The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon to come.
Thwock! The Black Peter administers justice upon the Evil One. Thwock! The Black Peter is tough, boy! He can really lay it on. Thwock! The Evil One bawls, but the Black Hand has gagged his filthy mouth. “Again!” the Black Hand commands. He holds pinned the Evil One. Thwock! “Switch him again, Paulie! Right on the peewee!” Thwock!
The Black Piggy is a sissy. A scaredy-cat. She administers justice like a baby. She always cries and runs away. Boy! they’ll get her now! They’ll make blood come.
They tell the Cravens boy if he will stop crying they will let him go home. He stops, but he keeps choking like. The Black Hand peeks out the shed door. “All clear!” he whispers. “Now, you shut up, Davey, and not a word, or we’ll deal with you again!”
“We mean it!” the Black Peter avers, whistling the switch through the air. But they’re not scared, because Davey Cravens is just three and hardly talks yet.
The Evil One, sobbing remorsefully, leaves. “Good job, Black Peter!” says the Black Hand. The Black Peter, swelling with pride, switches an old inner tube. Carefully, the Black Hand pushes his own hand out his sweater sleeve and slips the black one into a paper sack. The black one is beginning to fall apart. Already, the little finger has got lost and pieces chip off all the time. “Button up, Paulie.”
When the Evil One is out of sight, the Black Hand and the Black Peter, now disguised as Nat and Paulie Baxter, slip out of the shed and down the alley toward home, discussing proper retribution for the Black Piggy and plotting further astounding adventures.
Abner Baxter, Jr., helped his Mom as he always did on Saturday mornings, burning trash, filling the coalbin, cleaning the yard, and so on. Warm sunny day, a perfect first day of spring. The ground was damp and spongy from yesterday’s rain. His sister Franny was cleaning the kitchen, the other three were out playing. They got it easier than he ever did. He was already a freshman in high school, and he shouldn’t have to do this kid stuff.
Junior stared into the flames of his trash fire and watched the boxes melt, flare up, collapse. He built his fires like cities, then consumed them with his fiery wrath. Sodom fell beneath the flames every Saturday, an epic, and better even than in the movies. He put ants and beetles inside the boxes, watched them scramble out and to the top, just like people running to the roof. They scurried about up there, helterskelter, until, doomed anyway, they finally tumbled off and died. Sometimes he would catch a frog for his fires. Sometimes the frog died; sometimes, like Lot, he got away.
His little sister Amanda came down the alley. She was crying. “Whatsa matter?” he asked. Not that he cared.
“Nothing,” she said, and went on by. She was always crying.
A cornflakes carton tipped precariously as flames licked into its lower stories. The lettering turned cloudy black like the box, then shiny in contrast to the box. Miraculously, the carton did not fall, burned to a fragile black ash in that half-topple. Miracles happened all the time in Junior’s trash fires.
His Mom came out. “I been calling you,” she said.
“Fire ain’t out yet.” He watched her closely now for change, whenever she wasn’t looking, but she was still the same. Fat women don’t show for awhile. It disgusted him to think about it. “Awful dry today, and you cain’t take chances.”
She sighed and went back in.
He’d always thought his Mom was pretty, but now he didn’t think so. She was big and old. Maybe that was the kind of change that was happening.
A big black ant appeared on a milk carton skyscraper. Junior imagined it was Carl Dean Palmers. Carl Dean was a senior at the high school, a bully, and possessed by the Devil. He made fun of Junior in the shower room, and pushed him around outside classes, knocked his books out of his hands. The carton burned slowly, being heavily coated with wax. The wax began to melt and it made the ant run faster.
Carl Dean was having carnal knowledge of Elaine Collins. Elaine was only a freshman like himself and too young for seniors, but her Mom was arranging it. Junior’s Dad all but said so, and right in church on Sunday mornings, so it had to be true. When Junior went with his Dad to sing on the Bruno lawn night before last, he had hoped he might get to see it. He wondered if only Carl Dean did it to her, or if they all took turns. But his Dad made so much noise he scared them, and they came out and got in a fight.
The ant peeked over the edge, his feelers wobbling around. He was probably thinking about jumping. Junior watched with his hand in his pocket. Last year, when Reverend Collins was still alive and everybody was friends, Junior used to go by Elaine’s house at night, because she sometimes left her blinds up. The thing he always wanted to see was if she was getting hair yet like him, but he was never able to make sure. Now, she wasn’t at home so much, and anyway her Mom seemed awfully suspicious suddenly about Peeping Toms. The ant stopped running. It was surrounded by torturing flames. The roof of the skyscraper began to buckle. The ant bowed its back like a cat raising its fur. Then, as the skyscraper tipped, the ant rolled into the fire. Junior tried to watch it, but he lost sight of it in the ashes. Did God watch each single Sodomite to be sure he burned? When his Dad’s side finally won out and they took holy retribution on the apostates and impostors, Junior hoped he could be responsible for Carl Dean Palmers and Elaine Collins.
Franny Baxter knew who the “Black Hand” was. But she discovered that the two little ones were also mixed up in it, and she didn’t want them to get into trouble with her father. He had preached so furiously against whoever it was, she was sure he’d just about kill them if he found out.
Her mother shuffled about gloomily in the kitchen. Franny thought she should be joyful about having another baby, but she wasn’t. Maybe the truth of it was that the Sarah in the Bible wasn’t happy either, her husband only thought she was, or should be — the Bible never told the woman’s side of things. Maybe her mother was afraid: she wept all the time now. She was an old woman, after all, nearly forty. Franny wondered if she would ever have a baby, and, if she did, what it would feel like. She had never even had a boyfriend, but her mother always said that their father was her first beau, and she was over twenty when she met him. Franny thought she would like to have babies, but she didn’t want a man very much. Unless he was very nice and very quiet and loved her just as she was. If someone like James Stewart or Gary Cooper asked her to marry him and have babies, well, she would do it.
Amanda came in, in tears, and Franny decided it was time for a serious talk with the girl. She followed her into their room. Amanda threw herself on the bed and pushed her face into the pillow. But she wouldn’t admit anything, wouldn’t tell about it. Franny wanted to know why they used those peculiar names. She’d never seen them in comicbooks or in the movies. “You’ll get in trouble.”
“I don’t care.”
Franny never knew how to reason with Amanda. She could handle the boys, but there was always some kind of friction between her and her sister. She gave up, went back to her housecleaning. Really, she didn’t care. Let them do what they wanted to. It was little Paulie she was worried about. Paulie could grow up to be like James Stewart, if only he didn’t get going the wrong way.
Junior came in then from burning trash. She watched him at the high school, always felt a pain of disappointment. He never seemed to grow up. He slouched around the halls, looking lost and scared, his hands in his pockets, his head ducked, didn’t have any friends, didn’t join any of the clubs, didn’t study, didn’t do anything. He was just a wad of nothing. And he was going to get fat. He was already getting fat.
He was glancing sideways into the kitchen at their mother. Franny recognized that Junior was going to be jealous of the new baby. Amanda and Paul already were. Only she and Nat wouldn’t care. She smiled to think she could have something in common with Nathan. Junior looked up at Franny watching him and blushed, went into the bathroom. And that was another thing. Their mother was too careless about getting undressed and using the bathroom with the door open and everything, and she still gave all three boys their baths. No wonder Junior was like he was. Franny believed simply that people shouldn’t use the bathroom when other people were in there. But it did no good to argue. Not in this house. Junior didn’t butt in on her anymore at least, but everybody else did.
She saw Nat and Paulie outside. Nat with that paper bag. She knew she could count on Paulie. “Junior,” she called. He flushed the toilet and came out, looking kind of red-faced like he a lot of times did. “Go make Paulie come in. I want to talk to him.”
“What for?”
“Never mind. Something serious.” Junior was sullen, but she knew he would always do what she asked.
It was a hard thing to be the Black Piggy. She sought their admiration, but she always got crying at the wrong time and ruined it. Like when they fed that little long-eared doggy of Mister Brother Hall the hamburger with the broken glass in it. She just couldn’t believe a dog could be bad like people, even if bad people touched it, and when it started to twitch so funny and drip long stringy drips of blood from the mouth, she got all sick and sorry and had to run home. And when they switched the little Harlowe girl who was just two and made her go home in the snow without any clothes on, she just couldn’t stand it, it was too terribly cold, so she went right out there and dressed the girl in front of the whole world and took her home to her mother. Ow! She really got it that time! They took her into the shed and tied her on the old cot and hit her harder even than her Daddy did, because they said it had to be a blood punishment. And she had to prove to them she was as brave as they were by having a b.m. behind her Daddy’s pulpit, all alone, in the middle of the day. She nearly got caught and had to jump out a window and skinned her knees all up. And after that, they had to be pretty careful for awhile, because their Daddy was really mad and it seemed like he might have some idea who did it. But they let her be the Black Piggy again, instead of one of the Evil Ones.
And now today, she did it again. She wouldn’t hit that little boy. He looked sick or something to her. They would get her again. And there was nothing she could do. Unless she could think of the bravest thing of all. Against the worst enemy of all.
At supper Saturday night, their parents gone, the Black Hand smells danger. Sees it in his big sister’s eyes. Their parents have gone to a church meeting or something, and Junior went, too. At some hill. The Black Hand tries to beat it after, but she catches him outside. “Nat!” He slugs her in her soft cowardly gut, but she hangs on. “What’s in that bag, Nat?”
“Nothing. Candy.”
“Nat—”
“What do you care?”
“I know what it is. It’s awful, Nat. I’m going to tell.”
“Go ahead and tell. You fat old tattletale! It’s nothing. See if I care.”
She tries to grab it, but he kicks her in the legs, hits her on the ear. “I’m going to tell them as soon as they come home,” she says, still hanging on. She’s just like a pillow. You can hit her all day and nothing happens.
“You’re stupid,” he says. “You got red hairs on your fanny.” Schemes of bloody revenge race through his mind. “You’ll be sorry, you’ll really be sorry!”
“Not as sorry as you.”
“Who said it was anything?”
“Never mind who said.”
He knows. The Black Hand always knows. That stupid little sissy baby. They should never have let her join their gang.
Franny drags him back into the house, makes him go to the room. He kicks and punches. A pillow. She pushes him inside. The Black Peter is there, looking scared.
“Piggy squealed,” the Black Hand says when the door closes. “We gotta get rid of the hand.”
“How?” Peter is nervous. A punk, after all.
“Let’s dump it on old Widow Collins.” Number one enemy. He likes that hand. It hurts to give it up. But it’s getting old anyhow and a finger is broken off. He can be the Black Hand without it.
“Put it in her pants?”
“Don’t be stupid! We’ll wrap it up, give it like a present. We’ll scare the pants off that old whore!” The Black Peter giggles. “C’mon!”
Through the window.
In the trash, they find a box only partly burned. They put the hand in it, wrap it in newspaper from the shed. Warm night. Stars. Thin moon, though. Good night for a job.
The Collins house is dark. So much the better. They case it, approach from separate angles, recognize each other with soft clucks of the tongue, meet on the front porch. Steps creak as they mount them. They stiffen, crouch, slip up behind the swing. Minutes pass. Still okay. They scout around. Nothing to steal. The old whore has got smart. Black Hand tries the door. Locked. Slices up the screen, opens it. Inside door locked, too. Could smash the glass. Taps it. Too much noise. Quiet night. “Got any poop?” he whispers.
“No,” says Black Peter. “I already went.”
“Well, keep a watch out.”
The Black Hand lowers his pants, squats in front of the door where they’ll be sure to step in it when they come home. The poop is just half out, when the Black Peter gasps: “There’s somebody there!” and bolts down off the porch. The Black Hand pulls up his pants on the run and follows wide-legged after. What a mess.
Behind a tree, Hand stops, considers. Keep cool. Don’t let it drop and you’re okay. There’ll be a place. Peter slips up stealthily. “Do you see? There, at the back!”
“Yeah, you’re right. Shut up.” He winces into the black night. Can’t make out a thing, except some vague motion back there. “It’s only a dog, I think.” If it is, he’s going to rap the Black Peter, but good. And then he sees it. Like a star out of place. “Hey!” he hisses. “Somebody’s setting fire to the house! We gotta get outa here!”
Later, safely back in the room, the Black Peter asks, “What did you do with the hand?”
“I dunno. I don’t remember.”
Warm night in old West Condon. Still a chill there, but it was moving on. Vince Bonali, mildly looped, passed through this night, this town, on a Saturday night stroll. Spring had come on this morning hot and fragrant as a young girl in heat, and he still hadn’t quite got over it: bad as a man felt, how could he hate a day like that?
He’d spent the morning puttering around the house. The thaw and the cool March rains had left a damp soggy ground, easy to work, at least the first few inches, so he had loosened it up, planted some grass seed. He had knocked together a little picket fence about a foot and a half high, had painted it a bright white, and posted a sign to keep the kids in the neighborhood from gouging it up with their war games. The big elm over his head was budding, some sparrows in it, late morning sun seeping greenly through its branches, warm on his neck and arms. It was the kind of day that used to please Vince’s Mama so, break her gloom, set her mind turning about the Mediterranean and her old home there. Vince had always doubted that she could really remember it, left it too young, got the idea afterwards from calendars and fairy tales, talk with other Italians, movies later on maybe, but it didn’t matter. It was enough that it contented her that Italy equaled spring days. Rocky run-up-and-down hills terraced for the vines, cool breezes sliding through the umbrella pines, spongy beaches and necklaces of seashells and towns radiant white — and the sun: her sun of Italy. For a long time, Vince had actually been convinced his Mama really had owned the sun back in Italy, part of that mythical family estate all the Italian families joked about or something. Vince, as a young guy, had always hated the idea he was an Italian, but lately, last few years or so, he’d got to thinking maybe it wasn’t too bad, might even be nice to go back there, see where the old folks came from, see that sun.
After lunch, he’d gone out to admire his work, had seen that the bright little fence put the rest of the house to shame, so he’d wandered on downtown, picked up some housepaint on credit, borrowed a ladder from Sal Ferrero, and by evening had the front finished, plus a patch on the south side. Only night coming on had made him quit. Once inside, though, he’d wondered why he’d pushed so hard. Felt like ninety, not fifty, his back split down the middle from shoulderblades to ass, short pricks of pain stabbing the back of his head. Too long out of work, he was getting soft. Etta had asked him how much he’d got done, and he’d snapped back at her to stop asking dumb questions and just get the goddamn supper on. They had traded a few bad words and Angela had come in from her bedroom, had told them to stop carrying on like that, the neighbors would hear, it was just disgraceful.
“I’ll disgraceful your fanny, by God, if you come butting your nose in one more time!” he had roared at her. “You’ve sure got awful damn wise lately, kid!”
“Don’t be vulgar!” Angie had said, thrusting one shoulder at him and prancing back to her room. It had been all Vince could do to hold himself back from grabbing her and tanning her smart-alecky butt right on the spot.
He had shouldered on past his wife into the bathroom to take a hot shower. Had turned it up hot as he could stand it, letting it beat down, melt the hard knot of muscles bunched up in his shoulders and back, and, relaxing, had begun to regret jumping all over Etta and Angie like that. First day of spring, too. But, Jesus! he hadn’t ached so much since his first day down in the mines. He had tried to explain that after the bath, apologizing to Etta, and she had understood and had gone out to see his work. Angie, too. They’d come back in saying it was going to be just beautiful, they were pretty excited about it, even made him out a kind of hero, and had been very sympathetic when he’d said after supper that he needed a walk and maybe a drink or two to loosen up.
So he’d gone up to the Eagles for a couple drinks, the place being unbelievably dead for a Saturday night, and had wandered out feeling giddy with the spring and all he’d got done that day and with a big erection from thinking about Wanda. She wouldn’t be expecting him, but she was always glad to see him. He felt very goddamn good, tired but tough, and he walked relaxed but firm.
When he reached the housing development where she lived, however, he saw that her place was dark. He guessed where she was, and that made him madder than ever. He wondered if Bruno was getting into that girl. There were some pretty wild stories going around and he wouldn’t put anything past Wanda. Maybe old Bruno wasn’t a complete nut after all. Might have something going there. Vince had always been secretly aroused by accounts of black masses.
Well, home to big Etta. He did not fail to notice that the erection had gone limp again. Maybe there’d be a good war picture on the TV midnight movie. And then he heard the sirens. Bells. Didn’t seem far off, so he wandered toward where it seemed to be coming from. Began to notice a glow over the rooftops. Hadn’t seen a good fire in eight or nine years, ever since the lumberyard near the railroad station went up. But a siren at night is deceptive; the chase was longer than he thought. Some ten, twelve blocks finally. He got there winded, feeling pretty sober, a crowd already gathered. He shouldered his way to the front line, located Mort Whimple, the mayor, all decked out in his old firechief’s slicker. “Need help, Mort?”
“Hello, Vince. Maybe. May have to put some barricades up if this crowd builds up.”
“Jesus, it’s going up like a matchbox! Whose place is it?”
“Ely Collins’ widow.”
“Oh yeah? Jesus, that’s tough. Did she get out okay?”
“Nobody home.”
Flames lapped at the dark sky. Windows were smashed. Hoses snaked around and there was a lot of shouting. There were people running up all the time, and now it was Tiger Miller, the newspaper editor. Lot of nervous drive to that guy. He showed up everywhere. Vince had always liked him. “What started this fire, Mort?” he asked point-blank. He seemed a little out of breath.
“Beats me,” Whimple said. The guy worked his jaws funny. What was up? “She probably left something plugged in or something.”
“Sure. Like a Christmas tree,” Miller suggested.
