10
Now he sat on a stump in Bobbi's back yard without the slightest idea there was a loaded shotgun pointed at the back of his head.
He sat thinking of his mental replay of the party. It was so horrifying and so utterly obvious that he supposed he could be forgiven the time it had taken him to see it and grasp it. The ship in the earth could not be dealt with just on the basis of Bobbi's welfare, or Haven's welfare. Regardless of what it was or what it was doing to Bobbi or anyone else in the immediate area, the ultimate disposition of the ship in the earth would have to be made on the basis of the world's welfare. Gardener had served on dozens of committees whose goals ranged from the possible to the wildly crazed. He had marched; had given more than he could afford to help pay for newspaper ads in two unsuccessful campaigns to close Maine Yankee by referendum; as a college student he had marched against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam; he belonged to Greenpeace; he supported NARAL. In half a dozen muddled ways he had tried to deal with the world's welfare, but his efforts, although growing out of individual thought, had always been expressed as part of a group. Now ...
Up to you, Gard-ole-Gard. Just you. He sighed. It was like a sob. Ring those funky changes, white boy ... sure. But first ask yourself who wants the world to change? The unfed, the unwell, the unhomed, right? The parents of those kids in Africa with the big bellies and the dying eyes. The blacks in South Africa. The PLO. Does Ted the Power Man want a big helping of funky changes? Bite your tongue! Not Ted, not the Russian Politburo, not the Knesset, not the President of the United States, not the Seven Sisters, not Xerox, not Barry Manilow.
Oh no, not the big boys, not the ones with the real power, the ones who drove the Status Quo Machine. Their motto was 'Get the funk outta my face.'
There was a time when he would not have hesitated for a moment, and that time was not so long past. Bobbi wouldn't have needed any arguments; Gard himself would have been the guy flogging the horse until its heart burst ... only he would have been right there in harness too, pulling alongside. Here, at last, was a source of clean power, so abundant and easy to produce it might as well be free. Within six months, every nuclear reactor in the United States could be brought to a cold stop. Within a year, every reactor in the world. Cheap power. Cheap transport. Travel to other planets, even other starsystems seemed possible - after all, Bobbi's ship had not gotten to Haven, Maine, on the good ship Lollypop. It was, in fact - give us a drumroll, please, maestro - THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING.
Are there weapons on board that ship, do you think?
He had started to ask Bobbi that and something had stopped his mouth. Weapons? Maybe. And if Bobbi could receive enough of that residual 'force' to create a telepathic typewriter, could she also create something that would look like a Flash Gordon stun-gun but which might actually work? Or a disintegrator? A tractor-beam? Something which would, instead of just going Brummmmm or Wacka-Wacka-Wacka would actually turn people into piles of smoldering ash? Possibly. And if not, wouldn't some of Bobbi's hypothetical scientists adapt things like the water-heater gadget or the customized Tomcat motor to something that would put a radical hurt on people?
Sure. After all, long before toasters and hair dryers and baseboard heaters were ever thought of, the State of New York was using electricity to fry murderers at Sing-Sing.
What scared Gardener was that the idea of weapons held a certain attractiveness. Part of it, he supposed, was just self-interest. If the order came down to put a sport-coat over the mess, then surely he and Bobbi would be part of what was to be covered. But beyond that were other possibilities. One of them, wild but not unattractive, was the idea that he and Bobbi might be able to kick a lot of asses that deserved kicking. The idea of sending happy-time folks like the Ayatollah into the Phantom Zone was so delightful that it almost made Gardener chuckle. Why wait for the Israelis and the Arabs to sort out their problems? And terrorists of all stripes ... goodbye, fellas. Catch you on the flip-flop.
Wonderful, Gard! I love it! We'll put it on network TV! It'll be better than Miami Vice! Instead of two fearless drug-busters, we got Gard and Bobbi, cruising the planet in their flying saucer! Gimme the phone, someone! I got to call CBS!
You're not funny, Gardener thought.
Who's laughing? Isn't that what you're talking about? You and Bobbi playing the Lone Ranger and Tonto?
So what if it is? How long does it take before that option starts looking good? How many suitcase bombs? How many women shot in embassy toilets? How many dead kids? How long do we let it all go on?
Love it, Gard. 'Okay, everyone on Planet Earth, sing along with Gard and Bobbi - just follow the bouncing ball: "The aaanswer, my friend, is blooowin' in the wind. . . "'
You're disgusting.
