by Rae Meadows
* * *
AROUND THE SIDE of the church, Annie leaned over, guzzling air, until the faint passed.
She saw the tips of his shoes first, black and freshly shined, before she raised her head.
“I was worried,” Jack said. “You looked so pale.”
She looked around. “I’m torn up inside,” she said quietly. “This is a mess we’ve got going.”
He nodded and dropped his chin to his chest.
“You can talk to me.”
But Annie had spent her life not talking. Her mother could have found a gold bangle bracelet on her pillow—Mrs. Simpson used to wear three of them, which jingled together on her wrist—and still she wouldn’t have said anything to her husband. She took her lumps with steely Protestant resolve. And despite Annie’s contempt for her mother, she was really no different, unable to tell Samuel how she really felt about anything. You wanted what your husband wanted. You didn’t complain. You worked until your back ached and your hands split and your hair fell out from worry. Talk was selfish. She wouldn’t know where to begin.
Organ chords rang from the other side of the wall, and Jack’s hand found hers and then her lips found his and there they were, out in the open for anyone to catch them.
And then she thought of Samuel, felt the unbearable weight of his constancy. She pulled away and shook her hair—the wind had picked up—not meeting Jack’s eyes. A tumbleweed barreled close and snagged her stockings.
“Best to go on in,” she said. She turned away and left him standing on the side of the church.
“Annie?”
But she kept walking.
* * *
AS BIRDIE STOOD, she saw her mother nearly running from the side of the church, her head down, hair askew.
“Mama.”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “We should go in.” Annie tried to comb her hair into place with her fingers. She reached for the door just as Fred opened it from the inside, smiling.
“The wind’s getting kind of crazy,” Birdie said, but neither heard her for the singing of the hymn. As she turned for another look, she saw the mayor come around the corner, following the path of her mother. He walked quickly, his brow furrowed, hands in his pockets. She scooted inside behind her mother, pretending she had not seen him. Why had she done that? Something in his face, a trouble there.
They made their way back to their seats as the hymn concluded and the congregation sat. Samuel raised his eyebrows and Annie answered with a slight nod and an even slighter forced smile.
Why had they both been back there? Birdie thought. Her mother and the mayor. She didn’t like the feeling it gave her to put the two of them together.
* * *
PASTOR HARDY’S HAIR hung flat and greasy, and his tie was loose around his neck. The Bells sat close enough to the front that Birdie caught a whiff of something stale, like yeast, when his pacing pulled him near. Even him, she thought. Everyone was coming apart.
“How do you cope in a world gone astray?” the pastor asked to the space above their heads, his eyes cloudy and beseeching.
How indeed, Birdie thought. Cy had to be in California by now. She imagined trees full of oranges. Juice on her chin, sticky on her hands. Even the sun had to be different there, golden, soft. She checked each day for any bulge in her belly, but was relieved to find none, not yet.
Her father nodded along to the pastor’s sermon, Ezekiel, again. Her mother stared. Fred, in the light from the window above, looked for a moment like a newly hatched chick, with his twitchy little head and blinking dark eyes and face open to the world. Birdie felt something like fear then, something ragged and dark lurking just out of sight. Fred could die just like Eleanor did, just like the Wallace boy who’d gone to bed with a headache and died in the night when a blood vessel exploded in his brain. The slimmest margin separated life from not-life. Pastor Hardy boomed on and on.
“We must be overcomers or we will be overcome,” he said.
When it was finally time for a hymn, the pastor fell into his seat in a spent lump, and the congregation, the whole bedraggled bunch of them, rose to their feet.
Next to Birdie, Luke Carlton’s mother sang like an ailing warbler. His father had gone on relief and hadn’t been seen in church since. Luke, who would be a senior, a head and shoulders taller than his mother, ran a finger between his buttoned-up shirt and his neck, halfheartedly singing every third word.
When the hymn was over, Luke folded his mantis legs in on themselves in order to fit in the pew. He looked over and smiled at her—his elastic grin a little goofy, his hair a slept-on mess—and she felt a fading sadness at having been left.
