Apocalypse (19 page)

“A bear!” From the expression on young Tammy's face, this was a more shocking and unsettling event than if it had been a neighbor. People killed each other routinely on TV, but bears were Paddington and Pooh and Theodore; bears were for hugging.

“A bear. Somebody shot a black bear and put dungarees on it, hung it up there, poured gas on it and set it on fire. God knows why.” Cally saw Sojourner standing straight and gray on her shadowy porch, waved, then herded her kids back toward home and bed.

Sojourner watched after her retreating neighbors, but her mind remained on the girl who had been raped, whom she no longer remembered by any other title but that. The girl had worked, she remembered, at the sewing factory. After the rape there had been an arrest, and after the arrest, while the girl lay in her hospital bed, a mob of women from the sewing factory had stormed the jail and demanded that the man be handed over to them. Some of them had kitchen knives, wanted to take care of him so he wouldn't rape anybody again, and some of them had ropes, wanted to string him up from the water tower where everybody could see, though Sojourner doubted they would have set him on fire with gasoline. A nice touch like that they weren't likely to think of. Still, it would have taught rapists a lesson if they had got their hands on the man. But the pigheaded police wouldn't let the women have him. The man had been put away as mental. Just put away, with his pecker not cut off or anything. What was the good of just sending him away? Suppose he got loose, what might he do?

Sojourner sighed for what might have been and for the foolishness of humankind, took one last look around the quieting town, then before going indoors turned her eyes heavenward and surveyed the moon. A ring around it. Bad weather coming. Weather hadn't been right, hadn't been the same since the confounded government and the know-it-all scientists had messed around with the moon.

“What I mean,” said borough council President Wozny, “we got to find out who is doing this all.”

Like everyone else in Hoadley, he had found the night of the blazing bear oddly unsettling. Something about the incident seemed like a threat. More than a threat. Deviant. Sick. So much so that he had called a special meeting of the town council to address the problem, if there was one.

“Isn't it a police matter?” Council Secretary Zephyr Zook challenged. Looking at her, Wozny knew why some of these daunting old women still wore those long-out-of-date, rhinestoned wing-shaped glasses; they glinted hard and sharp as spearheads.

“It's a matter for all concerned citizens.” The president, who planned to seek re-election in the fall, looked around nervously, not sure whether he would come out of this meeting with his prestige enhanced or ruined. “It's everybody's concern when there's rumors like there been.” Council President Wozny let his voice sink to a dark and serious tone. “What I mean, there might be a panic if we don't do something. Everybody been seeing and hearing strange things. I hear there's talk about a witch been doing things.”

The response was far more forthright than he expected. “If there is a witch,” an outspoken old German snapped, “it's easy to tell who. That Ahira woman.”

The council had discussed Ahira at a previous meeting—or, rather, not at the council meeting itself, but at the real meeting of minds in the parking lot afterward—much as it had discussed barking dogs, without reaching any conclusion. The attitude of most upstanding Hoadley citizens toward Ahira was to ignore her as a nuisance and hope she would go away. The council had adopted the same attitude up until Gerald Wozny had mentioned witchcraft. Neither council nor president remembered in any conscious manner that the witchcraft idea had been brought before them first by Shirley. They had discounted her, and therefore regarded the concept as their own.

There followed one of those peculiarly circuitous and nonparliamentary discussions characteristic of governing boards of the town. The more important the matter under discussion, the less likely it was that a formal motion would be made. Herd instinct prevailed in Hoadley. No one wanted to stand apart from the crowd; therefore courtesy demanded that no member be required to ascend to the block and assume the neck-out position. Moreover, the tacit rule was that the council as a whole would not care to stand on record concerning any matter that was likely to come back to haunt it. Witch hunting qualified splendidly as such a specter. Zephyr Zook, finding in the nebulous swirl of talk no statement on which to hang her note-taking, laid down her spiral-bound notebook and Bic pen while the council, like a convocation of starlings, began without any discernible leadership to move in unison.

“Take her in for vagrancy?”

“What I mean, didn't none of this start to happen till after she come here.”

