“But you didn’t answer me.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Walt said with great effort, still not looking up, “I’m not in much shape to talk, right now.”

  “Hey, that’s too bad,” said Rob.

  Walt sat silent and unmoving.

  “I said,” said Rob, “that’s too bad.” He raised his voice again. “Too bad — I said.”

  “Why don’t you quit talking?” said Letty.

  “Yes, that’s a shame,” said Rob. “Shows how little real faith there is in people. God says one thing and the newspapers say another; so naturally, they take the word of the newspapers. Here, instead of the converted growing in numbers, they’ve been staying just the same. — Or maybe they’ve even been falling off the bandwagon. Is that right?”

  He paused; but Walt still did not respond.

  “Come to think of it, it seemed to me there were fewer people standing around listening to you and the rest preach tonight, than there were earlier today. — To say nothing of last night. The congregations’ve been getting smaller and smaller all along, here. In fact, haven’t the people been peeling off until there wasn’t anyone left for you to talk to at all? — Walt?”

  Walt stirred. He did not look up from the pieces of oak limbs which were now beginning to catch fire in the true sense and to grow rows of little flames flickering and running along their undersides. But he shifted his weight on the sleeping bag and the ground on which the bag was lying.

  “God is not mocked,” he said.

  “No, of course not,” said Rob.

  Maybeth, still seated beside Ranald, tugged a little at his arm.

  “Ranald…” she whispered.

  Ranald’s full attention came back slowly, as if from a thousand miles and a thousand years away. He looked at her, and around the fire at Walt, Rob, and Letty, and back to her again. Then he went away once more into distance and time.

  Maybeth dropped her hand strengthlessly to her lap.

  “God can’t be mocked,” Rob was saying, “because that wouldn’t be right. Or do I mean ‘righteous’? That’s right, I mean righteous. It wouldn’t be righteous for God to be mocked; the way He is here when people begin to decide they don’t believe in Him even after His stunt with the sun —”

  “They believed,” said Walt in a near whisper, staring at the fire.

  “Of course they believed,” said Rob. “After all, it happened, didn’t it? And they should have gone on believing. You ought to have made sure they go on believing. After all, that was your job, wasn’t it?”

  “Please,” said Walt, staring at the fire. “If you don’t mind…”

  “But I mean that really hurts me, those people who listened to you acting like this,” said Rob. “They should have gone off in every direction after hearing you, like a batch of disciples, to spread the faith. And here they do just the opposite. They back off from the faith themselves, dropping away one by one until you haven’t got anyone there listening to you. How could that happen? How could you let it happen?”

  Walt was no longer looking even at the fire. His head hung down now, so that he stared directly at the barren, heel-trampled earth between his thighs.

  “Leave him alone,” said Letty, getting to her feet. “Come on.”

  “No,” said Rob, not looking around at her, watching and speaking only to Walt, “I can’t let something like that happen without trying to understand it. Something that rotten can’t happen without a reason, some big reason. I mean — something besides the newspapers must have been working on those people listening to you, to drive every one — every single one of them — away from you, like that.”

  Walt shuddered a little, but he still sat without answering, staring at the ground.

  “Rob,” said Letty.

  “Be with you in a minute, Let,” said Rob, not moving from the ground. “I just want to find out how anybody could have a hundred percent failure, like that. Even the law of averages ought to give one or two converts, shouldn’t it? Here now, it’s almost as if Walt had been preaching against their believing in the miracle, instead of for it. Hey, do you suppose a man actually could do something like that? I mean, subconsciously? Say one thing, but say it so the people listening realized he was really lying to them? Like, for example, he would be saying out loud to them, ‘Abandon doubt, believe and enter the kingdom of heaven…’ but at the same time the way he’d say it he’d actually be telling them that even if they thought they were positive about something, they had a duty to question themselves about it anyway. — As if he was telling them sort of behind his words that they really had to consider the chance they were wrong. As if they ought to try doubt on for size, just to make sure —”

  Walt made a choking sound. Then another. It was suddenly clear that he was sobbing, crying where he sat, making no effort to move or wipe away the tears.

