Miracle

A Story

by JUNE WEST

THE sisters shared a bed and whispered violently in the sticky night. Virginia said, “ He was dreadful today. Especially to you.” Angela sighed. “It doesn’t matter.” But it did. It mattered terribly. She kicked the sheet off and shoved it onto the floor with her bare feet. Then she lay back in bed and hated her grandfather.

A thick layer of almost unbreathable heat hung heavy, hung limp, hung sodden and flatulent, draped over the Baptist parsonage like an endless mosquito netting from which escape is forever impossible, as in a nightmare.

Only Grandpapa was asleep, insulated by his ninety years, his partial deafness, and the quality of his own legend. Under his huge white beard he breathed hard, dreaming as always of Hell.

The Reverend Mr. Stanfield, his invalid wife, and his two daughters lay awake and waited. They left the hall doors open in the futile hope of a breeze and listened to each other sighing and turning. The clock in front of the King Undertaking Parlors next door struck twelve and went on unctuously ticking off the minutes that were left before your turn came too. (“And had you made proper arrangements?”) The parsonage was squeezed back between the mortuary and the Baptist Church and nobody who lived there ever forgot for very long about ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Only Grandpapa could sleep. He himself had retired from the ministry twenty years ago. The rest of them waited in the dark, steeping in perspiration. Angela was not sure what they waited for. Some merely for sleep; some, like herself, for a miracle. Just any miracle. It was slow coming. She would be seventeen next week.

It had been an unbearable day, a muggy, soggy Sunday, with Grandpapa bullying and tormenting the whole family, and — Well, there was no use thinking about that.

Something had to happen. It was that kind of night. Chartreuse heat lightning throbbed in a barren sky. Dry thunder careened, restless, among the moving planets. Angela caught her breath. The sky was electric with suspense. Something wonderful was waiting up there, something that meant something. If only everybody in the house would look up and hold his breath at the same time — if she could make them really listen — then this miracle would stalk lonely down the interstellar tunnels and take shape before them — in just a second — now!

“ Ahh! Satan!” Grandpapa rolled over in his bed and groaned loudly in his sleep, dreaming pleasurably of everlasting fires. “There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!” The deaf old preacher’s practiced voice crashed on the ears of his sleepless descendants.

“Here we go again!” muttered Virginia.

Angela’s miracle shuddered and fled. This, after all, was not the night for mystic unveilings. Just another night for listening to Grandpapa’s sermons in his sleep. He had not preached in the pulpit since his retirement, and he missed it.

“Beware!” he rejoiced. “The fearful time is upon you.”

“Oh, Lord!” moaned Daddy from his room at the end of the hall, and he did not sound like a preacher when he said it. But then he never did sound like a preacher, not like Grandpapa. He objected to the very word preacher, preferring minister or, at worst, parson. He believed in partial rather than total immersion. Grandpapa always said that was like believing in partial rather than total salvation and he didn’t know what the world was coming to. He did, though. It was coming to Hell.

“The everlasting flames are roaring, they leap higher every moment.” This was his favorite sermon, reserved for the hottest nights of all. In winter when the pipes froze he explained that Hell was made of ice.

“Oh, Lord.” Daddy bumped over in bed. A slat fell out and clattered on the bare floor. Virginia giggled. Daddy yelled, “Simmer down! Simmer down! ”

Angela sighed. Nothing was ever going to happen, in the sky, or in this house, or to her, ever, except that she would have to go on listening to Grandpapa’s brimstone oratory as long as she lived. He woidd go on ruling the parsonage and making everybody miserable forever and maybe after that. He was immortal. Heaven had rejected him and he had rejected Hell. It was a stalemate.

Sundays were always bad. Today he had scolded Mother like a child for having such a severe chill that she could not go to church. He sent fourteenyear-old Virginia weeping home from Sunday school because she had worn a gold bracelet; jewelry on the Sabbath was immoral. In church he scoffed out loud through Daddy’s sermon until the congregation tittered and Daddy plunged into the benediction half an hour too soon. But the worst had come when he had learned that Angela wanted to go to the High School Graduation Dance tomorrow.

Preachers’ daughters never went to dances. But this was different. She was graduating, second in the class. The Class President had asked her to lead the Promenade with him. She had saved her tiny allowance to buy pink organdy for her first party dress, and had sewed it herself, in secret. She had done the hem over five times but it still wobbled. This afternoon, though, when she put it on to surprise Daddy, her eyes had been so bright and eager in her thin face that the hem had not mattered. Daddy had stared at her so proudly that for the first time she thought, “Maybe I’m going to be pretty!”

Daddy had not said she might go, but he had listened. Virginia had helped her beg and coax. Mother had got out of bed, pale and unsteady, to urge him, “It’s only a little dance.” At last he had smiled at Angela and said, “But you don’t know how to dance.”

“I could learn!” she had answered, springing up. She had lifted her arms into dancing position and begun to whirl and whirl, faster and faster. “See? This is a waltz!”

“No, no!” Mother had cried. “It goes like this.” She had wrapped her kimono about her and stood up, eyes suddenly shining, chill forgotten, while her daughters stared. She had clapped her hands in accompaniment and swayed as she moved. “Step, slide, slide. Step, slide, slide. I remember!”

Daddy had looked into her eyes strangely and said, “So do I.” Angela had never heard his voice so uneven. “So do I.”

2

THAT was when Grandpapa had stalked in, tall and bald and bad-tempered. He had flashed his eyes, cleared his famous throat, and settled himself inside the sanctuary of his beard, hurling epithets viciously. Carnal knowledge. Lascivious women. Degenerate generation. “Besides,” he had ended, “only riffraff run around on the streets at night. Half naked.” He had tugged contemptuously at her pink dress, which had no sleeves — tugged so hard that t he organdy tore sharply across the waist.

Angela had managed not to cry.

Daddy had said, “How about a little picnic tomorrow, instead of the dance?” and had picked up a book, trying not to look at Mother.

Everybody was unhappy now, except Grandpapa. At the head of each bed hung a queasy rag, soaked in turpentine, dripping oil onto the sweatdamp pillows. The smell was hardly endurable, but it kept the mosquitoes away for a little while.

“Look out! Behind you, in the shadow! See his scaly face, smell his poisonous breath.”

Angela turned over too quickly. There was a loud rip and a tug at her nightgown. Virginia giggled. Angela flared, “I wish I didn’t have to be pinned onto you!”

“Well, it’s no fun for me, I can tell you.” Virginia sat up and removed the huge safety pin that held their cotton gowns together. Virginia sometimes walked in her sleep. Now they pinned her gown to Angela’s so that Angela could wake up whenever she moved and pull her back into bed.

“Ah-hanh!” gloated Grandpapa. “You’re thirsty now, O careless Sinner, but there is no drink in the Great Pit.” He was sometimes left out of the conversation in the day but the nights belonged to him, and he knew it. He was always at his best when the doors had to be left open. Tonight was made for him.

Everybody was always going around telling about what a powerful evangelist he used to be, with his enormous black beard, and how grown men had sobbed and little children shrieked and there always had to be a doctor at the tent meetings to take care of the ones who had fits.

And his wives. Sometimes it was said he had four, all dead, and sometimes five, still dead. When you asked him he talked about the Devil and got deafer than ever. If you asked Daddy, who was the tenth son, he was pretty sure he remembered at least two stepmothers in his boyhood, one fat and one thin, but both weepy as long as they lasted. Like Mother now.

He had had the beard as long as anybody could remember. He combed it twice a day. Sometimes he put brilliantine on it. It was the most beautiful beard in Tennessee. It hung to his waist and spread across his shoulders; it was his shining armor. The whole family was secretly proud of it. Even Angela could not help knowing how he impressed the little town. Other girls might go to dances, but no one had an ancestor like that. She took her turn meekly at the ceremonial washing of Grandpapa’s beard once a week, and never forgot to put bluing in the rinse water.

“You cannot swallow,” he shouted now. “No, Sir Drunkard, your throat is sealed, your tongue is swollen. . . .”

Mother was getting up slowly in the next room and trailing the sheets on the floor. She was going to take the sheets downstairs and wring them out in the cold water that dripped into the rusty dishpan under the icebox. The sheets left sepia streaks on you that showed up like blood in the dawn, but Mother insisted that it helped a little. She padded dimly into the doorway, her hair courageously screwed up in kid-leather curlers, one hand clutching the short skimpy skirt of her nightgown as if it were a train. She should have had one for ballast. She said, “Angela, I’m sorry about the dance. Maybe something will happen. I’ll try to think of something.”

“No water in Hell!” cried the old preacher, full of breath.

What if he wasn’t asleep?

Mother’s voice sagged sweetly. “It’s hard to think in this heat.” She wavered on her uneven path to the kitchen, sheets dragging eerily.

A sound of splashing and then of muttering came from Daddy’s room. He had tried to pour a glass of water from the pitcher on his table and had spilled it in the dark. “Mrs. Stanfield!” he shouted to Mother downstairs. “ Will you bring me a glass of water?” Mother being Mother, you could not tell whether she heard or not. He moaned, enunciating distinctly, “Just a lit-tle glass of wat-r from the faucet. Just — let — it — run.” Someone was supposed to ask him what the matter was. No one spoke.

Maybe he would say something about the dance.

