by S. M. Hulse
On the stage, a young man with a guitar sings into a microphone while behind him a woman plays an upright piano. The hymn is contemporary, the melody wistful but not gloomy, the lyrics filled with words like renewal and hope. I don’t know it. When the song ends, the musicians leave the stage, and another man steps to the microphone. He is younger than I would have guessed a pastor to be, older than me but probably no older than Samuel. He wears dark jeans and a pale blue dress shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to his elbows. His stride is long, his back straight, and he moves like someone used to being watched by others. I can’t see his face clearly, but it seems he’s looking at as many of the people seated before him as possible, moving from one set of eyes to another. It’s dark where I sit, but I wish I had transferred from my wheelchair to one of the chairs in the neat rows before me. I stay very still.
“It is heartening to see you all here tonight,” the man begins. “My name is Asa Truth, and I am the pastor of Light of the World Church. Many of you are strangers to me, and my congregation and I are deeply grateful for your support at what is a very trying time for our church community, as well as for Elk Fork as a whole.” His voice is clear and would carry easily even without the microphone. There’s something commanding in it, something calming, too, and I wonder whether that balance came naturally or if he’s cultivated it. It’s a voice that suggests assurance, solidity, certainty, and almost in spite of myself I find I want to listen to it. To believe what it says.
Of course I do.
It’s like listening to Samuel.
* * *
I haven’t been to church in years, not since I was twelve or thirteen. When I was a child, our mother took Samuel and me to one of the churches in Prospect, but I can’t recall her ever speaking of God and we did not pray at home, not even over dinner, so church must have been a social occasion for our mother, a small-town survival strategy. I liked it well enough. In Sunday school we acted out skits based on Bible stories and made greeting cards with the words of John 3:16 on the inside. On Good Friday, we sang “Go to Dark Gethsemane,” and I imagined Jesus on his final night, descending a thousand feet into the earth to pray. It must have been dark indeed, I thought, especially if he hadn’t brought a headlamp, though I allowed that Jesus himself might have emitted a gentle glow, perhaps just enough to make out the rock walls of the mine.
After our mother’s death, the pastor of our church visited me in the hospital. I remember his visit only dimly, perhaps because of the medications, perhaps because I’d paid so little attention to him during his sermons. In the hospital, the pastor was kind but seemed at a loss for words; he kept repeating, We’ll pray for you.
Samuel took me to church after that. The older I got, the more it bored me, and the less I believed in it. Or the more I realized I never really had. Sometimes I wonder if what happened the night Mom died was responsible for my lack of interest in religion. The old why me question, as though all the bad things in the world had been no obstacle to faith as long as they were happening to other people. It seems too simplistic. Maybe tragedy can only steal faith from those who truly had it in the first place, and I don’t think that was me.
It was different for Samuel, though. One Sunday—after Mom, but not long after—I opened my eyes during the final prayer and glanced at Samuel, half expecting him to sense my lack of participation, give me a warning look. But he stood straight, eyes shut so tightly there were wrinkles at the corners that made him seem older than his eighteen or nineteen years. His lips were moving silently, and I tried to make out the words but couldn’t. What I remember most are his hands, the way he held them in front of him, palms up, as though waiting for someone to place something in them, gift or burden.
* * *
The service continues with prayers, one led clumsily by Elk Fork’s mayor, the others more easily by the pastor. There are hymns, too; I recognize only “Amazing Grace” and “This Is My Father’s World,” which, we are told, is Emily’s favorite. As the hour draws to a close, the projector screen illuminates once again, this time with a photograph of a balding middle-aged man.
