A prolonged pause. Then, snappishly, “We have long been aware of that. Thank you for your interest.”
The common sense thing to do, the mayor reasons, is to tell those people to stay home, they’re creating a public disturbance. Neighbors are complaining about the noise. But he hopes it will just solve itself somehow like the “Black Hand” thing, which has at last died out. Everybody seems to be out after his neck as it is, blaming him for the town’s troubles, even for bad business and power failures, when there’s just nothing he could ever do about it, and he doesn’t need any more enemies, even crazy ones. He pretends he has solved the “Black Hand” affair, hinting that the boys involved may well come from well-to-do families in town, and he has seen fit to bring it quietly to an end his own way. People say that’s good common sense. He even starts believing it himself. Sometimes he wishes he was back in the fire department.
Four men, all Italian Catholics, play pitch at the Eagles. The first, thumbing his cards into order, says, “It’s common sense. I’m not exactly cheering my ass off, I can’t even sleep nights. But that mine ain’t never gonna open up again. I pass.” The second man bids two, as the first codas, “That’s all I’m saying. Anybody with any common sense can see it’s never gonna open up again.”
“Common sense!” snorts the third, partner of the first. “To hell with common sense! Listen, if that mine closes, I’m dead. I can’t let myself think that. I gotta believe it’s gonna open up, or I’d go off my bat. There’s some things, buddy, common sense ain’t no good for. Three.” The fourth man passes.
And more signs. Elan the teacher senses estrangement from the rest of the faculty at school. The principal, while by no means hostile, forgets now to smile, does not mention the permanent appointment. Students grow lax in their homework, seem amused at her austerity. Her two boys suffer endess humiliation and she must pretend detachment.
Up early one morning, the skies broken up for a change, she takes a stroll before going to school, passes a small frame church with yellow brick siding. Outside, a signboard reads:
GAL. 1.9: If any man preacheth unto you any good gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema!
She shudders, recognizing she has wandered into an alien place. A redheaded boy sits on the steps eyeing her coldly, cradling a root or something in his lap. Can he know who she is? She hurries by, feigning interest in something across the street.
At school, there is an obscene drawing on her blackboard. Supposedly an angel, or so it seems, it nevertheless possesses two stringy bare breasts, buckteeth, large spectacles, and frizzy hair. From its naked bottom rises a flag that reads: REPENT! Below the figure: ST. ELLIE. The children are hysterical, their faces buried in books. Elan, suddenly near tears, feels utterly helpless. Her back is to the students, and she cannot turn to face them, nor can she bring herself to erase the angel.
Her two boys enter then, Karmin and Ko-li. They stand and stare. Karmin slams his books to a desk, marches to the board, and erases the drawing. “Boy!” he shouts out. “Whoever did that is really rotten!” His face is afire with righteous anger. “If he’s got any guts, he’ll go outside with me right now!”
Elan is to confront with courage and inward serenity the history that is to come and to comprehend with grace the bitter obligement of suffering. “Thank you, Carl Dean.” Wash the earth from your hands and feet and cast your eyes to the limitless stars. “Now, please take your seat.” She is able at last to face the class. The giggling diminishes. Some blush. By my light, thou shalt flee the darkness.
Kit Cavanaugh, cruising back into town from the ice plant with Sally Elliott, is sore. Boy oh boy, how can any guy get so far and not get in? He must be the biggest idiot, the biggest chicken, in the whole United States. It was so beautiful, that whole Last Judgment line, they were already off the earth and flying, man, stretched out there near-naked in the back seat of the Lincoln. Boy, there were flames everywhere! Her skirt was up, her blouse off. He slipped from her embrace to ease her panties down. And he was just ogling that fantastic black place below her bum and wedging his nervous fingers down inside there, when he heard Sally talking to herself.
“What’d you say, Sal?”
“I’m praying.”
“Praying! Whatcha doing that for?”
