Читать книгу The Used World - Haven Kimmel, Haven Kimmel - Страница 8

Hazel had not dressed warmly enough, and so she draped a lap blanket over her legs. It was red wool with a broad plaid pattern and so scratchy she could feel it through her clothes. Snow had been predicted but there was no chance of it now that the clouds had broken open and the moon was bright against the sky, a circle of bone on a blue china plate.

The car was nearly a year old but still smelled new, which was to say it smelled wholly of itself and not of her or them or of something defeated by its human inhabitants. Hazel leaned against the door, let her head touch the window glass. She was penetrated by the sense of…she had no word for it. There was the cold glass, solid, and there was her head against it. Where they met, a line of warmth from her scalp was leached or stolen. Where they met. Where her hand ended and space began, or where her foot was pressed flat inside her shoe, but her foot was one thing and the shoe another. She breathed deeply, tried not to follow the thought to the place where her vision shimmered and she felt herself falling as if down the well in the backyard. Her body in air; the house in sky; the planet in space and then dark, dark forever.

“Ah,” her mother said, adjusting the radio dial. “A nice version of this song, don’t you think?”

“It is. Better than most of what’s on the radio these days.” Her father drew on his pipe with a slight whistle, and a cloud of cherry tobacco drifted from the front seat to the back, where Hazel continued to lean against the window. She was colder now and stuck staring at the moon. She tried to pull her eyes away but couldn’t.

“True enough.” Caroline Hunnicutt reached up and touched the nape of her neck, checking the French twist that never fell, never strayed. Hazel had seen her mother make this gesture a thousand, a hundred thousand times. Two fingers, a delicate touch just on the hairline; the gesture was a word in another language that had a dozen different meanings. “But it’s a sign that we are old, Albert, when we dislike everything new.” Les Brown and the Ames Brothers sang “Sentimental Journey” and her mother was right, it was a very nice version of the song. Caroline hummed and Hazel hummed. Albert laid his pipe in the hollow of the ashtray, reached across the wide front seat with his free hand, and rubbed his wife’s shoulder, once up toward her neck, once back toward her arm. He returned that hand to the wheel, and Hazel’s hand tingled as if she’d made the motion herself. Her mother’s mink stole was worrisome—the rodent faces and fringe of tails—but so soft it felt like a new kind of liquid. Time was when Hazel used to sneak the stole into her room at naptime, rubbing the little tails between her fingers until she fell asleep. That had been so long ago.

Countin’ every mile of railroad track that takes me back, Caroline sang aloud, the moon sailing along now behind them. Hazel’s head lifted free of the window, and as soon as she was able to think straight, she felt the car—the rolling, private space—fill up and crowd her. There was the baby hidden under her mother’s red, bell-shaped coat, hidden but there and going nowhere until she had decided it was time. There was Uncle Elmer, Caroline’s older brother, a yo-yo master and record holder in free throws for the Jonah Cougars, drowned in the Rhine as the Allies pushed across toward Remagen in 1945. Hazel did not really remember him but she kept his photograph on her dresser anyway, his homemade hickory yo-yo in front of the picture like an offering to a god.

There was Italy in the car, where her father had served as a field surgeon. He had brought home with him a leather valise, a reliquary urn, and a collection of photographs that revealed a sky as bright as snow over rolling hills in Umbria, a greenhouse in Tuscany. These items belonged to Albert alone and marked him as a stranger. Here was the edge of Hazel, here the surface of her father. And because of Albert’s past, Albert’s private history, the valise that was his and his alone, something else was in the car with them, a patient and velvet presence that vanished as soon as Hazel dared glance its way. It was the war years themselves, a house without men, a world without men. She tried, as she had tried so many times before, to touch a certain something that she had once thought was called I Got to Sleep With Mother in the Big Bed. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t the sweet disorder her mother had allowed to rule each day; it wasn’t that Caroline had kept the clinic up and running alone. It was somewhere in the kitchen light, yellowed with memory, and tea brewed late at night. Women sat around the table in their make-do dresses, hair tied back in kerchiefs. There was a whisper of conversation like a slip of sea rushing into a jar and kept like a souvenir, and Hazel didn’t know what they had said. But she knew for certain that women free of fathers speak one way and they make a world that tastes of summer every day, and when the men come home after winning the war—or even if they don’t come home—the shutters close, the lipstick goes on, and it is winter, again.

“It won’t snow now, will it?” Caroline said, lit with the night’s cold delicacy.

“Not now.” Albert tapped out the ashes of his pipe, and made the turn into the lane that would lead to his family’s home.

The quarter-mile drive was pitted already from this winter’s weather. Hazel studied, on either side of the car, the rows of giant old honey locusts, bare and beseeching against the sky. She could see the automobile as if hovering above it, the sleek black Ford whose doors opened like the wingspan of that other kind of locust, and whose grill beamed like a face. The car seemed friendly enough from a distance, but up close the nose was like an ice cream cone stuck into the metal framework, the sweet part devoured and just the tip of the cone remaining. The headlights lit up were Albert’s eyes behind his glasses, and what he and the car were angry about, no one bothered to explain.

Hawk’s Knoll was sixty acres on a floodplain leading back to the Planck River; a four-story barn; a metal silo once used for target practice; and a hulking house completed just two months before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. Albert Hunnicutt’s Queen Anne boasted a wraparound front porch with both formal and service entries. The doors and windows sparkled with leaded glass, and the fish-scale trim was painted every other year. The three rooflines were so steep and the slate shingles so treacherous that replacing one required a visit by two Norwegian brothers, who set up elaborate scaffolding, tied themselves to each other, and still spent a fair amount of time cursing in their native tongue. The front portion of the house and all of the upstairs were private, but the maid’s wing at the back had been converted to her father’s surgery. All day long patients came and went, sometimes stopping for a cup of coffee in the Hunnicutts’ kitchen. But at night the house and lanes were deserted.

The family stepped into the foyer of the formal entrance, where they hung up their coats and scarves; an inner door was closed against the parlor, the gas fire, and the flawless late-Victorian tableaux her parents had created. “On up to bed,” her father said, glancing at his watch. “It’s late.” They had stayed too long at the Chamber of Commerce Christmas party, her father unable to tear himself away from the town men. Albert came alive under their gaze, stroking the mantle of the European Theater he wore like the hide of an animal.

“Brush your teeth first.” Caroline kissed the top of Hazel’s head, cupped her palm around the back of her daughter’s thin neck, as if passing a secret on to another generation.

“Good night,” Hazel told both her parents, without a thought toward argument. She was not merely—then—obedient and dutiful, but anxious for the solitude of the nursery, regardless of whether the skin of the room, as she’d come to think of it, had grown onerous. She climbed the wide, formal front staircase, holding on to the banister against the slick, polished steps. Portraits of her ancestors, thin-lipped and metallic, watched her pass, up, up.

