“Go on, now.”
The little boy’s mother gave Ralph another doubtful look, then looked down at her son. “Ready, Pat”
“Yes! “Pat said, and grinned.
His mother nodded and raised one hand. The other she curled around his shoulders in a frail gesture of protection that touched Ralph’s heart. They walked around the side of the house that way.
“Don’t hurt us!” she cried. “Our hands are up and my little boy is with me, so don’t hurt us!”
The others waited a moment, and then the woman who had put her hands to her face went. The one with the little girl joined her (the child was in her arms now, but holding her hands obediently in the air just the same). The others followed along, most coughing, all with their empty hands held high. When Helen started to fall in at the end of the parade, Ralph touched her shoulder. She looked up at him, her reddened eyes both calm and wondering.
“That’s the second time you’ve been there when Nat and I needed you,” she said. “Are you our guardian angel, Ralph?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I am. Listen, Helen-there isn’t much time.
Gretchen is dead.”
She nodded and began to cry. “I knew it. I didn’t want to, but somehow I did, just the same.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“We were having such a good time when they came-I mean, we were nervous, but there was also a lot of laughing and a lot of chatter. We were going to spend the day getting ready for the speech tonight. The rally and Susan Day’s speech.”
“It’s tonight I have to ask you about,” Ralph said, speaking as gently as he could. “Do you think they’ll still-”
“We were making breakfast when they came.” She spoke as if she hadn’t heard him; Ralph supposed she hadn’t. Nat was peeking over Helen’s shoulder, and although she was still coughing, she had stopped crying. Safe within the circle of her mother’s arms, she looked from Ralph to Lois and then back to Ralph again with lively curiosity.
“Helen-” Lois began.
“Look! See there?” Helen pointed to an old brown Cadillac parked beside the ramshackle shed which had been the cider-press in the days when Ralph and Carolyn had occasionally come out here; it had probably served High Ridge as a garage. The Caddy was in bad shape-cracked windshield, dented rocker panels, one headlight crisscrossed with masking tape. The bumper was layered with prolife stickers.
“That’s the car they came in. They drove around to the back of the house as if they meant to put it in our garage. I think that’s what fooled us. They drove right around to the back as if they belonged here.” She contemplated the car for a moment, then returned her smoke-reddened, unhappy eyes to Ralph and Lois. “Somebody should have paid attention to the stickers on the damned thing.”
Ralph suddenly thought of Barbara Richards back at WomanCare-Barbie Richards, who had relaxed when Lois approached. It hadn’t mattered to her that Lois was reaching for something in her purse; what had mattered was that Lois was a woman. Sandra McKay had been driving the Cadillac; Ralph didn’t need to ask Helen to know that.
They had seen the woman and ignored the bumperstickers. We are family; I’ve got all my sisters with me.
“When Deanie said the people getting out of the car were dressed in army clothes and carrying guns, we thought it was a joke. All of us but Gretchen, that is. She told us to get downstairs as quick as we could. Then she went into the parlor. To call the police, I suppose.
I should have stayed with her.”
“No,” Lois said, and slipped a lock of Natalie’s fine-spun auburn hair through her fingers. “You had this one to look out for, didn’t you? And still do.”
“I suppose,” she said dully. “I suppose I do. But she was my friend, Lois. My friend.”
“I know, dear.”
Helen’s face twisted like a rag, and she began to cry. Natalie looked at her mother with an expression of comical astonishment for a moment, and then she began to cry, too.
“Helen,” Ralph said. “Helen, listen to me. I have something to ask you. It’s very, very important. Are you listening?”
Helen nodded, but she went on crying. Ralph had no idea if she was really hearing him or not. He glanced at the corner of the building, wondering how long it would be before the police charged around it, then took a deep breath. “Do you think there’s any chance that they’ll still hold the rally tonight? Any chance at all? You were as close to Gretchen as anybody. Tell me what you think.”
Helen stopped crying and looked at him with still, wide eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Then those eyes began to fill with a frightening depth of anger.
“How can you ask? How can you even ask?”
“Well… because…” He stopped, unable to go on.
Ferocity was the last thing he had expected.
“If they stop us now, they win,” Helen said. “Don’t you see that?
Gretchen’s dead, Merrilee’s dead, High Ridge is burning to the ground with everything some of these women own inside, and if they stop us now they win.”
One part of Ralph’s mind-a deep part-now made a terrible comparison. Another part, one that loved Helen, moved to block it, but it moved too late. Her eyes looked like Charlie Pickering’s eyes when Pickering had been sitting next to him in the library, and there was no reasoning with a mind that could make eyes look like that.