“I’m praying to Jesus not to let you do anything wrong, Tommy. If it’s gonna be the Last Judgment, I don’t want you to go to you know where.”
He thought she must be kidding, but there were tears running down her nose. “Aw, Sal,” he said, and took a last hungry look at the bum. He already had the rubber on: what a waste! Glumly, they headed for home.
The trouble is: how do you keep kissing them and get on top there at the same time?
“Tommy! Look at that!” Sally cries now.
He’d almost driven by without noticing, but now he sees the big gang of people. “My gosh! it’s a big fight!”
“Don’t stop, Tommy!”
“I’m just going slow to see. Hey! there’s old Ugly Palmers! Hey! look at him go! Man!” Maybe it’d be a pretty even fight at that, him and Ugly. “Say, you know what, Sal? That must be Mr. Bruno’s house! The guy who says it’s gonna be the Last Judgment!” Sally squeezes toward him. “Holy cow, wait’ll Dad hears about this!”
“Tommy, please don’t stop! I’m afraid!”
“But, gee, I think I oughta help old Ugly out. They’re ganging up on him.” Doesn’t mean to, though. Just whip old Sal up a little bit.
Suddenly, a window breaks with a tremendous crash. People start to run. “Tommy!” Sally screams. He guns it out of there, shaking just a little bit. Ho-lee cow!
In front of Sally’s house, they get in a hot clinch. Sal is trembling, sort of. Man, if he could just keep her mouth stopped, he could do it, just hold the kiss until he was in there. But how would he do that without breaking her neck? Something is wrong.
It is the last day of winter, the twentieth of March, a morning heavily overcast like many of late, and Betty Wilson is going to Mabel Hall’s. She slips out the back door, so Sister Clara, who lives down the block, is sure not to see her, past her torn-up hollyhocks and Eddie’s old bird dog nosing at a corner of his pen, and goes to see Mabel, knowing, though nothing has been said, that the other girls, anyway Mary Harlowe and probably Wanda Cravens, will come there, too. A new element has been added and now it must be appraised. Cards will be consulted, or else tea will tell what otherwise might be missed.
Like when Mabel saw “an evil event” and “love destroyed” in January, and she even says now she made Willie stay home that dreadful night, and who can say it isn’t so? it’s possible. And certainly it was Mabel who saved them all from despair when the Judgment failed to come the eighth of March like Clara had said, and it was Mabel who found “the man of honor” that knocked on their door just one week later. As for the eighth, they had met at Mabel’s the Wednesday before, and she had foretold it: “adversity,” “deception,” and “vain expectation.” So, in a way, they knew it all along, all the girls, knew it wouldn’t happen that night. Sometimes, in the excitement of a meeting, or when Clara was telling them how it would be, how they would see Ely and Eddie and Hank and all of them again, they forgot, and then the end was surely coming that night again, the eighth. But probably, deep down, they all knew a postponement had been ordained. Of course, Mabel was very close to that Norton woman these days, and, though they all believed Mabel, they listened to her with two ears, as it were, and she was certainly very quick a couple days ago to find the nineteenth of April in her cards, where it had never been before. Clara could be, in a way, wrong, and she could be stubborn in her wrongheadedness, but Clara could always be trusted. Betty never doubted for a moment a single word Brother Ely ever spoke in his entire life, he was truly the greatest man she ever knew, maybe even a living saint, nor does she nowadays doubt a single thing that her best friend Clara says, but sometimes, well, the same word can mean twenty different things, that’s all. Of course, Mabel is a little batty sometimes and she probably wouldn’t recognize the Coming in her cards if she saw it there, there’s that to consider, but one would at least have expected something like “a long journey” or “an unexpected visitor”—not even to mention the awesome trump twenty — and not “vain expectation.” So, they probably knew. Not the eighth of March, not yet. Mabel always used to read tea leaves, but more and more she has been turning to the cards, ever since she bought that fancy set in Mr. Robbins’ dimestore.