Eden Mine

by S. M. Hulse

  And I wanted Samuel to see what he had not been there to see. I wanted him to look upon that which I witnessed on his behalf.

  “Created from mud,” Asa says at last, lowering the paper.

  I hear the wonder in his voice, hear it break through the numbness and grief and fury, for just a moment. I used soil from the base of the fallen tree, water from the rain barrel. Mud made from the dust of the earth, blended and brought to life with the water of the heavens. “From Eden,” I tell him, because whatever crisis of faith he might be experiencing, I think it will still matter to him.

  He mouths the words after me.

  * * *

  Hardly ever rains like this here. Usually it’s a downpour that lasts five minutes, ten at most, or maybe a slow drizzle that peters out over the course of a few hours. Must be a chain of those spring storms, one after another rolling in off the solid ocean of the western slopes. The wind has kicked up again, pushing more thunderclouds through the valley, and rain comes against the side of the house in waves, steady most of the time but then suddenly battering before backing off again.

  The people outside have a bullhorn, and every so often they call Samuel’s name, ask him to answer the phone, pick it up, just for a minute. Twice they call my name—they call me Josephine the first time, Jo the second, and I wonder who corrected them, Devin or Hawkins—and once Asa’s.

  Every second that passes seems to carry weight, and the weight builds with the elapsed minutes and hours to a mounting pressure I’m finding harder and harder to bear. Part of it’s the uncertainty, yes, and the worry, but part of it’s the odd pairing of tension and tedium, waiting in this dark room listening to wind and rain, to the audible breaths of Samuel and Asa.

  The phone rings again, and Samuel glances at the screen. “Says it’s Hawkins,” he announces. Holds the phone in my direction, but offers no further instructions. I take my cell from him, my hands shaking. Hunger, probably. Or adrenaline. Adrenaline doesn’t have to mean fear. I glance once more at Samuel, who is seated on the floor against the opposite wall—his expression doesn’t change—and accept the call. “Hawkins?”

  I thought it might be someone else using Hawkins’s phone, but it’s him. “Jo? Thank God.” I feel a rush of relief at hearing Hawkins’s voice. I’m so glad someone who knows Samuel is on the other side of these walls. “What’s going on in there?”

  “We’re fine.” Fine. An insipid enough word even in casual conversation, and virtually meaningless here, but it seems less inflammatory than None of us are dead. Hawkins won’t be the only one listening.

  “Truth is there with you? He’s fine, too?”

  “Yes, Asa’s here,” I say, glancing at him. “Asa, I told you about Hawkins; say hi.” My own voice sounds strange to my ears, like that of a mother coaxing a child to speak to Grandma and Grandpa.

  I hold the phone up, and Asa leans toward it and says, “I’m here. I’m … fine.”

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Someone needs to feed Lockjaw.”

  “I fed her,” Hawkins says, and I can’t tell if he’s exasperated or amused by my thinking about the mule at a time like this. “Think Samuel would maybe let Truth go? That would really help. Calm these guys down out here, you know? You all have been in there awhile and they’re getting kind of antsy.” He’s kept his tone casual, but I hear the warning beneath the words.

  I keep the phone at my ear, look at Samuel. “They want you to let Asa go. You really should, Samuel. I’ll stay with you.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I know you don’t want to, but I’d really—”

  He shifts his hand forward on the rifle’s stock.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna work right now,” I tell Hawkins, as steadily as I can manage. “We need maybe a little more time.” God, I wish there were a script for this. All I want is to not make it worse.

  “Damn it, Samuel.” Hawkins sighs hard. “Look, the FBI has a guy here who wants to talk to Samuel. A negotiator. He ought to talk to him. They know how to handle these things.”

  I look at Samuel again. “They want you to talk to the FBI negotiator.”

  Again he shakes his head.

  “He doesn’t want to, Hawkins.”

