He nodded, childishly disappointed, but she thought he was pleased, in a way, because she had compared her feelings to his. “Someday I will,” she repeated, and put her hand on his arm. “Thank you, though, for— well, just for caring, Colin.” She looked up, and Jack was coming toward them grinning. He looked in such a good mood that Bethany wanted to kick him. Colin picked up her suitcase.
“Running away from home?” Jack ogled the flowered suitcase as if it were Colin’s, and smirked.
“I’m going to stay with Justin for a while,” Bethany said. “To help her get the house ready for Zebulon and unpack his books and papers.”
“Well free labor’s better than hiring a maid,” Jack said, and fell into step with them. Then, haughtily, “Claybelle’s leaving. Mother signed the lease, so I guess she’s stuck with the store. It’s your fault, you know,” he said, looking down at Bethany.
“Mine! But you wanted me to do it, you practically—” She searched his face, but saw only sarcasm there. “Go away, Jack. Go on away,” she said irritably.
“Come on Bethany,” he put his arm around her, and she jerked away from him, but he pushed closer and held her shoulder so tight it hurt. Colin pushed Jack ineffectually—then they all stopped and stared at the police car that skidded around the corner past them, its siren starting.
In front of the hardware store a small crowd had gathered, many were summer people, and the police car stood in the middle of the street with its doors open and its radio sputtering. “It’s old Krupp,” Jack said. “He was just getting warmed up when I went by. You’d think Reid would come and take the old sot home. But I guess it would take more of a man than Reid to do that.”
Bethany hated Jack vehemently. But she wasn’t going to show it, she wasn’t going to show him how furious he made her. “Don’t be such an ass, Jack,” she said coolly. “Let’s go see what’s happened.” It pleased her to think that was the kind of retort Beverly or Ciel would have made.
Mr. Krupp was inside the hardware store standing on top of a display counter, his baseball cap in his hand and his gray hair in strings over his forehead. He had already kicked more than half the display onto the floor. “The Lord is coming, I tell you! The time is drawing near. You sinners, all of you will burn in hell—”
It upset her to hear the old man speak of evil like that. Could what she thought she saw and felt have no more substance than the rantings of this old man? “False and evil spirits,” he roared; then he stopped suddenly, staring down into the crowd where Bethany and Jack and Colin stood, and pointed his finger. “That’s her!” Krupp shouted, “She who casts evil prophesies upon us, she who sins against us—”
She stared up at him, perplexed, and then alarmed. He was pointing at her.
Jack looked amused. Colin stood frozen for a moment, then, “He’s talking about you!” he hissed and began to pull at her. “Let’s get out of here!” He tried to make an opening in the crowd for her, but she was too shocked to follow him. “Come on,” he urged. “Oh, don’t just stand there, Bethany—”
“The prophesies of doom surround her, she carries the curse of the prophesies!” Krupp shouted. Colin pulled at her frantically. “Come on, Bethany!” And his expression was of such pain that she followed him at last as he opened the way, pushing at the people who stood in their path staring. She felt cold inside. And indignant.
“Evil will be visited on the daughter—” Krupp shouted after her. Bethany turned to stare back at him, but Colin forced her along, and Ciel Bapp’s face shone for a moment in the crowd, smirking.
The next day Reid made her tell him what the old man had said. He had come too late; his grandfather was already in jail.
“Let him rot in there,” he muttered now, and she thought she’d never seen him so angry. He was practically cross-examining her.
Finally, driven to anger herself, she turned on him, scowling. “That’s all he said, Reid! He didn’t say anything else!” His grip on her arm tightened, and when she put her hand across his knuckles, he took her by both shoulders, hard, and stared down at her almost as if she had been drunk in Bear’s Hardware. But his look was as much perplexed as angry, and he didn’t say anything. It was almost as if he didn’t trust himself to. “Reid,” she said at last, “he was only drunk, he didn’t know what he was saying. He didn’t hurt me.” She felt terrible for him; she wished she could make things easier. She took his hand, and they went on silently. “Some people never seem to have any real problems,” she said at last, puzzling. “Except just little everyday things. And some people—your grandfather losing his son like that, with the boat burning and all— Well if there were really a God watching over us like Aunt Bett says, then why would it all be so unequal?”
