The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  Reverend Hewlett saw it as his duty to raise an unpopular option the men had been mulling over the past few days. The mayor couldn’t bring it up, because he had an election to win in the fall. But Reverend Hewlett was not elected. And so he said it: “The swimming pool was never filled this summer. It’s sitting empty.”

  Some of the men and women nodded, and a few of the children, catching his meaning, made sharp little noises and looked at their parents. The circus folks didn’t much respond.

  “It’s an old pool,” the Reverend said, “and we can’t dig a hole this summer. We can dig a hole next summer, and that can be the new pool. This one’s too small, I’ve heard everyone say since the day I got here.”

  “There’s no dirt to bury him with!” Mrs. Pipsky called.

  “Maybe a tarp,” someone said.

  “Or cement. Pour cement in there.”

  “Cement’s half water.”

  The mayor stood. “This town needs that pool,” he said. The youngest Garrett boy clapped. “We’ll find another solution.”

  And before the meeting could devolve into argument, Reverend Hewlett offered up a prayer for the elephant (the Lord loveth the beasts of the field), and a prayer that a solution could be found. He invited everyone to the narthex, where the women of the Welcoming Committee had laid out a sheet cake.

  The Reverend made a point of greeting each visitor in turn, asking how they were enjoying their stay in Little Fork. “Not much,” the illustrated man said.

  The Reverend thought, with awe, how God had a plan for everyone. Some of these people were deformed—a man with ears like saucers, a boy with lobster-claw hands—and yet God had led them to the circus, to the place where they could find friendship and money and even love. And now He had led these people to Hewlett’s flock, and there must be a purpose for this, too.

  In the corner, the fire eater chatted with the mayor’s daughter. Stella Blunt was sixteen and lovely, hair in brown waves, and he was not much older, with a small, dark beard that Hewlett figured was a liability for a fire eater. Stella leaned toward him, fascinated.

  The following Sunday, most of them returned. They sang along with the hymns and closed their eyes to pray, and one of them put poker chips in the communion plate. The fire eater sat in the rear next to Stella. They looked down at something below the pew back, giggling, passing whatever it was back and forth.

  Over the past week, the smell of the elephant had crept from the tent and over the center of town. It was a strangely sweet smell, at least at first, more like rotting strawberries than rotting meat. Reverend Hewlett had planned a sermon on the beatitudes, but when the time came for prayer requests, Larry Beedleman asked everyone to pray for enough food to last his guests (all five trapeze artists were living in the Beedlemans’ attic), and Mrs. Thoms asked them to pray for the Lord to take away the stench of the elephant. Gwendolyn Lake wanted them all to beg forgiveness for the sins that had brought this trial upon them. So Reverend Hewlett preached instead about patience and forbearance.

  After the service, he caught Mayor Blunt’s arm. He said, “Isn’t it time we used the pool?”

  Blunt was a large man who tucked his chin into his neck when he spoke. He said, “I’ll lose the vote of every child’s mother.”

  “Have you seen,” Hewlett said slowly, “the way your daughter looks at that boy?”

  “We’ve taken him into our home,” the mayor said. As if that were definitive and precluded the possibility of teenage love.

  “Joe,” the Reverend said. “You’ll lose more votes to scandal than to a hole in the ground.”

  And so on Tuesday fifty men and women dragged the elephant to the town pool on waxed tarps and lowered her until she rolled in with a thud and a sudden release of the smell they’d all been gagging against to begin with. They covered her with cartloads of hay—everyone had a lot of hay that summer whether they wanted it or not—and they covered the hay with the gravel Tom Garrett had donated, and they covered that all with fresh tarps, held down by bricks.

  Reverend Hewlett gave the funeral service right there, with the locals and circus folk in a ring around the pool. The elephant trainer sobbed into his small, calloused hands. He did not have the stick with him, for once.

