Resurrection

by Linda Lael Miller

  Izannah smiled like a cat with feathers sticking out of its mouth. “You’ve given the matter a great deal of thought, it seems to me.”

  Emmeline glared at her cousin. “I had seven years to consider the matter,” she answered, spearing a drumstick from the platter of chicken.

  “Do you believe that Mr. Hartwell was really and truly shanghaied?” Izannah asked mildly, still undaunted.

  Emmeline recalled the smooth, thick scar tissue she’d felt under her fingers when she’d stroked Gil’s back, and her appetite was gone. Surely receiving such savage punishment changed men in very fundamental ways, breaking some, making others bitter or cruel.

  “I believe it all right,” she said.

  “Then why don’t you take him back?”

  Emmeline could not bring herself to admit that she’d tried, and been rebuffed. “It’s more complicated than that,” she told Izannah with conviction in response to her latest question, but in her heart of hearts, she had plenty of questions of her own.

  4

  GIL STOOD ALONE AT THE FOOT OF HIS OWN GRAVE, PONDERING the many paradoxes of life—and death. It is not given to every man, he thought with grim amusement, to read his name on a marble tombstone.

  Heedless of the copious summer rain, as soft and warm as an angel’s tears, Gil noted that Emmeline had elected to bury him in the family plot, facing the judge’s resting place. This touched him deeply, for Emmeline was a woman to whom family was vitally important.

  It was the empty space next to his own, though, that tightened his throat and twisted his heart into a painful knot, for she had plainly reserved that spot for herself. Emmeline must have loved him when she’d commissioned that stone, he realized, and with such devotion that she would have gladly lain beside him throughout eternity.

  He wondered, with the semblance of a smile rooted in irony rather than humor, exactly where she would have planted Mr. Montgomery—had she married him, of course. She hadn’t, and for that Gil, who had learned to expect little in the way of miracles, was wondrously grateful.

  He folded his arms, his new clothes soaked and his hair dripping. His body, still throbbing for want of the satisfactions he had denied it on Miss Emmeline’s screened porch, found some small mercy in the dousing, and was eased.

  For a time, Gil considered the world and its ways. Then, as mystified as ever, he squatted to trace the letters of his name, chiseled with Old World precision onto the face of the fine stone. Below was his birth date, followed by that of his supposed death—in a tragic twist, the day he’d been shanghaied. In many ways, he had indeed perished then, so he supposed it was fitting that there should be a grave for his old self. He might have come here to mourn the Gil he had been in the innocent arrogance of his youth, believing himself invincible and feeling so damn certain of everything.

  He smiled bitterly at the memory. “Rest in peace,” he said, rising and laying a hand to the smooth, curved top of the headstone. And then he turned and walked through the puddles and the thick, claylike mud to his wagon. The mule stood shivering in the rain, head down.

  Gil climbed into the box, pushed the brake lever down with one foot, and took up the reins. The mule, glad to be moving, slogged patiently over the slippery, rutted track, hauling his master home.

  • • •

  Gil did not come to town on Monday, or at least he didn’t pay Emmeline a call, and she told herself that was for the best. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, but the shrubs and the grass were bejeweled with water droplets, quivering prisms flinging off light. After her ten o’clock piano lesson, Emmeline went out into the garden and carefully took down the Chinese lanterns, now mere globs of brightly colored pulp.

  On Tuesday, Reverend Bickham came to call. He was a good man, attentive to his flock, and Emmeline gave him tea and tried to reassure him that her soul was safe in the bosom of the lamb. He departed in some doubt, she suspected, despite her efforts.

  By Wednesday, the prairie grasses were lavish, nurtured to a dazzling shade of emerald by Sunday’s rain, and Brother Joy arrived, with his wagons and barkers, and set up his gypsy camp just outside of town. The rhythmic sound of hammers rang through the weighted, fragrant air as the faithful pounded nails into the speaking platform inside the main tent.

