The Stand (Original Edition) (53 page)

The door opened and Nick came in—conversation broke off as if they had all been marking time, waiting for him. She could see in his face that he had made his decision, and she thought she knew what it was. He handed her a note that he had written out on the porch, standing by Tom. She held the note at arm’s length to read it. “We’d better start for Boulder tomorrow,” Nick had written.

She looked from the note to Nick’s face and nodded slowly. She passed the note on to June Brinkmeyer, who passed it to Olivia. “I guess we had,” Abagail said. “I don’t want to any more than you, but I guess we had better. What made up your mind?”

He shrugged almost angrily and pointed at her.

“So be it,” Abagail said. “My faith’s in the Lord.”

Nick thought:
I wish mine was
.

The next morning, July 26, after a brief conference, Dick and Ralph set off for Columbus in Ralph’s truck. “I hate to trade her in,” Ralph said, “but if it’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.”

Nick wrote, “Be back as soon as you can.”

Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows—an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring.

“You’re in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, Nicky.”

Nick wrote: “Have we got anyplace better to go to?”

“That’s true. It’s no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”

Nick nodded.

“Okay.” Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. “Dick, you ready to take a ride?”

Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. “Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!”

“Come on, then,” Ralph said. “Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain’t caught a crow yet. Better let me brush you off.”

Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn’t they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being.

He watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate’s panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“It says, ‘We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen’s Band Channel 14,”* Olivia read.

“What does that mean?” June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail’s driveway. That done, he wrote a note and handed it to June.

“One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time.”

“Oh,” Olivia said. “Smart.”

Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.

The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.

If that's the way you say it is, Nick, okay.

They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn’t even begin to understand why. You couldn’t take orders from a deafmute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.

I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. . .

No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, he would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn’t want to believe that, either . . . but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn’t want to be their leader.

It’s you, Nick.

A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn’t anymore. She was smiling down at him"from her armless rocker.

“I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression,” she said. “Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It’s true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in eighteen and ninety-five. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago.”

Nick nodded.

“My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that’s all that’s left now. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t’wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”

Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.

“Brothers don’t always work so well together, and they got to squabblin. Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fieldhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now.”

She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.

“Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they’d take a little more to pay it off, and I’d come out here to look at the part that wasn’t my own anymore, and I’d cry over it like I’m crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that’s how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they’d taken everything but this little piece o scratch that’s here. Big o them, wa’n’t it?”

He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.

“Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He
Is,
and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. ‘Abby,’ the Lord says to me, ‘there’s work for you far up ahead. So I’ll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I’ll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you’ll walk the earth. I’ll let you see your daddy’s lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love the best and you’ll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That’s My will, Abby,’ says He, and ‘Yes, Lord,’ says I, ‘Thy will be done,’ and in my heart I curse Him and ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ and the only answer I get is ‘Where were you when I made the world?’ ”

Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.

“Help me along, Nick,” she said, “I only want to do what’s right.” He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.

Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a push-board on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.

“There’s a helluva nice CB in that wrecker,” he told Nick. “Forty channel job. I think Ralph’s in love with it.”

Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail’s eyes noted the way Ralph escorted June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.

“So when do we go?” Ralph asked.

Nick scribbled, “Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?”

‘‘Yeah,” Ralph said. “I had it on all the way back. And you know, I could swear I did hear something. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I’ll say the truth, Nicky, I didn’t care for it much. It scared me a little. Like those dreams.”

A silence fell among them.

“Well,” Olivia said, breaking it. “I’ll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row.”

No one did. And by one o’clock the camping things, Abagail’s rocker and guitar, had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove toward westbound Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord’s will and His will would be done. The Lord’s will would be done, but she thought of that red eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.

It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.

She sighed and rolled over. Couldn’t sleep. She was afraid of the dreams.

To her left the three motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell’s Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven “hogs” ... or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epics?
The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels. Hell’s Angels on Wheels.
The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school. Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell’s Angels and good old American-International Pictures.

Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.

Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman.
Take Sominex tonight and sleeep . . .

It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold
knew
things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them—more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her.

She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially:
Harold, these dreams are a problem. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know exactly how to carry it out.
.
.a mild sedative . . . but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?

Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to a half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.

At least for the others.

Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn’t know if the Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams—
suffered,
that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother’s parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age . . . she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn’t have to carry the body. It was her father’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father’s shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say:
Take him, do anything, I don’t care, just don’t chase me anymore.