Apocalypse Page 5

  Cally’s childhood daydreams had been of beatings and torments. Sometimes, in the fantasies, her father and mother had been the perpetrators of torture. The dreams had been pleasant, because after suffering she had felt that she deserved love. The imaginary abuse had its bittersweet pleasures; the real neglect had none.

  Suffer, her Cinderella mythology had said, and someone will rescue you and love you and take care of you forever. And make you happy. And there had been Mark, and he had brought her to Hoadley. Her new family.

  And she turned away from looking at the louse and shivered, for the new family had much the same slithering feel to her as the old.

  In the evening Cally took the children to her in-laws for supper because of the viewings. When mourners were in the Home, no cooking odors could intrude their tactless presence from the apartment upstairs, no childish thumpings and scamperings and vociferations were allowed overhead, and even ordinary footsteps were discouraged—when she had to be around, Cally laid old pillows on the floor and walked on them. But generally she and the kids cleared out.

  On this May day, warm at last after the long Hoadley winter, the beautiful day the omens began, there was no hurry; they walked. Ten-year-old Tammy and her younger brother Owen, full of the pent-up energy of schoolchildren, careered ahead. Even in boots Cally could not keep up with them. And she could not keep up her usual rapid calorie-burning stride; she felt dazed, dizzied, either by the events of the day of her own end-of-day hunger. Warily she watched everything around her, half expecting the sparse traffic on Main Street to turn into an invading army, the plastic bunnies and flat-ceramic kissing Dutch kids and wooden propeller-wing ducks on the lawns to change before her helpless eyes into something horrific.

  (Though in fact she found Hoadley’s lawn kitsch horrible to start with. She did not much care either for the massive concrete paired lions and urns and three-tiered fountains with which Mark adorned the outside of the funeral home, but she was grateful that his sense of the dignity of the place kept him from decorating it with plastic pinwheel daisies.)

  A few doors up street from the funeral home Sojourner Hieronymus was sitting on her front porch waiting for suppertime. Cally stopped to talk. She could not have gone by even if she had wanted to. A strict though tacit porch etiquette prevailed in Hoadley. In emergency cases of extreme hurry a person could hustle past with a flap of the hand or a shouted greeting, but an explanation was due afterward, and such cases had better not occur too often, or their perpetrator would be suspected of unfriendliness, liver problems and subversive sympathies. The accepted behavior was for children to stop and say hello respectfully before escaping about their own business, and for adults to stop and talk for at least five or ten minutes from the sidewalk or leaning on the porch railing, depending on the degree and warmth of the acquaintance—but never to presume actually to come up on the porch and sit down unless invited. The porch was an extension of the porch-sitter’s home, and was treated, like a foreign embassy, as a sovereign territory.

  Cally would have stopped to speak with Sojourner Hieronymus in any event. She was interested in the old woman, if only because Sojourner kept no ceramic skunks, no whirligigs or cutout wooden tulips, no Mexican donkey planters or wire-legged flamingos or reflecting balls or pistachio-green seahorse birdbaths in her yard. She did not even plant petunias. The lines of her house, innocent of ornament, scrupulous and Heavenward-aspiring as the long lines of her face, rose austerely from her flat, clipped lawn. A broom and a shovel hung against the side of the house, on nails big enough to last. In front of the porch a small, smooth-raked, severely rectangular garden awaited three tomato plants in three tidy wire cages. The two porch chairs were of chilly metal many times painted. By the door stood a lean dapple-gray milk box. Cally appreciated Sojourner Hieronymus and her total lack of sugar-coating.

  “Good evening,” she called.

  The old woman looked gray all over, smooth prayer-bonneted hair, housedress—in fact the housedress was a faded, flowered blue, but it looked gray as old meat. Sojourner nodded and motioned toward the empty chair beside her. Cally came up and settled herself on the porch. The metal chair was of the sort with diamond-shaped cutouts and only two legs, in front, made of pipe bent to form a U-shaped stand rearward. It gave springily when sat upon, and could be jiggled to resemble a very staid amusement park ride. There should have been a metal glider to go with the chairs, but Sojourner had sold it.

