It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 6 page

“Ain't you afraid some kid'll break a bunch of them?” Mabel Noyes asked her once. Mabel's Junque-A-Torium was well supplied with signs such as LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT IF YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT'S SOLD. Mabel knew that the doll which had belonged to Justice Marshall's little girl was worth at least six hundred dollars—she had shown a picture of it to a dealer in rare dolls in Boston and he had told her four hundred, so Mabel guessed six as a fair price. Then there was a doll that had belonged to Anna Roosevelt... a genuine Haitian voodoo doll... God knew what else, sitting cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh with such common old things as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

“Not a bit,” Ruth responded. She found Mabel's attitude as puzzling as Mabel found hers. “If God means one of these dolls to be broken, He may break it Himself, or He may send a child to do it. But so far, no child has ever broken one. Oh, a few heads have rolled, and Joe Pell did something to the pull-ring in Mrs Beasley's back, and now all she'll say is something like —Doyou want to have a shower?”, but that's about all the damage that's been done.”

“Well, you'll pardon me if I still think it's an awfully big risk to take with such fragile, irreplaceable things,” Mabel said. She sniffed. “Sometimes I believe the only thing I've ever learned in my whole life is that children break things.”

“Well, perhaps I've just been lucky. But they are careful with them, you know. Because they love them, I think.” Ruth paused, frowning slightly. “Most of them do,” she amended after a moment.

That not all children wanted to play with “the kids in the schoolroom'that some actually, seemed to fear them—was a fact which puzzled and grieved her. Little Edwina Thurlow, for instance. Edwina had burst into a shrill spate of screams when her mother took her by the hand and actually pulled her over to the dolls on their rows of benches, looking attentively at their blackboard. Mrs Thurlow thought Ruth's dolls were just the dearest things, cunning as a cat a-running, sweet as a lick of cream; if there are other country cliches for fascinating, Mrs Thurlow had undoubtedly applied them to Ruth's dolls, and she was totally unable to credit her daughter's fear of them. She thought Edwina was “just being shy.” Ruth, who had seen the unmistakable flat glitter of fear in the child's eyes, had been unable to dissuade the mother (who, Ruth thought, was a stupid, pig-headed woman) from almost physically pushing the child at the dolls.

So Norma Thurlow had dragged little Edwina over to the schoolroom and little Edwina's screams had been so loud they had brought Ralph all the way up from the cellar, where he had been caning chairs. It took nearly twenty minutes to coax Edwina out of her hysterics, and of course she had to be brought downstairs, away from the dolls. Norma Thurlow was ill with embarrassment, and every time she threw a black look in Edwina's direction. the child was overcome again by hysterical weeping.

Later that evening, Ruth went upstairs and looked sorrowfully at her schoolroom full of silent children (the “children” included such grandmotherly figures as Mrs Beasley and Old Gammar Hood, which, when turned over and slightly rearranged, became The Big Bad Wolf), wondering how they could have scared Edwina so badly. Edwina herself certainly hadn't been able to explain; even the most gentle inquiry brought on fresh shrieks of terror.

“You made that kid really unhappy,” Ruth said at last, speaking softly to the dolls. “What did you do to her?”

The dolls only looked back at her with their glass eyes, their shoebutton eyes, their sewn eyes.

“And Hilly Brown wouldn't go near them the time his mother came over to have you notarize that bill of sale,” Ralph said from behind her. She looked around, startled, then smiled at him.

“Yes, Hilly, too,” she said. And there had been others. Not many, but enough to trouble her.

“Come on,” Ralph said, slipping an arm around her waist. “Give, you guys. Which one of youse mugs scared the little goil?”

The dolls looked back silently.

And for a moment... just a moment... Ruth felt a stir of fright uncoil in her stomach and chase up her spine, rattling vertebrae like a bony xylophone... and then it was gone.

“Don't worry about it, Ruthie,” Ralph said. leaning closer. As always, the smell of him made her feel a bit giddy. He kissed her hard. Nor was his kiss the only thing hard about him at that moment.

“Please,” she said a little breathlessly, breaking the kiss. “Not in front of the children.”

