"No, her ideas would have to be ratified by the Representative Board," Stu said, and then added slyly: "But we might find ourselves a rubber stamp for her instead of the other way around."
There was a long silence. Glen had put his forehead into one hand. At last he said, "Yeah, you're right. She can't just be a figurehead... at the very least we have to accept the possibility that she may have her own ideas. And that's where I pack up my cloudy crystal ball, East Texas. Because she's what those of us who ride the sociology range call other-directed."
"Who's the other?"
"God? Thor? Allah? Pee-wee Herman? It doesn't matter. What it means is that what she says won't necessarily be directed by what this society needs or by what its mores turn out to be. She'll be listening to some other voice. Like Joan of Arc. What you've made me see is that we just might wind up with a theocracy on our hands here."
"Theoc-what?"
"On a God trip," Glen said. He didn't sound too happy about it. "When you were a little boy, Stu, did you ever dream that you might grow up to be one of seven high priests and/or priestesses to a one-hundred-and-eight-year-old black woman from Nebraska?"
Stu stared at him. Finally he said: "Is there any more of that wine?"
"All gone."
"Shit."
"Yes," Glen said. They studied each other's face in silence and then suddenly burst out laughing.
It was surely the nicest house Mother Abagail had ever lived in, and sitting here on the screened-in porch put her in mind of a traveling salesman who had come around Hemingford back in 1936 or '37. Why, he had been the sweetest-talking fellow she had ever met in her life; he could have charmed the birdies right down from the trees. She had asked this young man, Mr. Donald King by name, what his business was with Abby Freemantle, and he had replied: "My business, ma'am, is pleasure. Your pleasure. Do you like to read? Listen to the radio, perchance? Or maybe just put your tired old dogs up on a foot hassock and listen to the world as it rolls down the great bowling alley of the universe?"
She had admitted she enjoyed all those things, not admitting that the Motorola had been sold a month before to pay for ninety bales of hay.
"Well, those are the things I'm selling," this sweet-talking road-merchant had told her. "It may be called an Electrolux vacuum cleaner complete with all the attachments, but what it really is, is spare time. Plug her in and you open up whole new vistas of relaxation for yourself. And the payments are almost as easy as your housework's going to be."
They had been deep in the Depression then, she hadn't even been able to raise twenty cents for hair ribbons for her granddaughters' birthdays, and there was no chance for that Electrolux. But say, didn't that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet. My! She had never seen him again, but she had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady's heart. She never did own a vacuum cleaner until the end of the Nazi war, when it seemed like all of a sudden anybody could afford anything and even poor white trash had a Mercury hidden away in their back shed.
Now this house, which Nick had told her was in the Mapleton Hill section of Boulder (Mother Abagail just bet there hadn't been many blacks living up here before the smiting plague), had every gadget she'd ever heard of and some she hadn't. Dishwasher. Two vacuums, one strictly for the upstairs work. Dispos-All in the sink. Microwave oven. Clothes washer and dryer. There was a gadget in the kitchen, eked like nothing more than a steel box, and Nick's good friend Ralph Brentner told her it was a "trash masher," and you could put about a hundred pounds of swill into it and get back a little block of garbage about the size of a footstool. Wonders never ceased.
But come to think of it, some of them had.