talk about Mr. Himebaugh being up in the bathroom all the time last night, and Mabel explains he has the flu. Mabel hardly ever talks, but she knows what’s going on before anybody else.

Mary asks if they all were noticing how Mr. Miller and the Bruno girl, the prophet’s sister, were getting so lovey-dovey, and, in a whisper, says she saw them kissing back in the bedroom when she went looking for her kids. Mabel says very bluntly that Wanda Cravens is also doing everything but lifting her skirts to get Mr. Miller’s eye, and at that Lucy Smith starts giggling so she can’t stop. “He is kinder cute,” she says in a titter.

“Well! if you knew what I know about that young man and dear Sister Wanda—!” says Mary Harlowe, and then she tells them.

“Wanda always has been man-crazy,” says Lucy. “I don’t know how poor Brother Lee ever put up with her so long.”

“And she was even flirting one night with that silly blond high school boy, poor child,” Mary adds, “and she certainly didn’t waste a minute trying to get her hooks in Ben Wosznik, either!”

Betty Wilson’s weak heart leaps dangerously to her throat, and she exchanges a terrified glance with Mabel, who, with a little shake of her head, warns her to say nothing. Betty guesses then that Wanda Cravens is not her only threat, that even her old friend Mary Harlowe has got ideas.

Just then, Wanda Cravens herself arrives with Thelma Coates, Thelma sneaking away from home and that horrible tyrannical husband of hers, Roy. She tries to say how sorry she is about the other night and starts crying pathetically, and they all cry together for awhile.

After that, they speculate on the meaning of Giovanni Bruno’s pronouncement about the Mount of Redemption, while Mabel shuffles the cards and says they should be quiet if it is going to work out properly. Sister Thelma asks what is the Mount, and Mary tells her about the hill at the mine, but Thelma and Lucy are admonished to keep utmost secrecy so as not to cause more trouble with Abner Baxter. A Bible is found and they swear on it. Mabel lays the cards out. She fingers each one before revealing it, studies each development, gasps, sighs, broods, smiles, purses her lips, squints her eyes. For a long time, an almost endless time, she gazes at the exposed cards. Outside, the rain falls steadily shushing mysteriously against the roof. “A controversy,” she says at last. Betty looks for it, but the faces are forever strange to her. “Two blond queens,” says Mabel, indicating them, “but,” another card, “the controversy is resolved,” yet another, “by time.” They all nod.

“But the end, Mabel,” Lucy insists, “is it coming?”

Mabel turns up another card, places it upper right. “It is not certain, but it is probable,” she says.

“Is it still April nineteenth?”

Mabel stares, her eyes running over the exposed cards. “I don’t know, but, yes, I think so,” she replies at last. “Here’s a five … black. Perhaps: a black hand …” A pause while they catch their breaths and glance at one another. Mary Harlowe is pale. “… And the number … the number … seven.”

“What does it mean?” Mary asks.

Mabel, not replying, turns up another card, places it just below the last one. “A reunion,” she says. “Perhaps to discuss the controversy.” Another card. “A distant place.”

“The hill!” Thelma whispers.

Mabel nods. “It can be,” she says.

Betty steals a glance at Sister Wanda Cravens. She is very young and slender with a cute freckly face, and Betty loses heart. Of course, she is too young and too thin and she is silly and fickle, but will Ben see that?

Mabel turns up a new card and catches her breath sharply. They all stare at it. “The Judgment!” she whispers, and one ringed finger points to Gabriel and three naked people: a fat lady with oversized breasts, a thin lady showing her bare behind, and an elderly man praying. Fascinated by the card, Betty barely hears the rest, only scattered phrases reaching her: “… ordeal … will subjected to wisdom and prudence … evil men … victory over opposition … false friends …” and so on. Trump twenty. Judgment. God has spoken.

“Who are the false friends?” Mary Harlowe asks. She would.

Mabel hesitates. “A dark man.” She glances up at Betty who withers. Of course, all the men Betty can think of are dark, except maybe the Meredith boy. And Abner, who is no friend in the first place. But, still, a cruel doubt has stabbed her, hurt her deeply, and inwardly she grows faint. “And perhaps a child,” continues Mabel, eyes flicking over the cards. “And a married woman.”

After the session, one of the best they have ever had, when the others have left, Mabel reminds Betty that Wanda Cravens has three small children and Mary Harlowe five, no obstacle perhaps to a beast of lust, but hardly attractive to a man of honor. Betty thanks her, weeping gratefully, and, as the rain lets up momentarily, leaves, her joy renewed.

12

West Condon came alive as Miller walked through it. First day of spring and, on impulse, he’d decided to leave the Chevy at home, walk to the Chronicle. Still needed the trenchcoat, but he wore it open. Women appeared to sweep porches, men laughed foolishly from autos, children ran and shouted. Bicycles bounced down off porches. He heard the whump-whump of a basketball bouncing on cinders. The cool rains of the last couple days had sunk a fragrance into the soil that the sudden vernal sun this Saturday morning exploited gaudily. Who would think some here saw an end to it all?

The new time springs forth! Sun splintering through the windowfrost sprays the truth of the new evangel upon her bed. She stretches, feels old constraints squeeze out her sinews to run fingering down her arms and out into oblivion. Make way for light!

Downtown, people opening their shops hailed him. He took off his trenchcoat, carried it over his shoulder. West Condon showing its best face, momentary denial of the gloomy omens. Exchanges of witless banter, easy laughter. Maury Castle, rolling out the awning of his shoestore, made a dig about widows and orgies. Miller only laughed and told him he’d better join up quick if he wanted to get a little of that grace. Castle heehawed.

The worst of it was still in front of him, but he felt ready for it. Admittedly, it was pretty harrying, and now that the cult had become a more or less public phenomenon, there was more to keep an eye on than merely the little group itself, and that pushed him all the more, but as long as they didn’t move the date up on him again, he felt he could make it to the end. Or close enough anyway, for what he wanted out of it. The cult itself had not grown much since Miller’s first night — an ex-coalminer named Ben Wosznik and two or three more disaster widows — but its force had. The town was now awake to them, and the members themselves felt this awakening. There was always a tension as they faced out of the Bruno house, and even their own homes now sometimes seemed alien to them.

