The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

“It’s not a performance,” I said. “It’s worship.”

  “Ah, that’s right. I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the box. “Not like any worship I’ve ever seen. I’m from Chicago, originally, and—”

  “Why are you following us, Mr. Pattinson?” I said. “No one’s been able to tell me.”

  “Frankly,” he said, his hands in his pockets, “you all fascinate me. I figure I’ll leave when all my questions are answered.”

  “How do you afford it?” I asked. He smiled, and I continued, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “What makes you think I’m rich?”

  “The way your friend said your name when I first saw him. Are you a man of faith?”

  “I’m Catholic,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Oh, Mr. Pattinson, I am sorry to hear that. I am sorry that you are enslaved to an evil, false prophet. Won’t you worship God instead of your pope, Mr. Pattinson?”

  He laughed. “Your people are very Protestant, aren’t they?”

  “We do not align with any of the false religions that call themselves Christianity. They are Pharisees, pretenders.”

  “You believe only your father’s interpretation of the Bible is correct? That the entire rest of the Christian world has it wrong?”

  “They do have it wrong,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was a child caught in a lie, then said, “May I sit next to you?”

  “If you’re not afraid,” I said. He smiled, and I added, “Of the snake.”

  “He’s a diamondback?” Mr. Pattinson sat on the tree at a respectful distance.

  “Yes. A six-footer. My father caught him on the day I turned fifteen.” I had a fierce pride of my rattler, one of my everlasting failings. “Most handlers only keep their snakes for a season, but I’ve had mine for five years now. He has a special beauty, a special grace.”

  Mr. Pattinson cocked his head and peered into the box. “It’s not tame by now?”

  I drew myself up a little. “They never tame.”

  “And the reason you can handle him is because of your unwavering faith?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been bitten?”

  I laughed at his audacity, wrapped in such an innocent tone, almost like a child’s. “I’m not going to talk about that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not going to dwell on the past.”

  “Are you ashamed of having been bitten?”

  All at once, I was conscious of the fact that I was alone with Mr. Pattinson, without Mother or Jessica or even the other girls to draw strength from. “We all go through our period of temptation, a period of questioning,” I said. “That time for me has come and gone.” I raised the sleeve of my dress, exposing my wrist and the two round scars just beneath the back of my hand. Mr. Pattinson leaned over my wrist and lifted it with his own hands, studying it. His fingertips had new calluses on them from the tent ropes.

  “When will your turn come again to worship?” he asked, dropping my wrist.

  “Not for a few weeks now,” I said, shutting the lid of the box. “We have many faithful.”

  “Would Jesus approve of this little twosome?” said Mr. Brown. He had come up silently and was leaning against a tree, smoking. I stood up with my rattler, embarrassed and irritated, and began to walk back toward the wagons.

  “Don’t be a swine, Chris,” said Mr. Pattinson from behind me. “Pshaw, Sam,” Mr. Brown said with a grin. “I mean it.”

  “I can see you do,” said Mr. Brown. The way he said it made him sound like the devil himself. “Pardon me,” he said as I passed.

  I stopped and said, “Remove far from me vanity and lies.” Mr. Brown spewed smoke out his nostrils and mouth in laughter. I began walking quickly away again, my face tingling.

  “You’re going to stop that, Chris,” I heard Mr. Pattinson say. “These people are sensitive about their women. Their women are sensitive.”

  My rattler hissed agitatedly at the way I was jostling him, so I slowed down.

  The next morning, I was in the wagon, alone again, before breakfast. I was sitting on the love seat, buttoning my shoes. I hadn’t yet braided my hair, and it was loose over my back. Someone knocked. I pushed my hair out of my face and opened the door. Mr. Pattinson was looking up at me.

  “I told you my father is not often here,” I said.

  He pushed his cap back, squinting in the light, and said, “Yes, I know. I was coming for you. To apologize for my friend.”

  I looked out across the road, to where they were putting up the tables. “Why are you friends with him?” I asked.

