Mysterium

But Christmas decorations were a secular tradition, too, and no doubt some of the private citizens in Two Rivers would be moved to dig out their strings of lights—so why not the churches?

A plausible argument, Congreve thought, but the Proctors might disagree. He counseled a prudent caution. Reverend Lockheed of the Mission Baptist said his young people were also anxious to do something to mark the season, so how about decorating the big pine in the Civic Gardens outside City Hall—as a kind of test case? If the Proctors objected, the lights could be unstrung. (Though not without vocal objections, if Congreve knew Terry Lockheed.)

Lockheed made it a formal motion. Congreve would have preferred to hold over the entire issue until Demarch was back. Why court trouble? But the show of hands overruled him.

The combined Lutheran and Baptist youth groups, plus interested, parties from the Episcopalians and Catholics—about seventy-five young people in all—converged on the Civic Gardens east of City Hall the next Saturday morning.

Electrical power was still interdicted at the source, so no one brought lights—those could be added later. Instead there were ribbons, balls, colored string; spun-glass angels, gold and silver coronets; tinsel, brocade, and popcorn chains by the yard. A morning snow fell gently and there was room for everything among the capacious, snowy branches of the tree. Reverend Lockheed showed up with a cherry-picking ladder so that even the peaks of the big pine were not neglected.

Work went on for more than two hours despite the cold. When the last ornament was installed, Pastor Congreve handed out songsheets printed on the Methodists’ hand-crank mimeograph: Silent Night, to be followed by O Come All Ye Faithful.

Midway through the first carol, a military vehicle pulled up across the road and a single soldier emerged. The militiaman stood looking on without expression. Congreve wondered if he understood the purpose of the display.

The soldier watched, arms folded across his chest, but didn’t interfere. Across the square, a crowd of townspeople had been watching the tree-trimming. They ignored the militiaman and clapped for the carolers.

Terry Lockheed looked at the soldier, then at Congreve, a mute enquiry: Should we carry on? Why not, Congreve thought. One more song. If this was a crisis, they were already well in it. He nodded his head. The faithful, the joyful, the triumphant were duly summoned.

Then, suddenly, there was nothing left of the morning. The young people adjourned to Tucker’s Restaurant for hot milk. The crowd melted away. Before long the Civic Gardens were empty save for the soldier, the tree, and the falling snow.

The tree disappeared that night.

Sometime before dawn it was cut, thrown into the back of a military transport, and burned on the perpetual trash fire in the parking lot of the highway 7-Eleven. Only the stump remained, a snow-covered hummock by the dim light of morning.

The news traveled fast.

It was never clear who initiated the Youth Club picket. Forced to guess, Brad Congreve would have picked the thick-set Burmeister girl, Shelda—the one who wore bottle-glass lenses and quoted Gandhi during Sunday Discussion. It was exactly the sort of febrile notion Shelda would have taken into her head.

She was certainly one of the twelve young people who had set up a picket line around the Civic Gardens, carrying stick-and-cardboard signs with such legends as

and

This time there was no pastoral guidance and no approving crowd of strangers. This wasn’t fun or familiar. This was patently dangerous. Pedestrians who saw the picket line stared a moment, then turned away.

When the soldiers came, Shelda and her eleven compatriots filed submissively into the back of a dung-green transport truck. In best Gandhian fashion, they were willing to be arrested. Calmly, they appealed to the consciences of the soldiers. The soldiers, grim as stones, said nothing at all.

The trouble with being close to a man, Evelyn Woodward thought, is that you find out his secrets.

From hints and silences, from phone calls half-overheard and words half-pronounced and documents glimpsed as they crossed his desk, she had learned one of Symeon Demarch’s secrets—a secret too terrible to contain and impossible to share.

It was a secret about what was going to happen to Two Rivers. No. Worse than that. Let’s not be coy, Evelyn thought. It was a secret about the last thing that would happen to Two Rivers.

It was a secret about an atomic bomb. No one called it that; but she had discerned words like nucleic and megaton among the veiled discussion of what would be done with the town, the vexing and impossible town of Two Rivers.

Now, with Symeon away and the house empty and all this snow coming so relentlessly from a woolen sky, the secret was an awkward weight inside her. It was like having a terminal disease: no matter how hard she tried not to think about it, her thoughts came circling back.

Her only consolation was that Symeon had not originated the idea and even seemed to despise it. He hadn’t argued when he talked to his superiors, but she heard the unhappiness in his voice. And when he told her she would be safe, he seemed to mean it. He would take her away. He might not live with her; he had a wife and child in the capital; but he would find a place for her out of harm’s way. Maybe she would go on being his mistress.

But that left everybody else. Her neighbors, she thought, Dex Graham, the grocer, the schoolkids—everybody. How do you imagine so many deaths? If you went to Hiroshima before the bomb fell, and you told those people what was going to happen to them, they wouldn’t believe you—not because it wasn’t plausible but because the human mind can’t contain such things.

There was plenty of food, and she dealt with the cold by burying herself in sweaters and blankets and lighting the propane stove Symeon had left. But she couldn’t keep out the dark, and in the dark her thoughts were loudest. Sleep didn’t help. One night she dreamed she was Hester Pry

She was gratified when, at the end of that unendurable week, the electricity came back. She woke up to a wave of new heat. The blankets were superfluous. The room was warm. The windows ran wet with condensation. She ate a hot breakfast and sat by the stove until it was time for a hot lunch. And then a hot di

The morning after that she felt both restless and celebratory. She decided she would take a walk: not in any of the fine dresses Symeon had given her, which would mark her for abuse, but in her old clothes, her old jeans, her shabby blouse and heavy winter jacket.

Dressing in these things was like putting on a discarded skin. Old clothes have old memories inside. Briefly, she wondered what Dex was doing now. But Dex had moved out when the lieutenant came (Evelyn had chosen to stay in the house); Dex had been threatened by the Proctors; worst of all, Dex was going to die in the bomb blast (damn that hideous, unstoppable thought).