The Nazarene preacher Abner Baxter, made jealous it would seem by the loss of some of his own congregation, had been the first to make the cult public by his open denunciation of it. Squat red-maned head butted forward, copy rolled up in his freckled fist like a truncheon, he had invaded Miller’s office one afternoon, accompanied by two of his flock — introduced to Miller as Mr. Roy Coates and Mr. Ezra Gray — to deliver a formal handwritten repudiation of the “false prophet Giovanni Bruno” and the “sorcerers and impostors” who surrounded him. His thunderings on apostasy and women—“Women they gotta keep silence in the churches! they ain’t permitted to speak out, like the law says! Anything they need to know, Mr. Miller, let them ask their menfolk!”—had made it clear he saw Sister Clara as the real marplot behind the heresy. He had raged there in the darkening office to the clacking rhythm of the wireservice teletypes and the distant thump of old Hilda the press, his stubby legs set martially apart, his two lieutenants now conciliatory, now indignant, now sinister, now apologetic. If Miller had been tempted to drop the project, it was Baxter who removed the temptations. Even Jones, watching on deadpan from his desk, had had to admit he was impressed. The office girl Annie Pompa, moonface blanched to a pale olive, had stood stunned in the doorway, staring at this exhibition as though at green-skinned monsters from outer space, had squeaked in fright as the three men had wheeled suddenly — in mid-damnation, as it were — to bulk out past her. In a half-faint behind her desk afterwards, plump hand pressed into the sponge of her bosom, she had been voiceless, able only to shake her fat head fearfully, as though to affirm that the world was, in truth, in danger.

The heady spring weather today whetted Miller’s appetite for baseball and golf, for the feel of damp grass as he knuckled a ball and tee into the earth or fielded a bunt, for different places he’d been on different spring openings, even for West Condon in the spring, but the old West Condon with track meets and pickups and late evening ball games, tennis and Indian rubber, picnics, bonfires, furtive assaults under burred blankets that scratched agitatingly on the uncalloused flesh — whetted, in short, his underappetite, and, truth to tell, he was hungry enough. Here, the cult had robbed him utterly. At Bruno’s house, neither he nor Marcella were left alone five minutes now. As their chief scribe, his presence was required at all times and at every break he got set upon by one or another of the factions, each seeking to convince him of their own peculiar point of view. All knew it without understanding what they knew: he was the only one present without convictions.

As for Happy Bottom, well, she was impatient and surely she tempted him, but he just didn’t have the time free. Trouble with that girl was that the act was no five-minute project with her, it was an epoch. Sometimes it almost seemed to him there was something suicidal about her leap into bed: a hot mole. Not that she looked like one — nor sounded like one: her Judgments gave him as much pleasure as he got these days. Still, he wasn’t able to make a whole kingdom of a mattress, and that was the kind of circle she seemed to chart for him. And, what was more to the point maybe, he wanted to stop lying to Marcella. Her total ingenuous belief in him gave him a kind of responsibility he hadn’t had before: didn’t especially want it, but he couldn’t help but recognize it. Commitment was a real thing to her, solid as a door, specific as a threshold, and so, unavoidably, had become so for him as well. He knew that weaning her away from the cult and her brother would not be easy, but he meant to try, and he knew the consequences of success, knew and accepted them. In fact, goddamn it, they even appealed to him.

She skips, singing, to the bathroom, peeling off her pajamas, shedding old skins. Everything new, everything clean, and, for the day, a bright yellow frock with the rustle of spring in it. Rebirth! Water splashes in the tub, exciting her, sunlight splashes on the floor. And then, just as she’s stepping into the tub, Mr. Himebaugh walks in, looking ill—“Oh, I’m sorry, dear!” he says. “That’s all right,” she smiles, ducking down into the tub, and he leaves.

Father Jones sat, fat polyp, alone on a stool in the hotel coffeeshop, belly butting the bar, before him an oval platter stained with egg yolk and dusted with toast crumbs. Jones sometimes ate as many as eight fried eggs in a morning. Miller flung his hat onto a wall hook, took a stool one removed from Jones to give the man elbow room, and they exchanged dry grunts of recognition. “Pecan waffles, Doris,” Miller said to the woman who wandered blearily behind the counter. She poured a cup of coffee, bopped the counter with it before bringing it to abrupt rest in front of him, thrust a grubby hand into the pecan jug, which still contained the crumpled cigarette package Miller had thrown there five days ago.

Cup at mouth, hat tipped back, eyes asquint, Jones said, “Lucky you happened in just now. Strange as it must seem, I was just contemplating as how, now that we’ve copped all the goddamn prizes being passed out this season, you’d probably be anxious to give your old Dad here a fortnight off. See, my poor old Mother is ailing, and—”

“Jones, don’t kid me, you never had a mother,” said Miller, pouring the coffee in the saucer back into the cup and sheeting the saucer with a paper napkin. “I will say, though, your appetite sure seems to have gone to pot from all the overwork.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Whoo! I feel awful.” Jones sagged.

“How many eggs did he eat this morning, Doris?”

“Same as always,” she said and poured stringy batter on the waffle iron, rained upon it broken pecans. “All we had.”

Miller laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal. But give me just four or five weeks more. Until this Bruno thing is over.”

“What? Haven’t you laid that chick yet?”

“Jones, that gang is full of women, and I can only handle one at a time,” Miller said, as Doris, dropping the lid of the waffle iron, turned a puffy eye on them. The lid lifted, batter bagged out and dribbled, turned hard. “In fact, you can help me out if you’ve got a couple minutes free tonight.”

Jones lit a cigar, grunted interrogatively.

“I haven’t been able to get good pictures of the group yet, but tonight may be a good time. They’re going to meet out at that little rise next to Deepwater Number Nine. You know it?”

“Yeah. Cunt Hill.”

“What! Are you serious?”

“Somebody told me when we were out there for the disaster.”

“But how did it get a name like that?”

“Looks like one. The east, or belly, slope is gradual, and there’s even a slight abdominal dip before the last pubic rise — Stretch out there on the bar, Doris, and lemme show—”

“Not me,” grumbled Doris. “My slope ain’t gradual,” and she slapped her belly, making them laugh.

