The subway uptown was almost empty in the late morning heat except for a pair of Columbia summer-termers, one of whom kept eyeing her over his paperback, and a group of black youths with baseball caps and duffel bags. Two of them were looking past her and giggling. Pretending to wipe the sweat from her forehead, she turned and saw a tattered blue sign pasted to the window just above her, bearing a cross and the printed slogan, It’s A Blessing To Be A Virgin. Below them someone had scribbled, But you got to give Great Head. Quickly she looked away. She was glad the next stop, 110th Street, was hers.
She walked south until she recognized the ancient grey brick building just off Riverside Drive. From eight till six a doorman was on duty, a sleepy-looking Hispanic whose only uniform was a T- shirt and brown slacks. He seemed confused as to what she wanted of him and, after she'd explained herself, reluctant.
'No,' he said, shaking his head slowly. 'I can't open no door for nobody.'
'But he may be in there dying,' Carol pleaded.
His expression suggested that he found this unlikely. 'Look, lady, I ain' got no key. The super, he the one with the key, but he gone out now. You wanna come back tomorrow, you talk to him, okay?' He looked away, his face impassive, as if she weren't standing there in front of him.
'Well, can I at least go up there and knock on his door?'
He nodded, still not looking at her.
'Thanks a lot.' She walked past him to the elevator and jammed her thumb onto the button marked 12. A minute later she emerged on Rosie's floor. His apartment was at the end of the hall, behind a dull green rather shabby-looking door from which gleamed three brass locks of formidable size. The old man was worried about thieves.
'Rosie?' she called, holding her finger against the buzzer beside the door. 'Rosie?' She could hear the buzzer's muffled ringing within the apartment. She pressed her ear to the door. There was no other sound.
She knocked now, softly at first, then harder, putting her ear once more to the door.
Nothing.
She shrugged, began to walk away, then stopped and went back. 'Rosie,' she called, putting her mouth to the crack, speaking as softly as she dared because she was somewhat embarrassed to be doing this, 'Rosie, this is Carol. If you're in there, listen to me. I can't get in the apartment, but I'm coming back tomorrow and I'll have the super let me in. So try not to worry. I'll be back.'
More than an hour had passed, and he still couldn't reach Carol. There was no answer at her apartment, and the woman he'd spoken to at Voorhis said that Carol hadn't come to work today. 'No,' Freirs had told her, 'no message.' He hung up, troubled, almost indignant, at this unexpected absence of someone he'd regarded as reliable. Where the hell was she, anyway? Who had she gone off with? Well, he would call her in a day or two, when he got back to New
York. He certainly wasn't going to wait around here any longer; he had already wasted enough time. Gilead's main street had been dull, with cars passing but rarely and those inside them regarding him with little warmth; and the library, where he'd thought he might spend the afternoon, had been unaccountably closed. He had drunk too many cans of soda, there on the porch, and eaten too many potato chips. Now, as he got to his feet and moved slowly down the front steps, the heat made him feel dizzy.
It was a long way back to the farm. He walked for more than twenty minutes down the road that curved past Verdock's dairy and the Sturtevant home, hoping for a ride, but the only car that passed him was an antiquated Ford, black as a hearse and traveling in the opposite direction. The elderly couple inside, also in black, regarded him with stony disapproval as they went by, giving him a taste of their exhaust.
He watched the car recede slowly up the narrow road until it rounded a bend and disappeared, the faint hum of its engine lingering a moment or two afterward. Once again the air was still, but for the sound of a distant tractor and the echoes of an axe; not a thing was moving save the cows eyeing him suspiciously in a field to the left, the butterflies hurrying from flower to flower, and an occasional green snake that wandered onto the pavement and slithered back into the grass at his approach. The oak trees' shadows lengthened perceptibly with the passing day, as if reaching back toward town.
Five minutes later, just as he was descending the hill that ran past Ham Stoudemire's farm and stepping past the dark, motionless form of a garden snake coiled in sleep at the edge of the pavement, a rusty blue pickup truck appeared on the road, two black-garbed figures inside, a sparsely bearded boy at the wheel and beside him a plump, snub-nosed girl. The truck bore swiftly down upon him. He stuck out his thumb and flashed a hopeful smile.
Far from slowing as it neared him, the truck increased its speed and made a sudden swerve to the right. The garden snake woke just ' in time and slipped into the grass. Freirs jumped back to avoid being run down.
'Assholes!'
He hoisted an angry finger at them as they went by, hoping, at first, that the two had seen the gesture and then, on reflection, that they hadn't. No sense getting into fights with the townspeople.
Teenagers, he supposed, were teenagers everywhere, even among the Brethren. Anyway, for all he knew they'd just been aiming at the snake.
It wasn't until he'd descended halfway to the brook, the road ahead now crisscrossed with shadows of trees, that he encountered a genuine Samaritan: a leathery old farmer with a truckful of garbage, on his way to the town dump half a mile past the Geisels' north field. 'I almost didn't stop for you,' he said, eyeing Freirs warily through eyes whose whites had turned as yellow as corn. 'Thought you might be one o' them gangsters.'
Freirs laughed and assured him that he was as honest as the next.
The other nodded gravely. 'You're the guy who's stayin' at the Poroths'.'
'How'd you know?'
'Figured that's who you'd be, soon as you opened your mouth.'
'It must be hard to keep a secret around here. Everybody seems to know everything that's going on.'
'Pretty much.'
It occurred to him, after they got. under way, that the man might be a resource. 'For a town this small,' he said, 'there seems to be a wealth of family history.'
The other was shaking his head. 'There ain't too much wealth in this town, son. We don't hold with gatherin' up the goods o' this world like some folks do.'
'No, no, I mean, a wealth of memories, a sense of identity based on family background.' God, he sounded like a textbook! 'Like Sarr Poroth moving back to his ancestral farm after more than a century. That's pretty amazing.'
The man shrugged. 'It was for sale at a good price, and someone was bound to settle there by and by. The Babers never did do much with it – not as much as some folks might.'
'I suppose the land's not all that fertile down there.'
'No, sir, there's nothin' the matter with that land. It's just a matter of clearin' back the trees from time to time. You've got to have the will to see it through.' He paused. 'Less'n you fancy livin' in the woods, like some around here.'
'You mean families like the Fenchels. I've heard Sarr speak of them.'
He nodded. 'Folks like that.'
'And the McKinneys,' said Freirs. "They must live out there, too, even deeper in the woods.'
The other looked puzzled. 'Never heard of anyone by that name, leastwise not around here.'
'No? What about the place they call McKinney's Neck? I figured it was named for someone in the area.'
'I expect you're right. But I sure ain't never heard of no McKinneys. Not in these parts.'
Freirs tried to remember his stroll through the cemetery. Now that he thought of it, he couldn't recall seeing any gravestones with that name.
'At any rate,' he said, 'I mean to hike through that region someday. Maybe I'll even run into a few ghosts.'