The Third Grace

by Deb Elkink

  The ten year old said, “But she is. Look at her,” and little Sarah paddled up closer to eyeball her as well. Aglaia understood what the girl meant; her skin was peeling, flaky and dry, and Aglaia could just imagine the condition of her face. She didn’t have on a lick of makeup, and her hair was hidden under the bandana she retrieved from her Dad’s handkerchief drawer that morning.

  “Yep,” Byron agreed. “She’s had some sun.”

  “If your snooty friend from the city could lay her eyes on you right now,” Naomi laughed, “she wouldn’t recognize you.”

  All three girls studied her, one even rubbing her dehydrated arm, and Aglaia shied away from them so that Naomi scolded them for rudeness. It wasn’t that Aglaia minded their fawning—they were sweet things—but their plump cheeks and rosebud mouths reminded her of the girlhood she long ago suppressed.

  Being near them all like this stirred up something in her gut. It was more than that her skin was cracking; she was a slumbering volcano coming to life, the molten lava beginning to churn deep within. She swallowed the last bite of her dessert with effort and compressed her lips to keep everything inside in its place.

  Byron yelled over to the two boys tumbling like a pair of puppies in a mock fight beside the truck and told them to settle down. They might be best friends, considering how they continued to joke and poke at each other. Silas at thirteen was the younger and looked exactly like his sisters, blonde with a freckled pug nose and a grin that reminded her of Joel. Why shouldn’t there be a family resemblance? After all, Byron’s great-grandpa was hers and Joel’s as well. The older son, Sebastian, favored his mom with dimples that dented his cheeks every few minutes, but his hair was darker and tousled, thick and heavy across his swarthy forehead.

  As Sebastian and Silas wrestled together on the ground, Aglaia was caught up in a sort of déjà vu and she almost said something, but one of the little girls asked her a question and broke the spell.

  “Can you talk French? Mommy says ‘mercy’ means danke. Did you talk to any children in Paris?”

  The boys, interest piqued, ambled closer and contributed to the conversation.

  “Yeah, you just got back from France, didn’t you?” Silas asked.

  “What were you doing over there? We knew someone from France, right Mom?” Sebastian caught his mother’s eye then, as if unsure he should be asking the question, and Aglaia couldn’t pinpoint the emotion behind the look on Naomi’s face. Byron rushed to her rescue.

  “Kids, save that for later. We need to get back to work before this heat brews up a squall. We haven’t had such a hot, wet harvest for at least ten years. But first, since we missed church today, let’s read.”

  He tugged a paperback New Testament from his hip pocket and Aglaia thought of the Bible still packed in her bag at the Enns house and those last, terrible words jotted in the margin of the Gospels: Aglaia, what a beautiful devil!

  Byron began the devotional in a formal voice that sounded like her father’s when the Bible was open in his hands, and read something morbid about the crucifixion. Aglaia wished he wouldn’t talk about death. Didn’t he have any sense of propriety, considering Dad’s close call? More to the point, didn’t he recall that Joel died just one field over from where the nine of them were sitting now, alive and well?

  When they were finished their family prayer and Aglaia opened her eyes, she saw Naomi scrutinizing her and then inhale as though steeling herself to make an urgent statement. Aglaia almost heard the drum roll.

  But at that moment Byron’s cell phone beeped a text message alert. He read it and then said, “Oh, Aglaia, you wanted to borrow my phone to check in with your boss?” She’d left hers in her suitcase, its battery drained with no way to recharge it. “Better do it now, before we get back to work.”

  She hated to phone Eb at home on a Sunday evening, but she grabbed the cell for a break from the intensity and walked a little away from the family bustle into the field. Aglaia had a terrible premonition that Naomi was trying to tell her something about François that she wouldn’t want to hear. Eb answered on the first ring. He indicated relief at hearing her voice and concern over her dad’s medical situation, and then fell into a comforting confirmation.

  “Ah, the slings and arrows. You take as much time off as you need, lass. Staring death in the face is a wondrous and a fearsome thing—there’s the rub. It seems as though the Maker isn’t ready yet to let your father shuffle off the mortal coil.”