In the shuffling quiet, before Pastor Hardy began again, the high windows rattled as the wind whipped against the church in jabs and gusts. People looked up, unable, for a moment, to bring themselves to move, each hoping it would go away.
“The Book of Ezekiel calls us to join in a renewed encounter with the God of Abraham. It asks to recognize the depth of evil that can lodge in each human heart.”
Samuel stood. “Pastor,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve got something brewing.”
“Let it come,” he said. “We’re talking about the Lord.”
“All due respect. I’ve got to get to the animals,” Joe Brevers said, rising with his hat in hand. When he opened the door, the wind blew it back with a crack. The rest of the congregation jumped up and scuttled to the door.
“Stay calm,” the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold. He watched Annie as she shepherded her children down the aisle, tying a mask on Fred even as he resisted, Samuel’s hand on her back. That hand was crushing to him.
Outside crows and nighthawks and killdeers filled the sky with swooping, squawking chaos as they flew pell-mell, as if they’d been hurled by slingshots. Blue sparks zinged off barbed wire from the static electricity. The dark clouds were a few miles off, thousands of feet into the sky and rolling east, sweeping up the dirt in their path, straight toward them. Even though the sun was still bright, the air had the acrid taste of what was to come. Jack Lily helped the old Hollisters to their car.
“You going to ride it out at the office?” Styron asked.
“Go on. I’ll seal it up best I can.”
“It looks like the end of the world, doesn’t it?”
Jack nodded, just as the Bells drove by.
* * *
“EVEN IN DEFEAT and despair God’s people need to affirm God’s sovereignty,” the pastor said to his empty church. His face blotched pink under a waxy sheen. “Even in despair.”
He sat in the first row, his hands lifeless in his lap. He didn’t want to go around to his house behind the church, couldn’t even muster the energy. He guessed he had some time before the worst of it. He closed his eyes and slipped into a jagged bout of sleep.
The first dirt hit soft like light snow, and then the gusts picked up, rocking the wooden church as sand hurled itself against the windows.
The pastor woke up to the cross above him, its burnished wood as smooth as alabaster.
“I just don’t know,” he said.
He fingered what remained of the letter in his pocket, the penciled words long disappeared, the edges as soft as cotton. It was the last he’d heard from Joseph, fifteen years ago, and he knew what it had said as well as he knew the Lord’s Prayer. “Last night the moon was out full and it was so much colder than it’s ever been at home,” it began. My poor boy, the pastor would always think. What a terrible thing he’d gone to war. He’d been gentle his whole life—nursing a fox with a wounded paw or carrying spiders out of the house—and yet the pastor had been glad when he’d been called up, thought it would toughen him up. “When I get home I want to fish,” he’d written. “That’s what I dream about the most. And Mother’s huckleberry pie.”
The wind now howled like a pack of wolves, dolorous and fierce. The
pastor turned his thoughts to his wife and how she would snap off both ends of green beans because she liked the symmetry. How after a day of rolling beeswax candles at the kitchen table, her hair would smell like honey. How when they were young, they would swim in the river, her dress billowing out around her like a spectral vision.
It looked like dusk, now, the sun obscured, the air cloudy and dry.
“Well, Martha, it’s the biggest black blizzard I ever did see. They wouldn’t know what to make of it back in Arkansas, now, would they?”
He was tired, his back ached, his finger joints were swollen from arthritis, his breath scratched his throat. He wanted to go home. He wanted to be with his wife and son. He closed his eyes and felt the church shake, stones dinging the windows. He knew his faith was bowing under the weight of this test that would not let up.
There was a loud pop as one of the windows blew in, showering him in glass and dust. The wind whipped his hair, the glass cut his face, and yet he braced himself for what was to come, unwilling to hide.
* * *
BY THE TIME Samuel delivered his family home, the duster closing in, he couldn’t stop thinking about Pastor Hardy and his faraway look that morning.
