responded to her new high-calcium feed by not laying anything at all. Deborah made us a vegetable omelet using all six eggs, but it was surprisingly poor. Odd medicinal taste; Sarr didn't even finish his. Deborah herself barely ate, which also seemed to annoy Sarr. 'Eat something,' he kept saying. 'You don't even open your mouth.' He's been in a bad mood lately.
Dessert not much good either: cheese amp; early apples which Sarr had bought in town last week. He'd been keeping them down in the root cellar; now most of them have gone bad. I took a few steps down to the cellar amp; could smell that the food down there had started to spoil.
Probably it's just as well I ate so little tonight; I'm definitely getting heavier out here, despite all my good intentions. Or flabbier, if not heavier. Really ought to do my exercises. Maybe tomorrow. Looked in the bathroom mirror after dinner, before coming out here, amp; wasn't too pleased with the sight. Maybe I can try to get a better sun tan before Carol arrives, amp; I could also really use a haircut. Must shave, too.
As I left the Poroths, they didn't seem to be getting along. Deborah, still hoarse, announced that she was tired amp; went upstairs alone. I left Sarr praying in the living room.
While I was outside, just before entering this room, I chanced to turn around amp; look at the farmhouse. The lamp was burning in the Poroths' bedroom, amp; to my amazement I saw, in silhouette, Deborah slipping off her long black dress. She was right in front of the window. Then she turned amp; stood there a moment, looking out. Sarr must have come upstairs right after that, because I heard him call to her amp; she quickly moved away… But until she did I had the distinct feeling that, as she stood there, she knew she was being watched, amp; that she, in turn, was looking right at me.
Later they would talk about it often. The good people of Gilead would talk and speculate and argue, gathered around Bert Steegler's cash register at the Go-operative, or sipping tea or lemonade on the van Meers' front porch, or on their way to Sunday worship: how, on the night of July twenty-sixth, just before the strange culmination of the events at Poroth Farm, Shem and Orin Fenchel saw the light dancing in the woods.
Neither father nor son was the kind to show up at Sunday worship, and the past Sunday, while their fellows were congregating at the Poroths', the younger, more enterprising Fenchel had been helping himself to a basketful of tomatoes from Hershel Reimer's garden (taking care to leave no tracks), and old Shem had been fast asleep and snoring. As to the events of the twenty-sixth, they would claim, later, that they'd been searching for a favorite hound that had wandered from the yard and lost itself in the swamp outside of town; but those who knew them best would suspect, always, that they'd been hunting out of season, the Fenchel larder being surprisingly well stocked with meat despite the annual failure of that family's crop.
It was safe to say, too, that the pair had drained a bottle or two that night; as one of the town's rare jokes had it, the elder Fenchel had brought up young Orin on the words of Jeremiah 25:27 – 'Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall.'
Their testimony, therefore, was not the most convincing, and there were those in Gilead who would deny that the two had seen anything at all. But there were others who, noting the son's wide-eyed amazement, the older man's obvious confusion, the discrepancies in their stories, and reflecting that the two had nothing to gain from lying – for indeed, the incident could only increase their notoriety in the town – would be inclined to believe all or much of what they said.
The moon was gibbous that night, casting a cold, sluglike face at the trees and rivulets and fallen logs over which they'd been stumbling. They were nearing the marshy region along the northwest border of the old Baber place – Sarr Poroth had bought the property last fall, and Fenchel agreed with those in town who held that he'd been cheated – and walking had become difficult; their boots made a wet, sucking sound with each step, and to remain too long in one place gave them the feeling of sinking into the earth.
The younger man was the first to hear it. Initially he took it for an animal caught, struggling, in some remote trap, but then he began to pick out what sounded like words – foreign words. The father heard it too, by now, and was thereafter to maintain that the language was Hebrew; his son, less dogmatic, would never venture to guess.
