Liza Burack permitted herself a brief smile that lingered throughout the reading of the minutes and the tabling of the unfinished business.
The church meeting hall was crowded, though not uncommonly so for Speech Day. Liza had been given a chair on the platform behind the podium and she was able to see the faces of the members. There were twenty-five or thirty women altogether… not a startling number; significant, she thought, only when you assigned them names. Haute Montagne was (she had heard Creath use the phrase) a Good Plain Town, and it was ruled by Good Plain People. The Baptist Church was a Good Plain Church, too, and friendly with the Methodists and the Episcopalians, though it was generally acknowledged that the Baptists were a little—well, Plainer.
It was a small elite of businessmen who controlled the town, a city council that constituted also, in large part, the executive committee of the Rotarians,- there was Jacob Bingham who owned the hardware store, Bob Clawson the high-school principal, Tim Norbloom of the police department, a handful of lawyers. It had been a clique all but closed to Liza and to Creath, especially since the ice business had fallen on hard times. And Creath’s surliness had presented a problem. But now Creath was back on track (though strangely subdued); she envisioned him pursuing a deaconship, which would better his connections.
And there were the Baptist Women. That significant congregation of wives: Phil McDonnel’s wife, Bob Clawson’s wife, Tim Norbloom’s wife: every important wife, in fact, who had not been sequestered by the Methodists or the Episcopalians, all here today, all staring up at the podium. It would be difficult, Liza thought, but here was an important nexus of power; if she and Creath were to climb back to respectability they would have to begin here.
Faye Wilcox did enter at last, toward the end of the business meeting; head bowed, she unfolded a chair at the back. Helena Baxter offered to give over the podium but Faye only shook her head no. Poor Faye. She had neglected to wear a belt, Liza observed; her dress depended from her immense bosom like a sultan’s tent.
The business meeting ended. Helena Baxter, somewhat daunted—she was a Faye Wilcox partisan—announced the candidates’ speeches. The assembly applauded. Faye Wilcox, as incumbent, was scheduled to speak first.
She trudged to the podium with a visible weariness, and there were whispers of dismay. Liza herself felt a surge of sympathy… dear Lord, this was how she must have looked, those long years when her husband’s indiscretions had sapped so much of her strength and attention. Depleted. Well, she thought. Sympathy is all right. But it was only the natural order of things that was being restored. Faye, after all, was the usurper. Here was her comeuppance.
Her speech was brief and mechanical. She read it from typed pages of Hammermill Bond: “Woman, Helpmate in Troubled Times.” It called for a return to traditional virtues. The speech was a morass of pieties without much life or enthusiasm in it, Liza thought, and when Faye climbed down from the platform, the applause was scattered and contained.
Helena Baxter, frowning now, introduced Liza.
Liza took up the recipe cards on which she had written her speech cues and assumed the podium.
There was the sound of rain washing down the high mullioned windows, the musty smell of leather-bound hymnals stored in the next room. How long since she had done this! The thought of it made her a little afraid. She had chosen a stark theme: “Haute Montagne Must Awaken from Its Long Sleep.”
She cleared her throat.
“Difficult times,” she said, “are upon us.”
She let the words simmer a moment in the dusty air of the church.
“There is no doubt about it. Every woman in Haute Montagne must surely be aware of it. A glance at the headlines is enough. Hard times. Murders. Rebellion. Immorality of an indescribable nature. And we are not safe from it. We must not think we are. But the question is: What can we, as women, do?”
She was surprised at how easy it was. She ignored the cards. The words came fluently. All this had been pent up inside her, stifled in a misplaced propriety: she had lived too long in her glass house. Now she alluded freely to the past: “I have seen the effects of loose morality, as many of you know, on my own sister’s child, blood of my blood,” acknowledging and dismissing it (Travis is gone away); “and I have seen, too, the power of spiritual revival,” thinking of Creath at the altar, Creath born again. And she alluded similarly—delicately—to Nancy Wilcox: “Our own sons, our own daughters,” the emphasis hardly more than a caress, “are not immune to the spirit of the times,” and it was enough, yes; heads nodded; Faye sat pale and unblinking at the back of the hall.
How simple it all was, really.
She finished with her last and boldest proposaclass="underline" that the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne should petition the city council to impose a twilight curfew “for the protection of our young people.” It went over well. She saw Mary Lee Baxter and Beth McDonnel conferring, nodding. Faye Wilcox, she saw, had further embarrassed herself by skulking out of the hall.
She sat down once more at the rear of the podium, and the applause, astonishingly, went on and on. Liza acknowledged it with a smile.
Helena Baxter approached her after the meeting. “I must say, Liza, it was a very dynamic speech. I think everyone was impressed.”
“Thank you.”
“I want you to know, you have my support when it comes down to voting.”
“Really? But I thought—you’ve been so close to Faye—”
“The times are changing, though, aren’t they? You said as much yourself. Hard measures for hard times. I’ve never had such a sense that we could— well, influence things.”
Possibly so, Liza thought. Possibly so. And a strange and disturbing thought formed in her mind.
They believe me because they are afraid.
Their fear had become Liza’s ally.
Anna was very sick.
Nancy had doubled back along the railway tracks to make sure she was not being followed. The rain dripped through the box elders and enshrouded her as she trudged across the muddy fields to the switchman’s shack. How pathetic and inadequate it looked, she thought, huddled against itself in the rain like a cold wet animal.
The packed earth floor inside was dark and wet. The air was thick with the odor of mildew and rotting wood. Anna lay curled on a blanket.
Her clothes were wrinkled and old. Her hair was tangled, though Nancy sometimes tried to comb it out. She was asleep, Nancy saw, shuddering in her sleep like a dog.
Nancy touched her gently and a feeling of the woman’s strangeness, faint but distinct, flowed up her arm. Anna’s eyes opened and the irises were a profound blue, the color of the sky reflected in a clear, still pond.
“I brought food,” Nancy said, hoarse with the wetness in the air. The rain had found its way into the loaf of bakery bread, and she laid that out on a handkerchief. There were canned goods, too, and she had left the porcelain bowl outside to fill with rainwater.
“Thank you,” Anna said. She sat up. Her body was emaciated,- she was pale and cold. She looked at Nancy. “You’ve been crying.”
“No. … A little, maybe.”
“It’s hard for you.”
The commiseration was unnecessary; Nancy shrugged it off. “Anna? Please—how much longer?”
She closed her eyes a moment. Looking inward, Nancy thought.
“A week,” she said. “Two weeks. I cannot guarantee it.”
Nancy sighed.
“You need help,” Anna said.
“Yes.” She gazed at the not-human woman. “I need Travis.”