* * *
—
a few weeks later, deep into the pocket of a warm June, Uncle Hendrick came back to Motty’s, carrying a couple of suitcases, one of them that green case that had carried The Book of Clara. She thought: More books!
No men with him this time, and no Ruth or Veronica, either. Alone he seemed more courteous and somehow shyer. He asked her how she was doing.
She proudly showed him her palms. “See? All healed up.”
Motty grunted.
“And how do you feel about…what happened? In the cave? Did you remember what it said to you?”
“Mostly.”
Hendrick was surprised. He looked at Motty, and she said, “Tell the truth.”
She remembered the communion. She’d never forget the hard bite of the God’s hands on her, or those long minutes of connection, his thoughts rushing into her, carrying her away like a log on a raging river. She remembered the bone-deep pain when Motty yanked her hands away from the contact. She’d passed out, and Stella realized, just now, that Motty must have carried her out of the cave and up those stairs. Stella had woken up in bed aching from the loss of that connection, the God’s jagged thoughts still echoing in her head.
What had slipped away from her was the nature of those thoughts. They were so foreign to her, so oddly shaped, she couldn’t hold on to them. Hendrick had come to her bedside, and she’d talked as fast as she could while he scribbled in his notebook, but every word she spoke seemed to shred the God’s thoughts. How could human language capture what the God had imparted to her?
Yet the feeling behind the thoughts remained, like a sore tooth she couldn’t stop touching. Sometimes in the weeks that followed she’d stare at her hand and think, This is not my body. Or she’d wake up in the middle of the night, her arms spread, and realize that she was vast, a mountain rising up from the plain—and then suddenly everything would flip and she was ant-sized, the room’s dark ceiling impossibly far away. Little, big, little, big.
“I’m fine,” Stella said. “I’m ready for the next communion.”
“She’s not,” Motty said.
“I am!”
Stella had asked Motty a dozen times about when she could go back, and every time she replied, “When you’re ready.” But she’d never explain what would make Stella ready, or how long it would take. It was infuriating.
“It’s Motty’s choice,” Hendrick said quietly. “She’s the eldest Birch woman.”
Motty was eldest everything, Stella thought. She was twenty years older than Hendrick, and could have been his mother.
“Damn straight,” Motty said. “I won’t be rushed again.”
“It’s no one’s fault, Motty.”
“I know whose fault it is. And your part in it.”
The adults had forgotten her. She didn’t know what they were talking about—some kind of old grievance. Stella had so many questions, but she wasn’t brave enough to step between them. The cross fire would kill her.
* * *
—
it turned out there was no chance she was going into the cave today—Hendrick had come for another reason. Motty made a show of unlocking the chapel door for him, then tucked the key into her bra. Her lock, her key. Stella hadn’t figured out where she kept that key when it wasn’t on her.
Hendrick strode through the door with that green suitcase under his arm. “What’s he doing?” Stella asked Motty. She was gripped with jealousy. Was Hendrick seeing the God in the Mountain without her?
“None of your business. Leave him alone.”
She wasn’t about to leave him alone. When Motty got busy in the kitchen about an hour later, Stella snuck out to the chapel. Hendrick looked up and smiled. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
The stairs to the cave were covered by that door in the platform. She was very aware of that door, like it was the muzzled jaw of a dangerous dog.
Hendrick sat at a chair with a writing board across his lap. A leather notebook lay open atop a barrel—a makeshift reading stand.
“You’re making a copy?” she said.
“No, no. I’m writing commentary.”
She didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know what that meant. “Is that my book?”
He nodded. “It is indeed.”
“Can I read it?” She stepped closer.
“I’m sorry.” He put a hand over the page. “I can’t tell you the commentary, it would prejudice you.” He saw the confusion on her face. “If I told you how I interpreted your communion, you might be tempted to echo it, give us what we expect.”
“I wouldn’t lie about what the God said.”
“You wouldn’t mean to. But such knowledge might, um, color what you report. You see, what we need from each Revelator is the pure message, undiluted, unpolluted. Like a mountain stream, clear and straight from the source. It’s my job to write explanations of what was said, to expand on it, so that it’ll make sense to others.”
“Will you put them in a library?”
“Someday they’ll be in every library in the world. When the God makes his presence known, the world will change forever, every person on Earth will know your name—and all the Revelators who came before you. But for now…” He smiled indulgently. “It’s for family only. Just for us.”
“But not me.” Stella was offended. She was family. Who else deserved to read it more? “You could at least show me Motty’s book. Or Lena’s.”
He winced. “I told you the rules. No reading the word of any living Revelator. But don’t worry, someday, when you’ve laid your burden down, and Motty has—well, you’ll read them all. You can even come to Georgia and read the original handwritten manuscripts. I keep the originals safe with me, but I do like to come here to write the first draft of each commentary. I can feel the difference in my work, and I believe future generations will sense the difference too.” He smiled. “You commune with the God, and I commune with the text.”
