Jason dove at Sam Green’s middle. “I’m sorry,” he said as he connected, sending the bigger man sprawling under him. The stink of cooked flesh was overpowering, and Green was slippery underneath his shirt, like he’d been skinned. “I know you’re hurt.”
Jason grabbed for the jar, but Green moved it out of his reach with one hand, grabbed Jason by the hair with the other and yanked him back. Jason cried out, and he felt ashamed: Green hadn’t so much as whimpered.
Jason pulled away hard enough that he left a fistful of his hair with Green, and drove his fist crosswise into the other man’s gut. Green coughed and bent, and Jason got the upper hand for an instant—just enough to get high and come down hard on Green’s shoulders, so he pinned him in the mud. He reached up to where Green’s burned-up fist held the jar. He closed his own hand around it and tugged. But Green wouldn’t let go.
“You can’t kill a thousand folk,” said Jason. “I seen less than that killed and it was awful. You can’t kill a thousand. Not like that.” He yanked again at the jar, but Green’s fist tightened.
“Boy, that jar’s a gift from God. If what your aunt says’s true, it’ll be enough to stop this.”
“You
can’t
kill a thousand.”
Jason realized he was crying, his eyes soaking up with tears. His voice was weak, a child’s voice. Some damn hero he was being for Ruth Harper and his mama and everyone else.
And Green—that bastard—he saw it too.
“No, Jason.
You
can’t kill a thousand. You might’ve. If you’d killed your aunt . . . you might’ve been able to. But you can’t and you shouldn’t. Leave it to one with blood enough on his hands already. You run on and—oh Jesus—look after that girl.”
Green glanced over to where Ruth stood, and perhaps trying to distract Jason, shifted in the muck, and pushed up hard. But Jason had the leverage and pushed back harder.
Green glared up at him. “God damn it, boy. She’s
got my gun
.”
“It’s all right, Ruth,” said Jason, not taking his eye off Green. “I got him.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ruth move into view. There was the sound of a hammer drawing back.
“
She wants to make sure,
” she said, in a strange, strangled but supremely confident voice; it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
Green struggled and motioned to her. “God damn it, boy. Look at her!”
Jason spared a glance, then looked again. Ruth stood like a lost child, feet close together, eyes darting here and there . . . one arm up over her breast—the other holding up Sam Green’s Russian, pointed at them both. Her eyes were wide, and the lids trembled—like there was a scream inside her that couldn’t get around that strange talk.
“
She wants to make sure
you don’t turn on Me too
,” said Ruth, in a voice like a chorus.
“Jason,” whispered Sam, “you got to let me up. She’s gone like old Bergstrom went.”
“Like Bergstrom?”
“Thought the Juke was talkin’ through him. Before he died.”
Ruth’s lips parted—and between them, wasn’t there the hint of teeth, sharp and ready to tear at him?
Jason looked back at Green.
“What’s happened to her?”
“Juke’s in her, I’m guessin’. You two got taken away—didn’t you now? Bergstrom said it, before he died. She was in a safe place. Somethin’s made her like Maryanne Leonard.”
“Raped her, you mean.”
“Raped her.”
Jason let up on Green.
“And it’ll kill her.”
“Might just.”
Ruth spoke, but this time nothing like words came out—rather a trilling, high song that Jason now understood was not entirely or even mostly coming from her. The trees around the hospital were filled with it—the whistling that he’d heard from the creatures, the Jukes, that filled this town . . . the quarantine.
They were the things that had tried to prick him, and put those eggs inside him, under the skin like a fly lays . . . they were the things whose call Ruth had heard, as they crept around the quarantine last night . . . the things that had drawn her in, to lie with Mister Juke.
The gun moved as though at the end of a tree bough, and settled on them. Jason felt transfixed—like he was when he stepped up to Mister Juke himself, in the quarantine, and only a cut hand broke the spell.
