Hope, as an anchor so steadfast,
Rends the dark veil for the soul,
Whither the Master has entered,
Robbing the grave of its goal…
Whispering hope, oh how welcome thy voice,
Making my heart in its sorrow rejoice…
After the song, Wayne steps forward to read the scripture lesson, which was to have been on the theme of “The present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory to come,” from Romans. But with the arrival of the visitors, he switched—with the help of his wife Ludie Belle, who is a faster reader—to the theme of togetherness. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” he reads, and turns the page. “And then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord!” is the next passage, announcing the Rapture and taken from First Thessalonians, but he just has them caught up together in the clouds without yet meeting the Lord when more pops are heard out at the edge somewhere, and Gideon Diggs interrupts to say, “I don’t think them was firecrackers.” In the brief silence—even the birds have stopped their evensong—they listen to hear if there are more, and there are—not many—and then they stop. They seemed not far away, but sounds travel easily at this time of evening. “Where you suppose…?” Ben asks, cocking his ear, and Glenda Oakes, her one eye staring off into the distance, says, “In the garden.” “The garden?” She shrugs, draws her children closer and other children who have joined her own. “Go see, Wayne,” Ludie Belle says, and Wayne, who has armed himself for guard duty later tonight, sets off toward Mrs. Edwards’ garden, the other men following cautiously behind and, when no more shots are heard, the women follow too.
It is quiet down in the garden and there is no sign of intruders other than a few late-to-bed birds raiding the berry patch. Up in the trees, darkening now against a darkening sky, others are back at their lusty night-warble. The evening air is full of the rich midsummer fragrance of ripening fruits and vegetables. Such an abundance all about! They should get down here more often. And will have to, too, now that Sister Debra has been taken away. The only thing out of the ordinary is that the tool shed door is open. Inside they find Hazel Dunlevy and Welford Oakes with bullet holes in their foreheads. Neither are wearing much. In fact, they are not wearing anything at all. They seem quite peaceful. More souls to pray for, and some drop to their knees and commence to do so. Everyone knows who has done this. “We’ll have to call the sheriff,” someone says. People notice that their Nazarene friends have left. “Look at their hands,” Corinne Appleby says. “Like Jesus’ nail-wounds on the cross,” Wayne Shawcross observes. Corinne shakes her head. “Looks to me like he shot away their life lines.”
After the longest day: the shortest night. But one so steeped in legend, ritual, and superstition—or decayed religion, as superstition is sometimes called by those who do not see all religions as such—that it sometimes seems the longest one. A night of love oracles, fire festivals, fertility rites, and magical cures. Of witchcraft and drunken excess. Of dreaming awake. It marks the birth of the god of darkness, whose power now will wax as the sun god’s wanes, and thus marks the birth of madness and death. The sort of thoughts the amateur folklorist Sally Elliott might be entertaining as she removes her clothes at the shore of the moonlit lake, the deepening sky still faintly aglow—her body, too, for anyone there to see. Even in a rational age, should such a thing improbably exist, these sorts of notions would die hard, nurtured as they are by the common imagination and its craving for solace and meaning in the face of the faceless abyss. Tonight, for example, Angela Bonali has tied nine flowers with pieces of grass (only scattered clumps of it to be found in their muddy unkempt yard, but fortunately long as weeds), and after asking the cement Virgin in the yard for her blessing on them, has placed them under her pillow, hoping to dream later of her future husband—namely, Tommy Cavanaugh, whose picture she has taken from her diary and also put under the pillow just to be sure—because she read about this in a magazine for young mothers loaned to her by Stacy last week before Angela got fired at the bank. The magazine, the unreflecting carrier of these ancient fancies, also had astrology charts and hers told her to expect a change of fortune on the very day (or nearly) that the bank let her go. She is waiting at home tonight for Tommy’s call, which she has thought about so much it’s almost as though it has already happened. He wants to take her to the Blue Moon Motel and dance with her in front of all her friends, even with his face all bandaged up, so she has bathed and shampooed and done up her hair in a different way based on a picture she saw downtown this afternoon in Linda Catter’s beauty shop window (it was wrong to have a double banana split and a whole pizza both on the same day, but she had a desperate craving for them so powerful that it has not abated even with the satisfying of it, and in her condition what can you do?) and tweezed her eyebrows and shaved her armpits and other parts seen only when everything is seen (she has created a kind of fern-leaf pattern down there) and applied blush and mascara and lip gloss and eyeliner and perfumed her bra and panties and put on her most summery and revealing dress and practiced what she will say when he apologizes and begs her to return to him.
