George Loomis lay perfectly still, as if tranquil. He was clean-shaven and combed, and the sheet was drawn over his bad foot, the good foot lying in the open, as though in this isolated mountain house he expected some visitor. But his mind was in a turmoil, struggling against thought.
“There are no disasters,” his grandfather had said, “God moves in strange ways.” But his mother was dying, so he’d gotten home from Korea on leave, shocked to find himself moved by her dying. He’d been young then, a romantic. Her face was sunken, and she drooled now, an effect of the stroke, and her ugliness made him see that she had been beautiful once and that he’d loved her. When she died his father said, “What shall we do?” and he had said nothing. Bury the dead. When she was embalmed, though, her face filled out and she wasn’t as bad as she’d been before, almost beautiful in the casket with its ridiculous window for the worms to look through. In carne corruptible incorruptionem He had not wept or wanted to, even at the graveside, but afterward he had gotten drunk, or rather sick, and had stood on a table at the Silver Slipper intoning Ovid:
Exitus auspicio gravior: nam nupta per herbas. …
For in those days there was still poetry. Still music, too. You would listen all night to the music your friendly American Airlines brought to you for your listening pleasure, and you would be pleased. Yet it was sound, even now; more comforting than silence. God bless you, friendly American Airlines. Into your hands I commend myself.
Then the memory flushed through him again, his headlights dipping over the crest of the hill as they’d done without harm ten thousand times, the incredible circus cart there in his road, straddling the crown, and again in his mind he hit the brakes with all his might and yanked at the wheel and heard the noise resounding like thunder through the glens. When that memory was over he saw Fred Judkins at his door again, nodding, sucking on the pipe, and after a minute the old man took off his hat. (But too late now to tell anyone, and no doubt too late from the beginning. An accident, one in an infinite chain.)
The American Airlines had chosen Scheherazade for him. He tried to listen, or rather he pretended to try to listen, consciously playing an empty role … no emptier, he thought, than others.
He ground out the last of his cigarettes and snapped out the light. In the darkness the music, like the heat, drew nearer, coming from all parts of the room at once. He rolled over on his stomach, the side of his head on his hand now, and closed his eyes. There had been birds circling above the back ravine. He’d been alarmed, seeing them, wondering who else might be seeing. Before that he’d been alarmed by the knock of the Watkins Man. But all this would pass.
(At the Dairy Queen in Slater there had been two young girls, strangers to him. One of them had smiled. She had long hair — both of them had long hair, one blonde, one dark, and they wore no lipstick. They were pretty, poised between child and woman, so pretty his heartbeat had quickened a little, and he’d imagined how they would look in those pictures you could buy in Japan, coarse rope cutting their wrists and breasts and thighs. The instant he thought it, his stomach went sour. They were young, pure: beautiful with innocence, yet corruptible. The one who smiled invited it. She was hungry for it. Serpentis dente.)
He twisted onto his back suddenly and sat up, soaking in sweat. “Please us,” he whispered. He could feel the memory of the accident coming over him, and he got up to look for a smokable butt in an ash tray, and some bourbon.
8
They’d all heard somehow (this was three nights later) of Nick Blue’s prediction. There was no more sign of rain now than there’d been all day: The clouds were piled up like tumbling mountains, blocking out the stars, but the dry breeze still blew, light. If the crickets were still it meant only that all signs fail. They talked though about how Nick Blue had a kind of sense (Nick Blue wasn’t there), and about how he’d known three weeks beforehand when the blizzard was coming, the year before last. If he’d said the rain would come tonight, then it was coming. Eight-thirty passed, and then nine-thirty, and the talk went on, more tense now — sharp against the dull moan of the fans — as though they were talking to keep themselves from noticing. Around ten-thirty George Loomis came in, and as he came over to the counter, the brace clumping on the wooden floor, the empty sleeve hanging free, they said, “Well, what you think, George?” “I didn’t throw on no raincoat,” he said. “That ought to bring it,” Jim Millet said. George said, “I’ll tell you one thing for certain: if it comes it’ll hit every farm in this country but mine.” They laughed — howled like wolves — though each of them had said the same thing in one way or another, taking pride in his singular bad luck — and they went back to their talk of Nick Blue and the blizzard two years ago and then to the time when it didn’t rain till the middle of September, in 1937. The talk got louder and at eleven-thirty the breeze was still blowing. Then Lou Millet said, “Henry, you old devil.”
Callie looked up. He was standing in the doorway, filling it, able to pass through it all, it seemed, only by a trick of her vision. Jimmy came out from behind his father’s right leg and around the counter, and she picked him up and put him on the stool by the cash register. “What are you doing up this time of night?” she said. But she kissed his cheek, holding his head to keep from pulling away.
“Daddy let me,” he said.
“Henry, you ought to be ashamed,” she said. But she dropped it. He was looking out into the darkness, and she knew why he was here. Nick Blue had been wrong, and they’d all believed him, and when the disappointment, embarrassment came, Henry wanted to be here. Because they’re neighbors, she thought. All at once she knew how it was going to be when they realized what fools they’d been. She understood for the first time (but wordlessly) Henry’s rage: It was not a little thing they’d come here expecting, and not something unduly fine, either (“No chance any more of winning,” Old Man Judkins had said. “They just try and survive”). That much, surely, they had a right to expect. And so they’d come here with high spirits, expecting not salvation but merely rain to recover the corn and a little of the hay; but they were going to see they’d made fools of themselves, that any dignity they thought they had was a word, empty air, and to act on the assumption that they had any rights in this world whatever, even the rights of a spider, to survive, was to turn themselves into circus clowns, creatures stuffed with old rags and straw who absurdly struggled to behave like human beings and who, whether or not they succeeded, were ridiculous. All this Callie knew, not in words but in the lines of Henry’s face, and she wanted to leave so she wouldn’t have to watch it when it happened.
It was quarter-to-twelve. Emery Jones’ hired man lit up, his buck-teeth gleaming, and he said: “Nick said it would come today. That means it’s going to be here in fifteen minutes.” He seemed to have no inkling of what a crazy thing it was to say. But they did. Old Man Judkins looked at his empty cup as though he’d just noticed a bug in it, and Jim Millet put his hat on and stood up. Ben Worthington, Jr., laid down the punchkey he was playing with and calmly, thoughtfully, pushed his fist through the board, then drew out his wallet. It was bulging with the money he’d gotten for his wheat and would be needing all this winter. “I’d like to buy that clock,” he said.
“Ben, that’s crazy,” Callie said. “Forget it. We’ll tell them it was an accident. Please.”