“Her body,” Leah said and the boys listened and the world listened. “Her body was buried here. This is where her father, heartbroken, buried her remains. I didn’t tell you, but she shot herself, taking her father’s gun from his desk while he was at work. She held it up to her eye and pulled the trigger. There was nothing left of her face. Her eyes and brains and nose were everywhere. Her father came home and found her and wept for his daughter. He felt so guilty, like he’d pulled the trigger. He carried her down here to the yard and buried her and built this around her.” A loose brick moved at her touch and the boys crowded around. Clouds of starlings passed by above. The boys pulled up the brick. With their fingertips, prying.
The sound of the metal gate behind them slamming the brick wall sent shudders through them and high squeals and standing there was Jacob in his powder-blue overalls just like a baby would wear. “I told you to stay home,” she said.
“You said we’d play.” The boys began to laugh. Something escaped from the garden. One boy noticed a nest in a pear tree, reached up in the sudden crowing of changing voices and tossed it down, dashing a blue egg to the interlocked bricks. Blue against yellow-green moss and lichen. She screamed at Jacob and he keened and the boys began to wander away, tongues aflame with glee. The little baby in his saddle oxfords. She began to follow but Jacob reached for her arm and she pushed him down, only registering for a moment the tide of pleasure that this brought and he fell rear first into the slosh and muck of the reflecting pool. Rotten water. The boys erupted and Jacob was silent, still, staring at Leah. “How could you do that to your own brother,” they said. “You’re a fucking bitch.” They began to cackle. They touched their own crotches and called her a slut and were gone.
“Please don’t tell mother what I did. I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell.” Jacob said nothing. He walked home wet and cold.
The next day, their mother sang. “Rise and shine and give God the glory.” Leah and Jacob rose and wandered downstairs, wobbling on still sleeping legs like the risen dead, hungry. They ate. Crispy bacon and blackened biscuits. They drank milk from colorful plastic cups. They’d all forgotten the spanking for the ruined clothes, still wet with reflecting pool water. “Get dressed for church. Come on now.”
Clothes out for them the night before. A dress with a square collar and small slacks and a clip-on tie. They wriggled in like worms wriggling into a corpse.
“I don’t want to go,” Jacob said. “Please.” He pouted and stormed down the steps and out the front door. She just sat downstairs in the chair in the living room, watching him pout down the front walk through the window, like he did every Sunday, happy to see him gone.
“Okay, let’s go. Where’s your brother?” She pointed at the door. Her mother opened it and began yelling for her son. “Jacob! Goddamn.” She looked at her watch. “Goddamn.” Her father came down the steps, pulling tie tight, and looked at the women of his house and said Mrs. Shepherd had to teach Sunday school and serve communion and could not be late. She asked her husband to find where Jacob was hiding and meet them at church and, prodding Leah along, left. Leah kept expecting to see him sitting by his favorite tree, on the curb with his round face in his hands, but they didn’t see him and Mrs. Shepherd continued to curse to herself. Leah almost said something to her mother, told her something, but didn’t. They walked on.
In her Sunday school class, Leah learned about the Tower of Babel. The children sat around the room in hard wood chairs and listened to the Sunday school teacher talk, and Leah slipped into a reverie raveled out and it was only when everyone began to get up and walk out that she returned to the room, looked around confused. She looked into the room where the younger children sat with the pictures of Joseph they colored, his bright coat in waxy rainbow scribble, but he wasn’t in there. In the sanctuary, she sat next to her mother who kept looking around for Mr. Shepherd, but he didn’t come. The service started and they sang hymns and listened to verses and her mother got up and walked to the front to take the trays of bread and grape juice and circulate them through the congregation and then she returned to her seat and the minister gave a short sermon on something, but Leah had faded away again, thinking of something else, her eyes open but seeing only what her mind fluttered in front of her and then the organ droned and everyone stood and walked out after the minister, and Leah and her mother walked home and Mr. Shepherd was standing outside and as they walked up he said, “Don’t worry—”
That night, they waited for someone to call. “Hello?” And then a pause. Her father’s face and her mother’s face and a fly between the blinds and the window pane. It rasped and flounced. She turned the rod and the blinds closed and its soft battering was lost in the sound of her mother.