Now, Ruth Harper herself held his gaze, as she aimed the gun at the two of them.
“
She will hide herself,
” said Ruth, “
while I make manifest
.”
And then, the world became brilliant, as the voices—Ruth’s included—coalesced, and one solo voice rang out across the Kootenai river valley. Jason swallowed, and felt himself swept in it.
“There are not ghosts,” said Andrew Waggoner.
He stood on the highest steps of Heaven, and looked down on the multitudes before him. At his side, the Dauphin’s woman—black-haired Oracle girl—stood, and whispered to him, in the fast and unmistakable tongue of the Dauphin . . . and she whispered:
Worship nothing but him
.
“There are not ghosts—there are not Devils from Hell,” said Andrew, and the people before him nodded, agreeing. “There’s no point in trying to impersonate them. You won’t fool anybody—any more than you will live well, coming here and sawing up wood for a rich man.”
The Oracle whispered to him, and he nodded, and went on:
“You won’t live well following those priests—your pastors. Because they talk about God far removed, who promises things later that might not be as fine as you’d heard. Not the one you see, right here in front of you.”
As he spoke, Andrew found he could also see farther, and that made a certain kind of sense. This place was high up—a mountain-top. The Oracle whispered at him, and he craned his neck and looked down the great river—all the way down, where men toiled in darkness and made up ways to hate, to elevate themselves above one another. He thought he might be able to see all the way to New York, where his father and his horses toiled too, hauling barrels of beer from a brewer to a tavern—thinking that well, at least he’d sent his son, his boy, to Paris.
“And you’ll live as poorly,” shouted Andrew to the multitude here, “following your reason. Why, reason misleads us. Same as those false priests, those frightening ghosts. It takes us to places where we can say such is so, and such else is so, and then—without knowing it—this further thing must be so. But it’s an error. A fellow could think himself away from—”
from the Juke
“—from this here . . .”
the Dauphin
“ . . . this Son.”
The Oracle whispered once more:
Get them ready
.
The world swirled about Andrew then, as the golden sands of Heaven flew into the air in a great cyclone, and Andrew drew higher. And he saw this multitude, turning to the south, and in a great line, making their way down the riverbank—some of them crawling on board the steamboat—and bearing on their shoulders a great Ark, that held in it the substance of the Son. Down the river they crawled and floated—until they came upon another Cathedral like this one, filled with folk, but empty of God. With guns and axes, they overtook it. And Andrew—Andrew preached the truth to the ones that lived; and gathered them into their army.
And from there, they swept the world.
Andrew spoke it—but he didn’t speak it: with the Oracle at his side and Annie Rowe holding his arm, he sang it. The whole world sang too, sang, and whistled—while in His Cathedral, the Son—the Juke—the Dauphin . . . was pleased.
And if a shadow moved beneath—if it didn’t sing as clearly—well, Andrew thought, what’s a small speck, in the all-seeing eye of God?
She has chosen him.
Lothar Feeger stepped forth from the shadow, his burden thrown over his shoulder. He carried his hatchet in one hand, and looked upon the back of the Oracle. She stood next to the nigger, bent, and held her prize—the prize that he, Lothar, had brought her—she held it between the two of them.
Lothar was not wise—he knew this about himself, and every time he forgot this someone would remind him—but he was wise enough to know that when he lay with Patricia, he had not taken her as a bride and had no claim over her. She was bride to the Old Man if to anyone, now that she had gone Oracular.
Lothar was at peace with that; same as any man, he would stand aside for God. Why, if God chose to murder young Missy, strangle her in the space between beds—leave her there, as the Mothers squirmed and cried out . . .
If that were His choice—Lothar would not object.
But the nigger . . . the pretending nigger—taking up the song, standing here at his Oracle’s side . . .
Lothar wouldn’t allow it.
Lothar stepped out—he resisted the song, with all the agony in his heart.
He would show her, the sweet girl who would not spill more blood than she needed. He would show her, what the crone and the nigger had done to her sister.