He laughed and swept her into his arms. “How about in front of the collected works of Henry Steele Commager?”

“Wonderful,” she gasped, aware that she was already half... no, threequarters... no, four-fifths... out of her dress.

He made love to her urgently, and with tremendous satisfaction on both their parts. All their parts. The brief chill was forgotten.

But this year she remembered on the night of July 19th. The picture of Jesus had begun to speak to “Becka Paulson on July 7th. On July 19th, Ruth McCausland's dolls began to speak to her.

The townsfolk were surprised but pleased when, two years after Ralph McCausland's death in 1972, his widow ran for the position of Haven town constable. A young fellow named Mumphry ran against her. This fellow was foolish, most people agreed, but they also agreed that he probably couldn't help it; he was new in town and did not know how to behave. Those who discussed the matter at the Haven Lunch agreed Mumphry was more to be pitied than disliked. He ran as a partisan Democrat, and the gist of his platform seemed to be that, when it came to a position such as constable, the elected official would have to arrest drunks, speeders, and hooligans; he might even be called upon to arrest a dangerous criminal from time to time and run him up to the county jail. Surely the citizens of Haven weren't going to elect a woman to do such a job, law degree or not, were they?

They were and did. The vote was McCausland 407, Mumphry 9. Of his nine votes, it would be fair to assume he had gotten those of his wife, his brother, his twenty-three-year-old son, and himself. That left five unaccounted for. No one ever “fessed up, but Ruth herself always had an idea that Mr Moran out there on the south end of town had had four more friends than she would have credited him with. Three weeks after the election, Mumphry and his wife left Haven. His son, a nice enough fellow named John, elected to stay, and although he was still, after fourteen years, often referred to as “the new fella,” as in “That new fella, Mumphry, come by to get his haircut this mawnin'; I member when his daddy ran against Ruth and got whipped s'bad?” And since then, Ruth had never been opposed.

The townsfolk had rightly seen her candidacy as a public announcement that her period of mourning was over. One of the things (one among many) the unfortunate Mumphry had failed to understand was that the lopsided vote had been, in part, at least, Haven's way of crying: “Hooray, Ruthie! Welcome back!”

Ralph's death had been sudden and shocking, and it came close—too very damn close—to killing the part of her which was outward and giving. That part softened and complemented the dominant side of her personality, she felt. The dominant side was smart, canny, logical, and—although she hated to admit this last, she knew it was true—sometimes uncharitable.

She came to feel that if that outward and giving side of her nature were to lapse, it would be something like killing Ralph a second time. And so she came back to Haven. Came back to service.

In a small town, even one such person can make a crucial difference in how things are, and in what jargonmeisters are pleased to call “the quality of life”, that person can become, in fact, something very like the heart of the town. Ruth had been well on her way to becoming such a valuable person when her husband died. Two years later—after what seemed in retrospect to be a long, bleak season in hell -she had rediscovered that valuable person, as one might rediscover something moderately wonderful in a dark attic corner—a piece of carnival glass, or a bentwood rocking chair that was still serviceable She held it up to the light, made sure it was unbroken, dusted it, polished it and then returned it to her life. Running for town constable had only been the first step. She could not have said why this seemed so right, but it did—it seemed the perfect way to at the same time remember Ralph and get on with the work of being herself. She thought she would probably find the job both boring and unpleasant... but that had also been true of canvassing for the Cancer Society and serving on the Textbook Selection Committee. Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore. And, she told herself, if she really didn't like it, there was no law to make her stand for re-election. She wanted to serve, not to martyr herself. If she hated it, she would let Mumphry or someone like him have a turn.

But Ruth discovered she liked the job. Among other things, it gave her a chance to put a stop to some nasty goings-on that old John Harley had allowed to continue... and grow.

Del Cullum, for instance. The Cullums had been in Haven since time out of mind, and Delbert—a thick-browed mechanic who worked at Elt Barker's Shell—was probably not the first of them to engage in sexual congress with his daughters. The Cullum line was incredibly twisted and interbred; there were at least two cataclysmically retarded Cullums in Pineland that Ruth knew about (according to town gossip, one had been born with webs between its fingers and toes).