When she was grown, Leah could not remember what happened next. She sometimes thought that maybe she finished changing out of her church clothes and went into her bedroom or she went into the kitchen and found her mother sitting there or she came into her room, looking down at her in her underwear and began to say something — maybe that happened later. There’d been policemen in the house all evening and men in coats and ties. The telephone rang and rang. She didn’t remember hearing her mother cry, but she could see her mother crying. And the telephone again and again. At some point, her father was home and put her to bed — where had he been? Walking. Looking. All night long. It was Sunday and her brother had not wanted to go to church. When her father found her, she was asleep in the yard.
Sometimes as she listened to the women at her work she could feel herself fill with an incredible feeling of disgust and irritation. The children wallowed on the floor or they threw the donated toys and the mothers sat mum or bellowed at the small things and just as the feeling rose, a sudden black point of pity and affection rose up inside, along with a sliver of shame. And then she smiled, looking the women in the eye, held out her hands, held out her arms, hugged them, told them she would see what she could do. Where they could be placed. Where might be able to help with a job and the women smiled at her and thanked her and the children wallowed and quaked with young voices, but that is what children do. The waiting room walls adorned with the crayon confusion of children’s drawings. The telephone on her desk rang, but she could not get to it in time.
At first they didn’t say anything, but when it was dark and her father put her in the bed, under the sheets that needed a change, she able to feel the grit on her feet, she asked him where her brother was. “We don’t know.” And then, “Don’t worry.” That was the last they talked about it.
Leah fell asleep outside the night after her brother disappeared, outside to get away from the sounds inside, and she saw two little girls in brilliant calico dresses walk from the garage and climb up the maple tree. They didn’t come down, not that she saw. The night was silent. The stars were silent. The grass was silent. The world was empty.
FOUR
CROW STATION, KENTUCKY: A GIRL AT THE window watching a shift in the shadows, listening to the sound of the night, the glittering dark above her bed, her father’s hands having placed the sky there, cracked plaster rivers among constellations of dead boys and girls, but by morning the vault of the heavens is nothing but the white ceiling, though the corners do flutter with dusty webs her parents have not noticed and her brother’s bed. A boy crouched in his room, praying to the sound of voices rising from the register softly wishing that the creature with the long claws would come and take them all away. A teacher waiting in the parking lot of the school for his student, the smell of her body still on his sweater, a duffle bag to hide the surprise, the parking lot wet from recent rain, the blacktop’s contours filled with miniature lakes, the spreading rainbow of oil on the face of the water, the teacher’s hands damp, the smell still rising to his nose, but he’s cried all he can and all that is left is the Lord’s Work. An empty blue car on the side of the road. The party, the men with drinks, sloshing and spilling, calling names, the smell of burning somewhere, names holler listen rolling across the ground all the girls they think falling into themselves who wouldn’t want this falling into themselves. The department store, closed, the windows reflecting the passing people, the display racks standing still but empty, though somewhere in the endless dark of now unused inner offices, boxes of receipts, decades of transactions, await another life. A man waiting in his office resisting the urge to call the hospital for the seventh time in an hour to check on her condition, when the sound of steps comes down the hall and he sets the receiver on its rest and pretends to work. A bonfire on a distant hill, orange light in the black night, hanging insubstantial in the void. A bonfire in a distant field, the gleaming grills of pickup trucks in a semi-circle, windows open so all could hear the sick system. Garth Brooks and Jodeci. En Vogue and Anthrax. Judas Priest and Onyx. Snow and Alan Jackson. A bonfire dying down to a charred blot in the starless night, pale bodies passed out in the beds of the pickup trucks, young men and young women, and in the total blank, a voice. The woman’s shaved head in the sun, feeling the sun, the warm rays, heavy rain as the boat bobbed, she removed her hat and her husband smiled at her and removing their life vests, they dove into the cool brown water of the man-made lake and swam around to the far side of the boat, in the shade of the bending trees in the inlet and found one another. A woman walking in the woods, listening for crying that she thought she heard. The muddy shore, brown and green, the brown water cooling in the shade. The buzz and whir of the trees. The clicking trees, the clacking trees. The silence of crumbling branches and leaves. The jawing of the woods, without beginning and without end and someone walking. A bend in the street and the sun-baked sidewalk with confetti of shadow, a leopard, and just at the bend a person walking away, disappearing around the curve, behind a tree and the street is empty. A secret post office box, a