Sis’ Shirley is seated on her cot, scratching Dixie’s head and hissing to distract her.
The man is stooped and thick-set with longish dark hair curling around the edges of his green cap. Wearing a black zippered jacket and blue-jeans like the girls, he is carrying either a rifle or shotgun, the barrel of which is stuck out before him.
Kim studies Shelton’s lean, bearded face for answers. Bad or good people? What will they find if they go inside the cabin, the first on the first row, where they are parked? Then she studies her sharp knees in blue jeans. She always wanted to be skinny and now she is. She used to get excited, after dieting and losing a few pounds, when her kneecaps would go from blunt to sharp. She liked looking at them through her jeans.
All day the brown wind has been blowing and howling around the corners of the cabin like wolves trying to get in. The howling and the racket from brittle pine limbs dropping on the tin roof and pelting the un-ceiled walls have kept Adam edgy and whiney. Kept Sis’ Shirley pacing window to window. It’s too cold to open the doors and too dusky to keep them closed.
The wind is bad news, not only because of the tall, slender, buggy pines possibly snapping and falling on the roof but also because of fire carrying through the dry peat bogs in a flash.
Yes, the water is drying up in the Swamp and they’ve watched the peat bogs turn to moist moss, then dry moss.
All day Shelton has been out and in, checking on supplies and checking to be sure that the lane along the back row of cabins is cleared of branches and fallen trees.
They’ll need to make a quick get-away if fire comes.
Back to watching the group at the first cabin, almost diagonally across the camp from their own, Kim finds herself on the verge of tears, her chest swelling up with sadness. It shouldn’t be this way, people hiding from each other rather then helping each other out.
She feels sad for the teenage girls with wind-blown hair the same dirty blond as the mother’s, who is so thin Kim thinks she makes Sis’ Shirley look healthy.
The girls and the man trot back and to from the van to the cabin, carrying cardboard boxes. The mother doesn’t show through the door again.
“What’s going on out there?” Sis’ Shirley says low. She is fiercely rubbing the thinning brown fur on Dixie’s back. Dixie plops down at Sis’ Shirley’s feet and groans. She’s had enough.
And Adam has had enough milk. He wants up and Kim can’t keep him down without making him cry. His long blond ringlets are matted, a tangle she’ll have to do something with. She’s exhausted and empty and still hurting inside because of what they’ve come to—selfish and greedy.
She stands up. “Y’all wait here. If I don’t come back, maybe I’ll meet you there.”
“Meet us where?” Sis’ Shirley asks.
“No, Kim.” Shelton stands and bumps his chair back from the window. He looks stunned. “Where are you going?”
“To meet my new neighbors.” She rams her fists into the pockets of her hooded red parka.
Adam cries and clings to her legs till Shelton peels him off and she steps out the door.
The cold wind smells of sulfur, raw and damp and at the same time dry. Sand and oak blooms attack her face. She senses too much time in a day then not enough.
She looks off the edge of the porch and sees the girls looking toward the cabin where Adam is wailing inside.
Taking one hand from the pocket of her jacket, Kim waves. They wave back hesitantly. She walks slowly, diagonally across the run-together packed-dirt yards of the cabins, hearing pine cones and twigs raining down on the tin roofs and the wind howling around the corners like warnings. Open doors squeak and flam open and slam shut.
“Hello,” she calls out, when about halfway there.
The man steps around the corner of the cabin front with the long black gun aimed at her. The two girls stand behind him, one on each side, a head taller than the man.
She stops, rooting her feet for the blast. “I’m Kim, from over there.” She points behind her to the cabin with the child wailing like the wind.
“Who you got with you?” The man sounds gruff, but it is forced.
“My family. My husband and little boy and an old lady.”
“Come on.” He motions with the gun barrel. “Get on over here.”
When she is standing face to face with him, neither blinking, she speaks: “We’re running too. Let’s help each other and share what we have.”
The girl on his right speaks: “Do you have food?” Both girls are freckled, very pale and very thin. The one on his left is the pregnant one.
“A little. Enough.” Kim says.