  Plentiful buzzed with delighted expectation, and Emmeline was pleased. For a little while, at least, people would talk about Brother Joy and his good friend, the Lord, instead of her. Like everyone else, she cooked extra food, and she and Izannah cleaned the house from top to bottom, even though it was unlikely that either Brother Joy or the Lord would come to call. All the while, Emmeline thought about Gil, alternately blessing and cursing him, wondering if he was eating properly and if he’d taken a cold from walking her home in the rain.

  With disturbing regularity, she caught herself halfway to the carriage house, bent on hitching Lysandra to the surrey and driving out to see how Gil was faring. Each time, however, Emmeline turned around and marched right back to whatever task she had just abandoned. She’d played the fool as it was, letting that man kiss her the way he had in the parlor that first night, allowing him to stroke her bare ankles beside the stream, and, finally, submitting to him as he’d stripped her naked on the screened porch. Not for all the rubies in India would she go to him again, just asking to be cast off like some strumpet.

  The problem was that her body burned for her husband’s touch, and the flames of her desire threatened to consume her.

  On Thursday afternoon, summoned by the blare of a trumpet loud enough to be Gabriel’s own, a stream of wagons, horses, and pedestrians spilled out of Plentiful and onto the road leading to the open field where Brother Joy would conduct the preaching. Emmeline and Izannah, riding in the surrey with a picnic basket and blankets on the floor behind the seat, were among the pilgrims.

  “I don’t see why we can’t camp out for the duration, like everybody else,” Izannah complained, folding her arms. “We’ll miss all the fun if we go home every night. How am I supposed to get saved, if I’m not even here when Brother Joy calls forth all the repentant souls?”

  Emmeline wore simple clothes, fit for sitting on the grass, and a broad-brimmed hat, chosen to protect her delicate skin from the ravages of the late-day sunshine.

  She did not deign to give her cousin so much as a sidelong glance. “You were saved last year,” she said. “And the year before that. Surely it is as much a sin to bore the Lord as to ignore Him.”

  Izannah was determined, as always. “I feel the need,” she said, “to be washed in the blood of the lamb.”

  “By all means, do so,” Emmeline responded. “Just be back at ten o’clock so that we can go home.”

  “You are a pagan,” Izannah accused.

  “I must be,” Emmeline replied, drawing the surrey to a stop at the edge of the field among a bevy of wagons and buggies. “Because just now, I have an intense longing to sacrifice you to the moon goddess. Ten o’clock, Izannah.”

  Izannah scrambled down from the surrey with a lack of grace meant to irritate. “Ten o’clock,” she confirmed, her lower lip protruding slightly. “You won’t be able to treat me like this, once I’m married. Then who will you persecute?”

  Emmeline scanned the gathering from the shadows of her hat brim, looking for Gil. “I shall have to find another victim, I suppose,” she answered in a distracted tone.

  Izannah spotted a friend on the horizon and fled in high dudgeon, and Emmeline watched the girl’s retreat with a smile. She hoped she wasn’t being too arbitrary with Izannah, insisting on a curfew, but the fact was that people got caught up in the fervor of these events and sometimes did things that were unwise. There were always more than a few babies conceived in the tall grass and the little copse of birch trees down by the creek.

  Emmeline had lifted the picnic basket from the back of the surrey and was busy hobbling Lysandra, who sometimes took it into her head to roam, when his shadow fell over her.

  “Come to get yoursel
f saved, Miss Emmeline?” Gil asked as she looked back at him over one calico-clad shoulder. Rising, she held her hat in place with one hand, and hoped he couldn’t see that she was quivering inside like the jellied fruit tucked away in her basket.

  She shook her head, smiling a little. “Once,” she answered, “ought to be enough. And you, Mr. Hartwell? Are you here to be, as Izannah puts it, ‘washed in the blood’?”

  He shuddered at the thought, although he was smiling too. “I came for the spectacle of it,” he said. “According to Jake Fleming down at the general store, Brother Joy plans to celebrate three days of bringing in the sheaves by setting off a fireworks display.”

  Not wanting to be petty, Emmeline refrained from pointing out that there was only one Jake Fleming in town, and one general store, thereby eliminating the need to clarify the matter. “And since you want to see the fireworks, you feel honor-bound to listen to the preaching first?”

