Feast for Thieves

by Marcus Brotherton

  She looked at the field across the road. It was blooming with mescal bean, least that’s what I’ve always called it—the shrub that flowers blue every autumn, and the field was filled with color.

  “Well,” she said, “the great classic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley talked about fountains mingling with rivers, rivers with oceans, and winds of heaven mixing forever with a divine law. You know what a ‘law divine’ is, Reverend Slater?”

  Now, that was strange. She seldom called me “Reverend” anymore and hadn’t used the title in weeks. I’d reckoned it sounded too formal for her to address me anymore.

  “Well, I’m getting to understand an idea of divine law, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  “No.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “It’s not about you learning how to preach. When I talk about a ‘law divine’ it’s … oh … hard to describe. It’s from a poem. Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle—Why not I with thine? See what I mean now? That last line of the poem is key. It’s important to me that you understand what I’m asking you here. Do you?”

  I nodded like I understood. But I didn’t. Not really.

  She snapped her gaze away from the field like someone had given her a pinch, exhaled through her nose, and said—almost like she was annoyed—“Let me see if I can ask this another way. You got any PT gear in that parsonage of yours?”

  “Sure.”

  She stood. “Let’s go for a run then.”

  “A run?”

  “Don’t question my ways, Rowdy. Just see if you can keep up.”

  There she was being ornery again. I decided not to rile up her aggravations further, went into the house, changed into some old PT gear of Danny Wayman’s that Augusta had given me, and came back outside. Bobbie untied the oxford shirt and tossed it on the steps, stretched once and touched her toes, and I noticed for the first time she was wearing a small pistol strapped tight against her T-shirt at the small of her back. It was a Stevens Old Model Pocket .22, a nice little handful for a lady’s purse, single shot and easy to reload. I’ve always admired a gal who packs a concealed weapon, although this wasn’t much of a gun. It was further wrapped in plastic, which made me curious. Bobbie noticed me looking at it.

  “Snake gun,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Snake gun?”

  “Yeah, back when I was thirteen, Daddy and I were out hiking one day. I jumped over a pile of brush and scared up a rattlesnake inside. It caught the tip of my heel as I passed. Daddy threw me over his shoulder and rushed me to the doc. Fortunately I lived, but I was mighty sick for a spell. I think we all were. Sick with worry. Sick with death. Ever since then, Daddy made me carry this.”

  “Ever fired it?”

  “Only during training. Daddy taught us all how to hit a bull’s-eye—me and Mama and Emma, although the gun always made me tremble. I haven’t encountered a snake up close since that day on the trail, but I got no problem shooting a snake in the head. There’s enmity between me and a snake anyhow—know what I’m saying, Rowdy? An enmity that longs for the evil that turned the snake against me to be crushed. It’s just my mind doesn’t naturally prompt me to draw a weapon and fire.”

  “You hate snakes. I get that.”

  She repeated carefully, “No. I hate the evil that turned the snake against me. That’s what I long to be done away with completely.”

  I grinned her direction. She was a spritely one, that Bobbie Barker, despite her innocent ways—I’ll give her that much. Yet I had one more question before I dropped the matter. “What’s the plastic for?”

  “To keep it dry, of course,” she said pertly, as if everyone carried a pistol that way.

  We struck off running at a good clip. It was nearing four o’clock, the sun was beginning to lower in the hot sky, the dust rising off the roadway. Evening service didn’t start until six, and I was almost prepared.

  We headed west up the Lost Truck Road for about fifteen minutes, then Bobbie veered off onto a trail to the south and cut her way through the slash tree stand. I knew my way around these woods pretty well by now, so I passed by her on the trail and picked up the pace to see how much fire was still left in her legs.

