TWENTY-ONE
A gentleman attempting to pass from Cape Girardeau to the pass of St. Francis, found the earth so much cracked and broke, that it was impossible to get along. The course must be about 50 miles back of the Little Prairie. Others have experienced the same difficulty in getting along, and at times had to go miles out of their way to shun those chasms.
Narrative of James Fletcher
“I peddled pornography.” Magnusson’s voice, amplified by the speakers, floated through the yellow curtains into Robitaille’s room. “I didn’t care about the consequences.”
“Yes, Father Robitaille?” Frankland said. “You wanted to see me?”
Frankland gasped for breath in the foul air of Robitaille’s room. When the message came that Robitaille had asked to see him, he’d left his morning service, right in the middle of Magnusson’s ritual confession.
Robitaille looked appalling. Gray, moist-skinned, with dark blooms around his eyes. The straggling whiskers on his face were more white than gray. The priest’s tongue, dark and leathery, flickered out in a lizardlike way to moisten his cracked lips.
He wants to talk, Frankland thought. Robitaille’s salvation, he thought, was hanging by a thread.
“Where am I?” Robitaille croaked.
“In my home. This is my spare room.” He looked at Robitaille curiously. “Do you remember the earthquake? The broken bridge?”
The priest gave a long sigh. Frankland peered at him cautiously, wondering if the Demon Desbestioles had finally vacated Robitaille’s body, or whether he was in for another battle with the forces of darkness.
“I corrupted children!” Magnusson cried on the PA. “I broke God’s laws.” Robitaille’s eyes moved uneasily at the sound of the amplified voice.
“May I have some water?” the priest asked.
“Of course, Father Robitaille. Can you keep the water down?”
“I think so.”
The porn-peddler Magnusson moaned about his sins and begged his neighbors for forgiveness while Frankland left the room and came back with a glass of water. Robitaille raised a scabbed, scarred hand to take the glass, but the hand trembled so much that Frankland sat on the bed, raised Robitaille with an arm around his shoulders, and held the glass to his lips. Robitaille took several careful sips, then began to swallow eagerly. But he coughed, and spluttered, and in the end pushed the glass away.
Frankland looked down. The consciousness of a miracle glowed inside him. This was the real Robitaille, he thought, the demon had gone.
“There’s more water when you want it,” Frankland said. “I’m glad you’ve come back to us.”
Robitaille dropped with a sigh to his soiled pillow.
“Forgive me, Lord Jesus!” Magnusson wailed. “Forgive me, everybody!”
Robitaille’s eyes wandered to the window. “What is that? Who is talking?”
“Brother Magnusson,” Frankland said. “Bear State Videoramics.”
“What—” Robitaille licked his lips “—what is he talking about?”
Frankland smiled and slapped his thigh. “He’s doing penance. You should know how that works, right? Being a priest?”
Robitaille furrowed his brows, but the act of comprehension seemed too much for him. ”I don’t understand.”
“It’s the end of the world!“ Frankland said cheerfully. “The flock must be purified. I make the sinners confess their sin, in public, so the people can learn.”
Robitaille still seemed puzzled. “Make them? How make them?”
Joy filled Frankland. Two thousand years, and neither the Pope nor his followers had worked out this one.
“See, we need everyone pulling together on this,” he said. “Times are critical. Nobody made any preparations but us. We can’t have disharmony, we have to speak with one voice. Anything that acts against scriptural reason has to be controlled.
”So what I do is make examples. I show what happens if people step from the straight and narrow. So people like Magnusson, now, they confess or they don’t eat. And their families don’t eat, either. And they confess sincere, because we can tell the difference.
“And the neat thing,” Frankland said, his enthusiasm growing, “after the first few, people got the idea. People are volunteering to come up and confess before the congregation. They talk about their problems with alcohol, with adultery— you’d be surprised how they talk. I get a kick watchin’ ’em, I really do.
“It’s working!” Frankland said. “See, I wrote it all down years ago! I have it on a schedule. Day 5—people come to a realization of sin. And that’s what happened!”
Robitaille closed his eyes again. He looked very old and very tired. His lips moved, but nothing came out.
“What was that, Father?” Frankland leaned closer.
Robitaille made an effort. “You .. . can’t,” he said. “Can’t do that.”
Frankland looked at the priest in surprise. “Can’t do what?”
Frankland could see Robitaille’s eyes moving under the pale, closed lids. The words came as a forced whisper from his cracked lips. “You are presuming to judge the Mystical Body of Christ. That is for God alone.”