  Eb’s empathy, embroidered as usual with words from another era, soothed Aglaia. Eb was so sincere that he could be a funeral director, if it wasn’t for his sprinkling of humor. He was a droll blend of the solemn and the sanguine.

  “Head office was ecstatic with the results of your costume delivery,” Eb said. “Montreal faxed over a note of receipt from the French museum along with the newspaper article and that photo of you handing off the costume to the curator. You’re famous!”

  In spite of his assurances, Aglaia knew he must be swamped at Incognito, just waiting for her return.

  “The harvesting should be done in a couple of days,” she said, ignoring the thunderclouds building in the west. “Then my friends will drive me home, so I’ll be in to work on Thursday morning.” She was sorry now that she’d left her car in the city and had to wait for Byron to take her back.

  “There’s no rush. Your family is more important than your occupation. Take the whole week off—you’ve earned it.”

  “I don’t know if I can stay away for another whole week, but I’ll need a day or two to catch up on my sleep after this harvest.”

  “I want you rested,” Eb said. “I have news for you concerning that movie being shot in the area—I mentioned it to you a while ago.” He told her Incognito was in the process of placing a bid on a contract to provide costuming. “It’s likely we’ll win the competition, lass. No other shop in the city has our reputation or the weight Montreal is throwing behind us. I think headquarters wants to be connected to a box office hit.” He snorted. “I hadn’t made a fuss about it to you earlier because I didn’t want to get your hopes up or take you away from the museum assignment. Our winning this film job, on top of your performance in Paris, should lock in that promotion I promised you.”

  Aglaia thanked him for watching her back, but her attention had been caught by Eb’s talk of the movie project. She recalled that Lou, also, had mentioned movies on a couple of occasions during the trip, and she’d thought it odd at the time because the comments were out of context and the woman had paused as if to give her time to react. What were Lou’s motives, and did Eb’s movie have anything to do with Lou’s offer of employment at PRU? The timing was fishy.

  She felt justified in her new wariness of Lou who, after all, had told a bald-faced lie about François meeting her in the Louvre. Aglaia gritted her teeth just thinking about it again. Lou promoted herself and her own purposes at every turn, with no thought of the consequences for others. Eb, on the other hand, was concerned for her family, wellbeing, and personal success. How could Aglaia even think of leaving Incognito for a job under Lou? Guilt pricked her conscience.

  She and Eb said goodbye and, since Aglaia had the phone anyway, she retrieved her messages left over the past week. There were a few from friends, and one from Tina calling from the hospital to ask about the crop yield because Henry was making a racket, wanting to know how many bushels to the acre they were getting. She also said that the doctor planned to send Henry over to Denver for some specialized tests unavailable in Sterling. Aglaia could hear the worry behind her mother’s words but there was no time to return the call because Byron fired up the combine again.

  Aglaia was bone tired by the time Byron shut down that first night, after the sun had set and the dew came on and the tough crop started plugging the combine. They stood together in the Klassen farmyard under the light of the great orange moon, Byron’s face streaked with the day’s labor.

  “I’ll be staying here at Mom and Dad’s for the nig
ht,” she told him. “You go on back to your family and I’ll be ready for you in the morning. I don’t need my suitcase. There’s got to be a spare toothbrush somewhere.”

  Byron rubbed the blonde stubble on his chin. “Naomi must have a cake or something in the oven for us.”

  “She’s been feeding us all day. Besides, I’m beat,” Aglaia answered to excuse her lack of sociability. “I’ll just fall into bed anyway.”

  She found the door unlocked. Zephyr streaked over from the barn and mewled around her feet on the veranda. She picked him up to stroke his fur and pat his round belly; apparently he’d been eating well, too. He was a natural predator. Had he tangled with a rat yet? They used to lurk beneath the coop, dilapidated now with its roof caving in and the chickens long gone. Gathering eggs had been her first after-school chore, delegated at age six when she’d grown tall enough to reach the nesting boxes and Joel had graduated to milking.