Then Vince heard it behind him somewhere: the Black Hand. And with that, he suddenly remembered that the friend who had talked Wanda into joining the weirdies at Bruno’s house was Widow Collins. It was all falling into place. Jesus Christ, he’d stumbled onto something! “Hey, you mean this is one of those Black Hand jobs?” he asked Whimple.
That stung the mayor somehow. Vince felt people cluster at his back. “Naw,” Whimple grumped. “That’s got all cleared up.” And he walked away. Aha.
Just then, a couple women jumped out of a car and came busting through the crowd. He recognized Widow Collins. The other was a young girl. They went flying right at the blazing house. Vince shouted at them to stay back. Tiger Miller chased after them. The door was already busted in. All three disappeared into the house. Smoke seeping out like a kind of sweat. Vince hesitated just a moment, then, with three or four other guys at his heels, followed them in. Darker inside than outside. Spotlights beamed through the front windows. Living room wet and the windows broken, but no flames here yet. The smoke stung, but it wasn’t too bad. Made him think of the mine disaster — had a brief flash of panic, then it lifted. He felt at home. The women were grabbing things off the walls and out of closets. Miller and the other guys were helping, loading up and running out. The widow headed for a back room and Vince followed. Bedroom. Fire there all right. Still, goddamn it, he almost enjoyed it. A spray of water slammed through a broken window. “Load me up!” he cried. She looked up at him, her face wild with shock — Jesus Christ! she’s really mad! She yanked stuff out of closets and drawers, dumped them in his arms. He was crying from the smoke. “Let’s get outa here!” he shouted. He staggered out under his load, coughing like a sonuvabitch. Somebody had spread a blanket out front near the street, and he dumped his armful on it. Ground was wet and soggy from all the water flying around. Vince dipped his handkerchief in the mud, tied it around his face. People watching agog. Lot of them now. Real community function. He recognized buddies from the mine, business guys off Main, teachers from the school, they were really piling in. Weird light from the flames playing on all their gaping faces.
Going back in, he met the rest coming out, all loaded down, all gagging. Widow Collins leaning on Tiger Miller. Didn’t see the girl. Pushed on in. He heard a crash to the rear, felt a puff of hot air in his face. Christ! what an idiot! maybe he was all alone in here! But then he saw the girl, sitting on the floor behind a stuffed chair with an armful of pictures and crap. He tried to grab the stuff away from her, but she wouldn’t let go, so he just grabbed her up, loot and all, lugged her out of there. About Angie’s age, he guessed, though she didn’t have what Angie had, and for a minute there it was like his own house was burning, the house it took him seventeen goddamn years to pay for and all afternoon to paint the front side of — he felt the pain of these people’s loss, just like it was his own, knew the emptiness that would come over them when the shock was gone, and, Jesus, he felt sorry for them and let the tears, pricked out of him by the smoke, flow freely.
On the way in this time, he’d noticed something somebody had dropped by the front door, so, on the porch, he set the little girl down, picked the thing up. Just a shoebox wrapped with newspaper. The girl slumped in his arms as he helped her down the steps, and Widow Collins, standing like something dead over her sad heap of dumped possessions, watched as though she wasn’t seeing anything. Oddly, she held a little porcelain Sacred Heart Madonna in her hand. Friends circled her, a lot of them bawling. Vince wiped his own eyes with his shirtsleeve.
The street was packed with townsfolk. He saw guys like Hall, Smith, Mello, Johnson, Baxter, Lucci, nodded to all of them. Lucci asked him if this was a Black Hand job, and Vince told Georgie that’s what he’d heard. He listened to his answer travel out in waves through the people. He spotted Whimple and Miller in a huddle near Widow Collins, Ted Cavanaugh there, too, and he wandered over, not out of a sense of seeking importance, but because there was something reassuring about them. Cavanaugh tossed him a nod. Old football buddy.
“What do you have there, Vince?” Tiger Miller asked.
“Hunh?” He’d forget he was carrying the box. “I dunno. Found it by the door there.”
He started to hand it over to Widow Collins to put with her things, but Whimple grabbed it out of his hands. Tore off the paper, opened the box, which was partly burnt on the inside somehow, turned stone white and fainted dead away, knocking two guys down as he fell.
There were screams and the crowd pressed on all sides.
Vince took up the box from where it fell, shook out on the blanket what was inside. A carbonized human hand. One finger missing. Same finger that Vince had lost. He felt dizzy and sat down.
People shrieked out what it was. Some girl started to vomit and Tiger Miller held her head. Widow Collins grabbed up that thing and held it high. “Ely!” she screamed. A piece of it fell off and everybody ducked. Jesus, the whole place went crazy! People wailed and hollered and people prayed and people got sick and people shouted and pushed, going in every direction at once, man, it was awful! Vince stared at his own hand with the little finger gone, feeling like he’d just seen an apparition. Widow Collins went completely off her bat, bleating out crazy stuff about the end of the world and the horrors of the last times, and her daughter was howling and groveling around in the stuff on the blanket something terrible. Vince, sitting still, glanced up and noticed that Ted Cavanaugh was looking down at him. Somehow, oddly, that calmed him for the moment. He sighed, got to his feet.
“Vince, you usually home weekdays?” Ted asked.
“Sure.” He realized, standing, how much he was trembling. His throat was parched and his chest hurt.
“I may drop by sometime during the week, if you don’t mind.”
“Any time.”
Cavanaugh left him then and he felt alone and the scene was just too wild for him. He had to get out of there. He pushed and bullied his way through the crowd. They seemed to respect him. He broke free, made his weak knees hold long enough to get him down the street a half block or so, then sat down against a tree. He looked back at the crowd, at the house burning. No stopping it. It was burning clean to the ground. The noise was farther off now. He began to feel a little better. The roof collapsed on part of the house, sending a big orange cloud billowing up into the black sky like a message. The sweat was cold on his face. He rubbed his hand to be sure of it. Did old Collins have a finger gone? He couldn’t remember. He did recall, though, that the Preach didn’t get burned in the disaster, but died trapped with Mario Juliano and the others, with Lee and Pooch. So what did she mean it was Ely’s hand? Anyhow it was so small, looked almost like a woman’s hand, and Ely Collins was a pretty big man.
There were a lot of guys back there in the crowd that he knew and could kid around with, but for some goddamn reason he was scared to go back. Scared of the panic maybe. At home, there would be Etta and maybe Angie, but he didn’t know if he could make it. He felt weak and the street looked treacherous. He wiped his mouth, discovered he still had the muddy handkerchief tied around it. He took it off. Felt better then. Felt freer.
Damp was creeping up his ass. He stood. He was stiff from all the day’s work, but not so shaky now. Then he noticed Guido Mello and Georgie Lucci leaving the scene. They lived near him. He waited for them. Mello was a chubby type, mostly nose, not too bright but a willing sort who always did his share. Worked as a garage mechanic now. Lucci, one of Vince’s boys in the mine, was tall, something of a clown, but goodnatured; Vince had felt a lot closer to the man since the disaster, since Ange Moroni’s death, and he and Sal and Georgie quite often did things together now.
“Hey, whatsa matter?” Georgie asked. “You shit your pants back there?”
Vince had been noticing the smell, too. At the streetlight, they looked: all over his ass. “Jesus, there must have been something by that tree where I sat down,” he said. He took a branch from a tree and scraped off what he could. Mello and Lucci laughed like idiots and made dumb cracks about it.
The rest of the way back to their neighborhood, of course, they talked about the fire and the hand. “You think you know what the fuck is happening in the world,” Vince told them, “and then suddenly you find out there’s a lot more going on than you ever guessed.” They both agreed. They were pretty shaken up too. They talked about the mayor fainting away and Widow Collins going off her nut and about the end of the world and Bruno.
“Hey, you remember when we stole that wine?” Mello asked.
Lucci laughed. “What wine?” Vince asked.
“Once when we was kids,” Mello said, “we stole a case of communion wine outa the church. Me and Georgie and Mario Juliano and his brother and a couple other guys. There wasn’t nobody else in the place except for Bruno. He was a kind of Father’s helper back then.”
“Jesus!” snorted Lucci, “you remember how he puked all over the Father?”
Vince laughed with the others. “You mean on the priest?”
“We talked him into going with us,” Lucci explained. “He hung back but you could see the poor sonuvabitch was lonesome and wanted to go, so we sorta dragged him along.”
“We took the wine out to the outdoor basketball court,” Guido said, “and opened it. Mario Juliano had snuck some alcohol outa chem lab just in case we couldn’t get the wine, and now he slipped a load into Bruno’s wine.”
“Christ, he got happy as a fucking lark,” laughed Georgie. “And five minutes after that he was out on his ass!”
“Then we went and told the Father,” said Mello, “and he went out and found old Bruno stretched out in the middle of all that stolen wine. He tried to bring Bruno around—”
“And that’s when he got puked on,” Georgie said. They all laughed. It was good to have something to laugh about. “The Father really gave that poor bastard hell. I don’t think he ever showed his face around the church again!”
Etta had already gone to bed when Vince got home, but he woke her up to tell her about it. He couldn’t get over how that hand had been missing the little finger just like his own, and he repeated that detail several times over, until Etta told him he’d better try to forget about it. He was too tired, too excited, too shaken up, and he slept badly, but his dreams were pretty good. Several times he was in Italy with his Mama and she was very grateful. Some problems about how he got there, or how he would get Etta and the kids over, but it seemed like all of these would get worked out. That morning, he got up with Etta and Angie and went to Mass.
He calmed down, but the hand kept haunting him. Like somebody was trying to tell him something. Like maybe his days were numbered or some goddamn thing. He tried to keep busy and when the good weather kept up Monday, he crawled back up the ladder to pick up where he’d left off with his paint job. But Sal Ferrero, his arm still plastered up in the cast, dropped by, having missed the fire, and Vince came down to tell the story. He tried to explain about the hand, but Sal only laughed. “Go ahead and laugh, you bastard,” Vince said, “but I got a feeling if I go back down in a mine, it’s gonna get me, that’s all.”
Sal told him about his boy Tommy making sergeant in the Air Force, and asked how Charlie liked the Marines. “He’s only wrote us once,” Vince said. “He said he managed to get his ass in a sling right off the first day, but they were gonna let him come home Easter anyhow. That goddamn wise-off. He’s lucky they don’t flog anymore.”
“Charlie’s okay. He’ll make out.”
“Yeah, Sal, that’s what I’m afraid of. Anyhow, he finally admitted there was worse food in the world than his old lady’s cooking.”
“That’s a helluva grand thing to say. I suppose Etta loved that, being compared to the—”
“Shit,” Vince laughed, “she bawled like a baby. And now she don’t talk about nothing except Easter.”
Etta brought them out a couple beers and joked about them being loafers and they both ought to break their necks instead of only their arms. Sal kidded back it was anyways better than breaking the old universal digitary, wasn’t it? and Etta went back in laughing her big laugh.
Then, over the beers, he and Sal started chewing over the old days, about how it was to be an immigrant kid in a place so loose and without any history, about the almost daily fights with the Polacks and hillbillies and Croats, nobody understanding anybody else, about how the old folks were always saving up to beat it back to the old country, how really it kind of scared them over here sometimes, and about how the Klan started up when they were just kids, he and Sal, and all that rum and Romanism crap and the stinkbombs they set off in the church.
Sal related again how his old man came out of a tavern one night and ran into a whole goddamn mob of hillbilly Americans fitted out like spooks, and how they took him out to a tree and said they were by God going to string him up, and they even tossed a rope over a branch before they finally let the poor guy go. The hillbillies stripped him and chased him bare-ass down Main Street with firecrackers and shotguns, a real goddamn party. And then Vince told Sal again how he and Angie Moroni and Bert Morani stood off seven goddamn sonsabitches out back of the high school one night after football practice, and how Bert got clobbered with a piece of lead pipe and died. “Jesus, Sal!” Vince said. “I’m the only one left!” The idea sent a windy chill through him and called up again the specter of the black hand.
Sal started in then on how it was down in the mines in the old days, about the crazy things he and Ange and Vince used to do down in those gassy deathtraps, not an ounce of goddamn sense, and so on. He and Sal had talked about these things hundreds of times, so now Vince just sort of tuned out. He sat there on the soft earth in front of his car, his back to the front fender, sipping the cool beer, smoking the cigar, feeling a little drowsy in the noonhigh sun, staring up at the front of his house. Bright yellow here on the front side, sun beating off it, ground out front turned over, the little picket fence, white and cheerful.
“You know, Sal,” Vince cut in suddenly. “I’m just for the first time in my goddamn useless life getting to feel like I live here!”
Sal stared up at the house too then. “It sure has took us a long time to come home, Vince.”
They sat there staring awhile, finishing the beer, and listening to the sparrows fussing over their heads. Finally, they stood, shook left hands on account of Sal’s fractured right, and Sal walked off, both of them saying they sure were damned glad they had had this talk, and how things were bound to work out for them in the end.
But then, goddamn it, the next afternoon he stopped by the garage where Guido Mello and Lem Filbert were working, and he got depressed again! Lem had got out of the mine just in time, and the only occasion he’d gone back down was to help with rescue parties in January. He’d come on his brother Tuck pasted up against the roof by a buggy, split clean in two, and since then he couldn’t talk enough about what a rotten job coalmining was, and how any man had to be a fucking idiot to go down in one of them fucking holes just so some fucking out-of-town rich bastard out in the East could live it up on fucking twenty-dollar dinners and hundred-dollar whores. Sure made a man feel pretty sick of being what he was, okay. Vince told Guido and Lem that he for one had seen his last of it, he was through. Lem said that at last he was getting some fucking sense, and Vince went away from there feeling just pretty miserable, because he knew it was all a goddamn lie. Lem and Guido were just young guys, hardly in their thirties, they didn’t know what it meant.
He tried to explain it to Wanda that night, it being one of their Tuesdays, but it was useless. As always. It really burned Vince how he had felt such a tremendous goddamn sympathy for her after the disaster, helped her all he possibly could, even gave her a little money now and then that he couldn’t afford, listened respectfully to her problems — mainly that: at least he listened to her — and now, when he was having problems, all she could find to yap about was talking with spooks and having wienie roasts out on some goddamn hill and building up that nut Bruno like he was a goddamn saint or something. Vince was almost positive that bastard was getting into her now. Boy, it really pissed him off!
There he was, the whole stupid scene: stretched out chilly bare-ass on her lumpy bed in that drafty dusty shanty, still sweaty from just having made it with her, feeling so miserable he thought he was for Christ sake going to cry — and all she could find to say was, “Y’know, Vince hon, what if Lee’s right here in the room with us now, lookin’ on, whaddaya think he’s thinkin’?”
“Oh Jesus GOD!” Vince roared. He shoved her away, sat up abruptly on the edge of the bed, began pulling on his undershirt. “He’s probably thinking what a goddamn idiot you are to be screwing around with those lunatics!” he cried.
That woke up the baby in the crib and it started raising a ruckus. ‘Now look whatcha went and done!” whined Wanda. She sat up and her poochy belly wrinkled up like a washboard. She sure had one baggy stomach for such a skinny little girl, Vince thought angrily. The brat’s screams were getting on his goddamn nerves. He kept imagining neighbors busting in on them, subject of a number of nightmares he’d had since this thing got started. He stamped over, shook the crib. It howled worse. The three-year-old appeared in the doorway. “Now, Davey, you git back in bed, y’hear? It’s late,” said Wanda, pulling the sheet over her belly, but letting her tits dangle. The kid stared hard at Vince’s crotch. “Least ye could do,” Wanda complained, “is put your pants on.”
“Yeah, it sure is!” said Vince. He turned his ass to the kid’s dogged stare and pulled on his shorts. This was it, man, he’d had enough.
“Now, Davey, I’m tellin’ ya, git back tuh bed or Mommy’s gonna paddle, y’hear?” She had to talk loud over the baby’s squall. Jesus God, what am I doing here? Vince asked himself, buttoning up his shirt, confronted by his own utterly unreal image in the bureau mirror. He could see in the mirror that the boy hadn’t moved, was still staring at him. The kid always had a lot of bruises lately, Vince noticed. Wanda probably really belted him around. “I dunno what I’m gonna do with that boy,” she complained, apparently to Vince. “He needs him a daddy to teach him some manners now, I declare.”
The next day being rocker weather, that was how Vince spent it. Out on the front porch, rocking slowly back and forth, thinking about that hand and feeling sorry for himself. Didn’t even feel like going on with the painting. Sorry he had left Wanda in such a bluster. Sorry he was an old granddad with all his kids scattered. Sorry he was so fucking poor he couldn’t even buy a bucket of paint without going into debt— No matter how they tried to cover it up, by God, the big guys still made all the dough, the little bastards knocked themselves out to get enough to pay their taxes, it was the goddamn truth. The Constitution was okay, or the Declaration of Independence, whichever it was, but goddamn it, it just wasn’t getting understood proper! That was it. If the people knew what was there and used it right, those big sonsabitches would get sat on mighty damn quick. Vince thought of becoming a congressman and changing a few things, by God, or a senator or governor or something, voice of the working-man, nothing for himself, just see to it for the first time in world history that everybody got a fair shake.
So that was what he was doing, rocking there in the spring, the twenty-fifth day of March, contemplating how he’d straighten things out once he was governor, how they’d cheer, when Ted Cavanaugh’s big Lincoln swung up at the curb. Ted got out, waved. Vince returned it, said to come on up, and he stretched out of the rocker to greet him, remembering then that Ted had said he might drop by this week. Ted was a rich bastard, but a good guy. They’d played football together back in high school, Vince was left tackle, Ted the best goddamn fullback in all football history. They were a real team, Ted always ran his offtackle play, the play that made him famous, over Vince: helluva great combination. Even though Ted later became a big name up at State, while Vince went anonymously down into the mines, they had always stayed friendly, calling each other by first names and talking casually when they ran into each other on street corners. In bad times, Ted had always seen Vince through on house payments and the like. He was still a powerfully built man, though his hair was thin and white on his big skull now, and there was a kind of settling around the middle.
