Thanks are in order.”
The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded.
The little girl said, “Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?”
“I think you’d be too heavy, honey,” the older woman, Olivia Walker, said.
“Nonsense,” Abagail said. “The day I can’t take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina.”
Ralph carried her over and set her down. “When she gets too heavy, you just tell me.” He tickled Gina’s face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. “Don’t tickle me, Ralph! Don’t you dare tickle me!”
“Don’t worry,” Ralph said, relenting. “I’m too full to tickle anyone for long.” He sat down again.
“What happened to your leg, Gina?” Abagail asked.
“I broke it when I fell out of the barn,” Gina said. “Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life.” She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled.
Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all.
“God’s mercy,” Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl’s hair.
Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She’d been playing in the hayloft of her uncle’s barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail’s dress).
Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness.
“Course it was,” Abagail said. “If you’d missed her, she would have just pined away.”
Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy.
“I’ll take her now,” Olivia Walker said.
“Put her in the little room at the end of the hall,” Abby said. “You can sleep with her, if that’s what you want. This other girl… what did you say your name was, honey? It’s slipped my mind for sure.”
“June Brinkmeyer,” the redhead said.
“Well, you c’n sleep with me, June, unless you’ve some other mind. The bed ain’t big enough for two, and I don’t think you’d want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there’s a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain’t got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess.”
“Sure,” Ralph said.
Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back.
“Maybe the old ways are best,” Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled.
“I mean,” Dick went on a little defensively, “that’s the first home-cooked meal I’ve had since… well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now… she was one hell of a good cook. She…” He trailed off blankly.
Olivia came back in. “Fast asleep,” she said. “That was a tired girl.”
“Do you bake your own bread?” Dick asked Mother Abagail.
“Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain’t yeast bread; ail the yeast has gone over. But there’s other kinds.”
“I crave bread,” he said simply. “Helen… my wife… used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy.”
“Tom Cullen’s tired,” Tom said abruptly. “M-O-O-N, that spells tired.” He yawned bone-crackingly.
“You can bed down in the shed,” Abagail said. “It smells a bit musty, but it’s dry.”
For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.
“I guess you got your campin gear?” she asked them.
“All kinds,” Ralph said. “We’ll be fine. Come on, Tom.” He stood up.
“I wonder,” Abagail said, “if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph.”
Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn’t talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled.
“Could you get me that mattress?” June asked softly.
“Nick and I will get it,” Ralph said, standing up.
“I don’t want to go out in that back shed all by myself,” Tom said. “Laws, no!”
“I’ll go out with you, hoss,” Dick said. “We’ll light the Coleman lamp and bed down.” He rose. “Thanks again, ma’am. Can’t tell you how good all this has been.”
The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dick— needing only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thought—went out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen.
“Mind if I smoke, ma’am?” Ralph asked.
“Not so long as you don’t tap ashes on the floor. There’s an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you.”
Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face.
She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn’t been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells.
“Ma’am?”
She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.
“Nick says…” Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.
“Go ahead.”
“His note says it’s hard to read your lips because—”
“I guess I know why,” she said. “No fear.”
She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.
She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.
