The words dried up in her mind. Her fingers forgot how to play; there was a final discordant jangle and then silence.

God! God! she cried, but God had turned His face away.

Then Ben Conveigh was standing up, his face red and flaming, his small pig’s eyes glittering. Nigger bitch! he shouted. What’s that nigger bitch doing up on our stage? No nigger bitch ever brought music from the air! No nigger bitch ever brought water from the rock!

Answering cries of savage agreement. People surging forward. She saw her husband stand up and attempt to mount the stage. A fist hit him in the mouth, bowling him over backward.

Get those dirty coons in the back of the hall! Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon!

Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, and they all began to punch and pummel the struggling woman under the velvet drape.

Mamma! Abby screamed.

The guitar was plucked from her nerveless fingers and smashed to strips and strings on the edge of the stage.

She looked wildly for the dark man at the back of the hall, but his engine had been set in motion and was running sweet and hot; he had gone on to some other place.

Mamma! she screamed again, and then rough hands were hauling her from the stage, they were under her dress, pawing her, tweaking her, pinching her bottom. Her hand was pulled sharply by someone, yanking her arm in her socket. It was put against something hard and hot.

Ben Conveigh’s voice in her ear: How do you like MY rock of ages, you nigger slut?

The room was whirling. She saw her father struggling to get at the limp form of her mother, and she saw a white hand holding a bottle come down on the back of a folding camp chair. There was a rattle and a smash, and then the jagged neck of the bottle, twinkling in the warm glow of all those lamps, was thrust into her father’s face. She saw his staring, bulging eyes pop like grapes.

She screamed and the force of her cry seemed to break the room apart, to let in darkness, and she was Mother Abagail again one hundred and eight years old, too old, my Lord, too old (but let Thy will be done), and she was walking in the corn, the mystic corn that was rooted shallow in the earth but wide, lost in the corn that was silver with moonglow and black with shadow; she could hear the summer nightwind rustling gently through it, she could smell its growing, wholly alive smell as she had smelled it all her long, long life (and she had thought many times that this was the plant closest to all life, the corn, and its smell was the smell of life itself, the start of life, oh she had married and buried three husbands, David Trotts, Henry Hardesty, and Nate Brooks, and she had had three men in bed, had welcomed them as a woman must welcome a man, by giving way before him, and there had always been the yearning pleasure, the thought Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man and how I love him to be sexy with me when he gets me what he gets me what he shoots in me and sometimes at the instant of her climax she would think of the corn, the bland corn with its roots planted not deep but wide, she would think of flesh and then the corn, when it was all over and her husband lay beside her the sex smell would be in the room, the smell of the spunk the man had shot into her, the smell of the juices she made to smooth his way, and it was a smell like husked corn, mild and sweet, a goodish smell).

And yet she was afraid, ashamed of this very intimacy with soil and summer and growing things, because she was not alone. He was here with her, two rows to the right or left, trailing just behind or ranging just ahead. The dark man was here, his dusty boots digging into the meat of the soil and throwing it away in clouts, grinning in the night like a stormlamp.

Then he spoke, for the first time he spoke aloud, and she could see his moonshadow, tall and hunched and grotesque, falling into the row she was walking. His voice was like the night wind that begins to moan through the old and fleshless cornstalks in October, like the very rattling of those old white infertile cornstalks themselves as they seem to speak of their end. It was a soft voice. It was the voice of doom.

It said: I have your blood in my fists, old Mother. If you pray to God, pray He takes you before you ever hear my feet coming up your steps. It was not you who brought music from the air, not you who brought water from the rock, and your blood is in my fists.

Then she was awake, awake in the hour before dawn, and at first she thought she had peed the bed, but it was only a night sweat, heavy as May dew. Her thin body was shuddering helplessly, and every part of her ached for rest.

My Lord, my Lord, take this cup from my lips.

Her Lord did not answer. There was only the light knocking of the early morning wind at the windowpanes, which were loose and rattling and in need of fresh putty. At last she got up and poked up the fire in her old woodburning stove and put on the coffee.

She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been one to slight company and she didn’t intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things—she forgot a lot these days—and misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail.

The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson’s henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.

“Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but sixteen was far behind her now.

She set off at eight o’clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn’t arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.

She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn’t sweat much—there wasn’t enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of—but by the time she’d reached the Goodells’ mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.

She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. Her brogans with the yellow rawhide lacings shuffled in the dust. The sun beat down on her, and as the time passed, her shadow got shorter and shorter. She saw more wild animals that morning than she had seen since the twenties: fox, coon, porcupine, fisher. Crows were everywhere, squalling and cawing and circling in the sky. If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and Glen Bateman discussing the capricious—it had seemed capricious to them, anyhow—way the superflu had taken some animals while leaving others alone, she would have laughed. It had taken the domestic animals and left the wild ones alone, it was as simple as that. A few species of domestics had been spared, but as a general rule, the plague had taken man and man’s best friends. It had taken the dogs but left the wolves, because the wolves were wild and the dogs weren’t.