And One to Die On (37 page)

“You can’t want to buy something for a christening now,” Rose said. “Don’t you realize there’s a storm com­ing?”

“Storm,” the woman said stupidly. “Oh, yes. Yes. I was in the library, you see—”

“The library is open today?”

“It was. For a little while this morning. And I’d heard about the storm, of course, but I didn’t think, you know—”

“Hurricane Hugo knocked out a third of the South Carolina coast,” Rose said. “We had a storm down here a couple of years ago that took down half the houses on the beach.”

The woman’s skin mottled again. “That was the kind of thing they were saying at the library. The woman there, the one with the lace collars and the green glasses, she told me—”

“Naomi Brent.”

“Excuse me?”

“Naomi Brent,” Rose repeated. “That’s the name of the woman at the library who wears the lace collars and the green glasses. Naomi Brent. She tried out for Miss North Carolina the year she was eighteen, but she didn’t make it.”

“I wanted to buy a gift,” the woman said. “For a baptism. I wanted to buy one of those pictures, you know, with the mother and child—”

“A Madonna.”

“—and I thought you’d have one. A big picture in a frame. That you can hang on a wall.”

“Are you a Catholic?” Rose asked.

The woman looked startled. “Catholic? No. No, of course not. Why would you think that?”

“That’s who mostly wants Madonnas,” Rose said. “Catholics. It’s a kind of Catholic specialty.”

“Oh.”

“Regular Christians want pictures of Jesus. Either that or they’re grandmothers, and then they like angels, espe­cially for granddaughters. You shouldn’t buy a Madonna for a regular Christian.”

The woman’s face seemed to close off. “I want one of those pictures of a mother and child,” she said. “One that can hang on a wall. With a frame.”

Rose moved around from behind the counter. She didn’t have many Madonnas. There were more Catholics in North Carolina now than there had been when she was growing up, but there still weren’t a lot. She went over to a shelf along the west wall and took down what she had: four different pictures in four different frames, ranging in size from a three-by-five card to a cabinet door. The woman reached immediately for the one the size of the cabinet door. It was the most sentimental one Rose had, with a baby Jesus that looked like he had just eaten all the icing off a cake.

“How much is this one?” the woman asked.

“Fifty-four fifty.”

“Oh.” The woman stepped back. “Well.”

Rose put her hand on the next size down. “This one is thirty-four fifty,” she said. “The next smallest is twenty- nine ninety-five. The little one is fifteen dollars.”

The woman looked at the little one. It was a murky picture, hard to see anything in. She picked up the next size larger, the one that would cost twenty-nine ninety-five, and turned it over in her hands.

“I’ll take this one,” she said.

“There’ll be sales tax on it,” Rose said. “It’ll come to—”

“I know.” The woman was turning out the pockets of her shorts. The shorts seemed to be full of money, dollar bills, loose change. The woman went to the counter next to the cash register and laid the money out next to the book­marks and enameled pins. Rose went to the counter, too.

“Thirty sixty-eight,” she said.

The woman counted her money out again, and pushed it across the counter with the flat of her hand.

Five minutes later, Rose was standing at the shop’s front window, watching the heavyset woman walk back up Main Street. Kathi had come out from the back and was watching, too, her hands full of prayer books with thick gold crosses etched into their fake white leather covers.

“What do you think she really wants it for?” Kathi asked. “Those people don’t get their children baptized, do they?”

“I don’t think she has any children,” Rose said. “I don’t think any of them do, up at the camp.”

“Ginny Marsh says they worship a goddess up there. They sit around naked in a circle and call out to spirits. Ginny saw them.”

“Ginny is a stupid little fool and so are you if you believe them. Let’s get moving here. Can’t you hear the wind?”

Kathi pressed her face against the small pane of glass. “I wonder what she really wants with that picture, Rose. I wonder what she’s going to do with it. Doesn’t it make you feel creepy, just thinking of what she might have had to get it for?”

Rose pushed Kathi away from the window and started to close the interior shutters. There were exterior shutters, too. She would have to go around front and get those when she was done inside. She tried to think of the plain, heavy woman doing something evil with a picture of the baby Jesus. Instead she got a picture of Zhondra Meyer again, a picture so clear she could almost touch the curling tendrils of that thick dark hair.