“If they stop us now they win!” she screamed. In her arms, Natalie began to cry harder. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you fucking GET it.P We’ll never let that happen! Never! Never.f Never!”
Abruptly she raised the hand she wasn’t using to hold the baby and went around the corner of the building. Ralph reached for her and touched the back of her blouse with his fingertips. That was all.
“Don’t shoot me!” Helen was crying at the police on the other side of the house. “Don’t shoot me, I’m one of the women! I’m one of the women I’m one of the women!”
Ralph lunged after her-no thought, just instinct-and Lois seized him by the back of his belt. “Better not go out there, Ralph.
You’re a man, and they might think-”
“Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois!”
They both turned toward this new voice. Ralph recognized it at once, and he felt both surprised and not surprised. Standing beyond the clotheslines with their freight of flaming sheets and garments, wearing a pair of faded flannel pants and an old pair of Converse high-tops which had been mended with electrician’s tape, was Dorrance Marstellar.
His hair, as fine as Natalie’s (but white instead of auburn), blew about his head in the October wind which combed the top of this hill. As usual, he had a book in one hand.
“Come on, you two,” he said, waving to them and smiling. “Hurry up and hurry along. There’s not much time.”
He led them down a weedy, little-used path that meandered away from the house in a westerly direction. It wound first through a fairsized garden-plot from which everything had been harvested but the pumpkins and squashes, then into an orchard where the apples were just coming to full ripeness, then through a dense blackberry tangle where thorns seemed to reach out everywhere to snag their clothes.
As they passed out of the blackberry brambles and into a gloomy stand of old pines and spruces, it occurred to Ralph that they must be on the Newport side of the ridge now.
Dorrance walked briskly for a man of his years, and the placid smile never left his face. The book he carried was for Love, Poems 1950-1960 by a man named Robert Creeley. Ralph had never heard of him, but supposed Mr. Creeley had never heard of Elmore Leonard, Ernest Haycox, or Louis L’Amour, either. He only tried to talk to Old Dor once, when the three of them finally reached the foot of a slope made slick and treacherous with pine-needles. just ahead of them, a small stream foamed coldly past.
“Dorrance, what are you doing out here? How’d you get here, for that matter? And where the hell are we going?”
“Oh, I hardly ever answer questions,” Old Dor replied, smiling widely. He surveyed the stream, then raised one finger and pointed at the water. A small brown trout jumped into the air, flipped bright drops from its tail, and fell back into the water again. Ralph and Lois looked at each other with identical Did I just see what I thought I saw? expressions.
“Nope, nope,” Dor continued, stepping off the bank and onto a wet rock. “Hardly ever. Too difficult. Too many possibilities. Too many levels… eh, Ralph? The world is full of levels, Isn’t it? How are you, Lois?”
“Fine,” she said absently, watching Dorrance cross the stream on a number of conveniently placed stones. He did it with his arms held out to either side, a posture which made him look like the world’s oldest acrobat. just as he reached the far bank, there was a violent exhalation from the ridge behind them-not quite an explosion.
There go the oil-tanks, Ralph thought.
Dor turned to face them from the other side of the brook, sailing his placid Buddha’s smile. Ralph went up this time without any conscious intention of doing so, and without that sense of a blink inside his mind. Color rushed into the day, but he barely noticed; all his attention was fixed on Dorrance, and for a space of almost ten seconds, he forgot to breathe.
Ralph had seen auras of many shades in the last month or so, but none even remotely approached the splendid envelope that enclosed the old man Don Veazie had once described as “nice as hell, but really sort of a fool.” It was as if Dorrance’s aura had been strained through a prism… or a rainbow. He tossed off light in dazzling arcs: blue followed by magenta, magenta followed by red, red followed by pink, pink followed by the creamy yellow-white of a ripe banana.
He felt Lois’s hand groping for his and enfolded it.
[“My God, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful he is?”] E “I sure do.”] [“What is he? Is he even human?”] [“I don’t kn-”] [“Stop it, both of you. Come back down.”] Dorrance was still smiling, but the voice they heard in their heads was commanding and not a bit vague.
And before Ralph could consciously think himself down, he felt a push.
The colors and the heightened quality of the sounds dropped out of the day at once.
“There’s no time for that now,” Dor said. “Why, it’s noon already-”
“Noon?” Lois asked. “It can’t be! It wasn’t even nine when we got here, and that can’t have been half an hour ago!”
“Time goes faster when you’re high,” Old Dor said. He spoke solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. ’Just ask anyone drinking beer and listening to country music on Saturday night. Come on! Hurry up!
The clock is ticking! Cross the stream!”
Lois went first, stepping carefully from stone to stone with her arms held out, as Dorrance had done. Ralph followed with his hands poised to either side of