In another part of town, Franny Baxter is in like manner preparing for her marriage on the morrow. Her prospective sister-in-law has fashioned a wedding gown for her out of her own old wedding dress plus a couple of yards of white satin, taffeta, and chiffon to accommodate Franny’s more ample figure, and she is helping Franny now, after giving her a bath, with the applying of perfume and makeup (first time ever!). The groom will arrive home shortly before dawn, probably too drunk to stand and stinking of whorehouses and vomited rye whiskey and pizza. Tess will drag him under a cold shower and then present him with his bride, spread out on their marital bed like a lush prairie flower in full bloom, in her wedding dress but nothing else, hoping stupid Stevie has enough jism left after his night of debauchery to do the trick. In case he gets confused or falls asleep, Tess has a steel ruler close to hand to whack his backside and urge him on. Angie Bonali will fall asleep on top of her bed in her party dress, but not Franny Baxter.
Out on the Bonali front porch, Angela’s father, headachy after the late afternoon beers, is talking into the gathering night with Sal and Gabriela Ferrero, mostly about their early married years, and about their working days down in the mine, how tough and dirty it was, Gabriela remembering when Sal would come home with his shoes full of coaldust and looking like a colored man, but how heroic and full of camaraderie those days were, too, and how they are missed now. They have also been talking about Dave Osborne, who hanged himself today, and their pal Big Pete Chigi, who died of black lung, and poor dear Etta, the town’s dead hovering over them as if peering down on them from the chalky face of the moon, and Vince has been reminded of his old high school, mine, and union buddy, Angelo Moroni, how he used to wear his hat tipped down over his nose when he played pinochle, cracking wry one-liners, maybe it’s the tipped lopsided shape of the moon that has brought him to mind, poor old Ange, killed in the mine that awful night like so many good men. And now the foreclosure on this house, the only one he’s ever owned, the one Etta loved so much, he’s getting near to tears again. “Next stop, Sal: a charity old folks’ home. Good night, sweetheart. That’s all she wrote.”
This old family friendship is being perpetuated into the next generation tonight by the two friends’ sons: Vince’s boy Charlie and young Nazario, known to his pals as Moron, who are, along with a half dozen or so other members of Charlie’s newly formed Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force, on a reconnaissance mission at old man Suggs’ strip mine, where the Christian Patriots (fascists!) are holding their bi-weekly pep session, parade drill, and target practice under the instruction of Suggs’ black-bearded mine manager, who sleeps, it is rumored, under a Nazi flag. The Dagotown Devil Dogs, as they also call themselves, have climbed one of the ugly mou
nds thrown up by the strip mine and are watching the Patriots through a pair of binoculars they pass around. Charlie points his finger at them and makes soft thuckety-pop noises, which Moron and his buddies assume must be the sound of a revolver with a silencer on it. With hushed pow! and pock! sounds they follow Charlie’s lead and knock off a few Christian Patriots with their pointing fingers. When the sheriff comes banging out of the mine office and jumps into his squad car, the Dogs fade coolly into the night.
If it is a night of sudden death and dark omens, it is also a night of erotic festivity. The ecumenical stag party up at the Eagles is now in full swing and has been joined by another dozen or so revelers, few being of a mood on such a sweet summery night to say no to free whiskey and good-humored horseplay. Carlo Juliano has provided an old blue movie about a guy in an antique Model A Ford picking up two girls hitchhiking, but the film has come apart just as the girls were taking their pants down, so they are entertaining themselves by telling about the first time they got laid. High school virgins, Waterton whores, babysitters, stepsisters, friends’ mothers. Georgie Lucci makes up a story that he swears is true about a nymphomaniac nun who took him under her habit when he was eleven years old to show him what she called the pearly gates and insisted on his reciting the Pater noster when she took a grip on him and transported him into Heaven. Just when memories and imaginations are drying up, laconic Cokie Duncan, who has said very little all night while nevertheless holding his own with the bottle, surprises them with a story about taking a sweet young thing out into the fields and just as he’s humping her having her mother show up. “Haw!” snorts Stevie Lawson, slapping his knee. “What’d she say?” “Nuthin. She just went on eatin’ grass.” Which sets everyone off in drunken mooing. They’re having a grand time.