And you're starting to sound downright dangerous. You remember how scared you were when that state trooper found the pistol in your pack? How scared you were because you didn't even remember putting it in there? This is it all over again. The only difference is that now you're talking about a bigger caliber. Dear Christ, are you ever.
As a younger man, these questions never would have occurred to him ... and if they had, he would simply have brushed them aside. Apparently Bobbi already had. She was. after all, the one who had mentioned the man on horseback.
What do you mean, a man on horseback?
I mean us, Gard. But I think ... I think I mostly mean you.
Bobbi, when I was twenty-five I burned all the time. When I was thirty, I burned some of the time. But the oxygen in here must be getting thin, because now I only burn when I'm drunk. I'm scared to climb up on that horse, Bobbi. If history ever taught me anything, it taught me that horses like to bolt.
He shifted on the stump again, and the shotgun followed him. Anderson sat in the kitchen on a stool, the barrels swivelling a bit on the window-sill with every move Gardener made. She was getting very little of his thoughts; it was frustrating, maddening. But she was getting enough to know that Gardener was approaching a decision ... and when he made it, Anderson thought she would know what it was.
If it was the wrong one, she was going to blow off the back of his head and bury the body in the soft soil at the foot of the garden. She would hate to do that, but if she had to, she would.
Anderson waited calmly for the moment, her mind tuned to the faint run of Gardener's thoughts, making the tenuous connection.
It would not be long now.
What really scares you is the chance to deal from a position of strength for the first time in your miserable, confused life.
He sat up straighter, an expression of dismay on his face. It wasn't true, was it? Surely it wasn't.
Oh, but Gard, it is. You even root for baseball teams that are cataclysmic underdogs. That way you never have to worry about being depressed if one of them blows it in the World Series. It's the same with the candidates and the causes you support, isn't it? Because if your politics never get the chance to be tried out, you never have to worry about finding out that the new boss is the same as the old boss, do you?
I'm not scared. Not of that.
The f**k you're not. A man on horseback? You? Man, that's a laugh. You'd have a heart attack if someone asked you to be a man on a tricycle. Your own personal life has been nothing but a constant effort to destroy every power-base you have. Take marriage. Nora was tough, you finally had to shoot her to get rid of her, but when the chips were down, you didn't stick at it, did you? You're a man who manages to rise to every occasion, I'll give you that. You got yourself fired from your teaching job, thus eliminating another power-base. You've spent twelve years pouring enough booze onto the little spark of talent God gave you to put it out. Now this. You better run, Gard.
That's not fair! Honest to God, it's not!
No? Isn't there enough truth in it to make a comeuppance?
Maybe. Maybe so. Either way, he discovered that the decision had already been made. He would stick with Bobbi, at least for a while, do it her way.
Bobbi's blithe assurances that everything was just ducky didn't jibe very well with her exhaustion and weight-loss. What the ship in the earth could do to Bobbi it would probably do to him. What had happened - or failed to happen - today proved nothing; he would not have expected all the changes to come at once. Yet the ship - and whatever force emanated from it - had a great capacity to do good. That was the main thing, and ... well, f**k the Tommyknocker man.
Gardener got up and walked toward the house. The sun had gone down, and the twilight was turning ashy. His back was stiff. He stretched, standing on his toes, and grimaced as his spine crackled. He looked past the dark, silent shape of the Tomcat to the shed door with its new padlock. He thought of going to it, trying to look through one of the dirt-grimed windows ... and decided not to. Perhaps he was afraid a white face would pop up inside the dark window, its grin showing a mouthful of filed cannibal teeth in a deadly ring. Hello, Gard, you want to meet some genuine Tommyknockers? Come on in! There's lots of us in here!
Gardener shivered - he could almost hear thin, evil fingers scrabbling on the panes. Too much had happened today and yesterday. His imagination had gotten out. Tonight it would walk and talk. He didn't know if he should hope for sleep or for it to stay away.
12
Once he was back inside, his uneasiness began to fade. With it went some of his craving for drink. He took off his shirt and then peered into Anderson's room. Bobbi lay just as she had lain before, blankets caught between her dreadfully thin legs, one hand thrown out, snoring.
Hasn't even moved. Christ, she must be tired.
He took a long shower, turning the water up as hot as he dared (with Bobbi Anderson's new water heater, that meant barely jogging the knob five degrees west of dead cold). When his skin began to turn red. he stepped out into a bathroom as steamy as London in the grip of a Sherlockian fog. He towelled, brushed his teeth with a finger - got to do something about getting some supplies here, he thought -and went to bed.