Incest is one of those time-honored country traditions of which the romantic poets rarely write. Its traditional aspect might have been the reason John Harley had never seriously tried to put an end to it, but the idea of “tradition” in such a grotesque matter cut no ice with Ruth. She went out to the Cullum place. There was shouting. Albion Thurlow heard it clearly, although Albion lived a quarter of a mile down the road and was deaf in one ear. Following the shouting there was the sound of a chainsaw cranking up, followed by a gunshot and a scream. Then the chainsaw stopped and Albion, standing out in the middle of the road now, one hand shading his eyes as he looked toward the Cullum place, heard girls” voices (Delbert had been cursed with girls, six of them, and of course they literally were his curse, and he theirs) raised in cries of distress.

Later, in the Haven Lunch, recounting his tale to a fascinated audience, old Albion said that he thought about going back into his house and calling the constable... and then he realized the constable had probably been the one fired the shot.

Albion only stood by his mailbox instead, awaiting developments. About five minutes after the sound of the chainsaw died, Ruth McCausland drove back toward town. Five minutes after that, Del Cullurn drove by in his pickup. His washed-out wife was in the shotgun seat. A mattress and some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and dishes sat in the truck's bed. Delbert and Maggie Cullum were seen no more in Haven. The three Cullurn girls over eighteen went to work in Derry and in Bangor. The three minors were placed in foster homes. Most of Haven was glad to see the Cullum family broken up. They had festered out there at the end of the Ridge Road like a rash of poison toadstools growing in a dark cellar. Folks speculated about what Ruth had done and how she did it, but Ruth never told.

Nor were the Cullums the only people Ruth McCausland, graying, trim, five feet five, and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, either ran out of town or had jailed over the years. There were the dope-smoking hippies that moved in a mile east of the old Frank Garrick farm, for instance. Those worthless, crab-raddled excuses for human beings came in one month and went out on the toe of Ruth's dainty size five shoe the next. Frank's niece, who wrote those books, probably smoked some rope from time to time, the town thought (the town thought that all writers must smoke dope, drink to excess, or spend their evenings having sex in odd positions), but she didn't sell it, and the hippies a mile down from her had been doing just that.

Then there were the Jorgensons out on the Miller Bog Road. Benny Jorgenson died of a stroke, and Iva remarried three years later, becoming Iva Haney. Not long after, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started having household mishaps. The boy fell getting out of the tub; the girl burned her arm on the stove. Then the boy slipped on the kitchen floor and broke his arm and the girl stepped on a rake half-buried in fallen leaves and the handle spanged her upside the head. Last but hardly least, the boy stumbled on the basement stairs while going after some kindling and fractured his skull. For a while it looked as if he wasn't going to pull through. It was a real run of bad luck, all right.

Ruth decided there had been enough bad luck at the Haney place.

She went out, driving her old Dodge Dart, and found Elmer Haney sitting on the porch, drinking a quart of Miller Lite, picking his nose and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. Ruth suggested to Elmer Haney that he was bad luck around Iva's place, particularly for Bethie and Richard Jorgenson. She had noticed, she said, that some stepfathers were very bad luck for their stepchildren. She said she thought their luck might improve if Elmer Haney left town. Very soon. Before the end of the week.

“You are not scaring me,” Elmer Haney said serenely. “This is my place now. You want to get off it before I brain you with a stick of stovewood, you meddling bitch.”

“Think it over,” Ruth said, smiling.

Joe Paulson had been parked out by the mailbox at the time. He heard the whole thing—Elmer Haney's voice had been slightly raised, and there was nothing wrong with Joe's hearing. The way Joe told it down at the Haven Lunch later that day, he had been sorting mail while the two of them argued it up and down, and he couldn't seem to get it sorted just right until that conversation was over

“Then how'dya know she was smiling?” Elt Barker asked.

“Heard it in her voice,” Joe replied.

Later that same day, Ruth had taken a ride up to the Derry state-police barracks and spoke with Butch “Monster” Dugan. At six-feet-eight and two hundred and eighty pounds, Monster was the largest state cop in New England. Monster would have done anything short of murder (maybe that, too) for Ralph's widow.

