Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She'd even had them back in her squatter's shack in Hemingford. You didn't think nothing of those plates... unless they didn't work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person's life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on... it came out of those switchplates set into the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the "trash masher" to hang your hat and coat on.
Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety's sake. Back home she'd had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she'd had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing - and so much of it - but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn't mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn't have to be anybody's business but her own.
They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here - some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.
Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they'd start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.
First they'd want to form some sort of government, probably one they'd want to run around her. She couldn't allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God's will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth - get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that "trash masher." Get the gas running so they wouldn't freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren't running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn't stop them, but she didn't like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.
She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God's will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils... but she would say nothing.
Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.
He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg... at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold's heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.