  There’s a long silence on the line, and for a minute I think Hawkins is handing the phone to someone else, but then he speaks again, louder than before, and there’s a clarity to his voice I haven’t heard in a long time, an iron intensity I’d forgotten. “You tell Samuel I’m doing my best out here, Jo. And he’d better believe it’s a fight to get these folks to listen to me. He don’t got a lot of friends out here, okay? You tell him I know I wasn’t there when he needed me, once. But I’m here now. I’m trying real hard, and I’d sure appreciate it if he didn’t muck it up any more than he already has. So you tell him all that and then you ask him right now: Will he talk to me?”

  I cup a hand over the phone’s mic. “Hawkins says—”

  “I heard him.” But he doesn’t reach for the phone.

  “Please talk to him, Samuel.” He watches me. Says nothing. But doesn’t shake his head, either. “That first day … the day of the bomb—” I look quickly at Asa, but he doesn’t flinch. “The FBI man, Devin, he came to the house and asked me what was the one thing he should know about you. One thing. Do you know what I said?”

  Samuel’s gaze is steady.

  “I said you would do anything for me.” And nothing changes on his face, nothing shifts in his expression, but still he is listening. “Was I right, Samuel?” I hold the phone out to him. “Will you do this for me?”

  At first my brother doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak, doesn’t nod. And I start to think I have gotten it wrong, and if I have gotten it wrong then I have nothing else to say, no other appeals, no more gambits. Then he pushes himself off the floor. Extends his hand. The wind rises up again; the rain slaps the house. He takes a step toward me. The shutter, the damned broken shutter, flies open and flattens itself against the outside of the house with a crack like a gunshot. And then Samuel is back against the wall—I hardly saw him move—and he slides back to the floor and his hand is at his chest and there is blood, blood on the wall and blood on his shirt and blood spilling over his hand and through his fingers.

  So much blood. So fast.

  * * *

  I don’t scream. The air has stilled itself in my lungs, frozen in my windpipe, no movement, no inhale or exhale. There is light in the room now, and I see the window glass shattered on the bed and Asa ducking with a hand over his head and his eyes wide and his mouth moving—He’s saying something; why don’t I hear him?—and the colors all seem leached to gray except the red, the blood.

  Samuel looks at his red-slicked hand, blinks, grimaces. He ungrits his teeth, opens his mouth, starts to say something but it comes out a grunt—I don’t hear that, either, but I see the shape of the pain—and he sucks in air and it seems to remind me how to breathe, too, and when he opens his mouth again I hear the words. “Close the shutter.”

  Asa looks at him, only looks—what must he see in this blood?—and Samuel lunges for the rifle with his free hand, lifts it so its muzzle stares at Asa. “Do it.”

  “Don’t,” I say, but I don’t have the rifle, so Asa rises carefully, leans across the bed, moves in slow motion. I think of those stories Samuel has told me about other standoffs, about the wrong people being shot because federal law enforcement doesn’t care about citizens. But Asa reaches through the shattered window for the broken shutter with one hand, keeps his other open, raised—he must have learned it from television, must hope that what works in prime time will work here—and he draws it closed, latches it as well as it can be latched.

  The candle has blown out, and the brief wash of daylight has ruined my eyes for the dark.

  “I meant to fix that,” Samuel says, a pause between every other word. “God, it hurts worse than before, Jo.”

  He has something to compare it to. The old scar is halfway down his side, but Ar
cher’s bullet tore only flesh, and did so cleanly; this bullet has struck more solidly. I get out of my chair, onto the floor, pull myself to the wall beside my brother. I move his hand away from his chest—it isn’t quite his chest, I realize, but his shoulder, below his left collarbone—and I feel the slickness of blood, yes, but also the movement of it, the flow of it over my hands as his heart ushers it from his body.

  “Here.” Asa’s voice, a bundle of cloth pressed into my hand. His shirt. I press it hard to Samuel’s wound, hear the choke of a suppressed groan. My eyes have started to adjust, and I can make out shapes, lights and darks. See the stain spreading in the fabric beneath my hand. I try to remember what Samuel said when he found me in the closet afterward. “It’s okay,” I say, but that’s not quite right. “You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.” I know now the words were as much for him as me.

