The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

  They had been deep in the depression then, she hadn’t even been able to raise twenty cents for hairribbons for her granddaughters’ birthdays, and there was no chance for that Electrolux. But say, didn’t that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet? My! She had never seen him again, but she had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady’s heart. She never did own a vacuum cleaner until the end of the Nazi war, when it seemed like all of a sudden anybody could afford anything and even poor white trash had a Mercury hidden away in their back shed.

  Now this house, in the Mapleton Hill section of Boulder (Mother Abagail just bet there hadn’t been many blacks living up here before the smiting plague), had every gadget she’d ever heard of and some she hadn’t. Dishwasher. Two vacuums, one strictly for the upstairs work. Dispos-All in the sink. Microwave oven. Clothes washer and dryer. There was a gadget in the kitchen, looked like nothing more than a steel box, and Nick’s good friend Ralph Brentner told her it was a “trash masher,” and you could put about a hundred pounds of swill into it and get back a little block of garbage about the size of a footstool. Wonders never ceased.

  But come to think of it, some of them had.

  Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She’d even had them back in her squatters’ shack in Hemingford. You didn’t think nothing of those plates . . . unless they didn’t work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person’s life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on ... it came out of those switchplates on the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the “trash masher” to hang your hat and coat on.

  Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek. Back home she’d had her own hand-pump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the backyard. At home she’d had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap.

  They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here; some from the dreams, some from her own good old common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

  Soon all these people would start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack ticket agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess.

  First they’d want to form some sort of government, probably one they’d want to run around her. She couldn’t allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God’s will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth—get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that “trash masher.” Get the gas running so they wouldn’t freeze their behinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick had a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren’t running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn’t stop them, but she didn’t like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.

  She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God’s will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils . . . but she would say nothing.

  Her business, she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.

  He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg ... at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

  Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired . . . and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street . . . unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him; a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

  She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blankness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able —only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

  He would have his followers. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. Some would make the deduction for themselves in time—his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep possible invaders out.

  Would he win?

  She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick.

  But. . . would he win?

  That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased him to let the Children of Israel sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow his only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

  God was a gamesman—if He had been a mortal, he would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand . . . and she would not overestimate her own place in the game any more than she would underestimate the dark man’s craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier—long pa
st retirement age, it was true!—in the service of the Lord.

  “Thy Will be done,” she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters Peanuts. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren’t they tasty?

  As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took it off.

  “You awake, Mother?”

  “That I am,” she said through a mouthful of peanuts. “Step in, Ralph, I ain’t chewin these nuts, I’m gummin em to death.”

  Ralph laughed and came in. “There’s some folk out past the gate that’d like to say howdy, if you ain’t too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I’d say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name’s Underwood.” “Well, bring em up, Ralph, that’s fine,” she said.

  “Good enough.” He turned to go.

  “Where’s Nick?” she asked him. “Haven’t seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?”

  “He’s been out at the reservoir,” Ralph said. “Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”

  Mother Abagail cackled, spraying peanut fragments from her toothless mouth. “Oh, Ralph, I like you. You’re a one.”

  “Why, I like you too, Mother. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee.” “And what did Nick say?”

  “Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it’s fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?”

  “Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?”

  “A lot,” Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. “You’re the reason we’re here. I guess we’ll do whatever you want.”

  “What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it’s time for me to have it. Like an American.”

  “Well, you’ll have all of that.”

  “The rest feel that way, Ralph?”

  “You bet they do.”

  “Then that’s fine.” She rocked serenely. “Time everyone got going. There’s people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean.”

  “Then I can go ahead?”

  “With what?”

  “Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn’t need any electricity, I’d just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers.” He shook his head. “Do they! Seven hundred. Why, I've only got four hundred and some here.”

  “And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in.”

  “I will.” Ralph started away.

  “Ralph?”

  He turned back.

  “Print a thousand,” she said.

  They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God’s name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief; a minor pilferer from time to time at worst.

  The mother of sin was pride.

  Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan. Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty? the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered, I did it.

  She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right—none in jail ever, none caught by the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets —but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of Will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At a hundred and eight she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamours.

  And when they filed through the gate she thought: It's me they've come to see. And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line.

  The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddish-gold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead.

  “You’re really real,” he said softly.

  “Why, I have always thought so,” she said. “I am Abagail

  Freemantle, most folks here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place.”

  “Thank you,” he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. “I’m . . . we’re glad to be here. My name’s Larry Underwood.”

  She held her hand out and he shook it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him.

  “I. . . dreamed of you,” he said awkwardly.

  She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn’t have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself shouldn’t have to try too hard for too long, not until he’s seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green. But she liked him.

  His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. “I’m Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Glad you could come by, Lucy.”

  “Would you mind if I asked . . . well. . .” Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously.

  “A hundred and eight at last count,” she said kindly. “Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days.”

  “I dreamed about you,” Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion.

  The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy’s face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold. He’s here, she thought. He’s come in the shape of this woman . . . for behold he comes in more forms than his own ... the wolf . . . the crow ... the snake.

  She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck.

  For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to her. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could . . . could what?

  Could see.

  Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to him) for whom she was intended.

  The two of them, each with their own fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them.

  He’s in her
—the devil’s Imp, Abby Freemantle thought.

  All of their power is right here, Nadine thought in her own turn. She’s all they’ve got, although they may think differently.

  Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand.

  “Hello,” she said in a thin, dead voice. “I’m Nadine Cross.”

  The old woman said: “I know who you are.”

  The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening.

  “Do you?” Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one.

  “Yes. I do.”

  She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe’s queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail.

  Nadine said: “This is Joe. Do you know him as well?”

  Mother Abagail’s eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck.

  “I don’t think Joe’s his name,” she said. “And I don’t think you’re his mom.” She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow won—that she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was ... ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn’t been ready for it!

  “What’s your name, chap?” she asked the boy.

  The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. “Come on, Joe,” Nadine said, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  Joe threw it off, and that seemed to break the block. “Leo!” he said with sudden force and great clarity. “Leo Rockway, that’s me! I’m Leo!” And he sprang into Mother Abagail’s arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away.

  “Joe,” Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again.

  The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her.