After James (3 page)

Irina had first appeared at the house on a hot July day. From the kitchen window Denise saw Shoad's brown pickup with its rust-red hood coming down the driveway and felt the pricks of fear in the soles of her feet. She was already calling Stefan's cell number when she saw through the windshield that it was a woman. She didn't finish the call. The woman stopped and stepped out of the truck. She was thin and foreign-looking, and right away Denise could see what had happened. She knows it came all at once because, later, when Irina told her the story of having come as a bride, Denise felt she already knew it, though until she'd seen the woman standing there by
the truck, looking toward the house, the thought of Shoad buying a foreign bride was too cruel for her to have imagined. There was no car in the driveway so Irina must have wondered whether anyone was home. Then she leaned back into the truck and took something from the seat—it was a cake, Denise could see—and she started toward the house.

Denise met her at the door. They introduced themselves. Irina presented the cake.

“I am the wife of Clayton.”

Denise didn't know what to say. The pause seemed to have trapped them both.

“I'm sorry. I didn't know he got married.” She'd forgotten even to take the cake, but she took it now, and invited Irina in, and felt that in doing so she was making a passage for ill fate to enter her home.

She learned that Irina had been living there for almost three weeks, that this was the first time she'd left Shoad's place, and she'd done so when he was out on his tractor, and that she couldn't stay long or he'd realize she was gone.

Denise nodded. The women understood each other.

“I remember about the truck, how it was. When I go back, I put it same way.”

Otherwise she would have to explain the truck, Denise thought, just as she herself would have to explain the cake. Stefan would question her, give her that look. He pretended Shoad was other than he was. She would transfer the cake to her own plate and wash the other and return it to Irina before she left.

“Do you know my husband, Clayton?”

Denise took in the woman's cheap wedding ring. It looked like it was made of a bent tin spoon handle and a bit of chipped quartz.

“We've known him. My husband, Stefan, and I know him, yes, but we don't see him much. We don't see him often.”

“Will you tell me about him?”

“About Stefan?”

“No. Will you tell me about Clayton.”

“Oh.” Denise said they didn't know him well. “I don't think he has many friends.”

Irina looked at her, deciding.

“My English is not so good, and there is no time. Tell me what you know, please.”

Irina went missing on a Tuesday in mid-October. They had arranged to meet at the house at ten in the morning, their usual time, when Stefan was at work and Shoad drove his truck to town for his weekly food and supplies run. If she followed the creek Irina could walk to the Dahls' place in about forty minutes, which left her forty-five minutes before she had to return. Over the summer and fall Denise and Irina spent their time together every Tuesday talking about gardening, their husbands, the wide world, Jesus Christ, how hope could be maintained in these, the end times.

Only once did Irina appear other than on a Tuesday morning, though Stefan believed she had not appeared, that Denise had imagined the appearance, fooled by the night itself and the wind rushing through it. On the Sunday before
she vanished, the Sunday after what would come to be their last Tuesday meeting, the last time Denise and Irina ever spoke to each other, Denise and Stefan were reading by the fireplace in their small living room when all at once the fire stood to its feet upon a sudden, powerful updraft, and Denise, who had been reading one of her favourite old British mystery books, found herself looking with horror at the flames that were growing, twisting, not unlike a burning woman turning at the waist, and then not a woman at all, but still something other than flames, and she heard the huge sucking of wind, as if the whole house were rising into a vortex. Then the house went dark and the wind was gone, and the fire sat down in its usual place.

Stefan went for the flashlights and candles—outages were common, they had their routines—but when he returned to the living room he found that Denise hadn't moved. She was supposed to be calling the power company. He asked what she was doing, and she said, “There's something wrong out there.” He went outside to collect firewood to heat the house through the night, and she followed and walked around the property in the dark, without a flashlight, and for no reason that she'd ever been able to explain. The storm, if that's what it had been, had passed as suddenly as it had arrived. The sky was full of stars. There was still a strong wind up in the trees but she knew it was being pulled behind the storm, and promised nothing in itself. She was halfway around the house when she noticed the serpent—that's what she called it, the word was there with the thing itself—and began walking toward it. When she got to within about forty
yards she stopped. The power line running eastward was down and thrashing in the field, shooting sparks, arcing, striking the ground with its mouth, and Denise had the urge to continue walking and to pick it up, to correct it somehow, an act that she knew should kill her, and so she saw it, too, as a serpent to take up in test of her faith, thinking this even though she didn't agree with such practices, such readings of every last word of Scripture as if the Lord Himself had no poetry in Him when every book of both testaments was filled with it.

