The Boy With Penny Eyes Page 5

  At the end of the hallway was a huge, tall window. There was a tree close by, but its branches were sparse and the window had an almost unimpeded view of the town. There was brown rolling lawn, the sharp line of a tree-lined road, and, beyond that, a dense cluster of white houses trimmed in blue or white. To the left, close by, was a traffic light marking the main street, a pleasantly wide ribbon of small shops and the newer, necessary effluvia of any modern town: a McDonald's, a fried chicken franchise, a Burger King a scant two blocks from its rival. Beyond the main road, another dense cluster of trees and houses, roofs barely visible, and, at the edge of vision, a cleared area with a square red brick structure that was the grammar school, the chain-link fence, the swing set, and the high slide just apparent.

  Billy turned from the window. There was a wide stairway, and he went down it to the first floor of the house. He walked through the kitchen, the dining room, a wide entranceway, and a living room with Victorian furniture in it, dust-free but so stuffy it looked like dust must be jammed into the furniture, generations of it waiting to burst out. Everything smelled of lemon polish and age.

  He opened the front door.

  The day assaulted the Victorian atmosphere of the house. Billy stepped out into air that was a little chilly, which told him that it was still morning.

  He heard faint sounds from around the side of the house. He walked that way. There was the small garden he had walked through the night before, filled with roses. Then he stood before the side entrance to the church. From within, he heard a single voice, rising and falling.

  He opened the door and went in. There was a short hallway, then an open area that almost looked like a stage. At a lectern stood the man who had taken him from the back of the church. The view Billy had was like that from the wings of a stage; he saw the man in profile.

  "So these are simple words," the man was saying. "'Hate the evil, and love the good.' Deceptively simple. You might ask, 'Isn't it easy to love good and hate evil, simply because good is good and evil is bad?' Think about it." He gestured with his hands. "Man is a funny creature. Hating evil sounds logical, but evil is so often easy to take, so common, that it is easier to accommodate it than to hate it. And accommodation can be, in its own way, a kind of love. Evil makes itself easy to love . . ."

  There was a narrow, winding stairway to Billy's left. He ascended it. The man's voice was muffled at first, then began to come back to him, amplified and echoing. The staircase opened onto a narrow loft with a pipe organ against the back wall. The organ was covered with a tarp. Billy sat on the single bench and looked out as the man at the lectern below him went on.

  "Think of little things," he said, holding up his index finger. "Think of voting, for instance. How many times, when Election Day rolls around, have you thought, Why bother? I know I have. Maybe it's raining outside, or there's an early snow, or it's just plain cold. It's a day off for many of us, and the temptation is there just to stay in bed and watch TV. We think it doesn't make any difference. The same politicians always win, and politicians are all the same. The good thing to do, the right thing, would be to go out to the school and vote, no matter what the weather is, no matter what you feel about politicians. But what's the easier thing to do? Can you honestly say you'd love to do the good thing in that situation? I can't. You'd love to do the bad thing—and many of us often do. And that's just a small example."

  There was a pause in Reverend Beck's talk, and Billy saw him look up and see him in the organ loft. Surprise crossed the man's face. Then he turned back to his notes.

  "We can take nothing for granted," Reverend Beck continued. "That is the lesson of today's reading. Good demands of us; to love good and to hate evil is constant work. It's not as easy or as simple as it sounds. To paraphrase, if I might, 'Good is a harsh mistress.' But, if we are to make ourselves better human beings, we must be willing to take that mistress on."

  There was a stirring as Reverend Beck tapped his notes back into square. He held up a hand. "Before we go on, I should mention our upcoming cake sale . . ."

  Billy looked at those below him. The church was about three-quarters full: bald men in shirts and ties, women in dresses holding babies, impatient teenagers moving restlessly in their seats. There were two older women; a family of four boys poking one another, their parents turning to quiet them with a slap or whispered warning; an old woman and her husband, eyes upturned to Reverend Beck, attentive. Near the front on the left side sat a boy with short black hair, with a tall man and woman and a little girl.

