“What?”
“You know. I thought you must have been killed at the lab.”
“No. I wasn’t there. They didn’t have a place for me—I stayed in town that night.” He looked past her into the dim interior of the house.
She said, “Well, please come in.”
Warm air embraced him. He tried to restrain his curiosity but his eyes searched for evidence of Stern. The furniture in the sitting room—a sofa, side table, bookcases—was casual but clean. A book was splayed open on an easy chair but he couldn’t read the title.
Howard said, “Is my uncle here?”
Ruth looked at him for a time. “Is that what you thought?”
“He gave me the telephone number but not the address. It took me a long time to find you.”
“Howard… your uncle is dead. He died at the lab that night with everybody else. I’m sorry. I thought you would have assumed … I mean, he did spend most of his nights here, but there was something going on, some kind of work… Did you really think he might be here after all this time?”
Howard felt breathless. “I was sure of it.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “It was a feeling.”
She gave him another, longer look. Then she said, “I have that feeling, too. Sit down, please, Howard. Would you like coffee? I think we have a lot to talk about.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The clergy of Two Rivers had responded to the events of the summer by putting together what they called the Ad Hoc Ecumenical Council, a group of pastors representing the town’s seven Christian churches and two synagogues. The group met in Brad Congreve’s basement twice a month.
Congreve, an ordained Lutheran minister, was proud of his work. He had assembled a delegation from every religious group in town except for the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Vedanta Buddhist Temple, which in any case was only Annie Stoller and some of her New Age friends sitting cross-legged in the back of Annie’s self-help store. The churches had not always been on friendly terms, and it was still a chore to keep the Baptists talking to the Unitarians, for instance, but they all faced a common danger in this peculiar new world.
Certainly they had all shared a trial of faith. Congreve often felt the way he supposed the Incas must have felt when Pizarro marched into town with banners flying—doomed, that is, at least in the long run. There was a Christianity here but it was like no Christian doctrine Congreve had ever imagined—it was not even monotheistic! The God of the Proctors presided over a cosmogony as crowded as the Super Bowl, Jesus being only one of the major players. Worse, these
Symeon Demarch had allowed the churches to carry on with services, which had been a morale booster, but it was Congreve’s private conviction that the writing was on the wall. He might not go to his death a martyr, but he would probably go down as one of the last living Lutherans. There was not even history to sustain him. History had been erased, somehow.
The only thing that had not been challenged was his belief in miracles.
In the meantime he drew together the Christian community in Two Rivers and tried to set a dignified tone. There was argument tonight about the explosion at the filling station and the curious phenomena some people had seen there. Signs and wonders. Congreve shunted that aside when he called the meeting to order. It was not the kind of issue they could resolve; it only fostered disagreement.
Instead, he raised the more immediate and practical question of Christmas decorations. The electrical power would be restored by the beginning of next week, and it was already the first of December—although it felt more like January with all this snow. His youth group wanted to string Christmas lights on the church lawn. A few lights would make everybody feel better, Congreve supposed. But Christmas lights were a religious display and according to Demarch all such displays needed prior approval by the Proctors. That was where the problem arose. Symeon Demarch was out of town; the man in charge was an unpleasant bureaucrat named Clement Delafleur. Father Gregory of the Catholic church had already spoken to Delafleur and the meeting had not been a happy one; Delafleur had expressed a desire to close down the churches altogether and had called Father Gregory “an idolator and an alien.”
But Christmas decorations were a secular tradition, too, and no doubt some of the private citizens in Two Rivers would be moved to dig out their strings of lights—so why not the churches?
A plausible argument, Congreve thought, but the Proctors might disagree. He counseled a prudent caution. Reverend Lockheed of the Mission Baptist said his young people were also anxious to do something to mark the season, so how about decorating the big pine in the Civic Gardens outside City Hall—as a kind of test case? If the Proctors objected, the lights could be unstrung. (Though not without vocal objections, if Congreve knew Terry Lockheed.)
Lockheed made it a formal motion. Congreve would have preferred to hold over the entire issue until Demarch was back. Why court trouble? But the show of hands overruled him.
The combined Lutheran and Baptist youth groups, plus interested, parties from the Episcopalians and Catholics—about seventy-five young people in all—converged on the Civic Gardens east of City Hall the next Saturday morning.
Electrical power was still interdicted at the source, so no one brought lights—those could be added later. Instead there were ribbons, balls, colored string; spun-glass angels, gold and silver coronets; tinsel, brocade, and popcorn chains by the yard. A morning snow fell gently and there was room for everything among the capacious, snowy branches of the tree. Reverend Lockheed showed up with a cherry-picking ladder so that even the peaks of the big pine were not neglected.
Work went on for more than two hours despite the cold. When the last ornament was installed, Pastor Congreve handed out songsheets printed on the Methodists’ hand-crank mimeograph:
Midway through the first carol, a military vehicle pulled up across the road and a single soldier emerged. The militiaman stood looking on without expression. Congreve wondered if he understood the purpose of the display.
The soldier watched, arms folded across his chest, but didn’t interfere. Across the square, a crowd of townspeople had been watching the tree-trimming. They ignored the militiaman and clapped for the carolers.
Terry Lockheed looked at the soldier, then at Congreve, a mute enquiry: Should we carry on? Why not, Congreve thought. One more song. If this was a crisis, they were already well in it. He nodded his head. The faithful, the joyful, the triumphant were duly summoned.
Then, suddenly, there was nothing left of the morning. The young people adjourned to Tucker’s Restaurant for hot milk. The crowd melted away. Before long the Civic Gardens were empty save for the soldier, the tree, and the falling snow.
The tree disappeared that night.
Sometime before dawn it was cut, thrown into the back of a military transport, and burned on the perpetual trash fire in the parking lot of the highway 7-Eleven. Only the stump remained, a snow-covered hummock by the dim light of morning.
The news traveled fast.
