“You must decide.”
Andy levered open his door. He stepped out and opened the rear door on his side. He unbuckled Peter and pulled him out. Then, leaning in, he removed Simon from his carrier.
“Andy,” said Dawn, “what’s going on?”
“I got to take the boys inside for just a minute.”
“I don’t know, Andy. Is that smart? It could be dangerous in there for a child …”
“Everything’s shut down. Ain’t nothing that can hurt them.”
“Oh, all right,” said Dawn. “One minute.” She moved to get out.
“No, honey, just me and the boys. It’s—it’s personal. Man to man. I want to show them what they got to look forward to when they grow up.”
Dawn settled back into her seat. “Of all the silly notions,” she said, although she seemed rather pleased. “I hope our boys’ll be doing better than working in a mill.”
Carrying Simon, holding Peter’s hand, Andy walked to the main door of the mill. It was locked.
“The side entrance is unsecured,” said Moloch.
Andy went to it. Moloch had spoken true.
Once inside, Andy locked the door. He walked to the basic oxygen furnace where Moloch had first spoken to him. It was cold.
“You are a good and loyal listener,” said Moloch. “Give Me the boys.”
Andy knew it was much too late to argue. He activated the motors of the cold furnace, which whined like animals whose legs were pinioned in traps. The pear-shaped vessel tilted to a point where Andy could just reach its lip.
“Put the boys in.”
Andy lifted first Peter, then Simon, dropping them both in, where they rolled to the canted bottom. They were curiously mute, almost sedated.
“Leave the vessel in the charging position, and go to the blast furnace.”
Andy did as he was told.
“Melt some ore.”
Andy moved quickly and efficiently. He knew that once he started the blast furnace, people would soon become alerted to the unwonted activity at the mill. Luckily the furnace caught easily, almost unnaturally so. Cans on a conveyor carried the raw ore to the top of the furnace. Soon Andy had tapped molten metal. This metal was a substance at 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,300 degrees Centigrade. In the basic oxygen furnace, under the inrush of that life-sustaining gas, it would soar to 3,000° F, or 1,725° C.
There came a banging on the main door. Andy wondered why the watchman didn’t just use his keys. Possibly in the confusion no one remembered. Such things happened. Possibly Moloch was preventing them.
At the receptacle that held the boys, Andy stopped with the charge of molten iron.
“Now?” he asked, already knowing what Moloch would say.
“Yes.”
Luckily it normally took less than five minutes to charge the furnace, and that was with a much larger draught.
There was no noise from inside the kettle as Andy worked. Only a titanic inrush as of breath when the vessel was full, which Andy knew came from Moloch.
Andy righted the vessel and lowered the oxygen lance. This was a steel tube fifty feet long and ten inches in diameter. It descended like the finger of God.
Andy stood watching, listening to the flow of oxygen and to Moloch’s keening exaltations. Then Andy felt hands grabbing him. “Moloch,” he called aloud, “Moloch, now I know!”
But Moloch did not answer.
THE GRANGE
“Look,” said Lucy, “the moon—”
Edward laid down his newspaper and looked up in the sky, where his wife was pointing. A waxing crescent moon, pale as a mermaid’s face, thin as a willow whip, was visible in the translucent blue heavens, trailing the noontime sun by some twenty-five degrees.
“Pretty,” said Edward, making to lift up his paper again.
“Pretty?” Lucy demanded. “Is that all you have to say?”
“What else should I say?”
“Well, what’s it doing up there now? Isn’t that weird? I mean, look, the sun’s still up. It’s only lunchtime.”
Edward slowly folded his newspaper into quarters, stalling for a few seconds. His mind was disordered; his fine intellect, complex as a cat’s cradle, had come completely unknotted in an instant. Lucy did this to him. Even after fifteen years of marriage, she still did this to him. All it took most times was a single utterance winging unexpectedly out of the conversational blue, or an idiosyncratic action. The day she had asked him what ocean Atlantic City fronted on.… Her puzzlement about why one had to apply the brakes when going into a curve.… The hurt incomprehension she had exhibited when she destroyed the microwave oven by trying to warm up a can of soup.…
It was at such times that Edward found himself utterly speechless, baffled by the unfathomable workings of Lucy’s mind. She was quite clever in many ways. That much must be granted. And it wasn’t a lack of logic she exhibited. Far from it. It was a kind of otherworldly, Carrollian logic she possessed, something utterly alien to his rational method of thinking.
He had believed he understood her before their wedding. They had, after all, known each other for most of their lives. Had been the traditional high school sweethearts, in fact. Surely such a long intimacy should have bred comprehension.
What a naive and pompous young idiot he had been! He realized quite fully now that he did not understand her at all, not in the slightest. Would never understand her. But he loved her, and that, he supposed, would have to suffice.
Trying to come up with a rational response to Lucy’s objections to the moon’s sharing of the sun’s domain, Edward studied her where she lay. Reclining on a folding, towel-padded aluminum lawn chair, she wore the smallest of two-piece swimsuits. Her graceful limbs and slim torso were thoroughly oiled and buttered. Her small tummy resembled a shining golden hill, her sweat-filled navel a mysterious well or spring atop it. She was levered partway up on her right elbow and forearm, her eyes shaded with her left hand, facing Edward expectantly.