  Gil was wearing wool trousers, a white shirt, and suspenders, and he pushed his hands into his pockets and shrugged, regarding Emmeline with his head tilted slightly to one side. “I’d better tell the truth,” he said, “lest God strike me down for a liar. I was hoping to find you here.”

  Emmeline felt a blush climb her neck to pulse in her cheeks, but she was pretty certain that the brim of her hat hid her face. She made a business of reaching for the picnic basket, only to have Gil step up close and take it from her.

  “Will you sit with me, Miss Emmeline?” he asked.

  Emmeline’s heart was pounding, and her breathing, though silent, was too fast and too shallow. “I don’t reckon I can stop you,” she answered coolly, “without making a scene.”

  His laughter was a sweet, unexpected sound, wholly familiar, and just hearing it made her soul resonate and brought tears to her eyes. She offered her first, and last, prayer of the day in the silence of her spirit—Whatever happens, or doesn’t happen, thank You for sparing him.

  After Emmeline had set her jar of jellied fruit and crock of fried chicken in the cold creek with dozens of other jars and crocks, Gil put the basket inside a small, ramshackle shed, along with the rest.

  They found seats on the long benches inside Brother Joy’s main tent, near the back. Folks had been arriving since daybreak in order to get a good view of the platform, and the places up front had been taken for hours. A baby cried lustily on the far side, and a farmer’s wife fainted, probably from a combination of heat and excitement. The invisible energy of anticipation swirled in the worshipers’ midst, like Pentecostal fire just waiting to burst forth.

  Emmeline, despite a long and settled relationship with the Lord, found herself shifting on the bench, partly because she was eager for the festivities to begin and partly because Gil Hartwell was sitting so close. She tried not to think of the way his thigh and upper arm pressed against hers, but it was a losing battle.

  Finally, when the tent was packed and the tension was palpable, Brother Joy’s personal choir trooped in, mounting the platform steps and solemnly taking their places in front of a portable pulpit. If their robes were a bit shabby and their hymnals dog-eared, nobody minded. They began to sing, accompanied by a wheezing organ balanced on a wheeled cart, and slowly, awkwardly, earnestly, Brother Joy’s borrowed congregation joined in.

  Somewhere during that first song, Gil took Emmeline’s hand in his, and she didn’t pull away. His touch made her too excited to trust her singing, so she simply listened.

  Brother Joy, a large, strikingly handsome man in a frayed suit, delayed his appearance, like the showman he was, until his audience had been roused to a fever pitch, then took the pulpit. Not only was he an orator to be reckoned with, but he was fascinating to watch, now weeping without restraint for the sins of the world, now calling down the wrath of heaven, now pacing the platform, talking of fire and brimstone in a low but thunderous voice. His skin glistened with sweat, and his energy was boundless.

  One hour passed and then another. During that time, Brother Joy preached almost without ceasing. Now and then he paused to douse himself, as if to drown the very fires of hell, with a ladleful of cold water from a bucket on one corner of the platform. The people of Plentiful were spellbound the whole while; some of them even toppled off their benches and onto the sawdust floor, overcome by a combination of the heat and the power of Brother Joy’s preaching.

  Emmeline barely blinked, even though she, like most everyone else in that tent, had heard every word before and knew every Bible passage by heart. It was Brother Joy’s delivery that captivated her, and if anybody on earth could have talked her into getting saved again, Emmeline supposed he’d have been the one.

  After a full three hours of preaching, Brother Joy showed no signs of tiring, but he took pity on his congregation—several of whom had already been carried out of the tent, revived, and brought back in again—and sent everyone out to “feast upon the loaves and fishes and ponder the word of the Lord.”

  Lacking loaves and fishes, the faithful spread blankets by the stream and ate ham sandwiches, fried chicken, and baked beans, along with cakes and pies of every kind. Women nursed babies in the shade of the birch trees, and small children sprawled under wagon beds, slumbering in the soft, sweet grass. Men smoked and spat and talked, Emmeline suspected, of matters unrelated to the Lord.

