Ahead of him by many hours went the black van with smoked windows (once the property of The Woods Center for Psychotherapy) driven by Pitt Thurston; Pitt leaned over the big wheel, his nose pointed eagerly toward the west, and now and then his lips drew back a little in a smile that revealed the tips of his canines. Ray Honeybeare beside him seemed asleep. In the seat behind them were Mike Mucho and Rose Ryder, erect and alert even after the long miles; silent though, nothing to say. Between them, Sam, silent too, knowing for the first time the melancholy of rainy winter highways at nightfall; and—hiding its light in the plastic backpack in her lap, unknown so far to anyone but her—the brown glass ball she had taken from the big commode in the living room of Arcady. The road straightened itself, the road to the west, pointing ahead, the long dashes that marked its hide appearing one after another out of the darkness to slide beneath the tires and be lost.
No that could not have been or there would have been no end to it; there is no end to it that way and we can never have found ourselves here doing this if we had gone that way and done that.
What happened was that as soon as Pierce started off from the street where Rose had lived he immediately lost himself, his earlier luck having run out; he found he could not both read the little map the woman had drawn and drive the car, and he took one wrong turn and then another. After a long anxious time he came upon signs for Route 6 and entered doubtfully upon it (a more confident car behind him honking at him to prod him along) and set out. Only after dark, when he had seen no promised signs for the westward road, did he recall or consider that he had seen the awful sun go down on his left (hadn’t he?) and that therefore it was certain (wasn’t it?) that he was going north not south, back the way he had come; but still he went on, unwilling to get off again for fear he would set off in another direction entirely and never find his way either there or back, and anyway shedding with every mile his conviction and his courage. Sometimes he wept.
Long after dark he turned in again at the Winterhalter gateposts, uncertain what he had done and what he had not done but rather seemed to have done. Of one thing he was certain, though: that he had failed again, this time utterly; and that when he came to this same place on the next turn of the rising spiral he would doubtless fail again, and then again, forever.
In his own house everything was as it had been, though seeming to have just hurried into place seconds before he arrived, and looking a little harried and disordered; he thought he heard a faint settling rattle from the crowded drawers of kitchen implements, a rustle from his papers in their piles. He went to the phone and lifted it warily, but the familiar tone was produced almost instantly. He thought with sick sadness of the news he must give. He dialed. No one answered at Arcady.
Meanwhile at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy (which according to the laws of the state had actually ceased to exist in the previous month, its assets being sold to satisfy its creditors), the lights were coming on. The black bulk of it was pierced by a few windows blinking open like eyes one or two at a time, starting with a string along the west basement where the laundry is, whose door was the only one to which the hopeful new possessors had been given a key.
It was Ray Honeybeare, and Mike Mucho and Sam, and a group of the others whom Ray had picked out to help make a thorough inventory of the place and its contents pursuant to a purchase-and-sale agreement.
Ray had asked Mike to come along at the last minute, just when Mike arrived at the Bypass Inn ready to go west with Pitt. Mike, seeing Ray so preoccupied and distant, had made no argument. Ray also suggested that Mike bring Sam along, her situation among them too new and unsettling, no reason to make her feel abandoned; and Ray had touched Sam’s hair with his big hand.
They went up floor by floor, switching on banks of lights as they went, finding the switches with a big red flashlight the vanguard carried. Laughing at their own voices echoing in the darkness, picking out spooky shapes with the lantern before resolving them with the overheads into timid inanimate objects, furniture and piled boxes. Mike Mucho lifted Sam so she could switch on some lights, click, lovely simple cause and effect. Ray Honeybeare came last, who as it happened had an unreasoning fear of the dark.
As though the sleeping pile awoke, startled and displeased, a dull rumble began all around them: the group in the basement had got the furnace going. The radiators were few and weak, never having been needed much; the heating system was high on the list of things that would need redoing. Ray had told them to bring sleeping bags and expect to be cold even in the daytime while the work of inventory and assessment was done.
They had intended to get here a lot earlier, and after a while Ray suggested that it was now so late that maybe they should start bedding down, and get an early start in the morning. Most of them elected to lay out their sleeping bags in the main-floor lounge, like a big sleepover, and there was more hilarity as the bathrooms were shared and nightclothes divulged, until Ray took out his small Testament and began looking for a passage he wanted to read; and then they grew quiet.
Mike was still in the bathroom, helping Sam get ready, watching her brush her teeth with great enthusiasm and flair and then sit on the pot, cheek in hand waiting.
“So that’s it?” Mike asked her. “All ready?”
“Well,” she said, and raised a forefinger. “I have to take my medicine.” “Do you always take it?”
“You-sually,” Sam said. “If I need to I can cancel.”
“You don’t like it.”
“Daddy,” she said, letting him know he was being obtuse. “Because it’s way down in the van,” Mike said. “I left it. I don’t know why I didn’t remember it. And we want to hear Ray read. Don’t we.”
“If I don’t take it Mommy cries.”
“Does she?”