  “How are you?”

  “How are you?”

  Neither woman listened or answered. This ritual needed no response. Their eyes watched the children capering on the front sidewalk, clapping and calling to the friendly mutt who lived in the neighboring yard. Cally felt no temptation to tell Sojourner about the crazy perceptions that were troubling her. Sojourner would have listened; Sojourner was not self-centered on her own ailments and bodily functions as so many old people were. Nor, in spite of the prayer bonnet, did Cally think Sojourner would scream “Armageddon!” and fall down in a fit. Sojourner was far too tough and stiff-backed for that. But she knew Sojourner would not approve of her seeing strange manifestations. Sojourner scarcely approved of anything.

  “Don’t you know better than to kiss that dog?” the old woman called to Tammy. “You don’t know where that dog’s nose has been!”

  Tammy smiled reflexively, her own snub nose confronting the suspect canine one, and paid no attention. At one point Mrs. Hieronymus had told her that if a cat gets into a crib with a newborn baby it would smell milk on the baby’s breath and suffocate the baby trying to lick the milk out of its mouth. Tammy had repeatedly introduced various neighborhood cats to her baby brother as he napped, with no satisfactory results. Mrs. Hieronymus had also told her that a child who bit on a banana peel would get leprosy. At various times Tammy had tested this statement by inserting banana peel into her brother’s mouth and forcing his teeth closed on the yellow, bitter skins. Again, she had observed no satisfactory results except Owen’s passionate aversion to bananas. She now knew better than to listen to Mrs. Hieronymus.

  Cally changed the subject. “Did you know Mrs. Zepka?”

  This was the deceased woman in the Peach Room, the one who had leered at her, as a corpse was not supposed to leer, however briefly. Cally’s question was a veiled request for information, which Sojourner promptly provided.

  “She was divorced and an atheist.” Mrs. Hieronymus lowered her voice to keep the dangerous words from the children. “It’s a sin she’s being buried in holy ground. I don’t know what Reverent Berkey can be thinking of. Just because her daddy is on the Council.”

  “Atheist,” in Hoadley meant nothing more than that the woman refused to go to church. Gigi Wildasin was an “atheist.” Cally often wished she could be the same. But Mark’s business depended on churchgoers.

  “They say she died of one of them aneurysms,” said Sojourner, “but I heard different.” The old woman lowered her voice yet further, to a hollow, husky whisper. “I heard she slept naked. And I heard a bat come in the room while she was sleeping. You know how a bat will go in any little hole. It went right up her vagina, and she didn’t know it when she woke up. She thought she had a dream.” Sojourner placed a disapproving slur on “dream,” then reverted to horror. “And it rotted there,” she whispered, “and poisoned her, and she died of it.”

  Cally was saved from responding to this revelation by Oona Litwack, who emerged smiling and fluffy from her house onto her porch next door.

  Within arm’s reach, almost, because the two old houses formed part of the same structure, a duplex. Oona’s porch, cheek and jowl with Sojourner’s, sheltered a waist-high white pachyderm planter containing a large, dead prayer plant, several white plastic parson’s tables holding potted coleus, a huge ceramic frog serving as a doorstop, and a wicker koala bear next to the porch swing, cradling magazines to its varnished bosom. In the small front yard, Oona had indulged in her usual springtime dementia, digging garden with dirt-strewing abandon until
only an irregular patch of lawn remained, then putting out a random exuberance of miniature windmill, plastic chipmunks, impatiens, cosmos, recumbent Bambis, gnomes, dahlias and snapdragons. Later in the year, Cally knew, the yard would resemble a jungle as the flowers and weeds outstripped Oona’s good intentions. Out of the riot the blue-eyed, butt-sitting fake chipmunks would peek, grinning. On Sojourner’s side of the property line, three tomato plants would nod meekly in their cages. The double house could not have presented a more antithetical face to the world if it had been Barry Beal.

