Bernice’s heart is pounding. All she wants is to have her hand back and to leave this fiendish place immediately. “Badly…?”
Glenda turns her eye up to stare it at her, still gripping the hand, her gold tooth glinting in the dusky light. “A fatal confusion of the spirit,” she says, and Bernice feels her knees go wobbly. “Madness.”
“I am sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Suggs, but something evil has got into the Wilderness church camp. It is infested with the ghosts of murdered sinners and a brood of filthy-minded imps and a cannibal witch who is one of them cyplops with just one eye. Wherever she walks a fire breaks out behind her and they’s no more birdsong because she aims her evil eye into the trees and the birds they fall like rain. Even the owls. Murderers are lurking out at the edge, and worse things, too, if you could see them, but there’s like a thick smoky cloud has sunk down over the camp with a rotten smell like the Devil makes. And Sheriff Puller, he’s come back, but he is blind and walks rocking back and forth the way dead people who crawl out of their graves do. Ben Wosznik has been doing all he can, praying and fighting and singing, but he is badly wounded in the thigh and we don’t know if he will live or die. I was able to doctor it, but it is a ugly wound and has got infected and we fret for him in the secret service. Clara and her daughter, they have fell into a kind of coma trance, which is that evil cyplop’s doing, and many people are losing their minds or are in fear of losing their minds. I wisht I had better news, but fear and trembling has got holt of me, and I am glad that we are safe here and far from all that sad desolation.”
As the days pass and Bernice recovers from her scare at the church camp, she repents of the darkness that overtook her history and begins to move it in a happier direction, telling Mr. Suggs that Ben is much better, thanks mainly to her miracle water; that Clara and Elaine have waked up from their deep sleep though they’re still very weak, it being said that it was the spirit of Ely Collins who came back and kissed them both that broke the spell; and that Mr. Puller was only pretending to be a kind of zombie so as to escape his kidnappers. Too late for the birds, though. She is sorry about turning Glenda Oakes into a wicked cyplops, partly because that gives her more power than she deserves, and, hoping Mr. Suggs has forgotten what she said before, speaks of her instead as a cranky old woman who is losing her mind even as everyone else in the camp is getting theirs back. Crazy as she is, you can’t believe a thing she says.
Thinking of Glenda Oakes reminds her of her promise to Calvin Smith. On a day when the theropests come, she walks over to the Smith house to visit Lucy, stopping at the hospital first to fill up her shoulder bag. There she learns that Mr. Thornton has presented Maudie with a handsome little reward on behalf of Mr. Suggs, and also a gift for the hospital to help pay the costs of their emergency generator, and he is also arranging for a free load of coal for it to be delivered from Mr. Suggs’ mine. “He’s a real gentleman,” Maudie says, and they all thank Bernice for her part in it, and she accepts their thanks.
On her way across Main Street to Lucy’s house, she finds huge crowds gathered to watch cranes lift the fallen helicopter down off the bar and grill roof, and she tells Lucy about this when she arrives. “Folks had got climated to it and booed when it come down and cheered when it tipped sideways suddenly and busted one of its fan blades.” She finds Lucy more distracted and nervous than before, and there is a big lump on her forehead, but she says she is feeling better and only needs a few good nights’ sleep. Bernice tells her she has brought her some pills to help with that, and also some miracle water to put on the lump and make it go away; Lucy takes some pills right away and wets some cotton with the miracle water and holds it against her brow and they sit down for some cookies and a chat, Lucy saying that she can already feel the lump going down and apologizing that she only has an electric percolator, so she can’t make coffee.
Bernice fills her in on the rescue of Mr. Suggs and her errand of mercy at the church camp, adding a few details that Lucy might appreciate, and Lucy tells her how the Piccolotti boy went blind saving her life and Calvin’s—“He seemed to fly way up in the air and catch the dynamite and throw it back at the bomber all in one single motion, and that was the last thing I saw!”—and how Junior Baxter apparently murdered the Tebbetts boy and maybe some others as well because he got caught with the gun in his pocket still hot from being fired, and how Calvin, who is the most peaceful and honest person in the world, is being blamed for helping some of the people who are now being charged with murder and may get put in jail himself. “He says that Vince Bonali’s mean boy, who is known more for breaking the law than keeping it, wants his job and is out to get him and that Italian city manager fellow is helping him.”
The strangest story, though, is that of finding two more bodies buried out at the state park, two missing young people whose parents thought they must have eloped, and also a severed head and two feet, though the feet had been mostly eaten up by animals. Naturally, everybody thought the head would be Nat Baxter’s missing one, but it turned out to be his younger brother’s instead. Had both brothers been beheaded? What was going on? Then they remembered that Junior Baxter, when he was arrested, kept saying that the masked biker gan-gleader with “Kid Rivers” on his jacket was really his brother Nat, so now a nationwide manhunt for Kid Rivers alias Nat Baxter has begun. Or anyway that’s what Bernice supposes Lucy meant to say, for what she actually says is “…s’crazy…notion…kid…ers…” and her eyes cross and she falls fast asleep while she’s still talking, such that when Calvin comes home a few moments later, he finds his wife sprawled out on the floor snoring. He smiles and calls Bernice a miracle-worker and a heroine.
Bernice’s first and most enduring life model was Martha, who labored quietly in the kitchen when the Lord came to visit while her flirtatious sister sprawled idly at the Master’s feet to better show off her dinners, as her father’s rude miner friends sometimes called them, and of course Jesus, like all men, couldn’t get enough of her or of them, falling out of her half-buttoned blouse like fruit out of a tipped bowl, and He even scolded Martha when she complained that she could use some help setting the table. Though, yes, Bernice also did sometimes complain, she was a mostly polite and biddable child who always felt she was born to serve. The gratitude of others comforted her, even that of her unloving mother, and she knew before she was twelve years old that she was going to be a nurse. Over time, Bernice grew more interested in Miriam, who saved her baby brother Moses’ life and stood by him faithfully on their long arduous journey but who questioned his absolute authority, especially as she was his big sister, and as punishment got struck down with leprosy and eventually died, the point being, one, that she did question his authority and, two, her lifetime of loving service availed her little when she did. A lesson learned, which led her in turn to other less servile Bible women like Esther and Deborah, Jael and Judith, women of wealth and power, capable of guile and subterfuge but also of bold action like beheadings and driving tent stakes into bad men’s heads, even while pursuing selfless lives of service, and she has stitched a bit of each into the wardrobe by which she presents herself each day to the world.