Lothar pushed forward, and knocked the pretender aside. And as the Oracle stared at him, he dropped the still corpse of her sister at her feet. And the nigger . . . he screamed like a pig.
The cyclone stilled, and Heaven sloughed away; what had been gates made from gold, turned back to weathered grey timber. Those multitudes, ready a moment ago to do battle for their God, knelt in mud. Andrew Waggoner crouched not at the top of a great stone staircase, but on the loading platform of the sawmill at Eliada.
At his knees—
—a dead girl. Just a child—the child that Germaine Frost had murdered, while Andrew stood helpless.
That’s three you didn’t save.
Andrew drew a ragged breath. There was no time for remorse; he’d been given a reprieve, the pain that sheared up in his arm gave him a moment away from the sorcery the Juke worked. And that remorse—that guilt—was a fast route back to the lie.
He blinked in the morning light and took stock. The girl was on the deck in front of him; to one side, a black-haired young man dressed in the buckskin uniform of these people, a hatchet in his hand. The Oracle girl knelt now to touch the child’s brow; her sister, Lily, stood with her fists bunched, eyes in tears. And just beyond, stood Annie Rowe, her hands clasped in prayer as she looked with eyes that nearly glowed, to the open doors, the dark cavern of the sawmill itself—like she was looking through the Gates of Heaven, toward salvation. Andrew looked there too. It was all dark, but for a square of light at the corner. It could be salvation; that was the riverside loading bay. Past it was a dock, and then the frigid waters of the Kootenai.
Andrew got to his feet, biting down on another scream. His arm was bad now—and he wondered if he would be able to keep it when this was all done. If he survived.
He staggered to Annie, and grabbed her with his good arm.
“Come on, Annie,” he said, and when she looked confused, he added: “Let’s go see Jesus.”
That was all it took to convince her. The two of them dashed into the belly of the sawmill, stepping into shadow even as the buck-skinned man pointed his hatchet at them and bleated into the silence.
The angels became quiet, and fell to the earth, the trunks of trees, and a silence fell upon the world. Ruth blinked and looked around, and down at her gun. The angels looked around themselves too, their faces wide, innocent—as Ruth Harper’s, only in miniature, in a multitude.
Jason opened his mouth to speak to her, tell her to put the gun down, but no words would come. He looked from one to another—to Ruth Harper, perched in the low crook of a branch, to others on the edge of the road, peering between strands of grass; still more higher in the branches of the tamarack, gazing down at him. Silent.
“They’re foolin’ you, Jason,” said Sam Green.
“I know,” he whispered.
“They’re the Devil.”
Jason looked down at Green. “Ain’t so,” he said. “They’re animals.”
Green looked up at him, his eyes ghastly white in their sockets. “They’re more than animals. They’re liars, Jason. They could . . . they make you think they’re God. They could be . . . they could be God.”
“You sayin’ there’s no God?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” he said. “God’s great and true. But these things . . . They act so much like God . . . like Jesus . . . A fellow could be made to wonder, where to place his faith exactly. In God and Jesus, or these things that look just the same? And that’s the Devil’s work.”
“I’m not fooled,” said Jason.
“Yeah,” said Green. “Not now you aren’t. That whistling’s stopped. You have to make up your mind. Before it starts.”
“
It starts
.”
The voice came from everywhere—all the creatures, in words and whistling. Ruth—the hundred or more of her, that inhabited the trees—they all looked up, and Ruth opened her mouth and the song came up again, and the face of Ruth Harper faded from the world, until it was only Her own, held high.
Jason looked at Sam Green—watched him shift and change again, the features melt, and him grow, until it wasn’t Sam Green anymore—but John Thistledown, burned not from a battle at the Harper mansion, but ten years in Hell. Ruth was singing this—making another lie for him, the way the song had before. Filled with the Juke’s issue, she was spinning its lie where the other had stopped.