Callie said, “Henry, do something!”
And so Henry said, “Simon, this is a diner. You go do your preaching somewheres else.”
“The Lord’s work—” Simon said, lifting his eyebrows.
“Not while they eat,” Henry said. “Go someplace else.”
Simon did not like it. He had no natural feeling for ordinary requirements of Nature. But he accepted it. After that Simon would meet them at the door as they were leaving, and he would press his pamphlets on them and writhe along with them as they went to their cars, Simon smiling and hissing about Kingdom Come. Callie compressed her lips and said nothing, and Henry, despairing, pretended not to see. George Loomis said once, coming into the diner, jerking his thumb toward the gas pumps where Simon ministered, “You know what that bastard’s telling them? He’s telling them they’re going to hell. You ought to trade him in on a goat or something.” Henry clenched his jaw and tried to think, then at last went over to the door and pushed it open and stuck his head out. “Simon!” he said.
Simon looked up, his head far forward, like a buzzard’s, his tie hanging outside the front of his suitcoat. At last he came over.
“I don’t mean just the diner,” he said, “I mean noplace in my sight. Leave the customers alone. You hear?”
“God forgive you,” Simon Bale said.
Henry clenched his jaw tighter yet and pulled his head in and let the door slam shut behind him. He started back toward the counter, then on second thought turned and ducked down to peer darkly through the glass. Simon was heading straight back to the people he’d been talking to, but he didn’t disobey — at least not yet. The car started up and swerved out onto the highway and escaped.
“Damn it, Henry,” George Loomis said, “that man’s crazy.”
“Maybe so,” Henry said. “How can I say?”
But he was thinking: Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only thought you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and again and again. So Simon. It wasn’t true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn’t going to stop him — except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.
And yet he felt no quiet. The truth was that there was something Henry was afraid of, something as undefined in his mind as the substance of his child’s nightmares, but real, for all its ghostliness: some possibility that became increasingly troublesome. He thought of the money he still hadn’t said one word about to Callie or to Simon either, though the woman was buried now, with no one at the graveside at all, and he felt sick for a minute, but that fear was different, because Callie’s finding out was inevitable, the only question was whether he could somehow cover the loss, make it back again or anyway make some of it back so the shock to her wouldn’t be so great when it came. What troubled him was something else. He remembered something very strange, though this wasn’t what was the matter either, though somehow it seemed related:
One night almost a year ago he’d been sleeping on the floor in Jimmy’s room (he couldn’t remember why anymore; maybe he’d just fallen asleep there, or maybe they’d had company that night and the beds were in use; it didn’t matter). Jimmy was asleep on the floor beside him. Jimmy had moved, or had said something, and Henry had sat up and opened his eyes without quite waking up. He’d thought there was some kind of animal in the room, and, thinking of Jimmy (vaguely identifying the voice, perhaps), he’d lunged at the animal, and it had run, the legs moving fast — a kind of blur, very much the way a rabbit would run — out into the hallway where the light was on, and Henry had caught it and lifted it up with a shout and then he’d come wide awake and he was holding Jimmy by the waist and Jimmy was screaming. Henry had calmed him almost at once, and Jimmy had seemed never to remember it, but for Henry the memory of that night was like a wound that would never heal. He would wonder, again and again, later, at odd moments when it all rose up in his mind more real than the diner or the dim-lit kitchen around him, what would have happened if he hadn’t awakened just that instant. And he couldn’t answer it. Then something else: He began to wonder if it had ever happened at all. There was no way of finding out.
Then one afternoon the troopers called. Callie answered the phone. She came running into the diner, carrying Jimmy (he had to be with someone constantly, these days; Simon’s attentions had spoiled him). As soon as she was inside the door, she called, “Henry, that was the troopers. They think they may have found who set the fire.”
Henry went cold. He hadn’t realized until this moment how far his trust was removed from his rational judgment. “Who did it?” he said.
“They think it was a couple of kids,” she said. She hiked Jimmy up a little, getting a better hold on him. “They don’t know, you understand, they just think. Two teen-agers. The troopers are on their way up here with them now. They want them to see Simon face to face.”
Henry thought: Thank God he didn’t do it! But carefully he cut God from what he said. “Then he didn’t do it.”
“It’s not sure, but they think not.”
Then: “Where is he? I’ll go tell him the news.”
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “In back, I guess.”
She left, still carrying Jimmy.
Henry’s legs went weak. He went over to the corner booth and sat down. He leaned his forehead on his fists and breathed deeply, and it was as if all his stomach had turned to jelly. He was still there when Callie came back, walking slowly, Jimmy walking beside her. Henry looked up. “What did he say?”
For what seemed half-a-minute she didn’t answer. At last she said with a despairing look, “If they did it, he forgives them.”
“The boys?” Henry waited.
She said, “Love thine enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. Thus saith Simon Bale.”
Henry snorted. “He’ll change his mind when he sees them.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“The fire killed his wife,” Henry said.
“It won’t make any difference,” she said. “I’m telling you, Henry. He’s strange, really strange.”
Her prediction turned out to be right, but Simon’s behavior was, as Simon would have said, of no importance. The law was still the law.
10
The nightmares were nothing to worry about, Doc Cathey said. All children had occasional spells of that sort, some children longer spells than others; in any case, he’d grow out of them. He made them a list of foods they shouldn’t give him within two hours of bedtime, and he warned them of scolding him too severely. Aside from that, there was nothing to do but wait. There was no question of there being any deep psychological disturbance, he said. He was sunny-dispositioned, placid, in a word, healthy.
They were relieved. Nevertheless it was a terrible moment when that scream would come, jerking them out of their sleep like a wire. It happened every two, three nights, sometimes twice in a single night. Henry would bound to Jimmy’s bedside and scoop him up and say, “What’s the matter? Bad dream?” They would never get out of him what it was he was dreaming about. It was hard enough to get the most ordinary information out of a two-year-old. Jimmy could talk well enough when he wanted to — in long, fairly complicated sentences, his eyes large and watchful, scrutinizing Henry’s face for the first sign that the sentence had gone wrong. But it wasn’t easy to make him advance information. He preferred to copy sentences he’d heard (in the morning they’d hear him practicing for half an hour at a time in his room, new expressions, new tones of voice). So what it was he was dreaming they never learned. Perhaps he forgot it all instantly, the minute he awakened. That was Henry’s theory, because often Jimmy would go back to sleep at once, the minute Henry scooped him up, and sometimes he’d be asleep again even when Henry reached his bedside. At the end of the second week the spell seemed to be over. He went five nights in a row without crying out (it was Callie who kept track), and they began to breathe more easily.