Steal the North: A Novel (4 page)

I knock on his office. “Come in, Sister Bethany.” I open the door. “I recognized your knock.” He gets up from his desk. “Please, come in. Shut the door.” We usually leave it open, but this is a confidential meeting.

He seems as nervous as I do, offering me a seat. Matt has teased before that Brother Mathias seems smitten with me. But that’s ridiculous. He has a deep respect for Matt and me as a couple. He’s mentioned more than once that Matt and I remind him of Priscilla and Aquila, a childless couple in the Bible who befriended and aided the apostle Paul with his ministry. Matt and I are close to Mathias’s age. I’m thirty-three and Matt is thirty-four. Brother Mathias is twenty-nine and from the South. He grew up with lots of sisters and is friendly and gentlemanly. Different from men in the West. Not as reserved or stone-faced. “Or masculine,” Matt commented once. More than once.

I notice the lavender sprigs on his desk.

“From your garden,” he says. He means the garden I started for him. “Freshly cut.”

After he prays, I confess that over the course of sixteen years, I’ve had numerous miscarriages. I tell him I’m embarrassed to say how many, but I do. He looks pained and rubs his forehead. I tell him there isn’t a single example in the Bible of a barren woman of prayer who doesn’t finally become a mother. For the first time I confess to anyone that my longing for a baby consumes me. In part, because I
haven’t
lost faith that my Redeemer will hear my cries. There’s a box of tissues on his desk, but he offers me his hankie. I tell him I’m pregnant again. It’s been nearly two years. “It’s my last chance. A woman knows.”

He walks around his desk and sits in the chair next to me. “Bethany,” he practically whispers, “I knew you were burdened.”

“Who told you?” Maybe my husband already set up a special appointment with Brother Mathias. It doesn’t seem like Matt. But he is weary of my pining for a baby. He wants to adopt. He wants to buy land. He wants us to move on, maybe move away.

“‘For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail,’” Brother Mathias quotes. “‘The voice of a
daughter of Zion
.
’”

He doesn’t try to hide his tears, as Matt always does.

“I heard your voice,” he says. “It summoned me west.” His countenance is still troubled, but relief flickers in his eyes. “My father, a minister himself, didn’t understand why I was moving so far away from him. I told him I heard a voice.”

I am speechless and feel more enraptured than during his most passionate sermons.

He continues. “My father feared the voice I heard was just the restlessness of my own spirit. But it wasn’t.” He pauses, then says with the deep conviction and humility, “Some are called by thousands, others by just one. You are my one, Sister Bethany.”

“Sister Bethany,” Matt says when I wake him up with a kiss. He calls me that only when joking around in bed or when he feels disgruntled toward the church. He’s a field mechanic for Basin Irrigation. He had a long day yesterday with a cranky farmer and a thrice-broken pump, so I insisted he sleep in a bit. I kiss him again. “Rise and shine. You’re taking me on a picnic.”

“I am?”

“I made chicken, potato salad, and your favorite, apple cake.” I plan to tell him the good news that I’m pregnant.

“So, in other words,
you’re
taking me.” He sits up. “Can I bring a fishing pole?”

“If you bring one for me too.”

I used to go fishing with Matt more than I do now. In fact, we even took baby Emmy fishing a few times. Those were the best trips. I still ride along when he goes pheasant hunting. I embroider in the cab of his truck, waiting for him to return across the open fields with a bird or two in his bag. When he hunts deer or elk with his brother, they dress the animals at his brother’s because we don’t have room. They soak the meat there, and Matt stores our portion in one of his brother’s game freezers. He smokes his fish at his parents’ place. Sometimes I go over there with him. He keeps his boat at his parents’, in one of the large sheds, where he also stores his waders, float tubes, most of his poles, his old dirt bike and snowmobile, along with countless tools, old and new. Soon we’ll buy a larger place of our own with a shop and property. We’ve saved for years, just waiting for the first baby. We planned to have a big family by now.

“Children,” the book of Psalms says, “are an heritage of the Lord
.”