“We pray for the healing of those injured in Sunday’s explosion,” the pastor says, “and particularly for those still hospitalized. Garrett Folsom.” A few moments’ silence, in which I hear a shuddering intake of breath several rows ahead. “Ruby Harper.” The projector switches to a photograph of a woman with gray hair and a sly, closed-mouth smile. I study each face as it appears. The radio said both have been upgraded to fair condition. Fair seems promising. Fair is better than I was when I was taken to the hospital. But there’s also—
“Emily—” The pastor stops, his hand raised before him as though in benediction or blessing. It falters, dips and trembles. His shoulders rise and square as he takes in a long breath, holds it, lets it go. The hand rises again, higher than before, steadies. “Emily Truth,” he says.
And she is on the screen. It’s clearly a school photo, a head-and-shoulders shot with a carefully neutral mottled gray background. Emily wears a blue blouse and a delicate necklace with a tiny silver cross that rests in the hollow of her throat. Her hair is a glossy auburn, her eyes a vivid green, and her broad smile is missing a tooth at the far edge. I imagine the photograph framed on a living room mantel, glued to a scrapbook page, tucked into a plastic sleeve in the pastor’s wallet. Her father’s wallet. I try not to think about what the face in the photograph looks like now, in the hospital, whether it has been changed by the explosion, and how.
Whatever reasons Samuel had for what he did, they’re not good enough. Whatever reasons he had did not justify hurting these people. This child. Still I hear part of my mind whisper, He didn’t mean it. I try to banish the thought. It doesn’t matter to anyone but me.
The screen goes dark, and the pastor resumes speaking, his voice clear and strong once again. I bow my head, close my eyes, and listen to the pastor pray for healing and strength and peace. It’s not a passive prayer; his delivery suggests these things aren’t inevitable but must be searched out, fought for, earnestly and genuinely desired. When he speaks of healing his voice takes on a sharper tone, each word ringing with a confidence I envy. I want the things he prays for, want them as deeply as it is possible to want something, want them so much the wanting is almost painful. I wish for Garrett Folsom and Ruby Harper to recover from their injuries, and most of all I wish for Emily Truth to be okay, to heal, to live. I wish for it with every thought and feeling and breath, and if fevered, fervent wishing can be a kind of prayer, then yes, I pray for it.
“You’re his sister.”
I jerk my head up, eyes open.
“I saw your picture on the news.” The woman is in the back row, just a few feet from where I sit. She’s turned, one hand on the back of her chair. “What are you doing here?” Her voice began as a near whisper, but it rises with each word. People close by crane their necks to look. I’m used to stares, of course—the wheelchair—but this is different. “Why did you come?”
I know now I shouldn’t have. I thought it would be like the prayer service I heard they held in Prospect after the Gethsemane collapse, a place to share worry and show care. I thought people wouldn’t notice me, and if they did, I thought they would see I was like them, I was sorry, I was sad. I thought they would see I was not my brother. Samuel would have known I was making a mistake. He would have told me not to come, would have told me I was being naive, breaking the rules we’ve fashioned for tragedies like this. He would have told me they would not let me separate myself from him. Would have told me I shouldn’t try.
The woman won’t be quiet. “This is a space for people who have been hurt.” The man beside her lays a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it off. Tears dart down both cheeks. She is the age my mother would be.
“I’m—” I swallow, try to think of words I can say, right words, good words, but none come. The pastor has stopped speaking; I don’t dare look toward the stage.
The man touches the
woman’s shoulder again, gingerly. “Margaret.”
“We don’t want you here,” she says, each word a sentence unto itself. She isn’t speaking loudly, but the room has gone silent.
I stare at her, jaw clenched. My hands are on the handrims of my chair, but they seem no more willing to move than my paralyzed legs.
Then the pastor’s voice enters into the silence. “Just as we pray for our loved ones and our community,” he says, “let us pray also for the man who detonated the bomb, for, like us, he is a beloved creation of God.” The pastor speaks more quietly than during the rest of the service, but his words command the attention of the room. Even the crying woman—Margaret—turns to face him. I feel the people around me resist his words. And why not? How can he say these things? How can a man whose child lies in the hospital at this very moment ask them to pray for my brother, who put her there? And do I hear something strained in that voice, something dutiful but no more? Or is that my own guilt bleeding into the words as they reach my ears? I bow my head, but not in prayer. Try to disappear into the darkness that isn’t nearly dark enough. “And let us pray also for his family and friends, for their suffering may be different than ours, but it is no less real.”
