Love and Sleep (19 page)
Sam soon found Opal's diamond missing, and by a combination of detective work and shrewd interrogation, concluded that Pierce had taken it. Pierce denied it.
"It's all right,” Sam said, in a manner not very mollifying. “It's all right. I just want to know why. Why would you do such a thing?"
"I didn't."
"Oh come
on
."
"I didn't!"
But then he was caught virtually in the act of smuggling the tiny stone back into the ring in the box in Sam's sock drawer, and was made to confess that he had taken it; still he would not say why. Furious, baffled, at the end of his invention, Sam set Pierce to write an essay on Why I Should Not Tell Lies and to read it out to the family. And he did it, his cheeks burning with shame not so much for himself as for Winnie, who sat stricken and impotent on the red plastic club chair. The reasons he gave in his paper were all practical ones, and turned on the bad effects that being caught out in his lying had, for himself above all, his present humiliation being a good example. But he never explained.
In that summer of 1953 Sister Mary Philomel was diagnosed as having cancer of the stomach. The surgeon Sam consulted thought it was not too far gone to be operable (though she had ignored it long, and only Offered Up the pain), but Sister Mary Philomel asked for special permission to see what prayer could do, and Sister Mary Eglantine reluctantly agreed.
It was daily Communion that Sister Mary Philomel afterward believed to have been the efficacious thing. She had inquired of Father Midnight how long, exactly, the little cutout of paste remained God Himself within her stomach, and Father Midnight said that the question didn't really have an answer, though he had read speculations that after twenty minutes or so the Host had dissolved in gastric juices, and therefore God might be supposed to be within (in that special way) for at least that long; and so every morning Sister Mary Philomel—though she knew, and Sam pointed out, that pious people had died of her condition despite it—applied to the lump of cold dark pain within her the warm and brilliant poultice of Divinity, and since the two (it seemed obvious to her) could not coexist, the One gradually wore away the other as Sister Mary Philomel breathed in patience and watched the clock. In a few months it was gone.
"Well it happens,” Sam said. “Ask any doctor, and if he's honest he'll tell you he's seen a miracle or two. The only thing is they seem to happen about randomly, to people who pray and people who don't, to people who believe God'll help and people who don't believe in God at all. There's no telling."
Sometime in that summer Warren began to be wakened by nightmares, or by nightmarish notions anyway, and then to be unable to return to sleep; finally to be unable to go to sleep at all without lights burning and Hildy or Winnie within calling distance. It took a long time to get from the stolid private boy what it was he feared; but at length and in fragments it came out, how it was Jesus he was afraid of: how Sister Mary Philomel had explained to him that any time of day, or any middle of night, Jesus might come to him, to take his hand and lead him away so that Warren could be with Him forever in heaven: and so (Sister Mary Philomel had no doubt concluded) Warren ought to say his prayers before he slept—just in case.
So Warren didn't want to sleep at all, in case Jesus did take it into His head to come for him, because Warren didn't want to go.
Standing shrieking on his bed in the middle of the night at a streak of watery moonlight or a gesturing curtain: not ready to go.
Sam talked to him. Took him into his room and lay on the bed with him, where the most important conversations were held, where Bird had learned there was no Santa Claus. No Jesus is not going to just show up and take you away with him. Sister's talking about dying, and you're not going to just die, son. If Jesus is ready to take you to heaven, then you're going to get real sick first, and I'll find out about it, and find out what you're sick with...
Like Bobby.
Like Bobby, and we'll do everything we can to get you better. And we'll keep you here with us. Okay?
Okay.
But the terrors didn't go away so easily. The others never hinted that they might not be all Sister's fault, that the nighttime meditations on Last Things with Bobby Shaftoe in the heater's glow might have contributed; instead, they suggested that they themselves might have been bent by other pronouncements of Sister's, which they had stored up for just such a moment as this and now retailed to their parents, watching Sam's and Winnie's faces for signs of dismay, incredulity, and annoyance. Sister said that on Christmas Eve baby Jesus goes all around the mountains ringing a little bell. And that you can see his footprints in the snow. Sister said that Negro people have the mark of Cain on them; how does she know that?