  Afterward, when the other circus workers went to take apart the tent, to fold up the benches and load things into their trailers, the elephant trainer stayed behind. He put his hand on Reverend Hewlett’s arm, then drew it back. And, as if it choked him, he said, “I can’t leave her here.”

  “Will you pray with me?”

  “I’m saying I don’t think I can leave this town.”

  “My son, I won’t let anything happen to the grave.”

  “I’m saying that my parents were drifters, and I’m a drifter, and I’ve never had a part of myself in the soil of a place before. And now I do, and I think I ought to stay here for the rest of my life.”

  Hewlett marveled at the ways he’d misread this man. Perhaps it hadn’t been grief he’d seen in the man’s face, but thirst.

  He said, “Then it must be God’s will.”

  The tarp stayed put through the dry fall and the dry winter, and the smell subsided.

  Before Christmas, Stella Blunt came to Reverend Hewlett for help. The fire eater was long gone, but her stomach had begun swelling and she was panicked.

  The Reverend arranged, to her parents’ naive delight, for Stella to spend the spring semester doing work at the VA hospital downstate. Only she didn’t really go there; he set her up in the vestry with a bed and a little library. She wrote her parents postcards, which Reverend Hewlett would mail in an envelope to Reverend Adams down in Landry, just so Adams could drop them in the postbox and send them back to Little Fork.

  Hewlett visited her three times a day, and Sheila Pipsky, who used to be a nurse and could keep a secret like a statue, stopped by twice a week. The Reverend would sit on the floor while Stella sat on the bed, legs folded. If he had time, he ate with her. They spoke French together, so she wouldn’t grow rusty. When the church was locked up for the night, he’d turn out the lights and let her know she was safe—and she’d walk around and around the pews, up to the little choir loft, down the hall to the Sunday school classrooms. As she grew bigger, less steady on her feet, he’d hold her arm so she wouldn’t trip in the dark. If he closed his eyes—which he let himself do only for a second at a time—he could believe he was walking down a Chicago street with Annette, the breeze on their chests, her hair in a clip.

  “It’s funny,” Stella said to him once. They were standing in the nursery, the rocking horses and dollhouse lit with moonlight. “I thought I loved him. But if I loved him, I’d remember him better. Wouldn’t I?”

  Hewlett had the utterly inappropriate urge to touch Stella’s cheek, the top of her white ear. He slowed his breath.

  Stella giggled.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Your shoes. They’re untied, like a little kid’s.”

  In May, the doctor came in the middle of the night and delivered a healthy baby girl, and Reverend Hewlett called the Millers, who had come to him praying for a child that fall, and they were given the baby and told she came from Shearerville. They named her Eloise. Hewlett had looked away when Stella said goodbye to the baby. He muttered a prayer, but it was a pretense—he couldn’t absorb her pain just then. He chose, instead, to think of the Millers. He chose to thank the Lord. Stella stayed two more weeks in the vestry, and then she went home. Hewlett continued his nighttime circuits of the church, though. They’d become habit.

  The elephant trainer worked on one of the farms, tending the cows and horses, until he decided to open a restaurant in the space left empty when Herman Burns had gone to war. He used to cook for the circus folk, after all, and he missed it. He served sandwiches and soup and meatloaf. Soon they were calling him by his name, Stanley Tack, and by June he had fallen in love with the Beedleman girl, and she with him.

  It made Reverend Hewlett think,
briefly, of writing home to Chicago, to Annette. He worried she was waiting for him, the way her girlfriends were waiting for their boys to return, battle-scarred and strong and ready to settle down. But the war abroad would eventually end; Hewlett’s war never would. And Annette would not join him on this particular battlefield. She’d made that clear. She would stay in Chicago, in her brownstone, and type for a firm, until he came to his senses and moved home to teach history. That she never doubted this would happen broke his heart doubly: once for himself, and once for her. She hadn’t written in three months. And he did not write to her. To do so would be to punch a hole in his own armor.