Drifting off, he found himself thinking again about the last thing Bobbi had said during their discussion. She believed the ship in the earth had begun to affect the townspeople. When he asked for specifics, she grew vague, then changed the subject. Gardener supposed anything was possible in this crazy business. Although the old Frank Garrick place was in the boonies, it was almost exactly in the geographic center of the township itself. There was a Haven Village, but that was five miles further north.
'You make it sound as if it was throwing off poison gas,' he had said, hoping he didn't sound as uneasy as he felt. 'Paraquat from Space. They Came from Agent Orange.'
'Poison gas?' Bobbi repeated. She had gone off by herself again. Her face, so thin now, was closed and distant. 'No, not poison gas. Call it fumes if you want to call it anything. But it's more than just the vibration when a person touches it.'
Gardener said nothing, not wanting to break her mood.
'Fumes? Not that, either. But like fumes. If EPA came in here with sniffers, I don't think they'd find any pollutants at all. If there's any actual, physical residue from the ship in the air, it's nothing but the tiniest trace.'
'Do you think that's possible, Bobbi?' Gardener asked quietly.
'Yes. I'm not telling you I know that's what's happening, because I don't. I have no inside information. But I think that a very thin layer of the ship's hull - and I mean thin, maybe no more than a single molecule or two in depth - could be oxidizing as I uncover it and the air hits it. That means I'd get the first, heaviest dose . . . and then it would go with the wind, like fallout. The people in town would get most of it ... but "most" would really mean---damn little" in this case.'
Bobbi shifted in her rocker and reached down with her right hand. It was a gesture Gardener had seen her make many times before, and his heart went out to his friend when he saw the look of sorrow cross Bobbi's face. Bobbi put her hand back into her lap.
'But I'm not sure that's what's going on at all, you know. There's a novel by a man named Peter Straub called Floating Dragon - have you read it?'
Gardener had shaken his head.
'Well, it postulates something similar to your Agent Orange from Space or Paraquat of the Gods or whatever you called it.'
Gardener smiled.
'In the story, an experimental chemical is sucked out into the atmosphere and falls on a piece of suburban Connecticut. This stuff really is poison - a kind of insanity gas. People get in fights for no reason, some fellow decides to paint his whole house - including the windows - bright pink, a woman jogs until she drops dead of a massive coronary and so on.
'There's another novel - this one is called Brain Wave, and it was written by . . .' Anderson wrinkled her brow, thinking. Her hand stole down to the right of the rocker again, then came back. 'Same name as mine, Anderson. Poul Anderson. In that one, the earth passes through the tail of a comet and some of the fallout makes animals smarter. The book starts with a rabbit literally reasoning its way out of a trap.'
'Smarter,' Gardener echoed.
'Yes. If you had an IQ of 120 before the earth went through the comet, you'd end up with an IQ of 180. Get it?'
'Well-rounded intelligence?'
'Yes.'
'But the term you used before was idiot savant. That's the exact opposite of well-rounded intelligence, isn't it? It's a kind of ... of bump.'
Anderson waved this aside. 'Doesn't matter,' she said.
Now, lying here in bed, drifting off to sleep, Gardener wondered.
13
That night he had the dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been
thinking tonight - that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn't afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren't monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from 'The Night Before Christmas' (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a great big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mindmovies instead of regular ones.
He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi's modified typewriter - it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o'-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats' eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space had made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson's shed.
But he drew closer, because in dreams you can't always help yourself. He drew closer, no longer wanting to see, no more than a kid would want to look out his bedroom window on Christmas Eve and see Santa Claus striding along the snow-covered slope of roof across the way with a severed head in each gloved hand, the blood from the ragged necks steaming in the cold.
Please no, please no
But he drew closer and as he entered that haze of green, rock music spilled into his head in a paralyzing, mind-splitting flood. It was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and he knew that when George started to play that slide guitar, his skull would vibrate for a moment with killing harmonics and then simply explode like the water glasses in the house he had once told Bobbi about.
None of it mattered. The fear mattered, that was all - the fear of the Tommyknockers in Bobbi's shed. He sensed them, could almost smell them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.
And ... the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn't water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.
As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain - and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.
He lay down again, thinking: God! If you're going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.
He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams. That night. The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN
The terrorist got bombed! The President got hit! Security was tight! The Secret Service got lit! And everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's stoned, And there's nothin' gonna change it, Cause everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's drinkin' on the job.
'Drinkin' on the Job'
The Rainmakers
Then he ran all the way to town, screamin' 'It came out of the sky!'