For a long time she stood watching the snake in its wheeling as if tormented by the stars, she and the snake both, feeling the pull to go closer. The line popped its speech and she was in the throat of it when she saw Irina, or the shape of her, standing, as the line strobed this way and that. Though never fully illuminated, even as the sparks flew upon her, the figure was there in the field as surely as was Denise herself, bent in on itself somehow, as if, impossibly, one side of it, from shoulder to waist, was crouching or broken. It looked like the figure in the fireplace, the burning woman. Denise had this impression in seconds, for when the line showered light on Irina again, she seemed only half there, floating, and then upon the next showering was gone, and Denise knew that she had been addressed.

When he got the story out of her Stefan tried to convince her that the vision was a mistake in perception. Denise said that whatever it was, it had not been an ordinary moment and shouldn't be explained as such. She refused to talk about it further.

At four thirty that morning, Stefan asleep, she got out of bed with the intention of driving to Shoad's farm, but Stefan had hidden the car keys. She put a log on the fire and returned to the cold bedroom. The firelight coming through the doorway made shadow planes like great silent herds moving to near extinction. He spoke without opening his eyes. “If something has happened to your friend, I don't want you going, and if it hasn't there's no need.” When the flashing lights came into their room she was still awake. The power trucks had turned off the road. Men in hard hats were making their way across the field.

So you see he understood, did Stefan. It wasn't hard to attribute the understanding. Shoad had bought the farm eight years ago, and Stefan had visited him a few times. Denise had met him twice then, and though they didn't have much conversation she sensed there was something troubling about the way he kept to himself. There was something inside him he didn't want others to see. Then he went to Europe and came back many months later, much changed, changed to his true self. He looked different, spoke differently, the halt and lurch of it. It was as if he'd fallen into an accent. Stefan tried to explain it away but she put into evidence the day Shoad entered the feed store where he bought seeds and supplies, and behind the counter the old woman was watching a little TV she had propped on a stool. On the midday news a mass grave was being exhumed—the woman, who'd told her husband, who'd told the man at the butcher counter standing next to Denise, didn't say where the grave was—and Shoad stared fixed as if he'd never seen images on-screen before. Then he looked at
the woman and she was “horror-struck,” her word, because the set of Shoad's face was wrong, as if he were having some kind of vision or seizure. She would never forget that face, the woman had said, not for as long as she lived.

Stefan understood, yes, but his understanding wasn't the same as a certain kind of knowledge, the kind Denise gained that night and carried with her into the next days. The days themselves lost meaning. Tuesday was not Tuesday, the day Irina was expected, because Denise no longer expected her. She seemed in fact to be somehow outside of expectation, of a world of approaching events, as if resigned to them, even though in any other time in her life this feeling, a red certainty was how she described it, would have been fear, the most acute form of expectation. This was a terrible time, of heavy hours. Though he didn't say as much, Stefan wanted her to pretend the knowledge away. He himself had a limited ability to pretend, and he used it. But the knowledge Denise had been stricken with was bodily, and she knew it could not be expelled and that trying to do so would be not just folly but a turning away from her friend and from one of God's mysteries and so she held the red certainty, became its keeper. Nothing, not the doctor Stefan called in, not the medications, not the Scripture he read to her of Naomi's bitter sufferings relieved (Stefan not hearing how it only confirmed her as a chosen subject of the Lord), nothing could uncolour the knowledge.

He said it was blasphemy to call a spell a vision. He said it was not a communication but something stirred up by her nerves, and so she kept the next episode to herself. She was
hanging sheets in the laundry room when it came upon her, brief but intense, and she let it play out. A cold fall day. She is running scared behind a naked woman in the creek, the water splashing their legs, and someone unseen is chasing them. Then there's just her, or rather she has become the other woman, Irina and not, and everything surrounding her now has a strange name. She is running without clothes or English words. Then she's falling into a hole or animal den and she's hurt and can't stand. She reaches as she can and covers herself with leaves and dead branches and tries not to breathe. The steps come near and pass by. The spell ends and she is standing at the fuse box with a black towel draped over her head.

