Apocalypse (37 page)

“Hot!” she exclaimed.

“Well, of course,” Mark grumbled, laying hold of common sense and hugging it to his mind as a child hugs a flannel blanket. Embers glowed like small earth-fettered stars all around his wife, stirred up from under ashes by her feet. There had been a fire; the horse would be hot.

Though it should also be charred to ruins. “It's not that,” Cally said, and she hitched to the horse's head, looked up into blue eyes in a proud white face.

“What is wrong?” she asked him. “It's true, I mostly want to save my kids. I want to see them again, and have another chance at my life. With Mark. And we need a world to live in, and I'd like it to be what's left of this one.… What is wrong?”

Sapphire glass eyes, clear, remote, gave her no answer. Gold forelock, real gold, not just a splash of paint, made a frontlet between them, and the eyes themselves seemed so transcendent they could have been the sky-born eyes of a god; who would make a carousel horse's eyes blue? The white horse's mouth, unlike that of most carousel horses, was closed and calm, giving its long head an expression of nobility and sadness. Cally went to one knee in the ashes, as if facing her Lord on Judgment Day.

“Hoadley,” she said softly. “It's Hoadley I have to want to save, isn't it? But how can I? I hate it. I made it my family, but it's a family full of guilt and abuse.…”

Mark had grown restive, listening to the crying of the soul-lost cicadas in the night, watching his wife talk to a wooden horse. “For God's sake, Cal,” he grumbled, and she turned her stark head to look at him. Tears shone on her cheekbones.

“I told you,” came an unexpected, faintly mocking voice, “you don't know what real abuse is. And even if you did …” Elspeth hesitated, lost her fine-tuned disdain, and when she, of all people, gave the answer, it came quietly as the flying of a lacewing in the night. “Even if you did, the hell of it is, there's still love. Mixed in with the hurting.”

Cally heard, though she did not look at the speaker, and she whispered, “It's true, I want them to love me.…”

In the night, on the mountain sides, in the scrub trees, Hoadley ceased its crying and fell silent, listening, waiting. Mark felt the world stop breathing, felt his mind go blank and his heart plod bare in the wilderness of his chest. Above Cally's head glass eyes the color of true sky shone steadily as a blue candle flame where no wind stirred. Beyond the clouds, somewhere, had the lonesome wheeling of stars come to a halt?

Cally said, “I have to love them. I want to—I will love them. I am Apocalypse, and I will forgive them and feast of their lives. I will live and hunger and eat, and I will give no more thought to whether they ever love me.”

And the white horse reared up in triumph so that his mantle lifted from his shoulders like wings.

Cally took Mark's hand and stood up, and somewhere the stars were making a canopy of lights for the carousel. Cally stepped back. “Never mind,” she said to Shirley and Elspeth as they moved forward to help. “We don't need to touch it. It will turn.”

Mark rolled his eyes, Elspeth looked dazed, but Shirley nodded as if she understood utterly. “Sure thing,” she declared. “Once you've got hold of that feeling, it all comes together.”

From every direction in the night small voices started to sing, soft as mist. “Round, around, up and down, all the pretty little horses. Hushabye, hushabye …”

Slowly, slowly, in the lullaby night, the wheel of gleaming horses started to move, to turn. And from the bushes as the hungerbabies laid themselves down to sleep chimed the notes of the great circling waltz of time. And still crouching by Joan Musser's body, Barry Beal gave a soul-deep sigh and looked up at the sky.

The clouds were clearing away as if before a strong wind, though no wind blew. Stars were showing through.

By gentle degrees the carousel spun faster. Barry Beal looked at it as if seeing it for the first time, seeing with a childlike wonder the moon-dapple grays and the sunbeam palominos and the starlit white leading the dance, its gleaming gold crown of mane flying … Barry stood up and came and stood by Mark in mute curiosity. It was Mark who spoke for both men.

“What's making that thing turn?” he demanded.

Cally said, “Hope.”

I didn't expect no sunrise ever again, but up it come, and I seed it, and I ain't never seen such a sky, all stained glass butterfly colors. I hadn't slept none. I was setting by Joanie again, and them others was off someplace for a while but they come back and set by me, so we all seen it. And that weird merry-go-round was still going round behind my back.