They shook hands, said something about the weather, laughed about nothing in particular. Etta brought beers out to them. Ted kidded with her a minute, then he and Vince sat down on the porch together, completely relaxed. A good guy. They talked, of course, about the fire and the black hand. Ted had got pretty shook up too. Vince told him how the missing finger had been pestering him ever since. Ted understood. He told him a little bit about what was going on between Bruno’s group and Red Baxter’s holy rollers. Vince didn’t know about Baxter’s part in it, but his chitchat in Wanda’s bed had made him a mild authority on the inside workings of Bruno’s gang, and he was able to impress Ted with a couple tidbits. The business about how they were meeting outside of town now, for example, and how there was apparently something kind of immoral going on over there.
They used that up and just started reminiscing about the old football team, about life in West Condon, all the ups and downs, wound up at the disaster. Vince asked if Ted had heard anything definite about whether or not No. 9 would reopen. Ted said, no, but he still had hopes. He went on to explain some of the plans he’d been working up, how he’d got the city to buy up some unused property out by the old mine road to offer rent free to industry, how they had drawn up a proposed bill to get another highway diverted through here, how he’d talked a university group into making an objective survey of the area’s industrial potential, how he and some other fellows were working up a special brochure in their spare time, and so on. Vince even began to feel pretty good. But then they drifted back to the business about the fire and the hand and Bruno and all, and they got gloomy again.
Ted sighed. “Sure going to be hell trying to impress some bigwig at DuPont or Westinghouse if they get wind of all this.”
“Yeah, ain’t it the truth?” Wow, that was pretty bigtime! “Seems like something oughta be done.” Vince stroked his chin thoughtfully. He was thinking about getting a few of the boys together and just booting Bruno’s ass right out of town, but he didn’t know if Ted would be too impressed by the idea.
“You know, I just had an idea,” said Ted, cracking his fist — smack! — into his palm. “Something occurred to me at the fire the other night when I saw you, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe, by God, what we need here is some kind of third force, something to bring a little common sense into the community and some peace between Baxter and Bruno. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, that might be a good idea,” said Vince, staring meditatively down at his beer glass. He wasn’t sure Ted was including him in his idea, but he thought he ought to say he was available. “We could get the whole town in on it maybe, get some life here.”
“By God, you’re right!” Ted beamed. Jesus, the guy really looked pleased. Vince drank off his beer. “Get up a kind of committee or something, and, like you say, the more people the better. I think if these people saw how the whole community felt, they might start showing a little, you know, a little common—”
“Common sense.”
“Exactly. Hey, wait! That’s great! A Common Sense Committee!” Ted slapped the porch rail. “How does that sound?”
“Sounds great!” Vince suddenly felt very goddamn bright, very much on top of things. “When do we start?”
“Hell, why not right now?”
“I’m ready.”
“Let’s see, today’s Wednesday, what do you say about Friday night? How many people do you think—?”
“How many do you want?”
Ted laughed. “That’s the boy!” Vince grinned. “Where can we meet, do you think?”
Vince thought about that, stroking his chin. “How about the old auditorium at St. Stephen’s?”
“Not a bad idea. How many does it hold?”
“Couple hundred, I guess.”
“I can probably round up a hundred or so. Think we can fill it?”
“Hell,” said Vince, “we’ll have them standing outside.”
Cavanaugh laughed, slapped him on the shoulder. Over Bonali. “Good man, Vince! By God, I’m glad I stopped over!”
With Etta’s help on the telephone, plus evening visits to the Eagles, the Legion and VFW halls, a couple key taverns and filling stations, and the Knights of Columbus, Vince managed to round up some hundred and twenty people who promised to show up. Ted called him a couple times to see how things were going, and Friday stopped by a few minutes to brief him on the meeting. He told him he’d got the support of the Rotarians and the Chamber board, the Protestant ministers, a couple women’s groups, Father Baglione, the PTA, just about all right-minded West Condon groups. He reminded Vince again how things like this Bruno nonsense could get out of hand, produce mass hysteria, make West Condon an object of national ridicule, but Vince didn’t need reminding, told Ted that was what he’d been telling the others. Ted asked him what he thought about making the mayor chairman of the committee. Vince said it sounded like a good idea. Made it plain this was an all-community affair. Exactly! Ted was really leaning on him.
As soon as Vince and Etta arrived at the Friday night meeting they found themselves surrounded by the people they’d contacted, wanting details, wanting to find out what the pitch was going to be, wanting in on the center of things and apparently figuring Vince was the route. The little auditorium was packed, must have been more than two hundred squeezing in, Jesus, it was just as good as he’d said it would be. And here in St. Stephen’s, Vince and his people felt right at home. He left Etta with a gang of them, told her just to talk and keep their interest up, while he looked for Ted.
He knocked into Chester Johnson, who asked him, “Hey, Bonali! We gonna have a lynchin’, baby?”
“Yeah.” Vince grinned, barely pausing as he moved through. “We’re gonna clean out the lousy pitch players in this town.”
He worked his way over toward where some of the town politicos were buzzing around Mayor Whimple. Felt a tug on his arm, turned: Ted Cavanaugh. “Come with me a minute, Vince.”
He and Ted shouldered their way through the crowd, a lot of eyes on them, respectful mumble, stepped into a little room just outside the auditorium proper. Couple businessmen in there. Vince recognized them, but had never met them personally. They turned toward him. “Maury, Burt, this is Vince Bonali. Maury Castle, Vince. Burt Robbins.” Vince greeted them, gave them a hard handshake. They said they knew him. Joe Altoviti and another guy stepped into the room. Altoviti was alderman from Vince’s part of town. The other guy was introduced as Jim Elliott, Chamber of Commerce secretary. “Man, Ted, that’s a real crowd out there!” Elliott said.
“Vince here had a lot to do with it,” Cavanaugh said simply. They all turned and looked at him. He pulled out a cigar, clamped it in his teeth, reached for matches, but Castle lit it for him. “We don’t have much time,” Cavanaugh went on. “I’m going to get the thing underway by stating the main purposes, telling what I know of Bruno’s group and the trouble that Reverend Baxter is causing, but we’ll need motions to actually get the committee set up and really functioning. Burt, Maury, can you take care of that?”
“Sure.”
“Who should we make chairman of it?”
The guys in the room looked around at each other. Vince didn’t see what was wrong with Ted’s idea. “Why not the mayor?”
Ted seemed to think about that a minute, like he’d forgot. “Okay. Will you take care of the nomination, Vince?”
Again the eyes. Vince nodded. Castle drew the second.
Cavanaugh: “Of course, this is as much a religious problem as a civic one. Maybe we ought to have a couple vice-chairmen. Father Baglione, for example. One of the Protestant ministers maybe. How does that strike you fellows?”
They assented, settling finally on Reverend Edwards of the First Presbyterian, since he also headed up the Ministerial Association. To emphasize it was all nonsectarian, Elliott was charged with nominating Baglione, Altoviti with naming Edwards.
On the way out, Elliott whispered in Vince’s ear, “Say, I hate to seem stupid, but what’s Father Baglione’s first name?”
“Battista.”
Elliott grinned, clapped Vince’s shoulders. “Thanks.”
Vince was thinking over what Ted had said. This was a town of Christians. Catholics and Protestants. We all believe in bringing up our children in our own faith, seeing to it that they get properly oriented to the life ahead of them here in this Christian country, that they learn what’s good and bad, right and wrong. It was true. That was what held them together. It was West Condon.
Back in the auditorium, Vince felt all the eyes on him. He felt a little nervous about the speech he had to make. They all seemed to sense he had some key part to play. Etta winked soberly from across the room. Turned some phrases over. Youngsters of this town. Our young people. Threat to our community and its welfare. Our Christian community. Morals. Immoral. City’s leading citizen. We all know him, know we can depend on him. Sense of responsibility. Vince nodded at Sal Ferrero and Georgie Lucci. Those of us who have grown up here. Has taken us a long time to come home. Home. West Condon is our home. Our lives are a part of. He saw a lot of his mining buddies. Taken chances. Invested our lives here. Bad situation. Explosive situation. Have to put down a little rock dust. Yeah, that was it. Your first blast can set off secondary ones. Depends on the effectiveness of your rock dusting. Contain the effect. Cavanaugh thumped him on the shoulders, moved his big frame up toward the front of the auditorium to call for order. Over left tackle. Vince ground the cigar out under his heel. Teamwork.
Mayor Mortimer Whimple’s West Condon Common Sense Committee burst upon the scene with unexpected force. Its impact was felt in every corner of the town, and its repercussions carried even beyond. The West Condon Chronicle, still silent on the activity that had sparked the Committee, nevertheless headlined the Committee itself, printed the texts of all speeches, reported all that it did or said it meant to do, and the wireservices and city papers picked a lot of it up. Old-timers could remember nothing quite like it since the long-gone days of prohibition and the interunion wars. It was like the town had been slowly dying of blackdamp and only a good sharp blast could really clear the air. As the Committee grew, its meetings were shifted from the Catholic auditorium to the high school auditorium, and finally to the gymnasium. “If something like this can happen here in West Condon,” the Italian coalminer Vince Bonali said during his famous “rock dusting speech” before that mass assembled on March twenty-seventh, “something is wrong! It’s up to us — you and me — to find out what it is, and set it right!” There was a thunderous burst of cheering and applause, and then the Presbyterian minister Reverend Wesley Edwards rose to read from the Bible:
“There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and …”
The minister paused, gazed out upon the crowd, closed his Bible with a resounding snap.
“… and a man who sows discord among brothers!”
Solidarity was the theme, but it was not complete. Some abstained, others were effectively barred. The embarrassing fantasies of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno were flouted, but no less so were “opportunism” and “extreme and fanatical fundamentalism.” Neither the Chronicle editor nor any loyal Nazarene follower of Reverend Abner Baxter could fail to recognize he was not exactly welcome. A famous proverb became the Committee’s unofficial motto, and no one doubted which West Condoners were therein being rebuked….
A worthless man plots evil, and his speech is like a scorching fire; a perverse man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends; a man of violence entices his neighbor and leads him in a way that is not good!
The mayor and certain business leaders urged prudence and restraint, emphasizing the Committee’s potential for positive constructive activities, and set up a program of community renovation, which, hopefully, would establish a base of Christian fellowship and prosperity here that would make “these other sentiments” seem silly and inconsequential. The Ministerial Association together with the Roman Catholic Church issued a joint resolution on the first day of April calling all citizens to join them in a renewal of basic Christian faith and to make this Easter season an occasion for recovering those values and aspirations that had made this nation great and brought justifiable honor to it. It all made sense, good old-fashioned American common sense, and the townsfolk of West Condon went for it, few doubting the while that things would be so dull as the mayor and the business leaders seemed to think. Subcommittees were set up, plans made, responsibilities given.
Meanwhile, attacked on one side by the violent powers of darkness, reviled on the other by a thickening mass of ignorance and prejudice, and even, as some feared, threatened from within by subversive or weakhearted elements, the followers of Giovanni Bruno decided it was time, as the former coalminer Ben Wosznik put it, to brattice themselves off, to retire entirely from public view. “When something goes off,” he said, “your first impulse is to beat it for the nearest exit. But you can’t tell from where you are just where it happened, and you may end up running right into the middle of the worst of it. It’s almost usually better to find you a safe place, wall it up, and wait there.” Domiron concurred:
Imitate the prophet!
They determined to avoid all conflict, to vary and keep secret the time and place of their meetings, to seek for the moment no new members, and to prepare quietly, each in his own way, for the personal test that awaited them all on the nineteenth of April.
“Those who are ready will come without our seeking them,” Eleanor Norton told them all, and they were quick to agree. “Let us only be certain to be prepared for them.”
The lawyer Ralph Himebaugh introduced hand signals and special tunics to go with the White Bird password and, with Mrs. Norton and Mrs. Collins, redesigned the altar and developed a meeting format. His new tunics, which the women made and which they all wore at their gatherings now, were white (the White Bird, the Coming of Light) with brown (Bruno) ropes at the waist, and, embroidered in brown on the breast, a large circle (Evening Circle, a Circle of Evenings) enclosing a miner’s pick, stylized to resemble a cross. The dimensions of this pick/cross were numerologically determined: seven units each for the arms and head, twelve units for the post or handle, totaling thirty-three, the life in years of Christ, not to mention an entire history of secondary meanings derived from important ancient writings. A banner was designed with the same emblem as the robes with the addition of a white bird flying above the embroidered cross and circle.
And there was given them to each one a white robe; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little time…
Mr. Himebaugh also designed a secret cross, utilizing the new secret name suggested to the group by their scribe and secretary Mr. Justin Miller, the “Brunists,” in which the T of the name was the cross itself, with BRUNI across the top of the crossarm and an S on each side of the post under the arm. The U, being the middle letter of the five on top, had the effect by enlargement of turning the cross or T into a trident, suggesting the Trinity and other significant trichotomies, as well as the horns of the Ram, with BR to the left and NI to the right. Giving these letters their alphabet value in numbers, the number of the cross itself became 20; across the top, the numbers read 2—18–21—14—9, with two 19’s below, on each side of the cross. The U’s number of 21 on top and in the middle was identified not only as three sevens, with all that meant, but also as 21 March, the first day of the sign of rebirth and the night Mrs. Collins’ house burned, marking mystically the commencement of this their final trial; similarly, the 19’s, repeated as though for emphasis, were quickly accepted as heralds of the 19th of April, the last day of the sign of Aries and the night the end of the world—“the ultimate transformation”—would come. Mrs. Collins, it was true, still clung to the notion this could happen, as her husband’s note implied, on the 8th of April, but even she was admittedly prepared to accept Mrs. Norton’s date fully if nothing did happen on the 8th. The most important number, of course, was the initial 2, which symbolized everything from the cosmic combat between the sons of light and the powers of darkness, to the two figureheads of the movement, Ely Collins and Giovanni Bruno. The number 18 was generally accepted as representing the first month and the eighth day, the day of the mine disaster, but some, including Mrs. Wilson Hall, feared it omened a significant event for 18 April. The 14 and 9 of N and I also possessed a hierarchy of meanings, but the approved ones were those originally proposed by Mr. Himebaugh: the 14 stood for the number of weeks between Bruno’s rescue and the end of the world (a “week of Sundays” plus a “circle of evenings”), while the 9 represented the number of the coalmine, and thus the Mount of Redemption where they would gather for the end. But Mr. Himebaugh also added and subtracted all these numbers, introduced 7 in different and intriguing ways, gave the letters Greek and Hebrew alphabet values, superimposed elements on his own graphs and vice versa, and even integrated the birthdates of each of the members for personal interpretations. With so much to learn, there was little time left for making foolish quixotic charges upon the hostile and ultimately damned world, and in their prayers they asked only for the peace which would permit them to remain together unto the end.
And then, on the evening of Palm Sunday, the fifth of April, a surprising message was received from Domiron in the presence of all members:
Heark ye to the message from the tomb! Light comes upon the eighth! Let no evil heart block its passage! Domiron bids you!
All were stunned. Mrs. Norton, as though in disbelief, looked up from what her hand had written at Mrs. Collins. Mrs. Collins turned pale. Mrs. Wilson began to tremble. “Oh, Clara!” she wept. “That’s just three days!” said Carl Dean Palmers. “Friends,” said Mrs. Collins, standing tall now in her white tunic: “Prepare!”
Idly, contentedly, Marcella stitches his white tunic. Dust, like a microscopic Imitation of the universe, floats and revolves in the shafts of sunlight that penetrate the room through the south windows. Hanging up the phone this morning, she felt the gray unnamable anxiety that has shadowed her these last weeks let go its grip, lift, fade like a bad dream. A paradox has apparently resolved itself, and now, with her discovery of its resolution, comes a great calm. The discovery encloses a decision, yet it is so easy a decision to make — in fact, it is already made.
Miller knew he had it in his hands to heave old Water Closet around and set her on a crisis course, and on April 8th, Wednesday of Holy Week, partly because he had no choice, he did it. Eight-page special on the Brunists, with photos, a 1,500-word release to the wireservices, and longer articles, previously accepted in précis, wired to three newspapers in large cities. The wireservices couldn’t get enough, offered special rates for another 1,500 words the next day, plus continued coverage. He airmailed wirecopy to the weekly news and photo magazines, suggesting unique angles for each and offering complete picture coverage; similarly to the television companies, tendering his services as “consultant.” Later, they’d get airmail copies of tonight’s edition.
He’d been considering all along popping it on Good Friday, had thought it might be a more destructive moment. But Eleanor Norton, obviously convinced he was an infiltrator sent by the powers of darkness — and indeed, she was right, he was — had been out to get him for some time now, and he’d suddenly realized she’d set him up for the ax tonight. It was the only way to account for Domiron’s sudden capitulation to the Collins faction last Sunday night: after announcing the “coming of the light”, on the eighth he had warned them to “let no evil heart block its passage.” And, of course, when it didn’t come, the heretic-hunt would have begun. Anyway, today wasn’t bad: not only was it Clara Collins’ celebrated “eighth of the month” and right in the middle of Easter Week, but it was also the Buddha’s birthday, a day to “beat the drum of the Immortal in the darkness of the world.”