  “Let’s line this wicker basket with a clean tea towel so the eggs won’t break,” her mother says as she folds under the ends of the striped muslin cloth. “Now Mary Grace, be quiet with those Heena and don’t excite them.”

  So she pulls on her sweater and trots across the grass, crunchy underfoot with new frost, and steps down over the sunken sill of the door into the closeness, the smell of ammonia making her eyes water. Trying not to upset the roosting hens, she sneaks her hand under each downy breast so she doesn’t get pecked and brings out brown speckled eggs, fragile and warm with the life still growing in them.

  “Mary Grace!” It’s Joel calling to her from the barn. “The mama cat’s had her kittens, five of them. Come see!”

  Aglaia put Zephyr back down and closed the house door behind her, leaving him outside in his natural element; she’d pour milk for him in the morning. She reached for the switch but stopped herself. She hated the fluorescent ceiling light as much for the buzz as for the moths it always attracted. The homey aroma that rose from a bucket of ripening tomatoes on the counter took her back to the garden, where she used to meet her father just after dawn to help him hoe before the mosquitoes started to bite, or to fill a battered tin basin with new potatoes, the loam making wrinkle patterns on her knuckles.

  Aglaia groped through the kitchen and up the creaking wooden staircase of the house. The moonlight shone through the windows. She trailed her hand along the banister and her arm bumped the frame of the cross-stitch she’d made two decades ago in kids’ club: “I am the light of the world.” Even before she was old enough for youth group, the family always went together to church midweek, her parents for prayer meeting and Joel to play floor hockey in the basement with the boys. The girls’ group met in the choir loft around a long table set up for their crafts, and they memorized Scripture to earn badges. They started with all the “I am” and “Blessed are” verses, and tested each other to see who could rattle them off the fastest: I am the good shepherd… Blessed are those who mourn … I am the bread of life… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.

  Well, she’d left her shepherd behind years ago, and worked hard at not thinking about light or righteousness, and had been ignoring her pangs for something more than the creativity that fed and watered her memories of François—something like manna.

  Now, in the darkened house, Aglaia continued upwards, gripping the smooth staircase railing with resolution against the invasion of memories, against her weariness that was allowing such thoughts to bleed into her mind again.

  Aglaia’s bed was made up with the floral sheets Tina ordered from the Sears catalogue for her sixteenth birthday. They hadn’t had much wear. It was well over a year since she’d last slept here, and she hadn’t been home during harvest since moving to Colorado.

  Aglaia unfolded the quilt that Tina had pieced together with scraps from sewing projects. She fingered the worn binding and assessed its cotton content. Was that striped patch from the Sunday shirt Mom made Joel? She found another square from her Easter dress the year she first partook of the Lord’s Supper.

  She slipped between the covers and into sleep without another conscious thought but that the full moon glowed on her through the old elm’s branches and that the forlorn wind called her, tapping on the glass. She dreamed about the first-ever costume she made in kids’ club for the Easter play— a flowered tablecloth fashioned into a cloak and a batch of willow suckers cut from the banks of the coulee.

  Mary Grace and the other children wait for the pianist to give them their cue but not patiently—rather, tittering and scuffling behind the door to the stage, jostling one another, the boys teasing the girls with leafy fronds. Then they burst forth in all their childish enthusiasm and spill down the platform steps into the church aisle to meet the make-believe donkey and its rider, spreading their garments and palm branches before him as they shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” And no one in the congregation rebukes them for their jubilant cries in the sanctuary because, if they dared, the creation itself would testify—the prairie wind, the endless sky, the very stones of the earth would surely take up the children’s silenced chorus of praise.

  Aglaia awoke momentarily in the tumult of a thunderstorm rattling the windows of the farmhouse, blazing neon bright and branding her vision with black tree branches against the burnished sky. How many childhood pot-bangers like this had sent her flying into her parents’ bed in fright? She fell in and out of another distressing dream.