Annie tore strips from rags and dipped them in a paste of flour and water, sealing the window seams. Birdie brought in the cows, settling them in the barn. Fred, after losing the battle with his mother to bring the chickens inside, secured them in the henhouse. As Samuel drew tarpaulins over the boat and lumber and tools, he felt he had to go back to the church. Something was not right. He found Annie teetering on a chair as she hung a wet sheet over the kitchen window. He took the hammer from her and fixed the corner with a nail.
“I have to go back and check on him.”
“Who?”
“The pastor.”
“The storm’s right outside the door.”
“He doesn’t have anyone else. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He turned then and rushed out the door.
* * *
“WHAT DO YOU think’s going to happen to us?” Birdie asked. She and Fred sat together in her bed, huddled under the quilt, as the winds bit into the house and the darkness closed in.
Fred twirled his finger in the air.
“Not with the storm, silly. That’s no secret. Everything gets dirty. Someone else goes crazy. You cough.”
Fred coughed and smiled, his mask around his neck.
“I mean, are we going to just stay and stay and get older and sadder?”
Fred scrunched his forehead. Was everyone sad but him? He reached over for his notebook and pencil and scratched out, “What’s wrong with here?” And then wrote again, “Cy?”
“Sometimes I wonder what he had for breakfast. I bet he doesn’t have to eat wheat porridge anymore. Maybe he has a grapefruit. Did you know it’s earlier in California?”
Fred shook his head.
“A couple hours or something. So when I wake up in the morning I think, Cy is still sleeping, and then I wish so much that I could be lying next to him.”
There was scant light, so Fred hoped she couldn’t see him blush.
“Someday you’ll understand what it’s like.”
* * *
AS THE DARKNESS grew, and with Samuel gone, Annie thought she’d join her children upstairs, but she stopped outside the door when she heard Birdie mention Cy’s name. Since he’d left, Birdie spoke to her in short angry sentences, as if Cy’s leaving were Annie’s fault. She wished she could hold her and say she understood. She had more in common with Birdie than she could admit. But she knew how trying to talk to her would go. They were each spinning in the dark, like flies in a glass of water, flapping around for something to latch onto. Something cracked against the house, blown by the wind. Annie was furious at Samuel for going out in the storm. She felt her way through the hall to her bedroom and slid under the covers, pulling the sheet over her head.
* * *
“I’M AFRAID MY whole life will be missing him,” Birdie said.
Fred found Birdie’s hand and held it. “It’ll be all right,” he wanted to write to her, but it was too dim to read words on paper. Dust as fine as baby powder sifted through the window seams.
“No. It’s not that. That’s not it,” Birdie said. “It’s not just Cy.”
He turned to her, the air thick.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Snatches of images ricocheted in his head, piling up in a confused collage: pregnant, baby, animals, mating, Cy, nakedness, darkness, sweating, thrilling, strange, awful, the end. His sister was not his sister. She was something else, separate. Someone who could swell with a child in her belly. The secret felt hot in his head.
“There. I said it,” she said. “I guess that makes it so.”
“Take it back,” Fred thought. “I don’t want it to be so.”
“It’ll come in the spring,” Birdie said. “If we haven’t blown away by then.” She turned to him. “You’ll be an uncle. Can you believe it?”
Fred couldn’t believe it. He kind of liked the sound of it, though. He could teach the baby things, like how the crows talk to each other with caws and warning cries and the soft chittering of affection. But his thoughts were stalled by one cough and then another, and he spat dark goo into the piece of flannel he kept in his pocket.
“You okay?” Birdie asked.
He nodded. He was going to be an uncle. And an uncle needed to be strong.
CHAPTER 11
It wasn’t Samuel who got to Pastor Hardy first. It was the man McGuiness, who blundered into the church half drunk, his boots crunching on broken glass, cursing God and the state of Oklahoma, which had treated him like shit since the day he was born. He’d been kicked out of Ruth’s, tottering toward where he thought he’d left his truck, when he got caught, shoved around by the storm. The church had been the closest door, and now that he was inside, he scanned the place for anything of value. The collection plate was empty, but it was made of silver maybe. He stuffed it into the front pocket of his overalls. He wedged his face into the crook of his elbow to catch a breath.