What if now that she’s said that, they go over to her cabin and shoot her family and steal the Land Rover with the supplies inside. Maybe that’s what happened to the dead person in the cabin that she had found.
From the porch, the thin woman’s thin voice carries on the wind. “We have a little too. Enough.”
Chapter 24
For some time both families go through another period of relief, or maybe distraction, getting to know each other, spreading their food together, helping each other out and just being human again.
The girls, Laura and Lucy, play with Adam and the dog, giving Kim, Jean and Sis’ Shirley more time to get to know one another and do made-up chores. They shake out bed-sheets and blankets from their front porches; they scrub their twin black iron skillets together at the shrinking channel, now more mud than water; they swap food, a can of corn for a can of peas—peaches, Do you have peaches? Have a can; we have three. And when the days grow increasingly colder and darker, they share blankets; like the Indian squaws who used to home in the Swamp, they wrap them around their shoulders and let the corners drag the ground.
Huey and Jean have winter clothing which they share with Sis’ Shirley, Shelton, Kim and Adam. His is a gray sweatshirt, belonging to Lucy, with sleeves cut to his wrists. They call it his “sweat-coat,” but it looks more like a bathrobe. Underneath he is dressed in layers of other clothing, trimmed to fit.
Kim can tell that Jean—the narrowest woman in the hips that Kim has ever seen—is leery and suspicious of Sis’ Shirley with her Selah campaign button on her chest. When Kim gets Jean off to herself, she explains how harmless and confused and scared Sis’ Shirley is. Kim doesn’t go into her being ridiculed and mocked by her own people.
Sis’ Shirley goes through fits and spells of wanting to go home, or move on, but when Shelton explains about the condition of the world “out there” and how he and Kim need her to help out with Adam, she goes back to her routine of cabin-keeping and baby-sitting and preaching about the end-times.
Next time she pitches one of her fits, Shelton takes her out to the Land Rover and turns on the news and leaves her sitting behind the green-tinted windows. She stays for about five minutes and when she comes back she lies on her cot, flat on her back, and pulls her blanket up over her head. “They’ve killed my Selah,” she says. “They’ve killed my Selah.” Her voice is firm, riveted.
“Killed him?” Shelton says.
“Dead as a hammer.”
***For two days she neither eats nor pays any attention to Adam. She drinks water only when Kim takes it to her on her cot.
“Sis’ Shirley, you have to get up. It’s okay,” Kim says, standing over her while she drinks from a white cup.
She hands the cup back to Kim and lies flat and again pulls the blanket up over her head, her huge glasses like a prop over her head.
Adam beside Kim says, “Get up, girly.”
Kim laughs, placing a hand on his head. “Get up, girly.”
“They killed my Selah and I wanta die too.”
“No, you don’t, I promise.” Kim knows from reading her bible and talking to Shelton that, if Selah is the antiChrist, he will be somehow resurrected by the false prophet, head of the new world religious system, in a fake show of the real thing. If this happens, Shelton and Kim agree, Selah will begin to strengthen i
n power by performing more amazing signs and wonders—though nothing to match his staged resurrection. But above all, for the redeemed after the Rapture, Selah’s dramatic resurrection means that their second chance is near, nearer than Shelton and Kim had supposed.
Now they listen for more news, not saying a word about the resurrection to Sis’ Shirley, in case they are wrong. They are amazed that Sis’ Shirley, with all her knowledge of the Bible, wouldn’t know about this resurrection too. They have times of hoping they are wrong and times of hoping they are right, but not for the same reasons Sis’ Shirley would hope they are right.
On the news, word is that people all over the world are mourning the great ruler, Abdul Selah. Multitudes gather in Rome, where the shooting took place; they gather in Greece and Turkey, and even in Israel, though it is common knowledge that Selah and his band of government advisors had planned to do away with every Jew on earth. While Selah lies in state at an arena in Rome, people pass by his bier uplifted on a great mound of stone.