  The cell phone rings again, and I reach for it but Samuel snatches it first. Puts it to his ear, growls, “I’m not dead,” and hangs up. Throws the device into the hall; it skids on the hardwood and clatters down the stairs. I hear it ring again from somewhere in the living room, distance rendering the chiming melody weak and forlorn.

  “That’s too much blood,” Asa says hollowly. He would know.

  “We have to go, Samuel. We have to get you out of here.” He shakes his head, and I expected nothing less.

  “Not as bad as it looks,” he insists. Would be more convincing if he didn’t need a new breath for each word. If I didn’t feel the shirt go soft and sodden beneath my palm.

  “You need a doctor,” I say. “A doctor can fix you.”

  Samuel laughs, short and ugly. “Fix me for what, Jo?”

  He’s let his hand slip off the rifle. I reach for it; he grabs my wrist before I get close. “No,” he says. Firm, sharp. I would have thought his grip would be weak, but I can’t pull free. Get my hand back only when he lets me go.

  And still the blood.

  I glance at Asa; he’s looking at the burned-out candle, the blackened wick. His jaw is taut, his hands clasped so firmly the knuckles have gone white. “It’s him,” I say.

  Asa turns to me. I can see his eyes just well enough to know he already understands what I mean.

  “It’s him,” I say again. “It’s Samuel. He’s the one you heal.”

  “He’s not.” The words a whisper.

  Samuel watching us, bewildered.

  “He’s not,” Asa repeats, louder this time, a fire kindling beneath the words.

  “Please, Asa. Try. You can heal him. You’ve done it before; you told me.”

  Asa looks at me, his hands, Samuel. “I was wrong,” he says. “I was a kid. I remembered it wrong.”

  “Jo.” Samuel, looking at me like I’m the one on the edge of delirium. “The hell?”

  “Asa’s a healer,” I say, hearing the desperation in the words. I know how this must sound to Samuel, so I chase all traces of skepticism from my voice, channel the calm certainty I heard in Asa’s words the day he told me the story. “He lays on hands. He healed a boy once who was worse off than you.” I say it like I was there. Like I believe it.

  “It can’t be him,” Asa insists. Rises to his feet in an instant, looms above us both. A solidity in his voice I’ve only heard hints of before, an unyielding strength that’s new. Takes me a moment to realize it’s fury, so hot I don’t feel it at first. “If I couldn’t heal Em, he can’t expect me to heal him.” At first I think he means Samuel can’t expect Asa to heal him. But then he says it again—screams it, spittle flying with the words—He can’t expect me to heal him—and I hear the capital H, understand that this is anger not only at my brother. Asa’s hand lunges out, sweeps the useless lamp from the bedside table; it crashes to the floor, its porcelain pieces mixing with the shards of window glass. He paces through the mess and the slivers shatter under his feet. This sudden rage is without lull; Asa ruins whatever he can reach with strangely fluid movements, like a violent but rehearsed dance. He takes the candle in his hand, throws it to the floor. Pulls the drawer from the table and dashes it against the wall; wood splinters.

  Samuel’s hand closes around the rifle again.

  Asa scans the room for more; there’s little left. He spots the plastic palomino, lifts it from the table and hurls it toward the floor in one furious gesture. A leg breaks, and one ear snaps off, skitters across the hardwood.

  Samuel draws the rifle onto his lap, moves his finger to the trigger.

  As suddenly as he started, Asa stops. He doesn’t look at Samuel. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. There are no more angry words. No raging at God. No heaving chest. Nothing. He stands silently over the little yellow horse, head bowed, staring down at a broken toy his daughter never played with, never saw.

  And then he falls to his knees at my brother’s side. Raises his hands before him. No longer in fists but open, fingertips up, palms out. He meets Samuel’s eyes once, for only an instant, and closes his own.

  I take my hand from Samuel’s shoulder, reluctant to pull away the soaked shirt, to let blood spill unimpeded, but I expect Asa will need to reach the wound.

  But he ignores the blood, the bullet. He lays one hand on Samuel’s forehead, gently, like a mother comforting a feverish child, rests the other on his chest, over his heart. His lips move but he does not speak, not aloud. Samuel has closed his eyes; I watch to see that he still breathes.