At the top of the stairs she paused in the gloom; the gaslights were now wired with small amber bulbs, three on each side of the hallway. To the right was the closed door of her father’s study, and to the left, door after door—bedrooms, bathrooms, the attic, closets, the dumbwaiter. Hazel walked silently down the Oriental runner and stopped in the prescribed place. She centered her feet on the pattern, closed her eyes, and wished—even this close to her tenth birthday she was not above wishing—and lifted her arms until they formed a straight angle; she could tell before she looked that she hadn’t done it, couldn’t yet or maybe ever. There was still nearly a foot of space between the walls and her fingertips. To touch both sides at once: that was what she had wanted for as long as she could remember, and it was an accident of birth and wealth that had left her stranded in a house too large, a hallway far too wide, for her to ever accomplish it.

The nursery was unchanged, unchanging. In one corner were her toys, preserved and arranged by Nanny to suggest that a little girl (who was not Hazel) had just abandoned her blocks, her paper dolls. The tail of the rocking horse was brushed once a week, though Hazel did nothing to disturb it. The dolls were arranged in their hats and carriages. At the round table the teddy bears and the rabbit were about to take tea out of Beatrix Potter porcelain, silver rims polished bright.

The walls of the nursery were painted gray; the floor a muted red. A teacher at the college had been employed to paint a scene a few feet from the ceiling, and traveling all around the room: a circus train with animals and acrobats and clowns. Trailing the caboose were six elephants of various sizes, joined trunk to tail. Hazel’s white iron bed frame was interwoven with real ivy—Nanny tended to that as well. Hazel did not love the bed, did not love the down comforter with feminine eyelet trim. What was hers, what was of her, were the small school desk and chair, and the white bookcase where she kept the E. Nesbit books her mother had given her over the years.

She slipped out of her shoes and party dress and hung them in the closet, then claimed the flannel nightgown from where it warmed over the back of the rocking chair near the radiator. Her bed was under a mullioned casement window, and each night Hazel moved her pillows from the headboard to the feet so she could lie awake and look at the sky. Such behavior was baffling to Nanny, who would exclaim each morning, finding the pillows at the wrong end of the bed, that Hazel was a silly girl.

Standing on the bed, she opened the window and leaned over the sill. The air was cold enough to cast the ground below her into sharp distinction; each tree branch looked knifelike and black. There were fifteen acres between the house and the road. From what Hazel could see, nothing and everything moved in the mid-December wind. A swirl of leaves tumbled down the lane, a barn cat leapt out of the shadows and back again. Hazel got out of bed and turned off the light, then settled against her pillows with the window still open. The moon was high, so she could see its light but not its face. Her best friend, Finney, had a favorite game called What If? What if a robber broke into your house? What if you were stranded on a mountaintop and had to eat human flesh? What if you were charged by a lion? Lying in the moonlight, Hazel thought the real question should have been What if…without anything following. Because that was what scared Hazel most.

What if the Rhine were freezing? What if her mother did not live? What if there were no difference between the surface of a German fighter jet and Hazel’s mind? It was that question that startled her awake, and even after she opened her eyes she didn’t understand what she was seeing, because outside her window, in the light of the dipping moon, a plane was gliding silent between two trees. Hazel held her breath, waited for a flash of light more awful for its lack of sound, the vacuum they prepared for during drills at school. Nothing came. The plane disappeared, passed once again, finally lowered its landing gear, and, wings tilted up, it alighted in her window.

The owl was backlit, enormous. Hazel knew she should not be able to see his eyes, but saw them. The stare of the bird felt colder than the air outside. He did not speak or move, and the way he didn’t move was so deliberate Hazel couldn’t move either, as if she had become one of the toys at the tea table. Her hands lay useless at her sides, and her shallow breaths didn’t lift her coverlet. The owl held her gaze so long Hazel feared she might yet return to dreaming, until, without warning, he was off the window ledge, sailing in one revolution around her room, counter to the circus train and the impotent, fading animals, and back out the window. There had never been the slightest sound.

Hazel broke free of the trance, scrambling out of bed and grabbing her brown leather play shoes, which she slipped on her bare feet. Her thick white robe was hanging on the back of her door; she tied it with an unsteady haste. She had to stop and catch her breath before she stepped out into the hallway. You weigh nothing, she told herself, closing her eyes and picturing herself levitating past the door to her parents’ bedroom. You weigh nothing. The brass doorknob felt resistant in her hand, but turned with the polished ease that came with a full-time handyman.

She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her with a slight tick. Two wall lamps were always kept lit, one on each end, and Hazel stood still a moment, as her vision adjusted to the pale yellow light. The pattern of the Oriental was, she saw now, a thousand eyes. If she moved to the left they opened. If she moved to the right they closed.

The floorboards closest to the walls were least likely to complain. Hazel slid along the mahogany paneling, the fabric of her robe whispering. At the top of the formal staircase she looked down into the thick darkness of the parlor, unsure of what she was about to do. What if you let the owl decide? She straddled the banister, a game she had never imagined would have a useful purpose, and slid noiselessly down to the thick newel post, which stopped her like a pommel on a cowboy’s saddle.

Her hand grazed the red settee embroidered with gold peacocks, the floor lamp with the milk-glass shade. She was afraid to go out the front door for all the locks, so she slipped around the heavy columns and into the library, where she could make her way to the service door. Here there was just a simple deadbolt, and on the outside screen a hook and eye. The doors closed behind her with such grace she wondered if she had opened them at all.

She made no noise crossing the porch, even though her leather brogans were awkward and half a size too big, as her mother tended to buy things ahead of the season they were in. Down the steps, the metal rail burned her hand. Jefferson Leander, who built the house, realized after moving in that he was too close to the county road. He had the original road closed and moved fifteen acres forward. The Hunnicutts called the remnant the Old Road, and even after ninety years it was clear, and circled their sixty acres. Hazel ran down to the driveway and turned right, following the Old Road past the apple orchard, past the fire ring, the cemetery where no one had been buried since 1888. She ran past the four-story barn where her pony, Poppy, was sleeping, probably dreaming of delivering a hard bite. Hazel ran away from the house and her parents, away from the teacups and the stained glass doors in the library bookcases, the track on which those doors opened with a sound like a metronome. She ran away from the deep dining room with the red carpet and captain’s bell; away from the butler’s pantry where her parents’ wedding crystal flashed, sharp and bright as stars. She tried to forget the ball of gray fur on the barn’s unused fourth floor, fur that Hazel had found a year ago and was keeping there as evidence of some unseen but powerful crime. She ran past the farm truck abandoned since the 1930s, a bullet hole in the windshield and a small tree sprouting through the floorboard—ran past it and it might as well have not been there. She ran on ruts, on rocks, on frozen shards of Kentucky bluegrass, until she reached the apex of the Old Road. From here the downward grade was steep enough to give Poppy pause when they cantered toward the first meadow. Hazel stopped because she wasn’t sure where she should go. The meadows were mown clear, the line of forest between her and the river too black to consider. She heard herself breathing, felt a fist in her chest. Afraid, she studied the forest at the bottom of the hill. Virgin timber—a wealth of sycamore and birch and oak, trees so tall they seemed more alive than Hazel herself, more real than the words in any history book or any photograph, even of Uncle Elmer. Drowned. These trees had outlived him.

