knows no children in the world are better fed than her own, he cracked the egg on the rim of the already half-full bowl, let the yolk drop inside, and whipped the liquid to a yellow froth. 'Hungry?' he called gaily over his shoulder.
'I'm always hungry,' said Freirs, slouched unshaven and tousle-haired over the table, and Carol, across from him, added, 'It's that famous country air.'
Rosie chuckled. 'That's just what I like to hear.' He poured the liquid into the heated frying pan, where it hissed and bubbled like hell-fire.
Breakfast left them feeling heavy and overfull. While Rosie fussed about the kitchen, the two stumbled groggily from the house and down the back steps, kicking off their shoes in the grass. It was nearly eleven, the sun high overhead. The Poroths still had not returned.
Reaching out a sleepy hand for Carol's, Jeremy pulled her after him, and together they wandered downhill toward the brook, the unmown grass dry beneath their feet. The day was warm, and by the time they'd passed the smokehouse and the barn, Carol was finding it hard to keep her balance; the lawn seemed to slope more steeply as she neared the water, tilting in ways that didn't seem right at all, and she had to stop herself from falling forward into the weeds that grew along the bank. The greenness seemed to spin around her; she felt Jeremy's hand slip from her own, and then she was floating, blue sky underfoot, green overhead, or was it the other way around?… Carol blinked and shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. The sunlight from the flashing brook was dazzling, almost blinding. There was a rushing of water in her ears, and she couldn't tell if it was the brook or her own lifeblood.
'I feel as if I haven't slept in weeks,' Jeremy was saying, yawning. She saw him remove his glasses and sink beside her to his knees by the bank of the stream, then lie back, and as she bent to kiss him she saw his eyes close in sleep. She lay beside him on the grass, feet toward the water, and just before her head fell back against the soft ground she thought, with a brief and terrible clarity, He's drugged us…
They slept.
But in the smokehouse, other things were awake – and angry.
The wasps that inhabited the small, enclosed area just beneath the peaked roof had seen their tranquil world rocked shortly before dawn by the intrusion of a pair of human legs, naked and female, thrust roughly upward into their domain through the hole in the ceiling boards. A few of the insects had been away from the nest at the time; others, during the course of the morning, had by sheer chance managed to slip through a small crevice in the boards, the one small portion of the hole that the legs did not fill. But like dwellers in an attic who have found their trapdoor sealed, hundreds more of the insects were still imprisoned, bottled up amid the darkness and the heat, their passage to the outside world effectively cut off by a stopper of decaying human flesh.
They were angry now, and frantic to escape, their frenzy mounting with each passing minute as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the air within the tiny chamber grew even hotter. In furious circles they swarmed around the grey, brainlike nest, blind things, maddened, stinging one another in their madness.
The morning passed, gave way to noon. Shadows of clouds swept over their bodies, then a sun so fierce it would have wakened any normal sleepers. Insects circled buzzing around their faces, settled on their eyes; a dragonfly hovered as if with evil intent above Carol's half-open lips. Freirs' plump belly rose and fell without a break in rhythm as flies crawled over his skin and mosquitoes feasted on his sun-warmed blood. Two cats crept forward to peer inquisitively at him, and a pale, glistening slug crept in stately slowness over his wrist and down the other side into the grass. His glasses gleamed beside him in the sunlight. The glimmering brook murmured unheard at their feet.
In the distance, up the sloping lawn, the screen door swung open, then shut with a bang. The old man approached them softly, peering at their sleeping forms. Briefly he knelt beside Carol, making curious passes over her face. Getting to his feet, he stood gazing down at them again, his eyes darting back and forth between a heavy-looking rock and Freirs' head.
Suddenly he froze, listening; his expression changed, face hardening into a smile as his eyes scanned the edge of the woods along the far side of the brook. Casually, almost as an afterthought, he brought his foot down on Freirs' glasses, crushing them into the ground. Then, finding a series of stepping stones, he stepped delicately across the brook and disappeared among the trees.
