He’d always been arrogant. Why hadn’t she seen that? Just like Jesus Christ was arrogant.
In that moment, she hated him, this man she’d once thought dashing, her personal savior from all the trauma of home, but who’d been a slime-covered aqueduct for her life since then. How could Thorne force Christ back into her environment like this? Still in shock, she couldn’t fathom it, except to note how her husband took on the characteristics of her persecutor, the Son of God.
If Thorne felt strained by his “enormous pressures,” which he’d brought upon himself—again, the presumption!—then it served him right for disregarding his wife’s wishes.
She stayed in her room until late that night. She refused the five o’clock dinner, the seven o’clock tea, and the nine o’clock fireplace stoking by ignoring Eliza Tefera’s polite knockings.
At ten, she cracked open her door. Candlelight glowed in Thorne’s room at the other end of the hall. She knew by his tuneless humming that he was drinking. The tone quality had worsened with his deafness in the three years since he’d come home. She reminded herself that there was no need to step so quietly.
On her way downstairs, she reflected that Christ must like it when people lost their senses or mobility. The loss of such facilities kept them dumb and pliable, ignorant of His grand facade named Creation, and handicapped in their ability to learn about it. She froze on the bottom landing, struck by this idea. No wonder her having the angel’s wings irked Christ so. With her telepathy, Alice had unparalleled sensitivity to His duplicity. Which again raised the old question of why He just didn’t take her powers back from her, so maddeningly answered: because Christ wished to preserve her debt obligation of sin, thus enslaving her to His whims.
She detoured to the study and used a wooden match to light a candle. A breath to calm herself, and then she continued to the basement. The flame dimmed in the basement hallway, as if the very act of nearing Christ invited darkness into the air.
Her pulse hammered with all the subtlety of a rice-pounding machine as she pushed open the door. She wouldn’t enter the chapel—no, couldn’t do that, despite what she planned to do—so she remained in the hall and shined her candle in.
Shocking. In the weeks since Thorne had started building it, he’d made more progress than she would have thought possible, somehow managing to efficiently use a small space not intended for this purpose. A group of six pews, each sufficient to seat six parishioners, dominated the room. Up the middle ran an aisle that would barely be wide enough for the new Mister and Missus Redger when they exchanged their vows next week. Stained glass shutters covered the windows flanking the back door. And upon the altar table, accentuated by the purple wall hangings behind it (which the tailor must have paid Thorne in lieu of cash for Alice’s last dress), sat the imposing, gold-plated cross donated by the widow Libby Hughes.
She fell to her knees.
Grief rose in her throat, petrified by the passage of eight years. She couldn’t take it anymore, and that was why she was here.
“Jesus, I’ve not spoken directly to you in many years.”
The words grated like stones torn from bedrock—the agony of overriding her years of anger, and yet once started, an avalanche.
Continuing to address the cross, she said, “I’ve felt your inter— your involvement in my life. I’ve not enjoyed it, not agreed with it, but I now accept that there’s nothing I can do about it. Thy will shall be done whether I like it or not. You are … you are the lord and master, and I am the slave. If you demand obedience, then I shall give it.”
Sweat covered her body. Dizzy. If Christ were the natural law, then why did this feel so unnatural?
“If you demand forgiveness for what you’ve done to me and my family, then I shall have to give it. If you require me to beg forgiveness for my mother’s childhood infraction, then I do so now. And even if you don’t, then I must obey you anyway. So I’m here to declare my willingness to submit. To give you what you want. Anything.”
Anything but the dissolution of my soul, her heart added. But she knew Jesus heard that also.
She waited.
Silence.
Minutes passed, but still nothing. Why didn’t Jesus speak to her? She wasn’t expecting actual words, but she’d at least hoped for some kind of sign, even if only an internal feeling.
Nothing.
No, not quite nothing: a tremor in the angel’s wings? A sense of something impending.