“Then, on the west side,” Jones continued, “it drops off sharply into a grove of trees at the edge of the mine buildings. But it only really got its name, I understand, when the company for some goddamn reason cut a clearing in the middle of all that vegetation, went digging for something or other, and left an incredible gash right in the old alveolus of love!”

“Right in the old olive-oilus of love!” exclaimed Doris. “What the hell is that?” She left them, shaking her head, to continue her mindless wandering behind the counter, smudging a clean glass here, dropping bread on the floor there.

“This fissure is now the repository of used condums, thrown there, it is said, in the belief that such oblations prolong the potency of the communicant.”

“Jones, you’re kidding!”

“There is, in fact, a sizable orifice in the crack, driven no doubt by some wag with an electric drill and a compressed air hose, though many in the heat of a drunken brawl have claimed to be the Man Who Deflowered Cunt Hill.”

Marcella, fresh from the bath and into the frock, flies gaily down the steps. Flagstones of sun lie bright in the living room garden. Out! out with the sackcloth! let the new day in! Marcella sings swings leaps skips whirls through the musty old house, heaves open the windows, brings the green air in, brings smiles to the faces of Elan and Rahim, huddled over writings at the kitchen table. It is spring! And she is in love! And then, from outside, a bird’s liquid laughter sends wildflowers shivering up her spine, and out she dances to drench herself in the hot and holy sun!

Passing through the hotel lobby on his way to the plant, Miller ran into Wally Fisher and the Chamber secretary Jim Elliott. Elliott wanted to talk about the industrial brochure and the new West Condon Common Sense Committee being set up. Miller agreed to print the brochure at cost and help with the layouts, listened noncommittally to the Common Sense idea. He had bet Cavanaugh would get into this thing, was glad to see it finally happen, but wouldn’t be able to participate. Fisher, for his part, had a wild story about an out-of-town couple that had come through last night, registering as Mr. and Mrs. Washington; they had slipped out before dawn without paying, leaving deposits of shit all over the bed. “Some spring,” he said.

“Happy first day of spring!” Annie his office chief sang out as Miller pushed through the front door.

“Same to you, Annie!” he said, so boisterously that Annie started. They both laughed.

“Mr. Miller, the plaque came today, the award for the disaster special!” She was giddy with possession of it.

“Well, hang it up!” he smiled.

In the newsroom, he plumped his hat on the spare chair beside his desk, tossed the trenchcoat over the back of it. Crossed to the teletype and snapped the switch. The carriage jumped as though goosed, bringing the room to with its familiar clacking thumping heartbeat. Thing he liked. In his morning mail, besides the award plaque, he found another black-bordered Last Judgment communication from the lady Black Hand:

The Devil, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be a woman. She roamed the tight streets of West Condon during the drawnout Judgment proceedings, servicing weak souls. Mother, complained the Supreme Judge, you are depopulating heaven! Your paradoxes drive me nuts, she responded with a dry scoffing cackle, and gave her skirts a kick.

• • •

Seven thousand philosophy professors were assembled simultaneously and told that if they could produce one truth among them, they would all be pardoned. The seven thousand consulted for seven days. At the end of that time, they presented their candidate, who, standing before his Judge, said: God is just. This philosopher was immediately sent to heaven to demonstrate the stupidity of his statement, and the remaining 6,999 were consumed by Holy Wrath.

• • •

A poet, seeking favors at the Judgment, composed a brilliant ode to Divine Justice, and presented it. It was so enthusiastically received that the poet was proclaimed Judge of the Day and granted Supreme Authority for twenty-four hours. So ingenuous and sweet-natured was the fellow, however, that he unhesitatingly absolved everyone who appeared before him. God finally had to call an end to the poet’s franchise for fear of being laughed at…

He shouldn’t go out there, just fog up the vision, but he’d promised yesterday. He’d better go. He would. Picked up the phone, dialed the hospital. Though it was what he lived by, he regretted the one-track specificity of all action, of all choice, what time made you do when you came to a fork in the path … or two forks at once. Eleanor Norton’s seven aspects were the thing, by God! While he waited, he hummed “Just As I Am,” an old revival tune, and doodled on his desk blotter. He noticed that all the doodles lately looked alike: M’s. Since his own name had never fascinated him that much, they could only stand for one thing. Some were peaked and shaded heavily, gone over and over until they looked like a flock of shaggy black birds in flight in a green sky. Others were rounded like two hillocks, or like one hill cleft, insignia of all three feminine distinctions at once. As if something were lacking still, some of the M’s had even been enclosed in a circle. “And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,” he sang into the phone, “O Lamb of God, I come! I come!”

Marcella, digging in the dewed earth by the old apple tree, sings revival songs of her own make. She punches open the gaily colored seed packages. Thirty days! The sun is gloriously hot on her spring-frocked back. He comes!

After loading up the hooks with wirecopy, Miller took the panel out to the hospital. Stalled at every stopsign, clanked even on new asphalt. Old rusty-smelling wreck. One year old. Stopped for gas at the station where Lem Filbert worked, asked him if he was keeping in shape. Filbert played a creaky shortstop on their semipro team. The guy grinned broadly, then sighed, spat. “Ahh, shit, I’m gittin’ too fuckin’ old, Tiger.”

“Yeah, we all are. Where’s all the young talent?”

Filbert’s grin faded. “They’re smart. They’re all gittin’ outa this deathtrap before it’s too fuckin’ late.”

“Is that Mello in there working on that Ford?”

“Yep, he’s one a the fuckin’ lucky ones. Come on a coupla weeks ago. Been at least fifty fuckin’ guys by here lookin’ for a job.” The valve on the gas hose burped shut. Filbert squirted enough more in to round the charge off, hung up the hose, capped the gastank, spat again. “Gonna be a lotta fuckin’ holes in the lineup this year,” he said flatly, and stared off.

“I know.” There was nothing else either of them could say, so Miller paid and left. Lem’s brother, Tuck, killed in the mine disaster — about all they were able to bring out were his head and feet — had played a great center field with them for six or seven years. There were others, too, too painful to think about. Lorenzini and Calcaterra. Their pitcher Bill Lawson, whose widow had been in and out of the cult. Mario Juliano. And Bert Martini with one arm gone now. Martini caught and Miller had known one-arm catchers before, and he hoped to rehabilitate the old guy. But it was going to be a pretty glum season. Man. Down with spring.