Nanny had told her that if she held her hands against a birch tree in the light of the full moon, the bark would peel away on its own, would roll down the trunk like old wallpaper in steam. Hazel saw the birch then, its silver flesh a streak of frozen lightning; her eyes traveled from the roots up to the lower branches, the scars where someone the size of a giant had rested his hands and relieved the tree of its armor. She studied the tree’s dark heart, where anything could be nesting. Her eyes skated up and up until she saw, at the very top, so close to the stars he could wear them like a crown, a man in black, squatting, his legs tucked under him. She thought it was a man, a midget black as coal, the sort of creature who should have been painted on her circus train but wasn’t. He will never get down from there, she thought, and before the thought was whole, the man had stretched his legs and was leaping like a diver into a pool of winter darkness. With arms outstretched, he fell, and then with a single downward closing of his wings, he flew. Hazel didn’t move, even as she saw that where he meant to land was where she stood. She didn’t move until he was so close she could see his claws lower and engage.

The stones of the Old Road cut through Hazel’s nightgown and bloodied her knees as the bird’s claws caught her on the forehead and dragged backward into her hair. She made a rabbity sound—half newborn, half terror—and tried to cover her head with her arms. There was a split second in which she felt the downdraft of his wings like the heat of a bonfire, and then she was on her elbows and knees and everything around her was quiet. The owl was gone. Hazel stood and looked around her but there was no sign of him. She reached up and touched her forehead, her scalp. Her hand came away covered with blood, and there was blood on her nightgown and robe.

In the morning she would carry this wound to her mother, who would stitch it up tight. The gown and robe would be bleached, mended. Much of the night would be forgotten, in the way that what is unspoken is often unremembered. What would remain, barely visible under Hazel’s hair, would be the two scars, tracks left like art on the wall of a cave. That primitive, and that familiar.

Sitting beside Claudia, Rebekah continued to run the receipts, each stack twice. She ran two adding machine tapes, attaching them both to the stack with the stapler that said public hardware on the top. Nothing in this building was new—nothing was specific to it. Here groups of furniture that had lived together for fifty years were separated, sold, sometimes destroyed. The place had a powerful effect on Rebekah, even though she’d worked for Hazel for nearly five years. The fluorescent lights flickered and whined, an everyday menace. And in bad weather, like today, the metal walls of the back half of the building seemed to bow inward, growling against their joinings like a chain saw.

Once finished, Rebekah stood, told Claudia she was going to shut down the lights in the back, check the doors. Before her stretched the whole construction, 117 yards long. Rebekah couldn’t see the end from where she stood. The front half was cinder block, rectangular—it had been a tractor tire store thirty-five years earlier—and the back half, which Hazel had added, was a tacked-on pole barn, ugly as sin. The floor was poured concrete, rough finished and unpainted, and the cold radiated up through it and right into Rebekah’s shoes. The walls were corrugated metal. The ceiling soared, making it difficult to heat, so Hazel had installed two twelve-foot industrial fans originally designed for the corporate-owned pig operations out in the county.

She started in the far left aisle, wandering as if she were checking the stock. Hazel and Claudia didn’t seem troubled by what bothered Rebekah the most: these were objects—yes—but they were also lost lives, whole families. They weren’t the dead but they stood for the dead, somehow. Here, in the very first booth, #14, was a four-poster bed made of beautiful aged maple, and right in the center of one of the posts was a shiny, hand-shaped groove, as if a woman had held the post right there as she swung around the footboard and into bed, night after night for decades. Rebekah hurried by booth #15, with its cherry dining room table, its chandelier and vintage landscapes, because #15, rented by the Merrills, also contained a collection of leather suitcases. Inside one she’d found an old rain hat and a note on yellowed paper that reminded: January 7 11:00 mother to Doctor. Now she could hardly look at #15, the suitcases especially. Everything stung her, everything Peter had touched, everything that bore the slightest mark of him.

Toward the middle of the building, the displays became more manly: #16 was primarily unmarked, narrow-necked bottles caked with dirt, and #17 was preserved wrought iron—tools and frying pans, with some cracked butter churns on the floor. The two parts of the building were connected by a short hallway (Hazel called it a breezeway), lined with cheap landscapes tacked up on fake-wood paneling. As far as Rebekah could tell, none of these paintings or prints had ever sold—even the frames weren’t worth anything. The hallway was narrow, then opened up into the massiveness of the back. How had it happened, Rebekah wondered, that a structure so displeasing, so prefabricated and out of scale, could feel so wonderful? It was wonderful. The slight breeze from the industrial fans, even the deep thrum of their motors—a sound so insistent Rebekah could feel it in her stomach—daily pulled Rebekah in. There, stretched before her, more than fifty yards of individual rooms established by Peg-Board walls six feet tall, each room filled with treasure impossible to predict. One booth, the Childless Nursery, contained nothing but wooden toys and rocking horses, the kind covered with real horsehide, with horses’ tails and cold glass eyes cracked and cloudy with age. Sometimes when she looked in this booth she imagined not the children who’d owned the toys, but further back: the horses themselves, whose hides now covered the wood frames and stuffing. She couldn’t see them whole, just the chuffing of breath on a winter morning, a flank, the shuddering of a muscle under skin.

There was a booth with a baby crib, a carriage, threadbare quilts, an old print of the Tunnel Angel, the guardian who presses her finger against the lips of the unborn and whispers, Don’t tell what you know. It was the very end of the building that Rebekah loved best. From the breezeway to the back were two long aisles—Rebekah thought of them as vertical—and against the back wall Hazel had set up a horizontal display. Everything here belonged to Hazel. It began against the west wall with Your Grandmother’s Parlor: an oval rag rug, its colors dimmed, surrounded by a plunky Baldwin piano, a Victrola, a radio in a mahogany cabinet, a nubbly red sofa with wooden arms and feet. On a low table was a green metal address book with the alphabet on the front—you pulled a metal tab to the letter you needed and pushed a bar at the bottom and the book sprang open—and a heavy black telephone from the 1940s, a number still visible on the dial: LS624.

Rebekah dusted the Victrola with the sleeve of her white cotton shirt, adjusted the dial of the radio, picked a piece of string off the sofa. At the telephone table she scrolled to the letter S but didn’t push the bar, rested her hand on the receiver of the phone. It was cold like metal, made of Bakelite, a heavy, nearly indestructible thing. She knew the phone worked, because Hazel had tried it with an adapter. The ringer was broken, but the phone worked. Rebekah had been circling it for three years now, waiting for someone to buy it, hoping they never would, because she believed that someday she’d pick up this phone and call the past. She’d call her own childhood, ask to speak to Rebekah, the bright-haired girl in Pentecostal dresses. She’d issue warnings, some mundane (Don’t turn your back on the Hoopers’ yellow dog), some of grave importance (Don’t ever get in a car with Wiley Crocker). Was there a way to call her mother, back when her mother was young? Or someone even farther away, a boy who’d just enlisted against his parents’ wishes, a young housewife confiding in her sister?

