The Stand

But the wolf only grinned and drew closer. She shrank from its breath, which was heavy and savage. This was the terror at noonday and the terror which flieth at midnight, and she was afraid. She was in her extremity of fear. And the wolf, still grinning, began to speak in two voices, asking and then answering itself.

“Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty? ”

“I did,” the wolf answered in a petulant, half-crowing, half-cowering voice.

“Who saved us when we did faint? ” asked the grinning wolf, its muzzle now only bare inches from her, its breath that of a living abattoir.

“I did,” the wolf whined, drawing closer still, its grinning muzzle full of sharp death, its eyes red and haughty. “Oh fall down and praise my name, I am the bringer of water in the desert, praise my name, I am the good and faithful servant who brings water in the desert, and my name is also the name of my Master —”

The mouth of the wolf opened wide to swallow her.

“… my name,” she muttered. “Praise my name, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him ye creatures here below…”

She raised her head and looked around the room in a kind of stupor. Her Bible had fallen to the floor. There was dawnlight in the eastward-facing window.

“O my Lord!” she cried in a great and quavering voice.

Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty?

Was that it? Dear God, was that it? Was that why the scales had covered her eyes, making her blind to the things she should know?

Bitter tears began to fall from her eyes and she got slowly and painfully to her feet and walked to the window. Arthritis jabbed blunt darning needles into the joints of her hips and knees.

She looked out and knew what she had to do now.

She went back to the closet and pulled the white cotton nightgown over her head. She dropped it on the floor. Now she stood naked, revealing a body so lapped with wrinkles that it might have been the bed of time’s great river.

“Thy will be done,” she said, and began to dress.

An hour later she was walking slowly west on Mapleton Avenue toward the wooded tangles and narrow- throated defiles beyond town.

Stu was at the power plant with Nick when Glen burst in. Without preamble he said, “Mother Abagail. She’s gone.”

Nick looked at him sharply.

“What are you talking about?” Stu asked, at the same time drawing Glen away from the crew wrapping copper wire on one of the blown turbines.

Glen nodded. He had ridden a bike the five miles out here, and he was still trying to catch his breath.

“I went over to tell her a little about the meeting last night, and to play her the tape, if she wanted to hear it. I wanted her to know about Tom, because I was uneasy about the whole idea… what Frannie had to say kind of worked on me in the wee hours, I guess. I wanted to do it early because Ralph said there’s another two parties coming in today and you know she likes to greet them. I went over around eight-thirty. She didn’t answer my knock, so I went on in. I thought if she was asleep I’d just leave… but I wanted to make sure she wasn’t… wasn’t dead or anything… she’s so old.”

Nick’s gaze never left Glen’s lips.

“But she wasn’t there at all. And I found this on her pillow.” He handed them a paper towel. Written on it in large and trembling strokes was this message:

I must be gone a bit now. I’ve sinned and presumed to know the Mind of God. My sin has been PRIDE, and He wants me to find my place in His work again.

I will be with you again soon if it is God’s will.

Abby Freemantle

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Stu said. “What do we do now? What do you think, Nick?”

Nick took the note and read it again. He handed it back to Glen. The fierceness had died out of his face and he only looked sad.

“I guess we’ll have to move up that meeting to tonight,” Glen said.

Nick shook his head. He took out his pad, wrote, tore it off, and handed it to Glen. Stu read it over his shoulder.

“Man proposes, God disposes. Mother A. was fond of that one, used to quote it frequently. Glen, you yourself said she was other-directed; God or her own mind or her delusions or whatever. What’s to coo? She’s gone. We can’t change it.”

“But the uproar—” Stu began.

“Sure, there’s going to be an uproar,” Glen said. “Nick, shouldn’t we at least have a meeting of the committee and discuss it?”

Nick jotted, “What purpose? Why have a meeting that can’t accomplish anything?”

“Well, we could get up a search-party. She can’t have gone far.”

Nick double-circled the phrase Man proposes, God disposes. Below it he wrote, “If you found her, how would you bring her back? Chains?”

“Jesus, no!” Stu exclaimed. “But we can’t just let her wander around, Nick! She’s got some crazy idea she’s offended God. What if she feels like she has to go off into the frigging wilderness, like some Old Testament guy?”

Nick wrote, “I’m almost positive that’s just what she’s done.”

“Well, there you go!”

Glen put a hand on Stu’s arm. “Slow down a minute, East Texas. Let’s look at the implications of this.”

“To hell with the implications! I don’t see no implications in leaving an old woman to wander around day n night until she dies of exposure!”

“She is not just any old woman. She is Mother Abagail and around here she’s the Pope. If the Pope decides he has to walk to Jerusalem, do you argue with him if you’re a good Catholic?”

“Goddammit, it’s not the same thing and you know it!”

“Yes, it is the same thing. It is. At least, that’s how the people in the Free Zone are going to see it. Stu, are you prepared to say for sure that God didn’t tell her to go out into the bushes?”

“No-oo… but…”

Nick had been writing and now he showed the paper to Stu, who had to puzzle out some of the words. Nick’s handwriting was usually impeccable, but this was hurried, perhaps impatient.

“Stu, this changes nothing, except that it will probably hurt the Free Zone’s morale. Not even sure that will happen. People aren’t going to scatter just because she’s gone. It does mean we won’t have to clear our plans with her right now. Maybe that’s best.”

“I’m going crazy,” Stu said. “Sometimes we talk about her as an obstacle to get around, like she was a roadblock. Sometimes you talk about her like she was the Pope, and she couldn’t do anything wrong if she wanted to. And it just so happens that I like her. What do you want, Nicky? Someone stumbling over her body this fall in one of those box canyons west of town? You want us to leave her out there so she can make a… a holy meal for the crows?”

“Stu,” Glen said gently. “It was her decision to go.”

“Oh, god-damn, what a mess,” Stu said.

By noon, the news of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had swept the community. As Nick had predicted, the general feeling was more one of unhappy resignation than alarm. The sense of the community was that she must have gone off to “pray for guidance,” so she could help them pick the right path to follow at the mass meeting on the eighteenth.

“I don’t want to blaspheme by calling her God,” Glen said over a scratch lunch in the park, “but she is a sort of God-by-proxy. You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.”

“Run that one by me again.”