  “After all,” said Rob, raising his voice a little over the sounds Walt was making, “it’s true enough. — I don’t see how any thinking person can deny it. You’ve got a duty to keep an open mind, no matter how much faith you have. That’s the only good way, the enlightened way —”

  “LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

  The fury of Letty’s scream was incandescent. Like a sudden eruption of white light in darkness, it left them all momentarily numb and dazzled; and it silenced not only Rob, but everyone in the meadow for fifty yards in all directions. Having exploded, Letty said nothing more, but stood waiting until Rob, after a moment, scrambled to his feet. Then she turned and stalked away. He went after her.

  Walt looked after them, then turned to Maybeth and Ranald with a face in which the lines seemed to have deepened like the eroded gullies in some dry desert riverbed.

  “He’s right,” Walt said. “I preached doubt to them. I preached my own doubt, after all. From the second day — right after those newspapers began to doubt, I began to doubt again, too.”

  “You shouldn’t care,” said Maybeth. “You did it in spite of what you were thinking. That’s harder than doing it with no doubts at all. Doing something in spite of yourself is the hardest thing there is.”

  He shook his head and went back to looking down at the earth. She looked bleakly at the ground, herself. It had been no use, like throwing a kiss to a starving man; but it was all she knew to say to him.

  The noise dwindled in the meadow and at last, with the moon small and high overhead and the fires low, there was silence. It was then that Dave came back and found all of them asleep but Ranald, who was still sitting as he had been.

  “Two bells, and all’s well,” said Dave, sitting down and tossing one of the oak limbs on the once more nearly dead fire. A scent of whiskey came across the fire with his words to Ranald. Just as in the woods, only a deliberateness about Dave’s speech backed up the evidence reaching Ranald’s nose.

  “Party’s over, I take it?” asked Dave.

  Ranald stirred and came back, as he had briefly for Maybeth earlier, from the distance of his mind.

  “Tomorrow everyone will go,” Ranald said. His eyes went to the bottom pants leg covering that ankle of Dave’s he had seen dark with scar and callouses.

  “No,” said Dave, following the direction of Ranald’s gaze, “I didn’t put it back on. Don’t intend to, either; but I don’t know as it makes any difference. Turned out the covenant between me and the Lord wasn’t something you could put on and off like a chain, anyhow.”

  “So,” said Ranald, almost to himself, “like the gentlefolk leaving chapel, like these around us here, there’s to be no change for you either, brother?”

  Dave frowned.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “I won’t know until I get the sight and stink of this place out of my eyes and nose.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cut chain. It glittered like a living metal thing in his grasp. “The day comes I can throw this away, I’ll know I found something here — found it for good.”

  He turned, unzipped his sleeping bag and opened it. He lay down in it, throwing the unzipped top flap loosely over him.

  “Paying Caesar never really worried me none,” he said, looking up at the night sky. “It was paying God. Actually, a man ought to be able to pay them both off — and be free. I’ll see about that after I’m clear of this place. Well, party’s over. Night.”

  “Farewell,” said Ranald.

  In a moment Dave was asleep and the meadow held only one waking mind under the moon and the stars.

  Dawn rose on a meadow empty of more than nine tenths of the crowd that had filled it when it was most full. And these that were left now went about the business of leaving, themselves. Even before the sun was above the hill beyond the road where the trucks had lined up, most of the last few campers were gone or on their way; and, now that the meadow was clearing, it was possible to see the signs they had left behind them.