The scene was ripe. The Brunists sat in hiding, intent only upon reaching the 19th without further harassment; Baxter and the loyal Nazarenes, furious as ever, had been effectively suppressed since the Collins fire by the Common Sense Committee and Whimple’s police; and Cavanaugh’s bund of Common Sensers itself had been using this time of silence to proselyte amongst belligerents and potential converts. As a result, Baxter’s forces had been reduced and the Brunists were down to the hardcore members, having got no new ones since Ben Wosznik: the Bruno family, the Nortons, the two boys, Himebaugh, Clara Collins and her daughter, the Halls, Wosznik, and the widows Wilson, Cravens, and Harlowe, with eight small children among them. Not that the cult was disheartened: this paucity of believers only made them more convinced than ever of their uniqueness, their special status as God’s select, and their group zeal and devotion couldn’t be greater. All they needed, Miller felt, was to be thrown upon the world scene, and they’d have no choice but to “prove” themselves right by finding more people to agree with them. Baxter, too, was probably waiting for that moment, for what he needed most right now was a visible enemy. And, surely, the Common Sensers realized that, for they’d been to see Miller several times already to urge him to continue suppressing this story, and most of them had even begun to get the idea he was on their side.
His main worry was Marcella. He’d thought to have her safely out of it by now. Originally, discovering Eleanor’s hostility toward him and her maternal sway over Marcella, he had thought it best to affect conviction and then tunnel out from within, share a carefully structured doubt, and then: conversion. Didn’t work. Marcella’s mind was complex and delicate, contained sweeping world-views that made cosmic events out of a casual gesture or a cloud’s idle passage, and, in such a mind, the commonplaces he liked to use were not common at all and refuted nothing. He had even hinted at marriage and she had laughed, supposing he must be joking. Now, he was bringing it to a head. He had called, asked her to meet him here at the plant this evening, and she had agreed. He’d insisted on the urgency of it: yes, regardless of what anybody might say to the contrary, she’d be there … she understood, she said. And maybe, at last, she did. He hoped so. He would show her the night’s edition, ask her to leave with him. He had no ring to offer, but he did have the brass collar still. He recognized that it might not be easy, but he believed, once the choice was clear to her, that her commitment to him would outweigh any other — Miller had that much faith in the gonads’ clutch upon what folks called reason.
Eleanor calls with the news. Marcella tells her she is sorry. Eleanor believes it is really a blessing, a further sign. Marcella agrees. She says nothing of her discovery, of her resolution. It was Eleanor, after all, who first confused her with all her divisions of love. But now the confusion has passed, the fear has passed, for perfect love, it is true, casts out fear. Love, she instructs her needle, never ends. Prophecy? it will pass away. Tongues? they will cease. Knowledge? it will pass away. But he who loves … abides in the light.
A beautiful spread! Goddamn, he had too much good stuff! Eight-column banner: BRUNISTS PROPHESY END OF WORLD! Four-column photo of the group on Cunt Hill, lit by the car lights he’d arranged and shot from the shaggy crotch by Lou Jones. Two-column mugshot of the Prophet in his new tunic, which Marcella had let him get for “inspirational” purposes. And inspirational it was: wonderful dark head afloat in pale white light; forehead, nose, cheeks — all looked as though chiseled from granite or marble, while the uncombed black hair and dark shadows in the throat, mouth and brow seemed almost like concentric circles leading inward to the glittering black pupils of his fierce eyes. Other photos through the issue of the free-for-all on the front lawn with the Baxterites, of Clara Collins’ house burning and the Brunists sifting through the ruins the next day for clues, of the Common Sensers assembled and excited, of the altar in the Bruno living room with its bizarre assortment of relics and instruments. There was an exquisitely grim three-column blowup of the Black Hand and, on the back page, some pictures from the Bruno family album, including a news photo from the late twenties of old Antonio Bruno bringing a gun butt down on somebody’s luckless head during the union struggles — same glittering eyes as his boy and a grin splitting his tough lean jaws. Miller was working up ideas for a special Millennium’s Eve TV documentary, if he could just sell the notion to one of the networks, and that picture of old Antonio was one he meant to use. Then, as if he wasn’t already overloaded, the school board had provided him an unexpected bonus story by firing Eleanor Norton last night. He dug up a somber group shot of the board, never before used because they all looked so sour in it, and ran it with cutlines that all but made grand inquisitors of them. Except for these cum-incensed types, as Lou Jones called them, Miller’s stories were essentially objective — meaning, he left it up to the reader to decide if the end might really be coming or not.
Of course, the greatest story would have to remain untold. Happy’s description of Giovanni’s abdominal scars had rung some kind of bell in his mind. She’d said they were all horizontal or vertical, but, though intricate, had no apparent design to them. It made him think of cracked wood and that made him think of the wooden statue of Saint Stephen in the local Catholic Church — its patron. He’d first noticed it at Antonio Bruno’s funeral a month ago. The mere fact that it was a Roman Catholic burial had troubled Clara’s people, but the excuse given that it had been the old woman’s pious wish had pacified them. The strangeness of the Cathedral, in fact, was probably the only thing that had kept the Nazarenes from completely losing their heads back then — as it was, they got a sudden stiff injection of awesome grandeur that would no doubt color the rest of their days. Antonio had been properly Disneyed up for his jolly journey, it would seem, to lollypop land, his bloody nose cured and even straightened in death. In fact, it was his very artificiality, oddly giving life to the statues in the Cathedral, that had drawn Miller’s attention to the boyish Stephen. Torso writhing, eyes turned inward to confront death, arms twisted up over his head, the boy was naked but for the usual loincloth — typically half-off, as though about to get raped — which hid away the prick beneath the soft girlish abdomen. Whereas old Antonio’s flesh had been ivory-smooth, the boy’s body was finely cracked, paint chipping off, joints separating. After Happy had tipped him off, he’d made a trip back to the Cathedral to see for himself: yes, the belly was that abstract fretwork of tiny scars she had described. Happy, when he took her there, had not only confirmed it, but located a kind of “LOF” in the right groin that had caused all the girls at the hospital to wonder if it stood for “love” or “laugh.”
The whole shop caught the day’s excitement. The ad force was instructed to keep quiet but to sell to beat hell, since there could be lean days in the offing. A boycott wouldn’t surprise him. Cavanaugh had already told him that “too extreme an exposure” might jeopardize the paper’s readership, might cause Miller to “lose contact with citizens here,” and this exposure was going to be pretty extreme. The front office was abuzz with anxious whisperings and Miller overheard that a couple of the girls had been approached by somebody who had asked them to quit or at least to protest if the newspaper they worked for insulted their community or their faith. Lou Jones, long chafing for this moment and unable to grasp why Miller had waited so long, was ecstatic now that it was on, which was to say, he wore a kind of half smile and smoked cigars all day. For his typesetters in the back, it was all the same: war, markets, recipes, disasters, end of the winter, end of the world. On the other hand, his pressman Carl Schwartz was in high spirits: perhaps he saw another holiday in the making, or another bonus — or maybe it was just his elation at receiving a gift from a whore.
Once all the copy had been hooked and layouts sent back, he headed out for a quick lunch. Already feeling a little giddy with what was coming. He skipped Mick’s, stopped in a drugstore for a sandwich instead, found Maury Castle and Vince Bonali in a booth there. Bonali had emerged as a new Cavanaugh protégé via the Common Sensers, and turned up on Main Street pretty often these days. Now a grin split his dark face from ear to ear.
“Hey, Tiger!” Castle boomed. “I was just telling old Vince here that story about the whore in Waterton, the one your boy laid the night after the disaster.” A quick glance told Miller that the little girl at the soda fountain and two ladies at another booth had heard it, too.
“Funny thing happened last night,” Miller said. “Dinah gave Carl a silk shirt.”
Castle roared with laughter. “No shit!” he bellowed. “What was it, his birthday or something?”
“No,” Miller said. “It would have been her brother Oxford’s birthday.”
There’s a small green sprout in her garden. She examines it closely. No, not a weed — birth! She feels a hand on her shoulder. But not his. She smiles up at Mr. Himebaugh. He clasps his hands in front of him, as though embarrassed, makes his sad face smile timidly. Such a child, and yet he is so wise and kind. He has been almost a father to them both since their own father died, and though he eats here almost daily now, he buys all their food and has undertaken many of her own tasks. Especially those touching her brother. “Is it a flower?” he asks. “I think so,” she says. He crouches down to see, loses his balance, steadies himself with a pale hand on her knee. “Yes, yes, I think it is!” he says.
Mort Whimple was waiting for Miller in the office when he got back, and said, glancing toward Jones, that he wanted a quiet personal-like talk. They went into the jobroom. Miller wondered if he had heard somehow they were breaking the story tonight. “What is it, Mayor?”
“Tiger, I just wanted to talk to you alone a minute.” Whimple was a small rolypoly man with a big nose, short forehead, close-cropped hair, wore colorful clothes too tight for him. Had a big idea of the swath he cut. Jones called him Wart Pimple. “Tiger, I’m in a spot. You’ve been a big help to me before, and maybe you can be again. Even if only for a little goddamn advice.” Whimple’s narrow eyes got so sincere, it looked like they might cross.
“Shoot.”
“Well, in a sense, now don’t take me wrong, but in a sense, I am West Condon, Tiger. I don’t mean that in any arrogant self-conceited way, goddamn it, you know that, I just mean I sometimes feel this whole town inside me. Organic like.” Miller shuddered at the image. “When something ain’t functioning right, I get to feeling sick. You know what I mean? Well, things ain’t functioning right now, Miller. And I’m feeling pretty cruddy. I’m sorry, but that’s the only goddamn way I know how to put it.”
Miller nodded. “Mort, I think if you just—”
“Now, I’m getting letters. Bushels of letters. More every day. Letters from crackpots. Letters from people who are out to get me anyway. But, more important, Miller, letters from sensible people here in West Condon. They don’t like this Bruno outfit. They’re getting nervous about what might happen next week. They don’t like the bad name the town is going to get if this thing gets out of hand. They’re good hardworking Christian people, Miller, who just want to be left the fuck alone.”
“Yes, I know. I’m getting letters, too.”
“All right, let’s face it, Miller. Bruno is a goddamn nut. I don’t give a shit about your big line that if Bruno’s a nut, Christ was a nut, that don’t mean nothing to me. I got a feeling everybody in that whole fucking outfit is a nut, but no offense. I admit, sometimes people can get carried away by this or that. Anyhow, I don’t give a good goddamn if Bruno thinks he’s the Virgin Mary, but what I don’t like is for the law and order in this town to get disturbed, see? People can belong to any goddamn religion they like, that’s their business, that’s their right, but what they can’t do, by God, is turn a goddamn town upsidedown!”
“Yes, but, Mayor—”
“Don’t but-Mayor me, Miller! Goddamn it! I want to make it clear how I feel. I ain’t the mayor to set on my fat ass and let the town go to hell. I got a duty, I got my duty here, and I think it’s pretty goddamn clear. I gotta nip this outfit in the butt.”
“In the bud.”
“I said butt! Now look, here’s what, Miller. Let me be clear. I don’t want to interfere with religion, see—”
“Yes, I’ve got that.”
“Now, just listen! I ain’t asking you to do a goddamn thing except just listen. And then tell me what you think I oughta do. I don’t want to interfere with religion, but I gotta stop this pack of screwballs from blowing the lid off here. Now, wait! I don’t mean stop, I mean, well, more like just hold them where they are. Jesus! if they’d only forget about this doom scare, so the people in this town could get settled down—”
“Mort, they can’t forget, not if that’s what they believe—”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Miller! I know they can’t! I just said, if only. Why can’t you listen? I don’t want to interfere in any way with the freedom of the press neither. I mean that, Miller. It don’t mean a goddamn thing to me, to tell you the truth, but I don’t want to interfere, not if it’s in the Constitution. So you can go and write your goddamn stories and in fact the whole fucking world can write all the goddamn stories they want for all I care, but I don’t want to give them stupid embarrassing things to write about!”
“Listen, Mort, calm down. You’ll—”
“Don’t calm-down me, Miller! I’m telling you! I don’t want to give you bastards stupid embarrassing things to write about! Can’t you understand that? I don’t want stupid embarrassing things to happen here in West Condon!”
The mayor was so red in the face, Miller had to smile. “But we’re all human here, Mort. You can’t expect—”
“Jesus Christ, I know we’re all humans, Miller — what the shit do you take me for? But, see, I’m the goddamn mayor of these humans, and some of the humans think certain other humans are stepping over their rights as citizens of this town, and it’s going to get worse. That’s the point! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! They want me to arrest Bruno and have him examined by a state psychiatrist and get him locked in a nutbin somewhere. But I don’t want to interfere with religion, see?” His chubby face drooped, the anger flush draining away. He looked like a sad fat little dog. “Miller, please, what the fuck should I do?”
Miller stood, rammed his hands in his pockets, turned his back to Whimple. Might be the way out at that. If the guy were arrested and proven mad, even if only a few hard doubts were raised … It would be one hell of a shock for her, but isn’t she to get that shock sooner or later anyway? But she’d probably see it as some kind of affirmation. Some of the others might quit, but not Marcella. Could even push her over the line for good. Besides, all this time he’d put into this thing, and now just as it seemed ready to pay off, could he let them pull the plug on him? No, he couldn’t. “It wouldn’t work, Mort,” he said, turning to face the mayor. “I know them. If anything, it’d only make them more agitated, more fanatic than ever. They expect things like this to happen as the date—”
“But, Miller, if we had that sonuvabitch in the jug—”
“You’d have twice the trouble you’ve got now. Bruno’s not the whole team, Mort. You’d have to arrest the whole lot, and then Himebaugh would raise a storm, and there’d be hell to pay in the nation’s press. God, you’d have every occult fanatic in the country piling in here!”
“I dunno, I got a feeling they’re packing their bags and are on the way, as it is.” Collapse was setting in. “Oh boy, sometimes I wish I was just a plain old smoke-eater again.”
“Mort, let me give you the best advice I know how. No matter what Cavanaugh or the other people here in town tell you, your best move is to sit it out. I mean it. Anything else will only give you more trouble in the long run. Bruno expects the end to come on the nineteenth. That’s just eleven days away, Mort. What can happen in eleven days? And, after that, it should all be over. Besides the Bruno family, there are only ten adults in this group. Why all this fuss about ten people?”
Mort Whimple sat like a waddy ball of bright-colored yarn on the leather sofa. He was quiet for some time, scratched his bur head out of habit. To the right of Whimple, the door of the darkroom was open, and Miller could see a photo of the Brunist banner hung up to dry. “But you really think we ought to just let them—?”
“I think it’s all you can do. I’m afraid anything else will get your neck in a noose, Mort.”
The mayor stared glumly at his pointed black shoes, his several chins beetling over his buttoned sportshirt collar. Finally, he stood. “Okay. Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But the first sign of any goddamn public disturbance, and I’m taking him in.” And he stamped authoritatively out of the plant.
She breaks open the crackly package of white underwear, purchased out of the community treasury in response to the new regulations, selects white socks and a fresh white blouse, the coffee-colored skirt he likes. Entering the bathroom with these things, she perceives, out of the corner of her eye, a shadow — but when she looks more closely, there is nothing there. This sensation of being pursued by something incorporeal has been with Marcella for two or three weeks now. Shapes in dark rooms. Shadows falling across her path. Disembodied sounds on stairways and under her bed at night. Sense always of a second presence, spectral and foreboding. It has worried Eleanor, who believes they must be manifestations of the powers of darkness — she, too, has been troubled more than a few times in the course of her long life. But Marcella wonders if Eleanor really grasps the intensity of her feeling, the oppressive frequency of the sensations. Frightened, she has asked Ben Wosznik to put hooks on all the bathroom and bedroom doors — but once already she has even hooked her own door at night and waked in the morning to find it unhooked. She has mentioned it to Justin a couple times, but he only smiles at her fears. Well, perhaps she is being childish. Yes, she laughs, she has been a child about too many things. Drying, she sings to herself. The water gurgles gaily from the tub. Over her glistening body, alive and tingling to its least touch, dances the towel, a white flutter like the beating of wings. She will not be afraid.
Hilda was thundering away in the back shop, producing the bomb. Jones had gone to cover a car accident, would spend the rest of the day in bars and clubs, scouting out the reaction for features tomorrow. There was an agitated stir up front, the girls gasping and whispering, carriers arguing and trying to explain to each other what it all meant. The boy who had the Bruno house on his route was king for the night. Miller leaned back in his swivel chair, gloating over the edition. Better than he had expected even, a work of art. He wished he’d had a copy to hand Whimple on his way out the door a couple hours before.
He knocked out some five or six galleys of stuff for tomorrow, taken in large part from the articles he was shipping elsewhere. He discovered he had enough photos, spacing them out, to last him right up to the 19th, though he and Marcella were in several of them. Anyway, as long as they were willing to convene out on the hill, there was no reason not to get more. Hooking the copy up, he asked the typesetters to help the other guys clean up the press after the run and knock off early tonight. He explained that they may have some busy days ahead. They offered to stay on, but he wanted them out of there. His mind was on the collar, and how to make of it an amulet against Christ and Domiron and all like fiends of the hagridden western world. He planned to start out slowly, reasonably, parabolically, and if he saw he wasn’t breaking through her shell, he’d throw it straight at her, hard right to that delectable midriff, the night’s paper, the wireservice stories, his real motives, what he thought of her brother and all those other types, everything. He’d tell her bluntly he was through as of right now, would never go back. He loved her and wanted her to marry him, wanted her to leave the cult with him now. Tonight. No pretenses. Sounded too cold. And where did the brass collar fit in? Better write it out. He realized he was back at his typewriter, but he didn’t recall having said anything when he walked away from the guys in the back shop. He rolled copypaper into his old Underwood, sat there for ten minutes, maybe longer, drumming his fingers on the keys. He wrote MARCELLA and added a comma. He heard Hilda groan to a halt. He x’d out the comma, typed a colon. Maybe it’d be easy. Maybe he was making too much of it.