Soon they’ll be moving on to the Blue Moon Motel, where Duke L’Heureux and his partner Patti Jo Rendine, backed up on guitar by the local favorite Will Henry, are at this moment introducing, to enthusiastic cheers in a packed house, a new number written by Duke just this afternoon called “She’ll Let Me Know When It’s Time to Go.” All Duke’s and Patti Jo’s songs have gone down well tonight—“There’s Always a Bus Going Somewhere,” “A Toybox of Tears,” “Trailer Camp Blues,” “The Potholes Down Memory Lane”—and the record company people have taut knowing smiles on their faces, but the hit of the night is “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” which may or may not ever get sold over the counter. No one has ever heard a song like that before—not in a public place. They don’t know if they like it, but they keep asking for it over and over again, as if they can’t believe their ears.
A quieter sort of celebration of the solstice is taking place in the Presbyterian church basement, where Prissy Tindle, after a quick visit home to freshen up and pick up costumes and props and her portable record player and the little rabbit-ear TV from the studio (Ralph was more petulant than ever, she had to push him aside to get into her closet), is mentally choreographing her advertised midsummer night special: The Dance of the Wedding of Heaven and Earth, hoping, after chasing Wesley all over town today, she has strength enough left to perform it. It was originally meant to be performed in the wild by moonlight, but it’s now restricted to their hideout down here in the church basement by candlelight. It’s an all-night dance (though on such a night as this that’s not so long), and while Wesley and Jesus converse quietly but grumpily about the circumstances in which they find themselves, Prissy blocks out the main elements in roughly fifteen-minute segments and considers ways to enhance the performance space, which is mostly a cluttered concrete floor with bare walls, no mats and no mirrors, about which lack Jesus has already complained, whining wearily. It has been a long day for the poor man and his eyes are crossing, so she shortcuts her way to the finale (a majestic moment) so as to get started as quickly as possible, assuming her knack for improvisation will carry her through the unscored middle bits or maybe they’ll just skip them. She is, of course, Earth, and he is Sky or Heaven, which means she will be obliged to dance the climactic scene on her back, so she sets out some dusty sofa cushions for the purpose. But first comes the Setting Sun and Rising Moon Dance, and, using the “Grand Canyon Suite” for dramatic effect and then “Claire de Lune” as a soothing closing movement (she has a yin/yang thing in mind here), she pours into it all the terrors and joys of the day, for the sun and moon also chase themselves about in a fiery manner, never quite finding each other. It is one of her best dances ever, but she succeeds only in dancing her audience and dance partner to sleep just at the most poignant moment, when his own participation is called for. Well, in a way, it’s a relief. She rolls him over on his side to diminish the snoring, and regretting only that she forgot to bring a couple of jars of pickles and peanut butter to get her through the night, curls up beside him, dancing the Dance of the Exhausted Disciple.
Exhaustion has also at last dropped Debra Edwards into a heavy sleep in her hospital bed, that and strong medication. Worried about her unresponsive state of mind, Police Chief Dee Romano called the minister at Trinity Lutheran, which he understood from Officer Bo-sticker was the church being attended temporarily by the pastorless Presbyterians, and said he was sorry to bother him again, but would he be willing to come down to the station to provide some urgent spiritual counseling? Of course. Reverend Dreyer took one look at the woman there on the wretched jail-cell cot and said she was obviously suffering from dangerously deep depression and should be kept in hospital overnight, where she can be kept under medical observation. Her dreams there are of dreaming, with Glenda Oakes sitting at the edge of her dreams like a dark angel and commenting cruelly on them even as she dreams them, so she keeps trying to wake up to be free of the one-eyed harpie, but she cannot. Down the hospital corridor from her, Mr. John P. Suggs—who does not dream, as he says—is suffering his own kind of nightmare: he is trying to think. He has the sensation of being in a large empty house with hundreds of locked closet-sized rooms for which he has no key. Brute strength alone frees him from any one room, only to leave him in another exactly like the first. Bernice Filbert, sitting nearby in a lumpy hospital easy chair, dozing fitfully, can feel his struggle and it translates into her own fragmented dreams as its opposite: the desire to push herself down into sleep, free from the cares of the world; but those cares resist her and will not let her go.