The media interview common people and those in high places about their feelings on the assassination. All speak of him as the greatest ruler ever known: he was eloquent, intelligent and brave. He was “my Selah.” It’s as if ordinary words fail to express how they feel, so they must rely on superlatives, and “Se-lah! Se-lah! Se-lah!” as if trying to call him up from the dead.
Sis’ Shirley is still lying abed, wasting away, the blanket over her body becoming flatter and flatter, Shelton, Kim and Adam trying to rouse her, when on the third day Huey knocks on the door, then enters, saying “He’s been resurrected. He’s alive!”
***If they had expected Sis’ Shirley to rise up braying and bragging about “my Selah,” they were proved wrong.
Like Kim and Shelton and the others she seems genuinely shocked, shocked speechless. They figure she has known all along about the counterfeit resurrection of the antiChrist spoken about in the bible and this is it. The real thing. No more pretending that this man is the savior of mankind on earth, his power is from Satan.
Chapter 25
The pregnant twin, Laura, is only about three months along, if Kim is any judge. But she is so thin that her belly is round and tight and sticks straight out on her narrow frame. Kim doesn’t mention it to Jean, of course, but does say that Sis’ Shirley delivered her baby. She stops speaking when she realizes she has only a vague idea how long ago it was.
Shelton is relieved to have another man in the park—Huey—who is not only friendly, helpful and good-natured but he has a gun. They go out hunting and scouting together and even bring home an occasional squirrel or a jack rabbit for stew. Huey has found a thin trickling spring out in the Swamp and they bring home clear but sand-dregged water, more valuable than the meat.
Those times with meat to cook, at one or the other cabins, are the best. Gathered around fires out in the yards, all wrapped in blankets, they turn and turn to get warm, waiting for the stew to get done, then pass before the kettle with Jean’s set of plastic bowls for Sis’ Shirley, wrapped in a blanket, her glasses spiking the fire-light, to dole out their half-cup portions.
Sometimes, because Jean and Sis’ Shirley are so thin and wasting away, and Laura is pregnant, Kim offers her portion to them. The women always refuse and say that Kim is nursing and needs to eat. But Laura takes the bowl and eats the stew without so much as a thank you.
Sitting cross-legged on a blanket with another around her shoulders, she eats without speaking or even lifting her eyes. Kim has seen her mother, narrow backside turned to the fire, looking the other way.
One night, after supper, when they’ve all gone to bed, Kim and Shelton hear Huey shouting in their front yard. They go to the door and peer out, breath freezing on their faces. The roof light is on inside the Land Rover and Huey is standing at the rear, trying to drag Laura out of the car. In one hand she is holding the can of evaporated milk that Kim has been saving in case her milk goes dry.
Laura scampers out and around Huey who Shelton and Kim can now see is aiming his rifle in the direction she has run through the dark. Then he lowers it and slumps off toward his cabin on the front row.
Back in bed, touching feet and hands with Adam tucked between them, they whisper about what has happened. “Do you think he would have shot her?” Kim asks.
“Over a can of milk? No,” says Shelton. “She was probably trying to steal the car and he caught her and she just grabbed something to throw him off.”
But it is more than just a can of milk and Sis’ Shirley knows that. Later, when Shelton and Kim go to sleep for the second time, she apparently goes out and somehow gets the milk from Laura. When they wake up the next morning, the milk is sitting on a shelf in the kitchen area.
Shivering, sitting on the side of her cot with a blanket over her head and only her bony face and glasses showing, Sis’ Shirley says, “That a bad girl there. Ain’t a good bone in her body.”
Kim, wearing her blanket, asks, “How did you get it from her.”
“Tell her it rotted and one sip gone lay her low.”
“And she believed you?”
“Don’t know but guess she figgered it could be.”
“Poor girl. She needed it for her baby.”
“She need it for that greedy mouth.”
Chapter 26
Every day the sky darkens more and the wind blows colder.
One evening the earth shakes for a couple of hours; the sky roars. In Jean and Huey’s front yard, cleared of pine straw and any thing that might burn or fall on them, they hover together around an uneasy fire, flames lashing at the quaking dark.
Dixie barks and barks and lunges from the firelight to the dark, then back again. The earth rolls. Trees crack and crash out over the Swamp.