Inside the hospital, the white was perhaps a little whiter, but past that there was nothing to let you know spring had got turned on outside. Miller picked up the traffic list. Seven admitted, five released: even the batting average was bad. He went back, took the elevator up to second. As he stepped out, the first thing he saw was Happy Bottom’s happy bottom. Her back was to him, her head down studying the diet and medications lists, and she was absently pinching through her skirt to tug down the legband that forever gaped upward. A useless effort, he had told her, being able to prove that the band’s natural position, given all stresses, was exactly five picas above her thigh’s best wrinkle. So what? she would say, and, turning from him, tug it again. “Now, how did you know I was coming?” he asked.

Her hand twitched away in reflex as her head came up, then stroked back toward its tugging cranny, again pincered the white skirt. Her arm relaxed, the hand sagging, pulling the taut skirt yet tauter. She turned then to look at him. “Oh,” she pouted, “I thought it was one of the doctors.”

A bell rang and a light came on down the corridor. “Say, I can’t stay,” Miller said. “I just dropped up a second to—”

“Post office is in room 24-A,” she said with a challenging smile, and left him to go answer the patient’s signal, switching her hips not too subtly at all. He could almost hear the old barrel organ root-toot-tootling away.

Of course, he should just wait here since he wasn’t going to stay, but he didn’t, wandered instead down to 24-A, empty as he had supposed it would be. He leaned back against the bed, waited, a few fantasies flowering from the root below.

Happy entered, glanced back behind her, eased the door shut. All those M’s, my God! M for mountains. She met his smile with one of her own, approached, everything moving at once. M for everything moving at once. “At last!” she growled. A wisp of sandy hair poked out under her nurse’s cap. “You are in my clutches! The Black Hand strokes again!”

Miller grinned. “Mother,” he complained, “you forget the gravity of the situation. Men are dying!”

She smiled up at him. Her breasts had that rare muscular thrust that made them look, from above, like a pedestal for the head. Or a platter. “Dying indeed. You’ve been around those awful morbid people too much, Tiger.”

“They’re not morbid, they’re ecstatic.”

“Listen, I saw that poor boy Bruno. He had so many scars on and around his unfortunate joint, it looked like he’d been rebuilt there by a quack plastic surgeon.”

“Who, Giovanni? You mean he had some accident—?”

“You bet, accident. Whoever flayed him, flayed by patterns. Or maybe he used a knife. He was a real curiosity out here. All the nurses took turns with his baths to get a look. Of course, as soon as he was strong enough, we couldn’t get near him.”

“Really?” Miller laughed. He’d guessed as much, but now he had information he hadn’t known otherwise how to get. “Who bathed him then?”

“His sister.” If she caught his inward jolt, she gave no sign of it. “And as for dying, well, nobody tries any of that funny business up here unless I let them. Of course, on off days, why, I don’t really care. I just forget and they drop off like flies.” The platter punched his chest as if to roll his own head upon it, and, below, her hipbone curled in to knock once. Enough. “Tiger, there’s thirty-six people up here whose lives depend on you!”

“Hand,” he grinned, “you’re even blacker than I thought.” And, as if in thanks for that, as her mouth dampened his grin, her hand trickled in a liquid gambol down his spine to midthigh, then back up the front where a wild demand had stirred. “But there’s no lock on that door,” he whispered, her lips biting his words.

“I’ve got the key to the upstairs X-ray room, and it just happens to be time for my break. Won’t be anybody up there all morning.” There was spring light in her smile and a glitter in her eyes’ mischief that chased all phantoms, even the most recent, while from his fingertips, pressed urgently into the soft swells that had won her her name, there radiated a message of scorn for the highflown moralizing of his morning walk and a sense of cosmic pandemonium that made him laugh. “We shall take inside pictures and sell them secretly to zee leetle boys,” she murmured. “We shall make a meellion!” He didn’t know if she meant dollars or pictures, but knew better than to ask.

Marcella sits on a stool under the scrawny apple tree in the grassless backyard, her hands full of damp dirt, the sun on her bright yellow back. Before her: a plot of troubled earth, about four feet square, marked off from the world’s vague extension by four corner stakes and a piece of wrapping string. Four or five sticks poke up in the plot like its first people, broad-shouldered, wearing empty seed packages, but headless. The gaiety of their uniforms delights her, but what will express the joy they think? She spies a clump of new dandelions in Rosalia’s yard next door. She picks a few, punches little holes in the tops of the seed envelopes — really the bottoms, for they are upsidedown, of course — and inserts the dandelion heads. She laughs. The fact is, Marcella doesn’t exactly believe in the cataclysm. At first, she had some doubts about her brother even, for she had never confused love with worship. But she has grown greatly in these few weeks, has discovered the true solidity of truths she previously only suspected, or thought might just be creatures of her own inturned foolishness. For example: that Jesus is not salvation, but only a single path among many to a higher condition that ultimately must even exclude him. Or: that true knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation. She has been greatly helped by them all. By Eleanor and by Mr. Himebaugh, even by Clara. And most of all by Justin. Though silent, apart, calm, singular, he is yet at the heart of the Plan, moving with hidden fingers, fulfilling with unspoken words, gentle, responsive, aloof from the human frailties of the group. Justin is — in a sense — their priest. She feels it. Perhaps they all feel it. She thinks of his silence as like the ardent silence of the sun, his apartness as like the enfolding apartness of the stars, his calm like the contained explosions in her chest. But the cataclysm: well, it’s a matter of definition. God is terrible, but as beauty is terrible, not horror. So, if she prepares the earth for Him, even four little square feet of it, it is not to deny His coming, but to affirm the love that motivates Him.