  As if feeling heat on the back of his neck, the boy rubbed there with his hand, and then he turned, looking up at the organ loft. His eyes went, wide. He mouthed a word, staring for a moment until the tall woman, sitting beside him, said something to him and laid her hand on his arm, gently turning him around. The boy glanced behind him again, up at the loft, but now it was empty.

  Billy descended the steps and crossed the hallway to the side entrance of the church. He opened the door and went out. He stood for a moment looking at the sky; the sun was high now and it looked as though autumn would hold off for at least another day. It would be warm later, the advent of Indian summer in this late September.

  He felt in his pocket where his cigarettes were and found they were missing. His matches, too. The other things he kept in there—loose change, a tiny pocketknife on the end of an empty key chain he had bought in a vending machine in a gas station washroom in Virginia—were still there.

  Suddenly he was very tired. He thought of the bed he had left, the unaccustomed, soothing softness of it. He had to sleep. He knew that, before long, he would grow used to sleeping in a soft bed again, just like he would grow used to all the other things that went with staying in one place with other people. In time, he would grow used to the routine of daily living again, and his back, which had slept on the ground for these past months, would conform to the curve of a soft mattress.

  At least while he was here. While he did what he had to do.

  He walked back to the empty house.

  11

  She was back in the tent.

  In the house, empty while Jacob conducted service next door, in the dark, in the bathroom with the door locked and the light off and her eyes closed, with her hands clenched and her back against the door, even with her eyes screwed so tight that tears were drawn from them with her mind screaming, Mary Beck was back in the tent.

  God, tell me what to do!

  She heard the sounds, and even smelled fresh-cut sawdust on the tent floor. She heard wooden folding chairs being creakingly sat upon. Coughs. The sound of spitting. Moaning and, from somewhere in the back, sobbing and the sound of a soothing voice. The sound of chant-like reading. An errant laugh, quelled. The close-by, crushing press of human flesh and spirit.

  "Go on," her mother said to her.

  She didn't want to go. She never wanted to. She would hide back here with her fear and they would all go away. She would be alone in a grass field, lying in the grass like that girl in the painting called Christina. She would be that girl, alone with only herself, and God somewhere way up there above the clouds, above the moon even, like He was supposed to be. He wouldn't be here next to her, in her mother, putting His hand around her heart and pulling the bottom out from her stomach, telling her what to do. She would be that girl, she would be Christina . . .

  "Mary, go."

  The stern voice, the stern face. God's conduit.

  She opened her eyes.

  "Please, Mother."

  The look: the blazing deep certainty on her mother's face that stretched down to her very fingers, the nails hot, the flesh sinewy as cooked meat, the blaze of glory itself . . .

  "Go."

  Had her mother's face always been like that? The thin long lines, set mouth, sharp bony chin and thin-fleshed cheeks. Gray hair, always pulled back, knotted in the back with a rubber band. The thin body, the frame of a scarecrow, the look that knew what the world was and accepted no other way but her
own.

  No. Not always like that. The hardness had not always been there; the face and body were the same but the hardness had been added that day in that other tent, when Mary had opened her mouth to say those words, words she would take back now and swallow, hold down with all the bile, words that had changed the world and made her mother hard.

  She went.

  There was almost applause. It seemed there should be; the same rustle, small intake of breath, whispers of recognition, as at any talk show or lecture. She thought that if there ever really was applause, she would flee, away from her mother and God, away from everything. That would be the end of it; she would live up in the mountains, in a cave or an abandoned cabin. When winter came, she would cover herself with leaves and tree bark, deep and warm, and she would hibernate and think of nothing, and no one would find her.