An internal check revealed that the feeling did indeed come via the angel’s wings, but she didn’t know its source. Well, that could be anything. She could be feeling the country’s displeasure with the impeachment trial. It didn’t necessarily have to come from Jesus. But she wasn’t about to release the wings from their mental cage to follow the trail.
Frustrated, she stood up but still remained in the hallway. She doubted she’d be able to come this near to the chapel again, let alone enter it for the Redger wedding.
There—that feeling of impendency again, now with new overtones: premeditation in progress, deviousness. She had felt this before. It was as if the angel’s wings were a dog in a cage, sniffing the air, begging to be let out so they could put noses to the ground and find the source.
But should she? She was normally so diligent about keeping them locked away except when using them during the mirror meditations in the dining room. Anything could happen if she took this risk.
She took a breath. Decided to chance it. She had to know if Jesus were planning something.
Once loose, the angel’s wings quickly found the source.
The discovery surprised her.
Thorne. The wings alighted in his head as he sat in his room. Watched through his eyes as he raised a glass to his lips.
I’m cold, he thought, but the drink was taking care of that. Chuckling. Everything is going perfectly.
She discerned no more from these impressions other than that the chapel figured centrally in his plans. She successfully recalled the wings to their mental cage.
The chapel—Jesus again! Why did everything come back to Him? Even in her husband’s thoughts, almost as if …
No. No, it can’t be.
Her breathing quickened as if she were running flat out on North Road. Yet all she had strength to do was step back until she felt a wall, and then slide down to the floor. Black splotches blossomed across her vision.
Ever since the day Thorne had returned after a four-year absence, she had accepted that Christ had sent him back into her life for a reason. This was why she’d worked so hard at sewing dresses for him: to bridge her schism from Jesus. But now …
The idea was too horrible to be true, but she couldn’t disregard it: could Thorne be conspiring with Jesus Christ against her? Or, at the very least, could Jesus be pulling marionette strings, subtly influencing Thorne’s actions? Either way, it would explain his preoccupation with the chapel and reluctance to reveal its true purpose—the “plan,” as Obie Redger had thought of it.
Minutes passed as her certainty grew. The betrayal! That she’d come to Christ in good faith, so to speak, only to discover a sinister plot against her.
She felt angry and weak at the same time. Despair pushed her deeper into the floor. She envied those who could cry out to God without reservation, because she felt like wailing, “Oh God, oh dear Lord, how can this be?”
But one thing she did know: she couldn’t afford to skip the Redger wedding. As uncomfortable as stepping foot inside the chapel would make her, she realized the event would be some kind of turning point. Thorne, Jesus, and secondarily, Obie, had been planning this for weeks, and she was sure it had something to do with her. If she avoided it, she missed whatever opportunity she might have had to thwart her adversary’s plan in action.
One had to be at the battlefield to fight a war.
Chapter 13
The fog choking the woods billowed with the rider’s approach, growing pregnant until the silhouette of man on horse emerged from the t
rail. Hoofbeats and the sound of the animal’s breathing began as if afterthoughts.
Alice had been standing on the porch, blowing steam off her morning tea. Knowing this might be her last opportunity because the Redger wedding was that evening, she had tried to enjoy the warmth flowing down her throat.
She knew the rider was a minister from the wide-brimmed, black hat, and by the way he sat: back straight in the saddle and head held high. A proud soldier of the soul.
Have you come to do battle with me? she asked him mentally.
He drew near to the porch, his face deceptively young and friendly. “Yes,” he said. His smile fell when he saw her shock. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you asked if I’m the minister.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked properly embarrassed. How guileful were the many masks of Christ’s children! “I’m Daniel Dawson. Mister Norwick hired me.”
“I’m his wife, Alice, but you already knew that.”
He expression didn’t betray that he did. “Pleased to meet you.”
He swung off his horse and attempted to take her hand for the customary handshake (ministers didn’t kiss ladies’ hands), but Alice turned her back and went inside.