  Oona Litwack was a plump, gray-haired woman with polyester slacks and poodle curls that reminded Cally of shredded coconut. “Look what I got me,” she chirped to Sojourner and Cally, displaying the object dangling from her hand. An obvious garage-sale find, it was macrame-and-ceramic wind chimes in the shape of owls.

  “You listen to them things all the time,” said Sojourner darkly, “you’ll go deaf.”

  “Then I won’t be able to hear Gus call me,” Oona retorted, and with more eagerness than prudence she clambered onto her porch swing to hang her find amid an already-impressive display of pendant macrame planters, other wind chimes, and nameless whirling objets d’art made out of two-liter Orange Crush bottles. She swayed with the swing, grabbed at a porch post, then paused, staring down the street.

  “Is that somebody riding a horse?”

  Cally smiled. “Haven’t you seen Elspeth going to check her post office box? She loops the reins over a parking meter—”

  Cally’s smile faded as she looked, then peered. It wasn’t Elspeth.

  “Don’t know what anybody would want to ride horses for,” said Sojourner severely, knowing quite well that Cally rode several times a week. “You don’t never know what a horse is going to do. And it puts you up too high. The birds fly too close to your head, they get tangled in your hair and peck out your eyes.”

  For no reason Cally got up and went down the porch steps to stand with her children on the sidewalk, a hand on each of them to protect them against she didn’t know what danger, as the rider went past like a dreamwisp plucked out of deep time.

  A woman, a young woman, so beautiful Cally knew without asking that she had never been seen in Hoadley before: Cally would have heard talk of the stranger if she had been anybody anyone in this town knew or had ever known: the fine-molded beauty of her face was that unforgettable, that symmetrical, that eerie. Her long hair, moon blond, rippled down her shoulders to the back of the white horse so that for a moment Cally thought hazily of Lady Godiva, though this young beauty rode fully clothed, in a simple dress like a flame that flowed down over her feet. Her eyes, amid a haze of blue shadow, seemed enormous. She, the stranger, whoever she was, did not turn her head or glance at the people standing on the sidewalk gawking at her—for Cally and her children were not the only ones—but gazed straight ahead. She did not speak. Down Main Street she rode, holding her bit-champing horse to a spirited walk. After she rounded the curve under the railroad bridge, Cally could see her no longer.

  And though her children were tugging at her and exclaiming, Cally turned first to Sojourner Hieronymus and demanded, “You saw her, right? You saw her too?”

  “I saw some sort of hussy on a white horse,” Sojourner snapped.

  “The horse,” Cally muttered. The strange, far-too-beautiful woman had not just happened into Hoadley, Cally felt sure of it. Her ride had been staged. It took hours of work to get a horse looking that white. The animal had been prepared as if for a parade. Had the hussy in question truly been riding it sidesaddle? Or had that been an illusion of the shimmering flame-red draperies, the elaborate trappings? Cally remembered a jeweled bridle with a bright circle of bronze at the cheek. With that bridle, the matching breastplate, tossing mane, polished hooves, the horse had looked like—like—like no living sort of horse Cally had ever seen. Its conformation did not match that of any breed she knew. Straight of profile, high-headed, short-coupled and slender and so white—

  “It looked like a carousel horse,” Cally said aloud.

  Of course. The bronze circle had been the number plate. The horse had even rolled its eyes and gaped its mouth like a carousel horse, showing its teeth. Had there ever been a carousel horse carved with its mouth closed?

  “I wouldn’t never let my children go on no carousel,” Sojourner declared. “Them horses start to go up and down, snakes come out of their mouths. A child I knew once got on a carousel horse and whole nest of copperhead snakes come out of its mouth and stung him. Death took him right there.”

  Cally stood speechless. Over the years she had gotten accustomed to the fact that Sojourner didn’t approve of ice cream (“You don’t know what they put in it!”), books, butterflies, bells, trees (“You don’t know what’s going to drop out of them next!”), puppies, garbage disposals and permanent press clothing, but she had just reached the limits of her belief in the negative: no one could not like carousel horses.