Angela got up and took him a glass of water from the bathroom. He did not mention the dance. She sighed. Life was a constant struggle to get your way agreeably from older people on whom you were dependent, without giving yourself away. Daddy and Mother were quite nice parents, better than lots, but if you really told them anything they took advantage of it. If she should tell Daddy how she felt about the sky tonight, with the thunder serenading the stars, and Something going to happen, he would talk to her about God (assuring her all the time that he was not talking as a minister), or he would insist that he had been through the same thing himself. She did not want him to have been through the same thing. He would make a Lasting Tie of it. She did not want any ties that would have to be acknowledged when she was in another mood.

Mother padded upstairs. The sheets rustled wetly and squeaked with a faint silken sound. Angela thought that if she ever got old and became a ghost she too would haunt the hallways shrouded in wet cotton and rusty ice water, looking reproachful but never saying why. Not that Mother needed to say why. That Mrs. Hunt sitting in the choir staring at Daddy. And Daddy, who had never wanted to be a preacher, looking at her from the pulpit and saying right out loud that Hell was in the mind. Angela wondered if Grandpapa knew. He was not blind. Only deaf.

It was a shame Grandpapa could not hear himself. “He is going to grab you! Closer, Closer, CLOSER. ...”

3

A JAGGED sound shrieked out of the sky and split the darkness. It shot straight toward all human sanity, obliterating everything but the roaring in Angela’s ears. She shot out of bed and landed standing up. Was this what had lurked behind the stars, waiting? The end of the world? Somebody screamed. Herself? Then, sickeningly, nothing. A silence was born, grew up, languished, and died.

Then came an earthly sound, not mysterious now, but still a sound of terror. The fire siren! It was the Devil loose on the night, and the Devil was an idiot, snuffling and gibbering and howling.

Angela raced Virginia to the window. They stood with arms around each other, quivering. Flames seared the darkness. The fire was close. Across the street and in the next block a building showed clearly, outlined by the glow of flames. The building was set back from the street, catercornered from the parsonage. Angela could see most of it through the trees. Virginia was shuddering. “Don’t be afraid,” said Angela. She wanted to run, to scream, to hide under the bed and never come out. Lights went on in near-by houses. Doors slammed. Voices called, tense and awed. There was another sound, too, a shrill squealing, not the siren, something more horrible yet, that could be heard when the siren slacked.

Daddy and Mother came in to watch from the window. Angela’s terror increased when she saw that Mother breathed quickly and that Daddy’s face was white. She said, “There’s a funny sort of sound —”

They listened and stared back at her, shocked.

A man ran past in the street below. He shouted, “Thompson’s barn!”

That was the sound then. The horses, inside.

“Can the sparks come over here?” asked Virginia.

“Where’s Grandpapa?”

“Let him sleep. He must be very tired not to hear this,” Mother said.

Daddy agreed. “First time I ever knew him to miss a fire. He’s getting deafer.”

The fire engine clanged up the street. Crowds of people appeared, running and panting. One woman carried her baby and the baby screamed, over and over.

It was better when the siren stopped. Panic subsided. There was reassurance in the sound of pumps and hissing hoses. The firemen moved quickly. A man shouted, “They’re getting the horses out!” There was a cheer from the crowd that brought tears of excitement and relief to Angela’s eyes.

“May we go?” she cried.

“Yes,” said Daddy. “Or rather — no. That’s only riffraff down there.” All he needed was a beard.

It was a wonderful fire. The first good one since the courthouse burned two years ago, the first real community event in months, unless you counted church meetings. The whole town was awake, and grateful now that the hysteria was over. The barn could not be saved. The flames flamed and the smoke smoked and the firemen struggled heroically with the writhing hoses. The best of all was when the roof caved in with a great crash, and the crowd backed away, screaming. Sparks shot up high enough to merge for an instant with the churning sky. Angela thought, “I knew something was going to happen!”

But it was over too soon. Rapidly the color faded and the noise died. Only damp smoke was left. The crowd shuffled listlessly home, yawning, to stuffy rooms and the smell of turpentine at the head of their beds. Lights went out like hopes. Doors slammed. The long summer boredom settled in again.

Angela sat in the window alone after the others went to bed. She tried to choke down disappointment. What had she expected? That the whole town would burn down?

4

FAR away a steamboat whistled, muffled and mournful and unbelieving. The water moccasins would be swimming contentedly in the green swamp scum that lined the railroad tracks. In the ditches the fireflies glowed, faded, glowed, as carefully as if they meant something. Angela blinked resentfully at the mocking sky.

Then she heard the men, a little group of them, talking and laughing in the street. They were arguing, too, and leading — no, pulling — somebody with them. She leaned out of t he window as far as she could. The somebody seemed to be pulling back and protesting. Maybe it was a fight!