Hazel’s things were really more beautiful than anyone else’s, but she never made much of it, didn’t carry around catalogs or talk much business with the Cronies. She just went to auctions, answered ads in the paper, came to work with treasure she’d paid almost nothing for. Her trick was to choose the stormy Saturdays—rain or sleet will drive a crowd away—and stay at the auction until the end, when the prize pieces had been saved back but there was no one there to bid on them. Hazel was a businesswoman, Rebekah knew, but still this pained her, the way Hazel moved around Hopwood County like a shark. It didn’t take going to many auctions to see what the truth was: each one was an occasion of sorrow. Either a parent had died, or a spouse who left no insurance. One way or another a life had been foreclosed on, and whatever was earned at the auction would go toward a debt that would never be paid. And there was Hazel, circling somebody’s heirloom china and linens, or a handheld drill with a man’s thumbprint permanently engraved, trying to figure out how to get it cheap and sell it high.

After the Parlor was Rebekah’s favorite place of all and her domain: the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Of all the things Rebekah had hidden in her years in the Prophetic Mission Church—the doubt at which she didn’t dare glance; the sense that the church was a screen between herself and everything she wanted to experience unmediated—there had been no secret as potent as what she kept in her closet. Forced to wear, every day, long denim skirts with white tennis shoes, white blouses or sweaters, and in full knowledge that the slightest violation of the dress code was a sin against God Himself, Rebekah had assembled—slowly, over the years—her own line of clothing. She had begun with items left in the lost-and-found at church, and then, when she could drive, by combing rummage sales for certain fabrics and rare buttons. Her first dress violated every precept of Pentecostalism’s radical edge: the top of the dress was a girl’s old blue jean jacket, darted beneath the breasts. Rebekah had removed the collar and the sleeves at the three-quarters length, replacing them with rabbit fur from another, moth-eaten jacket. The skirt was yards and yards of pale peach parachute silk lined with white organza, calf-length, 1950s style. Although she had modeled it on herself, Rebekah didn’t want to wear the dress. She wanted to make it, and to know it existed; that was all.

Other dresses followed, and men’s suits, baby clothes. Once she had purchased a box of Ball jars, and had taken it home, rolled up the smaller things and tucked them in the jars as if putting up tomatoes for the winter. Afterward she sat on the floor of her bedroom studying the gold lids of the jars, each in its own cubicle of waxed cardboard. In that week she had told her father she was leaving the church. She had endured brutal hours with him following the news, days of brutal hours, and yet there she was, still in her bedroom, still hiding things from him. The next week she saw a Help Wanted advertisement in the paper, run by Hazel, that read, Looking for a woman who believes there is a wardrobe beyond this wardrobe, and so she had come to the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Here a U shape of wooden rails held hundreds of vintage dresses, countless old coats, men’s suits, sprung leather shoes, which Rebekah found on weekend trips in the spring and summer to the county’s yard and estate sales, sometimes filling her car, sometimes arriving back at the store with nothing but a single item. There was a hat tree that looked more like a wildly exotic bush—hats with feathers, hats with fruit, men’s fedoras, Russian caps of Persian lamb. Hazel had found a dressing room mirror on a stand that was bigger than a bathtub, and a Chinese screen for changing. Tucked away under the dresses was a traveling trunk, barely visible, on its side and open, the drawers pulled out in graduating degrees, lingerie spilling out as if a sexy woman had left in a hurry. It was in the Dressing Room that Rebekah felt most acutely the presence of lives stopped, or abandoned, and here, too, was the place she most expected someone to return. Who could leave forever the narrow, creamy satin nightgown with the lace straps, or a bespoke suit tailored to a man nearly as big around as he was tall? Rebekah would never understand how some people came to have such style and then died anyway, but she could hold the satin nightgown, let it flow over the palm of her hand like cool water, and sense a breath of animation.

In the Dressing Room was the stereo where all day Hazel’s favorite songs played: Big Band Hits 1936–;38, The Anthology of Swing, The Greatest Hits of Glenn Miller, Sinatra and Dorsey. At least once every day Rebekah stood among the clothes, singing along with “These Foolish Things,” “Moonlight and Shadows,” “Make Believe Ballroom”—these were her new hymns. She stood back here just before opening and closing, when the cool, cavernous space was all hers, taking stock of everything—from the sad, shapeless housedresses every girl with a mother or grandmother recognizes with guilt and longing, to an evening dress made of cheap chain mail—Hazel’s costume collection covered the spectrum of the human drama.

Rebekah swayed to Rudy Vallee’s “Vieni, Vieni,” her favorite song on the tape. Vieni vieni vieni vieni vieni / Tu sei bella bella bella bella bella…

She knelt down and turned off the stereo, with reluctance. The vast space rushed in where the music had been, a tomblike echo belied only by the bass notes of the fan. She stood too quickly, looking over her shoulder at the two aisles leading directly to her. From the perspective opposite her, more than half a football field away, she was the vanishing point. The next thing she knew, she was on her knees, her face in a wine-colored silk dressing gown that smelled of age and cigarettes. No harm done; her knees weren’t scraped, she hadn’t hit her head. And there had been nothing there, no one in the aisle, no one just emerging either from the booth set up to resemble a one-room schoolhouse or from #32, the Abandoned Pews. No one was coming for her, and yet Rebekah wasn’t alone where she stood, and she knew it.

By the time Rebekah returned to the front counter, Claudia had checked the totals against the day’s receipts and prepared the deposit. The green zippered bag was closed and locked, the top and front of the glass estate jewelry case was wiped clean, the lights in the office were off. Claudia was looking at a Life magazine from 1954, waiting, Rebekah assumed, for her return, even though the wind outside was picking up and Claudia had farther to drive.

“You didn’t have to stay, Claudia.”

“That’s okay,” Claudia said, standing up and pushing her stool in, and it happened again as it happened every day that Claudia just kept rising. First there was the complicated gesture of getting her legs underneath her, and then the slow straightening up. Sometimes she stretched or pressed a fist against her back as if her body constantly came as a shock to her. Sitting on the stools behind the counter, Claudia was the same height as Rebekah standing. At her full height she was five or six inches taller than Peter, who stood at six feet even. All day Rebekah marveled at the basic facts of Claudia, the way her hands were twice the size of Rebekah’s. She watched openly as Claudia walked around the counter to the coat rack, removing her blue parka with the orange lining; watched the way Claudia covered the distance in two long steps. No matter what she wore—jeans, slacks, the plain dress shirts she favored, sweaters—it was impossible to tell at first glance that she was a woman. Rebekah didn’t think she looked like a man, either, which was a puzzle. Claudia’s black hair, just going gray at the temples, was cut short, but it wasn’t exactly a man’s haircut, and besides, a lot of women had short hair. Her face was both broad and well defined; she had high, pronounced cheekbones, gray eyes, dusky skin. What Rebekah really felt was that when Claudia stood up, it wasn’t Claudia who was revealed as too tall; rather, the rest of them were obviously too short. Red and Slim, for instance, the Main Cronies, sat all day on the cracked Naugahyde sofas at the front of the store smoking cigarettes, yammering away about nothing, both of them weak-backed and heading for emphysema, while Claudia lifted heavy furniture with one hand, opened the back door with the other.