  As soon as summer hit, there was torrential rain—as if all the town’s prayers from the previous year got to heaven at once, far too late. The bridge flooded out, and Stanley Tack’s restaurant flooded, and nearly everyone you passed, if you asked how things were, would respond, “I’m building an ark!”

  There were drowned sheep and missing fences at one farm, where the river now came to the barn door. An oak toppled in the park, roots exposed, like a loosened weed. Stella Blunt, lining up with the choir and looking through the stained glass, said, “It’s like someone’s trying to tear apart the world.”

  They sang “our shelter from the stormy blast” as thunder shook the roof. They sang “There Shall be Showers of Blessings,” and some of them laughed.

  Stanley Tack had come every Sunday that whole year, but always sat quizzical and silent through the prayers, the hymns. He never carried the stick anymore. He was always alone; the Beedleman girl worked the Sunday shift at the hospital. He never put anything in the offertory and he never took Communion. Reverend Hewlett started to see this as a personal challenge: Someday, he would give the sermon that would bring Stanley to his feet, that would open his blue eyes to the light shining through above the altar, that would make him pause on his way out of church and say, “Do you have a minute to talk?” They planned, as soon as the rain let up, to pour cement into the old pool and dig the hole for the new one. But the rain never let up. On the fortieth day of rain, folks stopped Reverend Hewlett at the pharmacy and the gas pump to joke: “Tomorrow we’re due our rainbow, right? Tomorrow we get our dove?” At least no one much minded not having a pool that summer.

  The Millers brought little Eloise to church, and she was baptized as Stella Blunt looked on from the choir. Reverend Hewlett poured water on the baby’s head and marveled at her angry little eyes. The daughter of a fire eater, born into a land of water.

  Despite the tarp, the pool had filled around the elephant and the hay and the gravel, and if you walked by and peered through the chain-link fence, you’d see how the tarp was now sort of floating on top, how the whole pool deck was covered in an inch of water that connected with the water in the pool. The children dared each other to reach through the fence and touch the dirty elephant juice. Mrs. Thoms wondered aloud if the elephant water would go through the pool drains and into the town supply.

  One day, Reverend Hewlett braved the rain to visit Stanley Tack’s restaurant. After the downstairs had flooded, Stanley had taken over the vacant apartment upstairs, cooking out of its small kitchen and serving food in what used to be the living room. On an average Saturday you’d find three or four families huddled around the tables, eating soup and listening to the rain hit the windows, but today the Reverend was the only one in the place. It seemed people were leaving their houses less. The spokes of their umbrellas were broken, and their rain boots were moldy, and they realized there wasn’t much they truly needed from out in the world. A lot of sweaters were knit that summer, a lot of books read.

  The Reverend sat, and when Stanley brought his cheese sandwich and potato soup, he sat across from him. He said, “I believe this is my fault.”

  The only “this” anyone in town was talking about was the rain. Reverend Hewlett said, “My child. This weather is the will of God.”

  “You preached—you gave a sermon, right after I chose to stay. And I couldn’t help thinking it was intended for me. The story of Jonah trying to sail away from Nineveh. Of God sending the storm and the whale.”

  The Reverend tried his potato soup, and nodded at Stanley. The soup was good, as always. Never great, but always good. He said, “I was thinking of many things, but yes, one of them was you. The way the Lord sends us where we need to be, regardless of our plans. I was reflecting on my own life, as well. I ended up in Little Fork by chance, and in my first year, when I felt doubt, I’d think of Jonah in the belly of that fish. It was preaching, you know, that he was meant to do in Nineveh. That’s what he was running from.”

  “Yes. But”—Stanley looked out the window, where the rain was slicing sideways—“what if this isn’t my Nineveh? What if this is the place I’ve run away to, and all this, all the rain, is God trying to wash me out and send me on my way? Just as he sent that storm for Jonah.”