A familiar voice clanged in the dark, proclaiming, “Children of the Flame! You cannot quench the fires of Hell!”

“Where’s Grandpapa?” She fled across to his room. It was empty. “He must have gone down the back stairs while we were at the window.”

The others were all up now, pulling on robes and hurrying down the steps behind her.

Three firemen brought him to the front door. “He’s not hurt,” they said. “He’s lucky.”

Angela could not tell, at first, what made him look so queer, standing reluctantly in the door and glaring about him so wearily. He had pulled his Prince Albert coat on over his pajamas and stuck his wrinkled feet sockless into his shoes, but that was not what made him look so tarnished.

The firemen tried not to grin. “Just got a mite too close to the fire and scorched his beard, that’s all.” They touched him on the back as if he were just any old man.

His descendants stared in horror, and he stared back sheepishly — a begrimed and singed old ram. The magnificent fleece was ruined forever — browned and seared and crinkled. Only the firemen had the heart to speak. “He’ll be all right. But that beard is a mess. Always reckoned he was goin’ to get too close some time. Old man never could stay away from a fire.”

“Yep. Sure does love a fire.”

They did not laugh until they were in the street.

It was as if all the family portraits had been defiled.

They pulled themselves together. They sat him down in the kitchen, washed, brushed, fed him. They vaselined his face in case it was scorched. The smell of burnt hair was sickening. No one spoke. They waited for his smoldering wrath. But he was quiet. He only humped over in his chair and muttered a little and then yawned loudly. He just sat there. It was embarrassing.

Mother faced truth first. “Bring me the scissors, Angela.”

They argued, but they knew she was right. When she set to work, Daddy turned his head. Virginia covered her face. Mother made strong, ruthless sweeps straight across. She cut it short. She snipped and clipped until the famous beard was only a stubble on an ancient chin. Ugly hunks of scorched hair littered the floor.

When it was all over, the little old man with the thin neck ran his hand over his face as if surprised to find he had one. He fumbled over his chest where the beard used to rest. “Shorn,” he mourned. “Shorn, like an old bellwether.”

For the first time in her life Angela put her arm around his shoulders. She even patted his cheek. “Maybe it will grow out again.” But she knew it wouldn’t.

“Fleeced.” Two tears stumbled down his screwed-up cheeks. “Bospoiled. Ravished.”

“But you look so handsome, Grandpapa.” Angela ran for a mirror.

That was a mistake. He stared at the mirror in dismay, as at an enemy. He straightened up belligerently and turned himself with difficulty to glare up at Mother. He ground the word out. “Delilah!”

Mother gasped and flushed, but she looked straight into his eyes for a long moment. Then she put the scissors down sharply and walked out. Her step was quick, sure.

By the time they were all in bed again, a tiny breeze shuffled along the floors. Angela listened to the slow separate breathings of her family sliding off into sleep, and loved them all, especially poor little Grandpapa.

“Ah hannnh, Satan!” The brassy voice came out as loud as ever. It clattered through the house and instantly they were all awake.

“Quiet, old man, quiet!” groaned Daddy without hope.

It was beginning again. Mother sighed. Angela ground her teeth and wondered if she could sleep with a pillow over her head. This was too much, it really w as.

“Lord,” said Grandpapa, “Lord —the truth is —”

Angela lifted her head quckly. There was a new note in his voice, a matter-of-fact ness. A relaxation. “The truth is—” he said calmly, “it’s a lot cooler this way.”

There was a long silence. Then a thing happened which was not a usual thing. It was that Mother began to laugh. She said, “It’s a lot cooler this way,” and she laughed and the sound was so sheer and so rare that her daughters sat up, not believing what they heard, and wanting it to go on forever. It was as if the earth and the air had reached an impasse, and neither one would give in, but they strove against each other, blinded with heat, and no hope of surcease, and then suddenly a fragrant silver rain had blown across the world and you could taste on your tongue the smell of new-washed dust.

“Oh, maybe she’s getting well,” breathed Virginia, and she laughed, and Angela, too, and the sound flashed and glinted like quicksilver in the parsonage.

“Simmer down, you females!” called Daddy, but it sounded like a cheer.

When they had simmered down, sleep came quickly to the others. Not to Angela. She would have to hurry. She listened until she was sure they were asleep. She got up very quietly and stood in the middle of the floor a moment, concentrating. She wanted to get it just right. Then she lifted her arms into dancing position, and began to sway. “Step, slide, slide. Step, slide, slide. Step, slide, slide—”

She hummed the first tune that came to her mind. It did not matter that the tune happened to be “Lead, Kindly Light.”