'It Came Out of the Sky'
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Chapter 1. The Town
1
The town had four other names before it became Haven.
It began municipal existence in 1816 as Montville Plantation. It was owned, lock, stock, and barrel by a man named Hugh Crane. Crane purchased it in 1813 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a province. He had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.
The Montville Plantation name was a gibe. Crane's father had never ventured east of Dover in his life, and remained a loyal Tory when the break with the colonies came. He ended life as a peer of the realm, the twelfth Earl of Montville. As his eldest son, Hugh Crane would have been the thirteenth Earl of Montville. Instead, his enraged father disinherited him. Not put out of countenance in the slightest, Crane went about cheerfully calling himself the first Ear) of Central Maine and sometimes the Duke of Nowhere at All.
The tract of land which Crane called Montville Plantation consisted of about twenty-two thousand acres. When Crane petitioned and was granted incorporated status, Montville Plantation became the one hundred and ninety-third town to be so incorporated in the Massachusetts Province of Maine. Crane bought the land because good timber was plentiful, and Derry, where timber could be floated downriver to the sea, was only twenty miles away.
How cheap was the area of land which eventually became Haven?
Hugh Crane had bought the whole shebang for the equivalent of eighteen hundred pounds.
Of course, a pound went a lot further in those days.
2
When Hugh Crane died in 1826, there were a hundred and three residents of Montville Plantation. Loggers swelled the population to twice that for six or seven months of the year, but they didn't really count, because they took their little bit of money into Derry, and it was in Derry that they usually settled when they grew too old to work the woods anymore. In those days, 'too old to work in the woods anymore' usually meant about twenty-five.
Nevertheless, by 1826 the settlement which would eventually become Haven Village had begun to grow up along the muddy road leading north toward Derry and Bangor.
Whatever you called it (and eventually it became, except in the memory of the oldest old-timers, like Dave Rutledge, plain old Route 9), that road was the one the loggers had to take when they went to Derry at the end of each month to spend their pay drinking and whoring. They saved their serious spending for the big town, but most were willing to bide long enough at Cooder's Tavern and Lodging-House to lay the dust with a beer or two on the way. This wasn't much, but it was enough to make the place a successful little business. The General Mercantile across the road (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's nephew) was less successful but still a marginally profitable business. In 1828, a Barber Shop and Small Surgery (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's cousin) opened next to the General Mercantile. In those days it was not unusual to stroll into this lively, growing establishment and see a logger reclining in one of the three chairs, having the hair on his head cut, the cut in his arm stitched, and a couple of large bloodsuckers from the jar by the cigar-box reposing above each closed eye, turning from gray to red as they swelled, simultaneously protecting against any infection from the cut and taking away that malady which was then known as 'achin' brains.' In 1830, a hostelry and feed store (owned by Hiram Cooder's brother George) opened at the south end of the village.
In 1831, Montville Plantation became Coodersville.
No one was very surprised.
Coodersville it remained until 1864, when the name was changed to Montgomery, in honor of Ellis Montgomery, a local boy who had fallen at Gettysburg, where, some say, the 20th Maine preserved the Union all by itself. The change seemed a fine idea. After all, the town's one remaining Cooder, crazy old Albion, had gone bankrupt and committed suicide two years before.
In the years following the Civil War, a craze, as inexplicable as most crazes, swept the state. This craze was not for hoop skirts or sideburns; it was a craze for giving small towns classical names. Hence, there is a Sparta, Maine; a Carthage; an Athens; and, of course, there was Troy right next door. In 1878, the residents of the town voted to change the town's name yet again, this time from Montgomery to Ilium. This provoked a tearful tirade at town meeting from the mother of Ellis Montgomery. In truth, the tirade was more senile than ringing, the hero's mother being by then full of years - seventy-five of them, to be exact. Town legend has it that the townsfolk listened patiently, a little guiltily, and that the decision might even have been recanted (Mrs Montgomery was surely right, some thought, when she said that fourteen years was hardly the 'immortal memory' her dead son had been promised at the name-changing ceremonies which had taken place on July 4th, 1864) if the good lady's bladder hadn't picked that particular moment to let go. She
was helped from the town meeting hall, still ranting about ungrateful Philistines who would rue the day.
Montgomery became Ilium, just the same.
Twenty-two years passed.
3
Came a fast-talking revival preacher who for some reason bypassed Derry and elected instead to spread his tent in Ilium. He went by the name of Colson, but Myrtle Duplissey, Haven's self-appointed historian, eventually became convinced that Colson's real name was Cooder, and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder.