Impulsively, his Saturday edition thrown shoddily to bed, Miller decided to go see Marcella. Go see her now, while his seed machine, old despot, was utterly drained of need, and make up his mind about that thing once and for all. Without the Chevy and the panel out, he had no choice, walked over. Didn’t mind. Loosened him up and gave him time to think. It was a little brazen, this midday visit, but there were few ignorant now of his involvement with the cult and, therefore, with any or all women in it. That was the trouble with this goddamn village, there was just no way to let an affair ripen on its own, it inevitably got put on a stage to be applauded, hooted, laughed at, or second-guessed. Even the high school kids suffered this kind of daily intrusion — how long had he known, for instance, that Ted Cavanaugh’s boy Tommy had been taking little Sally Elliott, Jim’s daughter, out to the ice plant several times a week? Only guy in town who refused to listen to that rumor was Coach George Bayles, who was afraid if he acknowledged it, he’d have to bench Tommy for breaking training and lose every game left on the schedule. Miller had in recent years resigned himself to pickups in roadhouses and distant dance halls — had the advantage they were usually young — but he was growing away from secretaries and phone operators, had trouble setting up anything worth more than a second listless event.

He passed the Lincoln School yard where a gang of youngsters were playing basketball. Lot of pushing, elbowing, fumbling, shouting. Found himself unconsciously trying to pick out the ones that might have promise. The ball escaped them, trickled out of bounds. A fat boy chased it, and the others let him. “Hey! Hi, Tiger!” shouted one of them, one of his carriers down at the plant. “That’s Tiger Miller, the baseball player!” the kid shouted at the others.

“We know it,” said the fat boy irritably, then turned his hungry smile on Miller. “Take a shot, Tiger!” he called, and heaved the ball. Three bounces. Miller reached down for it. Felt good in his hands.

“From way out here?” Miller asked, grinning. “I don’t think I can make it.”

“Aww,” said the fat boy, and the others joined in. “C’mon, Tiger!”

Miller sucked the ball with both hands to his forehead, his old shot: believed in thinking the ball into the basket. Hell of a long distance at that, though. He relaxed, brought the ball down hard against the pavement, half step forward, ball eased up against the palm of his right, the impact that converted mere force into a subtle control system, and as the ball’s momentum pushed his hand up, his left glided up, struggling against the bind of his trenchcoat, to guide — thrust off the asphalt with the calf muscles, felt old muscles snap awake, at jump’s peak, ball at the brain, shoved himself back to earth again. The ball arched away—fffft! — didn’t even touch the fucking rim going through. Hah! Only the stiff clock of his leather soles batting thinly on the asphalt whipped him back out of the stadium to this present scene, where small boys cheered the old baseball player who ran the town newspaper.

“Shoot another one, Tiger!” they cried.

Miller laughed, but knew when to quit. Still felt the knot in his legs from that short tight jump. “Let’s see you guys try it,” he said, and he left them excitedly imitating him.

As luck would have it, it was Eleanor Norton, not Marcella, who met him at the door of the Bruno house. Unprepared for her and with no excuse for being there, he said lamely, “Looks like good weather for tonight’s trip to the hill, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied, reluctantly admitting him. He recognized a growing distrust in her, especially since his photographing Baxter’s assault night before last. He knew his days were numbered, was a little surprised he had lasted so long — well, people accepted what they wanted to accept, and they wanted to think the city editor was on their side.

“How’s Giovanni? Will he be able to go out?”

“He’s doing well, but I don’t think we’ll risk it.” She sighed, rubbing her medallion. “It’s a delicate business, Mr. Miller.”

He agreed with that solemnly, and they passed through the meeting room and dining room into the kitchen. Giovanni’s door was closed, but he pushed away the thought that crowded in, accepting what he wanted to accept. Ralph Himebaugh was in the kitchen. Logs and papers were spread on the kitchen table. Ralph muttered a greeting. Another reason why Eleanor had come to distrust him, surely. Miller had always got along with the man, but, in the new context of the cult, Ralph could only hate him, whether he was being sincere or not. And now that Ralph had fallen victim, like the rest, to the informal harassment campaign on in town, he seemed to suggest he saw Miller as the man who had let the word out. A glance out the kitchen window into the backyard: Marcella was out there, mourning clothes off and now into a starchy yellow dress, bright as the bright day. She was working a small plot of earth, garden or something. When he glanced back at Mrs. Norton, he saw she was watching him. Himebaugh, too. Well, screw ’em. He smiled blankly, then, without excuses, walked out back to the girl.

The small yard was barren. Garbage pails by the back door. Small twisted fruit tree, fruitless, where Marcella sat now, back to him, on a stool. Wire incinerator in front of the alley. Fenced on one side, open to the neighbors on the other. This was his stage and something in the challenge from the kitchen, the warmth from the sun, the tug in his calves, the rumpled delicacy of her seated figure, made him shrug off caution and strut it like a cock.

The soft pulsing fine-boned feel of her shoulders — knew it, enjoyed it, even before his large hands wrapped them. The dress was fresh and crisp to the touch. She gazed up smiling — delighted, but not surprised. He had never succeeded in surprising her. Some way of divining his presence, split second of presentiment. He relinquished her shoulders, knelt to inspect her garden. They laughed at its seed-package keepers with dandelion heads, though Miller’s perverse eye turned them right side up and saw something else there. His gaze traced the expressive tapering of her right forearm, resting on her crossed knee, the bone-bent turn of her wrist, the fragile fretwork of veins, fingers smudged with earth. They talked nonsense, but under that sun out on this stage with that fragrance in the soil, anything else would have sounded pretentious. Anyway, he was watching her, curious about himself. If his artless inspection troubled her, her poise and easy gaiety gave no sign of it. The poise, that was part of it. The gaiety. And her eyes, brown, doelike, yet bright and awake, and eagerness there, and love for him. But he’d seen that intense gaze, been loved before, and painlessly had turned his back. Still, there was something there, in her eyes. Sensitivity, yes, and intelligence, though he’d hardly challenged either enough to prove them. He felt then, watching her eyes and warmed by the sun, a flicker of exaggerated tones and comforts from a distant innocence of his own — yes, the innocence, the astonishing uncomplicated ingenuousness that gave her such a nice clean sphere to live in, all harmony, and with him at dead center, that must be it. And it was what had been troubling him all day, even in the heat of that frantic bull-like assault on the X-ray table: that his own motivations had become fragmented, that Marcella and Happy, the newspaper and dead buddies, West Condon and East Condon, baseball, sociology, saviors, and sex, all existed isolated under uniquely different legal systems; Ellie Norton’s seven aspects hardly covered the field. And now, unexpectedly, he had knocked up against a simple yet all-embracing view whose every action was a direct manifestation of it. Purity. Saint’s eyes. And, goddamn, he had a yearning to share it. He glanced down at the seed-package soldiers. Back to the garden. He had spent a decade rooting it out of himself, and here, happily in hell, he’d wandered right back to the gate.

