The Stand

old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing—and so much of it—but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn’t mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn’t have to be anybody’s business but her own.

They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here—some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they’d start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.

First they’d want to form some sort of government, probably one they’d want to run around her. She couldn’t allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God’s will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth—get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that “trash masher.” Get the gas running so they wouldn’t freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren’t running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn’t stop them, but she didn’t like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.

She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God’s will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils… but she would say nothing.

Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.

He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg… at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold’s heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired… and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street… unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him—a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind.

Some would make the deduction for themselves in time—his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep the invader out.

Would he win?

She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick. She knew that a few of them besides herself had dreamed of crucifixions, but only a few. Those who did had told her but no one else, she suspected. And none of that answered the question:

Would he win?

That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman—if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand… and she would not overestimate the dark man’s craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier—long past retirement age, it was true!—in the service of the Lord.

“Thy will be done,” she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters peanuts. Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty-sixth birthday, and she would have a few peanuts if she wanted to. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren’t they tasty?

As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took the hat off.

“You awake, Mother?”

“That I am,” she said through a mouthful of peanuts. “Step in, Ralph, I ain’t chewin these nuts, I’m gummin em to death.”

Ralph laughed and came in. “There’s some folk out past the gate that’d like to say howdy, if you ain’t too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I’d say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name’s Underwood.”

“Well, bring em up, Ralph, that’s fine,” she said.

“Good enough.” He turned to go.

“Where’s Nick?” she asked him. “Haven’t seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?”

“He’s been out at the reservoir,” Ralph said. “Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”

Mother Abagail cackled. She did like Ralph. He was a simple soul, but canny. He had a feel for how things worked. She was not surprised that he had been the one to get what everybody now called Free Zone Radio going. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t be afraid to try epoxy on your tractor battery when it started to split open, and if the epoxy did the job, why, he’d just take off his shapeless hat and scratch his balding head and grin that grin, like he was an eleven-year-old kid with the chores done and his fishing pole leaned against his shoulder. He was a good sort to have around when things weren’t going just right and the type of man