The phone started to ring and the populace to whoop and scream. He told the girls to take the phones off the hook and go on home. He wanted to lock the door after them, but couldn’t until Marcella had arrived. He hoped she’d make it before seeing a copy of the paper. He helped the ad force wind up its day and get out, hurried carriers out on their routes, pushed old Jerry through his clean-up rituals.
Waiting for Marcella, he perched on a stool near the front door, behind the counter, peddling copies to people who pushed in, answering no questions, smiling absently at all comment. Most of them seemed to like it. One of his customers was Happy Bottom. Pert and fresh in spring green with a soft green cap atilt in her sandy hair, eyes full of challenge and unconcealable delight. She carried a black-bordered envelope. “Special delivery,” she said, hanging on to it. “Postage in advance.”
Miller smiled, trying to keep calm, hoping to get her out somehow without incident, showed her a copy of the paper. He glanced at his watch: didn’t think he could make it. “Eleven more days,” he said. “Christ, I’ll be glad when it’s over!” But he made no commitments.
She hardly glanced at the paper. “Listen, Tiger,” she said, but just then Carl Schwartz and a couple other back shop guys passed through on their way home.
“Hey!” praised Schwartz, openly surveying what she had. Miller was half afraid the guy might goose her on the way by.
When they were gone, and he was suddenly alone in the plant with Happy, she said, “Tell me the truth. Am I just wasting my time?”
“No,” he said, but then Marcella came through the door to contradict him. Young in a crisp blouse and the coffee skirt, a beige sweater over her narrow shoulders. Marcella gave the same distracted glance at Happy Bottom that Happy had given his evening edition, then turned her brown-eyed gaze full on him, exalting him with a soft smile.
Happy, whose eyes had not left the girl since her entrance, now tucked the envelope back in her purse. Her face was tugged gently downward in hurt, her lips parted. She folded the newspaper under her arm and clanked a nickel onto the counter. “Happy end of the world,” she said softly, and left. It had to happen, he supposed, but he was sorry about it.
He sighed, got down from the stool, came around and locked the door. He asked Marcella if she would like a tour of the plant. With a smile, she said she would. Full hopeful ingenuous mouth, slight fault in the smile that perfected her face — he kissed it, felt her press up into him. Though she clung to him, he eased her away, led her toward the back. He showed her his news office, but her eyes were on him. She told him she had finished his tunic. The teletype thumpety-clacked, repeating, he noticed, his story on the cult. They went on back, through the swinging door, to the composing and press rooms, where he pulled on a few lights, four-studded fluorescent fixtures big as desktops with blackened cotton cords, scant to the touch. He realized for the first time how dull and lumpy the back shop was, watching her pass through it. How was it the girl moved? Not a case merely of her legs propelling her, rather all of her seemed to participate at once, yet without effort, an easy light laborless motion. She seemed always to have been here, he the stranger.
On the concrete floor by a linotype lay a small pile of lead slugs, rejected lines of type. He picked one up, showed her his type-reading trick, how you had to read it upsidedown—
given into his hand for a time, tow times,
He had a talent not only for reading it at a glance, but for proofing it faultlessly as well. Had learned the knack back in his carrier days. He snapped the small rectangle of lead in two, pitched the halves into a metal bucket some six or seven yards away. She laughed at his accuracy and clapped.
Holding hands, he led her past the stone with its locked-up forms, his Brunist special, black, greasy, and all backwards. She studied it, or pretended to, her hips pressed back into the cavity between his thighs, his hands held in hers at her breasts. She fingered the long graceful arm of a linotype, remarked on the patterns in a fontcase, asked how the old flatbed press had got its name Hilda. He told her it was the name of the pressman’s useless gun-shy bird dog. She laughed, but insisted Hilda was a sphinx, not a dog. In the basket there in front of her was the last of tonight’s run, but she noticed nothing. All the time, he looked for entries, yet each mention of the subject got ignored by her. She smiled at everything he said, and he realized suddenly she wasn’t really listening.
They returned to the jobroom, where he got out some Old English and set her name. She asked him to set his, too. He put twelve points of space between the two names, but she took the spacing out, pressed the type up flush. He inked it, pulled a trial. The T in his name was broken, and she made him change it. The next one, she liked. He pulled half a dozen proofs for her, conscious that she had stepped a pace away, was watching his face while he worked. There was the leather sofa in there and he couldn’t get his mind off it. He lay the proofs out to dry. She stood against his side, cheek against his shoulder, corresponding metaphor to the proofs, to look at them. He started to put his arm around her shoulder, then remembered the ink on his hands. Some on hers, too. They both laughed, a little awkwardly, and, hands at their sides, kissed. He felt the sharp thrust of her young breasts against his ribs, felt the urgency in his groin as she squeezed into it, saw again the couch over her temple. It worked on him, undermined him. They washed at a small sink there. Apologizing for the coarse black soap, he stammered, caught himself losing his goddamn breath. Swore inwardly in a kind of amazement, then gave her the gift
She fingers each perfect fragment, turns it in the light: reds golds shadowy browns and soft brassy greens. She listens to its subtle music clashing somewhere in another century, watches astonished as it spills tumbles dives leaps in her trembling hands, flashing forth its bold prophecy of love. He takes it from her with strong hands, fastens it around her throat. An aroma present as of sacramental ashes from altarfires. His eyes from under dark brows gaze down upon her, burning her lips. She explains awkwardly, brokenly, how she loves him, accepts the benediction of his mouth. Do not be afraid, she tells him. His hands search
her body, found it trembling with a kind of wild excitement wherever he touched, her breast heaving against his, hands gripping his neck, pelvis thrust forward in immolation. Be careful! he told himself, but his hand, advancing on its own, glided down her thigh’s side, then up the back, passing between her legs to animating focus and combing the cleft above it, then grasped in its broad spread the whole width of her vibrant waist. There, unheeding, his fingers poked down between blouse and skirt, seeking flesh — she reached down to one side, unhooked the skirt, and it fell to the floor at their feet. “Marcella, wait!” The plant was empty, but impulsively he pulled away, put the hook on the jobroom door, arguing with the bold thrust of his own wishbone, then turned
to face her. He looks strangely like a small boy. As she unbuttons her blouse, her flesh is stroked by his hallowing beseeching eyes. Not for one moment does she fear, not even when, as though confused, he again asks her to wait. She drops the blouse, momentarily chilled by the pace of distance between them, but the collar warms her. She encloses herself in his arms once more, pulls out his shirt so as to run her hands up his strong back
The shirt sliding up out of his trousers felt like the uprooting of his entire control system. Stop her, you ass! he cried, but their mouths were locked and his own hand was coursing hungrily down the sleek gloss of her taut and trembling hips, his nostrils filled with the sweet odors of a recent bath. No! he argued, as the couch received them, soughing gratefully. His eyes fell on a copy of the night’s paper not three feet away, but his hands had already stripped her, found the place: wet with its own hot supplication. Wait! show her the goddamn paper! he shouted, as he removed his own clothes over her excited gaze. He kissed the hard erect nubs of her breasts, feeling her hands chase like a curious breeze over
his body, erect, strangely tense. She cannot believe it. She stares at it, trying desperately to understand, trying not to see the shadows gathering in all corners. “But what does it mean?” He seems drawn, spent, fearfully dark. “It means I’m leaving the cult, Marcella.” Again he embraces her, but now, in terror, she shrinks from him. “It has been a mistake. But now I’m trying to undo that mistake. And I want you to undo it with me. I want you to marry me, Marcella. Right away. Tonight even. I know it will be hard at first, but—” She twists away from his grasp, her body damp with fear, cold with the shadowed wind. “But, but you promised!” she manages to cry, tears tickling her cheeks. She pulls on the skirt and
blouse, buttoning a couple buttons hastily without tucking it in, grabbed up her other things, ran barefoot to the door. He tried to block her. “Marcella, wait! I love you! Please! We’ll leave together! We — we’ll get a nurse for your brother—Marcella!” She was past him.
She runs, but her balance has been thrown, she falls, skinning her legs. Shadows chase, eyes watch, driving her forward. Rocks bite at her bare soles. She cries out, but nothing emerges from her throat. Elan and Rahim receive her, frightened — they have copies of the paper, bear them trembling. They clasp their arms around her and hold her tight, take the clothes she carries from her, lead her up to her bed. Later, Rahim brings warm soup.
Dressing, he discovered a sock she had left behind. He picked it up, squeezed it tenderly in one hand: soft and white, spongy. A small foot. A child’s foot.
He went to the house, but it was locked and no one would let him in. He felt somehow oddly old and tired: where have I taken us? he wondered. The smells of her young body lingered with him still. People stopped him to talk about the Brunists. Some protested, some laughed, some were curious, some indignant. The full Easter moon was up early in the twilit sky, but it clouded over. In his pocket, he gripped her sock. With the threat of rain, the streets gradually emptied.
One caustic star lights the black hill and a wind creeps by like death. She stands there in her tunic, silent and forever removed. Something in Marcella Bruno has revolved a final turn. Crowds gather to taunt. A cloud comes.
Tiger Miller’s April eighth Brunist special hit the streets of West Condon like a blow in the gut. Reading it, Vince Bonali couldn’t sit down. Kept jumping up, slamming his fist into his palm, making speeches at nobody. Man! it was like somebody had dropped a bomb right on Easter, right on Christ Himself! Cavanaugh called him. “Yes, Ted, I read it. It’s awful.” He didn’t know the half of it. Cavanaugh clued him in on the stories appearing everywhere all over the goddamn country. “Jesus, Ted, it makes you sick!” But he’d never felt better. Nervous, pitched too high, feeling every minute like he had to hit out at something, but very goddamn good. Strong. In there. Knowing what he had to do. Everything seemed to be happening at once: the Committee, the Brunists, Red Baxter leading his hopped-up holy rollers all over town, Holy Week, and, as if to top it, Charlie’s expected return on Good Friday. Etta had cleaned the house all over again, fed Vince and Angie on potatoes and sausage, so she’d have money for a big Easter spread. Vince was on the move all the time. He had been appointed by the mayor to head up a special subcommittee to visit the homes of miners and disaster widows, anyone in the community apt to be contacted by the Brunists. He had had Sal and Georgie and Guido Mello to help him, along with the First Baptist minister and a couple young fellows off Main Street. They had worked hard, harder than the other three subcommittees put together, had managed to visit over sixty families in a week, getting a hundred percent firm commitments from them to turn any proselyters away from their doors, and several of them had agreed to send letters to the mayor and the newspaper. Everyone thought their subcommittee was doing a whale of a job. Ted Cavanaugh had been by his place almost every day or else had called him on the phone, mainly to post him on developments, call a few new plays, and to tell Vince what a goddamn good job he was doing. Reminded Vince of those benedictory slaps on the ass Ted used to give him on the way back to the huddle after a good offtackle play, and sometimes, talking to Ted, he almost felt his butt tingle with the great sense of inclusion. Once, Vince had happened to be out making house calls when Ted had stopped by, and afterwards Etta had told Vince that Ted had chatted with her a few minutes and that apparently he had “great hopes” for Vince. “It was those speeches did it,” she said with a big smile. She was proud as hell, Vince could tell. He had spoken at every meeting, reporting on calls and so on, and they always applauded after like hell.
Now, with the Chronicle special in the picture, Vince was invited to an emergency meeting of Committee leaders that Wednesday night. They all decided they had better try to break up the Brunists before they could get to their goddamn end. Mort Whimple refused to make any arrests yet, so Cavanaugh said they’d better go see each of them, one by one. Start day after tomorrow, Good Friday, with the weakest ones. The Halls, the Cravens and Harlowe widows, maybe Ben Wosznik. Vince went along with the idea, but he was sweating. Said he’d be tied up: Charlie was coming home that day, and, uh … But Ted said they needed him. What could he say to that?
Thursday interlude. Giovedì santo. Ninth of April. The Church was a flickering white, massed with lighted candles and white lilies. Together, they prayed to the Host. Murmur of sorrowful worshiping voices like a gently rocking sea. Angie, kneeling in simple pure white, prayed fervently at his side. Vince watched the words form in her mouth, slip through her moving lips. Their baby. She’s a good girl, God. He prayed in silence for his daughter. Barest fragrance of incense, low hum, altar radiant. Somehow, it felt to Vince like all his long life, from his boyhood to now, was wrapped up in this moment, he was all himselves at once, here, facing the Divine. Etta placed her hand gently over his. Slowly, half-forgotten words broke in on him, caught on Mama’s accent. Shadow of the priest moving among the candles, head bowed, God hovering above in the high dome like a reaching cloud. I’ve come back, Mama, he said to the cloud. “E non ci inducete nella tentazione ma liberateci dal male. Così sia.”
Outside, he was encircled by a clique of dark old ladies, anxious and peering up at him, almost like he was the priest. “I don’t know,” Vince said gently, “I ain’t superstitious. But you’re right, there sure is a funny coincidence about the disaster and Bruno’s operations.”
“Eresia!” whispered one. “Negromanzia!” muttered another in an old masculine rattle, and the other women bobbed their shawled heads solemnly, fingered their rosaries.
Vince was still inventing excuses, when Ted Cavanaugh’s Lincoln pulled up out front the next day. Even considered beating it out the back door. Etta went to meet Ted at the door, called to Vince from the front room. Well, hell, face up to it, he thought. Wages of sin and all that shit.
He worked up a careless smile, went in, shook Ted’s hand, that of Burt Robbins, the owner of the dimestore. “Ready to go?” Ted asked.
“Sure. Say, you know, Charlie’s coming home tonight, I don’t wanna get held up or anything, it—”
“Don’t worry, this won’t take long. Who’s going with us?”
“Sal Ferrero and Georgie Lucci. Sal’s waiting at home. Georgie said to pick him up at the Legion Hall.” Which was on the second floor over Robbins’ dimestore.
“Fine, let’s go. We wanted to have a minister along with us, but they’re all tied up with the Good Friday services.”
They said so-long to Etta, hurried through the light sprinkle out to Ted’s car. On the way to Sal’s house, Ted remarked what a terrific woman Etta was. “You’re a goddamn lucky man, Vince.” Vince smiled and nodded. Be goddamn lucky to get out of this one, okay. He hoped Wanda knew enough to keep her mouth shut. They also talked about the publicity. The paper last night was even worse than the Wednesday edition, and stories, Ted said, were popping up everywhere.
They picked up Sal and drove to the Legion. The other three waited while Vince went upstairs. Pretty dead, just a few of the bachelors. He found Georgie playing poker with his old section assistant Cokie Duncan, who was as usual pretty drunk, and a few other guys. “Ready to go?” Vince asked.
“Shit, Vincenzo, I’m winning!” Georgie complained.
“Good time to quit, then,” said Vince.
“Well, excuse me, boys and girls,” said Lucci, getting up with a rueful sigh. “Gotta go burn a few crosses.”
Another guy at the table, Chester Johnson, looked up. “Oh yeah?” Split his hillbilly face into a big smile. Bad teeth, spaced widely, gave him a beat-up look.
Vince and Georgie laughed. “Shit, I think he’d really like to,” Vince said. Then he added: “Ain’t nothing. We’re just paying a couple social calls on some of the Brunists.”
“Well, goddamn, Vince baby! count me in!” said Johnson, scraping back his chair. He turned to the others. “Wanna join the party?” None did. Vince wasn’t happy, but decided not to argue.
In the car, Vince outlined the plan as Ted had given it to him earlier. Robbins inserted a couple remarks so as not to be left out. Shifty bastard with a razorsharp nose and tongue to go with it. Vince didn’t trust him, didn’t like the way he always brown-nosed Cavanaugh. “We don’t want any rough talk, any threats, or any wising off,” said Vince, turning his gaze on Johnson. “We just mean to explain in simple common sense why they’re making a mistake that is gonna hurt them and is already hurting the community. It’s Holy Week, and we wanna use the traditional feeling about it to maybe make some inroads with these people. Mr. Cavanaugh here is taxiing us around, but it’s mainly our job. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” said Johnson in that goddamn nasal country twang of his. “Anybody remember to bring the hammer and nails?” Even Cavanaugh grinned.
At Willie Hall’s place, they got literally nowhere. They stood in the light rain at the front door and talked through the screen to Willie’s wife, who said Willie was not home, while a whole goddamn bevy of women tittered and whispered in the back of the house. “We’re all friends of Willie’s, Mrs. Hall,” Vince said, “and we just stopped by here for a minute to discuss with you both about this group you people have got that is talking about the end. We thought if we had a little—” And she shut the door in their faces.
Back in the Lincoln, wet and disgruntled, Vince suggested they maybe should have just gone on in there. His buddies backed him up, remarking that Willie was probably in there under the bed, and they could talk him out of anything. Ted shook his head, made it clear in a word that they had to keep calm, do what they could, not worry about it if they didn’t succeed. They changed the subject, joked instead about what a big brute little Willie’s wife was.
Widow Wilson they passed by, since Widow Collins was living there now. Since the fire. Ted told them Widow Collins had been somewhat deranged by her husband’s death and was a hopeless case. Widow Harlowe, who lived in the old housing development, just a couple dozen doors or so around the circle from Wanda Cravens, let them in. She kept a neat little house, in spite of a bunch of little children. “This is Mr. Cavanaugh,” Vince began, “from the bank. Mr. Robbins from Woolworth’s. The rest of us worked down in the mine, Mrs. Harlowe. With Hank. We just only wanted to have a little personal talk with you about, about Giovanni Bruno and the … his …”
“Oh, that,” said Mrs. Harlowe. “They ain’t nothin’ to talk about about that. Not less you wanna come ’n be members.”
