The Stand

from darkness and the shadow of the swing Joe had set in motion would always travel back and forth across the weedy yard. Larry wished he could stay here forever, he and his family. This was a good place. The man with no face could never get him here, or Joe, or Nadine.

Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us.

A cloud came over the sun. The swing’s arc had decreased to nothing. Joe stopped playing with a jangling rattle of strings, and Larry felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. The old woman seemed not to notice.

Before who gets wind of us? Nadine asked, and Larry wished he could speak, cry out for her to take the question back before it could leap free and hurt them.

That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won’t keep him black. That’s why we got to knit together. In Colorado. God come to me in a dream and showed me where. But we got to be quick, quick as we can, anyway. So you come see me. There’s others coming, too.

No, Nadine said in a cold and fearful voice. We’re going to Vermont, that’s all. Only to Vermont—just a short trip.

Your trip will be longer than ours, if’n you don’t fight off his power, the old woman in Larry’s dream replied. She was looking at Nadine with great sadness. This could be a good man you got here, woman. He wants to make something out of himself. Why don’t you cleave to him instead of using him?

No! We’re going to Vermont, to VERMONT!

The old woman looked at Nadine pityingly. You’ll go straight to hell if you don’t watch close, daughter of Eve. And when you get there, you are gonna find that hell is cold.

The dream broke up then, splitting into cracks of darkness that swallowed him. But something in that darkness was stalking him. It was cold and merciless, and soon he would see its grinning teeth.

But before that could happen he was awake. It was half an hour after dawn, and the world was swaddled in a thick white ground fog that would burn off when the sun got up a little more. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship’s prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood.

Someone was next to him, and he saw that it wasn’t Nadine who had joined him in the night, but Joe. The boy lay next to him, thumb corked in his mouth, shivering in his sleep, as if his own nightmare had gripped him. Larry wondered if Joe’s dreams were so different from his own… and he lay on his back, staring up into the white fog and thinking about that until the others woke up an hour later.

The fog had burned off enough to travel by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their things on the cycles. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry’s cycle without having to be asked.

“Slow,” Larry said for the fourth time. “We’re not going to hurry and have an accident.”

“Fine,” Nadine said. “I’m really excited. It’s like being on a quest!”

She smiled at him, but Larry could not smile back. Rita Blakemoor had said something very much like that when they were leaving New York City. Two days before she died, she had said it.

They stopped for lunch in Epsom, eating fried ham from a can and drinking orange soda under the tree where Larry had fallen asleep and Joe had stood over him with the knife. Larry was relieved to find that riding the motorcycles wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; in most of the places they could make fairly decent time, and even going through the villages it was only necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed. Nadine was being extremely careful about slowing down on blind curves, and even on the open road she did not urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-an-hour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they could be in Stovington by the nineteenth.

They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith’s route by going directly northwest on the thruway, I-89.

“There will be a lot of stalled traffic,” Larry said doubtfully.

“We can weave in and out,” she said with confidence, “and use the breakdown lane when we have to. The worst that can happen is we’ll have to backtrack to an exit and go around on a secondary road.”

They tried it for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a blockage from one side of the northbound lanes to the other. Just beyond Warner a car-and-housetrailer combo had jackknifed; the driver and his wife, weeks dead, lay like grainsacks in the front seat of their Electra.

The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the buckled hitch between the car and the trailer. Afterward they were too tired to go any farther, and that night Larry didn’t ponder whether or not to go to Nadine, who had taken her blankets ten feet farther down from where he had spread his (the boy was between them). That night he was too tired to do anything but fall asleep.

The next afternoon they came upon a block they couldn’t get around. A trailer truck had overturned and half a dozen cars had crashed behind it. Luckily, they were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit. They went back, took the exit ramp, and then, feeling tired and discouraged, stopped in the Enfield town park for a twenty-minute rest.

“What did you do before, Nadine?” Larry asked. He had been thinking about the expression in her eyes when Joe had finally spoken (the boy had added “Larry, Nadine, fanks,” and “Go baffroom” to his working vocabulary), and now he made a guess based on that. “Were you a teacher?”

She looked at him with surprise. “Yes. That’s a good guess.”

“Little kids?”

“That’s right. First and second graders.”

That explained something about her complete unwillingness to leave Joe behind. In mind at least, the boy had regressed to a seven-year-old age level.

“How did you guess?”

“A long time ago I used to date a speech therapist from Long Island,” Larry said. “I know that sounds like the start of one of those involved New York jokes, but it’s the truth. She worked for the Ocean View school system. Younger grades. Kids with speech impediments, cleft palates, harelips, deaf kids. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them an alternative way of getting the right sounds. Show them, say the word. Show them, say the word. Over and over until something in the kid’s head clicked. And when she talked about that click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said ‘You’re welcome.’”

“Did I?” She smiled a little wistfully. “I loved the little ones. Some of them were bruised, but none of them at that age are irrevocably spoiled. The little ones are the only good human beings.”

“Kind of a romantic idea, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Children are good. And if you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That’s not so bad. Wasn’t your speech therapist friend happy in her work?”

“Yeah, she liked it,” Larry agreed. “Were you married? Before?” There it was again—that simple, ubiquitous word. Before. It was only two syllables, but it had become all-encompassing.

“Married? No. Never married.” She began to look nervous again. “I’m the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven.” His eyes had moved to her hair before he could stop them and she nodded as if he had spoken out loud. “It’s premature,” she said matter-of-factly. “My grandmother’s hair was totally white by the time she was forty. I think I’m going to last at least five years longer.”

“Where did you teach?”

“A small private school in Pittsfield. Very exclusive. Ivy-covered walls, all the newest playground equipment. Damn the recession, full speed ahead. The car pool consisted of two Thunderbirds, three Mercedes-Benzes, a couple of Lincolns, and a Chrysler Imperial.”

“You must have been very good.”

“Yes, I think I was,” she said artlessly, then smiled. “Doesn’t matter much now.”

He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said uncomfortably.

“You don’t want me to?”

“No. I don’t.”

He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to that was the thing; he could feel