Light: not the image but the substance radiates within her, from her. These weeks she has dutifully cloaked it in black to hide it from the mourners, from Mama, from Rosalia and the prying dark-eyed neighbor ladies, from the old priest, from the fearful many who congregate now at her brother’s bed. Papa died and she could not weep, for sheer joy had overwhelmed her. The wailing widowed women omen the end, but for her it is a magnificent commencement. Only Eleanor has understood. “Love,” she has told her, “is not a goal, Marcella, it is a given. Love is the soul and the soul is love. It is our irreducible portion of the Divine, of the One, of Light.” Gaily, she prepares their lunch. His eyes today: how they opened! how they touched her! how they laughed! She smiles at Eleanor’s gloom, impulsively kisses her cheek. “It’s spring!” she whispers. Poor Mr. Himebaugh, irascible with his flu, eats without appetite. When he walked in on her this morning — the second time it’s happened now, poor man — he was clearly in pain: how strange that common illness should travel with them to the end! Her Mama, she knows, kneels still in St. Stephen’s, befuddled and bleak, her troubled old head bowed to her gnarled and knotted hands, the pews sullen and musty and empty, and would, untended, kneel there to her death. So Marcella eats hastily, her own appetite undone by excitement, by love, and rises to go bring Mama home, her daily midday ritual. Eleanor trails her to the door and there says a strange thing, so strange and unexpected Marcella cannot at first believe she has heard it: “Take care, Mana, for his mouth is the mouth of a cruel man!” Over the gentle lady’s shoulder, Marcella sees the old lawyer, nodding paternally. Light flashes golden off Eleanor’s medallion and compassionate tears mist her eyes. “Listen!” Marcella, though afraid, waits. “There is known to be one among us,” Eleanor whispers hoarsely, “sent by the powers of darkness!”
After a can of soup and a couple hamburgers at Mick’s, Miller hurried back to the office, goosed by guilt. But back by old Hilda, he was surprised to discover all the forms locked up and in place. Maybe they didn’t need him after all. Carl Schwartz, ink-smeared, told him the story, obviously filtered through Jones and thus elevated to a classic, of the George Washingtons who came to the hotel and left a deposit of shit to cover the bed if not the board, while two paperboys lurked behind the press to overhear it. Still another enduring contribution to American folklore: Jones had done it again. Miller used the toilet, washed up, glanced over the pegged layouts trying to remember what was going into the paper, nickeled a Coke from the machine, nodded to old Jerry the janitor as he shuffled in for work.
At his desk, he answered a few phone messages that had come in during his several long absences, took notes from a book on the Dutch Anabaptists which could be turned into a small feature piece for tomorrow’s edition, cleaned the excess clutter off his desk. Felt sleepy. Too much exercise. He dragged the manila file folders out of his bottom desk drawer: they contained the accumulation of his notes on the Brunists … hmmm. He jotted that down: the Brunists. Hilda’s muffled rhythm and the teletype (mustn’t forget the goddamn copy for Himebaugh) nearly had him dozing over his notes, when Reverend Wesley Edwards dropped in. Tweed overcoat, Sam Snead hat, leather gloves, smirking smugly around the stem of his briar pipe. Gregarious cleric of the new confession, seer of the secular Christ. All of which meant that once again the priests, having something to lose by risking the challenge, were rolling with the punch. In one breath, Edwards would ridicule “Mother Goose parsons” and boast of man’s “progress toward independence from any transcendent boss,” then, puff-puff on the pipe, turn right around and defend myth as “an image-language reaching out beyond the particulars of appearance toward the transcendence.” Today, it turned out, Edwards was not happy about the recent millennial features in the paper, felt they were adversely affecting the impressionable young, who were asking him questions, the answers to which they weren’t intellectually prepared to grasp.
“Well, Edwards, news is news.”
“Even if it’s from the fourteenth century?”
Miller laughed. “Well, of course, that’s not why—”
“No, I know it’s not why. If news is news, how did it turn out you missed that fight the other night on Mr. Bruno’s front lawn?” Miller shrugged. Edwards assumed a look of concern. Pipe out. Eyetooth nibbling his lower lip. “Justin, it’s just that sort of thing, I’m afraid, that’s beginning to worry me.”
“Unh-hunh. You think maybe we ought to use a little, uh, common sense …?”
“Well.” Deep flush. Puff-puff on the pipe. Edwards played the part of the Christlike servant, holding no direct power or wealth like his class before him, nor seeming to want any. But he was just more sophisticated. What had any hierophant since Aaron ever been, give or take a few awesome franchises, but a witchstick for the power man against the masses? The Reverend. “Of course, I suppose it will all be over in another month.”
“Maybe, maybe not. They’re already committed to the irrational, what’s to make them change their minds?”
“Well, if what they think is going to happen doesn’t happen …”
“Do you think Christ rose?”
“Well,” fumbled Edwards, “yes, of course.” He emptied his pipe into the wastebasket, reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a tobacco pouch. “But anyway, that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter—”
“Exactly! It doesn’t matter! Somebody with a little imagination, a new interpretation, a bit of eloquence, and — zap! — they’re off for another hundred or thousand years.” Miller passed his hand over the heap of manila folders on his desk. “Anyway, it makes a good story.”
Edwards gazed down at the folders. “But, Justin, doesn’t it occur to you? These are human lives — one-time human lives — you’re toying with!”
“Sure, what else?”
“But to make a game out of—”
Miller laughed. “You know, Edwards, it’s the one thing you and I have got in common.”
Edwards stood there, indignant, dead pipe in hand, glaring down at the folders. “The only difference,” he said finally, curling his mouth into a patronizing smile, “is that I know what I’m doing.”
They stand by his bed, Elan, Rahim, and Mana. Elan questions, her brother’s nods condemn, fracturing her vision. Alone in her room afterwards, Marcella prays. She’s convinced there’s been a mistake, and that a new day, a new hour, will restore consonance. She does not yet, however, see how that will happen, and so pleads now for help. And meanwhile, in her garden, the sunny heads of her seed-package people wilt to a disconsolate brown.
Miller returned to the plant from a haircut and a purchase: a collar of roughly hammered pieces of old brass, primitive, magnificently simple, colors taken from the earth. The colors on her fingers this noon. Late afternoon, press run over, long but inviting night ahead. Where should they go? Perhaps his own place, a good steak or something. But on his desk, he found a pink message to call Miss Bruno. Uneasily, foreseeing that Eleanor might have spread her mothering wings already, he did so and proved himself a fair prophet. Mrs. Norton had called a small supper meeting of certain members in preparation for tonight’s expedition to the Mount of Redemption, and Marcella now had to stay to prepare for it.