"Good grief,” said Sam. “Oh lordy."
At length he went down the hill to talk to Sister, and came home shaking his head, amused and indignant at once in a way that reminded Hildy of the way he had used to be when Opal was alive and he had talked more; but he wouldn't tell what he had said to Sister. “That woman,” he called her, and the children secretly thrilled to hear him. “That woman."
New arrangements were made; the children were getting older anyhow, and home school was not going to prepare them sufficiently for the real world, the world beyond these mountains toward which in a vague way Sam still bent his attentions. So Joe Boyd, after a prolonged and delicate contest of wills, was allowed to enter a military academy in Louisville, where he would spend two miserable years before admitting his mistake; Hildy went deeper in rather than farther out, boarding at Queen of the Angels School, an Infantines establishment in Pikeville. Just then Father Midnight's sister returned from wherever she had gone off to, and the younger children were given into her care again, one more year, then we'll think.
It would be twenty years before Pierce fell again under the suasion of believers of Sister Mary Philomel's powers. When he did, they would fill him not with boredom or indifference or a leftover guilty impatience to escape, but with an uncanny and nearly unbearable dread, a dread more convincing, in a way, than Sister's insistences had ever been, as convincing as a torturer's truncheon. It was as though his brief encounter with her had been the bee-sting, harmless at the time, that establishes in the secret toils of the immune system the conditions for a later fatal—well, near fatal, next to fatal it seemed to him—allergic reaction.
The Oliphants never saw Bobby Shaftoe again, though she wasn't taken off to Detroit after all. Not in that year anyway.
After pondering long, Floyd decided to go up the mountain, to the offices of the company that leased from Good Luck, to ask what compensation he was to be given for the loss of his corn patch and his bathroom. In the office he chanced upon a big company man, making an inspection tour; the man heard Floyd out, nodding, and then said he wouldn't give him any compensation, for that would mean admitting that the company had done something it oughtn't by rights to have done: and the company wasn't going to do that. Instead he offered Floyd a job, off the books: night watchman for the site.
Floyd believed that God had never meant the mountain to be used the way the strippers used it, never meant coal to be got so; he thought that those who took it would not profit by it. He told the company man he would consider his offer.
Not for some time then had Floyd been called out in the night, though he did not believe he had heard that call for the last time; he thought he might have a part to play yet, in the Enda Days, though what it would be he could not guess. Once he had supposed that, come the final conflict, his kind and those with whom they had done battle for the world's health would be enrolled under opposing banners, the Beast's, the Lamb's. More often now he thought otherwise: he thought that all the night walkers were but a part of this world, which was to pass away; so when these soiled and tattered heavens were rolled up like a scroll (revealing new heavens behind, fresh as paint), they would none of them be there. They had been among those things that kept this world aworking as it did, they and the Devil too maybe; under the Lamb's rule they would not be needed, the Lamb would put paid to their long feud and together they would turn back into the past forever. They would rest.
He took the job the man offered him. He slept in the day, when the living were up and at work; he spent his nights awake, watching over the great yellow cats asleep beneath the highwall of the open cut. He sat in his little shack beneath a yellow bulb with his Bible in his lap. The silence was deep; those creatures that awake to make sounds in the night had been driven off. Even the night smell of the mountains was changed, from what it had been to plain clay, dry-dusty or wetted and sour.
While he slept through the day, Bobby stayed away; when he went to work at night she returned. Weekends they worked the cornpatch together, wary and girded for conflict. She told him nothing of her life alone; sometimes she claimed she was going to school, at other times mocked him for believing so. When he talked about the Enda Days she listened and said nothing.
What was it she did do, how did she fill her hours, what did she learn, what did she want? What did Floyd do when the strip mine began operating round the clock in shifts, lathing the mountain away nightlong under strings of blue floodlights? What became of him? What became of her? Not even Bird knew, who might have noticed Bobby in the store or on the road; gone, that's all. Over time the Oliphants and Pierce ceased to remember very well what they had done with and to her (all but Bird); sometimes they remembered that once they had taken in a mountain girl while their parents were away, but like everything else, like the dimensions of their house and the buildings of Bondieu and the length of the road that contained them, like the compunctions of their religion and its mysteries, the story shrank with distance, the details grew too small to see, the topography smoothed.