Cokie Duncan has no such problems. He is out cold on the floor of the Eagles Social Club and he is not dreaming, his bombed brain cells are not up to it, but he is alone now under a scatter of playing cards randomly dealt upon him by his departing companions. They are now piling past the bouncer at the door of the Blue Moon Motel and entering the sound track of the final Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine number, an upbeat Elvis-influenced rendition of one of the motel’s theme songs, “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” the final number because the recording crew have quickly decided with the arrival of the whooping stag party that it is time to close up shop and get the hell out of here. Will Henry, too, is packing up his guitar and moving toward the door. The two singers are on a high, though—it has been the night of their lives—and when they get a clamorous request from the crowd pressing in around them on the dance floor for yet another refrain of “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” they cannot resist. It is into this festive congestion that tomorrow’s groom-to-be Steve Lawson and his rampageous pals stagger, not meaning to throw elbows and knock drinks out of people’s hands but not meaning not to either, too drunk for decision-making of any kind. Their goal is the tableful of drinks ordered up for the singers in the middle of the room and not yet consumed, their own supply exhausted, and, when reached, these are snatched up and passed around with a lot of hollering and cussing and laughing and generally obnoxious behavior. The freelance civil servant, Giorgio Lucci, the leader of this wild pack, gives a wave to his boss the fire chief who is just leaving, lets out a resounding coma-ti-yi-yippee-yippee-yo in acknowledgement of the hayseed performers, tosses back a tall glass of beer
in one long guzzle and finds himself face-to-face with the female half of the singing duo, no longer singing. He blinks in recognition, belches, grins his stand-up comedian’s grin. “‘Patti Jo.’ I’ll be damned! Patricia Josefina! I never forget a nose! You nearly fooled me with that hayseed act, Josie. Remember me? I once had my finger up your little patonza.” He grabs her in the crotch of her jeans, and sings: “So why not take all of me?” Doesn’t get past “all” before her musical partner and former bush league bullpen pitcher comes in with some high heat for his big K of the night. Which is the signal everyone has been waiting for.
Out at the lakes, far from the bench-clearing brawl erupting at the Blue Moon, Sally Elliott steps out of the cold lake waters as she stepped in, mooning the moon and musing about the whimsical customs of midsummer. A distant voice, floating with silvery clarity over the still waters, has just cried out: “Omigod! What are we doing?” “That was my mother’s voice,” she says, drying herself off with her shirt. “Let’s go.” Billy Don, still wearing his sunglasses, lingers in the water at waist level, wanting to stay cool as she has stayed cool and consequently self-conscious about his telltale arousal—which, for fear she will laugh at it, he is trying desperately but unsuccessfully to detumesce with prayer and the recitation of mathematical formulae and also with moral fortitude, the sort his baseball coach used to urge upon him, with equal lack of success, to discourage the sin of Onan. They have been playing a game of water tag that should have been more fun than it was, but Sally has done too much pool time and he has been unable to keep up with her, or else it was the beer (he’s not used to it), so he has rarely had his hands on her and then only fleetingly and not in the best places, which never seemed quite available. Like some kinds of knowledge he’s been offered in his life, but that he’s not been quite able to grasp, advanced calculus, for example. But just seeing her moonlit bottom bob up when she dove under water and feeling the swish of her as she passed suddenly between his legs have been enough to keep him in such an unholy fever it’s a wonder the water around him hasn’t started to boil. “Billy Don? Come on!” Still he hesitates. She seems to guess what’s troubling him and tosses him her shirt, the one that says give me a hug, turns her back and walks over to pull her jeans on. Using his boner as a shirt hanger is probably even more ridiculous than leaving it exposed and bobbing stupidly on its own, but that’s what he does, pretending to be drying himself off until he can reach his cast-off clothes. Still hasn’t been able to give her that hug. He doesn’t know why. Just too dumb, probably. This damp T-shirt between his legs, he’s pretty sure, is as close as he’s going to get.