Whoever he was, he won most of the Christians in town over to his own lively version of the faith by the time the corn was ready for picking - much to the despair of Mr Hartley, who ministered to the Methodists of Ilium and Troy, and Mr Crowell, who looked after the spiritual welfare of Baptists in Ilium, Troy, Etna, and Unity (the joke in those days was that Emory Crowell's parsonage belonged to the town of Troy, but his piles belonged to God). Nevertheless, their exhortations were voices crying in the wilderness. Preacher Colson's congregation continued to grow as that well-nigh perfect summer of 1900 drew to its conclusion. To call the crops of that year 'bumpers' was to poor-mouth them; the thin northern New England earth, usually as stingy as Scrooge, that year poured forth a bounty which seemed never-ending. Mr Crowell, the Baptist whose piles belonged to God, grew depressed and silent and, three years later, hanged himself in the cellar of the Troy parsonage.
Mr Hartley, the Methodist minister, grew ever more alarmed by the evangelical fervor which was sweeping Ilium like a cholera epidemic. Perhaps this was because Methodists are, under ordinary circumstances, the most undemonstrative worshippers of God; they listen not to sermons but to 'messages,' pray mostly in decorous silence, and consider the only proper places for congregation-spoken amens to be at the end of the Lord's Prayer and those few hymns not sung by the choir. But now these previously undemonstrative people were doing everything from speaking in tongues to holy rolling. Next, Mr Hartley sometimes said, they will be handling snakes. The Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday meetings in the revival tent beside Derry Road became steadily louder, wilder, and more emotionally explosive. 'If it was happening in a carnival tent, they'd call it hysteria,' he told Fred Perry, a church deacon and his only close friend, one night over glasses of sherry in the church rectory. 'Because it's happening in a revival tent, they can get away with calling it Pentecostal Fire.'
Rev. Hartley's suspicions of Colson were amply justified in the course of time, but before then Colson fled, having harvested a goodly crop of cold cash and warm women instead of pumpkins and taters. And before then he put his lasting stamp on the town by changing its name for the final time.
His sermon on that hot August night began with the subject of the harvest as a symbol of God's great reward, and then moved on to the subject of this very town. By this time, Colson had stripped off his frock coat. His sweatsoaked hair had tumbled in his eyes. The sisters had commenced getting down in the amen corner, although it would be yet a while before the speaking in tongues and the holy rolling got going.
'I consider this town sanctified,' Colson told his audience, gripping the sides of his pulpit with his big hands - he might have considered it sanctified for some reason other than the fact that his honored self had chosen it in which to spread his tent (not to mention his seed), but if so, he didn't say so. 'I consider it a haven. Yes! I have found a haven here that reminds me of my haven-home, a lovely land maybe not so different from the one Adam and Eve knew before they went picking fruit from that tree they should have left alone. Sanctified!' Preacher Colson bellowed. Years after, there were members of his congregation who still spoke admiringly of how that man could shout for Jesus, scoundrel or not.
'Amen!' the congregation cried back. The night, though warm, was perhaps not quite warm enough to completely explain the blushes on so many feminine cheeks and brows; such flushes had become common since Preacher Colson came to town.
'This town is nothing short of a glory to God!'
'Hallelujah!' the congregation yelled jubilantly. Breasts heaved. Eyes sparkled. Tongues slipped out and wetted lips.
'This town has got a promise!' Preacher Colson shouted, now striding rapidly back and forth, occasionally flicking his black locks back from his forehead with a quick snap that showed his cleanly corded neck to good advantage. 'This town has got a promise and that promise is the fullness of the harvest, and that promise shall be fulfilled!'
'Praise Jesus!'
Colson came back to the pulpit, grasped it, and looked out at them forbiddingly. 'So why you want to have a town which promises the harvest of God and the haven of God - why you want to have a town that speaks of those things named after some dago is more than I can figure out, brethern. Must have been the devil working somewhere in the last generation is all I can figure.'
Talk about changing the town's name from Ilium to Haven began the very next day. The Rev. Mr Crowell protested the change listlessly, the Rev. Mr Hartley much more strongly. Ilium's selectmen were neutral, except to point out that it would cost the town twenty dollars to change the Papers of Incorporation on file in Augusta, and probably another twenty to change the municipal road signs with the town's name on them, not to mention the letterheads on town documents and stationery.