“Well, not likely,” drawled Johnson.
“Let Vince handle it,” said Sal.
“The point is,” Vince continued, looking for the entry into this woman, “we just wonder if you fully understand the position you are putting West Condon into. Now, we all of us believe in God, Mrs. Harlowe, all of us in our own way, and we don’t mean to interfere with that belief, with your belief, that’s up to you. Only, you see, we think maybe this fellow Bruno, I mean we’ve all known him for a long time and he is a rather suspicious type, if you know what I mean, and we’re afraid he might have got some of you people off the track like. Call it the devil, call it a little strangeness, call it how you want, but, see, he might be getting you into trouble, and if he gets you in trouble, why, it gets us all in trouble.”
“Maybe,” said the widow. “But maybe it ain’t only trouble, Mr. Bonali. Maybe it really is the real end of the world. I know your Pope he don’t like it none, but we been expecting that. See, maybe it’s you all who’s in trouble.”
“If there was any reason for us to think so,” said Ted gently, “would we be here now?” Vince relaxed; somehow you always knew Ted could do the job, could carry the ball — he watched to see it happen. “Mrs. Harlowe, we’re trying to save you from shame and embarrassment. It’s not West Condon we are primarily worried about, or Bruno, or anybody else. We’re worried about you personally. You and your children and your future here with us.”
The widow weakened. She chewed on one reddish finger, stared out the window. A steady rain, now, fell in a tumbling hush on the low roof. “Well, I’ll think about it more. I know I sure do have doubts sometimes, and even when I’m talkin’ with Hank or whoever it is if it’s anybody at all, why, I’m not sure I know what I’m doin’. I’ll sure think about what you say, I promise.”
Vince and the others got up to go. Good work. But Ted remained seated, leaned his big athletic body forward. “Mrs. Harlowe, could you make a decision right now? Could you turn away from these people and join us today, now, on Good Friday, in our efforts to keep West Condon wholesome and Christian?”
The widow hesitated, twisted her thin hands, then started to cry. Vince wanted to pat her on the shoulder, tell her it was okay, let her be, but Ted waved him off. The man sat there calmly and gazed at her. She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t know what to do!” she whimpered.
“Come with us. Now.” Ted wasn’t letting go.
“But the kids—”
“Do you have a phone?”
She nodded, pointed to the small passageway that led to the kitchen. Ted dialed his house, asked his wife to drive over in Tommy’s car, gave the address. Ted and Burt talked to the widow while they waited. Vince suggested he could stay with the kids while they went on to the Widow Cravens’ house, then could catch up with them there. While Ted was still considering that, Mrs. Cavanaugh arrived, smiling, to take over. Handsome woman from upstate that Ted had brought back from college with him.
On the drive around the circle to Wanda’s house, Vince broke out in a cold sweat. Just so she didn’t act too fucking friendly, but he doubted she had enough sense to fake anything. It was bad enough, but with that bastard Johnson along, just itching for comedy — damn! He chewed down hard on his cigar. Mrs. Harlowe snuffled all the way.
“This it, Vince?” Cavanaugh asked, slowing to a stop.
Vince squinted out into the rain. “Can you see the number?”
“This is the place, okay,” Johnson said.
Mrs. Harlowe seemed reluctant to go with them, but Ted hooked one hand under her arm and she had little choice. They found the door open. Wanda would probably ask him why he hadn’t just walked on in. That dumb bitch. Or: why hadn’t he been coming by? Or: we done talked all this out before, Vince hon, what’s the point a goin’ through it agin? Sal knocked. Little Davey came to the door.
“Your mama home?” Sal asked.
The little boy just stood there staring at them. Vince had maneuvered to the rear, but the two guys in front of him for some goddamn reason stepped aside. The kid fixed his gaze on Vince: right on the fly. That goddamn kid was abnormal.
Sal beat on the door again.
“Must be out,” Vince said, and turned as if making to go.
“I don’t know, I think I hear somebody in there.” Probably pulling some pants on. She slouched around in almost nothing most of the time, he’d noticed.
Georgie knocked, shaded his eyes, tried to see in. “Should we just go on in?”
Before Vince or anybody could say no, Chester Johnson jerked open the screen door, pushed past the kid into the house. Almost like he’d been here before, too. Old buddy of Lee’s maybe. Robbins and Cavanaugh edged down off the porch with Widow Harlowe, and Vince followed. Johnson came out. “Ain’t nobody in there ’cept another little kid,” he said.
“Let’s go,” said Cavanaugh. Vince was ready, damn near flew to the car. Oh man! he was glad now he’d been going to Mass! The worst was over. Vince noticed Ted was starting to keep his eye on Johnson. Seemed a little pissed off.
When Widow Harlowe learned that their next call was upon Ben Wosznik, she went white and trembly, said she wasn’t feeling good and wanted to go home. Ted used the old arguments again, but this time they didn’t seem to work. Vince guessed she was scared of old Ben. Maybe what he’d heard about the whips was true. When Ted drove on out of the housing development anyway, and toward the edge of town where Wosznik worked an acre or two, she almost got hysterical. Ted told her she could stay in the car if she wanted to, and finally she calmed down.
Wosznik welcomed them warmly, invited them into his shack to have a hot cup of coffee, get out of the rain. Big heavy-shouldered man, a little stooped now, the still-impressive remains of a powerful though very mild-mannered guy. Vince remembered the man from the days of the union struggles: quiet and easygoing, but one of the toughest bravest bastards in the movement. He could’ve gone places in the union, but always joked that he didn’t have the brains for it.
“Well, what brings you boys around?” he asked, smiling good-naturedly. There was no place to sit down. Just a stove, a table, a rocker, and a cot, and the cot was taken up by a big dog, an old gray German police, who had Wosznik’s sense of aging power, but not his friendliness. Johnson settled into the rocker, while the rest stood. Wosznik put a kettle on for coffee.
“Ben, we just come by, as old friends,” Vince began, “to—”
“Wozz, old buddy,” Johnson cut in from the rocker, “why are you fuckin’ around with them goddamn loonies anyhow?”
Wosznik frowned, looked down at Johnson, then around at each of them. “Well now,” he said, “I don’t like you talking about my friends like that. They’re fine people, kind and sincere, and I don’t think you’ve got any call to come in here and—”
“Mr. Wosznik,” said Ted, calming the scene down, “you’re right. Mr. Johnson was not speaking for the rest of us. Our only hope was that we might, as men, talk this thing over, using the common sense and good will that God gave us to—”
“Well, now as you mention that, Mr. Cavanaugh,” said Ben, “I should tell you that’s exactly why I’m associated with these people. We all thought it was a little funny that you folks should call yourselves a ‘common sense committee,’ when it was just that, common sense, that you was forgetting to use. Now, not one of you has had the common sense to come hear first what Mr. Bruno has to say. Not one of you has had the good will to listen to the other side of the story. Not one of you had the common sense to find out what it was poor Mrs. Norton believed before you went and fired her from the school.”
“Maybe,” said Burt Robbins, talking up for the first time. “But there’s no need to now. We’ve read all about it in the paper. And now you’d just have to be pretty crazy to—”
“Just a minute now, Burt,” Ted interrupted. Robbins’ neck had started to go red, his face to blanch. Vince felt a smug pleasure at Robbins’ comedown. “Well, then, why don’t we talk about it right now, Mr. Wosznik?”
“I’d be glad to, Mr. Cavanaugh, on account of I think—”
“Listen, Ben,” said Johnson, grinning from the rocker. “Let’s not shit around. How many of those broads you been screwin’?”
Wosznik suddenly stood very goddamn tall and wide. “Get out!” he rasped. “Get outa here!”
Cavanaugh interceded. “Wait a minute, that’s not what—”
“Get out!” The old man was really riled. The police dog lifted its head, snarled. Very deep in the throat.
“Now hold on, old buddy!” Johnson grinned. “That ain’t no goddamn way to talk with old friends!” Maybe he didn’t see the dog.
“Come on,” said Cavanaugh to Johnson. “I think it’s better to go.” Robbins was already at the door, his eye on the dog.
“Aw, it’s all right, Mr. Cavanaugh,” said Johnson, rocking placidly. “We still ain’t found out—”
Wosznik made a lunge at Johnson. Johnson sprang up, cocked his fist, but simultaneously the dog shot off the cot, made for Johnson’s arm. Vince was the fourth one out the door, Georgie Lucci right behind him. Sounds of scuffling behind them, snarling and cursing, table falling, a groan. Johnson stepped out, a grin on his long face. “Shit, that old mutt ain’t got no teeth, boys. Now, don’t you wanna have that talk?”
“No,” said Cavanaugh bluntly. He was plainly sore. They found the car empty.
“Jesus, she’s got a long walk home,” said Lucci.
“In the rain, too,” said Robbins.
They all stared a moment down the muddy road. They couldn’t see her. “That’s enough for today,” Cavanaugh said.
When all but he and Robbins had been dropped off, Vince said: “Jesus, I’m sorry about Johnson, Ted. He invited himself, and I didn’t—”
“I know, Vince,” Ted said. “Those things happen. Let’s just hope Miller doesn’t get wind of it. Forget about it.” But he knew he’d chalked up a negative, and he thought he saw Robbins grin.
In walked Charlie Saturday afternoon, the eleventh, snapping his fingers, cap tipped so far down his nose he could’ve polished the bill with his tongue, and the door hadn’t even swung shut before he and Vince were into it again. Etta planted herself heftily between them, got Charlie maneuvered into the kitchen for a sandwich. When Vince asked him why he didn’t show up the night before like he’d said he would, all he got from the boy was a wink. A few minutes later, Charlie passed through the living room again, sandwich in hand, tipping his cap, revealing his nearly bald head, and then—snap! snap! — right on out the door.
“Didn’t stay long, did he?” Vince remarked sourly.
Etta sat down on the couch, big smile on her face. “Looks funny with that haircut, don’t he?”
“Haircut can’t change a boy.”
“Vince, you’re too hard on him. He’s a good boy.” Etta sat pleased and plump. She sighed. “I guess he’ll be a big man on the town tonight.”
Vince saw it was silly to carp. Anyway, it was good in a way to have Charlie home. Livened up the house. He wished the other kids would come home more often. Lots of room for them now. Grandkids and all.
There was a knock on the door.
“Jesus, he’s in trouble already!” said Vince, getting up, stuffing his feet back into the shoes.
“Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Bonali?” asked the boy at the door. Holding a goddamn bouquet of flowers big as he was.
“Well, yeah, that’s right,” said Vince.
“Well, Happy Easter, Mr. Bonali!” the kid said with a big smile, and handed him the flowers.
“What is it, Vince?” asked Etta from the living room.
“Jesus, I don’t know!” said Vince. He lugged the bouquet into the living room. “Somebody sent us this!”
“Oh my God!” cried Etta, jumping up. “It’s beautiful!” She came hurrying over, but she seemed almost afraid to touch it. “Does it have a card or anything?”
Vince fumbled around the stems, found a little white envelope. “Yeah, just a minute.” Fingers unsteady. The thing had really bowled him over. “Well, I’ll be damned!”
“Who—?”
“‘To the Vince Bonalis, Happy Easter! Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Cavanaugh and family.’ Wow! Whaddaya think about that!”
Etta, speechless, took the card from him and read it. “I can’t hardly get my breath!” she said. “Why, it must’ve cost a fortune! But, but where can we put it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. May have to build a new house just to have room for the damn thing!” Really, it was too great, it was a great thing to do! “There, let’s clear off that end table, it’s big enough, I think.”
When Angie came home an hour later, they still hadn’t got used to the thing, still kept fiddling with it, staring at it, putting the card one place or another, walking around it. She started to tell them she’d just seen Charlie, then stopped short: “Good golly, where did you get that!”
Vince shrugged. “The Cavanaughs,” he said as casually as he could, though he felt like a goddamn blimp in his pride.
“Really?” Angie was tremendously impressed. “Gosh, Mom, Dad’s really getting important, isn’t he?”
“Say, Vince, that’s some damn forest there!”
“Yeah, well, I told Ted he didn’t need to go to so much trouble this year, just a few samples off the shelves down at his store would do fine, but I guess he didn’t hear me.”
Greatest Easter of all time.
Angie and Etta passed round the coffee and sweet rolls, some thirty or forty people milling through the old house. Place looked shipshape, too. Etta had worked hard getting it ready for Charlie. Outside, the front was brightly painted and grass was poking up. Vince caught Angie’s eye, winked at her. He felt very damned proud of her. This after-Mass breakfast had been her idea.
“Ready for the Second Coming, Vince? Just got seven more days, you know.”
“Now, you know I’m always ready, Joe. But me and Georgie here, we’ve talked it over, and we’ve decided not to hold it for a little while longer yet. Still too many of you sinners around.”
Vince had really enjoyed church this morning. First time he had really felt one hundred percent at home since he’d started going back regularly. Even Charlie had consented to come along, remarking in his fashion that it was a good place to search out skirts. He’d made a big splash, too, polished and shined to a spit, and Vince saw that the Marines had been good for the boy, had slapped his burgeoning beergut back flat again and given him a new stature. Angie, full of ideas, had made a cutting from the bouquet and fashioned corsages for Etta and herself, and then, just before Mass, all excited over her project, had gone along with Vince to buy the sweet rolls and to borrow an extra percolator from the Ferreros.
Mass itself had been something extraordinarily beautiful, he’d forgotten it could give a man so much pleasure, so much peace. His conscience completely clean, he had entered into this day of Christ’s Rising with unchecked enthusiasm. Afterwards, Father Baglione had singled him out and, in front of everybody, had thanked him for his recent good works. His thick strong hand on Vince’s shoulder, he had looked up with dark searching eyes. “Dio vi benedica, Vincenzo,” he had said gravely. A wonderful old man.
“Mr. Bonali, we think it is an excellent fine thing you are doing with this, how you call, Common Sense Club.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Abruzzi. I really appreciate your support.”
Etta moved with surprising grace among the people. She never failed to have something to say, and folks even seemed to seek her out. Cavanaugh was right. She was a great woman.
“Where’s Charlie? Didn’t I see him at Mass this morning?”
“Yeah, but the experience was too much for him. He was afraid he might get his halo bent around such a big crowd.”
“How’s he getting along in the Marines?”
“All they were able to do to Charlie was shave his head, but after Charlie the Marine Corps will never be the same again.”
A big turkey was roasting in the oven in Charlie’s honor, stuffed with apple dressing. Whipped potatoes, turkey gravy, hot rolls, big green salad. A man had to arrange his life, by God, so that no matter how great the present was, there was always something better sitting out just in front.
“Thanks for having us over, Vince. Nice idea!”
“Don’t think a thing of it, Dom. Collection plate’s there beside the door.”
It wasn’t until after two that the last of the stragglers pulled out. “Man, that was some breakfast,” said Vince. “I thought I was gonna have to invite them to stay overnight.” He kissed Etta’s cheek. “Charlie here?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I told him about two or so.”
“You said noon. Well, as far as I’m concerned, it’s his tough luck. What do you say, Angie?”
“Second.”
“There, baby, you’re outvoted.”
“It’ll take me a few minutes yet anyway. I’ve still got to mash the potatoes and put the rolls in the oven to heat.”
Angie settled down on the floor to read the funnies from the city paper, while Vince thumbed through the sports section, glanced at the news headlines. Angie had nice legs. Lot of action in that blouse, too. She’d do all right. She was a great girl. Vince noticed a small boxed-in article at the bottom of the front page on the Brunists. Made them out to be a lot more than they were. Well, let them come and see for themselves. When they find out how Miller has been hoaxing them, maybe they’ll string the bastard up.
At three, Etta came in looking down in the mouth. “I’m afraid it’s all going to spoil,” she said.
“Well, hell, chicken, let’s eat without him.”
“That’s what I say,” said Angie.
Etta stalled. “Just a couple more minutes,” she pleaded.
Vince stood up, put his arm around her. “Come on, Mrs. Bonali, I’m starved. If we don’t start now, I’ll have to eat those flowers. It will still be good when that boy gets here, no sense ruining this banquet for all of us.”
Reluctantly, she let herself be led along to the table. It was all decked out with candles and fancy napkins and the best table linen. A little American flag in the middle. The front door opened. “There he is!” they all cried at once.
“Charlie! that you?” called Vince.
“Yeah!”
“Come on! You’re late for dinner!”
Charlie appeared in the doorway. “Jeez, I can’t stay. Got a date with a very fine number, a real pro-test-ant type. Man! Just whack me off a hunk of that bird, Mom, and stick it between two pieces of bread.” He turned, humming, snapping his goddamn fingers, and went into the bathroom.
She’s going to cry, thought Vince. Goddamn that little shit. Etta picked up the carving knife, sliced a thick slab of breast off the turkey, carried it to the kitchen. “Mayonnaise, Charlie?” she called, voice constricted, trying to hold up.
Vince shoved back his chair. Time to meet that boy head on. At the bathroom door, he lifted his hand to knock, then decided just to barge in. Charlie was sitting on the can, still wearing that goddamn cap tipped down on his nose. “Charlie, you get in there and you have dinner with us!”
“Jesus, old man, c’mon! Can’t you see I’m taking a crap?”
“I don’t give a damn what you’re taking!” cried Vince. He tried to swallow down his fury. “Now, you look! Your Mom fixed a special meal today, just for you, boy, she’s been planning it for two weeks, and I’m going to see to it that you eat it, you hear?”
“Look, at least close the door, hunh?”