  The crowd had been good about collecting their litter and trash in the beginning. But the last couple of days, all order had begun to disintegrate. Now that the surface of the meadow was no longer hidden by people, it showed all sorts of discarded material, as if the ground had sickened with a disease called humanity; and the illness showed now in a rash of useless items. Torn newspapers, unclean plastic and paper plates, empty cans, abandoned, punctured air mattresses in various gaudy colors, bits of tents and clothing, shoes and garbage, all blotched the gentle slope where sparse but tough green grass had covered loose, brown soil. Above, the morning sky was high and blue with clouds as fluffy and clean as if they had just been born out of the pure upper air. It was cool, with a fair, small wind blowing from the northwest, from the hill down toward the unseen river.

  Around Dave’s campfire, they were also getting ready to leave, packing up along with the two dozen or so other people remaining in the meadow. There were two of the sheriffs deputies in uniform going from group to group. One of these was Tom Rathkenny. He came up to the fire with a paper in his hand, as shiny in leather helmet, boots, and Sam Browne belt as he had been the first time they had seen him. Only the holster at his belt was empty, though the fact that the holster flap was closed and buttoned down helped to disguise its emptiness.

  “I’ll take my gun back,” he said to Dave, holding out his free hand.

  Dave, seated as he filled his pack, looked at the hand for a second, then reached into the pack, pulled out the revolver and handed it up. Tom unbuttoned his holster and put the weapon into it; but he did not button down the flap again. He held the paper up.

  “This is a legal notice,” he said. “Your license to camp here has expired and the county court orders you to vacate the premises, after cleaning up any litter you have left, repairing any damage you have done, and returning the area you have occupied to the condition it enjoyed before you occupied it.”

  “I never was much for being able to grow grass in one day,” said Dave.

  The younger man ignored him. Tom was looking at Rob only, and running the thumbnail of his right hand back and forth along the top curve of his unbuttoned holster flap. Rob. busy packing the tattered blankets he owned with Letty, ignored the attention he was getting. Ranald, the only one of them unmoving, still seated as if he had not even shifted once from his position the night before, watched both of the younger men.

  “Yang and Yin,” said Ranald to Tom, without warning, “love and hate. ‘Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase, awoke one night from a great dream of peace; and saw within the moonlight of his room —’”

  It was a moment before they all realized he was reciting verse; and, when they did realize, they continued to listen — for the moment all stopped from what they were doing — as if caught by the magic of primitive people listening to an incantation.

  “‘Making it rich,’” Ranald went on, as if no one but Tom were there.

  “… and like a lily in bloom,

  An angel writing in a book of gold.

  Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold;

  And to the presence in the room he said,

  ‘What writest thou?’ The Vision raised his head;

  And with a look made of all sweet accord,

  Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’

  ‘And is mine one?’ asked Abou. ‘Nay, not so,’

  Replied the Angel. Abou spake more low,

  But cheerily still, and said, ‘I pray thee, then,

  Write me as one that loves his fellow men.’

  The Angel wrote and vanished. The next night,

  He came again with a great wakening light;

  And showed the names whom love of God had bless’d;

  And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.

  “… and there are others,” Ranald said, without pause or change in his voice. ‘Le temps a laissé son manteau, De vent, de froidure, et de pluie…’ Also, ‘He prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast…’ But it doesn’t matter. I was too young the first time this happened. Each one must build or break his own god. — And I, like all…”

  Then, as they still watched and waited, his attention went away off from them again into time and space, as it had the day before. They sat or stood, still without speaking — there was something in the air, something fearful promised to whoever might break the silence first.

  “What was that about?” asked Dave.

  He asked the question of Ranald, but Ranald did not answer and he looked around at the others.

  “That… that last bit about praying was from Coleridge — ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” said Walt, unsurely, staring at Ranald. “The French bit was from the fourteenth-fifteenth century — a poem about how wonderful spring was, written by a man who’d been locked in prison for years, I think… Charles d’Orleans. That first verse is by some nineteenth-century poet.” He looked at Maybeth and Letty and Rob in turn. “I can’t remember who. Do you know?”

