“What?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Why?” He was near tears.
She didn’t know how to explain. She’d become a different person. Her heart belonged to someone else. Her life belonged to someone else.
“Just tell me,” Lunk said. “Did I drive you to it?”
He was so sad. She wanted to touch his face to soothe him, but her hands were for holy work now.
“Go home, Lunk. Find a girl, get married, become a preacher. Don’t come back.”
* * *
—
stella stood at the fence, her bandaged hands crossed on the top rail. Summer flies buzzed over the empty pen.
“It’s time to buy a sow,” Stella said. She’d heard Motty come up behind her.
“I ain’t buying no pigs.”
“The message ain’t coming from me,” Stella said.
Motty stared at her. “God damn it,” she said. “You’ve been to see him again.”
Stella didn’t bother denying it. The bandages were proof enough. “I don’t know why it wants one, but it does. I could see it in its mind—clear as a commandment.”
“I was hoping we were done,” Motty said.
Stella could remember the night, two years ago, a month after her first communion. The gunshot. Motty covered in blood.
“Last time,” Stella said. “You failed.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you doubt me.” When Stella did her first communion, the God’s thoughts evaporated almost immediately. Now she could hold on to the ideas and concepts for days, long enough to describe them aloud, as if she were two Stellas, speaking in tongues and translating at the same time.
“It’s dying, Motty. It’s old, yes, but also there’s a…something toxic in it. Or around it.”
“One body, ever blooming,” Motty said tiredly. “So that the poison of the world—”
“I know, I know. But this ain’t a metaphor, this ain’t spiritual. It’s actual. Something’s killing it, but it’s—”
“Stop calling him it.”
Stella closed her eyes, trying to wrangle one of the God’s thoughts—or rather, her memory of the thought as it had traveled through her. “The poison’s in the air. The rocks. It’s seeping into it.” Nefarious chemicals, she thought. “I can feel the death like it’s happening to me. When I’m communing with it, it’s like I’m inside it, looking down at myself.”
Motty made a small noise.
Stella asked, “Did you not feel that way?”
Motty slowly shook her head.
“It’s not what we think it is,” Stella said. “It’s not some spirit. It’s meat and bone. Like the Cherokee gods. Spearfinger had to eat and breathe, and the God—”
“Shush. This is Abby’s fault. He’s full of stories. I should have kept him away from you.”
Shush. If only Motty knew all the things Stella wasn’t saying. The things she only spoke to herself. Well, she’d find out soon enough.
“I want to talk to Hendrick,” Stella said.
“Why?” Meaning, Why now? Hendrick had been wanting to come back to the farm for weeks, and Stella had said she wouldn’t meet with him. She was doing her own work, and didn’t need or want him. Motty had respected her wishes.
“Tell him I’ve been doing communions.”
“He’ll explode,” Motty said.
“Maybe. But I want him to know what I’ve done. Tell him I’m going to keep communing, but I’ll let him record them. If.”
“Here we go,” Motty said.
“He’s got to let me read the other books. Not just the typed-up books—the originals, the handwritten transcripts. I need the source material to do my work—everything that was said, not what he decided to record.”
“But the whole transcript is in the books, he just types it out. That’s our tradition.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Hendrick does seem to love every last scrap of the God’s word, but he might have been tempted to leave something out. I need to know that—and that’s why I need the originals.”
“That ain’t going to happen. He already said no just to giving you the books, never mind the first scriptures!”
“I did that wrong. I asked him in front of the Uncles. You were right, you can’t embarrass a man, he won’t think straight. But I know he wants to know everything about the God. He’s as devoted as I am, in his way.”
Motty never agreed that it would work, but she said she’d invite Hendrick back to the farm. Something had shifted in their relationship since Stella started her own communions. Motty had starting acting respectful, but it could be that she’d just grown scared of Stella.
Stella said, “Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out more from it about the pigs.”
“You can’t go in again so soon!” It was strange to hear Motty so worried for her. It was almost sweet. “Stella, please. You just went two nights ago.”
Stella hadn’t told her that Lunk had carried her home. She didn’t want Motty to panic.
“Don’t you worry about me,” Stella said. “The Ghostdaddy would never hurt me.”
* * *
—
she found Uncle Hendrick and Motty in the kitchen, despite the summer heat. The oven was on, and there was corn bread in the oven. Hendrick loved her corn bread.
Stella was carrying the scientific notebook Merle had given her. Hendrick hopped up and turned on his smile, as if the last time they’d seen each other he hadn’t threatened to tie her down. He reached for her hand and stopped himself. The bandages were small, just a pad over each palm with a layer of cloth wrap holding them in place, but they shocked him. They were proof she’d been communing.
“It’s so good to see you, Stella.”
They took seats facing each other. The green leather case sat upright next to Hendrick’s chair.
“I want to apologize,” he said. “I didn’t hear you out and I let things get out of hand.”
Motty grunted in amusement.
Stella said, “You brought them?”
He lifted the case onto his lap and opened it. “We’ve never let a Revelator read all the books because, well, all the reasons I said before. However…”
He held out The Book of Selena. She tucked the notebook aside and took it. The book was thicker than Clara’s and Esther’s books combined. How many times did Lena commune, to fill so many pages? Or did she just have more to say?
