The Stand (Original Edition) (49 page)

At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between. He dreamed first of the black man on the high rooftop, looking east, and then of the old woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew that the man with no face was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin tattooed to his face, coming toward them, coming closer.

Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow in that dream he had known that the black man was not coming empty-handed. In his arms, borne like an offering, he had held the decaying body of Rita Blakemoor, now stiff and swollen, her flesh ripped by weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet, a putrid offering that would scream his guilt to the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn’t no nice guy, never had been, never would be.

The old woman on one side, the black man on the other,
he thought, already turning to sleep again.
And all the rest of us somewhere between, on the border
. . .
choosing up sides?

Then he slept again, and his sleep was silent darkness, undisturbed.

“Oh God,” Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her face and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.

It was the evening of July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. The four of them stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last day of captivity. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now getting shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms was the Plague Center itself, three stories high, who knew how much more underground. The place was deserted, silent, empty.

In the center of the lawn, a large sign had been erected:

ROUTE 7 TO RUTLAND

ROUTE 4 TO SCHUYLERVILLE

ROUTE 29 TO I-87

I-87 TO I-90

I-90 WEST

EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD

WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA

STAY ON OUR ROUTE

WATCH FOR SIGNS

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

STUART REDMAN

GLEN BATEMAN

JULY 8, 1980

“Harold, my man,” Larry murmured. “Can’t wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer . . . or a Payday.”

“Larry!” Lucy said sharply.

Nadine had fainted.

She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1950, the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain’t more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.

Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn’t seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of
judgment,
she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are
you?
Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I
Am,
Who I
AM.
In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.

She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother’s womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.

She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name, born in 1872 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She’d seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-ons of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her on home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I
Am,
Who I
AM,
and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered . . . and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and it scared her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in the spring of 1872 and had said to Himself: /
got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work in 1980, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.

Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face,
he
who stalked her dreams?

She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crow peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know
he
was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was

within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the doorpost wasn’t daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew
of
him and were frightened
by
him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.

“Welladay,” she said and popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright, fine day, and no part of her body was giving her a particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.

“God is great,” Mother Abagail said, “God is good. Thank you for the sunshine. For the coffee. For that fine b.m. I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain’t I the one? God is great. . .”

Her coffee was about gone. She set the cup down and rocked, her face turned up to the sun like some strange living rockface seamed with veins of coal. She dozed, then slept. Her heart, its walls now almost as thin as tissue paper, beat on and on as it had every minute for the last 39,475 days. Like a baby in a crib, you would have had to put your hand on her chest to assure yourself that she was breathing at all.

But the smile stayed on.

Things had surely changed in all the years since she had been a girl. The Freemantles had come to Nebraska as freed slaves, and Abagail’s own great-granddaughter Molly laughed in a nasty, cynical way and suggested the money Abby’s father had used to buy the home place—money paid to
him
by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina, as wages for the three years her daddy and his brothers had stayed on after the States War ended—had been “conscience money.” Abagail had held her tongue when Molly said that—Molly and Jim and the others were young and didn’t understand anything but the veriest good and the veriest bad—but inside she had rolled her eyes and said to herself:
Conscience money? Well, is there any money cleaner than that?

So the Freemantles had settled in Hemingford Home and Abby, the last of Daddy and Mamma’s children, had been born right here on the home place. Her father had bested those who would not buy from niggers and those who would not sell to them; he had bought land a little smidge at a time so as not to alarm those who were worried about “those black bastards over Columbus way”; he had been the first man in Polk County to try crop rotation; the first man to try chemical fertilizer; and in March of 1895 Gary Sites had come to the house to tell John Freemantle that he had been voted into the Grange. He was the first black man to belong to the Grange in the whole state of Nebraska. That year had been a topper.

And little by little he had brought his neighbors around. Not all of them, not the rabid ones like Ben Conveigh and his half-brother George, not the Arnolds and the Deacons, but all the others. In 1897 they had taken dinner with Gary Sites and his family, right in the parlor, just as good as white.

In 1895 Abagail had played her guitar at the Grange Hall, and not in the minstrel show, either; she had played in the white folks’ talent show at the end of the year. Her mother had been deadset against that. “I know how it was,” she said, weeping. “You and Sites and that Frank Fenner, you whipped this up together. That’s fine for them, John Freemantle, but what’s got into your head? They’re
white!
You go hunker down with them in the backyard and talk about plowin! You can even go downtown and have a spot of beer with them, if that Nate Jackson will let you into his saloon. Fine!
But this is different!
This is
your own daughter!
What you gonna say if she gets up there in her pretty white dress and they laughs at her? What you gonna do if they throws rotten tomatas at her? Huh?”

“Well, Rebecca,” John had answered, “I guess we better leave it up to her and David.”

David had been her first husband; in 1895 Abagail Freemantle had become Abagail Trotts. David Trotts was a black farmhand from over Valparaiso way, and he had come pretty nearly thirty miles one way to court her. John Freemantle had once said to Rebecca that the bear had caught ole Davy right and proper, and he had been Trotting plenty. There were plenty who had laughed at her first husband and said things like, “I guess I know who wears the pants in
that
family.”

But David had not been a weakling, only quiet and thoughtful. When he told John and Rebecca Freemantle, “Whatever Abagail thinks is right, why, I reckon that’s what’s to do,” she had blessed him for it and told her mother and father she intended to go ahead.

So on December 27, 1895, already three months gone with her first, she had mounted the Grange Hall stage in the dead silence that had ensued when the master of ceremonies had announced her name. Just before her Gretchen Tilyons had been on and had done a racy French dance, showing her ankles and petticoats to the raucous whistles, cheers, and stamping feet of the men in the audience.

She stood in the thick silence, knowing how black her face and neck must look in her new white dress, and her heart was thudding terribly in her chest and she was thinking
I’ve forgot every word, every single word, 1 promised Daddy I wouldn’t cry no matter what, I wouldn’t cry, but Ben Conveigh’s out there and when Ben Conveigh yells NIGGER, then I guess I’ll cry, oh why did I ever get into this? Mamma was right, I’ve got above my place and I’ll pay for it
—

The hall was filled with white faces turned up to look at her. Every chair was filled and there were two rows of standees at the back of the hall. Kerosene lanterns glowed and flared. The red velvet curtains were pulled back in swoops of cloth and tied with gold ropes.

And she thought:
I’m Abagail Freemantle Trotts, I play well and I sing well; I do not know these things because anyone told me.

And so she began to sing “The Old Rugged Cross” into the moveless silence, her fingers picking melody. Then, picking up a strum, the slightly stronger melody of “How I Love My Jesus,” and then, stronger still, “Camp Meeting in Georgia.” Now people were swaying back and forth almost in spite of themselves. Some were grinning and tapping their knees.

She sang a medley of Civil War songs: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Marching Through Georgia,” and “Goober Peas” (more smiles at that one; many of these men, Grand Army of the Republic veterans, had eaten more than a few goober peas during their time in the service). She finished with “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” and as the last chord floated away into a silence that was now thoughtful and sad, she thought:
Now if you want to throw your tomatas or whatever, you go on and do it. I played and sang my best, and I was real fine.

Then someone in the middle of the audience—her father told her later it was Gary Sites—began to applaud. Someone else joined him. And then they were all applauding (except for Ben Conveigh and his half-brother) and she stood there with tears sparkling on her cheeks as they stood up, applauding fit to raise the roof.