“Now, when you’re done, you get coming!”
Charlie unwound a big wad of toilet paper off the spool. “Okay, okay,” he grumbled, “only just let me wipe my ass in peace, okay?”
In the kitchen, Vince found Etta spreading mayonnaise on a slice of bread. “Now, you put that away, damn it! That boy’s gonna have dinner with us today, or, so help me God, he ain’t never gonna step foot in my house again as long as I live!”
“Please, Vince. Don’t shout.” She was already starting. Big wet tear rolling down her round cheek.
“Well, okay,” he said, feeling clumsy and hurt and angry all at once. “But I mean it.” Angie stood in the doorway, her face pale, her lip turned down. “Now, don’t you start, too,” said Vince. The front door slammed. Vince ended up eating Easter dinner alone.
Who? Jones, Duncan, Fisher.
Poker game.
Day of the Bunny and the Risen Son.
Legion Hall, over the Woolworth.
Nothing else to do till traintime.
How? hmmm. Inebriatus. With large coins. Very large coins. But not large enough, no. And with very limber preadamite pasteboards. Jones with four of the prettiest boys in his hand he has seen all night.
“This place is deader than my hotel,” observes Wallace the red-eyed Fish, he of the shiny pate and pink dewlaps. “Where is everybody?”
“Must be Sunday,” responds Dune the droop. “Raise ye three.”
“So it is,” Jones informs them, consulting his timepiece. “Five of the clock.”
“Aha,” says Wally wagging head wisely. “Morning or evening?”
“Make it five, then,” ups the looselimbed Duncan, shoving two coins additional into the pot with his elbow. “Of the cock.”
Fisher squints through blooded orbs as Jones meets five, raises five. “Fuck you, dear Father!” he declares parsimoniously and folds. “It is finished!”
“You are risen,” Jones reminds the remaining bettor.
Coke calls.
“Four infant jesi,” announces Jones the eternally damned, spreading his jacks with ritual flourish. “Read ’em and lament!” Rakes in the gold and silver as Coca Dunca blasphemes beneath breath.
Jones deals, Dune reels, Fish spiels: “I thirst.”
Jones passes jug, coolly faces five: two Negroid damsels, the anus of spades, and a twosome of nondescripts. It is then he, Jones, who advances three pieces of silver, and it is they, Duncan and Fisher, who, emitting bodily threats, respond in kind.
Further negotiations are momentarily interrupted by the pitter-patter of boots on the stair.
“Hark!” soundeth Jones. “One comes!”
“Get some more money in this fucking game,” smirks Fish, spreading cruel innkeeper’s lips in undisguised avarice.
Indeed, such is the case: it is the jester Chester Johnson with ready if not ample funds. “By God!” he cackles. “I thought I seen a light on up here!” He is welcomed with tripartite joy: one rumbling belch apiece. “How many days you guys been up here?”
“Yea, unto forty-two generations,” returns Jones and, retiring the two nondescripts from further participation, prepares to offer seconds. Of the which, Dune reluctantly accepts an individual, whilst Walleye petitions with desperation for four.
John’s chestless son, stirring the straw on knobby skull, lifts from the fundament two empty flagons bearing birds sinister, then two more, scrutinizes with beady balls. “Man! you guys done put it away!” is his typically superfluous commentary. Bald Fish produces a fifth fifth still vivifiable. This he straightarms into lean eager face, the which releases: “Well, by damn now! Whose party?” Jones nonchalantly slides four coins forward, covering the misfortune of two new nondescripts.
“Lou’s,” reveals the multiloquent hotelier, meeting the challenge of four.
“His last night in town. Wants some spendin’ money to take with him up to the big city,” is the more complex revelation of Cokedunk the old minero, and likewise replies with four, adds three.
“Hey, no shit, Lou baby? You all buggin’ out on us?” interrogates Johnson, and tips bottle greedily in apparent fear of an immediate exodus.
“The eight thirty-five,” says Jones, meets three, farts, raises four. “Passage is procured. It is a matter now of history.”
“Aw, shit, I ain’t got nothing,” Fisher the flushed and fleshy affirms and fades.
Dune eyes Jones, eyes cards, eyes Jones, eyes cards, eyes Johnson slaking interminable thirst, eyes own terminable funds. “I gotta piss,” he trows and cedes. Jones gathers.
“Tonight! Well, what the hell, Jonesy? You git a offer summers or somethin’?”
“Cheese, old comrade, I have been fired.”
“Fired!”
“Fired. Dismissed. Bounced. Cashiered. Exiled. In brief, this is farewell. Summarily, I have been passed the shaft.”
Fisher flings five to each while curses are laid upon the head of Just-in Miller. Jones discovers two hoary old studs and a pair of sevens, promising, if not the end, at least an in. They wait. Duncan, however, returns not. Chester, still motile, investigates. “He’s sawin’ ’em off on the crapper” is his not overly voluminous report, and once again they are three.
Hands pass.
Fog descends.
Gains are lost.
Heads weigh and sag.
“Hey, Lou baby,” reaches Jones from afar the seedy voice, “I ain’t anxious to see ye cut out, man, but it’s eight-thirty.”
Jones, with incredible fortitude, stands. Straight proceeds he unto the crapper, deposes the Duncan, and employs the venerable instrument. Returns.
“Say, listen, Fish, let’s us see old Jonesy off, whaddaya say?” It is the irrepressible Johnson, as usual, talking.
Fish, bleary, seeks Johnson’s face, nods, and “Great idea!” cries before collapsing backwards to the floor.
“Well, Jonesy,” Johnson concludes, “it’s you and me.”
“Never, my friend, have the prospects been more cheering.”
Concludes, of course, is imprecise. That lean sonuvabitch never concludes. Unto the frugging station he without cease declaims. He has employed Good Friedegg in visitation upon the Brunuts and must intricately reveal the data of his consequent sainthood. “You’re leavin’ this fuckin’ town jist in time, Jonesy. It’s the goddamn end a the world in jist seven days.”
“West Condom, Cheese, is not the world.”
Soggy and lumped stand Jones and Johnson afoot the termite-crudded platform, awaiting Old Destiny. She arrives with a wheeze and a blackgrease groan at 9:17.
Jones boards her, as Johnson fades in a chorus of effusive well-meaning obscenities. “We’ll git ol’ Tiger for ye, Jonesy!” is the last he hears. The old girl leaps forward with a jolt, topples Jones over possessions. Fat conductor splits worthless goddamn sides in contemplation of the Fall. Jones recovers, shoves bill into laughingbuck’s quaking midriff, “Just plant those bags somewhere,” he belches, “and cram it.” Then, briefcase under arm, he lurches, pissed, to club car.
Jones alone.
Meditation.
Festival still of the goddess Eastre, last year of our Lord.
Destiny’s club car.
Why? The authoritative source withholds further comment.
On his butt, rye beside. High as a bloated angel.
Jones is goddamn glad to get out, says Jones. Upward and onward to the big city, man. Tips rye to that. Water Closet. Pull the chain.
Opens briefcase, flips caressingly through photos. Hayseed bandy-legs in, Jones covers. Hayseed reposes bony hunkers at distant end, minds own matters, whatever they might horribly be. Jones re-eyes photos.
Story: that fabled day of the boom’s lowering, the Brunist special. Jones is in darkroom just off job-room working up gore pix of car wreck. Enters heroic protagonist to jobroom, quiff in hand. Jones observes, unseen, through speedgraphic viewfinder and darkroom window. Little gift, touch here, touch there, big itch all around. Protagonist struggles with conversion-from-cult pitch which twitches quiff to drop drawers, switching protagonist’s premises the which can only lead to syllogistic fuck: beautiful beautiful beautiful! Jones nearly leaps ecstatic out to congratulate, but lovingly operates instead voyeuristic camera eye. Splendid prelim thrashing about very photogenic and then, little quiff delirious afloat on cloud of imminent glory sacrifice, protagonist suddenly stands off (human interest shot of deceived crotch pathetically petitioning) and resumes with unanticipated fury his from-cult brief, accenting phoniness self-delusion marriageneed and godmadness, all of it an exquisite torture, Jones the while seizing his own balls and jumping silently for joy — but then, instead of quashing the quiff, protagonist stands ladylike by as she jumps into rudiments of clothing and barefoot staggers out door, and then, and then, O farewell manly virtues! protagonist weeps. Ugh!
Epilogue: Jones presents set of prints as Happy Easter Bunny oblation and receives compensatory walking papers. No goddamn sense of humor.
Jones swigging rye in club car now resumes review, confers blue ribbon on one titled “Quiff Couching at Forty-five Degrees.” Hay seed passes on rubber legs, gawks, flushes. “Hey, them’s purty hot pitchers you got there, mister!”
Jones belches wearily. “Three bucks apiece,” says he. “Thirty silver dimes.”
Easter Sunday, after dark. The phone rings. Eleanor Norton answers. “Yes?”
“This is Jesus Christ calling.”
She blanches and those watching blanch, too. These are the Last Days and even harassment must be taken for a sign, must be exploited for concealed meaning. “Why are you troubling us?”
“I have an important message for you all.”
“Why don’t you bring the message personally?” She tries to be stern, but her voice fails her.
“Well, actually, that’s what I’m doing. To tell the truth, I am here in the room with you right now, but you can’t see me. My only means to cross the, uh, aspect barriers between us was by utilizing the electronic amplification system provided by this instrument you hold in your hand.”
“Ah!” It is too reasonable to be denied. Hand covering the mouthpiece, she explains to the others, now crowding around, all, like her, dressed in white tunics. “But what … what is your message?”
“We have waited too long. The publicity campaign being waged against us by our enemies is muddling up the frequencies. We cannot risk any further delays. We have decided the end, that is, the transition, must come tonight.”
“Tonight!” she cries, her voice breaking with a squeak. She covers the mouthpiece. “He says the end is coming tonight!”
Mary Harlowe, paling, to Mabel Hall: “You said it could be Easter!”
Willie Hall: “As it says in the Good Book—”
Jesus: “Can you make it out to the hill in twenty minutes?”
“Yes!” Eleanor is already standing, waving at Wylie to get ready to go. She hears the sarcasm, knows it’s wrong, another horrid prank, yet doubts what she knows, for how can one be sure? And there is no time to think. “In twenty minutes!” she cries to them all, not covering, and there is a flurry of activity.
“Uh, just one thing. You must rid yourselves of everything that belongs to this world or you won’t be light enough to pass through to the next. Do you understand?”
“Yes, yes! Everything!”
“Roger. No possessions, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing.”
“No—!”
“Eighteen minutes.” (Click.)
She is frantic. She explains. Clara snorts. An argument ensues. Time passes. Even Wylie resists. But dare we take chances? Clara says flatly she isn’t going to go stand stark naked on that hill just on account of some telephone call and Elaine isn’t either. Carl Dean Palmers is strangely spotted with his acne-centered flush, but he refuses to support Eleanor. On the other hand, Ben Wosznik agrees they had better do it. They are grown-up people and common sense tells you you won’t be wearing clothes in Paradise anyhow, so why be embarrassed about it now? The widows pink and stammer, but seem to agree. Clara retorts she’s not embarrassed, she just doesn’t want to go put on a show for a townful of practical jokers.
The phone rings again. “Yes?” Eleanor’s hand trembles.
“Thirteen minutes.” (Click.)
“Thirteen minutes!” she cries. “Giovanni Bruno! Hark ye!” He is excited, alert, fingers digging into the scruff of the old armchair. She is suddenly terrified at the realization that he will say yes, they must go, that something awry could break forever the fragile circuit, that she herself really does not believe — or was that his inner voice on the phone—?
It rings again. Eleanor shies, watching Giovanni, and Clara jumps for it. “Hello, who is this?”
“Ten minutes—”
“Don’t hang up! Now listen, if you are who you say you are, and if you’re here in the room like you say you are, then you don’t need to dial our number to reach us. Even if I hang up on you, I shouldn’t be able to disconnect you, ain’t that so?”
Eleanor is breathless with the brilliance of it, awed by Clara’s majestic calm.
“Uh, the electronic mechanism is such that—”
Clara plunges her fist down on the cradle, gazes around at all present, then lifts it. She listens, smiles. They all listen: the dial tone … burrrp … burrrp … burrrp. They relax. Clara is praised. But they decide anyway to visit the hill.
Around town that night of Easter Sunday, April twelfth, the collective eye is on the hill. The great vernal celebration of the Risen Christ concluded, West Condon has no choice but to turn and face the week before them, the week of the Brunists, the prophesied end, the Mount of Redemption and of humiliation. For four straight days, the West Condon Chronicle has headlined the bizarre story. For four straight days, the city editor has exploited the event in special articles and photo features released to the world. As Vince Bonali put it, talking to his buddy Sal Ferrero one day: “History is like a big goddamn sea, Sal, and here we are, bobbing around on it, a buncha poor bastards who can’t swim, seasick, lost, unable to see past the next goddamn wave, not knowing where the hell it’s taking us if it takes us anywhere at all.” And so now, thanks to the city editor’s all-round betrayal, the leaky raft of West Condon rises on a crest, and if it cannot perceive, it is at least perceived. All the way from the Antipodes to the Balearics, Curaçao to Dahomey. Wirephotos, news stories, television and radio broadcasts, those tawdry flares that randomly light up pieces of that sea, burst now over West Condon, exposing it to all the Peeping Toms of Egypt and the Fijis, the Ganges and Hong Kong … indeed unto Zion. A month and a half ago, it was all about coalmines and violence and economics and death, and there was an innocence about it. Today it is faith and prophecy and cataclysm and conflict, and it is outrageous. Why did it happen here? How will it be stopped? Where will it end? Luckless mariners adrift, none can know.
At Easter Sunday Evening Circle at the Church of the Nazarene, Lucy Smith is telling all the girls about the lovely new tunics the Brunists are wearing now and how the prophet’s sister has neither spoken nor eaten in four days. There are rumors of something unspeakable that might have transpired between her and Mr. Miller, the newspaper editor, who has turned out to be the dark false friend that Mabel Hall found in her cards. President Sarah Baxter listens, as excited as the rest, yet oppressed by a terrible melancholy, hoping only that Abner is not listening in on them again. She feels so inadequate, is inadequate, and Abner has so reviled her for it. She liked Circle so much better when Sister Clara did everything, when she herself, like Sister Lucy now, was merely a belovèd anecdotist, free to have her tea leaves read by Mabel and to complain with the other girls about why the Circle wasn’t better than it was. Abner has grown so distant through this struggle, so austere, so crossgrained and vindictive, she feels quite desperately alone in the world with this new life stirring like a terrible condemnation in her aged womb. She cries every day. She just can’t help it. And Abner doesn’t care, he doesn’t even punish her for it. He just hates her.
Thelma Coates tells them now about Sister Clara’s travels through the neighboring counties and how, if the world should still exist in some form or other after next Sunday (they all giggle nervously), Clara has been authorized by God Himself, she says, to carry His new word and appoint His new bishops, and, what is more, Mabel Hall believes that Brother Willie may become the bishop of all West Condon, which is very exciting news.
Mildred Gray tells them how they are all selling everything they own and sharing the money as a single community, enjoying grand banquets and who knows what all, and how one night they all ate a whole leg of lamb apiece. Mr. Himebaugh, who is a very rich man, has given them all his money and is selling all his possessions and they say he is a true and living saint. Of course, she says, when it’s all over, they won’t have a stitch to their name. If they need one.
Lucy Smith then informs them with very tight meaningful lips that, speaking of not having a stitch, under the tunics all they wear is their underwear, and Sister Thelma whispers that she has good reason to believe they don’t even wear that, but she won’t say more. Utterly without any reason whatsoever, then, Sarah Baxter starts to weep uncontrollably.
Earlier in the evening, before the phonecall from the man who said he was Jesus Christ, Carl Dean Palmers has attended the Baptist Youth Group meeting. He used to be president of it and he is still very much looked up to. He is courageous in his questioning, and yet at the same time he is not conceited about being a senior and is not ashamed to believe, not ashamed to pray. Ashamed of Jesus! that dear Friend/On whom my hopes of heaven depend? Not Carl Dean! Tonight, as usual, Carl Dean has pressed the claims of his new affiliation. Reverend Cummins, who has always made it very difficult for him and has even threatened to bar him from attendance at the BYG meetings, was not there, so the eight kids who showed up were glad to listen to Carl Dean. “What have you got to lose?” he asked them. “You don’t even have to come until next Saturday, if you don’t want to, and you can all come together so you won’t feel alone. Listen, you got nothing to do next weekend anyhow. And what if it’s true? What if it really happens? You don’t want to miss out, do you?” They did not! And he reminded them how he was never one to get mixed up in anything crazy, was he? And he told them again how swell all the people were and how, if anybody in town just tried to get the least bit smart with them, they’d take care of them, and then he prayed out loud that they all find the grace in their hearts to be saved in this moment of trial, and with that they agreed to come. Saturday night. Carl Dean said he would get them all the materials they needed, and the girls promised to make the robes. They were very impressed and excited about the robes. He told them that there were many secrets they would learn, and, as a starter, he taught them the secret password and one of Mr. Wosznik’s new songs:
March on! march on, ye Brunists!
March on and fear no loss!
March on beneath thy banner,
The Circle and the Cross!
In spite of all adversity,
March out upon that mine!
The Cross within the Circle
Will make the vict’ry thine!
March on! march on, ye Brunists!
Forever shall we live!
The Cross within the Circle
Will us God’s Glory give!
So know ye are the chosen,
The gold among the dross!
March on beneath thy banner,
The Circle and the Cross!
And now, marched to the Mount (from their cars at the foot of the hill), standing courageously atop their origins and confronting a hostile world, dressed in pure white tunics embroidered in brown and tied at the waist with brown rope, the Brunists sing around a small campfire.
… Risk not your soul,
it is precious indeed …
Ben Wosznik, guitar strapped around his neck, wanders tall and melodic among them. How is it that this mournful and uneducated, yet strangely reassuring man can to one be a father, to another a son a brother and lover all in one? Such, one might suspect, are the sort of mysteries that lie at the heart of and propagate all faiths.
… Sinners, hear me, when I say:
Fall down on your knees and pray!
Fearing not the Baxters, for no man with the truth fears, yet unwilling to evoke the Last Battles prematurely, they have left the car lights off, such that the lonely fire dramatizes the fragility of God’s spark in the world of men, and the holy glow that warms their hearts, as their bodies, which they soon will shed, grow cool.
“Oh, Ben!” sighs the widow Betty Wilson. “It’s so lovely!”
To that, amens are heard, and even that austere schoolteacher has two tears that gleam in the corners of her gray eyes.
… I was a stranger there, intent upon my way,
But when I saw the crowd, I had the urge to stay…
By habit, and perhaps by instinct, they have always gathered near a small lone tree on the Mount, hardly more than a sprout, some distance from the grove of trees down near the mine that surely fathered it. The tree is like another member of their group, so familiar has it become: a promise and a shelter. Now, Dr. Wylie Norton, sitting as always at the edge of the group and nearer therefore to the tree than the others, chances to look up into its young branches and sees what looks like a kind of package up there. He stands, approaches it, peers more circumspectly, and, as he does so, the other members of the group watch him curiously.
He reaches up, grasps something. “That’s odd,” he says softly. The others crowd around. He is holding what seems to be a sort of tag, tied by a string to a bulky object above. He adjusts the glasses on his nose, squints, reads: PULL ME. Rather, he lets go of it, gazes blankly at the others. “What should we do?” he whispers in his tiny voice.
Ben Wosznik strides forward, takes a look at the tag, gives it a yank. There is a soft pop and then hundreds of white feathers cascade gently down upon their heads.
“The White Bird!” cry several women at once.
There is a rustling and whispering down in the grove of trees. The Brunists hastily stamp out the fire and flee to their cars. But before they do so, in spite of an inner certainty that this has been but another in the long succession of harrowing pranks, they gather up all the feathers.
The white bird: image of light and grace and the Holy Spirit, signal, as Eleanor Norton learned upon asking the One to Come, of a new life, another age. Has so radical a wonder ever happened before? Have mortals before been invaded by beings from higher aspected spheres? Or, as a reasonable man might ask: have men, known to be basically so reasonable, ever before anticipated with such unreasonable assurance such unreasonable events, behaved with such unreasonable zeal to obtain such unreasonable ends? A thoughtful question, and the sort that a reasonable man like Mortimer Whimple, the much-harassed public servant of this quiet reasonable little community, might fairly ask. Or Theodore Cavanaugh, that most reasonable businessman, whose cornerstones for the great community are old-fashioned hard work, good will, and common sense. Or a fellow like Vincent Bonali, that good-willed hard worker of incomparable common sense, whose only request is the right to earn a decent wage and live in peace with his fellow citizens. And so another man, until now thought to be reasonable, Justin Miller of the West Condon Chronicle, has presumed to answer them with wild tales (probably invented) of literally hundreds of white bird and Virgin Mary and other spectral visitations; of ecstatics who claimed to be the living incarnation of the Holy Ghost, marrying themselves to statues of the Holy Virgin, consummating it by the nearest available proxy, and substituting their own bathwater for the blood of Christ in the Eucharist; of a multitude of monks and minstrels with their own “messages from the tomb” that led thousands to their enraptured ends; of hermits who shook empires as resurrected kings; of well-to-do folks like you and me who took to whaling themselves with barbed whips and living in nude communion, the editor’s descriptions of which were rather excitingly graphic, and therefore probably obscene; of “third ages,” in short, at least five or ten times a century and literally dozens of times already in this one, the so-called modern or scientific age (the editor’s humorous and belittling references to messianic Marxism did at least seem reasonable to these reasonable West Condoners, if little else the editor wrote about did), with a conclusion on the Saturday before Easter to the general effect that all Christians were, in truth and by definition, as mad as March Hares, proving the editor to be, in the end, the most unreasonable man of all. Which probably explains and excuses the smashing of all the Chronicle windows on the night of Easter Sunday, the black cross swatched on the front door.
In the confusion of escaping the Mount, Elaine Collins and her Ma have somehow got separated, and in Carl Dean’s car there are only she and Colin Meredith. By some agreement Elaine has not been privy to, Carl Dean stops for a moment on a side street just inside town and Colin gets out to take a walk. “We better go on,” Elaine says, feeling a little bit afraid in such dark circumstances with nothing but this thin tunic and her underwear on, and her Ma absent.
“They won’t notice if we’re just a couple minutes late, Elaine. Anyhow, I got a big bunch of feathers, and we can say we stayed to pick up the last one.” Carl Dean’s arm slides past her neck and he grips her back kind of at the armpit. “We don’t never get any time alone together. Your Ma’s always watching.” The cloth of her tunic is such that there doesn’t seem to be anything between her back and his fidgety hand, and it keeps coming to her mind about Jesus asking them to stand on the Mount with their clothes all off, and how Carl Dean had looked at her that moment. “I–I just wanted to tell you, Elaine,” he stammers, “that, well, I think you’re just beautiful in your tunic.”
Her heart jumps in excitement and he kisses her. She is scared, but she lets him, because she loves him. From the beginning, they have been in love. They have a lot in common and have always talked together about it all. The only trouble at first was that Carl Dean said he didn’t know if it was really true or not, and then both of them suffered powerful doubts. But, in the end, they both believed, and they are glad that religion has brought them together. When he puts his other hand right smack on her leg, though, she jumps back and stops him. “I don’t like boys to do that,” she says, a little breathlessly, though in truth no boy ever has before. Her heart is going like crazy.
“I’m sorry, Elaine … it’s just … well, I love you so much … and now … with just a week … just seven days …”
An indefinable anguish wells up inside her and she kisses him again, and, even though it makes her cry, she lets him leave his hand on her leg, and it makes them kiss harder and love each other more than ever. Her Ma was a little cool on Carl Dean at first, on account of she was afraid he wasn’t a true believer. And Carl Dean took more interest in Mrs. Norton than he did in her Ma, and that didn’t help a whole lot either. Elaine said, if he didn’t think it was true, what difference did it make if he catered to Mrs. Norton or to her Ma? But he said he didn’t say it wasn’t true, he just didn’t know, that was all, and he had a lot of faith in Mrs. Norton. After all, he knew her first, and even her Ma said she was a great lady, didn’t she? But finally he came to believe more in her Ma and now her Ma likes him okay. “We better go,” Elaine says, partly because her leg is starting to hurt, he’s grabbing it so hard, “or Ma’ll be mad.”
“Just kiss me one more time, Elaine,” he whispers, taking his hand off her leg to wet one finger in the tears on her cheek. He looks at her extremely serious and she looks at him the same way. “So, no matter what, I’ll always remember it. It may be … our last kiss before …”
And so she does and feels the anguish in her throat again, and she holds him tight and prays to God to let nothing bad ever happen to him, but suddenly Carl Dean, loving her so much, hauls her right up off the seat and pulls her hard against him and she feels everything just like they were bare naked and his hands are everywhere and not just on her leg either, and that really scares her and she twists away and starts to bawl and get hysterical. But he apologizes and lets go right away and doesn’t do anything more except kiss her softly on her cheek, and he blinks the lights, and Colin comes back, and they drive straight to Giovanni Bruno’s house. As Colin gets out and starts up the walk, Carl Dean whispers, “I love you, Elaine, I really do! I’m awful sorry if …” She smiles a little and tells him she isn’t mad. She isn’t. Just scared. And worried about what she’ll say if her Ma asks her where she’s been so long and why her face is all streaked up.
Worry: indeed, what night in West Condon ends without it? Certainly Easter Sunday looking toward the prophesied end of the world is no exception. Worry is the universal dread tempered by hope, prolepsis of pleasure and pain alike, and so intrinsic to the human condition, that humanity has on occasion been defined by it. And so, tonight, fathers worry about their daughters, wives about their husbands, ministers about their flocks, doctors about their patients, Brunists about how they will meet the End, doubters about the truth, the mayor about the embarrassment and the shame and the next elections, businessmen about the slump and miners about the unemployment, children about their aging parents, and just about all West Condoners worry a moment or two, unless they have dropped off blissfully before the TV, about their health or their virility or their weight or their period or their happiness or when and how they’re going to die. Abner Baxter’s particular worry concerns the reluctance of his Nazarene congregation to recognize the real majesty and breadth of his vision, their almost womanish bickering about what to do and when to do it, instead of simply following him in faith — in short, their galling blindness. The newspaper publicity has frightened them. Yet, he is grateful for it. In the end, it will inspire them. Ralph Himebaugh, approaching total poverty — surprised to discover that it is an ascent, not a descent — also worries, like Baxter, about the willpower of those about him, and so he is also grateful for the publicity, much as he despises the publicist, convinced that, in the end, it will commit them utterly. Meanwhile, he is alert to the least sign of weakness, the least hint of retreat, the least flush of fear or faintness of heart. At nights, he doesn’t sleep at all. Nor, for a long time tonight anyway, does the banker Ted Cavanaugh. His dreams of a revivified community spirit, sprung from the Common Sense Committee, now seem doomed, thanks mainly to the Chronicle editor’s ruthless and unscrupulous exploitation of this insignificant cult. Passions in the Committee, as a result, are much higher than he had ever intended, and elements are taking over that he had hoped to keep excluded, and he wonders now if anything constructive can ever be salvaged from it after next Sunday. Probably not. He would like to turn it off, but knows he is unable. He is caught like the rest, and the most he can hope to do is to moderate somewhat the Committee’s zeal and pray for a small turnout next Sunday. As for the editor, on the other hand, there are some retaliatory steps that might be taken, that might even get rid of the bastard for good. Contemplating these, his other worries are momentarily forgotten, and he is able, finally, to sleep. The editor’s employees also worry, torn between conflicting loyalties. The devoutly Catholic Girl Fried Egg Annie Pompa, for example, has been called upon almost daily by friends who find much to criticize in her continuing assistance in the production of that paper. And today, even the priest has spoken to her. The police chief Dee Romano is worried that he may have to use his pistol. He has spent the afternoon at target practice, now methodically cleans it. In all his years on the force, he has never fired it at a man. Barney Davis, mine supervisor at Deepwater No. 9, is worried about the announcement he must make, now that Easter week is over, ending the Company’s pledge to Ted Cavanaugh. He himself has been offered a job with the Company elsewhere, yet he feels the pain of unemployment here as if it were his own personal affliction. He stares off, through his bedroom window, at the night sky. The worries of Wally Fisher, owner and operator of the West Condon Hotel and presently prostrate on his back on the floor of the Legion Hall, contrarily, are the happiest he has had in three months. Must remember to stock in some after-hours booze. Increase his fire insurance. Locate something to use as an annex, for already the room reservation requests from newsmen and TV people have surpassed the hotel’s capacity. What else will these newsguys want? Get some women from Waterton lined up. Keep the coffeeshop open longer somehow. And then the brainstorm hits him. He breaks into a delirious giggle, stretched out all alone there in the Legion Hall, terminating in a coughing fit. Tomorrow, he will call Barney Davis. If he lives that long. Somehow, incredibly, Eleanor Norton has cut the Mount of Jupiter on her left hand with a paring knife, and worries about the portent of it. On Eleanor’s hand, this rise is shifted toward the base of the middle finger, indicating, as one might expect, a tendency toward mystical religion, though principally, of course, it is ambition and the desire to command others that is read here. Can it omen the proximate loss of control over the movement she has mothered? Wylie asks her how she cut it, and she admits she doesn’t know. Betty Wilson, poor soul, faced with imminent judgment, worries about having fallen into the sin of envy and covetousness, insofar as she covets Ben Wosznik who seems to have become the private property of Wanda Cravens. Wanda has been taking special privileges in their group, moreover, just because Lee was with Ely and Giovanni Bruno when he died, but, after all, wasn’t her own Eddie a saint and prophet too? She has tried, humbly, to suggest this, but Ben seems less impressed. She is getting nowhere and is miserable. She decides to talk it over with her best friend Clara Collins the first thing tomorrow morning, and meanwhile sings herself to sleep with Ben’s new ballad. Battista Baglione frets about the correctness of the excommunication proceedings he has initiated against his former altar boy Giovanni Bruno. He does not doubt the heresy, of course, which he perceives as really a further fragmentation of Protestantism, heresy being, as he knows full well, a straight-line regression from the Mother Church … and the further, the faster. He is worried, however, about the wording, about the aptness of each charge, about the accuracy of his knowledge of pertinent Church history. His own future within God’s Kingdom on Earth may well depend on it. Although most of his flock worry conventionally, one who worries hardly at all is little Angela Bonali. She is almost literally afloat. She must be about the happiest luckiest girl in the world, her only worry being that this luck and happiness might end. Perhaps, in fact, it is inevitable. And her joy is not just because Christ is risen or because her Daddy has become so important, though she’s glad about these things, but because she is hopelessly beautifully unbelievably in love, and her love loves her. Ben Wosznik, in a comparable circumstance, though tempered by thirty or forty years more of experience, a man’s more defensive perspective, and a lifetime of obeying his own gift for practical common sense, worries about a possible proposal of marriage in the event they are disappointed Sunday. He’s afraid she may see something improper about it, though of course Christ Jesus Himself, just before His own death, emphasized that the risen dead did not live in wedlock in heaven. And he sure does admire her, he’s never met a woman her equal, yet he understands it won’t be easy to make her forget. He decides, practicing his new song, that maybe he ought to talk to her about it before Sunday, so she’ll know it’s on his mind and won’t run off afterwards without having had the opportunity at least to consider it….
On a cold and wintry eighth of January,
Ninety-eight men entered into the mine;
Only one of these returned to tell the story
Of that disaster that struck Old Number Nine!
Hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!
Hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!
We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption
To meet our dear Lord there face to face!
As we carried out the bodies of our loved ones,
We looked up to God in Heav’n above;
We asked Him why, and He sent a man to tell us:
Hark ye to the White Bird of Love!
And from that tomb came a message of gladness,
Though its author had passed to his reward:
“Hark ye ever to the White Bird in your hearts,
And we shall all stand together ’fore the Lord!”
So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!
Yes, hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!
We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption
To meet our dear Lord there face to face!
Seven weeks we gathered by his bedside,
Seven weeks we knelt and prayed to the Divine,
Seven weeks, and from the Seventh Aspect,
God answered our prayers with a Sign!
(Now,) fourteen weeks will have passed since the Rescue,
When we gather out on the Mount that night;
We shall lift our voices then to sing God’s glory,
And await with joy the Coming of the Light!
So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!
Oh yes, hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!
We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption
To meet our dear Lord there face to face!
And, finally, Reverend Wesley Edwards of the First Presbyterian Church worries about his sermon for next Sunday. A touchy problem, since he feels the occasion should be utilized, yet does not want to contribute in any way to hysteria. Somehow, Mark 4:11–12 seems appropriate to him as a text, yet it is full of pitfalls. Dare he risk it?
And he said unto them: Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them.
What a triumph it could be! He and his wife have turned in late, exhausted by the long week and longer day, having suffered through just about everything from baptisms to egghunts, from ecumenical Good Friday services to his own jampacked flower-laden programs, even a wedding and an afternoon children’s party, and so he is not exactly overjoyed that his wife chooses just this moment to find fault with his sermon this morning.
“Of course, it was beautiful, dear. Don’t bite your lip like that. I don’t mean that everyone didn’t enjoy it thoroughly.”
“What was the matter with it?” He tries to sound agreeable and open-minded, but he is very tired. Moreover, undressing in the room where she lay reading idly, he was even considering the marital sacrament this night as an appropriate climax to the joy of Christian renewal (both students of The Golden Bough, they often celebrate primitive festivals in such manner), but he has never been able to succeed — even as a lusting boy — so long as his mind was at work.
“I didn’t say anything was the matter with it, dear. Only, well, it seemed so much like the one you gave last year.”
He laughs. “You want me to rewrite the Resurrection?”
“Oh no, that’s not what I mean.” She smiles. “But, I don’t know, it just seems like you only tell them what they want to hear, and that doesn’t seem …” Her voice trails off ambiguously.
“That may be so, dear,” he says, rolling his back to her. “But if I do, it is because I believe that God’s behavior is visible in their needs. It’s difficult to put it precisely, but for some time now I’ve had the feeling that I am only a passive participant in a larger drama, that by responding to them, I respond to Divine Will, and thus fulfill what is there potentially all the time. I think this is really what ritual is all about. And it seems especially right at Eastertime, which celebrates not a speech or moral judgment, but a mute action. Who am I to stand above and scold?”
“Oh, Wesley!” She laughs, switching off the bedlamp and curling around his back. “You’re not a preacher, dear, you’re a poet!”
He laughs in pleased response. She runs her hands down inside his pajama pants. He is still irritated with her for having turned him on, as it were, but as she scratches and burrows, the channels of his mind click closed, one by one. Visions of candy Easter eggs behind slender trees, gay flowered bonnets and starched skirts, the long green look down the No. 6 fairway toward the red flag that stabs its hole, fill the void as his mind retreats.
“Is he risen?” she asks in his ear then, astonishingly resurrecting this old premarital collegetime joke of theirs.
Click! the last channel. “Indeed,” he whispers, rolling on his back to receive her: “he is risen!”