He did in fact almost come to grief as he entered the town, where the arrow pointing to left warned of the imminent curve to the right. From time to time he had taken one hand from the wheel, to draw across his nose, which is just what he was doing at that moment, and for uncountable terrifying instants he wove between the Civil War monument and the Depot Tavern, as though choosing which to demolish, an experience which the most worthy of goals could scarcely redeem, and explains why he had to be helped from his car upon arrival at the church.
Things had been set to rights as far as was possible, the pulpit replaced, the damaged pews straightened out, and the windows un-boarded, largely through the efforts of the burly man and his buddies. He stood now to the back of the unsteady gasping congregation, looking quite indignantly about him, and above, from an eye already greatly swollen and discolored. There were others as severely marked, better than a half-dozen of them, and he turned to one now, whose shirt hung in tatters under his torn jacket, to mutter, — We got him there all right, the doc gave him a sedative, put him right out like a light. Then he turned respectfully to the fore, waiting for the conscript in the pulpit to begin.
The young minister started twice, but the sounds he made could barely be heard above, or distinguished from, the gasps and chirps in the congregation. And the reason for this ferment was that they were, one by one, turning their eyes above them. Although little light came in through the lozenge-shaped panes even now, uncovered, because of the sudden change in the weather, and the electric lights were, like the organ, found to have been put out of order, it was still quite easy to see the figures of stars, planets, the moon in various phases, and a resplendent sun, among other lavish celestial bodies, painted broadcast over the inside of the roof.
Gradually the sound from the pulpit disentangled itself from those rising before it, climbing earnestly from one line to the next of what turned out to be part of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Alter that reassuring narrative, the place was quiet but for the sounds of his own sincere pleading, as he went on to Saint John, and that vernal episode involving Lazarus, which he seemed to think might not come amiss. Apparently he was right. They seemed more grateful for resurrection than they had needful of the stable birth; and as his own voice broke and mounted between gasps, and his eyes watered in what, from almost anywhere in that light, appeared an overpowering emotion of belief, many lips on the upturned faces joined his importunate plea, — I am the Resurrection, and the Life. .
It was a simple service. He hoped by now to do little more than read a psalm, solicit a hymn, a cappella, and during that exercise recover enough voice himself to get through benediction; but he had hardly launched Psalm Number 89, —Till I thy foes thy footstool make. . when there was a resounding crash which, though apparently some distance off, in the direction of the railway station, lost none of its impact on this convalescent throng. With great presence of mind, he called for Rock of Ages, and with equal fortitude led two stanzas of it himself, so that the benediction, when it came, was accepted as a minute of silent prayer by all but a few who could see his lips, and every bit of his face, straining over it, until, with the lowering of his unsteady hand, it was all over, and no one there ever saw him again.
He left that town the way he had come, though more slowly, and more slowly still as he approached the built-up end of the curve which had almost saved him from the experience he had just been through, in the same manner that someone else, a complete stranger as the barbarian license tag showed, had just been delivered from the cares of this world to the chimera of the next. The Depot Tavern was ablaze; and the car radio, which was well inside with the whole front end of it, was playing the rondo from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to the silent passenger, and the twelve-point buck, knocked slightly askew up there as though he had cocked his head, listening, and in spite of the red Christmas tree light dangling at the end of his nose, watching with a dusty eyeball and an air of imperturbable serenity.
The real storm came, shrouding Mount Lamentation and then obliterating it altogether. The wind blew with a peculiarly terrible quality, broke here and there in the town a few windows, vindictive, viciously fingered where there was anything to destroy. It swept over the empty carriage barn, and cracked a blotched pane of that window tucked high on the house where Janet had been found, blue and rough-faced, weeping, and slavering — never never never never never. . see him. . more. ., which some coarse unimaginative mind later publicly interpreted as a reference to a figure he'd known only as the sexton, found then in answer to the whine of a dog from behind a locked door, in bed, clutching a piece of paper, as the coroner, displacing the top button of the underwear for a token touch of his stethoscope against that empty chest, said he had probably lain for a day or two.
(Downstairs, in the defaced study, the coroner even got to his knees on the floor beside the carcass flung there at full length, to note and comment on the single fatal wound in the bull's neck, inflicted while it lived, as one could see from the round and gaping nature instead of its being drawn in a slit, as such a wound would have been otherwise.)
And the darkness came in like a substance driven on the wind which filled every crevice with it, and still did not relent where it failed in destruction, wailing round corners and shrill in the timbers erected awry but steady there at the foot of the hill. As for that platform, it would take three men as many days to dismantle it; but, although a number of curious things were to turn up around the place within the next few months, no one ever came upon anything that might have been a balloon.
A number of curious things turned up during the first few months of the new minister's tenancy, though that barely lasted the spring. He did "dig right in" (that was one of his expressions) to,ry to make the place "cheery" (another) and even "cozy" (. .), choosing, first off, a bright upstairs room for his study, where it was not until one day when he lay on his back on the floor exercising with dumbbells (that was one of the things he did) that he discovered the wall to be papered with roses, and all of them upside down. Heretofore the pattern had not disturbed him, for he'd never tried to make anything of it; but now!. . He was on his feet immediately, and had that taken care of, repapered, that is, with something (as he said) of a more masculine character, a repetitious series of what for him represented fox hunting, not unlike the paper he had used in a darker downstairs room, after its floor had been sanded to remove the stains, and its walls and ceiling scraped of the brilliant colors with which they had been heavily painted, that and a half-dozen repairs to the walls where they looked to have been kicked in.
From a small room at the end of the upstairs hall, he'd had removed a printing press, its jumble of type, and a bundle of printed matter of which he could not make head or tail; not that he needed the room for anything, but he saw no reason to have a printing press in it at the foot of the narrow bed. From a chest of drawers in another room, he had a quantity of empty bottles removed. Not that he needed the drawers. He took down some paintings, whose subject matter was neither cheery nor cozy, and stored them along with a damaged statue, whose presence was certainly neither of those things, in a closet w-here he had come upon a jumble of books and some pieces of dark wood each mounting a small broken mirror in the end, which he took to be the remains of a curious picture frame, though he did not consider trying to have it restored.