Rachel was surprised that she could still be shocked after the exhaustive sexual litany that the preceding pages had contained, but shocked she was. Though she believed it preposterous to think that this Galilee was the same man she'd known, her mind's eye conjured him whenever the name appeared on the page. Then it was her Galilee, in all his beauty, she saw holding Nickelberry in his arms; kissing him, seducing him, making a wife of him.
She should have anticipated what would come next, but she didn't. While she was still struggling with her repugnance at what Holt had described, he began a confession much closer to his heart, and no doubt the hardest thing he had written in the book.
I went to Galilee last night, he wrote, as Nickelberry had. I don't know why I went particularly; I felt no desire to be with him. At least not the same kind of desire that I feel when I go with a woman. Nor did he ask me for my company; though once I was with him he confessed that he'd wanted my arms about him, and my lips on his. I should not be ashamed, he said, to take pleasure this way. It was
a wasted hope in most men; only the bravest rose to the challenge.
I told him I did not feel brave. I was afraid of the act before us, I said; afraid of its consequences for my soul; and most of all, afraid of him.
He didn't laugh off this confession. Instead he wrapped me up tenderly, as though he held something more precious than flesh and bone. He told me to listen to him, and would tell me a story to calm my fears-
A story? What was this? Another Galilee who told stories?
-I felt like a child there in his embrace, and part of me wanted to be free of it. But his presence was so calming to my troubled spirit, that this child in me, which had not spoken in so many years, said: lie still. I want to hear the story. And I lay still, obedient to this child, and presently all the horrors I had seen, every one, all the death, all the pain, became a kind of dream I'd had from which I was waking into this embrace.
The story he told began like a nursery tale, but by degrees it grew stranger, calling forth all manner of feelings in me. It was a tale of two princes who lived, he said, in a country far from here, where the rich were kind-
-And the poor had God. Rachel knew that country. The child bride Jerusha had lived there. It was Galilee's invented land.
She sat absolutely still, the whine of her blood loud in her ears, while her eyes passed stupidly over the line, as if by study they might change it.
It was a tale of two princes…
But no; the words remained the same, however many times she read them. She could not avoid the truth, though it was hard-oh more than hard; nearly impossible-to contemplate. But she had no choice, besides willful self deception. The sum of evidence was now too persuasive.
This Galilee, here on the page before her-this man who'd lived a hundred and forty years ago, and more; this man was the same Galilee she loved. Not his father or his grandfather: him. The same flesh and blood and bone; the same spirit in that flesh and blood and bone; the same soul.
She accepted it, though it made chaos of all she'd understood about the world. She wouldn't squirm around any longer, hoping that something easier to believe was true if she could only find it. She was only tormenting herself if she did that; putting off the moment when she accepted the facts and tried to make sense of them.
It wasn't as though he'd lied to her. Quite the reverse, in fact. He'd intimated several times that he was not quite the same order of being as she was. He'd talked of being a man without grandparents, for instance. But she hadn't wanted to know. She'd been too deeply infatuated with him to want to countenance anything that might spoil the romance.
So much for denial. It was time to accept the truth, in all its strangeness. Two human lifetimes ago he'd been up to the same seductive tricks he'd worked on her, with Captain Holt as the object of his affections. The image of the two men entwined was lodged in her mind's eye: Holt like a child in his lover's arms, lulled into a state of passivity by the story Galilee was telling.
In a country far from here, there lived two princes…
She didn't care what happened next, neither to the princes nor to the men they represented. Her hunger for the journal had suddenly passed; her eyes were no longer drawn to the page. It had told her all that she needed to know. More, in fact.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand and got up from the table, flipping the journal closed. She felt light-headed and hot, as though she was catching the flu. She went through to the kitchen, got herself a glass of water, sipped it for a moment, then decided she'd go back to bed. Maybe she'd feel better after a few more hours of sleep. And now, with the journal's hold on her finally broken, she'd have a better chance of getting the rest she needed.
Glass in hand, she padded back to the bedroom. It was a little after five o'clock. She set the glass down, and lay down thinking that if she needed to take half of another sleeping pill she would. But as she was in the process of shaping the thought, exhaustion overtook her.
I settled down to sleep a couple of hours ago believing I'd brought Part Six to an adequate conclusion. But here I am, appending these paragraphs, and effectively spoiling the neatness of my conclusion by so doing. Ah well; this was never fated to be a book distinguished by its tidiness. I'm sure it's going to get a damn sight less orderly before we get to the final pages.
What was so urgent that I had to get up out of bed and write about it? Only another dream. I offer it here not because I think it's prophetic, like my dream of Galilee on the raft, but because it moved me so strangely.
It was a dream about Luman's children.
That's odd in itself, because I hadn't given any conscious thought to the conversation I'd had about his bastards for several weeks. My unconscious mind was apparently turning the subject over however, and its investigations produced this bizarrity: I dreamed I was a piece of paper; a sheet of tattered paper. And the wind had me. It was blowing me across an immense landscape, flipping me over and over. As so often happens in dreams, I saw more than I could possibly describe, all concentrated into a few seconds of dream time. Sometimes I was lifted high into the air, and I was looking down at towns that were so far below me their inhabitants were tiny dots; sometimes I was skimming a dusty road with all the other windborne trash. I saw canyons and cities; I clung to picket fences and telegraph poles; I was becalmed in the heat of a Louisiana summer, and forked up with the leaves in Vermont; I was frozen to a fence in Nebraska, while the wire whined in the wind; I was in the meltwaters when the spring warmed the rivers of Wisconsin. By degrees a sense of imminence crept upon me. The landscapes continued to roll on-the peaks of the High Country, a palmy beach, a field of poppies and wild violets-but I knew my journey was moving toward resolution.
My destination was an unpromising place. A grimy neighborhood in a minor city somewhere in Idaho; a wasteland of gutted buildings and rubble and gray grass. But there a man sat in the remnants of a broken-down truck, and when I came to his feet he reached down and picked me up. It was a strange sensation, to be held in those tobacco-stained ringers, but I knew, looking at the man's face, that he was one of Luman's children. There was something of my half-brother's satiric fever there, and something of his piercing curiosity, though both had been dulled by hardship.
He seemed to sense that he had found more than-a piece of trash in me, because he tossed his cigarette away, and getting up from his seat in the crippled vehicle he shouted: