Apocalypse (10 page)

Shirley, more prone than any of the others to say whatever came to mind, blurted, “Did you ever hear about the woman died a few years back, over in Mine 27? They went through her things, they found babies in her attic. Five babies, all brown and dried up, wrapped in newspapers and stuffed in a box. Can you imagine? They said one of them was almost a year old before she—”

“I don't want to hear it,” Cally interrupted, shaking harder.

With more anxiety and less sense than was usual for her, Gigi put in, “I've heard that deer make a noise like that sometimes. Like humans.”

“That's not deer,” said Elspeth flatly.

And with a twiggy sound, a dry, rattling buzz of wings, the chorus made itself visible.

In spectral colors, Halloween colors: black bodies, orange legs, orange veining in their crisp, translucent wings, spherical orange eyes on their blunt, black heads. They were little more than an inch long, the size of the first joint of Shirley's work-callused thumbs. With a plangent shriek one flew past Cally's ear to the crest of Dove's mane—seemed to topple there and stick in the coarse hair, rather, like a winter leaf in a storm wind—and with a noise of disgust in her throat and heaving stomach Cally struck it off before she realized.

The cicada had a human face.

A round, flat face like that of a baby, though still of that dead black-rubber-eraser color and still with those beadlike orange eyes, as if someone had stuck them into the infant sockets with pins. Cally did not at first comprehend; only as her hand, a huge doom, came down and swatted the clinging body into oblivion did she see the tiny triangular suckling mouth open to wail. Then her own mouth came open and screamed panting cries that made no sense, though they tried to form a word.

It finally came. “Babies!” she cried.

And the babies, bugs, cicadas, whatever they could properly be called, were swarming in such numbers that their pudgy bodies and frail wings darkened the world. Whether for revenge or for loneliness or love, there was no telling, but they lurched through air until they encountered big, warm, soft, and that they embraced. They caught hold on the horses and on the women, on their clothes, their collars, their hair; Shirley and Elspeth and Gigi, like Cally, had seen the pathos of their chinless, fumbling mouths, their tiny upturned noses, and tried to remove them gently, but they could not be gently removed. Their clawed hands stuck like thorns, like burrs. They flew toward faces. They clung to soft, whiskered noses, invaded flaring nostrils; the horses reared in protest. They crawled down collars, through plackets, searching for breasts—finding little enough on Cally and Elspeth, and only polyurethane on Gigi—and big-breasted Shirley screamed, a struggling, unaccustomed sound from her, alto in pitch, at variance with the soprano screams of the cicadas.

For scream the cicadas did, as they clung to bodies and faces, as they were struck down, they squealed and rasped and shrieked the hungry, demanding cries of babies, and all the women were fighting them with hard hands and swinging arms, and struggling to stay on the horses, and the horses were running wild, unreined, away from the fearsome place, toward the sheltering stable, where Shirley would give them food in the evening.

Gigi got control of her horse and herself first, for she was a steely old woman, and Snake Oil was accustomed to obeying her. She stopped him once he had run clear of the cicada swarm, and she batted away the bugs who had ridden with her, and pulled a fistful of squashed ones out of her post-mastectomy bra, and looked at them curiously, then dropped them with a muttered curse. Cally came straggling up and stopped beside her, for Dove was slow and calmed quickly. Cally did not calm so quickly; she was shaking thinly, like teazels in winter.

“Did you see!” she cried out to Gigi, more in plaint than in query. “Babies!”

“I saw.”

“But what the hun is going on? What are we going to do?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Shirley and Elspeth had been longer stopping their horses. Once they had collected the animals and themselves somewhat, they rode cautiously back down the trail, looking for the others. Shirley's ample face showed wholehearted relief when she saw Gigi and Cally safe, neither thrown by their horses nor savaged by anything weird and unaccountable. Elspeth, as usual, showed nothing, but she said, without embroidery. “Hoadley babies.”

The others all stared at her, and Cally cried out in the same aggrieved tone, “There aren't that many babies in Hoadley!”

“Dead ones. Out of the ground.” Elspeth stared over their heads with the glaze of intuition in her eyes. “Aren't the dead supposed to come up out of the ground?”

