On the morning of September 8th, tent and preacher were gone. He had harvested well… and seeded with equal success. Between January 1st and town meeting in late March 1901, nine illegitimate children, three girls and six boys, were born in the area. All nine of these “love-children” bore a remarkable resemblance each to the other-six had blue eyes, and all were born with lusty crops of black hair. The barbershop gossips (and no group of men on earth can so successfully marry logic and prurience as these idlers farting into wicker chairs as they roll cigarettes or drive brown bullets of tobacco-juice into tin spittoons) also pointed out that it was hard telling just how many young girls had left “to visit relatives” downstate, in New Hampshire, or even all the way down to Massachusetts. It was also pointed out that quite a few married women in the area had given birth between January and March. About those women, who knew for sure? But the barbershop gossips of course knew what had happened on March 29th, after Faith Clarendon gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy. A wild wet norther was whooping around the eaves of the Clarendon house, dropping 1901's last large budget of snow until November. Cora Simard, the midwife who had delivered the baby, was in a half-daze by the kitchen stove, waiting for her husband Irwin to finally make his way through the storm and take her home. She saw Paul Clarendon approach the crib where his new son lay-it was on the other side of the stove, in the corner which was warmest-and stand looking fixedly down at the new baby for over an hour. Cora made the dreadful error of mistaking Paul Clarendon's fixed stare for wonder and love. Her eyes drifted closed. When she awoke from her doze, Paul Clarendon was standing over the crib with his straight-razor in his hand. He seized the baby by its thick crop of blue-black hair, and before Cora could unlock her throat to scream, he had cut its throat. He left the room without a word. A moment later she heard wet gargling sounds coming from the bedroom. When a terrified Irwin Simard finally found the courage to enter the Clarendon bedroom, he found man and wife on the bed, hands joined. Clarendon had cut his wife's throat, lain down beside her, grasped her right hand with his left, and then cut his own. All this happened two days after the town had voted to change its name.

The Rev. Mr Hartley was dead-set against changing the town's name to one suggested by a man who had proved to be a thief, fornicator, false prophet, and all-round snake in the grass. He had said as much from his pulpit and had noted the agreeing nods from his parishioners with a grim, almost vindictive pleasure that was really not much like him. He came to the town meeting held on March 27th, 1901 confident that Article 14 would be resoundingly voted down. He was not even troubled by the brevity of discussion between the Town Clerk's reading of the article and Head Selectman Luther Ruvall's laconic, “What's y'pleasure, people?” If he had had the slightest inkling, Hartley would have spoken vehemently, even furiously, for perhaps the only time in his life. But he never had so much as an inkling.

“Those in favor signify by sayin” aye,” Luther Ruvall said, and at the solid-if not very passionate-Aye! that shook the roof-rafters, Hartley felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He stared around wildly, but it was too late. The strength of the Aye! had taken him so totally by surprise that he had no idea how many from his own congregation had turned on him and voted the other way.

“Wait-” he said aloud in a strangled voice that nobody heard.

“Those opposed?”

A scattered straggle of Nays. Hartley tried to scream his, but the only sound to escape his throat was a nonsense syllable-Nik!

“Motion's carried,” Luther Ruvall said. “Now, Article 15

The Rev. Hartley suddenly felt warm-much too warm. He felt, in fact, as though he might faint. He pushed his way through standing throngs of men in red-and-black checked shirts and muddy flannel pants, through clouds of acrid smoke puffed from corncob pipes and cheap cigars. He still felt faint, but now he felt that he might also vomit before he fainted. A week later he would not be able to understand the depth of his shock so deep it was really horror. A year later he would not even acknowledge that he had felt such an emotion.

He stood on the top town-hall step, snatching great swoops of forty-degree air, clutching the handrail in a death-grip, and looked out across fields of melting snow. In places it had now drawn back enough to show the muddy earth beneath, and he thought with vicious crudity that was also unlike him that the fields looked like splotches of shit on the tail of a nightshirt. For the first and only time, he felt a bitter envy for Bradley Colson-or Cooder, if that was his real name. Colson had run away from Ilium… oh, beg your pardon, from Haven. He had run, and now Donald Hartley found himself wishing he could do the same. Why did they do that? Why? They knew what he was, they knew! So why did they

A strong, warm hand fell on his back. He turned and saw his good friend Fred Perry. Fred's long, homely face looked distressed and concerned, and Hartley felt a smile cross his face.

“Don, are you all right?” Fred Perry asked.

“Yes. I had a moment in there when I felt lightheaded. It was the vote. I didn't expect it.”

“Nor I,” Fred replied.

“My parishioners were part of it,” Hartley said. “They had to have been. It was so loud, they had to have been, don't you think?”

“Well…”

The Rev. Mr Hartley smiled a little. “I apparently do not know as much about human nature as I thought I did.”

“Come back in, Don. They're going to take up paving Ridge Road.”

“I think I'll stay out a while longer,” Hartley said, “and think about human nature.” He paused, and just as Fred Perry was turning to go back, the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley asked, almost appealed: “Do you understand, Fred? Do you understand why they did it? You're almost ten years older than I. Do you understand it?”

And Fred Perry, who had shouted out his own Aye! from behind a curled fist, shook his head and said no; he didn't understand at all. He did like the Rev. Mr Hartley. He did respect the Rev. Mr Hartley. But in spite of those things (or maybe-just maybe-because of them), he had taken a mean and spiteful pleasure in voting for a name suggested by Colson: Colson the false prophet, Colson the confidence man, Colson the thief, Colson the seducer. No, Fred Perry did not understand human nature at all.

Chapter 2

“Becka Paulson

Rebecca Bouchard Paulson was married to Joe Paulson, one of Haven's two mail-carriers and one-third of Haven's postal staff. Joe was cheating on his wife, something Bobbi Anderson knew already. Now “Becka Paulson knew it, as well. She had known it for the last three days. Jesus told her. In the last three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible, distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her sleep, they were destroying her sanity… but weren't they also sort of wonderful? Boy howdy! And would she stop listening, maybe just tip Jesus over on His face, or scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For one thing, there was a grisly sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her. For another, He was the Savior.

Jesus was on top of the Paulsons” Sony TV. He had been there for just six years. Before that, He had rested atop two Zeniths. “Becka estimated that Jesus had been in roughly the same spot for about sixteen years. Jesus was represented in lifelike 3-D. This was a picture of Him that “Becka's older sister, Corinne, who lived in Portsmouth, had given them as a wedding present. When Joe commented that “Becka's sister was a little on the cheap side, wa'ant she, “Becka told him to hush up. Not that she was terribly surprised; you couldn't expect a man like Joe to understand the fact that you couldn't put a price-tag on true Beauty.