I took notice of a couple of special things in that sunrise. That big blond lady, the one with her skin all pale and spotted up, was setting near me, and when that sunrise light touched her skin it flushed sweet as a baby's and all them spots was gone in a minute. Then she started crying, and Mrs. Wilmore come to see, and I took notice that when that light touched her Mrs. Wilmore plumped up some even though she hadn't ate nothing yet.

Then I looked at Joanie, kind of holding my breath, kind of hoping.… But didn't nothing happen. Joanie was dead all right and would have looked pretty ugly even if she wasn't the color of old porch paint, which she was. When that sunup light touched her she should have looked like gold and roses, but she didn't. She looked like all a big bruise. I wished I had something to cover her.

And I didn't want just any something to cover her, neither. This here was Joanie. And if she lived, she would've been … would've done …

Mr. Wilmore and them others come around me, trying to talk gentle to me, but I ain't listening. I don't want to go nowhere or do nothing or eat nothing or see nobody. I don't give a damn about nothing or nobody but Joanie then. I just put my head down on my knees and tried to think what was next, now Joanie was dead. And then it come to me. I knowed where there was something good enough to cover Joanie.

I gets up and looks, and sure enough it's just right, all white and gold mixed up like cream, with a white flower border and a long gold fringe. And I can see just by the way it drapes around his shoulders and back that it's heavy and thin and rich, like a cover for a king. “Hey, white horse,” I says, “Hey, can you come down here a minute?”

“Barry, no!” Mrs. Wilmore yells at me, cause she told me later she was afraid I was going to stop Hoadley again, and Mr. Wilmore wants to know what the hun I'm trying to do, but I ain't paying no attention to them. I'm just trying to get Joanie a blanket to cover her dead body. And the white horse took an easy jump off that carousel and come prancing over to me, and I says to him, “I want this here blanket of yours for Joanie.”

And he arched his neck like a new moon and bowed his head to say yes. See, he knew. And after I undid the clips and took the blanket off him he went back on the carousel and neighed like he was glad to be rid of it, and he made that sunrise sound like a big yellow bell ringing.

The blanket was just like I thought, soft and silky-rich all at once, and I knowed it was going to lay great. Once I get it on Joanie I feel some better about everything, and I start to make it look pretty on her, and I don't care that the rest of them are all standing around staring at me.

“Barry,” Mr. Wilmore says to me. “Should we maybe take the deceased home first?”

Down to Hoadley, he meant. What was left of it. That made me look up at him. “No,” I says. “I think she liked it better up here.” What home she had, I figured this carousel was it. And I didn't want none of them people looking at her.

“Did she have a church?”

“No.” I knowed what he was thinking. “No, not in no graveyard you don't put her. She wouldn't like that none.”

“Where, then?”

I just kept on pleating at the blanket, and it was coming along pretty good. I liked the way the white flowers was worked right into the stuff. They give it heft.

After a while Mr. Wilmore says, “Did she have family?”

“Her ma. Left town. Her pa.” If he was still living. “Probably so pickled he don't care if she's dead.” And just thinking about Mr. Musser and what he'd done to Joanie I felt everything all of a sudden go hot and red, and I thought, that's the next thing for me to do, is kill that fucker. I didn't care what happened to me. He'd be setting on that rickety front porch of his with a bottle, and I'd walk right up to him and shove it up his nose and kick him till he broke open like a Halloween pumpkin. I wanted to kill him so bad it hurt. And my fists was clenched and my chest huffing, and everybody saying to me, “Barry. Barry, what is it? What's the matter?”

And then I think, it don't matter what I want. It just matters what Joanie would have wanted me to do. Suppose Joanie don't want him dead no more?

See, I knowed a couple things about Joanie. I knowed life had hurt her bad. And I knowed she'd changed her mind about a lot of that before she died.

So I didn't say nothing to none of them other people, but, “Joanie, help me think,” I says to her out loud. She's laying there dead, but I still hope she can help me. “Just this one time let me get it right.”

“Get what right?” Mr. Wilmore wants to know.

Mrs. Wilmore says to him, “Mark, butt out.”