Two days later, they went back to the Haney place. It was Monster's day off and he was in civvies. Iva Haney was at work. Bethie was in school. Richard was, of course, still in the hospital. Elmer Haney, who was of course still unemployed, sat on the porch with a quart of Miller Lite in one hand and the latest issue of Hot Talk in the other. Ruth and Monster Dugan visited with him for an hour or so. During that hour, Elmer Haney had an extraordinary run of bad luck. Those who saw him leaving town that night said he looked like someone ran him through a potato-grader, but the only one with nerve enough to ask just what had happened was old John Harley himself.

“Well, I swan,” Ruth said, smiling. “It was the darnedest thing I ever saw. While we were trying to persuade him his stepkids might live luckier if he left, he decided he wanted to take a shower. Right while we were talking to him! And do you know, he fell down in the tub! Then he burned his arm on the stove and -slipped on the linoleum while he was backing away from it! Then he decided he wanted some fresh air and he went outside and stepped on the same rake little Bethie Jorgenson stepped on two months ago, and that was when he decided he ought to just pack up and go. I think he was right to do it, poor man. He'll live luckier himself somewhere else.”

She really was the person who came closest to being the heart of the town, and that may have been why she was one of the first to feel the change.

It began with a headache and bad dreams.

The headache came in with the month of July. Sometimes it was so faint she barely noticed it. Then, without warning, it would swell to a thick, throbbing beat behind her forehead. It was so bad on the night of July 4th that she called Christina McKeen, with whom she had planned to go see the fireworks in Bangor, and begged off.

She went to bed that night with light still lingering in the sky outside, but it was dark before she was finally able to drift off to sleep. She supposed the heat and humidity were keeping her awake—they would keep people awake all over New England that night, she reckoned, and this wasn't the first night that had been like this. It had been one of the stillest, hottest summers in her memory.

She dreamed of fireworks.

Only these fireworks were not red and white and coruscating orange; they were all a dull and terrible green. They burst across the sky in starbursts of light... only instead of going out, the starfish shapes in the sky oozed together and became huge sores.

Looking around, she saw people she had lived with all her life—Harleys and Crenshaws and Browns and Duplisseys and Andersons and Clarendons—staring up at the sky, their faces rotted swampfire green. They stood in front of the post office, the drugstore, the Junque-A-Torium, the Haven Lunch, the Northern National Bank; they stood in front of the school and the Shell station, eyes filled with green fire, mouths hanging stupidly agape.

Their teeth were falling out.

Justin Hurd turned to her and grinned, lips pulling back to show bare pink gums. In the crazy light of her dream, the saliva streaking those gums looked like snot.

“Feel'th good,” Justin lisped, and she thought: Get out of here! They all have to get out of here right now! If they don't they are going to die the same way Ralph did!

Now Justin was walking toward her and she saw with mounting horror that his face was shriveling and changing—it was becoming the bulging, stitched face of Lumpkin, her scarecrow doll. She looked around wildly and saw that they had all become dolls. Mabel Noyes turned and stared at her and Mabel's blue eyes were as calculating and avaricious as ever, but her lips were plumped up in the Cupid's-bow smile of a china doll.

“Tommyknockerths,” Mabel lisped in a chiming, echoing voice, and Ruth woke up with a gasp, wide-eyed in the dark.

Her headache was gone, at least for the time being. She came out of the dream directly into wakefulness with the thought: Ruth, you have to leave right now. Don't even take time to pack a bag—just pull on some clothes, get in the Dart, and GO!

But she could not do that.

Instead, she lay down again. After a long time, she slept.

When the report came in that the Paulsons” house was burning, the Haven Volunteer Fire Department turned out... but they were surprisingly slow about it. Ruth was there ten minutes before the first pumper showed up. She would have torn Dick Allison's head off when he finally showed up, except she had known both of the Paulsons were dead... and, of course, Dick Allison had known, too. That was why he hadn't bothered to hurry, but that did not make Ruth feel a bit better. Quite the opposite.

That knowing, now. What exactly was that?

Ruth didn't know what it was.

