So be it. She spun the wheel and pressed her foot against the gas pedal. The Chevy swung onto the exit ramp and sped across the waiting world toward Gilead.
Freirs put down the book and checked his watch. It was almost a quarter to three. He looked to the right, squinting at the sun. Sarr and Deborah were still at it, both of them bent almost double, moving through the plowed field with the seed bags at their sides, chanting as they went. They reminded Freirs of a pair of huge black insects depositing endless rows of eggs. Behind them sunlight glimmered from one of the homemade scarecrows that Sarr had erected -really just aluminum-foil pie plates with strings through one end, dangling like limp kites from the tops of a row of stakes so that, at the smallest breeze, the plates would swing and flutter back and forth, banging softly against the stakes with the sound of far-off temple gongs.
How strange and picturesque it all seemed. He felt as if he were in a distant country. It was easy to forget that the two of them out there were human beings, people he sat down to eat with, people like himself.
He hoped Carol would arrive soon; the day seemed to be passing so quickly that, even with the sun still high, he could feel the chill of evening, the day already lost. A fly settled boldly on his cheek and he struck at it, knocking his glasses askew. Quickly he adjusted them, hoping the Poroths hadn't seen. Where in God's name was Carol? In a little while he was going to get angry, or worried, or both. He plunged despondently back into the novel, trying to lose himself again and speed her coming.
Sarr was thinking about the girl while he counted out the seeds, and he was troubled. He wondered if he'd done the right thing, allowing Freirs to have her out this weekend. Maybe his mother was right.
He had seen her at her house the previous night, where, offering some fresh eggs and a bag of early peas from Deborah's garden, he'd gone to seek his mother's advice on how best to deal with the members of the Co-op, to whom his debt was about to fall due. Thirty-seven hundred dollars for the mortgage, and another thousand for repairs – he would owe them, by August, nearly five thousand dollars. But there were a few grounds for hope, including a modest family trust left by his father that might, in emergencies, be drawn upon…
When he'd mentioned, in passing, that Jeremy Freirs had a girl coming on Saturday, his mother had seemed shocked. No, more than shocked. Dismayed, almost, like one who's learned an enemy has breached the gates.
'Son,' she'd said at last, 'I wouldn't open my door to her.'
'Now, now,' he'd said, 'the two of them aren't going to spend the night together. I wouldn't allow such a thing on my land.' He was already beginning to feel sorry he'd brought it up, and guilty about having acquiesced so easily to Deborah's argument that what Jeremy and Carol did was none of his business. Of course it was his business; everything that went on under his roof or his property was his business.
The evening – so agreeable, at the start, perhaps because he hadn't brought Deborah, always a source of tension – had ended in the sort of unforgiving argument, neither yielding an inch, that he hadn't had with his mother since he was a boy. Even as he'd left, she had still seemed uneasy. 'No,' she kept saying, 'the woman shouldn't come. She shouldn't be here at all.'
'Well,' Sarr had said at last, 'it's too late now. I can't stop her from coming; I can't go back on my word. At the very least, I have to offer common hospitality. Don't worry yourself, Mother, there'll be no sinning on my land.'
But she hadn't appeared comforted.
And now, as he labored in his fields, Sarr couldn't get the matter off his mind. Maybe, in some dark way he didn't yet understand, he had made a mistake.
He wondered if he would have to pay for it.
Mrs Poroth grimaced beneath the beekeeper's veil. Grey wisps drifted past her face from the nozzle of her smoker, a teapot-shaped metal contrivance packed with smoldering rags and fanned by miniature bellows. Every few minutes she would shake her head uneasily, as if trying to clear it of some indigestible thought. Earlier, as she'd gone about her Saturday chores, pruning the hydrangea on the south side of the house and, with veil on, examining the upright wooden frames of the beehives for the day's accumulation of honey, she'd considered, half seriously, the possibility of setting up a roadblock on her lane. Anything to keep away the visitor.
Of course, maybe this was just some idle girlfriend of Freirs' and not the woman whose coming she dreaded; there was no way to be sure. Still, she hated to take chances. Stationing herself by the third hive, lowest on the hill and closest to the roadside, she waited for the visitor's car to pass.
