Saturday, October 24

Ready, set, 3 days to go

Three days until the world was going to end. I spent the day cleaning my house and doing laundry so I’d have more than one holey, purple thong to wear—just in case. I changed the sheets on my bed though it wasn’t their week to be changed. I got a ladder from the shed and wiped off the ceiling fan, then took a moldy cheese from the refrigerator, then cleaned out the dryer. It wasn’t that I thought my cleaning would matter or that I was sparing myself harsh judgment due to the cleanliness of my lint trap; still, I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t a little nervous about losing this new world I was coming to love.

Like everyone else in Leetsville, I was on edge. When I closed my eyes, I pictured flames and fiendish faces. Every dark pit and nightmare from childhood came back to plague me. I wasn’t nervous about the state of my soul—it had no true state, and if it did I didn’t have a clue what that state might be. I was more afraid of facing pain. Even more than me, I worried about Sorrow, out snapping at dead ferns along the path down to the lake. He was only a pawn in this whole big prophecy, nothing to say about anything, and probably with a soul as big as mine, if not bigger—or no soul and the whole thing would end in a flash for him and he’d never be the wiser.

Winston called midday to say he’d gone back out to the campground. Both men weren’t available but he would keep trying. “Something going on I don’t understand …” he said.

“Well sure, the world’s going to end.”

“No.” I could almost see him shaking his head. “Something else. Can’t find that Arnold Otis. Even his aide says he hasn’t seen him. That’s three men I can’t seem to locate. It’s a real puzzle, Emily. Don’t you get the feeling when we have them all together we’ll know what’s going on?”

I had to admit that I did feel both murders were connected in some way to the Reverend Fritch. I just couldn’t say how.

My house was clean with nothing much left to do. I lay down on the sofa under an afghan and read my new P. D. James. Later, I picked out clothes to wear to the Blue Tractor, in town, found an egg expired only a few days, boiled it, salted it, and sat down to dinner with half a bagel and the boiled egg rolling back and forth on my plate.

Sunday dawned gray and blustery. The weatherman predicted sunshine later that afternoon, but at nine a.m. the trees whipped back and forth, leaves blew in circles, limbs fell in the woods, and rain pelted my windows.

I stepped out to the deck, bracing myself as wind tore at me. I wore only an old sweater over flannel pajamas. The smell of rain was in the air, and the feel of fine mist on my skin. It was a transitional morning—fall and winter in battle. I hugged my arms to my body and was going to go back in when I heard the cry of a single, lonely loon come from down at Willow Lake.

I’d thought they’d all gone for the season. But there it was, that familiar melodious swinging up and down the scales, the two-toned hurrah. I was the luckiest woman alive—to hear the last call of the loon, to share this moment with him—he on his way south for the winter; me staying put, there to greet him in the spring. The thought brought tears to my eyes, from joy to sorrow and then regret. Damn, I thought. What if all of this did end, the way the Reverend Fritch predicted? Some day it would. Everything ended—that was why everything came into being.

I hurried in. I had a freshly washed quilt to snuggle under and my P. D. James to finish. I had a few hours to spend exactly as I wished to spend them. Wasn’t I the most fortunate of women, at this precise moment, in this precise place, being precisely who I chose to be?