The pastor continues to speak—I’m sure he does, though I’m also sure he’s looking at me, so I keep my eyes cast down—but I no longer hear what he says. I feel like a child again, that child in the hospital, a victim to be pitied, not knowing whether she’s grateful for the prayers of others or resentful of them. Or, and this is a new thought: simply undeserving.
I test my hands again, and this time they obey. I cut across the room, not caring that several people turn to watch, and though the door gives me a few moments’ struggle, still I do not look up, and finally I’m in the broad fluorescent light of the hall and I feel my pulse return to me, steady and reliable. I push the handrims as hard as I can until I’m moving quickly enough to let it all blur.
I’m in the parking lot before I hear footsteps behind me. I turn sharply, and the pastor slows immediately, stops when he’s still a couple yards away. “Ms. Faber,” he says, and despite the wheelchair, despite the picture in the paper and the accusing woman inside, there’s a hint of a question in his voice, so after a moment I nod.
He is tall and narrow, the knobs of his wrists prominent, his cheekbones sharp angles beneath pale skin. His hair is a very light brown, probably darkened from a boyhood blond, and his eyes are green like Emily’s, and bloodshot. I look for judgment in those eyes, but their opacity reminds me of Samuel’s, and I instantly feel I’ve done something wrong, almost vulgar, in comparing the two men. The pastor puts one hand in front of him, and I recoil before I recognize it as a peaceful gesture; he sees me start and pulls back, and I remember the way his hand faltered when he prayed over his daughter’s name on the stage. “It shouldn’t have gone like that in there,” he says, and his voice is different now, not clear and commanding like it was during the service, but soft and a bit broken, a huskiness wounding the vowels. “People are … It’s a hard time.”
All I can think of is Emily’s photograph, and Emily’s favorite hymn, and Emily’s father standing here before me, looking at me and talking to me and all the while not knowing if his daughter is going to live.
Behind him, the school doors open, rectangles of harsh light cutting into the dying dusk, and people begin to file into the parking lot in ones and twos. The pastor steps closer. He moves as though he is fragile, or the world is, or both. He lifts his hand again, seems about to touch me, lets it drop gently back to his side.
I can’t look at him. Can’t speak.
He presses a small card into my hand. He takes a half step back, but waits for me to fold my fingers over the card before he lets it go and walks away.
* * *
I drive home five miles an hour under the speed limit, which is much too fast when it’s dark. The mountains blend into the night, but their peaks and ridges reveal themselves by masking the stars in the clear sky. I painted a scene that way once, all midnight blues and blacks, moonlit silver edges, and a spray of white stars. Hadn’t turned out the way I hoped. I made the stars too bright.
A few miles from the Split Creek turnoff, I spot a shifting of dark on dark and shove hard on the hand brake. Loose gravel rattles against the undercarriage. A whitetail buck stands immobile in the road, his eyes reflecting the glare of headlights. He’s close enough I can see the velvet coating each short curve and tine of his new antlers, the flare of his nostrils with his breath. He stares back for several long seconds, then flags his tail and bounds out of the road and beyond the reach of my human eyes.
I drive the rest of the way home more slowly, thinking of how many things in the world a person might not see until it’s too late.
* * *
I remember little of Ben Archer. He and my mother hadn’t dated long, a few weeks at most. At our second meeting, he gave me a toy unicorn; though it was horse-shaped, it was not a horse, and this small error, this misunderstanding of who I was and what I liked, had seemed to me to indicate some deeper flaw in his character. Perhaps if Archer hadn’t been so inexorably drawn to beer and whiskey, he would have simply been a clumsily well-intentioned suitor my mother could have kindly turned away. But there was the beer, and the whiskey. And then there was Hawkins at our house, and serious conversations and papers signed, and a warning not to talk to Archer if I saw him, and then there was a long quiet time in which I almost forgot about him.