Brother Mathias, after taking time to pray and fast, agreed to perform a public faith healing for me. I’m usually a private person, but sometimes I think I’d do anything for a baby that didn’t involve disobeying or denying God. Brother Mathias tried to say all he can do is bless my womb because he doesn’t have the gift of healing that the Lord bestows on just a chosen few. I assured him I sensed it in him, and I do. Still, he said we should call it a laying on of hands. He’ll ask the congregation to participate. For years the church elders have opted for small, closed-door healings and anointings, so Mathias has to convince them, and I have to persuade Matt. I feel guilty having told another person I’m pregnant before telling my husband. He’ll surely be hurt by this, and the longer I wait, the worse.

“What’s up, Beth?” Matt asks before we make it halfway to our picnic destination, which is Steamboat Rock State Park. I let him pick the place before we left. He’s been unusually quiet on the drive thus far. I sit close to him in the cab of his truck. Steamboat Rock is a mammoth basalt rock with layers that look like steamboat decks. Whenever I come across the verse “As the shadow of a great rock
in a weary land,” I think about Steamboat Rock before Grand Coulee Dam, and how it used to tower over nothing but endless sage. I’ve seen photos. Now it
towers over the edge of Banks Lake, an enormous reservoir stocked with fish. The park has a green lawn, picnic and camping areas, a sandy beach, boat docks, a few shade trees, and rows of poplars to help block the wind. It’s a pretty place as long as I don’t think about the rattlesnakes in the sagebrush. I am trying to pretend I didn’t hear Matt’s question.

“I was excited,” he says, “getting the fishing poles ready. Then it dawned on me. The reason for your good mood lately.”

“We’ll talk at the lake. Let’s just enjoy the drive.”

“Damn it, Beth.” He pulls the truck off the road and shuts off the engine. I hate it when he cusses. “How long have you known?”

“I can’t discuss this here.”

“How long?” I don’t reply. He raises his voice. “How far along?”

“Please. I made rosemary chicken.”

He waits minutes, staring first at me, then out the window. His hands are more nicked up than usual from work yesterday. Finally he restarts his truck. I don’t scoot away from him, though he probably wishes I would. I wish he were a little excited. God has been merciful to us yet again. We drive in silence. Despite Matt’s anger and the knot in my throat, I rest my head on his shoulder. He tenses at first, a reaction I’m not used to, but then he relaxes.

Once we’re seated on a blanket under a shade tree—the fishing poles remain in the truck—I tell him how I know this is the last time I’ll conceive. When I tell him about the previous pregnancy and miscarriage, he flinches, and then again as I describe to him the two meetings with Brother Mathias and the proposed faith healing. He stands up, but we haven’t yet eaten. When he turns to wipe his eyes, guilt tugs my conscience. The wind lifts the corner of the blanket where he sat. Clearing his throat, he says, “I’m going for a walk.”

“I’ll come too.”

He shakes his head. “I’m going to climb the rock.”

It’s a four-mile hike, vertical in places, with loose sand and rocks and rattlesnakes. He scales rocky embankments while fishing, but this is different. When I try to protest, he reminds me that he and his brother climbed Steamboat Rock more than once as kids. “I used to be kind of adventurous,” he says. No, he isn’t hungry. I can wait here, he offers, or go home and call his brother to come pick him up. He hands me his truck keys.

“I’ll wait,” I say. “We need to talk more.”

“Go home, Beth.” He’s never told me to leave before.

Years ago he told me that
I
was his adventure.

Now I watch him walk to the trailhead without me. A younger couple in hiking clothes follows not far behind. I’ll wait right here for Matt. I should’ve packed some calendula oil in the picnic basket, for patience. I look around at the different families in the park: the children with plastic buckets and shovels digging in the sand near the water, probably wishing it was warm enough to swim, the moms filling plates with food, the dads barbecuing or tossing balls. Some of the older kids look bored, and one dad seems angry. But most families appear cheerful. It’s spring. Summer is coming. It was a long winter, with half a dozen storms from Canada. There are plenty of boats on the water, people fishing.

Suddenly I feel very alone.

But I’m not alone. There is a baby inside me. And Jesus is always near. And Matt, he would never leave me for good. As Kate did. I never thought she’d stay away, as all my babies have left me so far. But not this one. I sense something different.