Long before the March town meeting at which Article 14, 'To see if the town will approve changing the name of Incorporated Maine Town No. 193 from ILIUM to HAVEN,' was discussed and voted on, Preacher Colson had literally folded his tent and stolen into the night. Said folding and stealing took place on the night of September 7th, following what Colson had for weeks been calling the great Harvest Home Revival of 1900. He'd been making it clear for at least a month that he considered it the most important meeting he would hold in town this year; perhaps the most important meeting he ever held, even if he should settle here, something he felt more and more often that God was calling him to do - and didn't that news just make the ladies' hearts go pitty-pat! It was, he said, to be a great love-offering to a loving God who had provided the town with such a wonderful growing season and harvest.
Colson did some harvesting of his own. He began by cajoling the attendees to give the largest 'love-offering' of his stay, and finished by plowing and planting not two, not four, but six young maidens in the field behind the tent after the meeting.
'Men love to talk big, but I guess most of 'em pack derringers in their pants no matter how big they talk,' old Duke Barfield said in the barbershop one evening. If there had been a Stinkiest Man in Town contest, old Duke would have won hands down. He smelled like a pickled egg that has spent a month in a mud puddle. He was listened to, but at a distance, and upwind, if there was a wind to make this possible. 'I heerd o' men with double-barrel shotguns in their pants, and I reckon it's so every once 'n' agin, and once't I even heerd tell o' some fella had him a three-shot pistol, but that f**ker Colson's only man I ever heerd of who come packin' a six-shooter.'
Three of Preacher Colson's conquests were virgins before the invasion of the Pentecostal pecker.
The love-offering that night in the late summer of 1900 was indeed generous, although the barbershop gossips differed on just how generous the monetary part of it had been. All agreed that, even before the great Harvest Home Revival, where the preaching had gone on until ten, the gospel-singing until midnight, and the field-fucking until well past two, there had been a great outpouring of hard cash. Some also pointed out that Colson hadn't had many expenses during his stay, either. The women damn near fought for the privilege of bringing him his meals, the fellow who now owned the hostelry made him the long-term loan of a buggy ... and, of course, no one at all charged him for his nightly entertainments.
On the morning of September 8th, tent and preacher were gone. He had harvested well ... and seeded with equal success. Between January 1st and town meeting in late March 1901, nine illegitimate children, three girls and six boys, were born in the area. All nine of these 'love-children' bore a remarkable resemblance each to the other - six had blue eyes, and all were born with lusty crops of black hair. The barbershop gossips (and no group of men on earth can so successfully marry logic and prurience as these idlers farting into wicker chairs as they roll cigarettes or drive brown bullets of tobacco-juice into tin spittoons) also pointed out that it was hard telling just how many young girls had left 'to visit relatives' downstate, in New Hampshire, or even all the way down to Massachusetts. It was also pointed out that quite a few married women in the area had given birth between January and March. About those women, who knew for sure? But the barbershop gossips of course knew what had happened on March 29th, after Faith Clarendon gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy. A wild wet norther was whooping around the eaves of the Clarendon house, dropping 1901's last large budget of snow until November. Cora Simard, the midwife who had delivered the baby, was in a half-daze by the kitchen stove, waiting for her husband Irwin to finally make his way through the storm and take her home. She saw Paul Clarendon approach the crib where his new son lay - it was on the other side of the stove, in the corner which was warmest - and stand looking fixedly down at the new baby for over an hour. Cora made the dreadful error of mistaking Paul Clarendon's fixed stare for wonder and love. Her eyes drifted closed. When she awoke from her doze, Paul Clarendon was standing over the crib with his straight-razor in his hand. He seized the baby by its thick crop of blue-black hair, and before Cora could unlock her throat to scream, he had cut its throat. He left the room without a word. A moment later she heard wet gargling sounds coming from the bedroom. When a terrified Irwin Simard finally found the courage to enter the Clarendon bedroom, he found man and wife on the bed, hands joined. Clarendon had cut his wife's throat, lain down beside her, grasped her right hand with his left, and then cut his own. All this happened two days after the town had voted to change its name.
4
The Rev. Mr Hartley was dead-set against changing the town's name to one suggested by a man who had proved to be a thief, fornicator, false prophet, and all-round snake in the grass. He had said as much from his pulpit and had noted the agreeing nods from his parishioners with a grim, almost vindictive pleasure that was really not much like him. He came to the town meeting held on March 27th, 1901 confident that Article 14 would be resoundingly voted down. He was not even troubled by the brevity of discussion between the Town Clerk's reading of the article and Head Selectman Luther Ruvall's laconic, 'What's y'pleasure, people?' If he had had the slightest inkling, Hartley would have spoken vehemently, even furiously, for perhaps the only time in his life. But he never had so much as an inkling.