It was a mark of the Brethren's restraint, their sense of decorum and protocol, as much as of their religious devotion that, though all of them were soon staring with curiosity and alarm at the twisting thread of black smoke in the distance, they continued singing as if nothing were wrong, pressing on through the traditional sixteen hymns. Even when the service was over and the Bible shut, few of them made any move in the direction of the Sturtevants' house, preferring to stay and give Adam Verdock and his daughter (who, of late grown used to death, seemed to be bearing up better than her father) what small comfort they could. Too much curiosity wasn't seemly; there were those among them who'd even objected to the presence of the local newspaper in their homes, arguing, with considerable zeal, that what God intended men to know was already set down in the Bible and that other printed words were mere distractions.
And so, in the end, when the assembly at last began to break up, it was only the more avidly curious among them – those such as Bert and Amelia Steegler, Galen Trudel, Rupert Lindt, and Jan and Hannah Kraft – as well as those closest to the Sturtevants – Joram's brother Abram and his wife, the van Meers and the Klapps, Matthew Geisel, Klaus Buckhalter, and a dozen or so more, including Ham Stoudemire, whose wife, Nettie, would be in attendance as midwife – who actually walked, in a party, toward the Sturtevant farm.
The house itself, a broad, white-shingled Colonial with low single-story wings on each side, was set well back from the main road at the end of a pathway bordered by tall shrubbery. The first things the party encountered, after ascending the path, were the Sturtevants' three young boys, normally a rowdy, outspoken bunch, standing in uneasy silence by the front of the house. 'Father won't let us inside,' the oldest boy explained somewhat fearfully. 'We have to stay here in front. Aunt Wilma's in there, though. So's Sister Nettie.'
This last had been addressed to Klaus Buckhalter, whose wife, Wilma – Lotte Sturtevant's older sister – was already inside, helping Nettie Stoudemire with the birth.
Buckhalter conferred briefly with his nephews, then turned back to the group. 'I think Abram and I had best go up alone.'
The others hung back as the two men climbed the front steps and knocked, almost timidly, at the door. After some moments, it was opened by Buckhalter's wife. She looked as if she'd been weeping.
'You can all come in,'she said. 'It's done now… She's alive.'
'And the child?' asked Abram.
She shuddered and shook her head.
Frowning, the two men entered the house, Wilma standing at the door as the rest filed nervously in behind them. Ahead of them, at the top of the stairs, the midwife stood wringing her hands.
'Is my brother up there?' asked Abram.
Wilma pointed, trembling, in the direction of the yard. 'Back there.' She turned and started up the staircase; as if by unspoken agreement the women in the group filed upstairs behind her, continuing toward a doorway at the right, from which issued a series of low moans. Left to themselves, the men stood awkwardly in the downstairs hall, then followed Abram toward the back of the house.
They found Joram seated in a rocking chair in the middle of the glassed-in back porch. He was rocking furiously, as if possessed, and seemed barely to notice them. His face, they saw, was drawn, weary, but his eyes, which stared at nothing, had a wild look. Behind him, outside in the yard, they could see a round pit filled with ashes from which a few dark tendrils of smoke still rose.
At first it seemed that Joram was addressing them, but then they all saw that he was in fact talking to himself. 'God is merciful,' he was saying as he rocked back and forth, over and over like a litany of comfort. 'God is merciful, merciful… '
Abram grasped him by the shoulder. 'What is it, brother?'
Slowly the man in the chair looked up, and recognition dawned in his face. 'He touched her belly,' he said, 'and she gave birth to-' A fit of trembling seized him. He shook his head. 'Thank the Lord it didn't live!'
Rupert Lindt stepped forward. 'Joram, what are you talkin' about? Who touched Lotte's belly?'
Joram turned to look at him. He was silent a moment, as if trying to recollect. 'Twas the one from the city. The one livin' out at Poroth Farm.'
The men eyed one another in silence, the same dark look growing on all their faces.
