42 | Psychopomp Magazine
soothing vibrations and her own silvering locks, she probably would have run screaming out of the house after Sammy’s first strange words and gotten herself gored by Don Patterson’s bull that wandered out in the road on that moonless night. She did walk outside, but luckily, the bull meandered back to Don’s side of the road, and no one got hurt. Perhaps crystalline strands had begun to wrap up its bovine brain, for amid the red dirt now lay pale clumps of silken fibers—some copper, some white—that were not iron deposits, drifting talc, pyrophyllite clay from the Alkali mines, spiderwebs, cotton, nor snow.
The strange has a way of becoming the ordinary, but not without growing pains. Samuel’s changes galvanized the town into wild gossip—everything from Sam Bell being the Christ of the potato field, and the Handle appearing to be some angelic tool of resurrection, to speculation as far out as Terlingua in the Starlight Café that the Bell Ranchers had made a deal with the Devil, been replaced by aliens, or just pulled a fast one on everybody to get some attention.
Instead of outrage and zeal to get to the bottom of things, acceptance and even pride about what happened pervaded our community. Why shouldn’t the world’s biggest change start with us?
True, there were stutters and stops, just as the chaotic scatter of raindrops leaves at first some surfaces dry—the noble influence of the Handle took more time in some than others. Mr. Peakes after his release from jail had packed up his tools and books and moved into Alkali Caverns. Even he could not hide from the wind and what it carried. His beard silvered and grew wispy new layers while the coyotes and renegade dogs yelped around him and his old toolboxes and books.
Samuel at first hoarded the chrome tube sticking out of his calf; rarely did he remove the Handle from his bronzed flesh. He loaned it to others for no more than ten minutes.