This came close to speaking something none of them wanted to say. Shirley gawked, and even Gigi seemed shaken. But Cally, oddly, turned suddenly serene. Death procedures were familiar footing to her.

“Not that way, they're not supposed to come up,” she said.

“Well, that's the way I'd do it,” said Elspeth with knife-edge of envy in her voice. And with a shadowed awe, the admiration of an artist for another—for a mystery artist, work exhibited but identity unknown. “If I were taking Hoadley down, I'd do it with a chorus, a swarming of the dead. That's just the way I'd do it.”

Shirley said, “So who's doing it? A witch, or—or God, or what?”

“How the hell should I know?” Elspeth reverted to her customary peevishness. “And what the hell can it possibly matter?”

“It matters.” Shirley tried, ineffectually, to explain herself. “It's not like we're just talking here. It's
happening.
”

“We don't really know what's happening,” said Cally.

“Don't we?” said Gigi.

The four horsewomen rode back to the stable in silence. Elspeth's sword chafed against her leg; she had not touched it since leaving the barn, and no one seemed to find it odd that she had not used it on anything, not even on blackberries.

There were plenty of dead babies in the ground around and under Hoadley. Aboriginal babies, among others. The town had been founded on blood-soaked ground. The first settlers, stalwart Pennsylvania Germans, had massacred or driven away all the savages they had found in the area, in retribution for an Indian raid (distant, probably by another tribe) on another frontier settlement. With the natives duly dispatched, they had set themselves to making the place a new Eden.

It was an Eden slow in coming, as the stony hills did not take well to farming. The growing season was short, the winters long, the labor hard. More babies died, babies white as wheat flour, joining the red ones under the ground: pale babies dead of pneumonia and “teething” and scarlet fever and “paralysis” and a hundred other diseases, and sometimes of starvation, neglect or abuse. Whole families died or moved to more fertile ground.

But wherever any folk at all remained, food had to be grown. By the nineteenth century, Eden had at last been established. Hoadley was a country village, an isolated hamlet, picturesquely located amid the Canadawa Range of the Appalachians on the banks of swift-flowing, crystalline Trout Creek; just below the village, the river plunged over fern-draped falls into a gorge that ran for a mile and a half, every inch of it lovely with moss and cliffside and huge old trees and leaf-sifted light on the sweet water. The place was known as far away as Pittsburgh as a beauty spot. An artist's colony of sorts became established there, and in the summer society people came to improve their minds in the peaceful contemplation of art, nature and each other. There were a few rooming houses, a general store, and one good hotel for the summer visitors, where downstairs the artists drank ale.

Then someone discovered coal.

Within the year the village had turned to a wildly thriving boom town, with new buildings thrown up daily as the mines bored down and the money flowed the way the stream once had. All the trees for miles were gone, cut down to make tipples and railroad ties and mine timbers, and the smoke of burning debris filled the air. Trout Creek ran choked with mud, its course diverted under new roads, around new buildings. Concrete supports stood atop the waterfall, carrying the black railroad bridge overhead. On every available inch of the valley the mine-town row houses were going up for the immigrant workers flooding in, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs, Greeks.

For fifty years Hoadley experienced unparalleled prosperity and appalling poverty. There were twelve tailors in what had once been the place where the road crossed the creek, and twenty barbers, and doctors and lawyers building great gingerbreaded houses on the hillsides only a little below the mansions of mine owners. In the row houses down below the tracks, down by the sulfurous stream, where the black bony piles shut out the air, lived the coal miners' women, the dun-skinned women the “natives” called “foreigners,” barefoot women who sometimes out of desperation ended or hid their pregnancies, strangled their newborns, entombed tiny tan bodies in the walls.

Then the many-branched deep mines reached the end of the coal. And the mine barons moved out of the mansions on the hilltops, leaving behind miles of rusting railroad, acres of slag, row on row of sparrow-brown mine town houses beneath hills scrubby with second-growth woods. Trout Creek, orange and lifeless with acid mine runoff. The waterfall and the gorge, junked with discarded machinery. The air, polluted enough to turn even new-fallen snow black with the smoke from the steel mills roaring farther down the valley.