They forgot more than that; they forgot their allegiances too, and their College; AEgypt. They just forgot, as an emigre ruthlessly forgets the Old World from which he came, expunging it by an effort he does not even admit to, so that the New World, which after all holds all his chance for happiness, can have his whole soul.
On his birthday that year, Pierce was given warm socks and flannel shirts, in readiness for winter, as he had been given similar ones the year before; his birthday coming so close to Christmas, little was made of it, not when Hildy's came the week before his and Warren's the week after, crowding the schedule, too much for Winnie to rise to.
But he was also given, as he had been given the year before, the new Little Enosh, a whole year's daily comic strips collected into a stiff and tart-smelling paperback volume.
Elsewhere, in Brooklyn, in civilization, lucky people were reading Enosh every day, on the subway or at dinner, in two or three different papers. In this place to which Pierce had come, you could only get your Enosh by buying the year-end compilation, in book form, of the daily strips. This year as last year, the compilation was a present from his father—so anyway Winnie said, handing him a package gaily wrapped with suspicious care. It had always been his father who each evening had read Enosh aloud to Pierce out of the paper, or had tried to read it, often laughing so hard he could not, laughing till he cried.
Little Enosh: Lost Among the Worlds
. On the book's cover Enosh's little minnow-like spaceship circled the letters of the title, emitting puffs of smoke. He had been Lost Among the Worlds from the beginning, from before the time Pierce had first asked his father what he was laughing at. Whenever he escaped from one planet on his endless journey home, he would always be captured by another, always beautiful at a distance, always the same when he landed there: a little world, a curving horizon, a desert landscape, the eternal dark sky beyond speckled with stars and ringed planets; always a banana-shaped crescent moon, whose changing expression commented on the activities below. There Little Enosh wandered in his goggles and a spacesuit that wrapped him from neck to toe in donut segments, like Tweedledum in his armor or the Michelin Man: innocent, alone, amazed.
Was he a little boy, or only little in comparison to the huge badguys, the Uthras, who thought about nothing but entrapping him, and hauling him before their Queen? The Uthras were distinguished from one another by details of costume and brutish armor, but they all wore black masks not different from their faces, with eyeslits that were the same as their eyes; and when they acted all in common, flying their smooth clamshell starships out from their hiding-places, they finished each other's threatening sentences as they crossed from panel to panel in neat formation.
What was so funny about them, was it only that they meant Little Enosh no good, and that they knew it and he
didn't
know it, and yet always failed to hurt him anyway, usually because he didn't understand they were trying to: turning away at the last moment to pluck a flower and so avoiding the net about to drop on him?
Ah
said one and
Hah!
said the other, but they had missed again. Even funnier was Little Enosh's own condensed outer-space language, unpunctuated and oddly spelt and striking Pierce as inexpressibly witty with its puns and elisions: “Oop tax,” said Enosh, as he realized the wicked Uthras had strewn the path where he rode his balloon-tired car: “Owel."
And Enosh's sad plight, that was funniest of all: lost, lost, deep in the dungeons of Rutha, Queen of the Uthras, big ball and chain on his ankle, and a single far star showing in his barred window: home, maybe. “Home,” said Enosh, looking out.
What Rutha wanted wasn't anything so wicked, in the end; she only went about it in ways even Pierce as a boy could see were all wrong, twisted out of true by her nature and her need. All she wanted was that Enosh admit, or accept, or believe, or pretend, that he was really Rutha's little boy. He couldn't of course, because he wasn't, and the guile of pretending to be was beyond him; even when he was tempted or at least flattered by the things she offered him—caresses, icy jewels, lavish banquets with himself installed in a tall chair and the Uthras rising (one's hand deep in a pie) to toast him—still he never really understood what she wanted of him.