  Oona Litwack, who had long since learned, like a good neighbor, simply not to listen, chirped tangentially, “We used to have a wonderful carousel, right here in Hoadley. At that trolley park.”

  “Trolley park?”

  “Didn’t you know Hoadley used to have a trolley? And they always put a park at the end of the line, out in the country, with a carousel and everything, so’s people could go out on a Sunday afternoon with their families and have a good time.”

  “So’s the trolley company could get rich,” retorted Sojourner.

  “You know nobody cared so much about money back then. Free and easy, that was us when we was on the trolley, on the merry-go-round. Oh, them days felt good. We felt like there was going to be a future for us.”

  “Trolley wasn’t good for nothing but for young girls to go out on a Saturday night and get ruint,” snapped Sojourner.

  “They didn’t get ruined, they got married,” said Oona merrily. “That’s how I got married. Right, Cally? You know what they say, the first one comes any time, and after that they take nine months.”

  Cally wasn’t listening. An evening breeze had come up, and her eyes were caught on the spinning of Oona’s many whirligigs, round and round and round. She waved to the ladies on their porches and started on her way, thinking hazily of Yeats and his turning gyres, of the giant carousel of time.… She looked up at the sky, where a display of sun rays, dusty gilt spokes in a celestial wheel, shone down through the clouds over Hoadley. Cally had been a sky-looker always, since she could remember. No matter what dreary bit of concrete her feet stood on, the sky was always there to look at. She gazed up often, on her way to the shopping mall, the mid-week Bible class, the dentist. The sky made her feel like riding a flying horse, like stretching out her hand for a brass ring always just out of reach. The sight of wild geese flying over in autumn, the sound of their piping, were enough to fill her with a pleasant longing. It was the very song of sky. A sunset, if she had time to lose herself in it, could bring tears to her eyes. And the sun rays, wheeling, always wheeling, tokens of passing time …

  Her children tugged at her hands.

  “A person looks at the sky too long, they’ll lose their mind!” Sojourner shouted at her back.

  Gigi Wildasin was the first one to say that something peculiar was happening. She was not afraid, not tough old Gigi, the clear-eyed cynic with the frou-frou name—“Gigi,” she had explained to Cally and Elspeth and Shirley out at the stable, stood for “G.G.,” Gladys Gingrich, her maiden name. (“And who the hell would want to go by Gladys?”) She did not mention that in certain high-school and nursing-school circles she had also been called “H.B.,” for “Happy Bottom,” a paraphrase of “Glad Ass,” a pun on “Gladys.” And not for nothing had her ass been called glad. But those memories of sexual escapades, though they delighted her, were no one’s business but her own. She spoke her mind about most things, but she had her private affairs, the hidden matters she kept to herself.

  Cally knew something strange was happening, but was afraid to s
ay it. Her children knew, and were not afraid, but merely watched, their heart-wrenching eyes veiling their alien thoughts, in the manner of children everywhere. Gigi, however, as was her habit, saw what she saw and spoke her mind about it. To Homer, when she finally got home to fix him some supper.

  She had spent her day at the stable, of course. She liked it there, and often went there at odd hours: dawn, dusk, late in the day when young wives like Cally Wilmore had to rush home to meet the children after school and make dinner. Gigi had decided some time back that her husband could fix his own supper if she was not around. Her husband, Homer Carville Wildasin, protested only by not eating, not so much as a sandwich, going on a sullen, silent hunger strike when she was not home to feed him. He went hungry a lot.

  The young wives, they didn’t have the gumption to stand up to their husbands. “How did you get Homer to buy you Snake Oil?” that little twit Cally had asked her, out on the trail one day. Cally’s husband, Mark, insisted that she wear the silly velveteen-covered hard hat and ride only the “guaranteed dead safe” horse he had bought her, and the poor thing didn’t know what to do about it. The goose. Gigi knew the younger woman liked her; Cally’s admiration amused her because it was based on misapprehension. There were quite a few things Cally didn’t know or understand about her. Cally was a nose-picking square, and an innocent. Gigi took sour pleasure in coaching her on the facts of life as she perceived them.