There’s a storm coming, Rose told herself sternly. Then she started to hurry, to hurry and hurry, because if she didn’t hurry she would think, and if she thought she would go crazy.

She was already going crazy, and she thought it might be killing her.

S
TEPHEN HARROW SAW CAROL
Littleton come out of Rose MacNeill’s big Victorian house, carrying a flat brown pa­per bag, but the vision didn’t register. Stephen was stand­ing on the sidewalk in front of the Methodist Church, looking up at the bell tower and worrying. The wind was whistling and rattling in the trees. The few thin strands of sandy hair that were still left on his head were jerking vio­lently across his scalp. In spite of the fact that he was only thirty-two, Stephen felt very old and very stupid. This wasn’t the first time he had wished that he belonged to a denomination whose ministers wore backwards collars. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense to him, being any kind of minister at all. When it got very dark at night, he would try to remember how he had made his decision. He would see himself, all alone in the attic bedroom of his parents’ house in Greenville, Massachusetts. If there was a God, Stephen Harrow had never met Him. If Christ had really risen from the dead, Stephen didn’t think there would be so many different Christian denominations now or so many people who didn’t believe in Him. This was the kind of thing that was understood implicitly in Massachusetts. At the seminary where Stephen had trained, there wasn’t a single professor who would have argued for the literal di­vinity of Jesus. It was different down here. All of his parishioners in Bellerton believed that Jesus Christ was really and truly God incarnate. All of them believed that there would be a last day of judgment with the righteous taken bodily into Heaven along with their immortal souls. Half of them believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis. When Stephen preached a sermon that mentioned evolution, or used it as a metaphor for the spiritual life, he always got a dozen phone calls, complaining about his lack of commit­ment to the inerrant Word of God. God, these people seemed to think, was a ghostly CEO, dictating letters to His tireless secretaries, wearing out the girls in the typing pool, insisting on His words being accepted without correction. Stephen couldn’t remember when he had started to hate it here, but it was soon after he came. If it hadn’t been for his wife, he would have left months ago. By now he even hated the accents these people had, and the way they walked down the street. He wanted to go home.

The parsonage was a big white farmhouse-style house right next to the church itself. As Stephen stepped back to the curb to look at the bell tower’s roof, the parsonage’s front door opened and his wife walked out onto the porch. She was wearing one of those thin flowered dresses she had taken to as soon as they moved down here. If she had had a hat with flowers on it, she would have looked like one of the garden party ladies in
The Manchurian Candidate.
Her name was Lisa; and back when Stephen was in the semi­nary she used to wear short skirts with lace panels on the sides of them and thick black tights. She would come to the room he had rented and spend the weekend. She would drink Tequila Sunrises until her lips were red with cold. Stephen had had no way of knowing that this was not the person she really was.

Lisa turned to look up Main Street and then came across the porch and down the steps to the sidewalk. She came close enough to him to be heard but not close enough for him to reach out and touch her.

“Is that Carol Littleton I see with the brown paper bag?” she asked. “What did she want in this weather?”

“She wasn’t here.” Stephen went back to looking at the bell tower. “She was at Rose’s. I think she bought something.”

“Now?”

“Rose seems to be open, Lisa. If Rose is open, Carol Littleton can buy something.”

“You’d think they would all have left town by now, for God’s sake. Why do you think they stay? It can’t be comfortable for them here.”

“Maybe they have nowhere else to go.”

“Carol Littleton might not have anyplace to go to, but Zhondra Meyer does. She’s rich as Croesus. She’s only here to bother us. She wants to enlighten the poor be­nighted yokels.”

“Enlighten us about what?”

“Gay rights. Tolerance and diversity. All that kind of thing. You know: We’ve all been colonized by a white male culture. We have to throw off the chains that bind our imag­inations and remythologize our lives into paradigms of true equality. That kind of thing.”

“Really.”