  Time passes, but very little of it. Seconds only. Asa takes his hands away, the one that touched Samuel’s chest now stained red. He lets out a slow breath, rocks back on his heels, opens his eyes. There is weariness in the slump of his shoulders.

  It seems too quick. I lean closer to Samuel, squint in the dark. What do I expect? A miracle I’ve insisted over and over again I don’t believe in? A magical stanching of blood, a knitting of flesh? Foolishness. Desperation. But I watch, wait. Even offer a short, awkward silent prayer of my own, a frantic Please issued to a deity I doubt is there. But I see no change. The hole still there in my brother’s shoulder, his blood still seeping from it raw and bright. I press the wadded shirt back over the wound, angry with myself for asking Asa to do this, angry with him for failing. Angry with myself for wanting to believe it might work.

  Samuel’s eyes are still closed. He sighs heavily, such a release in the sound that I’m afraid it is his last breath, that he intends not to take another. He opens his eyes, looks not at me but at Asa. “Preacher,” he says hoarsely. Licks his lips. “Asa.”

  Asa stays in his crouch, watches him warily.

  “I’m sorry,” Samuel says. “For what I did.” Another long pause. He closes his eyes again, forces them open. Lets go of the rifle, reaches for the other man’s hand. “I’m sorry I killed your little girl.”

  * * *

  He lets Asa go. Actually I tell Asa to go and Samuel doesn’t stop him. I tell him to find the phone downstairs if he can, call Hawkins and tell him he’s coming out. He does, then brings the phone back upstairs. Offers to stay, and says it like he means it, but I say, no, go, and finally he does, the painting of Emily in his hand. I hear the door, and the shuffling and stamping of a lot of feet, and I brace for them to burst inside, charge upstairs, but instead they retreat and then it is quiet. Even the helicopter has gone.

  It is very dark still, so dark, but I’m close to my brother and I can see the damp of his hair, the sweat on his forehead, the color of his skin, which is not a color his skin should be. The blood on the floor and his shirt looks almost black in the dim light, in such quantities, and I consider what it would be like to paint blood that way, to paint not a brilliant shock of red but that saturated threat of black. I will never try it.

  “We should go, too.”

  Samuel doesn’t deny it. “Where will you go?”

  “Hawkins’s house,” I say, because it’s the answer he wants and because it’s true.

  “Where will I go?”

  “You know.” I try to remember what he always told me. Okay not to like what was
, not okay to pretend it wasn’t. “To prison somewhere. I’ll visit.”

  “They could kill me anyway.” He doesn’t have to pause between every word anymore, and I think that should be reassuring, but it isn’t, because there seems so little breath at all, each so shallow there’s little to separate it from not breathing. “Execute me.”

  “That won’t happen,” I tell him. “And if it does, I’ll come to be with you.”

  He grimaces, the flash of teeth. “I wouldn’t want that.”

  “Then I would do what you wanted. Please, Samuel. We will deal with what we need to deal with. I will. But please don’t make me watch you die here and now, in this house.” I tug at his arm, but he resists, doesn’t even let me move him a few inches. He looks at me, a hint of an apology in his expression, but I see there is something keeping him here, something appealing about it, the idea of dying here in this house, in the shadow of Eden. I feel it pulling at him. Our father in the mountain. Our mother downstairs. Now Samuel here, a delayed fulfillment of that horrific night so many years ago.

  “I didn’t mean to become this,” he says.

  “I know.”

  The phone has been silent a long time. Asa talked to them, explained Samuel and I needed more time. Or they’re planning to move in soon. Or the battery is dead. In any case it stays dark.

  “I wish I could go back,” he says. Doesn’t say to when. Doesn’t have to. Back to the cabin. To the moments before the bomb, the idea of the bomb. Before the militia meetings, the pamphlets and tracts. Before the tattoo. The hallway. Gethsemane.

  “You can go forward,” I tell him. “You can’t go back. People hurt us. You hurt people. Those things can’t be undone, and they can’t be escaped. But your life is not over.”