hat they smelled.
I got to give it to them. It was all for nothing. If I don't give it to them, they'll rip me to pieces to get it. All for nothing.
In the darkness of her mind she could see the dark man's grin, she could see his fists held out and the blood dripping from them.
Another tug at the bag. And another.
The weasels on the far side of the road were now squirming across toward her, low, their bellies in the dust. Their little savage eyes glinted like icepicks in the moonlight.
But whosoever believeth on Me, behold, he shall not perish... for I have put My sign on him and no thing shall touch him ... he is Mine, saith the Lord ...
She stood up, still terrified, but now sure of what she must do. "Get out!" she cried. "It's chicken, all right, but it's for my company! Now you all git!"
They drew back. Their little eyes seemed to fill with unease. And suddenly they were gone like drifting smoke. A miracle, she thought, and exultation and praise for the Lord filled her. Then, suddenly, she was cold.
Somewhere, far to the west, beyond the Rockies that were not even visible on the horizon, she felt an eye--some glittering Eye--suddenly open wide and turn toward her, searching. As clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud she heard him: Who's there? Is it you, old woman?
"He knows I'm here," she whispered in the night. "Oh help me, Lord. Help me now, help all of us."
Dragging the towsack, she began to walk home again.
They showed up two days later, on July 24. She hadn't got as much done as she would have liked in the way of preparations; once again she was lame and almost laid up, able to hobble from one place to another only with the aid of her cane and hardly able to pump water up from the well. The day after killing the chickens and standing off the weasels, she had fallen asleep for a long time in the afternoon, exhausted. She dreamed she was in some high cold pass in the middle of the Rockies, west of the Continental Divide. Highway 6 stretched and twisted between high rock walls that shaded this gap all day long, except from about eleven forty-five in the morning until about twelve-fifty in the afternoon. It was not daylight in her dream but full, moonless dark. Somewhere, wolves were howling. And suddenly an Eye had opened in all that darkness, rolling horribly from one side to the other while the wind moved lonesomely through the pines and the blue mountain spruce. It was him, and he was looking for her.
She had awakened from that long, heavy nap feeling less rested than she had when she lay down, and again she prayed to God to let her off, or at least change the direction He wanted her to go in.
North, south, or east, Lord, and I'll leave Hemingford Home singing Your praises. But not west, not toward that dark man. The Rockies ain't enough to have between him and us. The Andes wouldn't be enough.
But it didn't matter. Sooner or later, when that man felt he was strong enough, he would come looking for those who would stand against him. If not this year, then next. The dogs were gone, carried off by the plague, but the wolves remained in the high mountain country, ready to serve the Imp of Satan.
And it was not just the wolves that would serve him.
On the morning of the day her company finally arrived she had begun at seven, lugging wood two sticks at a time until the stove was hot and her woodbox full. God had favored her with a cool, cloudy day, the first in weeks. By nightfall there might be rain. The hip she'd broken in 1958 said so, anyway.
She baked her pies first, using the canned fillings from the shelves in her pantry and the fresh rhubarb and strawberries from the garden. The strawberries had just come on, praise God, and it was good to know they weren't going to go to waste. Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life. A blueberry pie, two strawberry-rhubarb, and one apple. The smell of them filled the morning kitchen. She set them on the kitchen windowsills to cool as she had all her life.
She made the best batter she could, although it was hard going with no fresh eggs--there she'd been, right in the henhouse, and she had no one to blame but herself. Eggs or no, by early afternoon the small kitchen with its hilly floor and faded linoleum was filled with the smell of frying chicken. It had gotten pretty toasty inside and so she hobbled out to the porch to read her daily lesson, using her dog-eared last copy of The Upper Room to fan her face.
The chicken came out just as light and nice as you could want. One of those fellows could go out and pick her two dozen butter-and-sugar ears of corn, and they would have themselves a good sit-down feed outside.
After the chicken was put on paper towels, she went on out to the back porch with her guitar, sat down, and began to play. She sang all her favorite hymns, her high and quivering voice drifting into the still air.
"Have we trials and temptations,
Are we cumbered with a load of care?
We must never be discouraged,
Take it to the Lord in prayer."
The music sounded so fine to her (even though her ear had failed to a degree where she could never be sure her old git was in tune) that she played another hymn, and another, and another.
She was settling down to "We Are Marching to Zion" when she heard the sound of an engine off to the north, coming down County Road toward her. She stopped singing but her fingers continued to twiddle absently on the strings as she cocked her head and listened. Coming, yes Lord, they found their way just fine, and now she could see the spume of dust the truck was throwing as it left the tar and came onto the dirt track that stopped in her dooryard. A great, welcoming excitement filled her and she was glad she had put on her for-best. She put her git between her knees and shaded her eyes, although there was still no sun.
Now the engine sound was much louder and in a moment, where the corn gave way for Cal Goodell's cattle wade--
Yes, she could see it, an old Chevrolet farm truck, moving slow. The cab was full; four people crammed in there by the looks (there was nothing wrong with her long vision, even at a hundred and eight), and three more in the truckbed, standing up and looking over the cab. She could see a thinnish blond man, a girl with red hair, and in the middle ... yes, that was him, a boy who was just finishing up learning about being a man. Dark hair, narrow face, high forehead. He saw her sitting on her porch and began to wave frantically. A moment later the blond man copied him. The redheaded girl just looked. Mother Abagail raised her own hand and waved back.
"Praise God for bringin em through," she muttered hoarsely. Tears coursed warmly down her cheeks. "My Lord, I thank You so."
The pickup, rattling and jouncing, turned into the yard. The man behind the wheel was wearing a straw hat with a blue velvet band and a big feather tucked into it.
