Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

The same thing was going on at the airports, and at the docks where the exodus was the most pronounced.

For the next several weeks Derek and Blake worked together in the cabin, and Derek was happier than he had been for a long time. During this period of time Blake changed. Before Derek’s eyes he changed. His hair became mud-colored, and his eyes adapted to contacts that made them brown and smaller-looking. His cheeks became sunken, and his chin seemed to recede slightly, the result of the way he held his head, half ducked so that he peered up from lowered eyes. A new expression of obsequious servility intermixed with repressed brutality changed him even more. He shuffled his left foot when he walked now, not enough to bring a close study, but enough to change his walk from that of a young man to that of a man in his mid years, tired and despairing. Very carefully he planted hair in his ears, and in the midst of the dirt and earwax was a transmitter and a receiver. He and Derek would be in touch.

As soon as it all was in place he started to mutter. He left the cabin muttering to himself, and Derek turned on his receiver and listened to the snatches of filthy verse, strings of curses, bits of… so I says and he says… narratives, ruminations about the good old days, and so on. Derek burst out laughing. The shuffling man looked about wildly and muttered darkly about voices from the sky.

His role was finished with that touch. His name would be James Teague until further nonce, And he left Derek alone in the mountain cabin, alone, but not lonely.

Several days later, in the middle of a spring that was cold and dry, promising another year of drought to a land already worn out with dryness and the despair of no crops worth harvesting, there appeared in Des Moines a derelict muttering about the weather, about the lack of work, about the rottenness of the system, about the old days when a man could get a drink…. He shuffled about the city for weeks, getting in the way here and there, sleeping in doorways, getting rolled once or twice, but left undamaged; aimless, harmless, penniless, hungry, he quickly became a fixture, recognized by the cops and the inhabitants alike, accepted by them all. He wasn’t in the way any more than the thousands like him were in the way, and if his muttering became wearisome after a time, the listener could leave him without another thought. Eventually he turned up in a Listener’s .Booth and stood fumbling a shapeless hat for several minutes saying nothing, but muttering furiously, until he turned and left without confessing anything. The following week he was back, and this time he talked haltingly. “M’name’s Teague,” he said. “James Teague, that’s it.” This time also, he raised his gaze from the filthy hat and looked about him in darting, suspicious glances. There was little enough to see. The room was small, ten by ten feet, heavily draperied and comfortable at 72 degrees. The air was clean and fresh-smelling, regardless of the condition of the confessors who appeared there. And there was the voice there. It whispered and murmured encouragement to the confessor, and welcomed him to return when he was ready. It understood, no matter what he said, the listener understood. On his fourth visit Teague confessed to murder, of his wife and their three children. In a trembling voice, with much hesitation, many pauses, in a fashion of almost total incoherency he confessed to having chopped them to pieces with an ax and having buried them in a common grave in the Missouri Hills. He said that she had mocked him for the voice he heard.

“I didn’t want to do it, I really didn’t want to, but the voice, it said that I had to and I couldn’t see no other way out but to go ahead and do it and get it done with. She warn’t no bad woman, but she never heard the voice like I did and she mocked at it all the time and told the children to mock at it and to laugh it outa my head, ‘James Teague, you’re a crazy old man,’ she said, and the voice said I gotta make them all stop, so I did it.”

That week a card was given to him. It came out of nowhere to appear on the table in front of him, and the card told him to go to the Voice of God Church three blocks away and talk to the Reverend Huston Avery there. He read it aloud, like a child mastering his first primer, and then he read it again, and when he left he was muttering to himself about not going to see no Reverend Avery and it didn’t matter what the card told him to do, he wasn’t about to tell nobody about what he done, and it had been a mistake to go to the booth….

That night he showed up at the church, still very suspicious, uncommunicative. He spoke to no one. He handled the card all the time however. He returned to the church half a dozen times before the Reverend Huston Avery approached him and took him to an interior office where he talked seriously to him about the call of God.

“Sometimes God has us do things which would horrify our neighbors and arouse the wrath of the non-believers. It is a test for us. I see by the card that you are holding that you are one of the chosen. One of the many Hands of God, chosen to do His will, spoken to, directly by Him. Is this not true?”

The old man nodded without speaking.

“Yes. I suspected that it was so. And you feel that by obeying God’s call you have committed a crime for which the authorities will punish you. Is that not so?”

“Warn’t no crime. Just done what I had to do.”

“Yes, brother. The Voice of God spoke to you and you obeyed. That makes you one of the chosen ones.”

Reverend Avery was in his thirties, open-faced, beaming at the derelict happily. He was a good-looking man, and very kind. “How old are you, sir?”

“Forty-two, forty-three, don’t rightly remember exactly:”

“Would you like a job? We have work you can do.”

So James Teague started to work for the Voice of God Church. He did handyman labor at first, but gradually came to be trusted enough to hang out with the MM’s who stood guard during the services and who accompanied the Reverend Avery when he held rallies. James Teague didn’t join the MM’s because he was too old to be eligible, but in spirit he was one of them and recognized as such. After six months of dutiful labor, spending his wages each week on booze and women, he became converted himself. It happened spontaneously. He had a cot in the Church dorm, where many of the MM’s stayed. Nightly the Voice talked to them, praising their work, extolling them to greater efforts in the service of God. Teague never had paid much attention to the Voice before, but continued his almost inaudible monologue while the Voice spoke, but this time he cocked his head suddenly and started to listen hard, even after the Voice had stopped speaking. He nodded, listened, nodded again. He sat silently then for half an hour, again assumed his listening attitude, this time rising to his feet and leaving the room as one who walks in his sleep. The MM corporal who was on duty alerted Reverend Avery, who intercepted Teague in the hall leading to the street.

“Where are you going, James?”

Teague stopped, but didn’t focus his eyes on Avery. He said nothing.

“James, can you hear me?”

Teague saw him then. “You gotta let me go, I gotta go outside. Gotta get away from it. Keeps on and on. On and on all the time now.”

“What is it saying to you, James? You can tell me.”

“Says that I gotta go to the temple and go into service there. I don’t know nothing about no temple. I don’t know.”

“James, come into the office with me.” Reverend Avery led him into the small, very private office where he seated the man and left him. After a moment Teague raised his head again and listened. This time there was a Voice there.

“James, you must go to the temple and offer yourself for service to the Lord. The Lord is calling you, James. You must answer His call.”