Rebekah herself—the china doll of the Prophetic Mission Church, of the church school; the backyard, twilit games—was treasured for being smaller than other girls, more frail. Famous among her friends and cousins for her tipply laugh, a laugh so quick and impossible to repress, Rebekah was the embodiment of Girl. Her mother said she had Bird Bones, her uncles called her No Bigger’n a Minute. She had felt pride when other girls became coltish and awkward and she was still so neat and childish. Even after she’d reached a normal height, had grown unexpectedly so curvy that her father wouldn’t look at her, she continued to think of herself as that princess child, the one girl small enough to sit on Jesus’ knee as He Suffered the Children to Come Unto Him, while the others, the tall angry girls and the pimply boys, sat at His feet.

“Bekah, you coming?” Claudia stood next to the heavy front doors, her hand at the keypad for the alarm system.

Someone should have pointed out to Rebekah that it’s the summit of foolishness to feel pride for what you lack. Someone might have mentioned that there comes a day, and not long into life, when you’ll need all the strength you can get; when the woman who makes it across the prairie and saves her children turns out to be taller than Jesus by a foot and a half.

“Do you want me to follow you, make sure you get home all right?”

Rebekah smiled, shook her head, accepted her coat from Claudia. “That’s okay. Thank you, though—I have an errand to run.”

The snow wasn’t falling yet. Rebekah steered the old Buick Electra, wide and heavy as a ship, down the streets of the east side of Jonah, out to the bypass that would take her to Peter’s rural road. She was thinking it had been a Friday that she’d met Peter, a Friday because that used to be Claudia’s day off and she was nowhere in the memory. It was Friday now. An anniversary of sorts, but how many weeks? More than seven months of weeks; she was too tired to count.

Before her twenty-third birthday, when she left the church and took up with Hazel, Rebekah had never worn pants or cut her hair, not even into bangs, although lots of girls got by with that one. Rebecca’s hair had hung to the middle of her thighs, dark red at the roots and gradually lightening at the ends, until the last three inches were blond, fine as silk. Her baby hair. Her crowning glory. Vernon wouldn’t allow her mother to braid the blond hair, or put a rubber band around it. Once a week she had to use a VO5 Hot Oil Hair Treatment to protect it. Every year that passed was like the ring in a tree: blond as a baby; here you can see it starting to darken. Light, then strawberry, then more like a cherry, then like aged cherrywood—her life, her father’s life. By the time she cut it, that baby hair was a raggedy mess, most of it broken off and split in two; she pulled a comb through it hatefully, and her head hurt all the time from the weight of it on her scalp.

Until that day five years ago when Rebekah left the church, she’d never seen a movie or watched television or danced or been in the same room with alcohol. She’d never gone swimming or even taken a long bath, as it was considered immoral for girls to do so. She’d never been on a boat, an airplane, a train. She had been on a bus, in cars, trucks, tractors, and hay wagons. Garlic had been exotic to her, as were any spices beyond those in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner: sage, thyme, nutmeg. Salt. Her father ate onions as if they were apples, but didn’t hold with spicing food. She hadn’t learned the details of any world war, only the barest facts, and she didn’t know where on a map the great cities of Europe could be found. If she’d located the cities, she wouldn’t have known their currencies. She had never played a sport, had not run since she was a child, and her tendency to take long, brisk walks was frowned upon. At eighteen, twenty, she knew nothing about sex, only what she had heard whispered or otherwise referred to by her friends who’d married young, had children young.

But for all this naïveté, what was forced and what was natural to her, Rebekah had seen many dead bodies. The Prophetic Mission denied her the knowledge of sex and reproduction, but found death to be, in general, quite wholesome. She’d attended the calling hours and funerals of more people than she could recall. Though there were plenty she remembered: profiles—first just a nose, a temple, the back of the head meeting the silk pillow—who became her aunt Lovey; her grandparents; her mother; Sister Parson, who died old, and Sister Lynton, who was only twenty-nine; and children, too, and babies. Martin Peacock, who owned Peacock’s Mortuary, was Prophetic, and his funeral home was as familiar to her as any place in the world. The members of her church stood at the wake of every member who died, the extended families of every member, near strangers. They attended funerals when it was politic to do so, or when the service would be interesting, perhaps because a daughter from home who sang beautifully—a daughter who had since gone on to Olivet or Bob Jones University—would be there, singing.

INDIANA: CORN AND DEATH. She’d like a bumper sticker that said that. Ooh, that would vex her daddy, wouldn’t it? she thought, then realized she’d already gone about as far as she could where vexing was concerned, and was about to go the distance. The sky seemed somehow too close to the car—what was the problem here? The snow hadn’t started and yet the tires on the road sounded muffled, the color of a truck in the distance was dulled. She couldn’t tell where she was—somewhere on the County Line Road, but how far to go? Hadn’t it been a Wednesday? She would remember if Claudia had been there, she remembered everything else.

She had been wearing green, her best color, according to Hazel. A green cardigan because it was a cool morning in early May. She’d been sitting with Hazel at the counter when Peter came in alone. He nodded at the Cronies, gave a little salute to Hazel. Rebekah glanced at him, back down at her book. She had been reading Other Voices, Other Rooms, one of Hazel’s favorite novels. The mule had not yet hung himself from the mezzanine, but that scene was coming. Peter was average height, thin, wearing baggy blue jeans, a blue nylon jacket, a red knit cap, and later she would have a simple, bright memory of his face as she saw it for the first time, as he looked at Hazel and before he looked away. His cheeks were flushed from the spring wind, and his lips were red. The hair she could see at the edge of the cap was black, curly. Red cap, black hair, pink cheeks, red lips, his wide blue eyes fringed with black lashes. The blue was a surprise, the eyes themselves so round they were almost feminine, and the eyelashes, too.

He was not Vernon’s idea of what a young man should be. Rebekah watched him stroll into #14, pull out a drawer in a china cabinet, slide it back in slowly. He was wearing running shoes, something her father would never have tolerated in a son, if he’d had a son. Peter straightened a frame against the wall, tipped a floor-length mirror, rubbed the satin edge of a quilt; this was not how men behaved in her world. They stood still and kept a silent watch as their women committed such shenanigans; it was the province of the female to study objects and engage the earthly. She watched as he picked up an alligator travel case in #15 and carried it a few feet down the aisle, as if he were running late for a train. Rebekah laughed out loud before she could stop herself; the Cronies looked up a moment, and then went back to talking.