'Those in favor signify by sayin' aye,' Luther Ruvall said, and at the solid - if not very passionate - Aye! that shook the roof-rafters, Hartley felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He stared around wildly, but it was too late. The strength of the Aye! had taken him so totally by surprise that he had no idea how many from his own congregation had turned on him and voted the other way.
'Wait - ' he said aloud in a strangled voice that nobody heard.
'Those opposed?'
A scattered straggle of Nays. Hartley tried to scream his, but the only sound to escape his throat was a nonsense syllable - Nik!
'Motion's carried,' Luther Ruvall said. 'Now, Article 15
The Rev. Hartley suddenly felt warm - much too warm. He felt, in fact, as though he might faint. He pushed his way through standing throngs of men in red-and-black checked shirts and muddy flannel pants, through clouds of acrid smoke puffed from corncob pipes and cheap cigars. He still felt faint, but now he felt that he might also vomit before he fainted. A week later he would not be able to understand the depth of his shock so deep it was really horror. A year later he would not even acknowledge that he had felt such an emotion.
He stood on the top town-hall step, snatching great swoops of forty-degree air, clutching the handrail in a death-grip, and looked out across fields of melting snow. In places it had now drawn back enough to show the muddy earth beneath, and he thought with vicious crudity that was also unlike him that the fields looked like splotches of shit on the tail of a nightshirt. For the first and only time, he felt a bitter envy for Bradley Colson - or Cooder, if that was his real name. Colson had run away from Ilium ... oh, beg your pardon, from Haven. He had run, and now Donald Hartley found himself wishing he could do the same. Why did they do that? Why? They knew what he was, they knew! So why did they
A strong, warm hand fell on his back. He turned and saw his good friend Fred Perry. Fred's long, homely face looked distressed and concerned, and Hartley felt a smile cross his face.
'Don, are you all right?' Fred Perry asked.
'Yes. I had a moment in there when I felt lightheaded. It was the vote. I didn't expect it.'
'Nor I,' Fred replied.
'My parishioners were part of it,' Hartley said. 'They had to have been. It was so loud, they had to have been, don't you think?'
'Well . . .'
The Rev. Mr Hartley smiled a little. 'I apparently do not know as much about human nature as I thought I did.'
'Come back in, Don. They're going to take up paving Ridge Road.'
'I think I'll stay out a while longer,' Hartley said, 'and think about human nature.' He paused, and just as Fred Perry was turning to go back, the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley asked, almost appealed: 'Do you understand, Fred? Do you understand why they did it? You're almost ten years older than I. Do you understand it?'
And Fred Perry, who had shouted out his own Aye! from behind a curled fist, shook his head and said no; he didn't understand at all. He did like the Rev. Mr Hartley. He did respect the Rev. Mr Hartley. But in spite of those things (or maybe - just maybe - because of them), he had taken a mean and spiteful pleasure in voting for a name suggested by Colson: Colson the false prophet, Colson the confidence man, Colson the thief, Colson the seducer. No, Fred Perry did not understand human nature at all.
Chapter 2. 'Becka Paulson
1
Rebecca Bouchard Paulson was married to Joe Paulson, one of Haven's two mail-carriers and one-third of Haven's postal staff. Joe was cheating on his wife, something Bobbi Anderson knew already. Now 'Becka Paulson knew it, as well. She had known it for the last three days. Jesus told her. In the last three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible, distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but weren't they also sort of wonderful? Boy howdy! And would she stop listening, maybe just tip Jesus over on His face, or scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For one thing, there was a grisly sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her. For another, He was the Savior.
Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Sony TV. He had been there for just six years. Before that, He had rested atop two Zeniths. 'Becka estimated that Jesus had been in roughly the same spot for about sixteen years. Jesus was represented in lifelike 3-D. This was a picture of Him that 'Becka's older sister, Corinne, who lived in Portsmouth, had given them as a wedding present. When Joe commented that 'Becka's sister was a little on the cheap side, wa'ant she, 'Becka told him to hush up. Not that she was terribly surprised; you couldn't expect a man like Joe to understand the fact that you couldn't put a price-tag on true Beauty.
In the picture, Jesus was dressed in a simple white robe and holding a shepherd's staff. The Christ on 'Becka's TV combed His hair a little bit like Elvis after Elvis got out of the Army. Yes; he looked quite a bit like Elvis in G. I. Blues. His eyes were brown and mild. Behind Him, in perfect perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials trailed off and over the horizon. 'Becka and Corinne had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester, and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that white and uniformly woolly, like little fair-weather clouds fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps disappear if He wanted to.