  “We went to college together,” he said. I shook my head. “I guess that doesn’t mean much to you,” he continued.

  “I’ve never been to college,” I said.

  “We were in the war, too,” he said.

  “Never been to war either.”

  He pulled his cap back and forth over his head, as if scratching with it. Then he said, “Is there anyone you’re friends with only because they’ve been through a very important, or a very difficult, experience with you?”

  I thought for a moment. We must have made a queer picture, me standing above him with my hands on my hips, the ends of my hair twitching in the wind, and him below, looking up through his eyeglasses.

  “I guess the whole Church is like that to me,” I said.

  He looked as though I’d said words he’d never heard before. “I guess you understand, then.”

  “I guess I do,” I said.

  “Have you eaten yet?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He stepped to the side and paused. “Are you coming?”

  “I have to braid my hair,” I said, bringing up a hand to finger it self-consciously.

  “Oh, all right.” He nodded at me with a small smile. “Good morning.” He went away.

  I closed the door and stood for a moment, still fingering my hair. Then I smoothed down my dress, frowning at the small brown burn mark from when I had my back too close to the supper fire one night. I stood near the window as I braided my hair, watching the breakfast preparations, people gathering around the fire and setting out plates. I couldn’t see Mr. Pattinson, but Mr. Brown was there, in suspenders and a shirt with no jacket or waistcoat. There was a bump in his breast pocket from his pack of cigarettes. He seemed to be rubbing his face down with water from a cup in his hand. I refocused my eyes so that I didn’t see him anymore, but saw my faint reflection—my dishwater hair, my flat moon face and hook nose. There was movement in the window, Mr. Pattinson approaching Mr. Brown and putting a hand on his shoulder. Mr. Brown grinned and lifted his chin up to the sky. I licked my lips, which were dried out with the hot air, and put my hair into its braid.

  Everyone had grown accustomed to Mr. Pattinson and Mr. Brown by the time they had been with us for two weeks. When we were near a town, Mr. Brown would sometimes disappear for several hours, but Mr. Pattinson always stayed close. He began talking with my mother about the details of the Church, since Papa was always too occupied with other things to have conversations. She liked him, and began saying to me or to Jessica, after they’d finished talking and parted, “I believe he is truly growing to love the Lord.” I felt uneasy whenever she said that.

  Daniel became very fond of Mr. Pattinson and took to clumsily explaining Bible passages to him, and Mr. Pattinson played along as if he knew nothing about any of it. Once, when Mother and I returned to the wagon from gathering the dried laundry, Mr. Pattinson and Daniel were sitting on the love seat inside.

  “Daniel has made me a list of rules,” Mr. Pattinson said.

  In his hands Daniel had a torn piece of newspaper he must have picked up somewhere, and over the print he had written with a pencil, “Rules for Mr Patinsin.”

  “Read them, Daniel,” Mother said.

  Daniel haltingly began: “ ‘One, be good. Two, do not blaspheme. Three, don’t l
ie. Four, don’t be a Catholic. Five, don’t be a fornicator.’ ” As he stumbled over fornicator, I felt my face grow warm. Mr. Pattinson looked at Mother with surprise and said, “He’s six and he knows fornicator?”

  “We don’t hide the evils of the world from him,” Mother said. “He must know them to denounce them.”

  Mr. Pattinson looked down at Daniel. “Do you know what that word means? Fornicator?”

  I covered my cheeks with my hands as Daniel said, “It, ah, it means don’t, ah, don’t do bad things and—and Mr. Brown is a fornicator.” Mr. Pattinson leaned back in the love seat and rubbed his face with his hand, but he was smiling. I felt like I would cry.

  “Daniel, we’ll talk about what it means later, but you did a good job,” Mother said. Daniel continued to murmur about sinning, trying to stumble on the right meaning. I went out and walked down to the reptile wagon. I unhitched the back panel and climbed inside. I found my rattler’s box near the back, at the bottom of a stack. I sat in the narrow, dim aisle created by the two rows of boxes, at least four high and six deep. I leaned my ear toward one of the air holes to hear my rattler’s hissing over the hissing of the other snakes.