“Police say they can't do nothing.”

“They could, but they don't want to.”

“You don't want to get in a pissing contest with a skunk, what I mean.”

“Can't blame them. Look what happened to Reverent Culp.”

“Coroner said that was heart attack.”

“It don't matter. She done it to him all the same.”

“No great loss.”

“That's for sure.”

“Two of a kind, what I say.”

“Seems to me Father Leopold might could do something about her if we asked him.”

“What I mean, a town can't go letting a witch walk around like regular people.”

“What about Reverent Berkey? We could get Reverent Berkey to go talk to her.”

President Gerald Wozny sat by and nodded and tried not to let his mouth come open like that of a mutt hanging out a car window. He had never known the council to move with such speed. Within the single evening Ahira had been reclassified from annoyance to public enemy, from a gnat to a pestilence-carrying rat to be driven out or extirpated. In fact, the main problem was likely to be one of choosing the appropriate exterminator. Roman Catholics out-numbered Protestants, on the council, as they did in Hoadley proper, but simple majority would mean a vote, and a vote would mean a motion, on the record and therefore unthinkable. An accord had to be reached.

Wozny had opened the meeting intending to play the part of the rumor-scotcher, the level-headed, public-spirited leader paternally telling the citizenry to be calm and law-abiding. But the proper politician takes credit as credit comes. Wozny was equally pleased to find himself the nominal head of a righteous crusade. With rising excitement he realized that someday he, a Protestant, might be able to run for mayor if he could keep himself in the good with Protestants and Catholics both. He said, “How about Father Leopold
and
Reverent Berkey?”

It was settled, of course, after the formal meeting was over. The more important the matter, the less was actually said at the end. There were a few grunts and a soundless chorus of nodding, and it was understood that someone, eyed but unnamed, would speak to each of the divines, and that something was to be done about Ahira.

The priest came to the park in full liturgical regalia, in cassock and embroidered, lace-edged surplice, his heavy pectoral cross glinting on his white bosom, the symbols on his stole glimmering gold in the dusk. He progressed like a battleship under billowing sail, and in his wake an altar boy in alb and cincture swung a thurible giving off the smoke of consecrated incense to drive away demons. At the priest's side walked the Brethren pastor, hollow-chested and craterous of face, in soot-black suit and severe tie, black zippered Bible in hand. Behind the holy and ecumenical duo, but keeping a cautious distance, crowded the town council members and a few other clergy, nuns and church hangers-on, including Pastor Berkey's secretary (decently attired in skirt and sensible heels), Cally Wilmore.

The assembled misfits stared when they saw this strange congregation approaching, but Ahira laughed out loud, a lovely, ringing laugh out of her proud and lovely mouth.

The priest sketched the sign of the cross in her direction. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he and the Protestant pastor intoned in unison.

“In the name of the earth, and of the moon, and of the stars!” Ahira shouted back, still laughing. “You people can do nothing against me.”

Father Leopold carried an Occasional Service Book containing a text for exorcism, which he began to read in a droning voice, to no effect except that Ahira stopped laughing and listened with her head cocked catwise, smiling. “Old man in drag,” she interrupted after a while, “I like your dress. Where could I get one like it?”

The grim-faced Brethren pastor was growing angry, and impatient with the priest's droning. “Witch of Satan!” he shouted with thunder force, “Begone from this place!”

“The best lack all conviction,” said Ahira quietly, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Listening, Cally Wilmore startled like a deer, completing in her mind Yeats's next lines:
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand
.

Yet Ahira veered away from prophecy into mockery. “Old crow,” she jeered at Pastor Berkey, “why don't you wear a pretty dress and a necklace, like your friend?”

The individual in question lifted his Bible, directing its cross-embossed cover toward the enemy, and shook it at her—or else his hand shook with fury, as did his voice. “
This
is my clothing, my shield, my armor!” he cried. “This, the cross of Christ and the word of God!” It was a dramatic moment, and the priest did not wish to be left out. He abandoned his droned exorcism and lifted his pectoral cross in his hand, stepping forward. The Protestant minister was quick to step forward as well. Ahira addressed them sweetly.

