The memory of the tent revival came back blindingly strong—the fine high euphoria that had blossomed like a thorny wildflower behind his eyes. The two ecstasies warred inside him. Ecstasy of sin, ecstasy of faith. He felt his heart falter in his chest.
I know where she is, the boy had said. I can find her.
Was it possible? That she was still here, still in Haute Montagne, hidden somewhere—was that truly possible?
No, Creath thought. It’s a ruse, a trick, a lie. It cannot be. It must not be allowed.
He reached a second time for the bottle.
God forgive me, he thought. I want her back.
His hand was trembling.
Still smarting with humiliation, Greg Morrow nursed the spastic Model T down the south end of The Spur, out past the scabbed towers of the granaries to his daddy’s property, with its sprung doors like torn hip pockets and its elephant’s graveyard of rust-pocked farm machinery.
Inside, his old man was asleep. Dusk gathered complex shadows about the prostrate form on the sofa in the front room. A bottle of hooch, inevitably, lay on the plank floor next to him.
Greg experienced a wave of disgust. He harbored no illusions about the sort of man his father was. Shit-poor, he thought, shit-drunk—and shit-stupid.
He stomped into the kitchen. There were cans of charity food from the churches, a few, in the cupboard. Hoover, one of his father’s five aging and incontinent cats, sat smugly on the wooden counter-top. Greg put out his arm and swiped Hoover down to the peeling linoleum.
Shit-stupid, he thought, that was the sum of it. This town had reduced his old man to a kind of ruin, a living analogue of the junk machines rotting in the front yard, and there was no reason for it but a blind, complacent stupidity.
Greg had not done all that well in school and had left, in any case, when he was old enough to work. But he had discovered a simple truth that raised him above the level of his old man.
Small actions, he thought, have big consequences.
You pull strings. That was how it was done. He had watched the people who ran the town, and that was how they did it. Nothing big, nothing showy. A tug here, a tug there.
And more: Anyone could do it.
Today, for instance. Maybe he had endured that humiliation at the ice plant. But he had also got himself a job.
And all it took, he thought, was a word. The right word.
There were times he wished he could communicate this truth to his father. If they beat on you, he wanted to say, you don’t have to beat back, and you don’t have to take it (though his father had done both, copiously)—you just have to watch. And know. And learn the words to say, the strings to pull.
Revenge was available.
In his head Greg had kept a running tabulation of every humiliation he had suffered, every beating he had endured. His own and his old man’s. The memories were polished with handling.
He thought of Creath Burack. He thought of Travis Fisher and Nancy Wilcox.
Strings, he thought. Lots of strings there.
He opened a can of beans and chased Hoover, yowling, out the back door.
Night had begun to fall.
In the darkness under the railway trestle Travis dreamed.
His dreams were not coherent. Delirious with the cold, he was ravaged by visions. He dreamt of the Pale Woman, and recognized her from a lifetime of dreams: she was pure, virginal, white-robed; her face was his mother’s face except when it was Anna’s or, somehow, Nancy’s. He knew from looking at her that she was untouched, utterly female, desirable— and he was ashamed of his own arousal. He wanted to touch her, defile her. And in the dream she was always moving away from him, retreating, unapproachable; her purity, like some fundamental principle, was preserved.
He woke shivering in the darkness as the night freight passed by above him. Sparks showered down and the roaring made his ears ache dully. When the train was gone there was only the sound of the prairie wind rattling in the high beams of the trestle.
He sat up, frightened, the residue of the dream lingering in the dark air. If he closed his eyes he could see her, the Pale Woman, as clearly as ever. She was, he realized, the woman his mother had not been, the woman his mother had failed to be; she was the woman he had looked for in Nancy, too, and most particularly in Anna Blaise.
The woman he had not found.
And he thought, shivering in the darkness, stricken: What if there is no such woman? What if she doesn’t exist?
Chapter Thirteen
Nancy spent the next day at the switchman’s shack waiting for Travis to arrive, leaping up with a mixed gladness and terror whenever she heard a sound outside.
“He might come,” Anna admitted, her white stick-fingers laced in her lap. “If he does, he will have taken a step away from being—” She hesitated. “The thing he might have become.” “He’ll be here,” Nancy said. Anna was visible in the band of daylight falling through the open door. No one would mistake her for human now, Nancy thought. The Change had progressed too far. It was, Anna had explained, the natural sloughing-off of her humanity. But her need, the sickness of her separation from Bone, was also visible. The exaggerated orbit of her joints, the wildness of her eyes and the thinness of her lips, had only emphasized her decline. Nancy looked at her and thought of a child’s toy, one of those loose-jointed slat puppets connected by bits of string… but made of china or porcelain rather than wood, and with bright blue balls of glass for eyes.
“He might,” Anna said, “but he might not. You should be prepared for that.”
Her plain prairie accent, coming from that body, was like a bad joke. But no, Nancy thought, not really. The voice, for all its plainness, was high and lilted, a kind of song, like singing heard far off on a summer night, and it was that voice, the reassurance of it, that helped keep Nancy sane through all this. Physically Anna was frighteningly strange; she was alien, now unmistakably so; but that wonderful half-familiar voice contained a calming cadence, a necessary link to the known.
“He’ll come,” Nancy said, and: “What do you mean—a step away from being what!”
“He’s two people. You must have seen that. Part of him is the Travis who has been so often hurt and victimized, and that part of him is sympathetic. He wants to help. But there is this other Travis Fisher, the Travis Fisher who believes in a kind of female purity, who believes that women ought to be pristine, above nature, incorruptible—all the things he thought I was.”
“Or the things you chose to show him.”
“Maybe I deluded him. If so, it was not by choice. It’s in my nature to be a mirror. Like Creath, he looked at me and saw a hidden part of himself.”
It was at such times, Nancy thought, that Anna seemed most wholly alien. Her eyes grew distant, as if she were looking directly into Travis’s skull, peering somehow into the coral growths of his unconscious mind. Nancy had taught herself something about modern psychology; yes, she thought, there is some truth in all this. “He believed in you.”
“He thought I was that woman. But he wanted you to be that woman, too. The woman he once believed his mother was.”
His mother, Nancy thought, yes, my God. “He must feel—betrayed—”
“Betrayed and angry. And that’s the other part of Travis Fisher: this huge anger. A part of him hates us—hates both of us—for not being pure enough or good enough.”
“There were times,” Nancy said, nodding, “the way he’d look at me—”
“He suppresses the hate, of course. He believes in chivalry. And unlike Creath he is not by nature cruel. But the hate has had a good deal of trauma to feed on. It could displace his better instincts.”