He stood, feeling weak, and she stood to face him, sun bright on her upturned face. He realized that the decision was actually already made, had been made long before, and this was only a ritual: drawn to her sphere’s center, he had long since agreed to stay. There now remained for him only to redescribe the sphere itself for her, make a few holes and let real air in; and relearn himself the integrity and continence that belonged to her view of him. He asked her to have dinner with him tonight, and she, radiant, accepted. The scene, the moment, called for an embrace, but the old cock was feeling himself public again. He was, too. A glance back at the house revealed Mrs. Norton and old Himebaugh posed rigidly in the window: stony-faced American Gothic. They had come for lunch, Marcella said, smiling apologetically, and she had to get it ready. Would he stay? Something told him he should, but he hesitated to face those two, couldn’t run the risk yet of a direct showdown in Marcella’s presence. He told her he had to get the paper out if they were to have dinner together, walked her to the back door.

Eleanor and Ralph were waiting for them. Marcella, smiling, slipped on by them. “Don’t forget the wirecopy tonight,” Ralph snapped, drumming a metal rule on his knuckles. Himebaugh had decided the evening paper was neither soon enough nor comprehensive enough for his purposes, now demanded the teletype copy in its entirety every evening.

“And please, Mr. Miller, no photographs tonight,” said Mrs. Norton bluntly, fingering the gold disc.

“No, of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry about the other night. I thought I was being a help. But, if you like, I’ll bring the negatives and turn them over to the group.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said, but there was no melting there. He left before they could progress beyond these petty complaints to the real thing that was irking them. Off to Mick’s. For charred hamburgers.

The blossoming spiritual affair between Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton was, to be sure, one of the more fascinating products of the cult. And it was odd, because under ordinary circumstances, they would probably never even have spoken to each other. Both avoided others, were excessively polite and formal when necessarily in public. She, childless and middle-aged, was a good teacher, but uncompromising and not a popular one. He, a bachelor a few years her senior, was a brilliant file cabinet lawyer who avoided cases that must come to court, and Miller could never remember having seen the guy do more than tip his hat and mutter a delicate “hello” to a woman. But a disaster had thrown them together, two innocents surprised in a fever, and now their logbooks, their respective systems, were drawing their timid souls together in holy intercourse. In fact, their two systems did fit together in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below. The funny thing was, though, Ralph’s system was the one on the bottom.

Because they were reading each other’s logbooks — excitedly, voraciously, as though they were lovel-etters — Miller had to take what was for the given moment left over, jumping back and forth in time and between the two authors. The disrupted chronology was no problem in Eleanor’s case, for behind her writings of fifteen years ago there was the same essentially whole ontology that governed her most recent messages; if there was a difference, it was one of gradual growth, greater profundity, a stripping away of early pseudoscientific imagery related to space travel and biological transmutations, and an approach to that kind of all-embracing mysticism that characterized the poets of all faiths. But, read out of order, it was hard to make any sense at all out of Himebaugh’s schemata; their parts arose separately from their several points of origin, founded always in some concrete event in the world, discarded as they curved away from each other, altered, revised with each discovery of new data. Stylistically, Eleanor’s writings changed as a young author’s might, from an early awkward manner whose mystery was provided by broken phrases and harsh juxtapositions, through a florid “literary” period, acquiring finally her present mastery of vocabulary and syntax, a unique, albeit eclectic, style of her own. Himebaugh’s writings, at least those Miller read, covered a much narrower time span, only about four years, though he had disaster clippings that were a lot older, and his writing ways were constant: pedantic, precise, and abbreviated. The only change of note was a gradual adoption of new symbols, shrinking yet more his ever-spare use of language.

There were enormous differences between them. While Eleanor was, essentially, a gentle mystic who found peace of soul in the denial of all dualisms, particularly that of life and death, Ralph was terrorized by a haunting vision of the worst half of all dichotomies, obsessed by the horror of existence qua existence. In Eleanor’s messages from the higher aspects, Miller found, through all personal trials, an uncompromising rejection of constructive thinking: wisdom could only be intuited; contrarily, in Himebaugh’s disaster scrapbooks and derivative graphs, one encountered a total commitment to the precision tools of logic, of science, of mathematics, the patient step-by-step addition of simple premises or single actions to arrive, hopefully, at complex totalities, the larger truths beyond phenomena.

So, what was it united them? Partly, to be sure, it was the lonely need for compurgators they both felt, and partly it was their mutual recognition of superior intellects. They both shared, as well, that extreme intensity in the private project that characterizes all introverts, and both had staked their lives on some unspecified but cataclysmic event to which they believed their own destinies linked — each lent credence, that is, to the other’s central hope. And it was also true that, though Eleanor championed the intuitive life, her behavior was reassuringly rational, while Ralph’s rationalism reached to the superreal, became a kind of rational advocacy of the irrational.

But yet it was more than that, for there was a structural objective bond between them, too, as Miller had begun to perceive in conversations with each of them separately and in watching their behavior at the nightly meetings. Requisite to any understanding of either of them, of course, was an acceptance of their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth. It was all too easy to see Eleanor’s self-styled divine dispatches as mere responses, conscious or unconscious, to her own psychic needs of the given moment, and forget that she herself never doubted that they truly came to her from higher forces in the universe — by way of her gift of “extrasensory perception,” as she described it. Her transports were real, and though the envisioned truth was too grand for memory to contain it, she was convinced she had brought back with her from ecstasy partial images of it, and these she and the dense world possessed forever in her logbooks. If she did not live in perpetual communion with those mighty souls of the seventh aspect, it was only because of a fault in spiritual discipline. In like manner, while composed of what looked like arbitrary first principles, founded upon ambiguities he did not see as such, flawed by the confusions of the numerologists, and limited by his emotionally derived specter, “the destroyer,” Ralph’s system was nevertheless for him a new science, and if he did not yet embrace the whole truth of the universe, it was only because he still lacked all the data, lacked some vital but surely existent connection — in short, had not yet perfected his system. They shared, that is, this hope for perfection, for final complete knowledge, and their different approaches actually complemented each other, or at least seemed to. Eleanor’s practical difficulty, after all, was in relating her inexpressible vision of the One to the tangible particulars of in-the-world existence, and it was here where Himebaugh’s constructions and proofs, founded on the cold data of newspaper reports, seemed to be of value, providing her shortcuts, as it were, to the relevant material within the impossible superfluity of sense-data, and enriching her own vision with new and useful kinds of imagery. Similarly, Himebaugh’s major frustration, as he had explained it some time ago to Miller, was that his additive process never seemed to end, it was apparently impossible ever to ascend to that last telling sum, and he had welcomed this final figure, so-called, toward which he could more accurately direct his computations.