What was between Denise and Stefan now would always be between them, she knew. She had no choice but to deceive her husband. He stayed with her at the house and worked from home, and took her to town when he ran errands. Her escape wasn't planned but rather enacted as if it had already been scripted by Another, and so when she found herself waiting in the car for him to emerge from the post office, and getting out and going around to the driver's side and starting away, she knew not to look in the rearview mirror, knew he wouldn't have come out of the building yet, and then she was out of town and on the highway. And the certainty and the fear cleaved as one, and for the first time in her life she understood that the trials endured in Scripture by Jonah and Job were not a way of putting modern human fate in perspective, or a way of seeing our own small troubles in dramatic stories, but were real. For the first time in the life of her faith she felt truly descended from Eve and from Noah's
wife, and she drove with images flashing in her from her dreams of the previous night, which had fired into puzzling shapes and happenings so that all morning she felt more alone for not understanding them and having no Old Testament Daniel to interpret the dreams for her.

From the highway Denise saw the hard grey stem of smoke marking Shoad's hill and she covered the miles feeling directed, confirmed in her direction. She turned onto Shoad's property and started up the winding, wooded road, past the hand-drawn Private Do Not Enter sign, and the store-bought No Trespassing sign farther up, and came out at the clearing that held Shoad's house and outbuildings. She stopped the car between the house and the barn and sat looking at the clapboard building, weather-spackled green, with a few steps up to the front door, two large blind windows in front, and a simple, medium-pitched roof, not the peaked, terrible thing that was its truer form. The yard was orderly, dominated by the solid-looking barn. Shoad's truck, the one Irina had driven to the house, was nowhere. There were no cars or trucks at all. The only presence was the smoke coming from behind the barn.

She got out of the car and stood for a second in the silence with the door open and the keys in her hand, scenting something on the air she thought was time itself burning up, revealing a new character in the shadowless noon light. All moments in Scripture are eternal, the time of the resurrection and the time of the Lord's dying, and in the certainty of her righteousness she advanced on the house thinking that whatever would happen had already happened and the only
choice before her was no choice but to act according to the examples handed down through the turning ages that began upon the first disobedience and expulsion. She climbed the steps and looked through the window in the door into a mudroom leading to a kitchen. Covering the floor as far as she could see, from the door to the cupboards under the counter, were the horns of animals, cow horns and deer antlers strewn and tangled in a small apocalypse. Shoad wanted no one stepping inside. The door was either locked or in some way composed into a trap and so she stepped back down and moved along the length of the house and around to a padlocked door, up the other side, barely able to see into the windows and then finding in each only dull yellow blinds admitting nothing. The whole place was the shape and dimension of the sickness of despair.

Somewhere in crossing the yard she opened herself to guidance and knew again what she had tried not to know since the highway. She headed for the pillar of smoke that somehow pointed to the ground even as it pointed skyward. When she came around the barn she did so without fear or with fear secured by her conviction and watching her so that Shoad would be equally there and not there regardless of what or whom she found, and she felt every living thing for miles, every leaf on every tree felt distinctly without falling to senselessness or the lie of words like
green.
And so she approached the forge as the lone human but not the lone soul and saw it in all its terrible design. The two propane tanks, the petroleum pipes, and the huge brick oven. When she was little she'd asked her father who made the forge and he said
God made the forge in which He fashioned all things, but he himself made the forge beside the shed. He said you need a sheet of paper and five hundred pounds of brick. Shoad's forge was bigger, a stack chimney on top, so that it looked like a small house, and she pictured herself and her father in their house placed in sight of the town and the church, a scene she'd painted once, sitting with their ball-peened copper bowls and spoons. You light the paper, throw it in, he said. Turn the valve. In time you'll have three thousand degrees standing there staring at you like something pulled up from hell on a chain. He had made her scared of the furnace, scared for her own good, but now she knew the early lesson was only so she'd remember it in this moment as she approached the forge and thought of Daniel's friends who were thrown into the furnace on Nebuchadnezzar's order but kept their faith and were saved by the archangel Michael.