“I don’t understand—why can’t people just read what I—what the God said? It seems like the God can speak for himself.”
“I wish it were so. It’s very complicated, Stella.”
“Show me, then.”
He laughed. “Oh, Stella, you’re a persistent one.”
“One line. Please.”
He put on a serious face that had a grin hiding under it. “You can’t tell Motty.”
“I promise.”
That made him even happier. “All right then, let me see.” He flipped back a page, then another. “Ah, here’s an interesting passage.” He cleared his throat. “A white fire, it moves, it moves, cold under skin, like a light under glass in the dark.” His voice was sing-songy. “It cannot—I cannot. We starve without speaking, alone.”
She thought, I said that?
Hendrick inhaled deeply, as if savoring the words. “Now, then,” he said to her. “What do you think it means?”
This felt like a test. She desperately wanted to succeed. “When I said that thing about the white fire, I must have been—”
He was shaking his head before she’d finished her sentence. “The God is talking. That’s the first thing you have to understand. He’s speaking through you, to us.”
She started again, flustered. “So the God is talking about the fever he gave me when I communed with him.” She’d woken up with Motty pressing a damp cloth to her forehead.
He shook his head again, and she winced. “The fire’s a metaphor. It stands for the secret knowledge that he’s trying to share—a transformative knowledge, capable of changing everything it touches, but so hot you can forge steel in it. We can build new things with it! Normally we don’t have the tools to understand this knowledge—it would look like a dim light, that ‘light under glass.’ Now that’s a divine idea, there, that we know from First Corinthians. We mortals se
e things through a glass darkly, which means we always have incomplete understanding. Have you read your New Testament?”
“I have a Bible. Elder Rayburn gave it to me.”
“Of course he did.”
“He wants me to come to church.”
“Motty didn’t mention that.”
“Well, she doesn’t want me to go.”
He seemed relieved to hear that. “There’s nothing wrong with the Christian faith. I’m a Christian. But it’s incomplete. It’s…” His eyes went wide. “It’s exactly like the glass darkly that we’re looking through. What we’re creating, what the God is giving to us, is a third testament, and a fourth aspect—do you know what that means, aspect?” She hated not knowing a word, and was going to say Of course I do, but he saw her hesitation. “Trinity, then—have you heard of that? There’s God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.”
“Yes! Elder Rayburn told me about that.”
“Did he now. Well, that’s what most of the church believes. They all look like separate beings, when viewed through our mortal perceptions, but they’re really three views of the same God. The three known views.”
“So the God in the Mountain—”
“He’s the fourth aspect, revealed just to us. He’s not antithetical to Jehovah—how can he be? But like Jesus, he can bring a new message that the world wasn’t ready for before now. He adds, he clarifies, and when the great day comes that he emerges from the mountain, the whole world will hear it. Do you understand?”
She nodded, just to keep him going.
“Where was I? A glass darkly. That mention of skin—that fire that moves under cold skin—tells us that the God can only share what he knows through the medium of the flesh—that’s to say, through a human Revelator.”
Stella felt like an idiot. Uncle Hendrick had gotten so much more from those words than she did—and she’d been the one to speak them. “What does it mean that it’s starving because it can’t speak?” she asked. “Is that…” An idea came to mind. “…loneliness?”
“Yes! He longs to communicate with us, just as a starving man longs for food.”
The praise lit her up.
“When the God says, it cannot, and I cannot,” Hendrick said, “that means that neither the God nor we mortals can survive, unless the message is transmitted.”
“Golly bum,” Stella said. She wished she could tell Abby about this.
As if reading her mind, Hendrick said, “I hope you realize now how important you are to the church. You have to hide this light inside yourself, telling no one.”
“I understand, but…why don’t we just tell people now? If they knew he was in there, that he was real, then…”
“No! That would be terrible! Stella, if we let strangers into that cave, and they discovered the God before he was ready, imagine the chaos. The government would swoop down upon us like locusts. You’ve heard of revenuers, haven’t you? This would be a thousand times worse. Why, they’d probably lock you up just to stop you from talking to him.”
“Oh! That would be terrible!” Again, Stella felt so stupid. She wasn’t thinking through the consequences. But other questions popped into her head, such as: How could a God ever not be ready? Why did it need people to defend it and hide it?
“Don’t worry,” Hendrick said. “The time is coming soon. The God’s getting ready, and when he steps into the sunlight the world will know all about you and the other Revelators, the sacrifices you’ve made—you, Motty, Lena, her especially, going back to—”
“Why especially?”
He grimaced. “Another time. Let’s just say she had a hard time of it, your mother. But history will know of her, and perhaps even remember my small role in bringing this third testament to the world.”
“Okay…so we’ll be famous. That’s why we’re doing this?”
“Oh, Stella, no. No, no, no. We’re not doing it for glory.”
