Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [23]
They are startled, roused from torpor. Hugh stares up at her; she has given him no warning of this.
"Are ye ready for translation?"
"Aye!" they answer in a jagged chorus.
"But the forty days are not over," says Hugh confusedly.
She throws him an impatient look. "Christ's days are not measured like ours. I say again, are ye ready?"
"Aye!" goes the general roar.
"If ye are truly ready, Christ will come."
And suddenly Hugh knows it is true. The spark lights in his chest and flames up. He leads the roar: "Come, Christ!"
"Soon ye will be eating from the Tree of Paradise," she tells them, her voice almost singing.
"How soon?"
"Very soon. Watch and wait," she says, sitting down and lighting her pipe with composure.
Hugh sits at her feet, staring up at her, tense with excitement. "See," he whispers to the others, "Friend Mothers face shines with the glory of Christ." She is so sure, she is so radiant, how can he ever have doubted?
"Come, now," Friend Mother says at midnight, clapping her hands again to wake them. "Time to shed your trinkets. Ye won't need them on the journey."
There is a clattering like rain as the Buchanites fumble at their watches, rings, and lockets, hurling them onto the floor. John Gibson stamps on the crystal face of his grandfather's watch.
"Take your shoes off," she says now; "wear your old slippers for lightness, or bare feet would be best." On an impulse, Hugh runs over to the clothing chest. Time to put on his minister's gown, bands, and gloves: his final costume.
At her nod he unbars the door for the last time. They leave it swinging wide. She leads them up Templand Hill by moonlight in their slippers. The countryside is deserted; the green corn stands stiffly in the fields. They go slowly, a caravan of emaciated scarecrows, dragging the weaker Brothers and Sisters, but there is exultation in every face.
They have dragged their stock of wooden pallets with them, on Friend Mother's orders, and now they understand. "Build me a platform," she cries out. "A high platform so I can see Christ's Coming, at sunrise."
A shriek goes up. Sunrise. She has named the hour. At last, at last, thinks Hugh. His cheeks are wet; he finds himself weeping like a boy. The long trial is over.
The Buchanites stack up their pallets crazily, making a rough platform as high as their heads. Hugh waits, then heaves his own pallet on top, for Friend Mother's sacred feet to stand on.
"Bless you," she says, "bless ye all," and takes—of all things—a scissors out of her pocket. "Drop your hats, your bonnets. All your hair must be cut off," she instructs, "except for a tuft on top for the angels to catch ye by, to draw you up."
"Draw us up into heaven?" asks Hugh's small son, sheltering in Isabel White's skirts, and for a moment Hugh remembers what it was like to love his children—love them greedily, as his own. But there's no more time for that.
"Aye, hen," Friend Mother tells the boy. "At sunrise, there will be a light brighter than any light has ever been, and we will all be wafted into the land of bliss; we alone who are worthy, of all the folk that walk the earth!"
She cuts the hair of each man, woman, and child. It falls like dandelion seeds around them where they lie on the grass, suddenly weak again, as the night closes in around them. By the last of the moonlight, Hugh watches the transformation. Friend Mother comes to him last; he welcomes the feeling of lightness as the scissors move over his scalp.
Most of them sleep, in the end, but Hugh lies awake beside Friend Mother, his hand in hers, his blood thumping in his veins like a drum. He looks at her but her eyes are closed. He measures the slow creep of the stars.
Towards dawn she wakes, and mounts her platform like a cat, unaided. Hugh thought she might have asked