Knowing full well that it was all in vain, Edward tried to explain.
“There is no reason why the moon cannot be up at the same time as the sun. Because of the special way the sun and the moon and the earth spin around each other, the moon rises at a different time each day—”
“The moon rises?”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t just always there, but you see it only when the sun goes down?”
Edward sighed deeply. “No. Now pay attention. If, one night, it rises at, say 11:00 p.m., the next night it will rise later. Pretty soon it will be rising during the day, like now. Eventually it will go back to rising at night.”
“Why should it work in such a complicated way?”
“Gravity—”
“Stop right there. You know I don’t understand that word.”
“Well, then, you’ll never understand why the moon can be up during the day.”
Lucy flopped back onto the lawn chair. “Maybe I don’t want to understand. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe this is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and you just think you’ve seen the moon in the daytime before.”
Edward started to get irritated. “Listen, I know what I know. The moon is often up during the daytime. I’ve seen it a hundred times, if I’ve seen it once.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“No, honest, I’m not.”
“Well, I’ve never seen it before.”
“You’ve seen it now.”
“Now is not always. Like you keep saying, ‘One item does not make a series.’”
“Look for it tomorrow, then, if you don’t believe me.”
“Just forget it, then.”
“Maybe I’ll do just that.”
Edward tried to resume reading his paper. For some reason he had lost all relish for it. In the back of his mind was a nagging uncertainty. Had he ever seen the moon by day before …?
Lucy spoke sleepily. “Why don’t you take off that silly hat and get some sun?”
“I don�
�t want to burn.”
“You stayed blanched all those summers we lived in the city. You should enjoy our new country life.”
Edward had just received tenure at an urban-campused Ivy League college in the Northeast, where he taught philosophy. He and Lucy had promptly bought an old farmhouse forty-five minutes south of the city, in a sparsely populated district where cows outnumbered humans. Their property included five acres, one of which was lawn, the other four being scrub growth.
The time of the year was the first week of June.
“I can’t see the sense of getting all greased up to lie mindlessly for hours in the sun.”
“It feels good.”
1 suppose.
“In fact, it feels so good that I’m taking off my suit. It’s silly to wear it, out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Lucy, I don’t know—”
But it was too late. In a mere second, Lucy had skinned out of her bikini. The twin white premises of her breasts and the conclusion of her pale pubic delta formed a wordless syllogism whose validity was unsusceptible to proof.
Still, Edward felt professionally compelled to try.
Later that afternoon, after a lunch of curried chicken-salad sandwiches and Chardonnay, Lucy said, “You know what? I think I’m going to start a garden. It’ll give me something to do.”
“A garden? You’ve never grown anything before.”
“That was when we lived in the city. Things are different now.”
“What kind of garden? Flowers or vegetables?”
“Both.”
“How will you even know where to begin?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll ask around. Maybe there’s one of those whatchamacallits around here.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean.”
“I do?”
“The place where the farmers get together for their hoedowns or hootenannies or whatever.”
“A Grange.”
“Yes, that’s it. A Grange.”
* * *
It was odd, this living in the country. Very strange and disturbing to the intellect. Nature had an effect. Yes, it must be admitted. The mind, much as it might like to think it was sovereign and independent, was hooked up to the body; and the body, in turn, was merely a quivering antenna receptive to a bewildering variety of sensory inputs. And out here, away from the city, amidst a wild profusion of growing things, of hidden, scurrying animals, of running water and blind stones migrating upward through the soil, the inputs were different. More persuasive in a subtle way—although perhaps less blatant— than car horns and advertisements, sirens and the smell of restaurants.
But there was more to it than individual stimuli, or even the sum of the novel sensations. There were the underlying patterns to consider, the ancient cycles and the total ecology of nature. Take just the seasons, for instance. In the city, they passed almost unnoticed. Street trees donned and doffed their cloaks of leaves, and no one paid any attention. Pigeons did not fly south for the winter. Any river big enough to notice was too big to ice over. Flowers were something one bought already cut and bundled.
Out here in the country, though, it was different. In just the couple of months that they had been living here, Edward had become attuned to the progress of the summer. In a way that was almost sly and sneaky, things changed. Plants that, a few weeks ago in May, had been tiny shoots were now monstrous weeds, bearing heavy, randy blossoms never bred by man. Where there had once been a clear line of sight from the front porch to the mailbox, there was now an impenetrable greenness. The sun now rose above that ancient oak, whereas formerly it had crowned that other. (Elm, sycamore, ash? How could one tell?)
And the way the discrete elements of the environment related to each other.… When the trumpet vine that climbed the tumbled stone wall along the eastern edge of their land had blossomed, the hummingbirds had materialized from nowhere. How had they known to come? The ants that stripped the chewed carcass that might have been a possum—what had summoned them? The cloud of delicate dandelion parasol seeds—what fitted them to be carried by the wind?
