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pass through him, it would never leave him, he was in its grasp.
"I had nothing to say," he said to Bree.
"Nothing to say!"
"Because he's right." Right, right, how pointless. "Because if we want
him not to do it, we have to make him. Because . . ." There was no way to
say it, no way to pass it from him in words. He felt suffocated, as though he
were caught in a vacuum.
When, after her affair with Grady, Bree had begun reading the Bible and
talking and thinking about Jesus, she had tried to make Meric feel what she
felt. "It's being good," she had said. Meric did his best to be good, to be
Christlike, to be gentle; but he never felt it, as Bree did, to be a gift, a
place to live, an intense happiness. He thought to say now that what he had
felt in Painter's tent was what she had felt when she first knew Jesus, when
she had glowed continually with it and been unable to explain it, when it made
her weep.
But what could that mean to Bree? Her gentle Jesus, her lover who asked
nothing of her but to stand with her and walk with her and lie down with her,
what had he to do with the cruel, ravishing, wordless thing that had seized
Meric?
"It's like Jesus," he said, ashamed, the words like dust in his mouth.
He heard her breath indrawn, shocked. But it was true. Jesus was two natures,
God and man, the godhead in him burning through the flesh toward his
worshipers, burning out the flesh in them. Painter was two natures too:
through his thin, strained voice pressed all the dark, undifferentiated world,
all the voiceless beasts; it was the world Candy had urged us to flee from and
Jesus promised to free us from, the old world returned to capture us, speak in
a voice to us, reclaim us for its own. It was as though the heavy,
earth-odorous Titans had returned to strike down at last the cloudy scheming
gods, as though the circle had closed that had seemed an upward spiral, as
though a reverse messiah had come to crush all useless hope forever.
As though, as though, as though. Meric looked up from the face on the
screen, and drew a deep, tremulous breath. Tears burned on his dirty cheeks.
The chains, as they had in Painter's tent, fell away from him. Nothing to say,
yes, at last nothing to say.
Unable, despite a repugnance so deep it was like horror, to take her
eyes from the screen, Bree heard unbidden in her mind the child's song she
still sometimes sang herself to sleep with: _Little ones to him belong; they
are weak but he is strong_. She shuddered at the blasphemy of it, and stood as
though waking from an oppressive dream. "It doesn't matter," she said. "Pretty
soon they'll be gone anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"Grady told me," she said. "There are Federal people here. One of those
-- animals committed a crime or something. The Feds want to go in and arrest
him, or drive them off, or something."
He stood. She turned away from his look, "Grady's going with them. They
were only waiting till you got back. What are you doing?"
He had begun to open cabinets, take out clothes, equipment. "I haven't
come back," he said.
"What do you mean?"
He knotted together the laces of a pair of heavy boots so that they
could be carried. "Do they have guns?" he asked. "How many are there? Tell
me."
"I don't know. I guess, guns. Grady will be with them. It's all right."
He seemed mad. She wanted to touch him, put a hand on him, restrain him; but
she was afraid. "You have come back," she said.
He pulled on a quilted coat. "No," he said. "I came for this stuff." He
was cramming recording tape, lenses, bits and pieces quickly into his pack. "I
meant to stay a night, two nights. Talk to Emma." He stopped packing, but
didn't look up at her. "Say good-bye to you."
A rush of fear contracted her chest. "Good-bye!"
"Now I've got to hurry," he said. "I've got to reach them before Grady
and those." Still he hadn't looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said, quick, curt,
rejecting.
"No," she said. "What's the matter?"
"I'm going back to them," he said. "I've got to -- get it all down.
Record it all. So people can see." He slung the pack over his shoulder, and
filled his pockets with the bread she had set out for him. "And now I've got
to warn them."
"_Warn_ them! They're thieves, they're killers!" She gasped it out.
"They don't belong here, they have to go, they have to _stop it_!" He had
turned to go. She grabbed at his sleeve. "What have they done to you?"
He only shook her off, his face set. He went out of their space and into
the broad, low corridors that swept across the level. From the long high lines
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