From the Corner of His Eye

you?"
        Surprised, Bill said, "It's a fine day for January."
        "The thousand-year quake is overdue," Edom warned.
        "Thousand-year? " Jolene said, frowning.
        "The San Andreas should have a magnitude eight-point-five or greater quake once every thousand years, to relieve stress on the fault.
        It's hundreds of years overdue."
        Well, it won't happen on the day Agnes's baby is born, I'll guarantee you that," said Jolene.
        "He was born yesterday, not today," Edom said glumly. "When the thousand-year quake hits, skyscrapers will pancake, bridges crumble, dams break. In three minutes, a million people will die between San Diego and Santa Barbara."
        "Then I better have more cake," Bill said, pushing his plate toward Jolene.
        "Oil and natural-gas pipelines will fracture, explode. A sea of fire will wash cities, killing hundreds of thousands more."
        "You figure all this," Jolene asked, "because Mother Nature gives us a nice warm day in January?"
        "Nature has no maternal instincts," Edom said quietly but with conviction. "To think otherwise is sheer sentimentality at its worst. Nature is our enemy. She's a vicious killer."
        Jolene started to refill his coffee mug-then thought better of it. "Maybe you don't need more caffeine, Edom."
        "Do you know about the earthquake that destroyed seventy percent of Tokyo and all of Yokohama on September 1, 1923?" he asked.
        "They still had enough gumption left to fight World War Two, Bill noted.
        "After the quake," Edom said, "forty thousand people took refuge in a two-hundred-acre open area, a military depot. A quake-related fire swept through so fast they were killed standing up, so tightly packed together they died as a solid mass of bodies."
        "Well, we have earthquakes here," Jolene said, "but back east they have all those hurricanes."
        "Our new roof," Bill said, pointing overhead, "will hold through any hurricane. Fine work. You tell Agnes what fine work it is."
        Having gotten the new roof for them at cost, Agnes subsequently put together donations from a dozen individuals and one church group to cover all but two hundred dollars of the outlay.
        "The hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, back in 1900, killed six thousand people," Edom said. "Virtually obliterated the place."
        "That was all of sixty-five years ago," Jolene said.
        "Less than a year and a half ago, Hurricane Flora-she killed over six thousand in the Caribbean."
        "Wouldn't live in the Caribbean if you paid me," Bill said. "All that humidity. All those bugs."
        "But nothing equals a quake for killing. Big one in Shaanxi, China, killed eight hundred thirty thousand."
        Bill wasn't impressed. "They build houses out of mud in China. No wonder everything falls down."
        "This was back on January 24, 1556," said Edom with unhesitating authority, for he had memorized tens of thousands of facts about the worst natural disasters in history.
        "Fifteen fifty-six?" Bill frowned. "Hell, the Chinese probably didn't even have mud back then."
        Fortifying herself with more coffee, Jolene said, "Edom, you were going to tell us how Joey's coping with fatherhood."
        Glancing at his wristwatch with alarm, Edom bolted up from his chair. "Look at the time! Agnes gave me a lot to do, and here I am rattling on about earthquakes and cyclones."
        "Hurricanes," Bill corrected. "They're different from cyclones, aren't they?"
        "Don't get me started on cyclones!" Edom hurried through the house and out to the station wagon, to fetch the boxes of groceries.
        The blue vault above, cloudless now, was the most threatening sky that Edom had ever seen. The air was astonishingly dry so soon after a storm. And still. Hushed. Earthquake weather. Before this momentous day was done, great temblors and five-hundred-foot tidal waves would rock and swamp the coast.

Chapter 25
        
        OF THE SEVEN NEWBORNS, none was fussing, too fresh to the world to realize how much was here to fear.
        One nurse and one nun brought Celestina into the creche behind the viewing window.
        She strove to appear calm, and she must have succeeded, because neither woman seemed to realize that she was scared almost to the point of paralysis. She moved woodenly, joints stiff, muscles tense.
        The nurse lifted the infant from its