Sarr had done a different kind of swearing and had hurled the eggs against the barren ground east of the barn. He had acted, he realized, like a spoiled child and felt shame for it now, but it was already too late to apologize.
Yet even soft eggs were better than nothing, and nothing was what they'd had so far from the four hens they'd purchased Wednesday morning. Perhaps it was just a question of their new surroundings, he was too inexperienced a farmer to know for sure; perhaps they simply needed time to grow used to the place. Nevertheless he'd already decided that, if they weren't laying regularly by the end of the month, he'd go to Brother Werner and demand his money back.
Money – that was the real trouble, the one that stung the most. For just this morning the thing he'd been dreading had happened: Freirs had come to them and told them he was leaving – Freirs, whom they'd sheltered for the last two nights beneath their very roof and whom they'd treated, at all times, like a guest rather than a paying tenant. Freirs had cleared his throat this morning, after helping himself to his usual oversized breakfast, and, obviously shamefaced, had announced that he'd be pulling out on Saturday.
And why? All because he was frightened of that damned infernal cat.
'You told me yourself that the devil's in her,' Freirs had said. 'And maybe I'm beginning to believe it. At any rate, I don't particularly relish sleeping back in the outbuilding with a thing that likes to claw its way through screens.'
'You don't run from the devil,' Poroth had argued, 'not when it's your own land. You stand and fight him.'
'It's your land,' said Freirs, 'not mine. You fight the devil. I'm going home.'
Well, he'd seen it coming, this betrayal; he'd discussed it with Deborah just the night before last. He had warned her that city people turned tail and fled at the first sign of adversity. After all, they had no God to call upon, no certitude of heavenly support. Even the best of them were faithless.
At any rate, he hadn't made a scene; he hadn't argued with Freirs and he hadn't pleaded with him either. 'I expect you know what's best for you,' he'd said, reaching across the breakfast table to shake Freirs' chubby hand. 'I wish you all the luck a man can have.' He had comported himself gently, like a true Christian should; though inside he'd been crushed – panicked, even, for a moment – and haunted by a mocking little voice that echoed All the luck a man can have and then whispered You're ruined!
'Honey,' Deborah had said, when Freirs had gone back to his room, 'this means we'll be out nearly five hundred dollars. Do you think it'll be-'
'None of that matters!' he had said, more roughly than he'd intended. 'We'll just find the money somewhere else. God watches out for His own.'
Still brooding over Freirs' announcement, he had gone stalking down the slope toward the cornfields when his eye had fallen on the old wooden smokehouse that stood between the barn and the stream. He had always avoided it because of the wasps' nest somewhere inside, but now he saw it as a challenge, an outlet for his frustrated energies: something he might do to cleanse the land. Seizing a broom from the barn and prepared at any moment to flee, he had peered inside the little building through the hanging-open door. To his surprise he had seen no sign of a nest until, looking upward through a smokehole in the ceiling – a hole that now led nowhere, for the roof above it had long since been sealed over – he glimpsed in the darkness a pale grey claylike thing the size and shape of a human brain, plastered to the underside of the roofbeams.
There would be no knocking the nest down, he realized; it was too inaccessible. The only way of reaching it was by the circuitous route the insects themselves used, flying in and out the open doorway and up through the passage in the ceiling. It would have been a great place to hide money, if he'd had any, but in truth he had nothing worth stealing. Halfheartedly he had jabbed the broom up through the smokehole, and had been rewarded for his effort with a painful sting on his right hand just beneath the thumb.