Moreover, for Ralph Himebaugh, the One, if his universe of screaming particles could be so described, was the mindless spreading blot of death — the emptiness was not beautiful but black — and Eleanor, the mystagogue, had provided Ralph, the belovèd disciple, a new kind of hope: if that blot, what she called “density” or the “force of darkness,” were indeed mindless and random, how did he account for the very mathematical system he himself employed? If all were haphazard, where did order, however tenuous it might seem, come from? If all were irrational, how explain reason? As day, she covered and penetrated his night. Couldn’t he see that there must be an affirmative, an ascendant, a disciplining force in the universe? That if there were darkness and density, there must also be light?

Light: not the image but the substance radiates within her, from her. These weeks she has dutifully cloaked it in black to hide it from the mourners, from Mama, from Rosalia and the prying dark-eyed neighbor ladies, from the old priest, from the fearful many who congregate now at her brother’s bed. Papa died and she could not weep, for sheer joy had overwhelmed her. The wailing widowed women omen the end, but for her it is a magnificent commencement. Only Eleanor has understood. “Love,” she has told her, “is not a goal, Marcella, it is a given. Love is the soul and the soul is love. It is our irreducible portion of the Divine, of the One, of Light.” Gaily, she prepares their lunch. His eyes today: how they opened! how they touched her! how they laughed! She smiles at Eleanor’s gloom, impulsively kisses her cheek. “It’s spring!” she whispers. Poor Mr. Himebaugh, irascible with his flu, eats without appetite. When he walked in on her this morning — the second time it’s happened now, poor man — he was clearly in pain: how strange that common illness should travel with them to the end! Her Mama, she knows, kneels still in St. Stephen’s, befuddled and bleak, her troubled old head bowed to her gnarled and knotted hands, the pews sullen and musty and empty, and would, untended, kneel there to her death. So Marcella eats hastily, her own appetite undone by excitement, by love, and rises to go bring Mama home, her daily midday ritual. Eleanor trails her to the door and there says a strange thing, so strange and unexpected Marcella cannot at first believe she has heard it: “Take care, Mana, for his mouth is the mouth of a cruel man!” Over the gentle lady’s shoulder, Marcella sees the old lawyer, nodding paternally. Light flashes golden off Eleanor’s medallion and compassionate tears mist her eyes. “Listen!” Marcella, though afraid, waits. “There is known to be one among us,” Eleanor whispers hoarsely, “sent by the powers of darkness!”

After a can of soup and a couple hamburgers at Mick’s, Miller hurried back to the office, goosed by guilt. But back by old Hilda, he was surprised to discover all the forms locked up and in place. Maybe they didn’t need him after all. Carl Schwartz, ink-smeared, told him the story, obviously filtered through Jones and thus elevated to a classic, of the George Washingtons who came to the hotel and left a deposit of shit to cover the bed if not the board, while two paperboys lurked behind the press to overhear it. Still another enduring contribution to American folklore: Jones had done it again. Miller used the toilet, washed up, glanced over the pegged layouts trying to remember what was going into the paper, nickeled a Coke from the machine, nodded to old Jerry the janitor as he shuffled in for work.

At his desk, he answered a few phone messages that had come in during his several long absences, took notes from a book on the Dutch Anabaptists which could be turned into a small feature piece for tomorrow’s edition, cleaned the excess clutter off his desk. Felt sleepy. Too much exercise. He dragged the manila file folders out of his bottom desk drawer: they contained the accumulation of his notes on the Brunists … hmmm. He jotted that down: the Brunists. Hilda’s muffled rhythm and the teletype (mustn’t forget the goddamn copy for Himebaugh) nearly had him dozing over his notes, when Reverend Wesley Edwards dropped in. Tweed overcoat, Sam Snead hat, leather gloves, smirking smugly around the stem of his briar pipe. Gregarious cleric of the new confession, seer of the secular Christ. All of which meant that once again the priests, having something to lose by risking the challenge, were rolling with the punch. In one breath, Edwards would ridicule “Mother Goose parsons” and boast of man’s “progress toward independence from any transcendent boss,” then, puff-puff on the pipe, turn right around and defend myth as “an image-language reaching out beyond the particulars of appearance toward the transcendence.” Today, it turned out, Edwards was not happy about the recent millennial features in the paper, felt they were adversely affecting the impressionable young, who were asking him questions, the answers to which they weren’t intellectually prepared to grasp.

“Well, Edwards, news is news.”

“Even if it’s from the fourteenth century?”

Miller laughed. “Well, of course, that’s not why—”

“No, I know it’s not why. If news is news, how did it turn out you missed that fight the other night on Mr. Bruno’s front lawn?” Miller shrugged. Edwards assumed a look of concern. Pipe out. Eyetooth nibbling his lower lip. “Justin, it’s just that sort of thing, I’m afraid, that’s beginning to worry me.”

“Unh-hunh. You think maybe we ought to use a little, uh, common sense …?”

“Well.” Deep flush. Puff-puff on the pipe. Edwards played the part of the Christlike servant, holding no direct power or wealth like his class before him, nor seeming to want any. But he was just more sophisticated. What had any hierophant since Aaron ever been, give or take a few awesome franchises, but a witchstick for the power man against the masses? The Reverend. “Of course, I suppose it will all be over in another month.”