If the woman turned out to be the one she feared, what should she do? Killing her, of course, would be a sin, and the Lord punished such acts, even when committed for good ends, though she was half prepared to accept the sin and the eventual punishment. Besides, she reflected, killing was probably the kindest thing she could do for the poor girl.
No, she couldn't do it. She would have to play by the rules. The Old One would be playing by them too.
There was nothing to do for now but find out all she could. Adjusting her veil and once more directing the smoker into the hive so that the insects, reacting as if to a fire and gorging themselves on honey, would grow sluggish, she lifted the flat unpainted lid and withdrew one of a dozen wooden frames acrawl with bees. Transferring the honey-laden frame to a storage chamber above the hive, she stood once more and prepared herself to wait for the passing of the car. If the chosen woman was in it, she would recognize her – by her hair, if nothing else. It would be red. It would have to be. That, too, was a rule.
Gilead at last. There was no mistaking the tidy little crossroads and the general store, obviously the Co-op that Jeremy had spoken of. He had also said something, Carol recalled, about 'high walls' surrounding the town, but no doubt he'd exaggerated; the only walls she'd seen were low stone ruins back at the approach road, stretching from each gatepost and winding off among the trees. She might not even have noticed them if she hadn't been told to look.
But perhaps, she mused, there were walls here of a different sort. The place seemed different from other towns: neater, certainly, to judge by the well-tended lawns she'd passed coming in, and more decorous in other ways as well. Across the street from the Co-op, where a red-brick schoolhouse glared through a line of trees at the grassy playing field in front, a group of little children played quietly on seesaws, neither shouting nor laughing, as subdued as children in a century-old woodcut, and all without a sign of adult supervision. Nor were there the usual small-town idlers gathered in front of the general store.
Parking in front, just beyond the untended gas pumps, she climbed the steps and entered. The store appeared uncommonly well stocked, and smelled, in the dim light inside, of spice and old apples. It was almost like entering a cave. The beams in the ceiling were heavy with merchandise – everything from sausages to snow-shoes, from bulbous white garlics to lamp wicks, frying pans, and coils of rubber hose. A tall white metal cooler hummed serenely near the back, stocked with cheeses, ordinary-looking cans of soda, and things wrapped in wax paper. Low shelves near the front displayed cellophane-packed cup-cakes, barbecue chips, and beef jerky. A huge jar of picked eggs stood beside the cash register on the counter.
The woman behind the counter was talking with another woman; both were elderly and dressed in black. While pushing through the screen door, Carol overheard references to a Brother Joram and a Lotte Sturtevant, who was apparently growing quite enormous lately, but the two women fell silent and turned to her as soon as she came in. She asked directions of the one behind the counter. 'I'm trying to reach the Poroths' farm,' she said.
'Well, now, Sarr and that wife of his, I believe they bought the old Baber place.'
The other woman nodded gravely. 'My Rachel was out there last Friday evening. They're the ones that planted late.'
Farther back, in the shadows, Carol saw an alcove with another wooden counter, almost the mirror image of this one, and a wall lined with shelves and cubbyholes, in some of which leaned dusty-looking white envelopes. This, then, would be the local post office. It looked little used.
'You want to head out along the granary road,' the first woman – no doubt the postmistress – was saying. She stepped from behind the counter and, holding open the screen door, gestured in the direction of the retreating maples and the line of distant hills. 'Keep goin' straight past Verdock's dairy – it's just around that bend – and there you turn right and go along for half a mile or so.' She launched into a lengthy, detailed account replete with references to gullies, washed-out crossings, and lanes that dipped up and down like greased pigs, with particular attention to a mill road (' 'Course there ain't no mill there nowadays, it's all fell down since I was a girl') and a fork ('Don't go turnin' off on the little old road that splits off it on the left, 'cause that's goin' to lead you to the Geisels, and Matt and Cora like visitors so much they ain't goin' to let you leave before suppertime'). Carol found herself nodding politely, eagerly, but forgetting everything as soon as it was spoken. Right past Verdock's dairy, she remembered that much. She would find the place, no fear. She thanked the two of them and left the store.