Reid brought his attention back to her as if from a long way off, and looked at her quietly for a minute. “It’s not that,” he said at last. “It’s that you have to have chance.” His anger had subsided a little, his face was gentler. He unwrapped a Hershey bar and handed her half. “Without chance, there wouldn’t be any point in it. I mean, did you ever wonder why we’re here? It doesn’t make any sense to me that we’re here just to venerate God, or just to be good so we can get into Heaven. And what would be the good of God taking care of you so you didn’t have any problems? I think you have to have chance to be able to—well, I guess I mean to prove yourself. I guess I think the whole point is proving yourself.”
Bethany watched the shadows glide under her feet. “Do you believe in God, then?”
“I don’t know. I believe in something; not the kind of God my grandfather raves about, though. Whatever it is, chance has to be part of it. If things were predetermined, or controlled, then what you do, the decisions you make, wouldn’t mean anything. And if there’s chance, then unpleasant things are just naturally going to happen. Maybe it’s how you handle the problems that shows—well, like a testing.”
“A testing,” she said, and a little spark of something eager kindled in her. “Like we are being tested.”
“He hasn’t done his best,” Reid said suddenly and angrily. “Other people have things happen to them, even worse things. That old man hasn’t used what was in him to use.”
“I—” She looked up, they were approaching the stables.
Danny was in the cross-ties. Mr. Grady was grooming him. His bridle lay across his neatly folded blanket on the saddle rack, and the trailer was hitched to Mr. Grady’s car.
Bethany stared, then turned like a child to run away. But Mr. Grady spoke her name so imperatively that she turned back and went in to him. “Danny is ready to go home, Bethany,” he said more gently. “You knew he had to go. You did a good job with him. But now that job is done and his little girl wants him back.”
He looked at her kindly, his hat jammed low on his head. Bethany stood with her knuckles pressed against her mouth, desolate, and when Danny was ready to be loaded in the trailer, she cried against his neck; he nickered to her from the trailer as the car was pulling out the gate. You knew he had to go, she told herself harshly. You always knew. But that didn’t make it any easier. Reid put his arms around her while she cried against him, and he didn’t say, even once, that she’d get over it. He just held her and let her cry.
Late in the afternoon, though the sky was dark and threatening, she saddled little gray Molly and went out alone, missing Danny terribly, and feeling depressed. It was as they reached the hard-packed shore that she began to feel almost shaky for no reason, as if something lay waiting at the edges of the storm-dark sky. The dunes were utterly lonely and silent, not a gull, no sign of life. Even Molly seemed nervous, though she was a willing little soul, thrusting her nose dutifully into the wind. But her ears were cocked with tension, and she snorted now and then. It was as they were headed home, Molly eager for her hay and walking fast, that Bethany felt the heat come down around her suddenly and felt the difference in the gait of the horse under her. The sky brightened and quivered with heat, and she saw, wavering indistinctly through Molly’s white mane, the dark neck of another horse, felt the difference through the reins, the two horses superimposed one over the other. She felt her hands tighten on the reins and in spite of herself she felt a terrible desire to jerk the reins and dig in her heels so that the horse under her would thrust forward into the bit and be jerked upward, rearing. Her hands trembled, she could feel the desire so strongly. “No!” she hissed aloud. “Stop it!” The heat and the wind fought each other, the sky wavered between darkness and sun—the horse beneath her wavered. “No! Go away!” Bethany sat stubbornly, forcing her hands to lay lightly. Molly was trembling under her. “Go away!” Something—someone was trying stubbornly, forcefully, to make her do something. She felt the strength, the power, that she had felt in Selma’s church—only this time it was against her. She gritted her teeth stubbornly and fought it.