Even grasping the fact of the knowing was almost impossible. On the day the Paulsons” house burned, Ruth realized that she had been knowing things she had no right to know for a week or more. But it seemed so natural! It didn't come with trumpets and bells. The knowing was as much a part of her—of everyone in Haven now—as the beat of her heart. She no more thought about it than she thought about her heartbeat thudding softly and steadily in her ears.

Only she had to think about it, didn't she? Because it was changing Haven... and the changes were not good.

Some few days before David Brown disappeared, Ruth realized with dull, dawning dismay that she had been ostracized by the town. No one spat at her when she walked down the street in the morning from her house to her office in the town hall... no one threw stones... she sensed much of the old kindness in their thoughts... but she knew people were turning to follow her progress as she walked. She did this with her head up, her face serene, just as if her head wasn't throbbing and pounding like a rotted tooth, just as if she hadn't spent the previous night (and the one before that, and the one before that, and...) tossing and turning, dozing into horrible, half-remembered dreams and then clawing her way out of them again.

They were watching her... watching and waiting for...

For what?

But she knew: they were waiting for her to “become.”

In the week between the fire at the Paulsons” and Hilly's SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, things began to go wrong for Ruth.

The mail, now. That was one thing.

She kept on getting bills and circulars and catalogues, but there were no letters. No personal mail of any kind. After three days of this, she took a stroll down to the post office. Nancy Voss only stood behind the counter like a lump, looking at her expressionlessly. By the time Ruth finished speaking, she thought she could actually feel the weight of the Voss woman's stare. It felt like two small dusty black stones were lying on her face.

In the silence, she could hear something in the office humming and making spiderlike scritching noises. She had no idea what it

(except it sorts the mail for her)

might be but she didn't like the sound of it. And she didn't like being here with this woman, because she had been sleeping with Joe Paulson, and she had hated “Becka, and

Hot outside. Hotter still in here. Ruth felt sweat break out over her body.

“Have to fill out a mail complaint form,” Nancy Voss said in a slow, inflectionless voice. She slid a white card across the counter. “Here you go, Ruth.” Her lips pulled back in a cheerless grin.

Ruth saw half the woman's teeth were gone.

From behind them, in the silence: Scratch-scratch, scritchy-scratch, scratchscratch, scritchy-scratch.

Ruth began to fill out the form. Sweat darkened big circles around the armpits of her dress. Outside, the sun beat steadily down on the postoffice parking lot. It was ninety in the shade, had to be, and not a breath of wind stirring, and Ruth knew the paving in that lot would be so soft that you could tear off a chunk with your fingers if you wanted and begin to chew it...

State the Nature of Your Problem, the form read.

I'm going crazy, she thought, that is the nature of my problem. Also, I am having my first menstrual period in three years.

In a firm hand she began to write that she had gotten no first-class mail for a week and wished for the matter to be looked into.

Scratch -scratch, scritchy -scratch.

“What's that noise?” she asked, without looking up from the form. She was afraid to look up.

“Mail-sorting gadget,” Nancy droned. “I thought it up.” She paused. “But you know that, don't you, Ruth?”

“How could I know a thing like that unless you told me?” Ruth asked, and with a tremendous effort she made her voice pleasant. The pen she was using trembled and blotted the form—not that it mattered; her mail wasn't coming because Nancy Voss was throwing it out. That was part of the knowing, too. But Ruth was tough; her face remained clear and firm. She met Nancy's eyes directly, although she was afraid of that dusty black gaze, afraid of its weight.

Go on and speak up, Ruth's gaze said. I am not afraid of the likes of YOU. Speak up... but if you expect me to scutter away, squeaking like a mouse, get ready for a surprise.

Nancy's gaze wavered and dropped. She turned away. “Call me when you get the card filled out,” she said. “I've got too much work to do to just stand around shooting the breeze. Since Joe died, the work's piled up out of all season. That's probably why your mail isn't

(GET OUT OF TOWN YOU BITCH GET OUT WHILE WELL STILL LET YOU GO)

coming just on time, Missus McCausland.”