  The echoing crescendos rage like a beast, howling and reverberating through the skies like Leviathan thrashing his tail from the Abyss. Mary Grace is thirteen now and hasn’t cowered like this since she was a kid at the demonic fury of the wind’s screams unleashed in wrath from their restraints.

  “Mary Grace,” Dad reminds her when she’s tucked between them in the fortress of their presence, “it is the Lord’s voice speaking out of the whirlwind from His throne, the Bible says. He’s robed in majesty and armed with strength. The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”

  They spy a twister backlit by flashes forming in the roiling clouds, and Joel, who’s slept through the onset of the din, joins them on the porch as they watch in awe a funnel dipping and lifting, a dark finger stirring the blacker fields before closing up into the fist of the sky. Then Mom mixes up cocoa in the aluminum pan on the stove and they dunk ammonia cookies like Grandma used to bake.

  Tonight there was no tornado, no cocoa prepared by a motherly hand, no Bible-quoting daddy to calm a frightened, storm-tossed girl. And now she was no longer dreaming but half-sleepwalking, barely aware of the chill in the soles of her feet. She didn’t have the ability to stop her movement over the basement floor towards the trunk of cast-off clothes beneath the stairs, the will to resist bending her knees onto the cement as she gathered up a sweater and pressed her nose into it and smelled it for François—or was it for Joel? And the mildew, or maybe the grief, made her eyes water, so she rubbed them with that raw wool, but still she was torpid, peering more deeply into the recesses of the cellar, seeking but not finding.

  Her delirium and the incessant hounding of the still, small voice followed her as she padded back up the steps, and up the steps, head raised now to the bedroom window and the elm branches full of the bright harvest moon. And even then, in her sad state of half-awake sleep, verses from the Bible invoked her: You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy!… Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. The next thing she knew, it was Monday morning and Byron was honking outside and she had a sweater of Dad’s balled up in her fists, using it for a pillow.

  Twenty-three

  Harvest was completed on Tuesday night, the mania over. Aglaia awoke in the dark at four-thirty on Wednesday morning, her internal clock still topsy-turvy from the disruption of travel and the pace set by Byron, Sebastian, and Silas as they pushed to finish off the work. She swung her legs out from between the floral bedsheets of her maidenhood, her whole body stiff and
sore, then propped her elbows on her knees and bent her head to her palms till the fog lifted.

  Aglaia reached for the drinking glass by her bedside but it was empty, so she took it downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the tap. Well water, full of iron and tinted yellow, had a flavor Dad relished. Since her childhood he’d refused to put in a softener despite Tina’s entreaties. Aglaia never wore true white until she moved to the city and found out how sudsy water could be. But she craved the taste and gulped down two glasses, letting the frigid overflow dribble onto her top.

  Aglaia was wide awake for the first time in three days. The Enns family would still be asleep, no breakfast cooking at their place down the road, but she was famished now. Mom’s refrigerator held a bowl of eggs and a sealer of sweet cream, so Aglaia mixed up an omelette mousseline and brewed coffee for dunking her toasted Zwieback—a truly multicultural breakfast. She sat at the table in Dad’s chair and contemplated the nightscape out of the window as she ate.

  The tempest had passed while she slept, the thunder cell moving westward and leaving a puddle shimmering on the grass outside like a shard of mirror blinking back up at the sky. Dawn wouldn’t break for a while yet. She might as well resign herself to getting dressed, but somehow she dreaded the day ahead. Her thought life had been so occupied with physical labor that the free time might be hard to take, with the whole day to kill. The plan was for Byron to drive her to the city tomorrow morning, stopping along the way to pick up her parents at the hospital in Sterling to save them the cost of an ambulance ride to Henry’s appointment with the specialist in Denver.

  Aglaia’s suitcase lay unzipped on the floor near the table. She’d brought it from Naomi’s Monday after supper and hadn’t bothered to take it upstairs to the bedroom, just digging through it for her shampoo and clean underwear as needed. The Bible had slipped out sometime during the night and sprawled open, face down on the linoleum. She prodded it with her toe.