“You two righteous fools,” she said, “don't you know why you can do nothing against me? It is because you are a pair of frauds.” Her voice rang out over the listening crowd. “You pretend to come here in ‘Christian love,' but you hate each other.”

Her people, the misfits, stood gathered around her feet, their numbers sufficient to fill the park, and none of them had deserted her, though many of them had flinched back from the pastor, the priest and the attendant pillars of Hoadley.

To the two divines Ahira said, “I know what you have called each other in your prayers.”

They shouted at her, the one in English, the other in Latin, their mixing voices incomprehensible. Ahira spoke nearly in a whisper, yet her words carried throughout the crowd.

“All you fat-ass normals in this smug town, listen to me: there is not one of you fit to face me. Not one pure of heart. Hypocrites.” Ahira included all the intruders in her glance. “I know your secrets. I know how you fondle yourselves in the dark. I know which ones have latches on the outside of the bedroom closet door, and where you keep the whips and shackles. I know which woman sucks her little boy to give him a hard on. I know which man locks himself in the bathroom to sniff his daughter's underthings waiting for the laundry there. I know which men go to whores, and which ones go to other men, and I know which ones love their neighbors, and which ones love other women. I know which man likes to touch little girls. I know which man likes to beat little girls. I know which men have done rape and gotten away with it, and which woman has done murder and gotten away with it, and which one of you has killed animals and set them afire, and would love to do the same to neighbors.”

The crowd of the righteous had gone utterly silent, the council members and churchgoers and pastor listening intently to a soft, low, shocking voice, even the priest leaning forward to hear, and in the dusk above the grass of the park the bronze horseman sat silent, immobile, impotent, and the many fireflies winked slowly, like the myriad eyes of God—or the devil. One or the other, Cally Wilmore thought hazily, was in Ahira. What God knew, this woman seemed to know. Or what the devil knew, for why should the knowledge of the devil be any less than that of God? Though, thank God or the devil, Ahira had not mentioned mayapple or a love god like white sugar or Cally's own humiliating secret.

There had to be at least one pure and courageous person, one Galahad in Hoadley.… Mark? No, Mark was just an ordinary, whining man and no savior, at least not for her, though half the town looked to him as their white knight—but there had to be at least one truly good person, Cally thought. Reverend Berkey? She would have sworn Reverend Berkey was a saint, yet even his ascetic back, to which she looked, appeared bent, rusty black and defeated. What was his weakness? Did everyone, everyone in the whole world, have a dark secret and a hidden shame?

“Not one of you is fit to face me,” said Ahira.

The priest, the ship of the church, who had been listing badly, straightened and swelled, his sails full of stung pride. “Insolent sprout of Satan!” he intoned. “The might of the Lord God Omnipotent—”

“Is not in you. Is as nothing, compared to the might of those your God has trampled into dirt. Watch, priest.” Easily, casually, Ahira reached over the gazebo railing and touched the misfit who stood closest to her. It was the bald girl, who screamed, not in fright or pain, but in sheer startled ecstasy, for the touch of Ahira's hand put hair on her afflicted head: richly curling, shoulder-length fawn-brown hair, properly accessorized by eyebrows and eyelashes in the appropriate places. Her undistinguished face, awash in hair and alight with joy, looked very nearly beautiful. With a gentle hand Ahira turned her to face the onlookers.

“Can you do this, priest?”

A gasp and babble had gone up from the crowd, but the priest did not add to it or silence it; he seemed unable to speak. He had witnessed a healing, a miracle. The devil could quote Scripture, but only prophets and saints and messiahs were supposed to be able to do what he had just seen done.

“And the Antichrist,” Ahira added pleasantly, as if she had heard his thoughts. Like Jesus coming down from the mount she came down the gazebo steps to the bottom one and beckoned the erstwhile-bald girl to her side. With the same offhand but tender grace she lifted the plenitude of hair at the youngster's temple. There, just at the zygomatic arch, showed a dark red mark.