Did Brother Mathias really hear my cry clear across the country? He said a voice can travel far in a dry place. Does the older woman looking at me now think she hears my cry? Is my grief that obvious? It’s become a barrier between the other women at church and me. This woman picnics with a large group, so why does she keep glancing fretfully in my direction? She looks the age Mother would be if she were still alive. I barely remember her. Kate could recall all kinds of things about Mother: her favorite soap, her thick and chewy homemade noodles, how she’d occasionally play western saloon songs on the piano when our father wasn’t home. Kate liked to claim Father ruined Mother. I’m not convinced. When they met, they both worked at a logging camp across the mountains. Her father was in charge. Every morning the men left in trucks to fell trees in remote reaches of forest. They returned each evening. Mother waitressed in the mess hall. Her family had saved money and planned to send her to secretarial school in Tacoma. After my parents ran off and got married, he moved her to eastern Washington, where he was from. Kate alleged that Mother was never the same: that Father, the dust, and the lack of trees almost dried up her spirit. But I think my sister, in her memories, imposed some of her own spunk onto Mother. The ladies at church remember her as quiet. The way this woman now stares unabashedly at me reminds me of the way my neighbor, the Indian lady named Teresa, much younger, watches me. She often has a trailer full of relatives from the reservation, mostly kids whom Matt talks to occasionally. I feel sleepy and lean back against the trunk of the tree to wait for my husband.

I wake up when someone touches my shoulder. “You shouldn’t skip meals, ma’am, in your condition.” It’s Matt. He’s forgiven me, I can tell. I sit up. He’s dusty, and his hair is tousled and his shirt untucked. He looks like a rowdy boy. I smile. We’ve both stayed slim despite having no little ones to chase after. The sun has dropped lower in the sky. The shadow of the rock has nearly reached us. His voice cracks as he says, “How about that potato salad?” It may just be that his throat is parched.

“I’m sorry, Matt.” He sits down, and I dish up our plates. “I should’ve told
you
first.”

He takes a long drink of water, then says, “You can tell me how
he
plans to heal you.”

I explain to him in more detail the ceremony Brother Mathias is proposing. “He thinks a virgin should lay her hands on my belly to purify it.”

“Is that a southern thing? Sounds a bit pagan. Or at least Catholic. Isn’t Bro Mathias a virgin?”

“Matthew Miller.” But I have to admit, I wondered the same thing.

He chuckles as he wolfs down the potato salad and chicken. “Who then?” he asks, trying to be a good sport. “A girl from church—the youth group?”

“Emmy,” I say. “That’s who first came to my mind.”

He stops chewing.

“Ridiculous, I know. We’d never find her.”

He swallows hard. “Well, we’ve never looked for her.”

Sometimes I seek so fervently in my dreams for Kate and Emmy that I wake up exhausted in the morning.

Their bus tickets were for California. My sister wouldn’t tell me which city. And whether they even made it to California or not, Matt and I never heard. For years I waited for the phone to ring. I still wait. And I still add their names to the prayer chain each week.

“Do you mean drive to California and search?” I ask.

“No. I mean drive downtown to the forbidden library.” I see a nasty scratch on his arm and get the chamomile oil and cotton balls from the basket, but he won’t let me tend to him. “There are computers at the library,” he explains, “that have the new World Wide Web.” He says he knows the church views the Web as satanic and a sure sign of the apocalypse, but lately at work he’s heard stories on the radio about relatives being reunited through the Web.

“Really, Matt?” He drinks more water. “Do you think?”

“It’s worth a shot. But keep in mind, Emmy’s almost seventeen. She may not be a virgin. You and I were married at her age.”

“Oh, we can worry about that after we find her and Kate.” My heart starts to race, as if I too had climbed that rock. “I just want to find them.” Could my time in the wilderness be almost over? “Will you go to the library with me on Monday? Will you meet me there on your lunch break?” I wonder if I should ask Brother Mathias first or if maybe we should go to an out-of-town library. “Will you?”

He nods. “But you have to promise me, Beth, that
this
is it. You look ill. My family thinks so.” His family thinks I’m crazy. They always have. They are good people, despite not attending church or even saying grace before meals. “You don’t realize,” he continues. “You’re pale. Your hands shake.” My hands do shake, but so what, and not always. Not when I play the piano or garden. “You’re still a beautiful woman. Don’t get me wrong. That’s why Bro Mathias—never mind.” He stares hard at me. “Do you promise, Beth?”

“I promise.” Oh, to see my sister and niece again.

“Understand that I’m getting that surgery, no matter.”