The Long Tomorrow

“He said, ‘They have sinned! They have sinned against My laws, and against My prophets, who warned them even in old Jerusalem against the luxuries of Egypt and of Babylon! And they have exalted themselves in their pride. They have climbed up into the heavens which are My throne, and they have rent open the earth which is My footstool, and they have loosed the sacred fire which lies at the very heart of things, and which only I, the Lord Jehovah, should dare to touch.’ And God said, ‘Even so, I am merciful. Let them be cleansed of their sin.’ ”

The howling rose louder, and all across the open field there was a tossing of arms and a writhing of heads.

“Let them be cleansed!” cried the preaching man. His body was strained up, quivering, and the sparks shot up past him. “God said it, and they were cleansed, my brethren! With their own sins they were chastised. They were burned with the fires of their own making, yea, and the proud towers vanished in the blazing of the wrath of God! And with fire and famine and thirst and fear they were driven from their cities, from the places of iniquity and lust, even our own fathers and our fathers’ fathers, who had sinned, and the places of iniquity were made not, even as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Somewhere across the crowd a woman screamed and fell backward, beating her head against the earth. Len never noticed.

The voice of the preaching man sank down again to that harsh far-carrying whisper.

“And so we were spared of God’s mercy, to find His way and follow it.”

“Hallelujah,” screamed the crowd. “Hallelujah!” The preaching man held up his hands. The crowd quieted. Len held his breath, waiting. His eyes were fixed on the black burning eyes of the man on the wagon. He saw them narrow down, until they looked like the eyes of a cat just ready to spring, only they were the wrong color.

“But,” said the preaching man, “Satan is still with us.”

The rows of people jerked forward with a feral yelp, held down and under by the hands of the preacher.

“He wants us back. He remembers what it was like, the Devil does, when he had all those soft fair women to serve him, and all the rich men, and the cities all shining with lights to be his shrines! He remembers, and he wants them back! So he sends his emissaries among us—oh, you wouldn’t know them from your own God-fearing folk, my brethren, with their meek ways and sober garments! But they go about secretly proselyting, tempting our boys and young men, dangling the forbidden serpent’s fruit in front of them, and on the brow of every one of them is the mark of the beast—the mark of Bartorstown!”

Len pricked his ears up higher at that. He had heard the name of Bartorstown just once before, from Granma, and he remembered it because of the way Pa had shut her up. The crowd yowled, and some of them got up on their feet. Esau pressed up closer against Len, and he was quivering all over. “Ain’t this something?” he whispered. “Ain’t this something!”

The preaching man looked all around. He didn’t quiet the people this time, he let them quiet down of themselves, out of their eagerness to hear what he had to say next. And Len sensed something new in the air. He did not know what it was, but it excited him so he wanted to scream and leap up and down, and at the same time it made him uneasy. It was something these people understood, they and the preaching man together.

“Now,” said the man on the wagon, quietly, “there are some sects, all God-fearing folk, I’m not saying they don’t try, that think it’s enough to say to one of these emissaries of Satan, Go, leave our community, and don’t come back. Now maybe they just don’t understand that what they’re really saying is, Go and corrupt somebody else, we’ll keep our own house clean!” A sharp downward wave of his hands stifled a cry from the people as though he had shoved a cork in their mouths. “No, my friends. That is not our way. We think of our neighbor as ourself. We honor the government law that says there shall be no more cities. And we honor the Word of God, who saith that if our right eye offend us we must pluck it out, and if our right hand offend us we must cut it off, and that the righteous can have no part with evil men, no, not if they be our own brothers or fathers or sons!”

A noise went up from the people now that turned Len hot all over and closed up his throat and made his eyeballs prick. Somebody threw wood on the bonfire. It roared up a torrent of sparks and a yellow glaring of flame, and there were people rolling on the ground now, men and women both, clawing up the dirt with their fingers and screaming. Their eyes were all white, and it was not funny. And over the crowd and the firelight went the voice of the preaching man, howling shrill and mighty like a great animal in the night.

“If there be evil among you, cast it forth!”

A lank boy with the beard just sprouting on his chin leaped up. He pointed. He cried out, “I accuse him!” and the froth ran wet in the corners of his mouth.