"Harold, my man," Larry murmured. "Can't wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer... or a Payday."
"Larry!" Lucy said sharply.
Nadine had fainted.
BOOK II ON THE BOARDER Chapter 45
She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955 the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain't more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.
Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn't seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.
She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother's womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother's Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.
She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She'd seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-on of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered... and she wasn't up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother's legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She's got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.
Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?