Lisa made a face. “She talked to the library reading group last week. That was Maggie Kelleher’s idea, of course. God, but she’s been a strange woman since she came back from New York. I wonder what happened to her there.”

“Probably the same things that happened to you in New York,” Stephen said. “I met you in New York.”

Lisa gave him a sideways, look. “You may have met me in New York, but I didn’t change in New York. Maggie
changed
in New York. She changed a lot. I remember her from when she got accepted at that silly college of hers. She was all ruffles and charm bracelets. She was the kind of girl people’s mothers always called ‘sweet.’”

“You must have been in the cradle.”

“I was eight.”

Eight, Stephen thought. That must make Maggie—what? Forty? He squinted in the direction of the bell tower roof. This was the kind of thing he ought to talk to Lisa about. She was the one who was born here. She was the one who ought to care. The Methodist Church was the oldest building in Bellerton. It was the only one still standing that had existed at the time of the American Revolution. Everything else had been destroyed one way or another: burned down in skirmishes during the Civil War; gone to rot; bulldozed for the newer and shinier and brighter and smaller mock-Greek revival places everybody here pre­ferred to live in. The truth about Lisa was that she would bulldoze it all and put up split-levels if anybody ever gave her a chance. Lisa had no sentimentality at all and no feel­ing for history.

“You ought to come inside,” she said now. “We’ve got to pack a few things up and go to the high school. They say that storm is going to come right through the middle of town.”

“I’m worried about the church,” Stephen said. “About the tower. It’s such an old building.”

“You can’t take the church to the high school, Ste­phen. It won’t fit into the car.”

“That isn’t what I’m trying to say.”

“You can’t stay here, either.” Lisa tapped her foot against the pavement, impatient. “This is a major hurricane we’re talking about. It’s already done I don’t know how much damage. If you get in the way of it, it will blow you right to China.”

“I was thinking that maybe we could put something on the bell tower roof. Plywood boards. Something to pro­tect it.”

“If you were going to do something like that, you would have had to start days ago. It’s too late now, Ste­phen. Let’s get our things and go.”

“I will go. In a minute. I just want to stay here and—think for a while.”

“Think,” Lisa repeated. She turned on her heel and started to walk away from him, back across the front lawn, back to the porch. She didn’t turn around and tell him to be careful. She didn’t even tell him to hurry up again. She just went.

Once, Stephen thought, he spent all his time imagin­ing what Lisa was like without her clothes on. He sat across from her in restaurants and thought of the way her small breasts swelled as they hung, light and active, under the curve of her shoulders. He sat next to her on buses and thought of the way her thighs flowed into her hips, smooth and restless and very clean. Now he imagined her locked in closets and shut away in cardboard boxes, tied up and gagged, silent, sexless, free of him.

Stephen turned to go back into the house himself, but as he did he saw Ginny Marsh coming down the sidewalk at him, bouncing along with Tiffany in her Snugli sling. Ginny was not one of Stephen’s parishioners—like half of everybody else, she went to one of those big fundamentalist churches on the outskirts of town—but he knew her to talk to from seeing her around town. He knew the baby, too, because she was a good baby to play with for a man who felt uncomfortable around infants. He was worried that they were both going to be as blown away as Lisa said every­body would be. He had never been in a hurricane before, but he could feel the badness of it in the wind. The air around him was so full of water, he found it hard to breathe.

“You should be home,” he said, flagging Ginny down. “Or at the high school. There’s going to be a storm.”

Ginny stopped and adjusted Tiffany on her front. “Hello, Mr. Harrow. We’ll be all right. We’re headed up to the camp.”

“The camp?”

“That’s got to be the highest place in Bellerton,” Ginny said. “I don’t think they’re going to get any water at all up there. Unless the Lord is sending a flood.”

“I think the Lord promised Noah not to do that again. I think it’s supposed to be the fire next time.”

The quote meant nothing to Ginny. “Our pastor says God can do anything He wants to do, and that makes sense to me. Doesn’t it make sense to you?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not worried about drowning up there, Mr. Har­row. I’m worried about those women. And you would be, too, if you realized.”

“Maybe they don’t seem so strange to me, Ginny. Since I’m from the north myself.”