The Second Coming

bricks under the door with the other and start over. When the door was a little higher than the cleared bunk, she eased him over door and all, hoisted one end of the door, the head end, high enough to put three bricks under it so water would run off when she gave him a bath.
    The only real trouble was getting his clothes off. Pulleys were no use. Man is pitiful without a tool. It took all her sweating gasping strength to tug the slippery khaki over his hips and to roll him over far enough to yank one elbow clear of a sleeve. Why not cut his clothes off? Then dress him in what? She considered his underwear shorts. She wouldn’t have minded him naked but perhaps, later, he would. She covered him with her sleeping bag while she drew two pots of water, one for him, one for his clothes, the clothes first so they would have time to dry in the sun. No, the sun would take too long. Instead, she hung the shirt and pants on the nickel towel rack of the great stove. Quel pleasure, putting her stove to such good use!
    It took all afternoon. She didn’t mind bathing a man. How nice people are, unconscious! They do not glance. Yes, she should be a nurse of comatose patients. Again it was a matter of calculating weights and angles and hefts. The peculiar recalcitrant slack weight of the human body required its own physics. Heaving him over to get at his back, a battleground of cuts and scrapes and caked blood and bruises, she wondered: what had he done, fallen off a mountain? His face! With its week’s growth of beard, a heavy streaked yellow-and-white stubble, and the lump above his jawbone, he looked like a covite with a wad of chewing tobacco. But only when she finished did she stop to gaze down at him. No, not a redneck. Except for the golfer’s tan of his face and arms, his skin was white, with a faint bluish cast. The abdomen dropping away hollow under his ribs, the thin arms and legs with their heavy slack straps of muscle, cold as clay, reminded her of some paintings of the body of Christ taken down from the crucifix, the white flesh gone blue with death. The closed eyes sunk in their sockets and bluish shadow. The cheekbones thrust out like knees. He had lost weight. While his beard grew he had not eaten.
    Exhausted, she cooked a supper of oatmeal and made a salad of brook lettuce and small tart apples from the ruined orchard and hickory nuts. Her back felt looks. She turned around. The dog and the man were watching her, the dog with his anvil head between his paws, the man with his cheek resting on his elbow. The looks did not dart or pierce or impale. They did not control her. They were shyer than she and gave way before her, like the light touch of a child’s hand in the dark. The man looked one way, the dog the other, as if she were not there. Was she there?
    The man could not sit up to eat. She fed him. He ate heartily but his eyes, like the dog’s, only met hers briefly and went away as he chewed. She put hot oatmeal in the dog’s dry meal from the fifty-pound sack, which she had packed from town by tying it like a blanket roll in the lower flap of the Italian NATO knapsack. Her strength surprised her. She could hoist anything.
    2
    It wasn’t bad taking care of him. To tell the truth, before he landed in the greenhouse, she had begun to slip a little. It surprised her. She liked her new life. Physically she was healthy and strong. The hard work of cleaning the greenhouse and moving the stove made her hungry and tired. She ate heartily and slept like a log. She gained weight. When she caught sight of herself in the shop windows of Linwood, she did not at first recognize the tan towheaded long-haired youth loping along.
    But looks became more impaling. Some people, most Southern people, guard their looks as if they knew what she knew about looks: that they are not like other things. The world is full of two kinds of things, looks and everything else. Some people do not guard their looks. A woman met her eye in an aisle of the supermarket and looked too long. The look made a tunnel. The shelves of cans seemed to curve around the look like the walls of a tunnel. She knew she was not crazy because a can fell off.
    Some people use their looks to impale. Once, as she walked down the street, her thighs felt a look. She turned around. A dark stout man perhaps from Florida (most visitors were from Florida), perhaps a Cuban, perhaps South American, was not only looking at her buttocks but had