The Stand (Original Edition) (62 page)

“Jesus! Will she agree to that?”

“I think so. But I don’t think she’d ever be apt to exercise her veto power, not in any circumstance I can foresee. We just can’t expect to have a workable government here unless we make her its titular head. She’s the thing we all have in common. We’ve all had a paranormal experience that revolves around her. And she has a . . . a kind of aura about her. People all use the same loose bunch of adjectives to describe her: good, kind, old, wise, clever, nice. These people have had one dream that frightens the bejesus out of them and one that makes them feel safe and secure. They love and trust the source of the good dream all the more because of the dream that frightened them. And we can make it clear to her that she’s our leader in name only. I think that’s how she’d want it. She’s old, tired . . .”

Stu was shaking his head. “She’s old and tired, but she sees this problem of the dark man as a religious crusade, Glen. You know that.”

“You mean she might decide to take the bit in her teeth?”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” Stu remarked. “After all, it was
her
we dreamed of, not a Representative Board.”

Glen was shaking his head. “No, I can’t accept the idea that we’re all pawns in some post-Apocalypse game of good and evil, dreams or not. Goddammit, it’s irrational!”

Stu shrugged. “Well, let’s not get bogged down in it now. I think your idea of giving her veto power is a good one. In fact, I don’t think it goes far enough. We ought to give her the power to propose as well as dispose.”

“But not absolute power on that side of the slate,” Glen said hastily.

“No, her ideas would have to be ratified by the Representative Board,” Stu said, and then added: “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?”

“It doesn’t matter. What it means is that what she says won’t necessarily be dictated 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 faces 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 foothassock 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-talker 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 hairribbons 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, 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, looked 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.

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 squatters’ 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 on 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. Back home she’d had her own hand-pump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the backyard. 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 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 good old common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

Soon all these people would start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack ticket 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.

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 behinds 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 had 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. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired . . . and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of
him.
They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street . . . unless he
wanted
to be noticed. They might
feel
him; a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blankness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able —only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

He would have his followers. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. Some would make the deduction for themselves in time—his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep possible invaders out.

Would he win?

She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick.

But. . . would he win?

That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased him to let the Children of Israel sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow his only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman—if He had been a mortal, he would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game
was
the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand . . . and she would not overestimate her own place in the game any more than she would underestimate the dark man’s craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier—long past retirement age, it was true!—in the service of the Lord.

“Thy Will be done,” she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters Peanuts. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren’t they tasty?

As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took it off.

“You awake, Mother?”

“That I am,” she said through a mouthful of peanuts. “Step in, Ralph, I ain’t chewin these nuts, I’m gummin em to death.”

Ralph laughed and came in. “There’s some folk out past the gate that’d like to say howdy, if you ain’t too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I’d say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name’s Underwood.” “Well, bring em up, Ralph, that’s fine,” she said.

“Good enough.” He turned to go.

“Where’s Nick?” she asked him. “Haven’t seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?”

“He’s been out at the reservoir,” Ralph said. “Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”

Mother Abagail cackled, spraying peanut fragments from her toothless mouth. “Oh, Ralph, I like you. You’re a one.”

“Why, I like you too, Mother. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee.” “And what did Nick say?”

“Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it’s fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?”