The Book of Selena
Being the Fourth Volume of a New Revelation
From the God in the Mountain
To Selena Birch, Recorded by Hendrick Birch, her Uncle
with Commentary and Clarifications
by Hendrick Birch
“You recorded the words and wrote the commentary? How generous that you didn’t call it The Book of Hendrick.”
“It was amazing to hear the words as they were spoken,” Hendrick said, declining to take offense. “I believe it clarified my thoughts as I wrote the commentaries. When I sat down, later, I was—”
“Where are the other books? Motty’s. Mine.”
“Ah. Well.” He nodded as if he’d given it great thought. “Why don’t we start with hearing about communions? If that goes well, I’m sure I’ll bring more books on my next visit.”
“You were supposed to bring all of them—and the original transcripts. That was the deal.”
“There was no deal—Motty should have told you, bringing the transcripts is impossible. They never leave the safety of my care. It’s my most sacred responsibility.”
“See?” Motty said to Stella.
“It was worth a shot.” To Hendrick Stella said, “I’m honestly surprised you brought even Lena’s book. It kills you to even let one of t
hem go.”
“As I tried to explain—”
“Listen, Hendrick. Just listen. I know you love the word of God more than anything else. Even if I don’t trust anything else about you, I trust that. That’s why I brought you here.”
This was news to Motty. Stella kept her focus on Hendrick.
“The old Revelations are obsolete,” Stella said. “Everything you’ve told me, about the God, your beliefs, is wrong. Wrong or incomplete. You think the God loves you and is going to grant you eternal life, here on Earth.”
“That’s right,” Hendrick said. “On the day the God emerges from the mountain, we shall all be transformed, and the world will know that a new kingdom is here. And I—well, all of us, really—will be there to announce his presence, like John the Baptist.”
“John the Baptist got his head cut off,” Motty said.
Hendrick was undeterred. “The modern world has lost its faith, because of war and disease and machinery. But when shown proof of the God, irrefutable proof of the God, the old governments will fall away, and his children—”
“Hold on.” Stella was shaking her head. Hendrick frowned at the interruption. “I’m sorry, you’re making all that up. That’s not what the God is talking about.” There were so many things Hendrick didn’t understand, starting with the fact that he thought the God never came out of the cave. “It don’t care about governments, or end times. This is about its own end. It’s dying.”
Motty was staring hard at her. Was she furious? Afraid? Maybe both.
“The world is killing it,” Stella said. “It doesn’t care about you. It only cares about its children.”
“But we are his children,” Hendrick said. “In The Book of Esther it says that all who—”
“The Book of Esther doesn’t mean shit.”
Well. That shut them up.
Stella opened her own notebook. The pages were almost all filled. She’d recorded everything she remembered from her visits with the God, and everything that happened during the night of the sow. She hadn’t been writing to herself. She was describing these miracles to an unknown audience, years in the future, maybe a girl like herself, the next Revelator. Something about inscribing those words in black ink gave them a power that worked on her like X-rays, making tiny changes.
Hendrick and Motty were watching her.
“We have to be clear what the God really wants,” Stella said. “What it needs.” Her voice was level but she was ready to bolt if they rushed her. The hallway was at her back. “The whole focus of the church has to change, to concentrate on helping it.”
“And you alone know what that is,” Hendrick said.
“I’ve communed with it seven times since you were here last spring.”
Motty gasped. She’d had no idea how often Stella had gone out there. And Hendrick’s face was pure consternation. Seven times! That was more than all of Stella’s communions that Hendrick had witnessed.
“This notebook is my Revelation,” Stella said. “It’s the record of what it said to me.”
Hendrick’s face had gone pale. “You kept it? You kept the words?”
Motty glared at Stella. “What are you doing?”
“It’s all there,” Stella said. “Everything I could remember.”
Hendrick’s face contorted, and he put a hand to his eyes. Stella realized he was crying. “Oh, thank goodness. Oh, thank you, thank you.” He breathed out, and then laughed. “I’ve been so worried. I can’t tell you. I thought you’d never go in again, but this!” To Motty he said, “Did you know about this?”
Motty did not. The look on her face was as hard as tombstone.
“We can’t just keep this secret,” Stella told them. “I want this made part of the Revelations. I want it printed and published.”
“Of course, though—I’ll try. There might be issues, the commentary might—but if it’s what you say, of course it will be included.”
“It’s too important not to,” Stella said. “The next task is to move the God.”
She could feel the authority in her voice, hear that preacher cadence that Hendrick and Elder Rayburn had deployed on her—and she could see its effect on Hendrick. It thrilled her. She felt like she’d finally become a person in his eyes.
“The park will make it impossible for it to stay here,” she said. “We have to find a new home, a new Jerusalem, so that it can accomplish its great work.”
“Great work?” Hendrick’s eyes lit up. “What is it? What has he told you?”
So many things, Stella thought. Most of them she didn’t understand herself, not completely, but she wasn’t about to express doubt in front of Hendrick. One idea, however, was clear.