“Do you think so?” Keeping her voice light and pleasant now required a superhuman effort. Nancy's last thought had slammed into her like an uppercut. It had been as bright and clear as a lightning stroke. She looked down at the complaint form and saw a large black

(tumor)

blot spreading over it. She crumpled it and threw it away.

Nancy hadn't answered her question. Was pretending she hadn't heard, Ruth thought. But she had heard, all right.

Scritch -scritch -scratch.

The door opened behind her. She turned and saw Bobbi Anderson come in.

“Hello, Bobbi,” she said.

“Hello, Ruth.”

(go on she's right get out while you still can while you're still allowed please Ruth I we most of us bear you no ill will)

“Are you working on a new novel, Bobbi?” Ruth could now barely keep the tremor out of her voice. Hearing thoughts was bad—it made you think you were insane and hallucinating it. Hearing such a thing from Bobbi Anderson

(while you're still allowed)

of all people, Bobbi Anderson who was just about the kindest

I didn't hear anything like that, she thought, and grasped the idea with a sort of tired eagerness. I was mistaken, that's all.

Bobbi opened her post-box and took out a bundle of mail. She looked at her and smiled. Ruth saw she had lost a molar on the bottom left and a canine on the top right. “Better go now, Ruth,” she said gently. “Just get in your car and go. Don't you think so?”

Then she felt herself steady—in spite of her fear and her throbbing head, she steadied.

“Never,” she said. “This is my town. And if you know what's going on, tell the others that know what's going on not to push me. I have friends outside of Haven, friends that will listen to me seriously no matter how crazy what I'm saying might sound. They would listen for my late husband's sake, if not for my own. As for you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is your town, too. It used to be, anyway.”

For a moment she thought Bobbi looked confused and a little ashamed. Then she smiled sunnily, and there was something in that girlish, gap-toothed grin that scared Ruth more than anything else. It was no more human than a trout's grin. She saw Bobbi in this woman's eyes, and had certainly felt her in her thoughts... but there was nothing of Bobbi in the grin.

“Whatever you want, Ruth,” she said. “Everyone in Haven loves you, you know. I think in a week or two... three, at the outside... you'll stop fighting. I just thought I'd offer you the option. If you decide to stay, though, that's fine. In a little while you'll be... just fine.”

She stopped in Cooder's for Tampax. There were none. No Tampax, no Modess, no Sta-Free maxis or minis, no generic pads or tampons.

A hand-lettered sign read: NEW SHIPMENT ARRIVES TOMORROW. SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

On July 15th, a Friday, she began having problems with her office phone.

In the morning it was just an annoyingly loud hum which she and the person she was talking to had to shout over. By noon a crackling noise had been added. By two P. m. it had gotten so bad that the phone was useless.

When she got home she found that the phone there wasn't noisy at all. It was just smoothly and completely dead. She went next door to the Fannins” to call the phone company's repair number. Wendy Fannin was making bread in her kitchen, kneading one batch of dough while her mixer worked a second batch.

Ruth saw with a weary lack of surprise that the mixer wasn't plugged into the wall but into what looked like an electronic game with its cover off. It was generating a strong glow as Wendy mixed her bread.

“Sure, go ahead and use the phone,” Wendy said. “You know

(get out Ruth get out of Haven)

where it is, don't you?”

“Yes,” she said. She started toward the hall, then paused. “I stopped at Cooder's market. I needed sanitary napkins, but they're all out.”

“I know.” Wendy smiled, showing three gaps in a smile which had been flawless a week before. “I got the second-to-last box. It will be over soon. We'll “become” a little more and that part will end.”

“Is that so?” Ruth asked.

“Oh, yes,” Wendy said, and turned back to her bread.

The Fannins” phone was working just fine. Ruth was not surprised. The office girl at New England Contel said they would send a man right out. Ruth thanked her, and on her way out she thanked Wendy Fannin.

“Sure,” Wendy said, smiling. “Whatever you want, Ruth. Everyone in Haven loves you, you know.”

Ruth shuddered in spite of the heat.

The telephone repair crew came and did something to the connection on the side of Ruth's house. Then they ran a test. The phone worked perfectly. They drove away. An hour later, the phone stopped working again.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 480