  This troubled the Reverend. He bought some time by biting into his sandwich, but then it troubled him even more. Stanley had reminded him of Annette, on the day he left Chicago, fixing him with dry eyes: “I don’t see how you’re so sure,” she’d said. And he’d said, “There’s no other way to be.” And whether or not he was truly sure back then, he’d grown sure these past three years. Or at least he’d been too busy counseling others to foster his own concerns. He’d broken down in doubt a few times—not in God so much as in his plan—when he’d had to bury a child or when soldiers came home in boxes, but he’d always returned to a place of faith. Look at little Eloise, for instance, growing plump at the Millers’ house. Exactly as it was meant to be. But somehow the elephant trainer’s question had hit a sore spot in his own soul, a bruise he hadn’t known was there.

  He said, “All we can do is pray, and ask that God make clear the path.”

  “And how, exactly, would He make it clear?”

  “If you listen, God will speak.”

  Most always, when he said something like this, his parishioners smiled as if assured they’d hear the voice of God that very night. Sometimes he even had to clarify: “This is not the age of miracles, you realize. His voice won’t boom from the clouds. You’ll have to listen. You’ll have to look.” And they’d leave to await the message.

  What Stanley said was “God doesn’t talk.” It wasn’t something Reverend Hewlett was used to hearing in this town. And then, all seriousness, he said, “I think I’ve broken the universe.”

  Reverend Hewlett looked at his own hands, the veins and creases. He imagined they might crack open like the parched earth had last summer. Or at least, he felt a small crack somewhere inside, one that didn’t hurt but was letting in a bit of air. All he could think to say was “It’s raining in the next town over, too. And in the next town beyond that.”

  Reverend Hewlett’s name was Jack. This was increasingly easy for him to forget. He’d become John, and then—in the bulletins and on the sign outside the church—Rev. J. Hewlett, and since there was no one in Little Fork who didn’t know him as the Reverend, since even the few Catholics who drove to services in Shearerville greeted him as “Rev” or sometimes, slipping, as “Father,” he hadn’t heard his own name in three years. Annette no longer wrote to him at all, no longer extended the tail of the J down like the first letter of a chapter.

  And why had he left her? And why had he come here? Because he was needed. Because his mentor at seminary had said, “God is calling you there. God is calling me to send you there.”

  And that man, with his great beard, his walls of books, his faith in the hand of God, could not have been wrong.

  That night there was a dance at the Garden Club, on the east end of town. It was Little Fork’s version of a debutante ball, the same youngsters debuting themselves each year, in the same white dresses, until they were too old for these things, or married. Only tonight they were soaked through. Reverend Hewlett stood against the wall watching—his mere presence, everyone agreed, was salubrious—and observed the boys in their sopping bow ties, hair plaste
red to their heads, and the girls wrapped against their will in their mothers’ shawls. No boy would see through a wet dress tonight. Heaps of galoshes and umbrellas by the door.

  They coupled and uncoupled in patterns that seemed casual, chaotic, but of course were not. Every move, every flick of the eyes, was finely orchestrated. There were hearts being broken tonight. You just couldn’t tell whose.

  Gordon Pipsky sidled up and offered a sip from his flask. Gordon’s son was out there dancing, a girl on each arm. When Hewlett accepted, Gordon winked and grinned. “I’ll never tell,” he said. Even though he saw the Reverend take the Eucharist every Sunday. Perhaps what he meant was “I’ll never tell that you’re just a man like me.”

  Was it a secret, really? He’d never been anything else.

  He had felt like an impostor when he first put on his robe—but then everyone felt like an impostor, he’d learned in seminary. And now, after all this time, he rarely considered himself a fraud. But nothing had changed, really. Except that he had grown used to that robe, that second skin, just as he’d grown used to God’s silent ways. There was Stella Blunt, dancing in white. A debutante still.

  The next morning, the rain stopped. Not the kind of pause that makes you worry the sky is just gathering more water, but a true, clear stop, the air bright and clean and dry.