secret credit card, an evening hoping the cell phone does not ring. An evening worrying that the payment on the television set might not make it in time. That the payment on the SUV might not make it in time. A car driving past the house for the fourth time in an hour. A woman killing a colony of ants with a pot of boiling water and all the years’ leaves in dunes in the corner of the porch. The sun playing on the surface of the broken glass of the smashed bottle of beer thrown onto the patio in retaliation for a remark about a sister. The sun speaking along the edge of the glass and along the edge of the lite beer. Swill gilded with evening rays. The backyard garden, up mossy steps, in a stroke of sunlight, a distant parental voice, directionless, powerless to the draw of this moment, the distant dogs with the bloody stumps of their excised tails wailing to the distant turn of the neighborhood. A latex werewolf mask, a tent, the night and a knife, the brothers having fought, run and yelled, hollered and beaten walls, crying over insignificance, and one darting in the pale light of the security lamp in the backyard while the other whispered to his friends. The feeling of dirt and dust against dry skin and the rubbing of raw wood against the flesh of calves after having seen them on one another, calling out names and foulness, the pages of the illustrated Bible torn and wet, the tongue of summer heavy on everything. A drive home. A kiss. Divining a body in the dark. Fingers unhooking. Prodding terse and enveloping. Listening under a streetlight. On a swing set in the dark behind the church. Watching the outline of black trees as the warm breath of summer slips down thighs. A pasture cut by a stream, and on the other side, the green rise of a mound, a burial place perhaps and beyond even that, a marsh, webbed with water, fallen logs for lolling arms and the two outstretched, looking up through green light into the dark canopy of black leaves. Two shapes moving through the yard at night. Two shapes in the shade behind the empty department store. Two bodies roving one another. A howl loose and ranging. A howl lifted to the heavens. A howl harrowing the cul de sacs and courts. A window, half open, the voice singing the passing cars’ songs. Something left on the doorstep. A bed with sheet thrown back. The gutter on a street. The glass in the gutter on a street. The blades of grass rising through the garbage in the gutter on a street. Aglitter with God’s own last light. A voice saying, “She’s not doing well.” A voice saying, “Were you going?” Blood running into an eye and children swarming the basketball court screaming for the ball. Hook shots awry. The ivy-laced fence around the cemetery. The family no longer gathered, the woman alone straightening the silk flowers she left, looking at her name on the other half of the marker. The realtor walking through the empty house, noting to the young couple that there is no legal requirement to disclose if the previous occupant died of AIDS or if the house is haunted, and though she prepared the real estate purchase contract, the couple were unwilling to sign and she went home angry, though she could not show it to the young couple, and sat in her living room, checking the message on her cell phone and calmed herself by thinking about her mission trip to Africa. A hill and the two sitting, turning to leaves as the breeze speaks their names. A young man’s car in pieces across the highway and the state trooper dreading the call to the fiancée. A passing train, never ending. A man who brings his boys to watch it rattle along, listening to old soul songs as the boys pick things up off the ground. A boy talking to a girl, her hands signing, his eyes wishing he could read. The young man’s jeans riding low over bony hips, reaching across to where the older man sat, face flushed and a passing train rattled the windows. A dentist dragging a millstone through the town, window rolled down, pointing his finger at God like a pistol, laughing too hard to speak the warning to the world in his heart. A minister walking into a field. A father farting for his son’s amusement. The three girls waiting by the window, hoping their father does not come home. Sprawled in a bathtub, gray water cooling, too disinterested to even touch himself, a man remembers with wonder the first time he rubbed himself raw on the bathroom floor of his grandmother’s house while she cooked meatloaf and green beans and smoked unfiltered cigarettes, the kitchen windows open to let an autumn breeze in. Weeds growing up high. Grass growing faster than the property manager can handle and the tenant with the dog is standing on the balcony again screaming at the children below and the dog bays and howls and the children laugh and continue to throw gravel, though the rocks arc shy of their target. A glass case with trusses and braces. Metal rods to straighten the back. Bedpans and bottles with tubing. Walls of bottles. Elixirs, tinctures, pills, tablets, philters. A rack with sun-bleached comics. The Gods all dead. A gash across Hercules’ eye. Pages grow more brittle each year. A curving counter with a jar for beef sticks and loafing men spilled over the edge, gazing into the surface of their coffee or into the amber remnants of their syrup. Spitting griddle. Chili dogs, chuck wagons, brown burgers spitting on metal plate. A dusty window lets in gray light. Horehound candy, Beech-Nut gum. A long cluttered counter of tin cars in faded boxes waiting f