At the farmhouse farther up the road, Adam Verdock gazed mournfully down at his wife on the bed. She had never regained consciousness; she was losing strength fast. Their daughter, Minna, had been wonderful, she'd been there to tend Lise day and night, but the woman had shown no signs of recovery, and this morning he'd been forced to tell old Brother Flinders the carpenter to set aside the pine boards for a coffin. Their prayers, all of them, had been in vain.
Poroth, too, was praying, kneeling as he faced the corner of his room, eyes tightly shut. He had been there all afternoon, unmindful of the heat, the Bible beside him turned to Judges 6 ('And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us?'). But nothing brought him peace today. The Lord was unforgiving. How empty the phrases of the Scriptures seemed, how barren the rituals of his religion. Whom was he calling upon, anyway? He felt as if he were kneeling here speaking only to himself. Was anyone listening?
'O Lord,' he prayed, 'let me know that we, thy children, still merit thy love. Vouchsafe me a sign of thy presence… '
He was chilled to hear, as if in answer, a low, malicious laugh. Opening his eyes, he gazed around the room in horror; the sound had seemed to come from just beside his ear. But now he heard voices and more laughter – a man's, a woman's – and realized they were coming from outside. He went to the window and looked out. Down in the yard a dusty white Chevrolet was parked near the house, and beside it stood Freirs, alternately embracing a red-haired young woman, whom Poroth recognized as Carol, and pumping the hand of a short white-haired old man who looked damnably familiar and who, as Poroth watched, threw back his head and laughed.
So they had arrived. He would slip away with Carol tonight, as promised, and report back to his mother.
Below him he heard the screen door swing open; slow footsteps descended the back stairs. The old man turned, suddenly no longer laughing, and for a moment Poroth saw his eyes narrow and a new look enter them, a kind of guarded excitement. All at once he beamed. 'Ah, yes,' Poroth heard him say, his little frame now shaking once again with laughter, 'yes, indeed, and this must be Deborah!'
At last Deborah herself stepped into view. Gravely she advanced across the yard to meet them, a smile spreading slowly across her face as she extended to both visitors, but especially to the little old man, a hand of welcome.
Aside from the contact he's established, there is no particular joy in being back. Everything is much as he's remembered it, despite the passage of a century. In size, shape, even the weathering of its shingles, the little farmhouse looks almost the same as the first one that stood on this site. The apple tree behind it is new, of course, and so is the line of rosebushes he saw as he climbed from the car. But he recognizes the broad unpainted barn farther down the slope, where he'd drawn his secret pictures and practiced secret chants; its roof is sagging now, and, for all its rusted body, the battered old pickup truck parked within the doorway seems alien and new. So does the little wooden smokehouse at the edge of the property, another addition since his time, though for all he knows its door has been hanging open that way for the past eighty years.
The black willow rising by the barn is new to him, gnarled and ancient as it seems. But the acres of cornfield (looking stragglier than those he remembers), the vine-encrusted ruins of the outhouse that the woods have all but reclaimed, the brook where he'd performed those preliminary sacrifices, the dense surrounding forest and the hot, doomed country air – all these are familiar. Yet the memories mean little to him.
He notices, with no more than the faintest curiosity, that some things are gone: the woodshed and the stables and the old chicken coop, replaced by the squat grey structure that the Poroths have converted into a guest house; the elms that lined the roadside (victims, no doubt, of that Dutch disease); and the tall, slender oak that once stood beside the house, shading the living room. But of course, he's almost forgotten: the tree, like the house itself, perished in the fire…
The fire: how far away that night seems now, in the present afternoon sunlight – and yet how close! He can still remember standing in the back yard beside the barn, watching as the roof caved in and the walls collapsed and the house folded in upon itself and all it contained like a clenching fist…
Just as the Master had said.
That same night, at the Master's instructions, he had burned the Master's body and ground the ashes to a black powder- the powder he'd used, as the Ceremony required, to mark the two sacrificial women.
But he'd been careful to save a part of the Master's body from the flames – a single part which, as the Master had decreed, he had buried at the base of the tree.
