Nick looked at him sharply.

“What are you talking about?” Stu asked, at the same time drawing Glen away from the crew wrapping copper wire on one of the blown turbines.

Glen nodded. He had ridden a bike the five miles out here, and he was still trying to catch his breath.

“I went over to tell her a little about the meeting last night, and to play her the tape, if she wanted to hear it. I wanted her to know about Tom, because I was uneasy about the whole idea… what Frannie had to say kind of worked on me in the wee hours, I guess. I wanted to do it early because Ralph said there’s another two parties coming in today and you know she likes to greet them. I went over around eight-thirty. She didn’t answer my knock, so I went on in. I thought if she was asleep I’d just leave… but I wanted to make sure she wasn’t… wasn’t dead or anything… she’s so old.”

Nick’s gaze never left Glen’s lips.

“But she wasn’t there at all. And I found this on her pillow.” He handed them a paper towel. Written on it in large and trembling strokes was this message:

I must be gone a bit now. I’ve sinned and presumed to know the Mind of God. My sin has been PRIDE, and He wants me to find my place in His work again.

I will be with you again soon if it is God’s will.

Abby Freemantle

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Stu said. “What do we do now? What do you think, Nick?”

Nick took the note and read it again. He handed it back to Glen. The fierceness had died out of his face and he only looked sad.

“I guess we’ll have to move up that meeting to tonight,” Glen said.

Nick shook his head. He took out his pad, wrote, tore it off, and handed it to Glen. Stu read it over his shoulder.

“Man proposes, God disposes. Mother A. was fond of that one, used to quote it frequently. Glen, you yourself said she was other-directed; God or her own mind or her delusions or whatever. What’s to coo? She’s gone. We can’t change it.”

“But the uproar—” Stu began.

“Sure, there’s going to be an uproar,” Glen said. “Nick, shouldn’t we at least have a meeting of the committee and discuss it?”

Nick jotted, “What purpose? Why have a meeting that can’t accomplish anything?”

“Well, we could get up a search-party. She can’t have gone far.”

Nick double-circled the phrase Man proposes, God disposes. Below it he wrote, “If you found her, how would you bring her back? Chains?”

“Jesus, no!” Stu exclaimed. “But we can’t just let her wander around, Nick! She’s got some crazy idea she’s offended God. What if she feels like she has to go off into the frigging wilderness, like some Old Testament guy?”

Nick wrote, “I’m almost positive that’s just what she’s done.”

“Well, there you go!”

Glen put a hand on Stu’s arm. “Slow down a minute, East Texas. Let’s look at the implications of this.”

“To hell with the implications! I don’t see no implications in leaving an old woman to wander around day n night until she dies of exposure!”

“She is not just any old woman. She is Mother Abagail and around here she’s the Pope. If the Pope decides he has to walk to Jerusalem, do you argue with him if you’re a good Catholic?”

“Goddammit, it’s not the same thing and you know it!”

“Yes, it is the same thing. It is. At least, that’s how the people in the Free Zone are going to see it. Stu, are you prepared to say for sure that God didn’t tell her to go out into the bushes?”

“No-oo… but…”

Nick had been writing and now he showed the paper to Stu, who had to puzzle out some of the words. Nick’s handwriting was usually impeccable, but this was hurried, perhaps impatient.

“Stu, this changes nothing, except that it will probably hurt the Free Zone’s morale. Not even sure that will happen. People aren’t going to scatter just because she’s gone. It does mean we won’t have to clear our plans with her right now. Maybe that’s best.”

“I’m going crazy,” Stu said. “Sometimes we talk about her as an obstacle to get around, like she was a roadblock. Sometimes you talk about her like she was the Pope, and she couldn’t do anything wrong if she wanted to. And it just so happens that I like her. What do you want, Nicky? Someone stumbling over her body this fall in one of those box canyons west of town? You want us to leave her out there so she can make a… a holy meal for the crows?”

“Stu,” Glen said gently. “It was her decision to go.”

“Oh, god-damn, what a mess,” Stu said.

By noon, the news of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had swept the community. As Nick had predicted, the general feeling was more one of unhappy resignation than alarm. The sense of the community was that she must have gone off to “pray for guidance,” so she could help them pick the right path to follow at the mass meeting on the eighteenth.

“I don’t want to blaspheme by calling her God,” Glen said over a scratch lunch in the park, “but she is a sort of God-by-proxy. You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.”

“Run that one by me again.”

“When Moses smashed the golden calf, the Israelites stopped worshipping it. When a flood inundated the temple of Baal, the Malachites decided Baal wasn’t such a hot god anyway. But Jesus has been out to lunch for two thousand years, and people not only still follow his teachings, they live and die believing he’ll come back eventually, and it will be business as usual when he does. That’s the way the Free Zone feels about Mother Abagail. These people are perfectly certain she is going to come back. Have you talked to them?”

“Yeah,” Stu said. “I can’t believe it. There’s an old woman wandering around out there and everyone says ho-hum, I wonder if she’ll bring back the Ten Commandments on stone tablets in time for the meeting.”

“Maybe she will,” Glen said somberly. “Anyway, not everyone is saying ho-hum. Ralph Brentner is practically tearing his hair out by the roots.”

“Good for Ralph.” He looked at Glen closely. “What about you, baldy? Where are you in all of this?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It’s not at all dignified. But I’ll tell you… it’s a little bit funny. Ole East Texas turns out to be a lot more immune from the Godspell she’s cast over this community than the agnostic old bear sociologist. I think she’ll be back. Somehow I just do. What does Frannie think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her at all this morning. For all I know she’s out there eating locusts and wild honey with Mother Abagail.” He stared at the Flatirons, rising high in the blue haze of early afternoon. “Jesus, Glen, I hope that old lady is all right.”

Fran didn’t even know Mother Abagail was gone. She had spent the morning at the library, reading up on gardening. Nor was she the only student. She saw two or three people with books on farming, a bespectacled young man of about twenty-five poring over a book called Seven Independent Power Sources for Your Home, and a pretty blond girl of about fourteen with a battered paperback titled 600 Simple Recipes.

She left the library around noon and strolled down to Walnut Street. She was halfway home when she met Shirley Hammett, the older woman that had been traveling with Dayna, Susan, and Patty Kroger. Shirley had improved strikingly since then. Now she looked like a brisk and pretty matron-about-town.

She stopped and greeted Fran. “When do you think she’ll be back? I’ve been asking everybody. If this town had a newspaper, I’d write it up for the People Poll. Like, ‘What do you think of Senator Bunghole’s stand on oil depletion?’ That sort of thing.”

“When will who be back?”

“Mother Abagail, of course. Where have you been, girl, cold storage?”

“What is all this?” Frannie asked, alarmed. “What’s happened?”

“That’s just it. Nobody really knows.” And Shirley told Fran what had been going on while Fran had been at the library.