Now into their midst once more comes Mabel’s husband Willie, suspenders dangling as before, shirttails out, his eyes swollen with sleep. He clears his throat and, scratching his narrow chest, declares, “And the Lord God a hosts is him what touches the land, and the land it’ll melt’n rise up like as a flood! Lord Jesus! It’s him what calls for the waters a the sea, and pours ’em out ’pon the face a the earth: The Lord is his name, ay-men! Amos 9:5–6!” When he is done, Mabel tells him that the two fellows from out east were here looking for him, and he nods and returns to the back, drawing up his suspenders. “Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn’t of told him. Now he’s gonna go out there in that rain.”
“He’ll be all right,” Ludie Belle says. “It’s easin’ up.”
Glenda and Hazel glance over their shoulders through the wet windshield and see that the rain has stopped and the men have come out in their heavy boots and are inspecting the channels they’ve dug for the underground wiring, tracking them through the mud up toward the Meeting Hall. The plumber Welford Oakes turns and sees his wife Glenda staring at him through the caravan’s front window with her good eye, her glass eye catching the hazy light from the brightening sky, and he grins and blows her a kiss and she turns away. Hazel Dunlevy, sitting beside her, shrugs and waves at her husband Travers when he turns around, and then the two men continue on up through the dripping trees along with Ben Wosznik and Wayne Shawcross to see what the storm has done.
“I got tangled up with the pillow and waked up this morning from a nightmare in which Wayne here was a-tryin’ to rip my head off,” Welford says. “I made the mistake a sayin’ so when Glenda asked what I was yellin’ about, and she said that only means I got a way a dodgin’ the truth and I act afore I think, and I said well, maybe, but it hurt more’n that.”
“Your Glenda got Hazel in a tizz,” Travers says, “by tellin’ her that a dream about gettin’ to Heaven and flyin’ around with the angels was really about her knowin’ down deep she ain’t never gonna get there, and then she told her some scary stuff about them angels which Hazel won’t even tell me about. Dang near ruint her. She ain’t been able to sleep good ever since.”
“My lady can be a trial and a terror,” Welford says. “Basically, she don’t believe in happy dreams, it’s bad news whatever, somethin’ her ole lady laid on her early. So I’ve learnt to shut up ‘ceptin’ when I forget.”
They find that some of the trenches they’d dug for the underground wiring but had not yet sealed up are running with water, like canals seen from the sky, and the uncovered lantern bowls have pooled up, but, though the ground is soft and soggy, all the lamp posts seem to be standing true and nothing has shifted. Welford asks after Hovis and Uriah, and Wayne says he sent the old boys over to his house trailer for hot showers. “They wandered out into the rain and got lost somehow. Their rags was stuck to ’em like another skin. But it seems to’ve let up. Figger we can sweep out the trenches and carry on?”
“Whatever you say, Wayne. Sure as heck don’t wanta get my head tore off.”
The camp’s new system of streetlamps is Wayne’s pet project. He has installed circuit boards inside the janitorial supplies closet off the Meeting Hall entryway, fed with power from the old Deepwater mine, accessed by over four miles of underground and overground cable, crossing county roads, ditches, and wooded land; a massive challenge, but, thanks to Mr. Suggs, they have had outside help for that from his own strip-mine crews and their heavy equipment as well as from members of the private militia he sponsors, the Christian Patriots, who are mostly the same persons. The Meeting Hall with its kitchen, office, and spare rooms has its own circuit board and there is another for all the cabins, the carpentry shop, the new laundry room, and whatever comes next. But incoming cables have also been directly connected to a separate distribution board and from there they have laid wire underground through these foot-deep trenches to new tubular steel streetlamp posts, donated to them by their Florida congregations and set up throughout the camp. Wayne has strung wire through the posts and they have dug three-foot holes for them with a post hole auger borrowed from Mr. Suggs and planted them squarely on the bottom on beds of gravel and staked them there in their upright positions. When the lanterns are in place on top, it will be possible to turn the lights on all at once or by sections or from inside the lanterns one at a time. All that remains before tomorrow night is to pack the post holes tightly and pull the stakes, empty out the bowls and attach the lanterns to the tops of the columns, and finally test all the switches and circuits, and if they don’t finish it today, they still have all day tomorrow before sundown. They are all looking forward to this camp-lighting ceremony with great excitement, amazed at their own accomplishments. It will seem like a regular little city then, bright shining as the sun.
In her cabin next to the old lodge, the minister’s wife, watching them work with such enthusiasm, understands their excitement and that of all her other new friends, but she does not fully share it. She loved the camp just as it was. Just as it was ten years ago, that is. She is grateful that circumstances have made it possible to rescue her favorite place on earth from what had seemed terminal ruin, and she is infinitely happy here in their little cabin, far from the outside world, with Colin safe and under her constant care, but the camp that was wholly hers is no longer hers. When Wesley first took up his ministry in West Condon, they were still holding summer church camps, and she was out here year round, making it ready, welcoming young campers, overseeing its rentals to other denominations, cleaning up after they’d gone. Debra cared little for most church duties in town, though she got used to them, but she loved the camp, and she often came out on her own at this time of year to air out the lodge and cabins, clean up the litter of off-season intruders, do some weeding and painting and creosoting of the cabins and tidy up the picnic areas, feeling more at home here than in their own home, which was really not theirs at all but more like an annex of the church. She liked using the outhouses and bathing in the creek and picking berries and chopping wood for the fireplace and the old wood cookstove and, above all, just walking through the campgrounds, day or night, often wearing nothing but her working gloves and mosquito repellant. She even loved the rain, the chattery patter of it on the cabin roof, the thin tinny sound it made when falling on the creek like insects walking on glass. And the insects, she loved the insects, their hopeful abundance, the chittery songs they sang. She felt closer to God out here, and though in town she could be quite skeptical and lighthearted about ultimate things, out here she knew she was a true believer. And Wesley, too, seemed to love it and love her in it. He was so passionate out here — the way he looked at her then, all over! — she was sure they were going to have a baby. They bathed together in the creek, soaping each other up, and sometimes made love in broad daylight among the flowers in Bluebell Valley, the sun beaming down on them, warming their bodies with its excited gaze. Even peeing together thrilled her, walking naked hand in hand under the stars did. Of course she still had her figure then, and her nakedness thrilled her even when he wasn’t with her. Well, it still does.
Wesley lost interest in the camp when he lost interest in her and that was when everything started to fall apart. The generator broke down, a fungus invaded the communal shower. Vandals toppled the outhouses, left a scatter of broken beer bottles. She did what she could, but he rarely helped, paid little attention to the work she did, and he looked away when her clothes came off. When he complained to the Board of Deacons about the malodorous unappealing condition of the collapsing camp and requested a complete renovation, she sensed that it was she he was describing. He was disappointed; she was also disappointed. They refused to meet his budget request and he peremptorily closed the camp. On health and safety grounds, he said. She got angry about that, but he just puffed on his little pipe and went off on his pastoral errands. For a time she continued to come out on her own to care for the camp, but it grew away from her and she gradually lost heart. She never stopped loving it, though. And now at last, in an unexpected way, if it is not exactly hers again, she is, as before, its residing spirit.