Later, she stood by the pantry’s fireplace, unable to heat the shivers out of herself. She felt like smashing her tea cup on the floor and screaming, “Get out of my house!”
Thorne had already eaten breakfast, but that didn’t stop him from digging into the muffins Eliza had laid out for Alice and offering them to Reverend Dawson. She listened as they chatted about inconsequential things such as traveling conditions. Apparently, they had met before to discuss business, no doubt on one of Thorne’s many trips for land hunting. The only relevant thing Thorne said was that the parishioners would probably trickle in that afternoon.
‘Parishioners’ indeed. ‘Christ-agent conscripts’ would be more like it.
“What a beautiful mirror,” Dawson said.
“My grandmother’s,” Thorne replied.
Alice peered in to see him fondling the large mirror’s frame—her mirror. She wanted to tell him to leave it alone, that it wasn’t his; he’d never used it.
“She whipped me for almost cracking it once as a child. Told me the day I break it will be the day I die.”
Chuckling, Dawson turned his cup’s handle from noon to midnight. “When we get to Heaven, remind me to tell her the parable of the man who worried more about worldly riches than God’s.”
Alice grimaced from the exchange, which she felt Jesus had calculated to make her uncomfortable. From the pantry, she said irritably, “Reverend, just how did you come to be here?”
Why, I came from Jesus, sent especially for you. Silly girl.
“You mean, for the wedding ceremony?” He looked confused. “I answered your husband’s advertisement.”
“What did she say?” Thorne hadn’t been looking at her lips.
“She asked me how I got here. I’m a journeyman, spreading the news of Christ to the heathens in this our hour of greatest need. Are you well, my child? Come sit down.”
Thorne glared forbiddingly at her.
“You mean, you’re only here to perform the ceremony?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But what about our general need for a minister?”
“Well, as Mister Norwick explained to me—”
Thorne cleared his throat. “Alice, this is no concern of yours. This is man’s business, and I would thank you to—”
“I am simply asking a question. Why don’t you—”
“I hate to interrupt,” the reverend said, obviously not hating it at all. He gently placed a hand on Thorne’s shoulder to silence him and then stood. “But it is time for me to see that chapel. I have preparations to make.”
“Of course. Right this way.”
Bowing her head in resignation, Alice stepped aside as they cut through the pantry.
At the door leading downstairs, Thorne turned. “And to answer your question, Alice, the church elders haven’t yet selected a new minister. The reverend here is only to fulfill immediate needs.”
Reverend Dawson smiled sheepishly at her with crooked teeth. Then, turning to the stairs, he withdrew a crucifix-pendant necklace from his jacket and put it on.
Alice’s heart stopped.
The same necklace. The same golden atrocity that Reverend Forney had worn around his neck in Herbstown. The very same necklace. She knew this because it had the twin hooks curling backwards from each terminus, as if its maker had desired to illustrate the phrase “fisher of men” by fashioning the crucifix into a fishing lure. It had dangled in her face, touching her lips and forehead, as Forney raped her on the altar.
“Can’t be.”
Thorne, seeing the look in her eyes, stopped short, and Reverend Dawson bumped into him from behind. “Alice?”
The room swam. “That necklace.” Her mouth felt numb. But seeing Dawson’s growing concern, she said, “Your necklace. It—it’s beautiful. Where did you get it?”
“Oh. My mother’s brother bequeathed it to me. He died several years ago in Herbstown, South Carolina.”
Thorne, reading Dawson’s lips, flinched visibly.
The awkward moment stretched as comprehension sunk in. My mother’s brother. Reverend Forney? Alice sensed the clamp of secrecy cut off Thorne’s impulse to explain their silence.
The reverend eyed the two of them as they remained quiet. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Not at all.” Thorne’s disarming smile pushed onto his face. “I’m sorry. It’s early. Shall we head downstairs?”
“Ah. Yes. Good. For a moment, I thought there was a battle in Herbstown I’d not known of.”