There was a kind of mindless fecundity behind it all, an inexhaustible and exuberant organic experimentation. What was it the writer Annie Dillard had said? That nature was “wasteful and extravagant of life … That seemed about right.
Edward had noticed unmistakable changes in himself since their residency here. For one thing, his attention was more liable to drift from his work. He had fall-semester classes to prepare, scholarly papers to write, a book to outline. (It was to be a volume of philosophy for the layman, hopefully very popular, like what Sagan and Gould had done in their fields.) Despite these demands, he found himself spending useless hours outdoors, wandering along the game trails that threaded the adjoining woods, his mind wandering likewise, unable to focus on the work at hand.
(But was it totally empty during these walks, or rather, working in a different way, examining different, wordless topics …?)
And then, of course, there were the changes in Lucy. Back in the city, during his untenured years, she had done part-time librarian work to supplement his pay, and spent most of her free time as an expert shopper. Since the increase in his income and their subsequent relocation, she had quit her job and completely lost interest in the local stores or the more distant, inevitable mall. All it seemed she wanted to do was vegetate in the sun. That, or cook these intricate, peasant-type meals for them. Supper might be a big pot of thick stew and a crusty whole-grain loaf, still hot from the oven. Breakfast an omelet round and golden as the sun accompanied by cornbread made with white meal and cooked in a cast-iron skillet in the oven, emerging like a scorched harvest moon.
Edward found himself putting on weight, like some country squire.
And now there was this matter of a garden. It was the last thing Edward would have predicted Lucy would want. (Of course, when had he ever been able to guess what she would do next?) It was certainly a harmless enough hobby. Maybe she would find some local folks who might provide her with company on days when he was working.
As for his own inability to concentrate—well, there was bound to be a period of adjustment connected with such major changes in their lives. Edward was certain that any day now he would be back to his old self.
Meanwhile, though, perhaps he’d just go out for a stroll.…
* * *
Car tires chewed noisily on the gravel in the drive. Edward looked up gratefully from the disorganized pile of papers on his desk. Splotchy sunlight, filtered by the leaves of the large oak just outside the window, carpeted the varnished floor of his study with a pattern of shadow. The house had seemed empty without Lucy. Maybe now that she was home, they could go for a walk together. It wasn’t as if he were accomplishing anything sitting here.…
Stepping beyond the wooden screen door onto the wide porch that wrapped itself around three-quarters of the old house, Edward was met by Lucy bounding up the steps from the verdant lawn. She grabbed him and whirled him around in a crazy little dance.
“I found it, I found it, I found it!”
Stepping back dizzily when released, Edward said, “My God, it could only be Leibniz’s universal calculus—”
“No, dummy, the Grange.”
Edward took Lucy’s hand, and they went into the cool indoors.
“I stopped in at the Blue Label feedstore and asked the man there. He said there was a Grange in town. It’s one of the oldest branches, in fact. They meet in that brick building with the waterwheel that we wondered about. It used to be a real flour mill hundreds of years ago, even before World War I.”
“That old, huh?”
“Yes. And tonight there’s going to be a meeting that the public can attend. At least the first part. The Grange is a society, you know. You have to be members before you can go to every meeting and function. But if we go tonight and show some interest, I think they’ll ask us to joi
n. The feedstore man said that most of the members were pretty old, and that they were always looking for younger people to belong.”
“I guess we qualify, then. Anyway, I know you make me feel pretty young.”
Edward grabbed Lucy’s ass.
“About sixteen years old I would estimate,” she said.
“You should remember.”
“Oh, I do.”
Later Edward was motivated to pull down the proper volume of the Encyclopedia Americana and look up:
“GRANGE, one of the general farm organizations in the United States, formerly known as the Patrons of Husbandry. It is a secret, ritualistic society. Established in 1867 in Washington, D.C., by Oliver Hudson Kelley and six associates, its officers bear the titles of Grange Master, Overseer, Chaplain, Secretary, Treasurer, Steward, and Gatekeeper.…”
Neat, thought Edward. Each of the original seven founders got to be an officer. That’s my kind of club.…
Evening filled the woods with twilight. The tall trees surrounding the farmhouse—where the porch light defined a small circle of artificial day—had become towering, shadowy masses, rustling in a light breeze, seeming to exhale waves of moist coolness. Crickets chirruped. A chorus of falsetto frogs peeped cheerfully in a distant swamp. Stars began to burn through the canopy of night. The scent of new-mown grass filled Edward’s nostrils as he and Lucy walked to the car. The crew of locals that maintained their property had been by that afternoon.
Just where the lawn met the gravel of the driveway, Lucy stopped. “Edward, look at this.”
Edward saw an irregular ring of beautiful white mushrooms, each about three inches high, phallus-capped, rearing proudly above the mower-shortened blades of grass. They limned a hollow moon.
“The men must have missed it,” he said, knowing even as he said it, as he stared unbelievingly at the cut grass beneath the ring, that he was not speaking the truth.
“No,” Lucy said, “these things can sprout up fast. I’ve heard about them.”
“In a couple of hours?”
“There it is.”
“Well,” said Edward, “Maybe they’re good to eat.”
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