Page 104 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
Hattie led them down the unpaved road apace, round the bend, and up a hill.
Throughout Nebraska, from Omaha to Hemingford Home—all across America, truth be told—under the veneer of civility, the mood was angry.
A season of blood spread like a contagion across the country.
The South was one thing, but the North wasn’t much better, just hidden behind a more polite mask.
Workers seethed over job losses and the rising cost of living.
It seemed like everyone quit working and went on strike: boilermakers, tailors, truck drivers, butchers.
The Gatlin Bee kept running articles about businesses hiring Black folk to replace their striking workers alongside crime waves involving Black criminals.
The newspaper editorials pounded a constant drumbeat about Negro attacks and police failure to make arrests, and rumors of white women assaulted by Black men.
“Look over there. You can see Gatlin from here. Filled with a bunch of men who made their money from bootlegging, but want to crow about being upstanding citizens. Honest and law-abiding. God-fearing.” Hattie spat off to the side.
Before long, they wandered down a secluded grove and soon arrived at a run-down barn, its planks half-rotted, its paint peeling.
A beaten-up sign swung in the wind, the name obscured.
A group of men eyed them as they walked up.
A couple were Black soldiers who had gone off to the Great War to fight for liberty and had returned to a home where they did not have freedom for themselves.
A man in well-patched overalls—the brim of his broad hat frayed about the edges—tipped his cap at them and kept drinking.
He was one of the Black folks who moved from the cotton fields of the South to search for work in the North during the Great Migration.
Though hate followed them like a dogging shadow, they were still able to carve out spaces to call their own.
“What sort of place have you brought me to?” Abagail asked.
“The kind that brews its own moonshine out back.” Hattie half curtsied to the Broad-Brimmed Hat Man.
He opened the door. The bar was fashioned from repurposed wood, surrounded by mismatched tables and chairs scattered around a hardwood dance floor.
String lights ran the length of the walls.
Abagail knew she wouldn’t get the smell of cigarette smoke out of her clothes for days.
In the corner, a man pounded the keys of a piano, wringing all the blues and boogie-woogie he could out of it.
A woman belted out lyrics at the top of her lungs to the whoops and hollers.
“Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man
And how I love him to be sexy with me
When he gets me
What he gets me
What he shoots in me”
“Oh… my.” Abagail blushed. The energy of the room, the easy laughter, the carrying on, it felt like she belonged.
She harbored secret ambitions for herself beyond singing at churches.
Of maybe one day performing for the smart set, being booked through the Sherman Dudley Theatrical Enterprises touring company.
Maybe make a hot record. Make a decent buck.
It all felt like a life within her grasp.
All it would require was her just… choosing.
“Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’d rather have you take this cup from my lips if You can.
” She’d seen a heap during her time on earth, nothing to match the doings of the latest months.
The call of God was always about His mission.
Moses was called to wander a desert and climb a mountain, never to enter the Promised Land.
Noah saved his family from God’s wrath and judgment by flood only to drink himself into a stupor with his survivor’s guilt.
In response to her prayer, a crow squawked from a telephone pole. Its wings fluttered. It cocked its head, its eyes dark and knowing, studying her with a merciless scrutiny. Her opposite number was close. So close she could almost feel his hot, fetid breath on the back of her neck.
“My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O Lord—how long?!” She yelled into the night, her loud cry followed by a sudden burst of tears.
“I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to lie right here on the home place.
I’m ready to go right now if You want me.
Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tired shuffling old Black woman. Thy will be done.”
Several more crows landed, settling onto the branches.
The inky sky silhouetted them. A couple more dropped onto the pathway.
Their glossy wings reflected the moonlight, giving them an eerie sheen.
Their unsettling caws an aphonic drone. An ominous hum resonating with a sinister energy.
Even without looking, she knew she had company.
Her eyes darted to the crows, the man-shaped shadow she knew lurked in the darkness.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be somewhere like… here.”
“In such a den o’ heathens?” Hattie asked.
“I just don’t want Daddy to be embarrassed if folks was to find out I was in places like this. Ain’t a place for a respectable woman. Not at all.”
“What folks? White folks? They better not come ’round here.
Far as we concerned, this is a Black sundown town, here.
” That was what she admired about Hattie, the way her ancestors’ stories pulsed through her veins, strengthened her limbs.
“I come from a long line of troublemakers who fought back and rebelled.”
“None o’ that sounds like me.”
“Girls like you stay home to marry. I ran off to teach.”
“I’m too old for schoolin’.”
“You’re never too old to learn, long as you leave your mind open to it. For you, I have a different assignment.”
“What sort of assignment?”
“Some folks would love it if you could favor us with a song,” Hattie said.
“I don’t know…”
“Don’t do that false-modesty thing. Just go do what you was born to do.” Hattie handed her a guitar. “Sing us a song. A real song. A you song.”
Abagail thought of her father.
John Freemantle joined the Mystic Tie Grange back in 1902, the first Black man to ever do so.
Abagail’s father’s entire life was marked by such “firsts.” There was always a cost to being such a pioneer.
The jokes he pretended not to hear. Believing in holding his head up and quoting the Bible, he modeled being a respectable Negro hoping to sway folks’ minds.
It worked, as many people came around. But some were never going to be reached.
Abagail had barely been married for three months when she played in the Grange Hall.
She was so nervous. A young Black girl in a pretty white dress, scared the crowd would turn on her, at the very least hurl tomatoes.
Abagail sang her terrified heart out, starting with several gospel songs, changing things up with a risky little ditty, and closing her encore with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Oh, how she remembered the applause as if it were yesterday.
If she admitted it to herself, a part of her heart basked in their adulation.
Seen and validated in their eyes. Her heart swelled with pride.
It was the happiest night of her life in a topper year.
Abagail didn’t know if it was a “her” song, but it was the one on her heart.
The one from that night, which left her feeling…
incomplete. She whispered “Digging My Potatoes” to the piano man.
He grinned. When she performed the bawdy little ditty at the Grange Hall, it felt off, wrong somehow.
While it spoke to her, wanting to show her mischievous side, the way they received it, with their leers and howls, made her feel dirty.
Like she was expected to sing such coon music.
But now, three verses in, her crowd clapped and danced, caught up in the spirit of the moment.
In the corner of the room, she sensed a presence.
More of an… absence, like a lonely rustle of dead leaves.
She didn’t have to see him. Her mind pictured a man shadowed by the night.
A penumbra creeping at the edge of the room waiting for the lights to flick off.
A coldness that settled into your marrow, numbing you until you couldn’t move, knowing you might never know true warmth again.
His voice the desperate scratch of fingernails against a locked coffin.
Even without being conscious of his presence, folks drifted away from the corner.
She came to know the Moon Shadow Man as the Dark Man, the servant of the Devil.
His face remained hidden, as if shadowed by a cowl, except for his eyes.
They burned red like coals in the night, searching for her.
In her most recent dream, he stood on the roof of a building, like a white pharaoh deciding all that he saw was his domain.
The sun set behind him, but he stared east. Always east, but there was no love for it.
A pharaoh swaddled in blue jeans and a denim jacket.
With a white forehead, red cheeks, his leering grin framing white teeth, sharp and neat.
His dusty black boots had run-down heels.
“I love it out here. So peaceful. So quaint,” the voice’s overly genteel tone a slick poison in her mind. A voice where a man should have been. The shadows shifted, quiet and devouring. “What’s my name?”