  Back in Georgia during basic training, every man in our company wouldn’t think twice of running seven miles before breakfast. They called the run Currahee: it was up a high stack of mountain three miles up, three miles down, a half a mile away from camp. The name Currahee came from a Cherokee word that meant “We stand alone together,” and the trail was formed in rutted ugliness when a bulldozer crashed its way up and down the side of that hill. When we new recruits first started running Currahee we all hated it and grumbled at our misfortune, but after a while the trail began to stand for something. At night the fellas would be standing around and somebody would say, “Let’s go run Currahee.” So we’d run that cussed trail for the fun of it. Just for pride’s sake. Just to show we could.

  Through the pines, I could hear Bobbie running behind me. She was keeping pace, panting on my heels, so I sped up even more. We were flying now, weaving in and out of the timber. We hurdled roots and fallen trees. We leapt stumps. We splashed across a stream and blazed up the side of a hill. At the top, another rise lay before us and we charged up that one too. Again came a rise, and another, and another. Up and up we sprinted. The trail bombed and swooped, sometimes visible through the bracken, sometimes not, and soon we reached a plateau at the summit of the hill.

  For a quarter mile on the plateau the trail cleared and widened so two could run side by side. Bobbie lengthened her strides and ran next to me now. She was breathing easier than I was and spitting every so often the way runners do. “Hey Rowdy! Do paratroopers … believe in faith?” she yelled between breaths.

  “This one’s … starting to—why?”

  “Up a hundred yards ahead … comes a cliff.” Bobbie’s face was flushed. “We’re going to fly right off it … just like you fellas jumped out of your airplanes. You don’t know … if it’s twenty feet to the bottom … or a hundred. But I do. The only way to find out … is to jump with me.”

  “You’re crazy!” I yelled back.

  The girl sped ahead. We neared the cliff’s edge now, both of us sprinting full out. The edge of the cliff was less than ten feet away. There weren’t no time to think or ask questions. Bobbie was running straight over a sheer drop, and I was running right behind her. Five steps. Four. Three. The edge was upon her first. Bobbie shouted: “See the mountains kiss high Heaven … No sister-flower would be forgiven if it disdained its brother!” And she vanished. Two steps later the ground gave way beneath me. I was falling, falling, counting as I fell. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four—I looked down and sucked in a lungful of air.

  The river smashed into me. Down, down, deep beneath its inkiness I plunged. Water swirled far over my head. I clawed and fought my way to the surface, kept my wits, burst up out of the blackness, sucked in a fresh lungful of air, and stroked my way back to the shore.

  Bobbie was already standing in the shallows of the river, looking at me strangely. The girl seemed full of mysterious muscle, hidden strengths she kept reserved and showed to no one except by her choosing, and I found myself staring back at her with new admiration.

  “You know how that poem ends?” Her clothes clung to her sides. “It’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ by Shelley.”

  I shook my head and waded closer. I was nearer to her than I’d ever been before.

  “These are its last lines—” Bobbie closed her eyes, reached forward, and grabbed my hand in hers. But it wasn’t same hands, right on right, like we were going to shake. It was opposite hands, her right with my left, and I didn’t know what to do with that. “The sunlight clasps the earth,” she said, “And the moonbeams kiss the sea—What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?”

  Now, I’d grown accustomed to meeting with Bobbie Barker every week, to hearing her poems that didn’t make sense, an
d to having her explain to me things about preaching. Of course, I’d never told her of my growing accustomedness to her—I hadn’t. Sure, her hair was honey colored and wispy in the right places around her ears, and, sure, her orneriness had settled down a mite and I wasn’t afraid of her poisoning me anymore with arsenic in my coffee. But the idea of a ruffian like me courting a girl as pure as Bobbie Barker didn’t make sense in the big scheme of things. It wasn’t fear that kept me from speaking my mind. It was respect for her. I’d been too many places. I’d done too much evil in the world. She’d said as much—that she’d never date a ruffian—although not with her words, so I’d never brought up the subject. Meeting with this girl every week and having her tell me to preach to the woodpile—that was my contentedness in this arrangement. That was all I reckoned a friendship with this girl would ever bring.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. She pulled me closer, and my thinking stopped in its tracks. Her eyes were still closed, and her pulling caught me off guard. To my surprise—as quick as you could say Percy Bysshe Shelley—she opened her eyes and kissed me. Her lips were warm and wet, her mouth still hot from our run, and if I’d been a thinking man I would have drawn her close and kissed her right back. But instead she pulled away, looked me over from head to toe, slapped my face, then closed her eyes and kissed me a second time, this time much longer. When she released me, one corner of her mouth was upturned, as if in bemused satisfaction.