“Then what do we get from the God?”
“His love, of course. And, well, a sense of purpose. There’s nothing more fulfilling than knowing what we do will help the world.”
“I mean, what do we get. Like, will he protect us from our enemies, like those Carolina bushwhackers? Or, say the government tries to take the farm from us. Will he stop them, or, I don’t know—”
“The God doesn’t work like that,” Hendrick said. “He loves us, he wants to keep us safe, but we can’t expect him to, well, slay people on our behalf.”
She was disappointed. “So what, then?”
“There is one promise it has made to us. It comes from The Book of Esther. The God has guaranteed that when he emerges from the mountain to reveal himself to the world, his children will receive a new body. Not in heaven—here on Earth. An immaculate body that never grows old, never suffers from disease, and never dies. It will be as immortal as the flowers that come back every year.”
“One body, ever blooming,” Stella said.
“That’s right!”
The chapel door banged open. It was Motty, and she was in a rage. One look at Hendrick told Stella he wasn’t going to get in Motty’s way. The full brunt of her punishment was about to fall.
And Stella thought: It’s worth it. Hendrick had listened to her. He’d talked to her like a person. He’d opened a book for her—that vast story of the Birch family and the God in the Mountain—and she’d stepped inside it.
“Excuse me,” Stella said to Hendrick, with the grace and dignity of a royal. “I have to go break off a switch.”
* * *
—
early in september, Motty walked into her bedroom without knocking, wearing a scowl. Stella said, “Don’t get on me, I already slopped the hogs.” New pigs had arrived over the summer, and Motty cared about nothing more than those animals.
“Sit down,” Motty said.
Stella frowned. Looked at her bed like it was a trap. Sat gingerly.
“We aren’t like them,” Motty said finally. “You, me. All the Birch women.”
Stella waited for her to say more. Motty was worked up about something. Finally the old woman said, “We walk a tougher road. These men, they only know what they’ve heard. It’s all secondhand, might as well be gossip. Do you understand?”
Stella didn’t. But she nodded. “Hendrick said that my mama paid a sacrifice. What did he mean?”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but—?”
“Never mind him. You’re responsible for your own soul. Just remember that.”
What a crazy thing to say, Stella thought. Who else would be responsible for it?
Motty went to the door. “Hendrick and the Uncles are coming in the morning.”
A thrill ran through Stella’s body. Finally! It had been six months since the communion.
“You best take a bath tonight,” Motty said. And slammed the door.
* * *
—
stella was waiting on the front lawn when Hendrick and the Uncles got out of their cars. She greeted each one by name, and old Morgan Birch cackled when he shook her hand. And then, after supper, she led Motty and the old men to the chapel. The door had been set aside for her.
Motty held out her hand, but Stella ignored it. She stepped down through the hole on her own, her head high. Then she reached the bottom. She hesitated, letting her eyes widen in the dark.
“Go on,” Motty said. “You want to lead, lead.”
Stella held out a hand and made her way through the dark. She found the narrow passage, and then reached the stone table.
“Climb up,” Motty said.
Suddenly Stella was afraid. What if the Ghostdaddy didn’t show up? What if he rejected her?
Motty gasped, and Stella looked up and saw a glimmer of white. A shape leaned down out of the dark. Joy erupted in he
r chest, and she raised her hand.
Here I am, she thought. Here I am.
10
1948
Stella drove the hour back to Maryville, following her headlights but seeing nothing but Sunny, that crazy-quilt skin, those sharp eyes.
In the dark her home looked as small as a doghouse.
It was just a six-hundred-square-foot cottage on red clay and spongy lawn, but it was hers, paid cash for it. She had a telephone, electric heat, and her pride and joy, a Speed Queen automatic washer. None of that back-porch handwringer bullshit. Never again.
The house was clean, too: no still, no mash, no moonshine paraphernalia of any kind. The law wasn’t going to have any excuse to seize it from her.
First thing she took a hot shower. Heard the phone ringing for her number—two short rings, one long—and ignored it. When she was done she wrapped herself in her robe, went out to the kitchen. She was starving. Her tiny fridge was empty, though, and there was nothing in the cupboards but half a sleeve of saltines and of course the Final Okra. She hated okra, and that unopened canning jar, a gift from one of her customers, was the last bullet in the chamber, the one you saved for yourself for when the enemy overran the barricades.
Not today, Final Okra.
The saltines pack was already open. The top cracker was stale, but that was nothing that bourbon and Lucky Strikes couldn’t fix.
The phone rang again, for her number. She shared the party line with five other households along the road.
“Hello, central,” she said.
“How you doing, Stella?” It was Alfonse.
“Today’s been a hell of a week.”
He asked about her cousin and she told him the girl was fine. Everything was going to be fine. He had something on his mind, though, and she suspected what it was.
“Did you make the delivery?” she asked.
“I ran into a problem.”
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