The Stand (Original Edition) (51 page)

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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 glittering eyes 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 toward home again.

They showed up 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. She slept a lot to make up her strength, but her sleep was not easy. She dreamed of the dark man constantly. In one of the dreams she was in a cold high pass west of the Continental Divide. Highway 6 twisted and switched back in a high throat of stone. In this dream it was not weasels that crept toward her; it was wolves. Long gray timberwolves, their eyes sullen and red. They were all along the shoulders of the road and their ragged, ghostlike forms moved between the shadowy blue mountain spruce like the wind. They were killers, and they would do
his
will.

She woke up praying.

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 that 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 dogeared 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 meal 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.

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 cowpond—

Yes, she could see it, an old Chevrolet 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 108), 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 her other was corked securely in her mouth.

The young man with 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 eyes were alight with joy. He stopped at the foot of her 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 eyeglasses.

Nick was looking at her urgently.

“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 said, 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 didn’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 Brentner, 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.

“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 had 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 hugely. 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 c’n 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, but there’s a mattress put away overhead, 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 away. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove, 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,” he went on a little defensively, “that’s the first home-cooked meal I’ve had since . . . 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 was one hell of a good cook. She . . He trailed off blankly.

Olivia came back in. “Fast asleep,” she said. “She was beat.”

Dick asked, “Do you bake your own bread?”

“Course I do. Always have.”

“Tom Cullen’s tired,” Tom said abruptly. “M-O-O-N, that spells tired.” He yawned bone-crackingly.

“You can bed down out 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. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.

“I guess you got your campin gear.”

“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, his eyes 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.