She owed her father her life, that’s what she thought. Her mama died the day she was born. “That old fool Dr. Trent told Herman Hathaway his wife was dead before he mentioned his daughter was alive,” Arlen told me. “When the poor man heard the baby wail, he thought she’d been born of a dead woman, and no amount of talk could convince him otherwise. He dressed her up so fine, in little wool capes with fur collars, pretty lacy dresses, and patent leather shoes. But he couldn’t bear to look at her — even in the end when she had to feed him from a spoon that old man didn’t look her in the eye.”
Minnie was only twenty when her father had his first stroke. He never spoke again. He didn’t speak but he lived. Fifteen years of silence. Fifteen years of blinks and grimaces. Fifteen years of bedpans and soiled sheets, and oatmeal dribbling down his chin.
I stared at Minnie Hathaway, looking for the girl she had been before she watched her father die so slowly. But that girl was gone; the face I saw was withered beyond salvation, withered even beyond the grace of love. I thought she’d done the right thing, staying with her father all those years, but I saw how she’d paid, and I was afraid.
These were my comrades, Lyla and Bo, Myron Evans and Minnie Hathaway, familiar people I did not know. Just being in their company made me think there must be hope for somebody like me. I wasn’t too far gone, not by comparison.
The lights flickered. A blast of cold air moved through the room like a parade of the dead. Freda Graves stood in the entryway, stomping snow off her boots. Her hands were bare, chapped and raw from the cold. She wore layers of scarves and shawls, dark and unwashed, tattered moth-eaten wool and frayed silk. She unwrapped herself quickly, leaving the last shawl draped around her shoulders.
I thought, the face of God himself could not be more fearsome. Her gray curls sprang from her head, thick and impenetrable. Only a steel pick could find its dark way through those unparted strands. Deer moss hanging in the forest was like silken threads next to the hair of Freda Graves. I was sure no smile had ever tainted her lips; no young girl’s brazen blush had risen on those bony cheeks; no summer light had ever broken in her eyes. Her eyes burned with the dark fires of redemption. Jesus might be kind, but God and Mrs. Graves were only merciful.
She glided to the center of the room and raised her hands. “Praise the Lord,” she said. “Let us bear our suffering on earth. Let us fall to the ground and thank God for testing us. Let us curve our backs to the whip and be grateful.” She whispered, “The closer you are to God, the more the devil wants you. You’ve got to look behind you.”
I resisted the temptation to glance over my shoulder to see if the devil hunkered down behind the sofa. Her words were strangely comforting to me: I was still so far from the Lord that the devil couldn’t possibly have any interest in snatching my soul, not yet.
“The devil loves attention. He doesn’t care if you worship him or curse his name. To the devil, it’s all the same. He hears you call and his pitiless heart pumps with pride just knowing he’s stolen our thoughts from the Lord. He prances on his goat legs; he sings from his frog throat. But we won’t utter his name. No, he won’t trumpet and dance in this room. But I warn you — the devil lies in wait for you, for all of you. The God you love will watch with idle hands while His evil brother tries to snare you. God only wants the purest hearts. An untried soul is an empty prize.
“One among us is tested even as I speak. One man in this room has the sweet fruit of evil pressed to his lips. Oh, do not bite that apple, brother. Let your body wither to the bone. The body’s life is short, but the soul suffers for all eternity.”
No one dared to look around the room. I could almost see the heat jumping off Bo Effinger’s skin, fierce and dry. Second by second, I grew more certain he was the one. I thought he’d have to crawl to Freda Graves’s feet and beg her to stop him from doing what he wanted to do to Lyla Leona.
But Bo Effinger’s soul was not the one Mrs. Graves saw perched on the shore of the lake of fire, not tonight. She turned and lit three candles on the table behind her. “Come to me, Elliot Foot,” she said. “Come and stand before the flames.”
Elliot rose like a man condemned. A runt in any litter, that’s what Aunt Arlen said, a scrawny little man with spectacles. His hair started halfway back his skull, and the unsteady light of the candles made shadows pass like clouds of remorse across the high curve of his forehead. Freda Graves beckoned, forgiving mother, brutal angel.
She stood behind her table and Elliot faced her. The row of candles flared. “Can you hold your hand in the flame?” she said, her voice soft as wind through grass.
Elliot pulled his wire-rims tight around his ears as if to remind her there were certain things you couldn’t do to a man wearing glasses.
She waited for an answer, but none came. “Elliot,” she said at last, “how close can you bring your finger to the fire?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and settled into himself, shrinking by the second, a boy with a beard.
Joanna Foot squinted so hard her eyes disappeared, and I feared her face might crack. She rocked back and forth, all two hundred pounds of her, silly Humpty Dumpty about to fall. Careful, I thought, careful — there’s too much of you to put together again.
“Give me your hands,” Mrs. Graves said. She clutched his fingers and pulled them toward the flames, closer and closer, ever so slowly, giving him time to struggle or plead. But the little man was proud. He let her have her way until his knuckles grazed the fire, until we heard a sizzle and smelled the hair burn off the backs of their hands. Elliot jerked free.
“Oh, the flesh is tender,” she said, “and the flesh is weak. You who cannot hold your finger to the burning wick would risk plunging your soul into the fiery pits of hell for a few days of pleasure on this earth. Do you fear these pitiful flames? The final conflagration will scorch the face off the earth. Oh, pray that you will be among the chosen, pray that you will be raised in grace before you see the days of our Lord’s wrath.”
Freda Graves squeezed out the flames, one by one, between her thumb and forefinger.
Elliot sat down beside his fat, grinning wife. Mrs. Graves spoke with the voice of a woman who has crossed the valley of bones and climbed to the mountaintop, her bare feet cut and bleeding. “My children,” she said, “didn’t Matthew tell us that a man who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart? If your right eye leads you into sin, pluck it out.”
She made Elliot confess. “Olivia Jeanne’s come back,” he said. “Wants to take me on another ride.” He wouldn’t let her in the door, so she’d parked her Winnebago right in front of the Last Chance Bar. “Says she’ll ruin my business if I don’t do what she wants.” Now I knew I’d seen Miss Olivia Jeanne Woodruff, but I never thought she’d be any man’s temptation. Her skin was yellow, and her long eyes had a sleepy, stupid look. Even so, I wondered what a girl as young as Olivia saw in the likes of Elliot Foot.
“Heed the words of Peter,” said Mrs. Graves. “She has eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. She entices unsteady souls. Her heart is trained in greed. She would steal you from your children.”
There was some speculation among us that Olivia Jeanne had been carried back to Willis on the very wings of the devil. This was an interesting topic, and we couldn’t help letting our minds wander for a half hour or so — though Mrs. Graves had warned us about giving the devil that kind of attention.
The room was cramped and sticky with the heat of our bodies. There was too much furniture: a heavy green couch, the overstuffed loveseat, the long table, and a dusty bookshelf that stretched along one wall from floor to ceiling. But Freda Graves kept no books on her huge shelf. I suspected novels were evil in her mind, the work of the devious imagination. History was a lie. There was only one book worth reading.