Frost still said nothing, mostly because he could not decide what might be safe to say. It was quite clear that these people meant to keep the car and there was nothing, he realized, that he could do about it. They were laughing now, at their own good fortune and his discomfiture, but at any moment, if he should say the wrong word, he sensed they could turn ugly.
"Pa," a shrill boyish voice cried, "what is that there on his forehead? He has got a red mark there. What kind of thing is that?"
Silence fell. The laughter died. The faces took on grimness.
"An osty!" cried the slack-jawed man. "By God, he is an osty!"
Frost spun and made a sudden lunge. His hands grasped the upward side of the car and, with a single motion, he vaulted over it. He lit unsteadily on his feet and stumbled, saw the mob of Loafers pounding around each end of the car, closing in on him. He started a stumbling run and saw that he was trapped. The river lay in front of him and there was no chance of dodging to one side, for either way he turned the Loafers had him flanked. There was shouting and laughing once again, but it was vicious laughter, the shrill hooting of hysterical hyenas.
Stones whizzed past him and plunged into the ground or skipped through the grass and he hunched his shoulders to protect his head, but one caught him in the cheek and the blow of it jolted his whole body and it seemed for an instant that his head was coming off as swift pain lanced through his jaw and skull. A fog rose from the ground and obscured his vision and he was plunging into it and all at once, with no sense of having fallen, he was down and hands were reaching roughly for him and lifting and carrying him.
Through the haze of the fog and the deep rumble of the shouting voices, one bullhorn voice rang out loud and clear above all the rest of them. "Wait a minute, boys," it roared. "Don't throw him in just yet. He'll drown sure as hell if he has got his shoes on."
"Hell, yes," yelled another voice, "he has to have a chance. Get them shoes off him."
Someone was tugging at his shoes and he felt them leave his feet and he tried to yell out, but the best he could utter was a croak.
"Them pants of his will get waterlogged," yelled the man with the bullhorn voice.
And another said, "Them rescue boys might not even be able to fish him out should it happen he did drown."
Frost fought, but there were too many of them and his fight was feeble as they stripped him of his trousers and his jacket and his shirt and all the other clothes.
Then there were four men, one to each arm, one to each leg and somewhere off to one side, someone was shouting out the count: "One! Two! Three!"
And each time at the count they swung him and at the count of three let go and he sailed out above the river, naked as a jaybird, and saw the river rushing up to meet him.
He struck sprawled and spraddled out and the water hit him like a doubled fist. He sank into it, fighting and desperate and confused, down into the blue-greenness and the cold. Then he rose and broke the surface and worked his hands and feet, more by instinct than by purpose, to keep himself afloat. Something bumped hard against him and he flung out an arm to ward it off and felt the roughness of wood touch against his hide. He wound an arm around it and it floated and sup, ported him and he saw that it was a drifting tree trunk: floating down the current. He swung himself around and got both arms over it and rested on it, looking back.
On the river's bank the Loafers pranced and hopped in a hilarious war dance, shouting out at him words he did not recognize and one', of them, with an arm raised high, waved his trousers at him as if they might have been a scalp.
29
Sometime in the night the wind had blown down the cross again.
Ogden Russell sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.
He sat flat upon the sand and stared at the fallen cross and it was more, he thought, than a man should have to bear. Although, by now, he should be used to it. He had done everything he knew to keep the cross erect. He had hunted driftwood and had tried to brace and prop it. He had found some boulders at the water's edge and, with a great deal of work and time, had lugged them up the beach and with them formed a supporting circle at the cross's base. He had dug hole after hole in which to plant it and had used a heavy piece of driftwood as a tamper to pack the sand solidly about it.
But nothing worked.
Night after night, the cross fell down.
Might it be, he wondered, that this was no more than a persistent sign that he was not about to find the comfort and the faith he sought and that he might as well give up? Or might it be a testing of his worthiness to receive the boon he hunted?
And what were his shortcomings? Where had he failed?
He had spent long hours upon his knees, with the hot reflection of the running river water and sand scorching jjjrn, turning his hide into a peeling loathesomeness. He had wept and prayed and cried upon the Lord until his legs went dead from lack of circulation and his voice grown hoarse. He had practiced endless spiritual exercises and he had allowed to flow out of him a yearning and a need that would melt a heart of stone. And he had lived entirely on the river clams and the occasional fish and the berries and the watercress until his body had shrunk to skin and bones and his stomach ached with hunger.
Yet nothing happened.
There had been no sign.
God went on ignoring him.
And that was not all. He had used the last of the fuel from the two ancient pine stumps he'd found on the edge of the willow clump which grew back from the sandy beach. He had grubbed out the last of the roots that he could reach the day before and now all the fuel that he had left was the occasional piece of driftwood that he came across and the dead branches of the willows, which were largely worthless as fuel, burning out quickly to a fluffy ash.
And as if this were not enough of tribulation, there was the man in the canoe who, throughout the summer, had snooped about the river and at times had tried to talk with him, not seeming to understand that no proper and dedicated hermit ever talked with anyone.
He had fled from people. He had turned his back on life. He had come to this place where he'd be safe from both life and people. But the world intrudes even so, he thought, in the form of a man paddling a canoe up and down the river, perhaps spying on him, although why anyone should want to spy upon a poor and humble supplicant such as he, he could not well imagine.
Russell came slowly to his feet and, using both his hands, brushed the sand off his back and legs as well as he could manage.
He looked at the cross again and knew that he would have to do something better than he had been able to accomplish heretofore. The only answer, he told himself, was to swim ashore and find there a longer piece of drift-wood to make a new upright for the cross and then sink it deeper in the sand. More deeply planted, it would not be so top heavy and might not tip so easily.
He walked across the sandbar to the river's edge and knelt there, dipping water with his two cupped hands to scrub his face. After he had washed, he stayed kneeling and looked out across the fog-misted plane of steel-gray water that moved with unhurried strength against the ragged background of the forest that crowded close against the other shore.
He had done it right, he thought. He'd followed all the ancient rules of hermitry. He had come to a waste place of the earth, deep in the wilderness, and had isolated himself on this sandbar island in the middle of the river, where there was none or nothing to distract him. With his own hands he had made and reared the cross. He had nearly starved. He had followed proper form in his petitioning; he had wept and prayed, humiliating both the spirit and the flesh.
There was one thing. One single thing. And through all these weeks, he knew, he had fought from knowing it, from admitting it, from saying it. He had sought to keep it buried. He had tried to make himself forget it, make his mind and consciousness erase it.