  For all that, people took note that Gil Hartwell was sitting on Emmeline’s blanket, sharing her picnic lunch, but she didn’t care. Though he was apparently set on barring her from his bed, Gil was Emmeline’s husband, by decree of the very God they were there to worship. It was right and good that they were together, even if Emmeline thought with sadness, it was only temporary.

  When the food was gone—except for what had been put aside for supper, of course—a few of the most devout returned to the tent, jealous of their seats at the foot of the platform. Gil lay back on the blanket with a contented sigh, a piece of grass between his teeth, his hands cupped behind his head.

  “I’ve been working real hard out at the ranch,” he said presently, without looking at Emmeline. “There’s a good roof on the house again, and I mean to start shoring up the barn on Monday morning.”

  Emmeline wondered what she was supposed to think. Was he telling her he wanted her to come and live with him as his wife, or just making idle conversation? “That’s nice,” she said.

  Gil propped himself up on one elbow and tossed aside the piece of grass. “About last Sunday afternoon—”

  Emmeline stiffened. The hat didn’t hide the color in her face, and she was too indignant to give a damn. “I hardly think this is the place to discuss last Sunday afternoon!” she hissed.

  “Damn it, Emmeline, we have to discuss it somewhere, sometime, and you haven’t come near me since!”

  Several heads turned, and Emmeline considered standing up, striding into the middle of the stream, and trying to drown herself. Unfortunately, she realized, some sincere soul would probably haul her ashore while she was still breathing.

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Mr. Hartwell,” she replied in an acid whisper, “a gentleman calls on a lady. The reverse is not acceptable!”

  “Then why did you come out to my place last week and let me rub your feet?”

  Emmeline distinctly heard a giggle from the next blanket, and shot the miscreant a look fit to curdle sweet cream. “I have had enough of this conversation,” she told her husband.

  Gil reached out and grasped Emmeline’s wrist when she would have gotten to her feet and stormed away. His hold, while not painful, was too firm to resist without stirring a ruckus. “I apologize,” he said quietly. His blue eyes flashed with an unholy fire and there was a tense edge to his jawline, giving Emmeline to believe that he wasn’t actually sorry about anything.

  “You are not forgiven,” Emmeline said, in a voice that was barely more than a breath.

  “That,” replied Gil, “is the problem.”

  That afternoon, Emmeline’s heart wasn’t in the preaching. If it hadn’t meant spoi
ling Izannah’s fun, she would have packed up her blanket and basket, unhobbled Lysandra, and driven home. Instead, she sat numbly on the bench, beside Gil, considering what he’d said.

  He really and truly had been kidnapped that night in San Francisco, seven years before, and there could be no doubt that he had suffered the agonies of the damned aboard a ship—the Nellie May, he’d called it. Such an ordinary, innocent-sounding name for a vessel maintained by the blood and sweat of slaves.

  Gil had felt the bite of the captain’s whip, not once but several times, and had worked his way back from Australia after his escape.

  Emmeline knew all those things, and believed them with her whole heart, and yet Gil was right. She had yet to forgive him for leaving her, for putting her through years of grief, for robbing her of the babies that might have been born of their love. It was insane to resent a man for something he couldn’t help, and yet she did. Her fury was as powerful as her passion; she wanted to mate with Gil with all the ferocity of a tigress in the jungle, but she also wanted to fling herself at him, claws bared, screaming and biting, kicking and crying.

  She loved Gil and, at one and the same time, hated him.

  The realization was devastating, and Emmeline did not know how to resolve the problem. One thing was certain, however—she could not go to this man she loved so desperately until she’d found a way to lay down her anger, once and for all.

  Brother Joy ranted and thundered all afternoon, and through half the evening, too. It was almost dark when he called another truce between good and evil and the believers filed out of the tent. Bonfires were lit, and people ate their suppers and told stories about other revivals, who’d gotten healed, and how and who’d gotten saved and why.

  Mr. Dillard, the postmaster, had been wrested from the grip of sin that very afternoon, before their very eyes, and the sight had been a memorable one.