  The lights were hot; they were always too hot. There were June bugs out tonight, and mosquitoes as big as thumbnails. She looked up; at the top of the center pole, where it was dark green from the shadows made by the artificial light and canvas, a lone wasp circled. He landed on the pole, took off, alighted again.

  Already they were starting up from the back aisles, beginning to move out into the long line that would be endless, the line of sunken faces, eyes that begged, hopeless hungry stares, rasping breath, clutching fingers, the words, "Please, please . . ."

  "Brothers and sisters," Uncle Henry said. His long gray-panted leg was tall as a smokestack as he stood next to her. She refused to look up at him.

  She closed her eyes.

  Oh, God. What is it you want me to do?

  She saw that face again; that first face. How old was she then? Five years old. The same sawdust, the same smell of tent and summer sweat, the same anticipation. She had been out in one of the folding chairs with her mother, next to the aisle. She remembered her feet swinging because they didn't reach the floor. She remembered someone in the back singing "Precious Lord" in a low voice, almost under the breath, ashamed or unwilling to share it. She remembered a fat man across the aisle from her, slapping at mosquitoes on his neck, the brown spot on his huge, almost bald head looking purple under the lights. She remembered the endless line filing past her, the cripples, the legless in wheelchairs, the bone-thin, the wheezing, the coughing, the weeping fat women with older women on their arms. They passed her like frames in a movie film, one frame for each broken human being.

  And then one of them, a man with long matted hair, and a beard and sores on his face, and spittle on his lips, collapsed in the aisle next to her. He moaned and held his arms out blindly. And without thinking she held out her hand over him. And then she cried out the one word that changed her life. "Light!" she cried. For there was a great light where the man had been, a great mass of luminescence, near perfect in its fullness but for a spot, a blemish in the perfection, and she cried, "His leg! His leg!"

  And then they carried him off, and the doctors looked at his leg and found what was wrong there, and then their eyes were always on her. They called her a reader, and the hardness came to her mother's eyes, the hard light of a calling, and the lines of people came to her, and there were tents all summer long, the same tents and smells, and the churches and school auditoriums and halls in the winter, Uncle Henry driving them through the freeze to see the people, see their light and tell them where to look, reading them, the mouths and eyes that begged, "Read! Tell me what it is!"

  God, please tell me . . .

  The mosquitoes were frenzied now. The heat of the lights, the closeness of the human bodies, the smell of hot blood, drove them around the tent in slapping clouds. The wasp, Mary saw, had settled on the pole and clung still as death, watching in the near shadows what happened below. Was that God? she thought. Was that Him up there, watching to see that she did His will, waiting to sting her with the poison of death if she did not do as He commanded?

  She tugged her eyes away from the wasp onto Uncle Henry's bearded face, the stain of tobacco on his teeth, the breath of tobacco on his lips as he knelt beside her. "They're ready, child," he said.

  Her mother took her arm.

  She was led to the edge of the steps. Through her sandals she felt the uneven slats of wood sinking beneath her tiny weight, pushing her forward. She looked at the floor. There was an awful hush; even the mosquitoes seemed to quiet.

  Her mother said into her ear, pulling aside the yellow bangs of her straight hair. "Now." She shut her eyes.

  There was a body there. She did not look at or feel it, but her mind saw it. She saw broken light. She felt arms on her, clutching fingers, old skin like a turkey's throat, but her mind saw the shaping light, felt its contours, and suddenly she came to a place where the light was dim and weak, as if the brightness in the rest had been shielded or the source pulled away.

  She brought her mind away, opening her eyes, forgetting what she would see. There was the face that went with the arms, the withered face, the hopeless eyes like claws, digging into her, pleading with her, "Please, please tell me how to be well."

  Mary shut her eyes again, holding them closed as tight as she could. Tears wanted to come because she could not say that the woman's heart would get better, could not tell her that she would soon die, the light was so dim, that it had grown weaker even as Mary had looked at it.