  They stared at him, and shook their heads.

  “All three things he quoted have something to do with loving — people or things…” Walt said. “I… don’t understand.”

  Dave looked at Tom Rathkenny. Tom’s features were pale and tight. It was impossible to tell whether his expression was one of fear, or rage, or only of simple embarrassment. He wore a statue’s or an idol’s face; and, as Dave’s eyes hit him now, Tom turned and plunged away, off down the slope of the meadow toward another group of late departees.

  Rob looked after him for a moment, then turned back to stuff the last blanket into the pack he, himself, would be carrying, and buckled it closed. Getting to his feet, he put the pack on. Letty already bore hers.

  “Well,” said Rob, half turned to go. He hesitated, looking at Maybeth and Walt. “We’ve got the promise of a ride in the last panel truck down there. The driver wants somebody along to help him change tires. He could take some more people besides us.”

  Walt got slowly to his feet, then shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got to be alone — a while.”

  He snatched up his pack and went off away from the road, downslope, but not in the direction Tom had taken, until he disappeared into the woods between meadow and river. They watched him go; and neither Tom nor the other sheriffs deputy was watching as he went.

  “Well,” said Rob, after he had gone, “anyone who wants a ride better come along in a hurry. That trucker’s ready to pull out.”

  He and Letty took their gear and went toward the road. Maybeth looked after them, hesitated, and looked back at Dave and Ranald.

  Ranald’s eyes, once more lost on the view of his inner vision, looked through and past her. Dave returned her look.

  “Better go,” Dave said.

  “I can’t stay with you,” she said, “even a little longer?”

  Dave shook his head slowly.

  “Not me,” he answered. “Someday, maybe, if it turns out this changed things, I may want a woman around steady, neighbors in to dinner, and all the rest of it. But that’s someday.”

  He buckled tight the last buckle of his pack on its pack-frame and stood up, sliding his arms through the straps. Maybeth looked at Ranald.

  “Good-bye, Ranald,” she said.

  He came a little way back from where he had gone, to speak to her.

  “Go with a god,” he said. “Your god, if may be. But any god will do.”

  She turned abruptly and almost ran after Rob and Letty, who were now standing talking to a short, brown-shirted man beside the left front door of a somewhat battered blue panel truck — the only vehicle left in the meadow except for two motorcycles of the sheriff’s deputies. Dave looked after her for a moment as she joined them, and they all got into the truck. It pulled away, back down the route up which they had all come.

  “The other way, for me,” said Dave, “up that road alongside the river we saw, into Medora or whatever they call it. A day or so’s walking’ll clear my head.”

  He looked back at Ranald.

  “So long, then,” Dave said. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ranald. His voice and eyes were a little strange because of his being only partway back. “I will turn away a little, then turn back and find you are dust. Unless…”

  “Unless?” Dave stared at him curiously.

  “Unless…” said Ranald, still from the in-between of two places, “you turn away, then turn back to find me dust. I was too young the first time I saw this.”

  “You figuring on dying?” said Dave, bluntly.

  “No. Yes — eventually. Maybe, soon…” Ranald came almost all the way back and looked up at Dave with strangely clear eyes. “I do not know if I want to. I do not know if I should. I don’t know if I will.”

  Dave stared at him.

  “What makes you so sure anything’ll happen?” he asked.

  “Always,” said Ranald. “People always do the same things. A curse makes a blow — makes — wounding — makes a killing.”

  Dave grunted slightly under his breath.

  “Man ought to know what’s he doing.”

  “I belong to no god,” said Ranald. “And no more do I belong to any people, so that their ways are a law to me. I belong, though, to myself — to Ranald; and I do not know what Ranald is going to do. It’s a little thing to die after three score years and ten. To die after much longer is a hard problem. How can I be sure this moment is so worthwhile? Will it be worth all those other times before when I refused death, fought it off and said — ‘Not yet’?”

 

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