Halfway down the carriage road to Mim’s, we met her coming up with Jonathan and Hard Mary. Mary held her hand up, palm outward, sending a beam of light along the road so they could see the ruts. “Who is that?” gasped Barb, while Esther clutched my arm with a muffled shriek. Kat had been down to the cellar to splint his leg, but neither Barb nor Esther had seen Jonathan before. His hair bounced against the stars. “What’s up,” he said.
“Hello, girls,” said Mim. “This is Jonathan.”
At that moment a shot rang out. We all began to run back toward the road. I stumbled along wildly for a moment before I realized that Mary was matching my speed, her light shining on the grass. This was strange, for she had always moved at a slow, sedate pace. Now, I saw, she had new wheels, larger ones. They were thick and rolled easily over the cropped grass of the pasture. Her skirt had been cut short so it wouldn’t get caught. She also had some new structure about her waist, with a sort of ledge behind it where Jonathan crouched, clinging to her neck for support, his splinted leg tucked close, a knapsack humped up on his back, his glasses glinting in the dazzle from her hand. They looked altogether otherworldly, like something one of the old kings in the Bible might have encountered in a dream. Oh, my sweet Mary, I thought, both proud and frightened, as she cut the night. (I still tell people my first child was a girl.)
We dashed behind Miller’s place. Beyond it, people were gathered in front of the vans. We could see the lights. We could hear the harsh, booming voice. “This is where I get off,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be your backup. Holler if you need me. Watch this. I’ma jump off like a cat.”
He gathered himself and sprang into Barb’s mother’s forsythia bush, all gangly arms and legs. “Ow, shit!” he said.
“What—what,” Esther panted, half crying, “what is he?”
“He’s an old scarecrow,” said Mim, “but he’s all right.”
She stepped on the new ledge attached to Hard Mary and rolled into the light.
The rest of us followed, clinging close together. The night was cool, October, but I was sweating and I could smell Barb’s sweat, like dried flowers, and the tartness of Esther, and Kat’s damp odor of herbs. Esther rubbed her cheek against my sleeve, smearing off tears. Kat was squeezing my hand. It felt like seeing Hard Mary in the old days—the old days when we clustered around her, all touching her at once, when she seemed made up out of all of us, a group project. The old days, which were less than a year before. No one lay on the ground in the flashing lights. The gun we had heard must have fired into the air. I looked for Sam and found his half-dark shape among the men who had formed a line in front of the vans. I recognized the slope of his shoulder.
Dr. Stoll sat in the lights, raised up on a sort of chair that stuck out from the side of a van. He looked cheerful, and wore a green knitted cap. He raised a white cone to his mouth. “WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY,” he blared. Then he laid the cone in his lap and leaned to talk to a girl in white. He was laughing, shrugging. Like it was a holiday. He flipped one lens of his glasses up against the edge of his cap, bending down, as if it would help him hear better. The girl handed him a paper cup with something that steamed. Her head was shaved and her arm was in a sling.
“They’re horrible, horrible!” Esther whispered.
“They’re just foreign,” I said. They did look strange. People in white coats milled among the men with guns. A boy was arguing with our elders. He had metal teeth. A girl yawned in the driver’s seat of a van, a boil like a ruby on her nose.
“WE DEMAND,” honked Dr. Stoll. Then he saw Mary.
Mim and Mary moved forward until they were just in front of the vans. The girls and I followed at a slight distance. Dr. Stoll smiled. “Goodbye, Mary,” Barb cried out softly.
Dr. Stoll called without his white cone, “Good evening, my dear.”
“I don’t know that I’d call it evening,” said Mim. Her voice carried across the suddenly silent field.
Dr. Stoll chuckled. “Charming,” he said. “Very pert. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mim. Truly a pleasure. As one architect to another.”
He placed his hand on his breast and inclined his head. He told her he found her work impressive. He would like to offer her a seat at the table. Mim said she doubted she was interested in any of his furniture. Dr. Stoll slapped his thigh and called her charming again. Mim had come down from Mary’s ledge and was standing in the grass. I could only see her from the back, the familiar outline of her cap, but I guessed from the front she’d look about as charming as a tub of rattlers.
“Come on, Honey,” said Dr. Stoll, and then there was a pause.
“Come on, Honey,” he repeated a little more forcefully.
Nobody moved. Mim had crossed her arms. Mary stood beside her. Perhaps it was just the lights, but it seemed to me that she was trembling. It seemed to me that she was shaking so fast you could barely see it. I remembered when we used to take her out behind the springhouse, those first few times, in the cold gray air, how she would drift away from us and we would call her back. She’d turn, grinding and rickety, to face us in cloud-light, and slowly return. Now I realized with a chill that she’d always drifted eastward. She had moved toward the Profane Industries.
Dr. Stoll’s lithe body squirmed in the chair. “Natasha!” he snapped. “Pass me the handy.”
He reached one arm inside the van without taking his eyes off Mary and Mim. The girl with the boil placed something in his hand. Meanwhile the elders had come across the field. They were talking to Mim. They were telling her to give Mary up. They were saying she must listen. The bishop thumped his cane on the ground, the lights from the vans sparking wild lights from his dead-white beard.
(John is my problem child. The one who won’t mind, who sits down and cries in the road, who gets up at night to crawl into my bed, the one with the unnatural terror of cats. “It’s nothing,” I’m always telling him, “nothing, get up, quit crying, don’t.” Mother says he’s a character. I think of Dr. Stoll. I think of his talk of characters, the ones you love, the ones you kill. The ones you wipe out. I think of the flood. I think of God.)
Dr. Stoll was jabbing a finger at the little object in his hand, and the men with guns were strolling toward him with casually questioning looks, and the bishop was growling, and our men were shouting, and Esther let go of me and knelt to pray, Barb stumbling and falling to her knees almost on top of her, and the sky was clear and crisp except in the east where the fumes of the quarry blurred the tops of the trees with a vapor like blue fur, and the heavens turned a sickly, blank no-color, the color of the world when your eyes are shut, above the dark halls of the Profane Industries. And Mary was motionless, silent. The doctor got tired of pushing buttons on whatever instrument of Satan was in his hand. “You didn’t do this!” he roared. “You couldn’t have done this.”
“You better back off with those guns,” Mim told him, “or you’ll never find out.”
He sat and looked at her. He snapped the one side of his glasses down and looked at her through two lenses. Then he gave a cough. It turned into a bunch of coughs, which I realized was a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. His mouth was iron-hard.
The laughter made a lot of spit, which he wiped off with his hand. All his white-coated people stood staring at Mim. A couple of the gunmen were smoking cigarettes. “Get up, you ninnies,” I said, pulling Esther and Barb by the backs of their collars. “Mim’s about to beat this heathen.”