  A shadow darkened the aisle. Mr. Pattinson was standing outside the wagon. “Did that upset you?” he asked. “Your brother is not incorrect about Mr. Brown. May I come in?”

  I rested my forehead against one of the boxes and looked down. I could feel the snake inside the box slide against the other side. “You think it’s funny to bring your disgusting friend into our midst,” I said. “You think my brother’s concern for the state of your soul is funny. Why are you still here, with your false religion and your questions—to mock us?”

  “No,” he said from across the wagon’s floor. “I want to see if you’re right.” I raised my eyes, and from my odd angle, he was just a black shape in the sunlight. He hoisted himself up into the wagon, and I brought my knees closer to my chest. He raised his arms above the stacks of boxes so that he wouldn’t accidentally nudge any of them, and he murmured, “I’m taking my life into my hands.” Then he lowered himself to the floor. It was a squeeze for him, and once he was sitting, his wide shoulders blocked out the sun and put me in shadow. He had his legs out in front of him, bent, with his forearms resting on his knees. He was wearing long trousers that day, and the way the legs hiked up when he sat, the tops of his tan socks were exposed, along with their garter strings, and I could see just a little bit of his bare shin and its light-colored hair. It felt obscene, and I looked back at my rattler’s box.

  “I respect your people, Rachel,” Mr. Pattinson said. “I respect your religion. I want to find out what feeds the kind of faith you have.”

  “The Lord does,” I said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Mr. Pattinson said. “If he did, what worth would it have? You know better than that.”

  “Why don’t you ask my mother about it? She knows better than me.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s thought about it in that way.”

  “You’re right,” I said, beginning to trace the painted letters on my rattler’s box. “I don’t think she’s ever doubted. That’s why you want to talk to me?” I could hardly make my voice loud enough to be heard. “Because you think I’ve doubted?”

  He didn’t say anything for such a long time that I raised my eyes to him again. He’d taken off his cap and was slowly smoothing out his hair, his hand working through it while he looked at me. “No,” he said. “Because, for a second, on that first night, you seemed afraid of the snake. That’s why.”

  I looked down and squeezed my wet eyelids shut.

  I heard a smile in his voice when he spoke next. “None of the other young ladies will talk to me.”

  “Well, what do you expect?” I said, rousing myself and swiping the bottoms of my palms across my eyes. “You’re an unmarried man, an outsider. And I don’t talk to you that much.”

  “How do they expect to meet young men, then?” Mr. Pattinson said. “There aren’t very many at all in the Church. If they want to get married, they’ll have to look outside.”

  “No girl of real faith will marry outside the Church.”

  “They’re going to have to if they want to have a new generation in it,” he said. “Do you want to get married?”

  I looked at him askance, before I could stop myself.

  He smiled. “Not to me,” he said. “I mean in general. Silly girl,” he added quietly, rubbing his knees with his hands.

  “I very likely won’t get married,” I said, looking back at my finger tracing the box’s lettering. “Even though our worship seems attractive, we’re speaking harsh truths for the world, and those truths do not attract anyone but the righteous, and there aren’t many righteous. My sister and I have accepted that.”

  “Your mother and father got married, though.”

  “They were lucky.”

  “Don’t you want to have children someday?”

  “I will do whatever the Lord wants of me.”

  “Be fruitful and multiply,” he said. “That’s what he wants of you.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Then don’t reply to me with platitudes, with quotes from your father’s sermons,” he said.

  “The only reason you’re allowed to stay with us is because you’re paying my father,” I said.

  He put his cap back on and sighed. “I suppose that’s true enough.”

  I rested my cheek against my knee. “I could never marry a man from outside,” I said, “because I have a true and unrelenting faith. So I will not marry.”

  I felt Mr. Pattinson’s shadow stretch over me as he leaned closer. “You’re afraid that a man from outside would not accept that part of you,” he said.