“Maybe, maybe not. They’re already committed to the irrational, what’s to make them change their minds?”

“Well, if what they think is going to happen doesn’t happen …”

“Do you think Christ rose?”

“Well,” fumbled Edwards, “yes, of course.” He emptied his pipe into the wastebasket, reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a tobacco pouch. “But anyway, that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter—”

“Exactly! It doesn’t matter! Somebody with a little imagination, a new interpretation, a bit of eloquence, and — zap! — they’re off for another hundred or thousand years.” Miller passed his hand over the heap of manila folders on his desk. “Anyway, it makes a good story.”

Edwards gazed down at the folders. “But, Justin, doesn’t it occur to you? These are human lives — one-time human lives — you’re toying with!”

“Sure, what else?”

“But to make a game out of—”

Miller laughed. “You know, Edwards, it’s the one thing you and I have got in common.”

Edwards stood there, indignant, dead pipe in hand, glaring down at the folders. “The only difference,” he said finally, curling his mouth into a patronizing smile, “is that I know what I’m doing.”

They stand by his bed, Elan, Rahim, and Mana. Elan questions, her brother’s nods condemn, fracturing her vision. Alone in her room afterwards, Marcella prays. She’s convinced there’s been a mistake, and that a new day, a new hour, will restore consonance. She does not yet, however, see how that will happen, and so pleads now for help. And meanwhile, in her garden, the sunny heads of her seed-package people wilt to a disconsolate brown.

Miller returned to the plant from a haircut and a purchase: a collar of roughly hammered pieces of old brass, primitive, magnificently simple, colors taken from the earth. The colors on her fingers this noon. Late afternoon, press run over, long but inviting night ahead. Where should they go? Perhaps his own place, a good steak or something. But on his desk, he found a pink message to call Miss Bruno. Uneasily, foreseeing that Eleanor might have spread her mothering wings already, he did so and proved himself a fair prophet. Mrs. Norton had called a small supper meeting of certain members in preparation for tonight’s expedition to the Mount of Redemption, and Marcella now had to stay to prepare for it.

“You can’t get out of it?”

“No.” Then, hesitatingly, as though perhaps being overheard, she added, “Tonight … please … be careful!” And she hung up … without inviting him to the supper.

Disgruntled, he dropped the phone in its cradle. The first day of spring was fading outside, gathering to a gray chill that matched his inner turn. The thought occurred to him to drop the whole thing. His morning seemed an age ago. But he had invested three hard weeks, and he needed at least that many more to have anything really exploitable. He stared at the manila folders: yes, there was a story there. More than one. And even his struggle to stay in the group would provide him new materials, wouldn’t it? It would. Then, there was the brass collar in his pocket. He took it out, held it in daylight. Did it really matter who established the choice for her? Let them do it, let them victimize him, let them crack her circle, and with patience the pieces would be his. Grinning malevolently at those two old specters in the back window, he took up the gauntlet, and, doing so, realized he had to hurry. Tonight. He’d begin tonight.

Before supper, dusk hanging still, they gather, the select. Giovanni slumps pale in the front room armchair, pale but life now waxes beneath the filigree of eggshell ribs. Eyes aglitter with the flames of early candles, they form community with him in a circle: Giovanni, Womwom, Karmin, Ko-li, Elan, Rahim, Mana. The absent one is missed silently by all. They lock hands to meditate. Privately, Mana repeats her prayer. She has felt her own security totter, fears now for what might yet come, though love has invested her with a strength none have accurately reckoned. The challenge, she realizes full well, is her own: to bring him back, to bring them back to him. Veins ripple electrically in Eleanor’s temples. Both hands Marcella grips shed a damp cool clamminess: it is as though both hands were the same man’s. But her brother’s hand is rigid, a frozen metallic claw; Mr. Himebaugh’s fidgets, squeezes her fingers absently, strokes her thumb. His eyes are closed and he shows his teeth. Eleanor gasps. Hands drop. Domiron speaks:

I call thee now to courage! Though each hour bring thee a new test, persist! Through all plights, against the blind, despite all mischief, persist! Though the powers of darkness pursue thee, yea, though they clasp your hands and share your table and strike at your innermost heart, persist! In self-denial, austere and venerative, persist! Persist, and unto new aspects shall the vernal winds of regenesis blow thee! Domiron bids you!

And so, where this night she anticipated joy, she confronts asperity and fear. Hints of betrayal. Divisions. Justin rises above the conflict, smiles silently upon it. Then, the journey to the hill: it reunites them. Her mother remains with Giovanni, the rest leave in cars: Mr. Himebaugh with the Nortons, Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Harlowe with the Halls. Mrs. Collins, Elaine, and Colin with Carl Dean, Mr. Wosznik and Mrs. Cravens with her and Justin. His right hand rests on her knee. She takes it into her lap. It is a large hand, not coarse, yet full of strength. He glances at her, smiles reassuringly. His fingers grip her thigh, giving her strength, then he returns the hand to the wheel. The Mount of Redemption. They arrive to find it dark. Colder than they had expected. Why: they are so few! It shocks them all. Justin eases the crisis: they line the cars up facing them, turn on all the headlights. Mr. Wosznik says that he will make torches for their next meeting. They sing, but their voices are swallowed up in the night and they seem, each, to sing alone. Without her brother, they seem strangely purposeless. Mr. Wosznik and Carl Dean build a small fire, blotting out the last of the stars, but bringing a moment of warmth to their small community. Below them, past a patch of firs and naked elms, the mine buildings squat darkly, unspecific threat that somehow, in its inanimate crouch, draws tears from the eyes of the women widowed here. Only one thing seems certain: they have come to the right place. Suddenly: car lights on the mine road! They huddle at the fire and watch in silence, in fear — yes! again! — it is Reverend Baxter and all his people! More of them than ever! Cars and cars! How did they know? The Nortons insist they must get away. But they are all afraid to leave the little fire. Mr. Himebaugh is trembling. Mrs. Collins is angry with Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Hall. Taunts and shouts from below. Justin speaks with Mr. Wosznik and Carl Dean and Colin. And still another car. But this time the driver, Mr. Diggs, comes running up the hill. The men brace for him. “Clara! Clara!” he cries. “It’s your house! It’s burnin’ down!”