“Sometimes. What I don’t like,” she said, “is the taste.” She made a face of tried patience and disgust, eyes crossed and lifted and her remarkable big pink tongue, long enough to touch her nose with, hanging down. Mike laughed and clasped her.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t think you have to take that medicine tonight. I don’t want you to have to take it. I think—I think there’s a way for you to never have to take it again.”
“Yay,” Sam said calmly, as though she had long expected this announcement, and it was overdue.
“Mommy doesn’t need to cry, Sam,” Mike said, and he bent and took her by the shoulders. Sam saw little starry tears inside his own eyes. “Nobody ever needs to cry.”
She took his hand and they went out into the big lounge, and the young people applauded her in her jammies; she wiggled into her sleeping bag, lined in flannel on which were printed cartoon people, Ray had shaken his head over them, smiling in something that was not quite amusement or even tolerance. After a few moments she got out again and dragged her plastic backpack near her, and got back in again.
Mike thought she would fall asleep while Ray read, but she didn’t. There was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon fought, and his angels; and prevailed not. After Ray had shut the book and prayed a while in silence, he gestured to Mike, who got up and went to him in sock feet. Ray turned to lead him out. When Mike looked back he could see Sam’s open eyes. Ray took his shoulder, and motioned with his great head toward the door.
“Be back in a minute, sweetie,” he whispered to Sam; he followed Ray out of the lounge and down the dim wood-panelled hall toward the former director’s office.
“I was going down to the van,” Mike said. “Sam’s medicine. I know you said, I mean I know how you feel about it, but in consideration of her mother.”
Ray looked at him in a way that Mike knew, as though he were waiting for Mike to be done, yet listening carefully.
“I mean what do you think, I.”
“Mike,” Ray said, to silence him gently, compel his attention, let him know Ray needed no further information. “Mike there’s a reason why this has happened to this child. I don’t know exa
ctly what the reason is and it may be, Mike, that you don’t know the reason either.”
He pointed Mike to a chair. He himself remained standing, leaning against the former director’s broad desk, his slippered feet crossed and his tartan robe tied loosely around him. Mike realized that he was sitting in the same chair, in the same room, where he had first applied for a job at The Woods.
“But maybe,” Ray said, “you do know it, or knew it once, and don’t remember it now.”
“I don’t know it, Ray,” Mike said. “I don’t.”
“This trouble that she’s experiencing now,” Ray said, as though he hadn’t heard Mike speak. “It was let into her at some past time somehow. This evil.”
“How do you mean, let into her.” A kind of internal noise like a rising wind was filling Mike’s ears. He thought at first that it was the roar of the far-off furnace, then knew it was not. “What time, when.”
“Well,” Ray said, and now he turned to look directly at him. “Mike, whenever it was—and maybe it was more than one time, I don’t know—it’s perhaps still giving strength to this thing. We don’t know that. But we know that something which can make such a little child so sick has got to have once been well fed. Do you understand? Got to have.”
“What are you saying, Ray. That I.”
As soon as these words left his mouth they seemed to Mike to be a lie, a form of lying, even though the words said nothing in themselves. Ray didn’t respond, but for a long time didn’t look away: as though Mike had not spoken, but might. Then he pushed his great body from the desk’s edge, and tightened his robe. “Throw away that medicine, Mike,” he said. “She’s not going to be helped by anything you put in her. There’s been enough of that.”
The phone’s ring in the midnight lifted Pierce bodily from his bed, like a cartoon animal.
“Hi Pierce. This is Rose Ryder.”
Cheery, as though she were in the neighborhood, just down the road or over the hill. But she could not be.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m,” she said, and seemed to study her surroundings, he could hear nothing, the swish maybe of a passing car. “I’m in Millstone.”
“In where?”
“Millstone, Ohio. Near Zanesville. The far side.”
“Rose,” he said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this,” she said. “I really meant to, last night.”
He couldn’t think for a moment what she meant, last night, then understood that yes it had been only twenty-four hours, less, since she had been with him here in this house.
“I’m going out to Indiana,” she said. “It happened really fast.”
“I know,” he said. “Indiana. I knew that.” There was a silence on her end that might have been wonderment or suspicion. “I went to your house today,” he said. “To your apartment.”
“Why?” she asked.
He couldn’t say, couldn’t remember; or what he remembered could not be said. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need me to come get you?”
“I’m fine.”
“I will. I can. I can leave now.”
“Pierce. I’m fine.”
He heard another car go past, there where she was. He saw her, for a moment, at a public phone, her eyes lowered and her hair falling over the instrument, a hand over her other ear to hear. “When will you come back?” he said. “Will you come back?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe when they finish the deal with The Woods and it reopens. They’re up there now, Ray and Mike and those. It’s all going so fast. So fast.”
“Mike’s not with you?”
“He’s coming soon,” she said. “Pierce, I’ve gotta go. Goodbye.”
“No.”
“I just wanted to tell you where I was,” she said. “Where I’m going. It wasn’t fair not to tell you.”
“Wait,” he cried; but Rose didn’t hear him, she had hung up, for the van’s horn had already sounded twice; the van waited, rain-slick and already exhaling whitely at the pumps. She’d told them she was only going to pee.