Frankland reared back in surprise. The Body of Christ, he knew, was a fancy theological term for the congregation of Christian believers. He looked down at Robitaille. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I figured you’d like this part. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You listen to confession. You make people do penance.”
Robitaille’s lips began moving again. Frankland leaned closer in order to hear. “. .. not ... how it works,” he said. “Not just confession. Must be ... truly contrite. Perform satisfaction to God.” He shook his head. “Not public. Not . .. this. The Mystical Body of Christ is judged by the Lord alone.”
Anger flared in Frankland. All these fine distinctions were pointless, he thought, the world wasn’t about to allow for fine distinctions anymore. Good or evil, take your choice, pay the penalty. That’s how it worked.
“Well,” Frankland said, “not to engage in debate, here, Father, but this is the dang end of the world, ain’t it? I can’t have bad influences in my people— I want everyone to go to Heaven, not just the few with the strength to fight the Antichrist on their own.”
Robitaille shook his head. His words were barely audible. “Can’t... judge . ..”
“Evil is like a virus!” Frankland roared. “I’m doing quarantine! I show the people what evil can do! Evil’s not a mystery, damn it! I know it when I see it!” He rose to his feet, waved his hands. “It’s you who are judging me\ You got no right!”
Robitaille said nothing, just lay there beneath his dirty sheet. His mouth had fallen open.
“Hey, Robitaille!” Frankland said. He shook the priest by the shoulder. “Robitaille, you asleep?” He laughed. “You dead there, Father?”
Apparently the priest was not dead. His chest rose and fell with his shallow breaths. There was a little drool at the corner of his mouth. He had fallen asleep.
“Dang it!” Frankland pounded the wall with a fist. “You answer me!” he demanded. “Who are you to judge, you ol’ drunk!”
Robitaille lay inert. Frankland punched the wall again, then stalked out of the room, past the guard he’d put on Robitaille’s door, and who had told him that the priest was awake and asking for him. The guard watched Frankland with wide eyes as he stalked down the hall. “Robitaille okay?” he asked.
Frankland didn’t answer. He walked out of the house, headed toward where his people were gathered on the grass beside the church. He heard Calhoun’s voice on the PA, making a few announcements about the day’s work details.
Hilkiah met him on the way. The big man looked grim. “Brother Frankland, I just heard something.”
Frankland didn’t break stride, made Hilkiah walk after him. “Yeah?” he snarled. “If it’s trouble, I don’t want to hear it.”
“You know old Sam Hanson? The farmer, from out Baxter Road?”
“Yeah? He’s here, ain’t he?”
“Well, sure. And he’s with his friend Jack MacGregor.”
“So?”
Hilkiah hesitated. “Well, according to Brother Murphy, y’know, their guide, he heard the two of ’em makin’ out in their tent last night.”
Frankland stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled on Hilkiah. “You’re telling me what, Hilkiah?”
Hilkiah seemed embarrassed. “Well. You know. They’s queer.”
Frankland looked at Hilkiah in astonishment. Sam Hanson was just an old soybean farmer, past fifty, and his friend Jack wasn’t much younger. Neither of them were the slightest bit— the slightest bit of whatever homosexuals were supposed to be, effeminate or lisping or whatever. Granted, the two had lived together for longer than Frankland had been in Rails Bluff, but there hadn’t been the slightest hint that there was anything deviant going on, everyone just assumed they lived together because they shared so many hobbies.
They tied flies, Frankland remembered, they’d won a prize at the county fair.
“Is Brother Murphy sure?” Frankland said.
“Oh yeah. He said they were kinda noisy. And it wasn’t just Murphy who heard it, neither.”
“Lordamighty,” Frankland said, stunned. “I can’t have this going on in my camp!” A new determination seized him.
I know evil when I see it. You don’t need to be a Catholic priest to know when Satan was among the people.
Frankland took off at a brisk stride toward where Dr. Calhoun was finishing off the morning service. “Wait up there!” he shouted. He reached around his back, took out his Smith & Wesson, waved it over his head.
“We got one more item of business!” Frankland shouted. “Sam Hanson, Jack MacGregor, get up here!”
Judge me, will he? Frankland thought. I’ll show him judgment!
They were going to have themselves some righteous atonement, by God. And they were going to have it now.
*
Later on, after Hanson and MacGregor had been exposed, after they had wept and crawled and begged God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of their neighbors, after they’d been separated and sent off to work with two different parties, Frankland heard from the guard he’d put over Robitaille that the priest had died in his sleep.