She wondered, in the months that followed and certainly now, what the human eye sees in that first moment. Do we know something, or do we decide it in an instant and only later rewrite the scene to imply that something decided on us? Because now, if she were asked, she’d say that he looked smart and funny, whimsical, sophisticated, gifted. She might even say that she saw something in his hands she loved, a certain eloquence, but in truth she didn’t, on that Wednesday, notice his hands at all. His eyes, that blue, told nothing about what he turned out to be. There were jokers in the church, men who could do imitations, who could tell jokes, even a few with a droll wit that was lost on nearly everyone. But no man in her life would have run like a girl with a travel case and make her see the train, and do it for the benefit of no one.

Rebekah had laughed, and the laugh hung in the air a moment the way a bell will after it’s stopped ringing. Peter turned, offered her a slight bow. Hazel glanced at her, went back to her magazine. The Cronies were silent a moment, then Red had said, “I told him I’d rather tow a Chevy than drive a Ford.”

“Yep, that’s right.”

“I don’t care if it’s a V-8 or a V-80, don’t be asking me should you buy a Ford truck.”

“That’s the way to say it,” Slim agreed.

“And then he sets over to the house night after night, watching grown men wrestle on the TV. His mom carries his food in to him like he’s a shut-in. I said I sure didn’t raise him to set like that.”

“His get-up-and-go got up and went, sounds like.”

“Hand me another cola, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Rebekah turned left onto Peter’s road, which had a number but everyone called it One Oak. The snow had just begun to fall and now she wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake, maybe, coming out this way before the storm. Before she could really regret it, there was his cabin. His mailbox, the short lane, three steps up, the broad porch, the screen door, his storm door, his windows. He was there—the porch light was on, and there was his little red truck. She’d intended to drive by, just drive by the once, but now all she could do was stop and wait for a sign, not from God, but from Peter. She no longer fit in her life and it was his fault and there was no sense going on until something was resolved. A silver strip of smoke curled up from the chimney, away. Snow began to settle in the upward curving arms of the trees, and Peter, if he was really home, gave nothing to go on. A note, a letter, should she leave something behind? But what should she say? That right there, as close as her own breath, she could see the faint scar on his palm where he’d been bitten by a cat? That the shirt of his she slept with was losing his scent, and when it was gone she would see no light in her life? She could say: The way you shake hands with strangers, play the guitar, know songs about umbrellas—these things have destroyed me. You gave me red wine, venison, you lifted the hair off the back of my neck, which no one has done since my mother died. Every person wore the look that spoke of this loss, it had happened to everyone, and they could all say these things: his smell, her voice, her body in sleep. What had happened to Rebekah? What has happened to me? she said aloud, and watched the door Peter didn’t open. What would she really say to him, if there were world enough and time, a letter like a book he would have to read but never get to finish?

She would say, Peter, there was a sinking-down comfort in my life, as if I knew I was trapped in the belly of a whale, and so I built my little fires and was content to ride the waves out. All my life I’d looked around at the hangar of ribs, the slick walls, and thought, This is the size of the world. But what if the Leviathan opened his mouth? What if the greatest darkest biggest beast in the deepest sea imaginable, my God, the land that was my God and the Mission and the fear that were the swallowing that had swallowed me; what if that very beast opened wide and there above the sky I had always thought was the sky, the hard black whale palate dotted with whale stars; what if that sky opened to the sky above the sea, and I could see the wild spread of it above me, the real stars for once, for the first time? What if I suddenly saw the teeth, the tongue, the cervical curve of the whale’s mouth? What then?

Well, she thought, taking a deep breath, I would run for it.

She gave him thirty seconds more, but she knew he wasn’t coming. Peter didn’t pull her from the sea. He wasn’t the shore, the sky, the stars. He was just standing there, agreeable at the time, and while she hadn’t even begun to grieve for him, hadn’t begun to reckon up what the cost would be to her in the end, she also knew women never really die from love. Hazel had told her so.

Rebekah put the car in gear, and headed home.

Claudia stopped at Parker’s Supermarket on her way out of town, joining half of Jonah in the joy of the looming crisis. She took what milk was left, the orphaned loaves of wheat bread. Not knowing whether the storm would even come, and if it did what she would need, made her forget what she’d come for. The store was vast, too bright, and both her knees and her will felt porous. Again and again and again, the car door, the parking lot, the groceries, the stares. In the produce section she stood a few moments unmoving, thinking how odd the fact of consciousness in beings who spent their lives like hamsters on a wheel.

She ended up buying more fruit than she could ever eat, and a few things she’d never purchased before in her life: buttermilk bath salts, smoked cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate. On a whim, she went back and bought two of everything, thinking she might leave a bag on her sister’s porch with no note, as if Millie had been the object of a visitation; Millie, who had no need of help from anyone, and didn’t care much for food. Everyone in the store gave Claudia at least a long look; and one elderly woman stopped in her tracks and pointed directly at Claudia’s chest, while saying to her stooped husband, “Look-a there!” Claudia walked on, never meeting an eye or giving an indication she’d heard their comments, as if she weren’t merely too tall, too broad, but deaf and blind as well. It wasn’t that she was resigned to her status, although that was part of it. And she hadn’t precisely taken inside herself the years of scorn, although for a while she had. Now she relied on something she’d heard Amos Townsend say in church a few months earlier.