Then the steel mills closed also, and the air, sullied only by house coal, was somewhat cleaner again (though not the earth or the creek), and half the row houses in Hoadley were boarded up and empty, and the people who remained supped deep of the mysteries of Unemployment Compensation and Welfare and Food Stamps and Government Surplus Cheese. There was a flood like the wrath of God, coming to wash the refuse out of Trout Creek gorge. A dead baby floated down the bloated stream. The people who remained in Hoadley learned the ways of the Red Cross and Federal Disaster Aid. Rebuilding, they went about their business with cautious eyes and no poetry in their souls, not daring to hope in anything. These were the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of the Irish and Italian and Polish and Lithuanian and Slavic miners. Some few were the Pennsylvania German descendants of the the original settlers, and went to the Lutheran and Brethren churches instead of the many Roman Catholic ones, and gave themselves airs. But they all remembered a time when men had worked twelve hours a day in the dark and couldn't ever get ahead of the Godawful gouging rent, the constant debt at the overpriced company store. They remembered men dying under the guns and clubs of strikebreakers. They remembered men going berserk and killing their wives, each other, their babies. They remembered all the babies dead, the stillborn and those who lived a few days or years, all the little ones for whom there was seldom milk and sometimes no bread.

Much evil had been done in Hoadley.

A council of such cautious-eyed citizens met the fourth Thursday of May: the borough council sat at its regular monthly meeting. Seven men, mostly substantial and oviform, and two high-coiffed women in rhinestoned glasses sat around the long table. One of the women took notes. All church councils, school boards, library boards and such governing bodies in Hoadley had to include at least one woman to be secretary. Men, apparently, did not know how to write minutes, though they sometimes made coffee.

A motion had been proposed that an ordinance should be formulated to ban pit bull terriers from the borough. No one in the area owned such an animal, nor to any council member's knowledge did anyone in Hoadley plan to own a pit bull terrier, but a council has to have something to do at its monthly meetings. The motion had opened a far-ranging discussion on dogs and dog ownership, and the council was discussing the banning of chronically barking dogs, and how many woofs over what period of time defined the term “nuisance barking,” when council president Gerald Wozny thought of yet another possible pet ordinance.

“What I mean,” he said, “we ought to forbid dogs and cats from defecating on anybody's property but their own. Their owner's, I mean.”

“What about urinating?” one of the women, the one not taking notes, wanted to know.

“Defecating leaves a pile. Urinating don't matter.”

“If it's on shrubs it does,” challenged the woman. “Kills the shrubs.”

“My neighbor's dog used to come and piss on my eggplants,” complained the only thin man in the gathering. “Would you like to eat eggplants had a dog pee on them?”

“All right, then, defecating and urinating both. Producing bodily wastes. The dog or cat is only allowed to do it on their own—their owner's property. What do you say?”

The council was saved from discussion of the impact, constitutionality and enforceability of this proposal by a knock on the door. A tall, husky woman no one recognized came into the room, followed by a smaller young woman everyone knew by sight: the breedy oddball who rode her horse to the post office.

“Shirley Danyo here.” The first one loudly announced the reason for her visit. “Me'n my friends want youse guys to know about some plenty strange things been going on.”

Though Elspeth had come with Shirley, she did none of the talking. She stood by, quietly and contentedly conscious of her exotic beauty, as Shirley explained, in Shirley's own inimitably voluminous fashion, about her hex sign, the cicadas out of season, the naked fetch in the woods, the baby-faced bugs.

Without surprise Elspeth observed the council members glancing at each other, then growing too uncomfortable to glance at each other. They had, of course, already heard about the mysterious far-too-beautiful woman on the white horse. She had appeared again, on foot, at dusk, to speak to some ignorant people in Hoadley park. Tacitly the council had agreed to ignore her presence in favor of the more pressing problem of dog excrement. The national government could have learned from Hoadley natives; the latter had used censorship for generations. Entire scenes of Hoadley history had been erased from the books and had therefore never happened. Council discussions often went unnoted, to be denied if necessary. The woman on the white horse, undiscussed, therefore did not exist.