Steward slapped him full in the mouth, and had it not been for Simon Cary, another massacre might have taken place. "Hold that man!" shouted Reverend Cary and, pointing to K. D., "You in trouble, son."
Pious banged his fist on the wall. "You have already dishonored us. Now you going to destroy us? What manner of evil is in you?" He had been looking at Steward, but now his gaze took in Wisdom, Sargeant and the other two.
"The evil is in this house," said Steward. "Go down in that cellar and see for yourself."
"My brother is lying. This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility."
For the first time in twenty-one years the twins looked each other dead in the eyes.
Meanwhile Soane and Lone DuPres close the two pale eyes but can do nothing about the third one, wet and lidless, in between. "She said, 'Divine,' " Soane whispers.
"What?" Lone is trying to organize a sheet to cover the body. "When I went to her. Right after Steward… I held her head and she said, 'Divine.' Then something like 'He's divine he's sleeping divine.' Dreaming, I guess."
"Well, she was shot in the head, Soane."
"What do you think she saw?"
"I don't know, but it's a sweet thought even if it was her last."
Dovey comes in, saying, "She's gone."
"You sure?" asks Lone.
"Go look for yourself."
"I will."
The sisters cover Consolata with the sheet.
"I didn't know her as well as you," Dovey says.
"I loved her. As God is my witness I did, but nobody knew her really."
"Why did they do it?"
"They? You mean 'he,' don't you? Steward killed her. Not Deek."
"You make it sound as though it's all his fault."
"I didn't mean to."
"Then what? What did you mean?"
Soane does not know what she means, other than how to locate a sliver of soap to clean away any little taint she can. But it is an exchange that alters their relationship irrevocably. Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back to children, livestock, fields, household chores and uncertainty. How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?
Lone has said she would stay with the bodies until Roger got there.
Melinda asks, "How will you get back? Your car is out at our place." Lone sighs. "Well, the dead don't move. And Roger's got a lot of work to do." As the car pulls away, Lone looks back at the house. "A lot of work."
He had none. When Roger Best got back to Ruby, he didn't even change his clothes. He gunned the motor of the ambulance/ hearse and sped to the Convent. Three women were down in the grass, he'd been told. One in the kitchen. Another across the hall. He searched everywhere. Every inch of grass, every patch of Scotch broom. The henhouse. The garden. Every row of corn in the field beyond. Then every room: the chapel, the schoolroom. The game room was empty; the kitchen too-a sheet and a folded raincoat on the table the only sign that a body had been there. Upstairs he looked in both bathrooms, in all eight bedrooms. Again the kitchen, the pantry. Then he went down into the cellar, stepped over the floor paintings. He opened one door that revealed a coal bin. Behind another a small bed and a pair of shiny shoes on the dresser. No bodies. Nothing. Even the Cadillac was gone.
SAVE-MARIE
"This is why we are here: in this single moment of aching sadness-in contemplating the short life and the unacceptable, incomprehensible death of a child-we confirm, defer or lose our faith. Here in the tick tock of this moment, in this place all our questions, all our fear, our outrage, confusion, desolation seem to merge, snatch away the earth and we feel as though we are falling. Here, we might say, it is time to halt, to linger this one time and reject platitudes about sparrows falling under His eye; about the good dying young (this child didn't have a choice about being good); or about death being the only democracy. This is the time to ask the questions that are really on our minds. Who could do this to a child? Who could permit this for a child? And why?"
Sweetie Fleetwood wouldn't discuss it. Her child would not be laid to rest on Steward Morgan's land. It was a brand-new problem: the subject of burial sites had not come up in Ruby for twenty years, and there was astonishment as well as sadness when the task became necessary.
When Save-Marie, the youngest of Sweetie and Jeff's children, died, people assumed the rest of them, Noah, Esther and Ming, would quickly follow. The first was given a strong name for a strong son as well as being the name of his great-grandfather. The second was named Esther for the great-grandmother who loved and cared for the first so selflessly. The third had a name Jeff insisted upon-something having to do with the war. This last child's name was a request (or a lament): Save-Marie, and who was to say whether the call had not been answered. Thus the tense discussion of a formal cemetery was not only because of Sweetie's wishes and the expectation of more funerals, but out of a sense that, for complicated reasons, the reaper was no longer barred entry from Ruby. Richard Misner was therefore presiding over consecrated ground and launching a new institution. But whether to use the ad hoc cemetery on Steward's ranch-where Ruby Smith lay-was a question out of the question for Sweetie. Under the influence of her brother, Luther, and blaming Steward for the trouble he got her husband and father-in-law into, she said she would rather do what Roger Best had done (dug a grave on his own property), and she couldn't care less that twenty-three years had passed since that quick and poorly attended backyard burial took place. Most people understood why she was making such a fuss (grief plus blame was a heady brew) but Pat Best believed that Sweetie's stubbornness was more calculated. Rejecting a Morgan offer, casting doubt on Morgan righteousness might squeeze some favors from Morgan pockets. And if Pat's 8-rock theory was correct, Sweetie's vindictiveness put the 8-rocks in the awkward position of deciding to have a real and formal cemetery in a town full of immortals. Something seismic had happened since July. So here they were, under a soapy sky on a mild November day, gathered a mile or so beyond the last Ruby house, which was, of course, Morgan land, but nobody had the heart to tell Sweetie so. Standing among the crowd surrounding the bereaved Fleetwoods, Pat regained something close to stability. Earlier, at the funeral service, the absence of a eulogy had made her cry. Now she was her familiar, dispassionately amused self. At least she hoped she was dispassionate, and hoped amusement was what she was feeling. She knew there were other views about her attitude, some of which Richard Misner had expressed ("Sad. Sad and cold"), but she was a scholar, not a romantic, and steeled herself against Misner's graveside words to observe the mourners instead. He and Anna Flood had returned two days after the assault on the Convent women, and it took four days for him to learn what had happened.
Pat gave him the two editions of the official story: One, that nine men had gone to talk to and persuade the Convent women to leave or mend their ways; there had been a fight; the women took other shapes and disappeared into thin air. And two (the Fleetwood-Jury version), that five men had gone to evict the women; that four others-the authors-had gone to restrain or stop them; these four were attacked by the women but had succeeded in driving them out, and they took off in their Cadillac; but unfortunately, some of the five had lost their heads and killed the old woman. Pat left Richard to choose for himself which rendition he preferred. What she withheld from him was her own: that nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women (a) because the women were impure (not 8-rock); (b) because the women were unholy (fornicators at the least, abortionists at most); and (c) because they could-which was what being an 8-rock meant to them and was also what the "deal" required.