He had welcomed them and they’d sung something, Claudia couldn’t remember the song, and then he read from Scripture and she didn’t remember what that was either—something from the book of Mark, she suspected—and then Amos began to talk about the character of Jesus. He’d quoted a Quaker theologian named D. Elton Trueblood: “Jesus Christ can be accepted; He can be rejected; He cannot reasonably be ignored.” Claudia wrote the words in the little notebook she had taken to bringing with her to church. She could see how Trueblood’s claim might be true intellectually, and yet ignoring Jesus was as easy as ignoring anyone else in the realm of the dead, as far as she was concerned. He could have easily said that the Civil War cannot reasonably be ignored, or the mechanics of evolution, or the missile silos in the American West. Of course they can’t, she had thought, and yet it’s in our nature to ignore everything except our survival, and indeed, our survival probably depended upon a narrowness of focus that began in the morning with the hunt and ended at night with shelter. She was thinking of this when Amos said that he’d thought about Jesus his whole life—he agreed with Trueblood—and as an adult his contemplation felt like a combination of what young girls feel for rock stars and what young boys feel for abusive fathers. Claudia had blinked, taken a breath. He imagined, Amos said, a girl lying on a sofa, studying pictures and biographies of the object of her affection, imagining she knew Him in a way no one else did, and also hoping to get closer, to establish greater intimacy and to get to the bottom, finally, of her passion. Or a boy, walking through the house after dinner and hearing his father come up the steps—the wariness, the quick prayer, Please don’t let him notice me. Jesus, Amos continued, had always struck him as a man filled with rage. Think of Jesus’ impatience with His mother, with the Apostles, His chilly distance from the people on whom He performed miracles, how He was so irritated with everyone who simply didn’t get it. Think of Him with the fig tree. What a world to be born into! How grotesque and cruel to be made manifest by the Divine just to suffer and be killed for a senseless metaphorical principle. Amos shook his head in disbelief, mentioned Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard, how the message sent was understood by the Son, but not by the messenger. He paraphrased a passage from a book about cosmic child abuse. Claudia was lost a moment, then Amos said he thought the great message of Jesus might be there, in His anger, in the abuse He had suffered not at the hands of the Romans, but at the hands of His Father, because that’s what we really share with Him. We are called upon to love a God who either didn’t see fit to protect us from disaster and death, or was helpless to prevent it. What sort of a God was that? And Jesus, in response, created for Himself a sort of daily compassion (not empathy, of which He seemed to have little, at least to Amos), but a cobbled-together will-to-patience that was born not of His divinity, but of His humility. Amos said he’d imagined Jesus so many times repeating under His breath, “Don’t smite them, don’t smite them, they’re really just a bunch of morons and are in enough trouble already,” repeating it as He healed the hemorrhaging woman, the blind man, the soldier, people He did not love but took mercy upon anyway. If Jesus hadn’t seen His lot as the same as humanity’s, He could not have been human. And if He hadn’t felt compassion for the people around Him, He could not have been Divine. “Or maybe I’m just mad at my Father,” Amos had said near the end of the sermon, with his rueful smile. He ended by saying it was possible to consider Jesus an entire lifetime and find nothing but projections of our own futility, our own fear of death; He was a wild, blank, imaginal screen on which we had cast our looming cultural shadow.

The Haddington Church of the Brethren was completely silent when Amos stopped speaking. Claudia didn’t dare look around, but she wondered what the other parishioners were thinking as they listened. At the time she didn’t even know what Brethren meant, except that she never thought about her clothes when she was there, and no one and nothing but Amos Townsend and this church really interested her.

After that Sunday, Claudia thought often of the phrase ‘He created for Himself a kind of daily compassion,’ and she tried to do the same, even though she lacked power, divinity, wisdom, grace. She walked through the grocery store, or stepped into a gas station, and when the toothless women in sweatshirts, their bodies and hair reeking of cigarette smoke and fast food, stared at her cruelly or even went so far as to make a comment, she no longer thought, They hate me. Now she tried to remind herself that if we don’t feel the weight of the human condition, we must not be fully human. She thought instead, They hate themselves. They hate being alive. They hate their Fathers.

As she walked to the car, the feeling in her chest was atmospheric, a pinching there not unlike excitement. The silence was so thick Claudia became aware of her own breathing, and of the sensation that she was actually in the sky. The sky was no longer above her, or the clouds at a safe distance. As she loaded her groceries the snow began to fall, heavy flakes at first, but by the time she started the car and turned on the lights, the wind had picked up and the six miles ahead of her seemed too long. She had the second bag of food, the things she’d thought she might leave for Millie, but knew she’d never get to her sister’s house and back home before the storm struck. As she made her way through the north end of Jonah, she decided to leave them at Rebekah’s; the old house where Rebekah lived with her father was on the way.

The porch light burned at the Shooks’, but Rebekah’s car wasn’t there, and there was no sign of Vernon. Claudia trudged up the sidewalk, the heavy bag obscuring her vision. Rebekah’s neighborhood felt abandoned—there were no dogs barking, no movement. She left the bag in front of the wooden screen door, under the porch light, as she would have at Millie’s, with just these words written on the outside of the bag: For Rebekah, a cold night.

By the time Claudia reached Old 73, heading east toward home, hers was the only car on the road, or the only one she could see. There was a little visibility to the south, but almost none in the north; she could make out the houses, the convenience store, the used car lot to the right of the road, but nothing on the left. She knew her right turn was coming up, and began to look for the mailbox that signaled the V of the additional lane—just a little turn lane a quarter of a mile long. She was too familiar with the road, had driven it too many times, and tended to sail into the turn lane at top speed, then slow down quickly in order to make the turn. Indiana country roads have that effect on most people, Claudia thought; they breed a false security, because the world seems so flat and manageable, the sight line so clean. She didn’t see the mailbox and then she saw just the outline of it, and some part of her body led into the swerve to the right, but something else, a voice, cautioned her to flash her high beams into the lane, just in case. There in the lane was a man, dressed in a black coat and walking shoulder-hunched against the blowing snow. Claudia jerked the wheel of the old Cherokee too hard to the left; too late realized her error. The back fishtailed with a skating, liquid ease, and Claudia took her hands off the wheel. She spun in a full circle, then half of another, and when the tires found some purchase, she gently turned the wheel into the spin and felt the truck shudder in her hands.

She could no longer see anything. Her headlights were pointing west, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The walking man was gone, had vanished as if into smoke, or a high tide. She had to get off the highway—whoever she couldn’t see wouldn’t see her, so she drove a few feet, then recognized the iron gate of the old nursing home, empty for the past three years. Bear Creek, her road, was due south—so she turned and drove tentatively over what she hoped was the road. By now there was nothing, no shoulder, no fencerow, nothing to indicate if she was still on pavement or heading toward the culvert. Two miles yet from home, and she’d left earlier that day without either boots or gloves, another bit of typical Hoosier folly.

Sometimes the snow blew horizontally across her headlights, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. She’d gone nearly half a mile when she saw something off to her right, at the edge of the headlight beam. She angled the Cherokee toward the shape just slightly, just enough to cast light upon it, and got out of the truck. The wind and snow hit her face like an open hand, rocketing into her coat, and for a moment she thought of how silly this was, a woman like Claudia undone by a winter storm. She’d lived on this road her whole life; how could she possibly fail to get home? The wind sang in her ears, rising and falling, and a stand of trees outside her sight moaned along in time.

“Hello?” Her voice seemed to stop in her mouth. The wind had blown it back at her.

There, then: a set of eyes caught green in the halogen light. Claudia took a step backward, saw another set, a third, the vague impression of fur. Three dogs, she thought, long-muzzled, gray. She imagined more than she saw. Three dogs lying on the frozen ground, snow blown up against their sides, the brutal wind. Before she could decide what to do, all three animals rose and ran away from her, deep into the pounding whiteness, the black ground of the field on which they could run all night.

The snow was blinding by the time Rebekah drove home, leaning close to the steering wheel, as if that would help. When she finally reached her house, she parked the car in the general vicinity of other car-shaped, snow-covered mounds, hoping she wasn’t actually on the sidewalk, or in somebody’s yard. She’d left the porch light on by accident that morning, and now it was the only guide to her door—the too bright bulb her father insisted on and that she usually found distressing.