And now this fragment of the Master is free once more, risen from the earth. It has survived. He has just seen it looking at him through the eyes of the one called Deborah.
Carol had had strong misgivings about bringing Rosie with her to the farm – she knew it was sure to preclude her going to bed with Jeremy, who'd probably resented the old man from the start, and she worried that the Poroths might find him too effete, compared to the crusty old-timers they probably associated with – but now she was glad he'd come along. Good God, he was practically the only one with any animation tonight, and her respect for him grew as she listened to him recount stories of his travels, and poke fun at bis own fussy driving, and tell amusing anecdotes, with actual beginnings, middles, and ends, about their adventures together in the subway and the park; and all the while, as he talked, the fat red rose that Deborah had given him kept wobbling absurdly in his buttonhole, as if he were the father at a wedding, come to give away the bride. Without him, dinner would have been a real struggle to get through. The two of them had 'shot the works,' as Rosie'd put it. They'd brought out cold pasta from the city, and four pounds of flank steak – not for her, of course – and half a cheddar wheel that Rosie had picked up at Zabar's, and along the way they'd stopped off at a sun-baked little roadside stand outside Morristown for a dozen ears of deliciously sweet fresh corn. She hoped Sarr hadn't been offended by it; his own crop looked terrible.
So did Sarr himself. He had been silent and morose all evening -so different from the first time she'd seen him, when he'd spoken so freely – and there were deep rings of worry beneath his eyes. Clearly he was going through some kind of crisis: whether marital or spiritual, she couldn't say.
Jeremy wasn't much better; he looked positively awful, in fact, his complexion blotchy, his hair long, unkempt, and none too clean-looking. And he didn't seem to have lost any weight at all so far this summer; he looked more out of shape than ever. She wondered if this was a preview of what he'd be like ten years from now and was vaguely troubled at the fantasies he'd inspired.
Deborah, too, seemed out of sorts, and it was clear from her hoarseness and her uncommunicativeness that she hadn't yet gotten her voice back – but then, at least she had an excuse; she was still getting over that horrible incident with the cat, Jeremy had told her about it earlier. Carol noticed with uneasiness, not for the first time tonight, that he kept eyeing Deborah surreptitiously across the dinner table, though Deborah herself seemed unaware of it; the woman had eyes only for her guests.
God, what if there'd been something between them, Jeremy and Deborah? And what if Sarr suspected? Certainly the farmer had been giving the two of them a lot of funny looks all evening.
Most of his attention, though, seemed to be focused on, of all people, Rosie. In fact, Sarr had been sneaking glances at the old man all through the meal, even during grace, as if hoping to catch him out in the midst of a prayer. Maybe, after all, it was religion that was on his mind. Serenely oblivious to all this, poor little Rosie had clasped his hands and smiled and uttered a heartfelt amen at the end, right along with everyone else. Carol had actually felt relieved. Yet afterward Sarr had continued to stare at Rosie – and at her too – in the most peculiar way, as if he expected one of them to suddenly do something outrageous. It was disconcerting, to say the least. What in the world had gone wrong with these people? She felt sure that she herself had grown stronger and more confident this summer – had positively blossomed, in fact, out from beneath Rochelle's shadow and under Rosie's kindly tutelage -while here at the farm they were falling apart.
At the end of the meal, Rosie yawned, gave his lips a prissy wipe with the napkin, and informed them all that, thanks to this afternoon's hours on the road, he was 'weary unto death.' Pushing his chair back, he shuffled off to the bathroom and, on his return, announced that he was going to bed. 'I'll leave the night to you youngsters,' he said, chuckling. 'I'm sure you can make better use of it. Now if someone here can just provide me with a blanket… '
'I'll bring you everything you need,' said Deborah. She stood, a trifle unsteadily, and moved toward the stairs. They heard her rummaging in the linen closet in the hallway.
It had already been agreed that Rosie would spend the night on a spare cot in Jeremy's room – an arrangement suggested, to Carol's surprise, by Jeremy himself. Even with Rosie along she'd had a faint, stubborn hope that maybe somehow she'd be able to stay with Jeremy tonight, and she'd at least expected him to ask her.
