The muscles of Simon’s face were working, and he had his eyes fixed on Henry’s forehead. After a moment, with a darting motion, he drew a stack of small, white leaflets from his inside coatpocket. He leered and slid them across the table toward Henry, watch and wait! the top one said. The next said, who shall be saved? Under the title there were words in italics: But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. (Rom. 14:10) It was not what Henry would have expected; he would have expected, well, something about God’s wrath, say, or the seven angels of doom. “Is this what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe?” Henry said.
However mild the text, there was a spark of anger in Simon’s eyes. “Not what we believe,” he said, “the truth!”
“Yes, of course,” Henry said, looking down.
“Do you dare to deny the Judgment of the Lord?” Simon said. He was leaning forward now, his lower lip trembling. His fury seemed to Henry inexplicable, unwarranted by anything Henry had said.
“I don’t deny anything,” Henry said.
“But there is evil,” Simon said. “Woe to that man—”
“Perhaps so,” Henry said sharply, cutting him off.
Simon looked at him for a long time, then at last bowed his head. “You have been kind to me, within the bounds of your understanding.” After another moment: “I am deeply grateful. May the Lord keep you, Mr. — ” He seemed to cast about for Henry’s name.
Henry winced, watching him closely, at once repelled and fascinated, like a man watching a rattlesnake behind glass.
“I accept your hospitality,” Simon said, suddenly smiling grotesquely, tears in his eyes. “God’s will be done.”
7
The troopers came in the next afternoon and casually asked to speak with Simon. Behind the counter, Henry Soames stood thinking a moment, the lenses of his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I’ll see if I can locate him,” he said. He rubbed the side of his nose, still thinking, and then, reluctantly, he left the diner to look.
He was a little on edge to start with, as he frequently was when Callie’s mother decided to come down and help out. She’d been here most of the day again, busying herself when there was nothing to do, mopping the floor when it was perfectly all right, bending the old gray spoons back into shape, criticizing the electric potato peeler for eating up three-fourths of every potato. He wished she’d get down to what she’d come here to say, but she didn’t, and gradually Henry was beginning to believe she had no intention of getting down to it. Maybe she figured she would drive out Simon Bale by just hanging around. Well, she figured wrong. When Henry asked her, “You seen Simon, Ellie?” she had looked surprised, as if she hadn’t heard what the troopers had said, five feet from where she’d been careful to be standing, and she’d said, “Why, no, Henry, I been too busy. Does somebody want him?” Henry had nodded and hurried on by her.
Simon wasn’t in the garden, this time, and when Henry called into the house he found he wasn’t there either. “Why do you want him?” Callie called back, but Henry ignored her too. He started for the garage.
He didn’t know what to think by now. Not just about the money, about the whole damn business, from the minute he’d first seen Simon Bale slumped down on the ground by his snow fence, and the people around him not moving a muscle. There was something he’d read, about a week ago: Some old man had been stabbed in New York City, it said in the paper, and there were fifteen people standing around and even when he asked them to, they never even called the police. It was hard to believe they’d all just stand there, fifteen of them, and not even one of them lift one finger, and he’d thought and thought about it. It didn’t seem natural, and he’d tried to see it from their side, because if there was any way on earth to explain it, the secret had to be in those people’s feelings. He could understand their not helping: afraid of the fellow with the knife. But to merely stand there like a herd of cows — it was past all comprehending. A man could turn into an animal, then. It was something about living in the city, that was all he could figure. And he could understand that, it came to him. He’d felt it himself one time in Utica. He’d never have believed there were that many people in all this world, especially that many poor people, burnt-out-looking; and walking in that crowd, looking at faces that stared right through him (no two faces in all that city exactly alike, each one marked by its own single lifetime of weathers, suppers, accidents, opinions), he’d felt a sudden disgust — or not even that, a calm disinterest, as though he were seeing it all with the eves of a thinking stone to whom all human life was nothing, to whom even his own life was nothing. If there were millions and millions of people in the world, they were nothing compared with the billions and billions already dead. But then he’d seen a man he knew, and he could hardly recapture, when he’d thought back to it later, that vision of people as meaningless motion, a stream of humanity down through time, no more significant than the rocks in a mountain slide. It was different in the country, where a man’s life or a family’s past was not so quickly swallowed up, where the ordinariness of thinking creatures was obvious only when you thought a minute, not an inescapable conclusion that crushed the soul the way pavement shattered men’s arches. And so they had stopped being human. It was outrageous that it could happen, but maybe it did, and, worse, maybe it was the people in New York City that were right. What was pleasant to believe was not necessarily true. Elves, for instance, or Santa Claus, or what he’d never have doubted once, the idea that Henry Soames would live practically forever. He thought: Or angels. He could remember — it seemed like centuries ago, when he was four or five — lying in bed with his grandmother, looking at pictures in the Christian Herald. It was in an upstairs room in the big old house where his parents had lived, and outside the window there were pines moaning and creaking in the summer wind. She had told him about angels, and there had seemed no possible question of its not being true. Once, standing on a hillside watching the northern lights, he had seen an angel with absolute clarity — as clearly as, another time, he’d seen a great, round frying pan in the sky when he was looking for the Big Dipper. But then the evidence against them came in, piece by piece, fact after fact, until by sheer bulk the facts overwhelmed them, and what was good to believe — for the world was vastly more beautiful with angels than it was without — was incredible. He’d been right, then, at least in this: He wasn’t acting for but against—Callie, Callie’s mother, the people who said on no earthly grounds but animal distrust that Simon had burned his own house. And maybe he had, who knew? How far would Henry Soames go on what George Loomis would call pure meanness? He thought of the money and the sinking feeling returned. He was sweating again.
He found them behind the garage. He stopped when he saw them, and neither Simon nor Jimmy looked up. Simon was sitting on a tipped-over oil drum, writing something with a pencil on a piece of wood, and Jimmy was standing at his elbow watching. Henry stopped and it came to him that, close he was, they didn’t realize yet that he was there. Jimmy was saying, “Why?” and Simon said, “Because he loves all little children, if they repent.” He spoke softly, insistently. Henry went cold all over. Jimmy said, “Who is God?” Henry said sharply, “Simon!”