‘Come back? Oh yes. If the world doesn’t end by winter, I think she’ll be back.’
‘Oh, I only wish you the best,’ she said, and embraced
5.
The farm in Vermont had no furnace, and when the saucer had still not arrived by late October, Vera came home. The saucer had not come, she said, because they were not yet perfect – they had not burned away the nonessential and sinful dross of their lives. But she was uplifted and spiritually exalted. She had had a sign in a dream. She was perhaps not meant to go to heaven in a saucer. She felt more and more strongly that she would be needed to guide her boy, show him the proper way, when he came out of his trance.
Herb took her in, loved her as best he could – and life went on. Johnny had been in his coma for two years.
6.
Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam.
Walter Hazlett took his bar exam and was invited to take it again at a later date. Sarah Hazlett kept school while he crammed for his tests. The students who had been silly, gawky freshmen the year she started teaching were now juniors. Flat-chested girls had become bosomy. Shrimps who hadn’t been able to find their way around the building were now playing varsity basketball.
The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go. Vera Smith became convinced that Christ would return from below the earth at the South Pole. This intelligence was based on a new pamphlet (seventeen pages, price $4.50) entitled God’s Tropical Underground. The startling hypothesis of the pamphleteer was that heaven was actually below our very feet,
and that the easiest point of ingress was the South Pole. One of the sections of the pamphlet was ‘Psychic Experiences of the South Pole Explorers’.
Herb pointed out to her that less than a year before she had been convinced that heaven was somewhere out There, most probably circling Arcturus. ‘I’d surely be more apt to believe that than this crazy South Pole stuff,’ he told her. ‘Mter all, the Bible says heaven’s in the sky. That tropical place below the ground is supposed to be…
‘Stop it I’ she said sharply, lips pressed into thin white lines. ‘No need to mock what you don’t understand.’
‘I wasn’t mocking, Vera,’ he said quietly.
‘God knows why the unbeliever mocks and the heathen rages,’ she said. That blank light was in her eyes. They were sitting at the kitchen table, Herb with an old plumbing J.bolt in front of him, Vera with a stack of old National Geographics which she had been gleaning for South Pole pictures and stories. Outside, restless clouds fled west to east and the leaves showered off the trees. It was early October again, and October always seemed to be her worst month. It was the month when that blank light came more frequently to her eyes and stayed longer. And it was always in October that his thoughts turned treacherously to leaving them both. His possibly certifiable wife and his sleeping son, who was probably already dead by any practical definition. Just now he had been turning the J-bolt over in his hands and looking out the window at that restless sky and thinking, I could pack up. Just throw my things into the back of the pickup and go. Florida, maybe.
Nebraska. California. A good carpenter can make good money any damn place. Just get up and go.
But he knew he wouldn’t. It was just that October was his month to think about running away, as it seemed to be Vera’s month to discover some new pipeline to Jesus and the eventual salvation of the only child she had been able to nurture in her substandard womb.
Now he reached across the table and took her hand, which was thin and terribly bony – an old woman’s hand. She looked up, surprised. ‘I love you very much, Vera,’ he said.
She smiled back, and for a glimmering moment she was a great deal like the girl he had courted and won, the girl who had goosed him with a hairbrush on their wedding night. It was a gentle smile, her eyes briefly dear and warm and loving in return. Outside, the sun came out again, sending great shutter-shadows fleeing across their back field.