She wept a little, but in the rain no one would notice the wetness she wiped from her cheeks. All she wanted was what she wanted, and out there she would know, maybe, what that really was; and knowing it would not be different from having it. The side door of the van slid open for her as she approached. It was still many hours more.
The world is, or was then, a figuration, a cipher, an equation to be solved, a seal to be completed. It was also (as it is now) just a world, full of this and that in billions, unresolvable, both entire and infinite. Rose Ryder hadn’t remembered exactly what Pierce said about marriage on the night of the Ball, but what he told her had touched her, and left in her heart the conviction that after all he had not tried to use her awakening to God as a means of shedding her, the way most men would do, the way you would expect. It was for that reason that she thought she ought to give him a call from the road, to say goodbye. And because Pierce was someone who had never been able to tell left from right, and never would, he had been there in his house in Littleville to answer.
At length he put down the receiver, understanding there was no one any longer there. Then he picked it up again, and called Arcady again. This time the phone was answered. It was Brent Spofford.
“Hi, it’s Pierce.”
“Hi.”
“Is Rosie there?”
“She’s asleep,” said the shepherd, sounding wary and distant, which brought a furious blush to Pierce’s cheek and a corresponding icy grip to his heart; but there was no way to speak of what had occurred between himself and Rosie, supposing that something actually had.
“Well don’t get her,” Pierce said, but Spofford had already left the phone, and soon Pierce heard Rosie’s voice, and for a moment couldn’t speak, overcome with something, compassion or humility or grief.
“Pierce?” she said. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Home.” He gathered himself, cleared his throat of the coagulated tears and fears that had collected there. “I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but. I wanted to tell you. I think I know where Sam is.”
13
Far up on the slopes of Mount Randa, tallest of the hills that form the Faraways, there stands on an easterly bluff a monument, put up some years ago to honor that locally famous autodidact and visionary Hurd Hope Welkin, “the educated shoemaker,” naturalist, reformer, philosopher. The original plan for this monument had been a statue of the old man himself, not set up on a pedestal or pointing the way east, but just standing on the earth, bent and white-bearded, wearing the old checked suit and wide-awake hat he always went botanizing in; he would be caught having just spied a specimen in the mountain grasses, Silene virginica Hurdii, and bending to it: the moment before he heard what he afterward called “this loud though yet gentle noise,” on that “fair day in summer, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring”: that noise that awakened him.
The path upward to the monument from the valley below follows old cowpaths and loggers’ ways, coming and going on its traverses, disappearing into a slough or a woods and appearing again, marked occasionally with round rocks painted white. It was now dawn of the following day, once again mild in the Faraways, and from where the monument stood the sun could be seen beginning to rise, still molten and uncollected. On the path, far down, able to be discerned only by the hawks awakening on the heights, Pierce Moffett walked, climbing upward toward it. Now and then he paused and lifted his head, confused or alarmed, as though he too heard a loud though gentle noise; once he started back down again, only to stop, seeming to remember something, and turn to climb once more.
That there was a path upward to this place had been mentioned to Pierce on the first day he had come to the Faraways. Brent Spofford amid his sheep had pointed upward, and they had talked of one day going all the way up to the spot. And on this day, when Pierce found himself long before dawn
still awake, he decided that rather than dispute further with the demons gathered around his bed he would get up, throw on some clothes, and go for a walk. A good long walk. He set out, and past the Littleville post office, not a mile from the Winterhalters’, he came across a small road he had not noticed before, marked by an enamelled sign pointing upward, with the symbol of the shoemaker’s last on it; and he turned up that way. His disputants had not been left behind, but went along with him, and he told and retold his story to them, or refuted theirs; they charged him with his sins, and he denied or admitted them. Then he began again. Now and then he stopped, looked around himself in wonder to find himself here, the world too; tried to judge how far he had walked, and failed; told himself to go back, and instead went on.
The long view from the monument on the heights had formerly been even longer, before the mountain farms were given up and their pastures filled up with quaking aspen, sumac, balm-of-Gilead poplars, firs and pine. You could have seen then all the way down to where the Shadow River joins the Blackbury, and runs to pour over the curve of the earth. Down there now, in the wooded hills, were the lights of Blackbury Jambs, still lit: the all-night gas station blue, the streetlights yellow.
Lights were lit too in Allan Butterman’s office, where the counsellor was already at work though nobody else in the Ball Building was. He had court appearances today and felt unready, had come in in his sweats to look over the papers his secretary had prepared the night before and left neatly flagged and tabbed. On the hat-rack his black suit and white shirt hung like armor waiting to be donned.
“Well it’s not theirs yet,” he said to Rosie Rasmussen. “Maybe it never will be.”
Rosie had called and found him here. He had tried to ignore the call, but on the fourth ring he had given in.
“No?” Rosie said. “It’s where they are right now. Moving in.”
“Well we’ve found some things out,” Allan said. “In the first place they are not a registered nonprofit, as they have listed themselves as being.”