Alice stayed behind as the men moved downstairs. Minutes passed in which she could focus on nothing but the rasp of her dry tongue. This was as bad as anything that had happened in recent weeks—worse, because it coalesced everything, confirming all her suspicions. Whereas last night she’d had only an intuition—albeit a strong one—that Christ and Thorne were planning some terrible fate for her, she now had proof, outright proof.
The chapel’s construction, the implausibility of Obie Redger’s marriage, the strange thoughts about a “plan,” and now the appearance of Reverend Forney’s nephew. Proof.
Yet one thing troubled her: Thorne’s apparent surprise, then caution, when discovering Dawson’s relation to Reverend Forney. If this were anyone else, wariness certainly would be warranted. She and Thorne might still be wanted for questioning in Forney’s death, even eight years later, since Thorne had taken an unnecessary risk by sending that letter home in the weeks following. But why would Thorne be so reserved with Dawson, his ally in Christ’s conspiracy against her?
For one, shining moment, the idea occurred to her that Thorne and Dawson were not really allies—and that there was no conspiracy. That Dawson’s tie to Forney was coincidental, which meant that Christ really wasn’t involved.
She immediately disregarded that answer as too simple to be true. No, the only possible explanation was that the Heavenly messenger who’d introduced Thorne to Dawson had neglected to inform them of this link to the past.
Yet doubt remained.
Scowling with concentration, she descended the stairs. She needed more information. She took station in the hallway, careful not to step foot in the chapel.
No.
She closed her eyes, knowing she must overcome this aversion. Taking a deep breath, she stepped across the threshold.
Reverend Dawson, hands folded behind his back, was pacing the aisle. He reached out and traced a finger along a pew, as if checking for dust.
Watching him, Thorne said, “Your uncle in Herbstown—was he also a man of God?”
“Oh? I’m sorry. Yes, yes he was. Do you think we could possibly separate these another foot? I’m concerned the bride and groom won’t be able to walk arm-in-arm.”
“Certainly.” Thorne proceeded to move th
e first pew.
“Funny you should ask about my uncle. My cousin near Herbstown just wrote me a letter, chastising me for not spending Christmas with her.”
The men worked in silence to adjust the pews. By the time they were done, sweat had pooled in the reverend’s eye sockets. He collapsed onto the nearest pew. “Good gracious. Too much bread and wine, I’m afraid. Uh, that was a joke.”
Thorne forced a laugh and glared at Alice, who also attempted a giggle.
She was startled when Thorne did a doubletake, as if he were surprised to see her here within a church.
Yes, she thought, I’m here. You shall not take advantage of my fear of this place to hide anything from me.
She came around front as Thorne, looking confused and worried, sat down next to Dawson. She tried to keep an eye on both the altar and the two men, prepared for an attack from either quarter.
Here I am, Son of God. Strike me down. You thought to do it in your own time, but I am in your house now, among your servants. Take back your angel’s wings, confront me, or put me out of my misery. Let’s be done with it!
The reverend gave her a puzzled look before wiping his face with a handkerchief. Alice realized she must be staring at him strangely, so she said, “You must miss your uncle very much.”
“To a degree, but I remember him as being rather self-righteous, even for a priest. I don’t think I even … Ah, well, I only got the necklace because I was his only relative in the ministry.”
“No closeness in your relationship?”
She didn’t know where she was going with this, but it made sense to keep him talking and test the Christ pig’s defenses. Thorne read both their lips with hawk’s eyes.
“Not truly. I met him only a few times. And I regret I didn’t take a greater interest in finding his murderers.”
“Murderers.”
An embarrassed grin. “Well, now I’m getting into Forney family legend. My uncle supposedly died of a heart attack while raping a local girl in his church.”
“Oh my!”
“Oh, yes. But she and her paramour—some rascal in the military—fled the state. I believe the authorities were trying to locate them through the army—the U.S. Army—when the War intervened. So obviously, suspicions remain.”
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