  “It’s all of me,” I said.

  Daniel was sick that night. He woke us up with his retching—he’d vomited all down the side of the love seat, into Mama’s hair. She’d scolded him as she used her blanket to wipe it out, but Daniel just vomited again. Finally, she took him outside. We could hear him through the open doorway, out of sight, retching every two minutes or so while Mother murmured angrily.

  Jessica and I were lying in our bunk, with me on the inside, my arms pressed up against her back, as always.

  “Poor Daniel,” Jessica whispered. “It must have been something he ate.”

  I watched the narrow plane of Jessica’s back, her nightdress shifting as she breathed.

  “I was thinking about home,” I murmured.

  “Are you homesick?” she said.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “I was thinking about the way Mother keeps Papa’s shaving kit all lined up by the kitchen window, and she won’t let anyone move it. And she can do that because it’s her house, with her husband. I was thinking about how—there’s no place that we can do that.”

  Jessica was quiet. Then, she whispered, “Do you mean how we’re not going to get married?”

  I buried my face into the corner created by Jessica’s back and the bottom of our bunk. “Yes.”

  “Do you want to pray?” Jessica said.

  I wanted to say no, but I said, “All right,” and I gave her my hand.

  Over the following days, I was not quite right. I thought it was about to be my delicate time, which is the only thing Mother would ever call it. My senses were acute like they became just before my time—the air was hotter, the sunlight whiter. When we traveled, I stayed inside the wagon with Mother, Jessica, and Daniel for as long as I could before I had to get out. I walked alongside then, staying in the shade. I didn’t mind the dust rising up from the wheels, and I let the flies flick against my face without shooing them away. But I checked every morning, and I wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t like Jessica, who could mark down the calendar and be prepared—I never knew when it would come. To this day, I never know.

  Half a day away from Aurora, our Ford broke down. I was walking beside the wagon when Mr. Malcolm came running past, up to the front, and shouted
something to Papa. Papa turned and signaled the rest of the line to stop. As he walked back with Mr. Malcolm, he said to me, “What are you doing outside?” But he did not wait for me to answer.

  The Church ladies milled about the road irritably as every single one of the men went down the line to the Ford to help. We could see them all crowded around the car like ants around a dropped watermelon. Two hours passed, and the ladies gave up on the day. “We won’t reach Aurora until well past dark, even if we leave right this minute,” each said in turn, and they began moving the wagons off to the side of the road, setting up for an early evening. Near sunset, one by one, the men came wandering toward the smell of creamed corn, ambling like milk cows in the heat, chewing tobacco and fanning themselves with their hats, until most of them had come to get their supper. When it was getting dark, Mother sent me to fetch the rest.

  Mr. Forrester was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Ford, swiping a handkerchief over his face, and Mr. Brown was in the passenger side, rolling a cigarette with concentration in the diminishing light. Papa and Mr. Pattinson were bent under the raised hood. They were both sweating in their shirtsleeves, dirty with engine grime, hatless. Papa grunted something, and Mr. Pattinson said, “Maybe not.”

  I stayed a little distance away until Papa noticed me. He straightened up and pushed his shoulders back with his hands on his hips, frowning at an ache. “Yes, Rachel?”

  “Mother says supper’s ready. Do you want it?” I asked. Mr. Pattinson stayed bent over the engine.

  “The carburetor’s blown,” Papa said, tensing his lips so that his clenched teeth showed. I turned around to go back, but Papa said after me, “Some water.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  I brought back two cream tins full of water.

  “I’ll leave before sunup, take my car into Aurora,” Mr. Pattinson said as Papa took one of the tins. “Get back to you before noon with a mechanic, hopefully.”

  Papa spat on the ground. “Whole day lost. Mechanic will rob us blind.” He took a drink.

  From inside the car, Mr. Brown said, “Damn!” He was trying to light the cigarette he’d just rolled. “I need some Luckies. I can’t roll these damn things.”