  “Don’t you ever speak of this,” she said, backing away once more. “Don’t you ever … ever … mention a single word …” Her voice trailed off.

  I grinned. “I take it you’ve done this before.” I glanced upstream at the cliff we’d just jumped off.

  She slapped me again for good measure, then realized what I’d meant and gazed at the cliff gratefully, like she was gazing at an old friend who’d helped her over a rough patch. The rushing river had chiseled away at the rock for hundreds of years until a high bluff formed. The bluff lay flat against the river, and the gorge underneath flowed clear and deep. She kept looking at the cliff and spoke with her voice far away, as if in reverie—“All that time when I was preaching every Sunday while the men were at war, I’d preach in the morning and visit with folks in the church all afternoon, then get ready to preach in the evening. There was always an hour in late afternoon when I’d drive back to church and have so many burdens within me. Burdens I didn’t know how to unload. For a long while I didn’t know where to put those feelings. I didn’t.” The girl snapped back to attention, waded to the riverbank, sat on a flat rock, and stretched back so the last rays of the sun could begin to dry her. I followed and sat a short distance away on the sand.

  “That’s when I started running,” Bobbie added. “Each Sunday afternoon I ran and ran until all the problems of the world faded.” The girl squeezed water out of her hair, running her fingers along its length. “After my run, I’d come back to the old parsonage, heat water on the stove and take a bath in the wash basin, change my clothes and fix my hair, then go preach again. That was the only way I made it through.”

  I’d never thought about how it might have been difficult for her, having all the weight of a congregation on her shoulders. What a fool I’d been. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, don’t be. Running like that was the only way I could sort out the weight of my mind. That’s all. Today was another day I needed to run, so that’s the reason I asked you to come. I thought you might like to know my secret of surviving in the pulpit. I’m just passing it along to a fellow minister. That’s all.”

  She was a genuine introvert, this girl of guarded solitude, a person who needed time alone to recharge like she needed her next breath. I decided to press the matter and asked, “What was weighing so heavy on you today that you needed to run? Was it your money coming in? You worried about going overseas now that it’s finally happening?”

  “No.” Her word was clipped and she looked at the river with that same, strange, faraway look in her eyes, the one she had when she looked at the field of blue wildflowers.

  “What then?”

  “Because I got a phone call.” She cleared her throat. “Right after church.”

  “From who?”

  “The fella I told you about. My boyfriend.”

  “What did he want?” My voice was flat.

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  “Oh.”

  She didn’t say anything for a spell, and I didn’t know what to say next neither, but now it was me looking at her, looking at this girl like I’d never looked at her before. Finally I found my tongue and asked, “What was your answer?”

  “I told him yes.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Didn’t like it one bit. Bobbie’s eyes turned forlorn, like she wasn’t happy about her answer neither, and I reckoned the fella who asked her was a smart man. A smart single gal such as Bobbie wouldn’t be around forever. Some quick fella was bound to snag her like a beautiful trout on the end of a fishing line. I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what. Foolishly, the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “So what are you doing here with me then?”

  Bobbie sniffed. “I’m trying to ask you important questions about poetry. Questions I’d hoped you’d understand.”

  I stared at her, confused.

  She shook her head like she was changing course then added, “I guess you could say congratulations.”

  I swallowed. “Congratulations then.”