Grimly he had hurried off to the abandoned field and, despite the pain had busied himself clearing rocks when, like a messenger come to see Job, worried Amos Reid had come bumping down the road in his car with the news that Poroth's aunt, Lise Verdock, had been kicked by a cow last night as she tried to coax some milk from it and now lay at death's door. So he and Deborah, both sorely troubled, had piled into the truck and had followed Amos back toward town and up the hill to the Verdocks' farm. Aunt Lise had been lying pale and unconscious on the bed with a horrible purple swelling curved across one temple like a hungry living thing, while Minna, her daughter, had been sitting exhausted nearby, and poor Adam Verdock – who'd known trouble enough the past week, God knows, what with his cattle having ceased to give milk – was almost too distraught to speak. Poroth had looked down at the unconscious woman and a terrible dread seized him; he had thought for just an instant, She'll die if they don't get her to a hospital. .. But that had been the devil's solution, not his own, a remnant of the years he'd passed in the wicked world outside. Prayer, he knew for sure now, worked just as well as surgeons' polished steel.
And prayer was what they'd raised. They had gotten on their knees, all five of them together by the bed, and had prayed silently for what seemed close to an hour. And here he had discovered the most terrible secret of all: for while the others had been praying, he'd been wrestling with visions of losing the farm; and that mocking little voice had kept whispering Money… ruined… damned!
And so, because of him, what should have been a holy occasion, filled with the devotion a man owes his father's only sister, had been blighted. The guilt was his alone; he had discovered sin, not under his roof but in his own heart.
He stood leaning by himself against the pickup truck parked just beside the barn. He surveyed the straggly rows of cornstalks, prey to all manner of vermin and not half so high as they should have been by this time of year, and he wondered, for the first time in his life, what the future held in store for him, for Deborah, for the Brethren. Had they been abandoned by God? Did the devil have his claws around their ankles? And was he somehow to blame, if this was so?
He kicked gloomily at the earth at his feet. How ironic, that the Brethren should be coming here this Sunday to hold their worship! This was no place for blessings. This earth was damned.
The student checked his watch – two p.m. exactly – and opened the door marked Authorized Personnel Only. Switching on the light, he crossed the small cluttered room and unlocked a cabinet where the rolls of lined paper were stored. Taking a fresh roll, he returned to the main room; here the geology department's recording instrument stood on permanent display, connected by cables to a Sprengnether vertical seismograph in the basement. With another key he unlocked the large glass-and-steel case and slid back the heavy glass lid that protected the device from dust and disturbances in the room. The paper on the drum was changed daily at this hour, and the task had to be done quickly; back in 1979 the department had missed recording one of the largest earthquakes in central New Jersey history because a student had been caught between rolls.
Carefully he lifted the delicate metal stylus from the paper, the ink at its tip leaving a jagged little squiggle as if the vicinity had suffered some small disturbance. Slowly turning the metal drum, he pulled off the old paper roll and slipped the new one in its place, fitting the ends into slots in the metal. He relocated the stylus and, taking a pen from his pocket, scribbled a few words on the new paper: the date, time, attenuation, or signal power of the machine, and the name of this seismographic station – PRIN for Princeton. Closing the glass lid, he locked it in place.
Turning to the previous day's record, the student scanned the thin black line that rose and fell across the paper as if tracing the contours of a mountain range. Yes, the pattern had been holding all this week, as it had been for most of the month, and even without triangulating the data with the other stations in the Lamont network, he knew exactly what it represented: minor seismic disturbances in the north central part of the state.
For the next half hour, he transcribed the data onto a series of U.S. Geological Survey record forms; the paper roll was filed in a closet. Still calculating mentally to himself, he carried the forms across the corridor to an office marked 'Prof. J. Lewalski -Director.' He knocked twice and went in.
The young man inside was not Professor Lewalski; he was a graduate student in geology employed by the department for the summer. He took the forms and ran his eye over the data.
'Hmm, one point four, eh? That's up a little, isn't it?'
The younger student nodded. 'Yes, it was one point two on Wednesday. It's been climbing all week. Are we supposed to inform someone about this?'
The other rubbed his chin. 'Well, according to policy, we're not supposed to issue reports unless disturbances get above three, when they may start doing some damage. Otherwise, all you do is scare people.' He looked down at the data once again and frowned. 'Of course, this trend is rather interesting… But with things like this, you never know. It could stay at one point four all year or die away tomorrow. Anyhow, Lewalski won't be coming back till
