“Well,” Mrs. Green said firmly, “if anyone’s to be chose, it’s sure to be Jim Minerva, mark my word. I’ll put my corn and stock to wager.”
Though I found the conversation puzzling, wondering who was to be chosen and for what purpose, and by what means, I was forced to smile at the agreeable circle.
“Dear sakes,” the Widow said, “if that sheep’s not positively snowy.” The men had rinsed the animal’s coat, and one of them lifted it from the tub and set it on its feet to dry in the sun; another retied the bell around its neck. While the women continued together, sewing and gossiping in their group, the unoccupied men likewise drew off together, meditatively picking their teeth, an easy lackadaisical drone to their voices, their attention occasionally directed to the sheep’s bell, whose soft tinkle hung in the air as the washers brushed the white woolly coat, none of them speaking, all of them seeming to be waiting.
A little distance away, Missy Penrose stood stock-still, idly staring up at the sky where a silvery jet traced a white contrail across the blue. The Widow called out to a passerby, “Miss Clapp, take her out o’ the sun. Out o’ the sun, I say. It’s too hot. She’ll never last till they’re ready.” Miss Clapp brought the child under the tree, where the Widow took her on her lap. She rummaged in her piece-bag, produced a length of twine which she tied in a loop, and began showing Missy how to do cat’s cradle. The old lady seemed at pains to amuse the child, and when they had played for a time, she set Missy on the grass and resumed her stitching.
Mrs. Green looked up at the church clock. “Soon it’ll be time.”
“Soon,” said Mrs. Brucie.
I felt a touch on my shoulder, and turned to find Beth beside me, watching me sketch. She smiled, then walked across the grass and circled the tree until she stood behind the Widow, where she looked down at her work.
“It’s a beautiful quilt.”
The Widow smiled up at her. “Bit o’ fancywork. A way to pass the time.”
“Why, it’s Noah and the Ark.”
“Aye, dear, it’s only lackin’ two giraffes and the dove.”
“How long does it take to make one like that?” Beth asked.
“Depends. Four or five of us can finish this off before the moon goes a full quarter. What you ought to do, dear, is try a bit of fancywork yourself. Everyone in these parts sews. Set a spell, dear. You start savin’ your hand- me-downs and worn-outs, you’ll have enough to begin quilting right off. Never throw nothin’ away, that’s what my granny used to say.”
I smiled to myself; the idea appealed to Beth, I could tell.
“Here, dear, let me thread up a needle,” Mrs. Zalmon said. “Mrs. Brucie, pick out a patch there, can you? See-you just pin it on, then it’s ready to be stitched.”
Beth glanced over at me with a smile, her expression clearly saying,
Later it cooled slightly, the shadows began to lengthen as the sun dropped, and the Common settled into somnolence. The air was still and heavy and smelled faintly sour, the odor of weeds or grass cuttings. The pennants hung limp and tired on the booths. No traffic passed, no voices called, no dogs barked. All was silence.
I went across the roadway in the direction of Penance House, where I had seen some of the men disappearing. Wondering what had taken them there, I walked past the post office, and when I heard low voices from behind the barn next door, I went to investigate. Abruptly the voices stopped. In the stillness, I could feel the same prickling at the base of my neck I had felt that morning, and a lifting of the hairs along my forearms. An uncanny feeling, telling me something was about to happen. I took several steps toward the barn, then halted, riveted by a sound I instantly recognized, climbing to a terrible pitch, a wild cry, rising upward and outward as though from the heart of a bell, to float, then to die in the air, trailing away to nothingness. A pair of swallows, alarmed, took abrupt flight from the eaves of the barn, arcing out against the sky, dipping and swooping past my vision. I rounded the corner of the barn and was confronted by a baffling semicircle of backs. No one turned. Why so still, these men and boys, why so grave, so silent?