“Land of the Trembling Earth,” Huey says. “That’s what Okefenokee means.”
Across the licking flames of the fire, the two men stand and talk, while the women sit and listen, and Kim nurses Adam on her lap. Sis’ Shirley, on the other side of him, keeps moaning and gasping with a trembling hand on Adam’s legs. Jean, next to Sis’ Shirley, only sits staring at the fire with her sunken gray eyes. She looks older and sicker and like a stranger in the firelight.
Another tremor, cracking the bare dirt around them. Off in the woods, trees continue to snap and crash to the ground. The wind picks up and they have to hold their blankets tighter. Kim is glad they can’t see beyond their circle around the fire, where the woods have to be opened up, revealing the rest of the gutted earth. She shuts her eyes pulling Adam closer to her breast. Lord, don’t let him wake up, she prays to herself.
Since he started talking Kim has found it harder to nurse him. She’s embarrassed for him. And Laura teases him endlessly, calling him the milk man. He repeats it, “Milk man, I’m the milk man.” Sis’ Shirley has threatened to pop Laura’s jaws if she keeps it up. “You don’t want some of me, old lady,” Laura said.
Sis’ Shirley lowered her head, brown eyes rolled up on dingy flecked eye-whites. “Milk man, where I come from, mean a grown boy having things to do with his mama, or tother way round. So, don’t be pinning that name on my boy to have to live down till the day he die.”
“So who cares? Who’s here to care? What makes you think he’ll live to grow up?”
A tree closer by snaps and crackles and hits the ground. Dixie yelps and cowers behind Shelton on the other side of the fire from Kim, then she bounds back to the dark, barking.
Laura curses, and then stands, gathering her blanket around her and walks off to stand on the edge of the firelight where Dixie joins her. Lucy waits a few minutes then rises and goes to stand with her sister and pats Dixie on top of her head. The ground within their circle looks like moles have been tunneling.
“I think it’s about over,” Shelton says to Huey. “Don’t you?”
“Sounds like it.”
Then they pick up their conversation where they left off, maybe to make the women feel that things are back to normal
. Huey tells about them driving from middle Louisiana to the east coast, and then following the coast north in search of a place to hide. They had lost their home during Hurricane Katrina, way back, and were living in one of the government trailers where “things got really bad after people went missing.” His voice gets low, for Shelton’s hearing only. Then louder he says that he had read about the Okefenokee Swamp and decided that was the best place to “wait.”
Shelton and Kim eye each other across the fire.
*** All night they stay, feeding the fire. Kim dozes off with the nipple of her breast touching Adam’s puckered lips, and him stretched out with his upper body on her lap and his folded legs blanket-wrapped in Sis’ Shirley’s lap. His girlish curls fan out on his blanket. The girls, rolled in blankets, as close to the fire as they dare, sleep on.
When the chocolate sun rises above the trees in the cloudy brown sky those awake are amazed that aside from the thinning of the spindly black forest, nothing much has changed. As the wind picks up for another trying day, they just stare, wondering, relieved. If they have made it through this, there must be a reason; there must be a God with a purpose for them.
Chapter 27
Huey tells Shelton and Kim not to tell the others but China and Russia have been messaging each other with nuclear missiles, resulting in what the environmentalists call nuclear winter. He says that many towns in Israel, and even Egypt, are being bombarded by a world-wide army put together by “the antiChrist.”
“What are they fighting over?” Shelton asks.
“The Promised Land.”
“Why?”
“Oil.”
This is the third clue from their neighbor that he knows what is taking place.
After that, he and Shelton talk openly about the bible’s prophecies and guidelines to the end-times, about what phase of the tribulation they are going through now. From the radio news they learn about falling brimstone, meteorites and stars shook from the sky all over the world. From the radio news they learn about a seventy-two-year-old man, in Australia, enslaving his daughter for twenty-four years in the basement of their home. The young woman gave birth to seven children—four of whom had vanished during the “mysterious global weather upheaval.” The others, born later, had been forced to watch their father repeatedly rape their mother.