Nick wrote, “Be back as soon as you can.”
Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows—an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring.
“You’re in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, Nicky.”
Nick wrote: “Have we got anyplace better to go to?”
“That’s true. It’s no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”
Nick nodded.
“Okay.” Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. “Dick, you ready to take a ride?”
Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. “Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!”
“Come on, then,” Ralph said. “Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain’t caught a crow yet! Better let me brush you off.”
Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn’t they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being.
“See you, Nicky,” Ralph said, and climbed up behind the wheel of the Chevy.
“See you, Nicky,” Tom Cullen echoed, still grinning.
Nick watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate’s panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“It says, ‘We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen’s Band Channel 14,’” Olivia read.
“What does that mean?” June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail’s driveway. He buried the bottom three feet of the picket. Nothing but a big wind would knock it over now. Of course there
He wrote a note and handed it to June.
“One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time.”
“Oh,” Olivia said. “Smart.”
Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.
The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.
They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn’t even begin to understand why. You couldn’t take orders from a deaf-mute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.
No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags. He would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn’t want to believe that, either… but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn’t want to be their leader.
A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn’t anymore. She was smiling down at him from her armless rocker.
“I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression,” she said. “Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It’s true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in nineteen and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago.”
Nick nodded.
“Those were good days, Nick—most of em were, anyway. But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord. My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that’s all that’s left. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t’wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”
Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.
“Brothers don’t always work so well together; they almost always fall to squabblin. Look at Cain n Abel! Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fielhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together, but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now.”
She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.
“Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they’d take a little more to pay it off, and I’d come out here to look at the part that wasn’t my own anymore, and I’d cry over it like I’m crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that’s how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they’d taken everything but this little piece o scratch that’s here. Big o them, wa’n’t it?”
He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.
“Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He
Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.
“Help me along, Nick,” she said. “I only want to do what’s right.”
He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.
Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a pushboard on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.
“There’s a helluva nice CB in that wrecker,” he told Nick. “Forty-channel job. I think Ralph’s in love with