  She felt the woman's hand on her arm, gripping her, waiting for the answer, the sentence of death, and she only said, "Your heart," two soft words, and then the woman's hands were pried gently from her and she heard sobbing as the woman was led away. And then there was another presence before her, another light to hold in her mind, and her own heart shook not with joy but with despair because if she opened her eyes once more, she would see the same face, an endless line of the same face, out through the flaps of the tent and into the dark night, the procession of the dead and dying, the endless, endless line . . .

  God, tell me what to do!

  Remembering, with the hard bathroom door at her back, Mary bit her lip so hard that a rush of salty blood covered her tongue.

  Plea—

  Out in the hallway, she thought she heard a sound. Suddenly alert, she listened, but there was nothing, and she slumped back against the door.

  Please, tell me!

  She remembered the first night her mother brought her to read in the tent. There was thunder, and lightning so intense it had a sound of its own, a crack that fought with the loud thumping roars of thunderclaps and filled the July night with God's fury.

  She hid under the bed with her teddy bear. Her blouse was soaked with sweat. She tried to clamp her eyes shut but the cracks of lightning made shadows even through her closed lids. The rumble of thunder shook the house, and hot wet rain beat against the side of her bedroom wall in whacking sheets, trying to break in at her. The rain fell so hard it drove through the closed shutters, pelting warm water on the floor, splashing out to hit her bare leg. She held her bear so tightly he threatened to burst.

  "I won't go, Tam," she told the bear. As she said it she heard Uncle Henry hitching up the horses outside her window, shouting to the farm helper Reddy through the drenching storm. Tears ran down her face, only the salty taste making them different from the drops beating in through the window.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the teddy bear, a crumpled thing that stared up at her half blindly, one button eye lost. A white flash of lightning made his face horrible.

  Outside, Uncle Henry's shouts to Reddy stopped. The rain slackened. She knew Uncle Henry was in the house now. Soon her mother would come for her. As the hall clock struck the hour of seven, her mother's voice came: "Mary, it's time."

  She pulled back farther under the bed, clutching the bear.

  "Mary," her mother called.

  The rain beat for a moment longer and then stopped, leaving the sharp, clean smell of ozone. Water dropped from the roof outside into a depression of dirt outside her window. The world smelled like July, after a storm.

  The door to her room opened. Mary f
elt her mother enter as much as heard her. "Mary?" she called impatiently, but then the tone changed by the end of the word. Mary hugged the bear, looked out as two thin legs, bearing feet in two old shoes, stopped before the bed.

  "Mary?" her mother said. Her voice had a tone Mary had not heard since she was a baby. Her mother bent down, her face dropping below the line of the bed, becoming visible to the girl.

  "Come out, Mary," she said softly.

  Mary crawled out. Her mother's hand brushed back her hair. She sat on the bed, next to her mother, her face buried in her mother's dress.

  She heard Uncle Henry come to the door, and start to say, "We—" but then he stopped and went away. Her mother's hand rested on her head, stroking her hair.

  Her mother said, "Are you scared, Mary?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't be. This is what God wants you to do."

  "It's not!" she bawled. "He would never want me to do something I'm afraid of!" And then she was crying, and her mother held her even tighter.

  "What are you afraid of?"

  "I'm scared of telling them they have to die!"

  "That's nothing to be frightened of. All of these people—you'll be helping them. Their light is God's own light, in them." After a moment her mother said, "God is speaking to you, Mary. He's speaking to you through me. And He's telling me that this is a great gift He's given you, and that there's nothing for you to be afraid of. He will always tell you what to do." She could feel the strength in her mother's arms. "God gave you this gift to root out Satan, Mary. That's the real reason why you must read. If you were to read Satan, you would find him out, because there would be a sickly light, nearly black emptiness, because God's light has been taken from him." She held Mary away from her, and there was an almost prophetic gleam in her eye. "If you were to root Satan out, it would be because God wanted you to, and I would be there to tell you what He wants."