Dede could not believe, nor could she doubt, and wanting no more of either horror she snatched the teeth from her mouth, turned away and went to fetch her mother's ragged Bible from the breadbox and sat in her rocker, suddenly, like a collapsed accordion, heaving chords of grieving, asthmatic dumbfound to the dark, rocking swiftly as if that motion might somehow exempt her from the millennium, hugging the book's limp, cold leather to her bony, muslined breast as if in tardy afterthought. Far off in the shot-riddled dark Jason raised his head from the rock among the pumpkin vines, and struggled to his feet. And like Dede, as he moved into the faint light of the dooryard, seeing the sea of them: the people oceaned out infinitely to the ends of Water Street and spilling back down through the shoreweeds, brush-filth, and willows across the bricks of the old steamboat landing; Jason now, like Dede, believing, disbelieving; neither, both. The once gardened and tended earth-shapes among the patterned bricks beneath the rose of Sharon were torn up and packed tight again as if beneath the hooves of driven cattle: Dede's nasturtiums, her lilies-of-the-valley impressed so flat into that stampeded and flattened soil as to appear painted upon a ceramic blackness: earth tamped and pressed by the aggregate tonnage of that militant, marching and now-retreated multitude.