It was Friday, so Vernon would be at the Governance Council Meeting until it was over, snowstorm or not. Rebekah didn’t worry about him driving or becoming stranded; to do so would have been a betrayal of who he was to her, and who he believed himself to be. He had, Rebekah knew, thrived in storms far worse than this, once traveling seven miles on horseback in a blizzard because he’d intended to propose to her mother and would not wait.

Constance Ruth Harrison, called Ruthie, had been seventeen years old in 1958, had known nothing of the world when Vernon set his cap for her. They’d met when Vernon responded to a call from the pulpit to help get a neighbor’s crops in; Ruthie’s father, Elder Harrison, had fallen to pneumonia, and his family was in trouble. They weren’t Prophetic, the Harrisons, but belonged to a radical Holiness sect that had broken away from the larger body and set up worship in a barn on Elder Harrison’s land. At first they called themselves Children of the Blood of the Lamb, and then Children of the Blood, and finally, just The Blood. That was where the truth lay, they believed, in the old story. For some groups it was in Christ’s miracles, for some it was the Resurrection. (The Mission preached that demonic sects like the Catholics worshiped only Mary and a group of Mafia-connected cardinals in Italy who carried submachine guns under their red robes, and who communicated with the Underworld through a code involving sunglasses.) But the Harrisons and their little ragtag army, which had remained isolated as long as Elder Harrison lived, believed that the divine message of Jesus was in His Blood, the blood He shared with the Master Creator Father God, and the blood He spilled on the cross to redeem humanity. In them, the Blood rose up and spoke; it told them of the End Times, it said there would be a worldwide slaughter of the unconverted Jews. As the Children of the Blood married and mingled with the Prophetic Mission, and as the secular world slouched toward them, they realized there would need to be a worldwide slaughter of other groups as well. No hope of conversion would be offered to Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindoos, the Godless Buddhists. A special trampling under the hooves of the Four Horsemen was reserved for Unitarians, and a spectacle of Holy Execution for the mortal enemies of The Blood, the Mormons. The old peace churches, the Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Brethren, would be mown down, but gently, like wheat, as the members of The Blood respected their work ethic. Jesus would smite the proclaimers of the Pentecost with a special vengeance, including the Nazarenes, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God, because their worldliness was evidence of a silent affiliation with Satan. Any branch of the crooked tree that called itself Pentecostalism, then built its ministry around cavorting with prostitutes and self-glorification, had not merely gone astray. It had become a carrier of the Disease.

Until five years ago Rebekah had thought it all perfectly normal, what went on in that barn with her Granddad Elder, her child mother, the members of the fugitive group. It was Worship as they Worshiped. Of course there would be no Children of the Blood without blood, there would be no life, there would be no eternity. The barn was their Temple, and its altar was stained, as had been all the altars of the seven tribes of Israel. And her father riding his great horse Michael over miles of snow-blanketed fields to claim Ruthie as his own—that had sounded normal, too. Ruth had had no say in the matter, wouldn’t have dreamed of making any claim to her life or liberty. She’d told Rebekah at the end, lying in the hospital bed the Mission had rented and set up in her bedroom, that although she couldn’t say she’d loved Vernon at seventeen, there had been something in the cruel set of his jaw that had thrilled her and made her want to go away with him. So she’d been willing, in her way, then he took her and married her, and it hadn’t been her family or her childhood she’d mourned, it had been her girlfriends in the church, whom Ruthie had taken for granted, considered permanent. They’d never been together as a group again, never walked across a field or gathered around a porch swing, never spent the night in the same bed or talked for hours about nothing, chattering like magpies, as the men used to say. All those girls were married off eventually, scattered to the winds, kept behind closed doors.

Rebekah hadn’t worn boots to work, and so was forced to make her way down the sidewalk in mincing steps, reaching out for trees. She imagined someone watched her do this. Hazel’s voice suddenly entered her head, saying, Oh look, a little redheaded stepchild has escaped from under the porch. Rebekah laughed aloud, lost her footing, righted herself. She could just see, in front of the screen door, a bag from Parker’s Supermarket. When she reached it, she looked inside before picking it up, but it was just what it appeared to be. Who would have done such a thing? Who would have thought of her, now that she’d lost her cousins and all her extended family, the church she’d grown up in, and the love of her father?

The front door opened into a sitting room that contained a piano no one had played since her mother died, but which Vernon had tuned once a year because that’s what one did: tune the piano. The walls were painted pale green and decorated with the acceptable notions: family pictures, a print of Jesus knocking on the door—everyone knew the image of Him knocking on the door and awaiting admittance. Jesus knocks, was what the print was trying to say, He doesn’t just walk in and help Himself to your old mess. Above the piano was a counted-cross-stitch sampler Ruthie had made that read JESUS IS THE SONG IN MY HEART. The same could be said of everything in the parlor: the bench on which no one sat, the piano no one played, the two wing chairs gathered around the little table on which Ruth had placed her knickknacks and doilies—all of these things were somehow connected to Jesus. It was a wonder to consider, the experiment to make Jesus everything, the effort it contained.

Rebekah unloaded the groceries on the butcher block table in the kitchen as if compiling the clues to a mystery. Milk, eggs, bread, orange juice—that could be anyone. But this French cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate, buttermilk bath salts in what was supposed to look like an antique milk jug? And all this fruit: oranges, grapes, apples, as if it were a different season altogether. For a single fluttery moment she thought Peter must have left it, he must have been worried about her, and then she saw the note: For Rebekah, a cold night. Claudia’s handwriting.

The oranges looked so good she decided to eat one right away—she would puzzle over Claudia’s gesture later—but then saw again the bath salts, so she carried them both into the bathroom, ran hot water. She took off her clothes without looking in the mirror, as her mother had taught her, poured part of the milk container into the tub. The salt didn’t smell like buttermilk (thank goodness) but it was that color, and the water became creamy, slightly foamy. Rebekah climbed in, surprised by the silky feeling of the water, and leaned back. The water lapped over her, rose and fell as she breathed, leaving a sheen of sweet-smelling oil on her skin. Rebekah closed her eyes and thought of Peter; he had glanced at Hazel and she saw his face again, everything around and behind him gone dark in her memory. She focused on nothing but the color of his skin and the shape of his mouth and the length of his eyelashes. But she couldn’t hold on to the image; she kept seeing Claudia’s handwriting, the span of Claudia’s hand on the glass countertop of the Used World. Span. It was a biblical word for time, Rebekah thought. The smell of the orange rose up in the heat of the room. Water continued to pour from the tap as she claimed the orange from the countertop, thrust her thumb under the skin around the navel. She pulled off large sections of peel and dropped them in the water, where they floated, riding the crests of the small waves around her body. She hummed a bit of Artie Shaw’s “My Heart Stood Still” as she peeled the orange clean, then pulled it apart harder than she meant to, not bothering to divide it into neat sections, and ate the whole thing in quick, big bites.