Then I saw the child, and thought at first she must be hemorrhaging, so red were her arms. I saw Will Jones’s simple farmer’s face looking at me. In hat and overalls, he stood meekly in the center of the circle, the handle of his sickle clasped loosely in one hand, the sharp silver crescent gone red. At his feet lay the felled sheep; below the red wool its thin legs still jerked. The child knelt in the dust, busily engaged as she gazed dreamily down at the red mass of viscera she held in her palms, her arms red to the elbows.
She raised her blank face and, as though waking from a dream, peered around the circle of men stolidly looking upon her and upon the red maw of the sheep’s cleaved belly and upon the still-palpitating entrails she tenderly cupped in her hands. Dripping red, the glossy tubular glands and bulgy membranes slid about and slowly slipped through her splayed fingers and fell back into the parted red cavity beneath them. Never removing her eyes from her hands, she raised them palms upward before her, toward the sky, their redness trembling against the blue. There was no sound, only the dry rattle of the watchers’ breath trapped in their throats; one man coughed, another blew his nose into a bandanna. Still the red hands remained outstretched; as if in a trance, the child rose and began a slow circuit, her eyes glazed, uttering not a word as she moved around the circle of younger men.
Stiffly she walked past young Lyman Jones, past the Tatum boys, past Merle Penrose, past several others, until she stood before Jim Minerva. A faint sign of recognition appeared in her face, a perceptible widening of the eyes, a murmur in the throat. Her hands moved slightly as if to touch him; then she passed on in her dream and in her dream stopped again, reaching out her hands and laying their redness against the cheeks of Worthy Pettinger.
A sigh, a murmur; stillness. The whir of insect wings.
When she took the hands away, a replica of each palm lay upon Worthy’s flesh, and as she slowly turned, she dropped her hands almost to her sides; not quite, for in her dream something told her to hold them away from her dress. Some of the men gathered closer to Worthy-pale now around his bloody marks-and thumped him on the shoulders, congratulating him, while others dragged the sheep aside, leaving a smeared trail of red upon the brindled ground. Several men lit up their pipes, scratching blue-tip matches on the seats of their overalls, exchanging nods and low remarks. Out on the street a car backfired, jolting me into shocked reality. I looked again, saw dust and straw and blood, heard the dull buzz of flies, the dry hiss as someone took breath in through his teeth, smelled the stench of the animal. The women came running from the Common in pairs and groups, looking at the ring of men, all amazed.
“Did she choose?” they wanted to know. Who? Who was it? Was it Jim? Jim Minerva? “No,” said the men, shaking their heads, moving aside, and “Praise be!” the women cried, seeing the marked boy. They kissed him, hugged him, bore him away, the men following, until there was no one behind the barn except me.
And the gutted sheep.
And Missy Penrose.
Breathing through her mouth, she was making strange, incomprehensible sounds as she stared at the open cavity. “Mnn — mean-um-nmm-” Where all had been red before, now a black liverish-looking bile was running from the rent tissue. She stopped, put her fingers into it, brought them out bloodier, darker, held them against the sky, her body going rigid and beginning a tremulous shaking.
“Mean-um-nmm-mean-’’
Her eyes rolled upward in their sockets; a slight spittle appeared at the corners of her mouth, became a froth. She twitched, jerked, then a stiff arm rose, a red finger pointed at me. A rising breeze caught her hair, lifted it across her eyes; she brushed it away; red appeared on her forehead like a stigma.
I stared back, feeling the same chill again, the same cold sweat. Wind was whipping the grass at her feet. I said nothing. She said nothing. Her eyes were glassy, blank; I knew she could not see me. Yet she saw-something. Then, still pointing, red, she began screaming. I stood frozen in terror. From the Common came the tumult of celebration. No one had seen, no one saw. She was screaming louder than I thought it possible for a child to scream, and, screaming, she pointed.
She stopped. Her arm fell and hung limp, her eyes came into a kind of focus; she stared briefly at the dead sheep, then turned and walked away.
The air began to freshen, the wind to change, and the sky by slight but perceptible degrees to darken, and out on the Common I could see the men standing back as the women rushed to engulf the child, touching and petting her, a murmur sweeping through them, becoming chatter, then acclaim; then, as the child fainted, their
