Boaz came into the upside-down ship, his arms loaded with dead harmoniums. He was carrying four quarts or more of the seeming dried apricots. Inevitably he dropped some. And, in stooping to pick them up reverently, he dropped more.
Tears were streaming down his face.
“You see?” said Boaz. He was raging heartbrokenly against himself. “You see, Unk?” he said. “See what happens when somebody just runs off and forgets?”
Boaz shook his head. “This ain’t all of ‘em,” he said. “This ain’t near all of ‘em.” He found an empty carton that had once contained candy bars. He put the harmonium corpses into that.
He straightened up, his hands on his hips. Just as Unk had been amazed by Boaz’s physical condition, so was Unk now amazed by Boaz’s dignity.
Boaz, when he straightened up, was a wise, decent, weeping, brown Hercules.
Unk, by comparison, felt scrawny, rootless, and soreheaded.
“You want to do the dividing, Unk?” said Boaz.
“Dividing?” said Unk.
“Goofballs, food, soda pop, candy,” said Boaz.
“Divide it all?” said Unk. “My God – there’s enough of everything for five hundred years.” There had never been any talk of dividing things before. There had been no shortage, and no threat of a shortage of anything.
“Half for you to take with you, and half to leave here with me,” said Boaz.
“Leave with you?” said Unk incredulously. “You’re – you’re coming with me, aren’t you?”
Boaz held up his big right hand, and it was a tender gesture for silence, a gesture made by a thoroughly great human being. “Don’t truth me, Unk,” said Boaz, “and I won’t truth you.” He brushed away his tears with a fist.
Unk had never been able to brush aside the plea about truthing. It frightened him. Some part of his mind warned him that Boaz was not bluffing, that Boaz really knew a truth about Unk that could tear him to pieces.
Unk opened his mouth and closed it again.
“You come and tell me the big news,” said Boaz. “‘Boaz – ‘ you say, ‘we’re going to be free!’ And I get all excited, and I drop everthing I’m doin’, and I get set to be free.
“And I keep saying it over to myself about how I’m going to be free,” said Boaz, “and then I try to think what that’s going to be like, and all I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that – and nothing pleases ‘em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes ‘em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain’t made ‘em happy, and we all push and pull some more.
“And then, all of a sudden,” said Boaz, “I remember all the crazy little animals I been making so happy so easy with music. And I go find thousands of ‘em lying around dead, on account of Boaz forgot all about ‘em, he was so excited about being free. And ever’ one of them lost lives I could have saved, if I’d have just kept my mind on what I was doing.
“And then I say to myself,” said Boaz, “‘I ain’t never been nothing good to people, and people never been nothing good to me. So what I want to be free in crowds of people for?’
“And then I knew what I was going to say to you, Unk, when I got back here,” said Boaz.
Boaz now said it:
“I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I’m doing good, and them I’m doing good for know I’m doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.
“And when I die down here some day,” said Boaz, “I’m going to be able to say to myself, ‘Boaz – you made millions of lives worth living. Ain’t nobody ever spread more joy. You ain’t got an enemy in the Universe.’” Boaz became for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he’d never had. “‘You go to sleep now,’” he said to himself, imagining himself on a stone deathbed in the caves. “‘You’re a good boy, Boaz,’” he said. “‘Good night.’”
CHAPTER TEN
AN AGE OF MIRACLES
“O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia – what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, ‘Somebody up there likes me.’ And no longer can a tyrant say, ‘God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!”
– THE REVEREND C. HORNER REDWINE
It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime in the northern hemisphere of Earth.
Earth was green and watery. The air of earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream.
The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart.
Earth was warm.
The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.
The daintily tart rain fell on a green place where there was a great deal of death. It fell on a New World country churchyard. The churchyard was in West Barnstable, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The churchyard was full, the spaces between its naturally dead chinked tight by the bodies of the honored war dead. Martians and Earthlings lay side by side.
There was not a country in the world that did not have graveyards with Earthlings and Martians buried side by side. There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.
All was forgiven.
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universal Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
A seeming wild man stood in the churchyard, wondering at the creamery air, at the green, at the wet. He was almost naked, and his blue-black beard and his hair were tangled and long and shot with gray. The only garment he wore was a clinking breechclout made of wrenches and copper wire.
The garment covered his shame.
The rain ran down his coarse cheeks. He tipped back his head to drink it. He rested his hand on a headstone, more for the feel than the support of it. He was used to the feel of stones – was deathly used to the feel of rough, dry stones. But stones that were wet, stones that were mossy, stones that were squared and written on by men – he hadn’t felt stones like that for a long, long time.
Pro patria said the stone he touched.
The man was Unk.
He was home from Mars and Mercury. His space ship had landed itself in a wood next to the churchyard. He was filled with the heedless, tender violence of a man who has had his lifetime cruelly wasted.
Unk was forty-three years old.
He had every reason to wither and die.
All that kept him going was a wish that was more mechanical than emotional. He wished to be reunited with Bee, his mate, with Chrono, his son, and with Stony Stevenson, his best and only friend.
The Reverend C. Horner Redwine stood in the pulpit of his church that rainy Tuesday afternoon. There was no one else in the church. Redwine had climbed up to the pulpit in order simply to be as happy as possible. He was not being as happy as possible under adverse circumstances. He was being as happy as possible under extraordinarily happy circumstances – for he was a much loved minister of a religion that not only promised but delivered miracles.
His church, the Barnstable First Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, had a subtitle: The Church of the Weary Space Wanderer. The subtitle was justified by this prophecy: That a lone straggler from the Army of Mars would arrive at Redwine’s church some day.
The church was ready for the miracle. There was a hand-forged iron spike driven into the rugged oak post behind the pulpit. The post carried the mighty beam that was the roof tree. And on the nail was hung a coathanger encrusted with semiprecious stones. And on the coathanger hung a suit of clothes in a transparent plastic bag.