“It’s trying to create a child,” Stella said. “A child of its own that can survive here.”
“When you say create a child…” Hendrick was barely keeping up. “Do you mean actually impregnate a woman, or—?”
“The God ain’t male. It ain’t female, either. Those were just words we put on it, trying to make sense of it. All that matters is that it is, do you see? It is, and it wants to make more like itself. It’s been trying to grow something of its own that will survive in this world. Something adapted to it. So far none of them have lived, or…” This was a foggy concept. In the God’s thoughts, none of its children had thrived; none had lasted long enough to be what it needed. She was confident that with more communions, its exact needs would become clear.
She told him what she did understand. “They withered,” she said. “They failed. But the God’s going to try again, it’s going to keep trying, over and over, until it succeeds.”
“What’s she talking about, Motty?”
“Tell him,” Stella said to Motty. “Tell him about the sows.”
“The sows?” Hendrick asked.
“The next—”
The punch knocked her to the floor. Stella lay on her side, gasping. Her vision had gone starry.
Motty plucked the notebook from her hand. Turned toward the iron stove and opened the firebox. The logs were in full flame.
Hendrick shouted. Tried to reach past Motty. She shoved him away, sent him stumbling backward. Pushed the book into the flames and slammed the firebox door.
“That’s priceless!” Hendrick said. “You can’t burn the word of God!”
“Get out of my house, Hendrick.”
He looked at Motty’s hands, then down at his chest where she’d pushed him. Across the white shirt, a bloody smear.
* * *
—
the headache would not abate. Stella lay on her bed, curled into a ball, eyes closed. Every time she tried to open them her vision wavered and the pain in her head spiked. Her cheek where Motty had smashed her felt hot. The pain ebbed and flowed.
Motty had spanked her countless times, and striped her butt with a switch when her offense had been more serious, but she’d never struck her with a closed fist. This was new. A violation.
After Hendrick drove off, Motty stomped to her bedroom and slammed the door, leaving Stella on the floor. She picked herself up. Winced at the brightness of the fire. Slunk off to her own room.
I’m alone, Stella thought. Motty had shown herself to be jealous and weak, a spurned Revelator who’d rather burn the truth than accept Stella’s leadership. Hendrick could only be trusted to follow his path to religious glory. And Abby was useless—so reluctant to take a stand against the Birches that he couldn’t stand for her. He’d go to his grave with blinders firmly in place. And Merle and Lunk? She’d fooled them, and that made them useless to her. They cared for her only because they didn’t know her true nature. They loved an imaginary Stella.
None of them understood what she did, the thing that she had not written down, because it was too much for them to bear: they were all, Stella included, expendable. Humans were as common a
s June bugs. Not only was the God unique on this Earth but its life was centuries long, and so many times more precious than their own. The difference between Stella and Hendrick—and Motty and every Birch who’d come before her—was that Stella understood this, and accepted it. Better to sacrifice yourself for a higher purpose than to live a long life scrabbling in the dirt.
There was only one soul she cared for in the world, and one soul who knew her for what she was.
Stella climbed out of the bed. Her limbs felt heavy, and her head was awash in dizziness. She leaned against the wall until she thought she could walk, then passed out of the house, into moonlight. The cold air shook her awake.
She walked between the dark trees until she reached the chapel. Her head pounded but she ignored the pain. Pushed the cave’s door out of the way.
“I’m here,” she called out. “I’m alone.”
She closed her eyes and let her feet and hands guide her down the steps and into the mountain. When her fingers touched the stone table she breathed deep, until the latest wave of pain passed, and then climbed up onto the surface.
“I’m here,” she said again, and lay back on the rock.
The walls were still. The only thing she could hear was the sound of her breathing. Her head throbbed with pain. The minutes crawled by.
“Please,” she said.
The table sucked the heat from her body. She began to shiver.
And then the God descended.
20
1948
Worry stretched the afternoon into an endless staircase—she’d never reach the top. Every minute she spent in this cell was a minute closer to Sunny entering the cave. A minute closer to her being erased.
Stella should have just lied to Mary Lynn and told her, Sure, Lunk was the love of my life; Sunny’s his daughter! The Rayburns would have jumped to help Stella. Now she was stuck under Whaley’s thumb. He wasn’t about to let her out, not until Hendrick achieved his wet dream and saw his god with his own eyes.
Stella couldn’t understand what Sunny had told the Uncles. What crazy lie let them think the little girl could commune with the Ghostdaddy—on her first time—and convince it to come out to get its fucking picture taken? When Stella communed, there was never a moment when she felt like she could demand anything from it. There was nothing she could tell it, no words it would listen to. It wanted nothing from her but obedience. The great lie about communion was that it wasn’t a union at all. Every experience was a one-way street. The Ghostdaddy filled her with its thoughts, over and over, until she burst. And then, when she’d proved to be a failure, it stopped talking to her altogether. Just like it had stopped talking to Motty, and then Lena. The Revelator wasn’t good enough for it, so it moved on to the next child.
Revelator: A Novel Page 24