* * *
A new canvas.
My studio is on the eastern side of my bedroom. The room is large, as wide as the kitchen and dining area combined, though not so deep. Several tall windows in both the eastern and western walls let in light all day long. I hadn’t wanted to move into this room after our mother’s death—made Samuel carry me upstairs to my old bedroom for months afterward—and it wasn’t until I set up the studio years later that it truly began to feel like mine.
When the room was my mother’s, I sometimes came here in the evenings to curl up and read in one of her two whitewashed wicker chairs, or to play with my toy horses on the braided rug. My mother would have a book of her own, and we sometimes let an hour or even two go by without either of us speaking. Samuel never joined us, and at the time I had been glad, had guarded those precious hours alone with my mother, but now I wish I could remember him here.
Where the wicker chairs used to be stand a pair of easels. The desk has been traded for a storage chest filled with paints and palettes and brushes, the braided rug replaced by a spattered dropcloth. The room, which once wore a subtle scent of aging paper and mild potpourri, now smells mostly of paint.
I take the painting I ruined the day of the bombing off one of the easels. I consider trying to salvage something from the blackened canvas, decide I don’t want to even if I can; nothing will stop me seeing the memory of that day on it. I fold the smaller of my two easels until it looks like a bundle of aluminum kindling, compact enough to close my hand around, and slip it into the bag slung across the back of my wheelchair. I add a box filled with pencils, erasers, and charcoal. Then I sort through the handful of prepped canvases and boards propped against the wall, finally select one twenty inches by twenty-four. I balance it on my thighs and go outside, down the long porch ramp, and over the patchy lawn to a spot twenty yards from the house, beneath one of the tall ponderosa pines that punctuate the property.
I have painted this house my great-great-grandfather built many times. It has appeared in winter scenes, buried under deeply drifted snow; in spring, with crocuses pushing through the soil in front of the porch; in summer, when the white exterior stands stark and bright against the fading fields; in autumn, when curling leaves gather along the foundation and the larch on the mountain slopes behind the house burns a brilliant yellow. Like most of my work, those paintings are light, impressionistic, never detailed enough to show the hard edges beneath the veneer of beauty. It’s a picturesque farmhouse, and on my canvases its
paint is never peeling, its gutters always straight, its shutters never broken.
* * *
The first Christmas after our mother died, there were gifts from neighbors and our mother’s friends and near strangers in town, people who had worked with our father years ago or whose children attended school with me or Samuel. The second Christmas, there were almost no gifts (Hawkins gave me a book about mules and gave Samuel a bone-handled pocketknife), and no money to buy any.
I made a coupon book for Samuel, an envelope filled with construction paper vouchers for tasks I already did: make dinner, feed Lockjaw, play three games of gin rummy. It felt like a feeble gift even then, and too young for me—I was twelve—but Samuel thanked me sincerely. I suppose he was embarrassed by his gift for me, too: a shoebox containing five half-empty tubes of paint, two stained and splayed brushes, and a pad of drawing paper that held far fewer than the one hundred sheets promised on its cover.
I’d never expressed much interest in art before my injury. Sometimes I doodled in the margins of my school papers, but I didn’t think of myself as having any noteworthy artistic talent or inclination. In the hospital, the nurses gave me a box of markers and a package of paper, and I started drawing there because it was one of the only ways I could find to feel close to the things that were important to me. I drew horses and mules, the house and barn, the meadows and mountains. Over and over I drew them. By the time I left rehab, I’d already gained some appreciation for the promise and limitations of the pen, for the joy of putting right on paper what was not right with the world, and the sorrow of knowing it was mere illusion.