“I’m here,” the pastor said, in a wheezy shout. “Who’s there?” Hardy turned in the pew, roused from his thoughts, and scrunched his face at the large figure coming toward him.
“Well. McGuiness. Looking to fleece me too?”
“Bet you got some whiskey at your place. Get up, will you?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Suit yourself.”
Samuel pushed through the door with a towel over his face, disoriented by the swirling dirt.
“Pastor?”
“Go home to your family, Samuel,” Hardy said.
But Samuel knew Hardy wasn’t quite right, and could see now the cuts on his face.
“Help me get him over to the house,” Samuel said to McGuiness.
“I know, you,” McGuiness said. “You’re Noah.” He laughed and coughed. “You’re goddamn Noah. Did you ride in on your ark?”
“Get his other arm!” Samuel shouted.
McGuiness complied, nudged by the hope of a drink, and they trundled the docile pastor out into the fury of the wind, feeling their way along the side of the church until the small clapboard house came hazily into view. The three men squeezed through the door, slamming it behind them.
Samuel helped the pastor over to a chair, rinsed out a dirty glass, and filled it.
“Thank you,” Hardy said.
“You weren’t yourself today in church,” Samuel said.
“What, no thanks for me?” McGuiness flung open cabinets, shoving aside plates and tins of salt and sugar. His gut knocked a jar of jam from the counter to the floor.
“It’s in the one above the icebox,” Hardy said.
Samuel recognized McGuiness, one of a handful of scavengers who roamed the county. He was as big as a bear, his hands broad and filthy. He smelled of beer and sweat.
“I won’t ask you to leave, on account of the stor
m,” Samuel said. “But I’ll ask you to show some respect.”
“Oh, okay, sure, Noah.” He laughed and grabbed the whiskey by the neck and sat down at the table. “I haven’t seen you in a while, Pastor. You’ve gotten old.”
“Yes, well. It happens. The collection plate.” The pastor held out his hand to McGuiness.
“In the spirit of this fine gathering.” McGuiness pulled it from his overalls and set it on the table.
The wind whistled through cracks in the house. Samuel felt dislocated and uneasy. He’d have to wait for the storm to pass before he could leave. He’d had experience with men like McGuiness before, but he was out of practice, and wished only to disperse the tinder of tension that might set him off. Back in Kansas, before Annie, he’d held his own twice with his fists, numbed by drink and youth. Once he’d awoken behind his shack on Gramlin’s place to find his nose broken and his knuckle split, no memory of whom he’d fought or why. He’d lain there with the wet spring earth against his cheek and felt the sun on his back as it rose. He knew he ought to get up and hitch up the plow, but he felt small and petty and breakable. There was the earth and there was God. And he knew then that that was everything.
“Hey, Noah. Why don’t you sit down and join the party. Bring over some glasses while you’re at it.”
The chair creaked under McGuiness’s weight. He took a swig from the bottle, then absently rubbed his thumb along his half front tooth. Hardy slouched and his jowls hung. His face was dirt-smeared and defeated, a crusted cut above his eye. Samuel imagined he didn’t look so well himself, thin as he was now and wind-whipped. He sighed and pulled two cloudy glasses and a jelly jar down from the shelf. The lamp cast a low yellow light on the table, the electricity surprisingly still on.
“You okay, Pastor?” he asked.
Hardy nodded with a grunt. “I lost myself for a moment in there, I’m afraid. I’m obliged to you.” He sipped his drink. “How’s the boat coming?”
“Got the ribs setting up. Fred’s a good helper.”
“I’m cheap labor,” McGuiness said, a hint of challenge in his voice. “I don’t know shit about boats, but you don’t either, I suspect.”