"Yeeeeee-haw!" he shouted, and waved. "Hi there, Mother! Nick said he thought you might be here and here you be! Yeeeeee-haw!" He laid on the horn. Sitting with him in the cab was a man of about fifty, a woman of the same age, and a little girl in a red corduroy jumper. The little girl waved shyly with one hand; the thumb of the other was corked securely in her mouth.
The young man with the eyepatch and the dark hair--Nick-- jumped over the side of the truck even before it had stopped. He caught his balance and then walked slowly toward her. His face was solemn, but his eye was alight with joy. He stopped at the porch steps and then looked around wonderingly ... at the yard, the house, the old tree with its tire swing. Most of all at her.
"Hello, Nick," she said. "I'm glad to see you. God bless."
He smiled, now beginning to shed his own tears. He came up the steps toward her and took her hands. She turned her wrinkled cheek toward him and he kissed it gently. Behind him, the truck had stopped and everyone got out. The man who had been driving was holding the girl in the red jumper, who had a cast on her right leg. Her arms were linked firmly around the driver's sunburned neck. Next to him stood the fiftyish woman, next to her the redhead and the blond boy with the beard. No, not a boy, Mother Abagail thought; he's feeble. Last in line stood the other man who had been riding in the cab. He was polishing the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
Nick was looking at her urgently, and she nodded.
"You done just right," she said. "The Lord has brought you and Mother Abagail is going to feed you.
"You're all welcome here!" she added, raising her voice. "We can't stay long, but before we do any moving on, we'll rest, and break bread together, and have some fellowship one with the other."
The little girl piped up from the safety of the driver's arms: "Are you the oldest lady in the world?"
The fiftyish woman said: "Shhhh, Gina!"
But Mother Abagail only put a hand on her hip and laughed. "Mayhap I am, child. Mayhap I am."
She got them to spread her red-checked tablecloth on the far side of the apple tree and the two women, Olivia and June, spread the picnic lunch while the men went off to pick corn. It was short work to boil it up, and while there was no real butter, she had plenty of oleo and salt.
There was little talk during the meal--mostly the sound of chomping jaws and little grunts of pleasure. It did her heart good to see folks dig into a meal, and these folks were doing her spread full justice. It made her walk to Richardsons' and her tussle with those weasels seem more than worthwhile. It wasn't that they were hungry, exactly, but when you've spent a month eating almost nothing that hasn't come out of a can, you get a powerful hunger for something fresh and just cooked special. She herself put away three pieces of chicken, an ear of corn, and a little smidge of that strawberry-rhubarb pie. When it was all gone, she felt as full as a bedtick in a mattress.
When they got settled and the coffee was poured, the driver, a pleasant, open-faced man named Ralph Bretner, told her: "That was one dilly of a meal, ma'am. I can't remember when anything hit the spot so good. Thanks are in order."
The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded.
The little girl said, "Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?"
"I think you'd be too heavy, honey," the older woman, Olivia Walker, said.
"Nonsense," Abagail said. "The day I can't take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina."
Ralph carried her over and set her down. "When she gets too heavy, you just tell me." He tickled Gina's face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. "Don't tickle me, Ralph! Don't you dare tickle me!"
"Don't worry," Ralph said, relenting. "I'm too full to tickle anyone for long." He sat down again.
"What happened to your leg, Gina?" Abagail asked.
"I broke it when I fell out of the barn," Gina said. "Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life." She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled.
Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all.
"God's mercy," Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl's hair.
Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She'd been playing in the hayloft of her uncle's barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail's dress).
Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness.
"Course it was," Abagail said. "If you'd missed her, she would have just pined away."
Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy.
"I'll take her now," Olivia Walker said.
"Put her in the little room at the end of the hall," Abby said. "You can sleep with her, if that's what you want. This other girl ... what did you say your name was, honey? It's slipped my mind for sure."
"June Brinkmeyer," the redhead said.
"Well, you c'n sleep with me, June, unless you've some other mind. The bed ain't big enough for two, and I don't think you'd want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there's a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain't got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess."
"Sure," Ralph said.
Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back.
"Maybe the old ways are best," Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled.
"I mean," Dick went on a little defensively, "that's the first home-cooked meal I've had since ... well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now ... she was one hell of a good cook. She ..." He trailed off blankly.
Olivia came back in. "Fast asleep," she said. "That was a tired girl."
"Do you bake your own bread?" Dick asked Mother Abagail.
"Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain't yeast bread; all the yeast has gone over. But there's other kinds."
"I crave bread," he said simply. "Helen ... my wife ... used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy."
"Tom Cullen's tired," Tom said abruptly. "M-O-O-N, that spells tired." He yawned bone-crackingly.
"You can bed down in the shed," Abagail said. "It smells a bit musty, but it's dry."
For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.
"I guess you got your campin gear?" she asked them.
"All kinds," Ralph said. "We'll be fine. Come on, Tom." He stood up.
"I wonder," Abagail said, "if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph."
Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn't talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled.
"Could you get me that mattress?" June asked softly.
"Nick and I will get it," Ralph said, standing up.
"I don't want to go out in that back shed all by myself," Tom said. "Laws, no!"
"I'll go out with you, hoss," Dick said. "We'll light the Coleman lamp and bed down." He rose. "Thanks again, ma'am. Can't tell you how good all this has been."
The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dick--needing only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thought--went out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen.
"Mind if I smoke, ma'am?" Ralph asked.
"Not so long as you don't tap ashes on the floor. There's an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you."
Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face.
She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn't been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells.
"Ma'am?"
She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.
"Nick says ..." Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.
"Go ahead."
"His note says it's hard to read your lips because--"
"I guess I know why," she said. "No fear."
She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.
She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.
"Lord God I have suffered," Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.
"We got to talk," she said. "You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out."
"Well," Ralph said, "