“We want to talk to him, I guess we got to go up there.”

Pop climbed up the ladder and got on the scaffold. I went up behind him. We could see the man from the side here, which was a little better than not seeing anything but his back. He was older than Pop, and he didn’t have any shoes on. He was wearing overalls and a white shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he had on a high stiff collar and a tie. The tie stuck down inside the bib of his overalls. There was a little ring of white hair around his head just above his ears, and when he turned towards us his eyes made you think of a man yelling at cars in a traffic jam. Sort of wild-like. Only he didn’t act like he saw us.

“It’s too late,” he says, kind of shouting and waving the hammer in Pop’s face.

“Too late for what?” Pop asks. He backed up and bumped into me.

“No use coming around now. I tried to tell you. All of you. But nobody’d listen. Everybody chasing the almighty dollar and drinking and lying and fornicating back and forth, and now it’s too late.”

“Where’s Sagamore?” Pop says, yelling in his ear.

“Whole world’s busting with sin and corruption. It’s a-coming. I tried to tell you. Armageddon’s a-coming.”

“Pop,” I says, “what’s Armaggedon?”

“I don’t know,” Pop says. “But he sure as hell ain’t going to hear it when it gets here, unless it runs over him.”

Then Pop leaned over and put his mouth right against the man’s ear and yelled, “I’m looking for Sagamore Noonan. I’m his brother Sam.”

“It’s too late,” the man says, waving the hammer in Pop’s face again. “I ain’t going to take none of you sinners. You can all just drowned.”

Pop sighed and looked around at me. “I think I know who the old skinhead is now. It’s your Aunt Bessie’s brother Finley. Used to be a sort of jackleg preacher. Deaf as a post. He ain’t heard hisself in twenty years.”

“What do you suppose he’s building?” I asked.

Pop shook his head. “No telling. From the looks of it, he must have forgot, hisself.”

He climbed down the ladder and I jumped down after him. Just then we got another whiff of the smell coming from up at the house.

“You suppose something is dead up there?” I asked.

Pop looked up towards the house, then I looked. We didn’t see any sign of anybody.