now I’ll shut up.”
Glen: “Call the question, Stu.”
Stu: “Okay. Let’s go around the table. I vote aye. Frannie?”
Fran: “Nay.”
Stu: “Glen?”
Glen: “Aye.”
Stu: “Suze?”
Sue: “Nay.”
Stu: “Nick?”
Nick: “Aye.”
Stu: “Ralph?”
Ralph: “Well—I don’t like it that much either, but if Nick’s for it, I got to go along. Aye.”
Stu: “Larry?”
Larry: “Want me to be frank? I think the idea sucks so bad I feel like a pay toilet. This is the kind of stuff you get when you’re at the top, I guess. Neat fucking place to be. I vote aye.”
Stu: “Motion’s carried, 5–2.”
Fran: “Stu?”
Stu: “Yes?”
Fran: “I’d like to change my vote. If we’re really going to put Tom into it, we better do it together. I’m sorry I made such a fuss, Nick. I know it hurts you—I can see it on your face. It’s so crazy! Why did any of this have to happen? It sure isn’t like being on the sorority prom committee, I’ll tell you that. Frannie votes aye.”
Sue: “Me too, then. United front. Nixon Stands Firm, Says I Am Not a Crook. Aye.”
Stu: “Amended vote is 7–0. Here’s a hanky, Fran. And I’d like the record to show that I love you.”
Larry: “On that note, I think we should adjourn.”
Sue: “I second that emotion.”
Stu: “It has been moved and seconded by Zippy and Zippy’s mom that we adjourn. Those in favor, raise your hands. Those opposed, be prepared to get a can of beer dumped on your head.”
The vote to adjourn was 7–0.
“Coming to bed, Stu?”
“Yeah. Is it late?”
“Almost midnight. Late enough.”
Stu came in from the balcony. He was wearing jockey shorts and nothing else; their whiteness was nearly dazzling against his tanned skin. Frannie, propped up in bed with a Coleman gas lantern on the night table next to her, found herself amazed again by the confident depth of her love for him.
“Thinking about the meeting?”
“Yes. I was.” He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the night table and grimaced at the flat, boiled taste.
“I thought you made a wonderful moderator. Glen asked you if you’d do it at the public meeting, didn’t he? Is it bothering you? Did you decline?”
“No, I said I would. I guess I can do that. I was thinking about sending those three across the mountains. It’s a dirty business, sending out spies. You were right, Frannie. Only trouble is, Nick was right, too. In a case like that, what you gonna do?”
“Vote your conscience and then get the best night’s sleep you can, I guess.” She reached out to touch the Coleman lamp switch. “Ready for the light?”
“Yeah.” She put it out and he swung into bed beside her. “Good night, Frannie,” he said. “I love you.”
She lay looking at the ceiling. She had made her peace with Tom Cullen… but that smudged chocolate thumbprint stayed on her mind.
Maybe I ought to tell Stu right now, she thought. But if there was a problem, it was her problem. She would just have to wait… watch… and see if anything happened.
It was a long time before she slept.
Chapter 52
In the early hours of the morning, Mother Abagail lay sleepless in her bed. She was trying to pray.
She got up without making a light and knelt down in her white cotton nightgown. She pressed her forehead to her Bible, which was open to the Acts of the Apostles. The conversion of dour old Saul on the Damascus road. He had been blinded by the light, and on the Damascus road the scales had fallen from his eyes. Acts was the last book in the Bible where doctrine was backed up by miracles, and what were miracles but the divine hand of God at work upon the earth?
And oh, there were scales on her eyes and would they ever be shaken free?
The only sounds in the room were the faint hiss of the oil lamp, the tick of her windup Westclox, and her low, muttering voice.
“Show me my sin, Lord. I don’t know. I know I’ve gone and missed something You meant for me to see. I can’t sleep, I can’t take a crap, and I don’t feel You, Lord. I feel like I’m prayin into a dead phone, and this is a bad time for that to happen. How have I offended Thee? I’m listenin, Lord. Listenin for the still, small voice in my heart.”
And she did listen. She put her arthritis-bunched fingers over her eyes and leaned forward even farther and tried to clear her mind. But all was dark there, dark like her skin, dark like the fallow earth that waits for the good seed.
But the image that rose was of a lonely stretch of dirt road in a sea of corn. There was a woman with a gunnysack full of freshly killed chickens. And the weasels came. They darted forward and made snatches at the bag. They could smell the blood—the old blood of sin and the fresh blood of sacrifice. She heard the old woman raise her voice to God, but her tone was weak and whining, a petulant voice, not begging humbly that God’s will be done, whatever her place in that will’s scheme of things might be, but demanding that God save her so she could finish the work… her work… as if she knew the Mind of God and could suborn His will to hers. The weasels grew bolder still; the croker sack began to fray as they twitched and pulled it. Her fingers were too old, too weak. And when the chickens were gone the weasels would still be hungry and they would come for her. Yes. They would—
And then the weasels were scattering, they had run squeaking into the night, leaving the contents of the sack half-devoured, and she thought exultantly:
In her vision, she turned, fear leaping hotly into her throat with a taste like fresh copper. And there, shouldering its way out of the corn like a ragged silver ghost, was a huge Rocky Mountain timberwolf, its jaws hanging open in a sardonic grin, its eyes burning. There was a beaten silver collar around its thick neck, a thing of handsome, barbarous beauty, and from it dangled a small stone of blackest jet… and in the center was a small red flaw, like an eye. Or a key.
She crossed herself and forked the sign of the evil eye at this dreadful apparition, but its jaws only grinned wider, and between them lolled the naked pink muscle of its tongue.
But she was so terrified! Not for the people around her, which were represented in her dream by the chickens in the sack, but for herself. She was afraid in her soul, afraid