So they all set down and waited for me to think. And it took me a while, but I done it right and good. I could feel it, like I could feel the blanket shaping up good under my hands. And then I looked up, and it was Mrs. Wilmore I was looking at. So I tell her.

“Joanie forgive them all,” I says to her. “All of them. She would've saved them if she could. If she lived, she would've been the one rode that white horse.”

“Damn right,” says Mrs. Wilmore, and she sounds like she means it. She knowed it, just like the white horse knowed it. And just looking at her, I knowed I had a friend. She understood about Joanie.

The sun was up just a little farther in the sky, slanting down through the tops of the trees, all beautiful in the green leaves, and the sky was clear deep blue like the white horse's eyes on the merry-go-round kept circling and circling close by, and it was all—it was like everything was new again. It was special.

Mrs. Wilmore says, soft: “So it must have been in the first, spinning place.” And I didn't understand at first. But later I remembered them words Joanie had wrote down and pinned over the mirrors inside the merry-go-round.

Mr. Wilmore says, just as quiet, “Barry. You want her buried—here.”

I didn't want her buried at all. But she had to be, since she was dead, and I knowed this was the right place. I nodded. Then I stayed with Joanie while him and the others went down Hoadley.

Trudging back up the hill with the shovels, feeling much stronger and somewhat more her former self, Cally said, “Bet this is the strangest funeral you'll ever do, Mark.” Slipping back already into the role.

Mark said, “It's the last funeral I'll ever do.”

She accepted this fact as another petal in the flower of her blossoming happiness, almost as a matter of course. Because Hoadley was all in confusion or in the pit, they had gone as far as Shirley's stable to find shovels (noting in passing that the fence had returned to normal but the castle had fallen; no longer would Elspeth keep herself cloistered in that makeshift tower) and while there Cally had found to her astonishment that Shirley's phone was in working order, and had telephoned her mother. The children were well. All symptoms seemed to have disappeared overnight. As soon as they could arrange it, Mark and Cally would go to join and retrieve the youngsters.

“Oh?” she said to her husband, smiling. “You're not going to be a funeral director any more?”

“I'm not going to be a prop for the tottering any more, I'm not going to be a pillar of Hoadley any more, and I'm not going to be a dutiful son or a take-care-of-it husband.” He gave her a grin she remembered from those distant student days when he had been in the habit of secreting a spring-loaded cloth snake in her purse.

“By damn,” Cally remarked with zest. “What will you be, then?”

He said, “Alive.” And he turned to her, took her by the shoulders and kissed her. Not a formality, that kiss. Rather, an urgency.

Shirley said, grinning, “Watch it, youse.” She had brought them most of the way back in the pickup, coming with them to help dig. “Save it for later.”

Cally said, “I'm hungry.”

“Aren't you always?” complained the dark, intense young woman who walked by her side.

“No, Elspeth, I mean I'm really hungry.”

Mark the prosaic in cahoots with Shirley the equally pragmatic had brought along a paper bag of food from the latter's refrigerator. Silently he reached in and handed his wife an apple, a Golden Delicious, pudgy and yellow. They walked to where Barry Beal still knelt, oblivious to them and their concerns, arranging and arranging a kingly cloak in tucks and pleats and folds and gathers over the body of Joan Musser. As they journeyed, Cally ate her apple down to the core.

EPILOGUE

The media headlined it as the worst case of mine subsidence in recorded history. Questioning the survivors, reporters met either embarrassed silence or hysteria. The latter, expressed in terms of beasts and burning bears, four horsewomen and human-faced bugs, they dismissed as a manifestation of millennial fever. Such reports would, in any event, have been censored from the public record.

Within the first day a decision was made, loudly and unanimously, at an
al fresco
town meeting, to rebuild. It was unthinkable to do otherwise. Friends were in Hoadley. Family was Hoadley. Only the place had to be repaired; the people remained, for the most part. Thirteen had been killed (excluding Bud Zankowski, whose body was not found for months afterward), and Homer Wildasin had been taken away on suspicion of murder when the bodies of Gigi and her horse were found. No one said much about Homer. Quite a few solid citizens had seen the change; they knew who the second beast had been (though not the first), and the less said about it, the better—especially in front of outsiders.