It was shortly afterward that they saw, far in the distance, the dancing light. It was bobbing up and down out there in the swamp, over land so treacherous that neither man dared approach too closely. Sometimes it would dip below a shrub or rotting log and would be lost from sight: at other times it seemed to float above the surface of the ground-water, as if playing with its own reflection. Occasionally it winked, flickered, and dimmed; most often it burned with a small, steady flame. Both men would later agree that it had been moving ever deeper into the woods, away from Poroth Farm.
But subsequently their reports would differ. Orin, who had the sharper eyes of the two, was to describe the light as that of a single candle. His father would deny this with a queer vehemence; though in his sorry life he'd been accused, by his more pious brethren, of every form of blasphemy, he would shudder, even months afterward, at the notion of a burning candle, as if at something unnatural and obscene. He would never explain his reasons, however, except to say that no candle could have cast so strong a glow; he'd claim that what they'd seen had, in fact, been a hand-held lantern, or even a flashlight.
As to just what sort of hand held the lantern, it was still too far away to tell, and a low midsummer mist obscured their view. They stood awhile in uneasy silence, squinting at the light. It seemed, slowly, to be drawing closer. Occasionally the faint singsong voice would reach them from over the swamp. Shem, at this point, observed that whoever was carrying the lantern must be small indeed, because it appeared to be swinging only inches from the ground. Perhaps it was a child… The two peered into the darkness ahead, wondering how any being could make its way through that mud and looking in vain for a face they might recognize above the approaching light.
In fact, they looked in vain for any face at all.
It was here that Orin broke and ran. Later, when asked to account for his uncharacteristic faintheartedness, he would mutter something about that light's having been 'too damned close to the ground. No man could carry a candle that low,' he'd say, crossing himself. 'Leastwise not in his hand.'
Shem Fenchel didn't remain there much beyond his son, but he lingered long enough to form an opinion – or, rather, several opinions – of what might have been out there. 'Some kinda animal,' he told his wife, when he woke her that night. 'A dog or monkey or' -his eye fell on young Lavinia's picture book – 'or a trained seal. Like in the circus. Carryin' the lantern in its teeth.'
It was only later, when in his cups at the roadhouse up near Lebanon, that he was heard to brag that what he'd really seen crawling through the swamp that night had been a naked woman.
July Twenty-seventh
Feeling tired amp; on edge today. I was up most of the night, thanks to the sounds outside – like distant thunder… And when I finally slept, woke up wishing I hadn't. If only there were some way of warding off these bad dreams. They're soon forgotten, of course, amp; seldom repeated; but while you're living through them they're all the reality you've got.
How does that line from the Cabala go? Reality hangs by – a thread?
Closing his journal, Freirs strolled outside and wandered toward the farmhouse. He felt grubby and was sure he needed a bath, but he'd forgotten to bring his towel and was too enervated to go back and get it. Heating the water for a bath was too complicated anyway.
Deborah was nowhere around, but there was a hot fresh blueberry pie cooling by the window. He was still aroused, in memory, from the sight of her disrobing in her room last night and was eager to see her again. From Sarr's workroom in the attic of the barn came the sound of steady hammering, echoing through the yard. He found some lukewarm milk left in the pitcher on the counter, enough for a shallow bowl of cereal, but he felt like something more; lighting the lantern, he climbed down the narrow steps to the cellar. The entire room now smelled of spoiled food; had the weather really gotten so much hotter lately that the perishables had… perished? He stayed down there as short a time as he could: just long enough to assure himself that the milk in the container was sour and that there were no eggs on the shelf. He was glad to get back upstairs.
Wandering out to the back porch, he heard Poroth in the barn give a yell of exultation. It was the first time in days that the farmer had shown such emotion; lately he had grown morose and moody. Freirs hurried to the barn to see what had produced the change.
Poroth was crouching on the platform that supported the chicken coop, peering into the nest with the smile of a brand-new father looking through the glass of the maternity ward. Freirs climbed up the ladder to join him.
'Look,' said Poroth, 'look what they've done.' He pointed to a pair of pristine-looking white eggs lying on the platform by his feet. 'I found them under two of the new birds.'