A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV, and she supposed that now she knew why, oh yessirree! Boy howdy! Joe, of course, had his trumped-up tales. 'It doesn't seem right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching Magnum or Miami Vice,' he'd say. 'Why not put it up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or ... I'll tell you what! Why not put it up on your bureau until Sunday, then you can bring it down and put it back while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Jack van Impe? I'll bet Jesus likes Jimmy Swaggart a helluva lot better than He likes Miami Vice.'
She refused.
Another time he said, 'When it's my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the guys don't like it. No one wants to have Jesus Christ looking at him while he tries to draw to an inside straight.'
'Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling's the devil's work,' 'Becka said.
Joe, a good poker player, bridled. 'Then it was the devil's work bought you your blow-dryer and that garnet ring you like s'well,' he said. 'Better take ,em back for refunds and give the money to the Salvation Army. I think I got the receipts in my den.'
So she allowed Joe to turn the 3-D picture of Jesus around on the one Thursday night a month that he had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker ... but that was all.
And now she knew the real reason he had wanted to get rid of that picture. He must have had the idea all along that that picture might be a magic picture. Oh, she supposed sacred was a better word, magic was for pagans, headhunters and cannibals and Catholics and people like that, but they almost came to the same thing, didn't they? Anyway, Joe must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means by which his sin would be found out.
Oh, she supposed she had known something was going on. He was never after her at night anymore, and while that was something of a relief (sex was just as her mother had told her it would be, nasty, brutish, sometimes painful, always humiliating) she had also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time, and that was not a relief at all. She supposed she could have ignored the connection - the fact that the pawings had stopped at the same time that occasional smell of perfume started showing up in his collars - indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on top of the Sony hadn't begun to speak on July 7th. She could even have ignored a third factor: at about the same time the pawings had stopped and the perfume smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired from the post office and a woman named Nancy Voss had come up from the Augusta post office to take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom 'Becka now thought of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years older than she and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she was a trim, well-kept, handsome fifty. 'Becka was willing to admit she herself had put on a little weight during her marriage, going from one hundred and twenty-six to two hundred and three, most of that since Byron, their only chick, had left home.
She could have ignored it, would have ignored it, perhaps even have come to tolerate it with relief; if The Hussy enjoyed the animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved The Hussy was little more than an animal herself. Also, it freed 'Becka of a tiresome, if ever-more-occasional, obligation. She could have ignored it, that was, if the picture of Jesus hadn't spoken up.
It happened for the first time at just past three in the afternoon on Thursday. 'Becka was coming back into the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffee-cake and a beer stein filled with cherry Za-Rex) to watch General Hospital. She could no longer really believe that Luke and Laura would ever come back, but she was not able to completely give up hope.
She was bending down to turn on the TV when Jesus said,---Becka,Joe is putting it to that Hussy down at the pee-oh just about every lunch-hour and sometimes after quitting time, too. Once he was so randy he put it to her while he was supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what? She never even said, "At least wait until I get the first-class took care of."
'And that's not all,' Jesus said. He walked halfway across the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a rock that jutted from the ground. He held His staff between His knees and looked at her grimly. 'There's a lot going on in Haven. You won't believe the half of it.'
'Becka screamed and fell on her knees. 'My Lord!' she shrieked. One of her knees landed squarely on her piece of coffee-cake (which was roughly the size and thickness of the family Bible), squirting raspberry filling into the face of Ozzie, the cat, who had crept out from under the stove to see what was going on. 'My Lord! My Lord!' 'Becka continued to shriek. Ozzie ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove again with red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed there the rest of the day.
'Well, none of the Paulsons was ever good for much,' Jesus said. A sheep wandered toward Him and He whacked it away, using His staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded 'Becka, even in her current frozen state, of her late father. The sheep went, rippling slightly because of the 3-D effect. It disappeared, actually seeming to curve as it went off the edge of the picture ... but that was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. 'Nossir!' Jesus declared. 'Joe's great-uncle was a murderer, as you well know, 'Becka. Murdered his son, his wife, and then himself. And when he came up here, do you know what We said?---Noroom!" that's what We said.' Jesus leaned forward, propped on His staff.---Gosee Mr Splitfoot down below," We said. "You'll find your Haven-home, all right. But you may find your new landlord asks a hell of a high rent and never turns down the heat," We said.' Incredibly, Jesus winked at her ... and that was when 'Becka fled, shrieking, from the house.