Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Page B

spite of the prayer bonnet, did Cally think Sojourner would scream “Armageddon!” and fall down in a fit. Sojourner was far too tough and stiff-backed for that. But she knew Sojourner would not approve of her seeing strange manifestations. Sojourner scarcely approved of anything.
    â€œDon’t you know better than to kiss that dog?” the old woman called to Tammy. “You don’t know where that dog’s nose has been!”
    Tammy smiled reflexively, her own snub nose confronting the suspect canine one, and paid no attention. At one point Mrs. Hieronymus had told her that if a cat gets into a crib with a newborn baby it would smell milk on the baby’s breath and suffocate the baby trying to lick the milk out of its mouth. Tammy had repeatedly introduced various neighborhood cats to her baby brother as he napped, with no satisfactory results. Mrs. Hieronymus had also told her that a child who bit on a banana peel would get leprosy. At various times Tammy had tested this statement by inserting banana peel into her brother’s mouth and forcing his teeth closed on the yellow, bitter skins. Again, she had observed no satisfactory results except Owen’s passionate aversion to bananas. She now knew better than to listen to Mrs. Hieronymus.
    Cally changed the subject. “Did you know Mrs. Zepka?”
    This was the deceased woman in the Peach Room, the one who had leered at her, as a corpse was not supposed to leer, however briefly. Cally’s question was a veiled request for information, which Sojourner promptly provided.
    â€œShe was divorced and an atheist.” Mrs. Hieronymus lowered her voice to keep the dangerous words from the children. “It’s a sin she’s being buried in holy ground. I don’t know what Reverent Berkey can be thinking of. Just because her daddy is on the Council.”
    â€œAtheist,” in Hoadley meant nothing more than that the woman refused to go to church. Gigi Wildasin was an “atheist.” Cally often wished she could be the same. But Mark’s business depended on churchgoers.
    â€œThey say she died of one of them aneurysms,” said Sojourner, “but I heard different.” The old woman lowered her voice yet further, to a hollow, husky whisper. “I heard she slept naked. And I heard a bat come in the room while she was sleeping. You know how a bat will go in any little hole. It went right up her vagina, and she didn’t know it when she woke up. She thought she had a dream.” Sojourner placed a disapproving slur on “dream,” then reverted to horror. “And it rotted there,” she whispered, “and poisoned her, and she died of it.”
    Cally was saved from responding to this revelation by Oona Litwack, who emerged smiling and fluffy from her house onto her porch next door.
    Within arm’s reach, almost, because the two old houses formed part of the same structure, a duplex. Oona’s porch, cheek and jowl with Sojourner’s, sheltered a waist-high white pachyderm planter containing a large, dead prayer plant, several white plastic parson’s tables holding potted coleus, a huge ceramic frog serving as a doorstop, and a wicker koala bear next to the porch swing, cradling magazines to its varnished bosom. In the small front yard, Oona had indulged in her usual springtime dementia, digging garden with dirt-strewing abandon until only an irregular patch of lawn remained, then putting out a random exuberance of miniature windmill, plastic chipmunks, impatiens, cosmos, recumbent Bambis, gnomes, dahlias and snapdragons. Later in the year, Cally knew, the yard would resemble a jungle as the flowers and weeds outstripped Oona’s good intentions. Out of the riot the blue-eyed, butt-sitting fake chipmunks would peek, grinning. On Sojourner’s side of the property line, three tomato plants would nod meekly in their cages. The double house could not have presented a more antithetical