  “This is what folks do after a war, Rowdy. They get married. I’ve always dreamed of being married someday, and my fiancé is a good man—as upright and dependable as the color brown. He is highly determined and sits at the front of the classroom and filled with every intention to save the world, same as me. Why, he’s as good a husband as any woman could ever find in these parts, and I should be grateful to have him. I wanted to tell you about the engagement right away, because I know we’ve been getting along as friends lately. All this time we’ve spent together these past weeks—I liked it, I truly did. I don’t have many friends my age in these parts. The girlfriends I went to school with are all married now and living on ranches or farms. Next to my sister, you’re about the best friend I have anymore. In fact, if I can make a request of you, from one friend to another … I’d be obliged if you’d perform the wedding ceremony, seeing as how you’re the only minister beside me I know around these parts.”

  I coughed. “When is it?”

  “Six months. Maybe a year. Maybe two. There’s a heap of details we haven’t worked out yet. He’s studying to be a missionary in China, and God’s calling me to Haiti, so we haven’t worked that out yet.”

  “Well, I’d like to meet him. Shake his hand. When’s he going to see you next?”

  “It’ll be a while. He’s in Dallas all this year, finishing up his seminary training.”

  “You love him?” The question blurted its way out of my mouth.

  She paused.

  “No,” she said.

  The girl stood up quickly, took a few steps forward, found the trailhead, and began to run. She was thirty feet ahead of me before I realized our conversation was over. I stood in a jiffy and began to run after her.

  Bobbie blazed a different trail back to the parsonage. This one meandered alongside the river for a mile, then cut sharp to the north. It merged with another trail, then dumped us out back behind the outhouses at the back of the church building. I let her lead the run the whole way home. She ran independently, not alongside of me this time, and Bobbie slowed to a walk only when she reached the church property. Her hands were on her hips and she was breathing hard.

  “It’ll be good when this old place … is fixed up again,” she said, looking at the back of the church.

  I wanted to ask her more questions, to peer under the surface of what had just transpired between us, but all that came out of my mouth was, “It’ll be good indeed.”

  “Daddy said everyone will start work … this Satu
rday, now that the money’s all in.”

  I nodded, started to say something, then changed course and began to walk back to the parsonage. I reckoned a girl such as her had already made up her mind when it came to who to marry and for what reasons. I certainly wasn’t one to change it. “You need anything?” I called over my shoulder. “A towel?”

  “No,” Bobbie Barker said.

  That one, solitary word left her lips. It was the only word she spoke to me, and she shook her head and headed toward her jeep. That one word told me all I needed to know about Bobbie Barker as far as our futures together were ever concerned. She slid herself up and over on the seat, started the jeep’s engine, and put the transmission in gear with the clutch held in. She wasn’t moving anywhere, and out of the corner of my eye I saw she gave one long last look my direction.

  By now I was a few feet away from the parsonage steps, so I stopped and held her gaze. She was framed in the distance by that field of blue wildflowers, as if caught in one of those new photographs that was bathed in color.

  I nodded respectfully to her. And she nodded respectfully to me.

  After that she let out the clutch and drove away. She shifted gears quickly as she drove down the road, and I could hear the familiar rumble of the jeep’s engine in my ears for a long time to come, even though it gradually grew quieter the farther away she went.

  Well, I cleaned myself up, dressed myself in church duds, and when it was time to preach for evening service I headed back over to the church. My mind wasn’t tied tightly to what I would be preaching on, and no, even as the words were leaving my mouth from behind the pulpit I knew it wasn’t one of my finer sermons. Bobbie wasn’t in service that evening, and I kept glancing at the empty space between her daddy and her sister where she always sat.

  When the service was all but over, the sheriff motioned to me like he had something to announce. I called him up and he stood at the pulpit. I thought he’d be wearing a smile at the thought of announcing to the congregation that our building program was set to begin next week, but he wasn’t smiling. Come to think of it, he’d worn a peculiar frown all the way through service.