The Stand (Original Edition) (63 page)

“Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?”

“A lot,” Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. “You’re the reason we’re here. I guess we’ll do whatever you want.”

“What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it’s time for me to have it. Like an American.”

“Well, you’ll have all of that.”

“The rest feel that way, Ralph?”

“You bet they do.”

“Then that’s fine.” She rocked serenely. “Time everyone got going. There’s people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean.”

“Then I can go ahead?”

“With what?”

“Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn’t need any electricity, I’d just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers.” He shook his head. “Do they! Seven hundred. Why, I've only got four hundred and some here.”

“And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in.”

“I will.” Ralph started away.

“Ralph?”

He turned back.

“Print a thousand,” she said.

They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God’s name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief; a minor pilferer from time to time at worst.

The mother of sin was pride.

Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan.
Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty?
the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered,
I did it.

She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right—none in jail ever, none caught by the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets —but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of Will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At a hundred and eight she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamours.

And when they filed through the gate she thought:
It's me they've come to see.
And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line.

The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddish-gold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead.

“You’re really real,” he said softly.

“Why, I have always thought so,” she said. “I am Abagail

Freemantle, most folks here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place.”

“Thank you,” he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. “I’m . . . we’re glad to be here. My name’s Larry Underwood.”

She held her hand out and he shook it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him.

“I. . . dreamed of you,” he said awkwardly.

She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn’t have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself shouldn’t have to try too hard for too long, not until he’s seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green. But she liked him.

His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. “I’m Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Glad you could come by, Lucy.”

“Would you mind if I asked . . . well. . .” Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously.

“A hundred and eight at last count,” she said kindly. “Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days.”

“I dreamed about you,” Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion.

The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy’s face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold.
He’s here,
she thought.
He’s come in the shape of this woman .
. .
for behold he comes in more forms than his own ... the wolf
. . .
the crow ... the snake.

She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck.

For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to her. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could . . . could what?

Could see.

Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to
him)
for whom she was intended.

The two of them, each with their own fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them.

He’s in her—the devil’s Imp,
Abby Freemantle thought.

All of their power is right here,
Nadine thought in her own turn.
She’s all they’ve got, although they may think differently.

Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand.

“Hello,” she said in a thin, dead voice. “I’m Nadine Cross.”

The old woman said: “I know who you are.”

The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening.

“Do you?” Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one.

“Yes. I do.”

She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe’s queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail.

Nadine said: “This is Joe. Do you know him as well?”

Mother Abagail’s eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck.

“I don’t think Joe’s his name,” she said. “And I don’t think you’re his mom.” She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow won—that she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was ... ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn’t been ready for it!

“What’s your name, chap?” she asked the boy.

The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. “Come on, Joe,” Nadine said, and put a hand on his shoulder.

Joe threw it off, and that seemed to break the block.
“Leo!”
he said with sudden force and great clarity. “Leo Rockway, that’s me! I’m Leo!” And he sprang into Mother Abagail’s arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away.

“Joe,” Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again.

The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her.

“Come away,” Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. “She’s old. You’ll hurt her. She’s very old and . . . not very strong.”

“I love her,” the boy said.

Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. “Come away, Joe!”

“
That's not my name! Leo! Leo! That’s my name!”

The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what.

The two women locked eyes again like sabers.

I know who you are,
Abby’s eyes said.

Nadine’s answered:
Yes. And I know you.

But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first.

“All right,” she said. “Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her.”

He left Mother Abagail’s arms, but reluctantly.

“You come back and see me whenever you want,” Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine.

“Okay,” the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine’s face was stony. She didn’t speak. As they went back down the path the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman’s face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely . . . wasn’t she?

He comes in more shapes than his own . . . wolf, crow, snake . . . woman.

But the thought had no power over her now.

I was sitting here complacently
,
waiting to be kowtowed to
—
yes, that’s what I was doing, no use denying it—and now that woman has come and something has happened and I’m losing what it was. But there was something about that woman . . . wasn’t there? Are you sure? Are you sure?

There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn’t doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy fake.

Oh, but I’m old! It’s not fair!

And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own:
Not too old to know the woman is
—

Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. “Hi, Mother Abagail,” he said. “The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.”

And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man’s hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.

The woman is
—

—
what?

Did it matter? The woman was gone.

“I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time,” she said easily to Mark Zellman. “Town named Rouses Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?”

Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.

“From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.

The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn’t get there soon she was going to stain her dress.

All of that and the feeling, fading now, that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.

Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $150,000-$200,000 range . . . and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.

On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different . . . but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease . . . but there were not
enough
corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it . . . Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.