“Dang it!” Frankland wanted to hit something, but there was nothing nearby, so he kicked the ground instead.
Robitaille had slipped away, had escaped Frankland’s jurisdiction. Before Frankland could argue him around to his way of thinking, before he could get Robitaille to denounce the Catholic church and join his own.
Before he could save Robitaille’s soul.
“Dang it!” Frankland said again.
If only he’d had another few more days.
*
“I have some preliminary figures, sir,” said Boris Lipinsky.
“By all means,” said the President. Lipinsky turned up in the Oval Office, every morning at ten a.m., to bombard his president with numbers. The President had gotten used to it by now.
He was staring out the Oval Office windows at the White House grounds. A light rain was falling, spattering the glass with tiny drops. He turned and sat himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.
“Please sit down, Boris,” he said. “And if you can, try to keep it brief. I have to attend Congressman Delarue’s funeral.” Delarue, a party stalwart, had died of a heart attack during an aftershock while on a visit to his home district in Arkansas. Being what the government termed a “Vietnam-era veteran”— without, however, actually having served in Vietnam— Delarue would be buried in the military cemetery at Arlington, after a service in the capital.
Lipinsky spoke without referring to the notes in his hand. The President, who usually needed his briefing books to remind him of the reasons behind his positions on the issues, could only envy Lipinsky this ability.
“We believe the quakes in the New Madrid region have killed between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Almost two hundred thousand have injuries serious enough to require hospitalization. There are approximately three million homeless people in the New Madrid seismic zone, of whom over fifty percent are now living out of doors for lack of a safe structure to house in, and a further five million in need of one form of assistance or other, either food aid, ice, medical aid short of hospitalization, or emergency financial aid in order to purchase food or other basic necessities.” He blinked behind his thick spectacles. “These figures are very preliminary, sir.”
“Ice?” the President said. “Why are we providing people with ice?” He had pictures of cocktail parties at the government’s expense.
“To preserve food, Mr. President. The victim areas range from temperate to subtropical zones, and—”
“I understand now, thank you. Continue.”
Rain tapped on the Oval Office windows as Lipinsky licked his lips and continued. “Much of the area is still without electric power, particularly rural areas. The lack of electricity means that other utilities, such as water, gas, and sewage treatment, may be difficult if not impossible to restore. Lack of safe water and proper sanitation will almost inevitably result in epidemics of disease ranging from dysentery to cholera and typhoid.”
The President sat up in his chair. “Those diseases are in the United States?”
“I fear so, sir. Particularly on a major waterway such as the Mississippi.”
“You are taking—”
“We are taking every possible precaution, yes. Ranging from urging people to boil their water to preshipping the necessary medical supplies to centralized points within the victim areas.” He shook his head. “But there are entire districts— all rural— where we have been unable to do anything. We lack the assets to put into the victim areas, and even if we had the assets, the infrastructure no longer exists to put them in place.” Lipinsky solemnly shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands of people— maybe over a million— are entirely dependent on their own resources in this crisis. It is an ongoing tragedy to which we cannot even bear witness.”
Ongoing tragedy . . . For a moment the President was outraged. Lipinsky spoke about tragedy in the same pedantic manner he spoke of assets and infrastructure.
These people are not statistics, the President thought in fury. But then the fury passed, and he sighed. He was slowly growing used to his own impotence. He looked up at Lipinsky.
“The— the nuclear plant in Mississippi? This situation is being dealt with?”
“I am informed that General Frazetta will implement a— rather novel— plan at Poinsett Landing. An artificial island will be built around the reactor to stabilize it.”
They can do that? the President wondered. Well, he concluded, why not? “I want that problem neutralized,” he said. Meaning the political problem as much as any other. “The full resources of the government, you understand?”
“Indeed, sir.” Lipinsky, the President knew, understood the political dimensions of a nuclear catastrophe as well as anyone.
“And . ..” The President hesitated. “General Frazetta’s other problem? The water supply?”
Lipinsky paused, the moment of silence adding gravity to his words. “Our HAZMAT teams are still testing the water, Mr. President. Any information is exceedingly preliminary.”
“And the preliminary reports indicate what, exactly?”
Another pause. Then Lipinsky just shook his head. “Preliminary reports are not at all encouraging, sir.”
So, the President thought, it would get worse. Three million homeless, and it will get worse.
Worse.