She passed the Wards' house again, and this time Arvel's pickup truck was in the driveway. The man himself was checking the fluids in his tractor, which was parked by the barn up behind the house. She waved in what she considered a neighborly fashion. Arvel flipped a grease rag at her, then motioned for her to come to him.
He met her in the driveway. "How ya doing, Mrs. Smith?"
"It's Logan. Katy Logan."
"Oh yeah, that's right." He gave her a one-eyed squint. "Things going good?"
"Fine. A lovely day."
"Sure enough. Taking a walk, are you?"
"Yes. I'm going to the general store."
Arvel rubbed his hands on the grease rag. "Shame Gordon won't set you up with a better car. Him being a professor and all, he's bound to have the money."
"We decided we'd save up for a while and wait for things to set-tie down a little." She didn't want to tell her neighbor that Gordon was turning out to be a control freak. She'd always kept her personal life to herself, which might have contributed to the failure of her first marriage. Katy recognized the irony of requiring Jett to undergo drug counseling while she and Mark had never sought marriage counseling. "How's Mrs. Ward?"
"She's in the hospital."
From his tone, he could have been talking about a leaky radiator. "What's wrong?" Katy asked, hoping she didn't sound snoopy.
"Slipped in the kitchen yesterday and busted her skull. Had a few stitches and a concussion, but the doc said she ought to be home in a few days." He gave an uneven grin. "I always said she was a hardheaded woman."
"I didn't hear any sirens."
"You're a good piece up the road, and there's a stand of pines between our houses. Most neighbors in these parts are kind of on their own."
"I'll have some flowers sent to her room."
"She'd like that. Except no Queen Anne's lace. Betsy's allergic to that."
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
"Nothing can mend her but time. And I'll get along fine myself. I learned to cook on camping trips, and the laundry will keep until she's back on her feet."
"Okay. But come knocking if you need anything."
"I'll do that. Say, I'm driving the tractor up the river road. I have a job tilling up an old burley tobacco field. Want to catch a ride?"
She smiled despite herself. "It might be faster to walk."
"No, really, just climb up here and straddle the P.T.O. box. If you're going to be a mountain woman, you might as well learn the basics. Plus the goats are riled."
"Riled?"
Arvel hesitated, then looked out across the pastures that ran alongside the gravel road. "Uppity. They usually rut in the spring, but for some reason they're tangling here on the front door to winter. They get mighty strange when they're in the fever."
Katy started to chuckle, but something about the man's expression stopped her. She remembered her own encounter with Gordon's goat. "Mighty strange" seemed like a good catchall phrase for the odd occurrences that had plagued her over the past few weeks. "Maybe a ride wouldn't be so bad after all," she said.
David Tester sought to live his life according to the words of the Bible. Primitive Baptists didn't hold with the cross, the crucifix, or even pictorial representations of the Lord. Such things were graven images, and therefore false idols. It was God's decision alone to decide which souls were taken to Glory, and God might choose all or none. To leave that choice up to the sinner was an insult to God's power over all things. The best course of a sinner was to live according to the gospel here in this life and assume God had ample room in the next. As the church elder, David served as an example, and even though he avoided temptation when possible, he knew he suffered the sin of pride.
Primitives chose their elders from among the congregation. The position required no formal training. Basically, anyone who heard the call of the Lord would stand up and give it a go, and sometimes would preach for years before being officially selected to lead the church. In the meantime, other elders sought the same position, depending upon the passion in their hearts. David's own brother Ray had delivered a few sermons, but Ray didn't have the gift of oration that his older brother did. David's biggest regret was that Ray had subsequently left the church, and David's biggest failure was the pride he had felt at being named elder. Ray's chances of reaching heaven were just the same as they had been before, but David sometimes wondered if weakness ran in the Tester blood.
Because Harmon Smith was back, and the only way that could have happened was if the Lord so willed it. David had no magic spells he could invoke, no special dust he could sprinkle, no prayers for strength against enemies. The plain, bald truth of it was God had brought Harmon to Solom for a reason. He almost wished he were a Southern Baptist, so he could believe Harmon was of the devil and therefore had arrived to work against the Lord's purpose. The only comfort David could draw was that God's ways were known to God and should be accepted. Even if you didn't have such faith, God was going to do as he pleased anyway, so it was best to be prepared for the worst.
The question now was whether or not David should try to do anything about Harmon. If the answer was no, then David would go about his business, keep his head down, and let his congregation deal with the situation as the Lord so chose. If the answer was yes, then maybe the little valley community of Solom had been chosen as the final showdown, the battleground depicted by the apostle John in the book of Revelation. Maybe the signs had already shown themselves, the seven seals broken, the red dragon risen up from the sea, and all that, and the farmers of Solom had been just plain too busy to notice. The charismatic Baptist sects had made a lot of hay over the signs, and it seemed like, growing up, David had heard almost daily that the end was nigh and the Lord's return was just around the corner. What David could never understand was the fear in the voices of the doomsayers. The Lord's return was a thing to be welcomed, no matter if it rode in on fire, famine, and spilled blood.
But what if the Lord had sent Harmon Smith back as some kind of test? The Old Testament was practically one long test, what with Abraham being ordered to offer up his son on the altar and Job undergoing terrible trials. Even Jesus Christ had to stand on a plateau and turn down the devil's offer of a shining city laid out before Him, and if God couldn't trust His very own Son to do the right thing, then what chance did David have?
David paused in his work forking mulch over Lillian Rominger's strawberry bed. After the killing frosts, David's landscaping business slowed down, and besides some tree pruning and a side business growing poinsettas in a small greenhouse, he would be scraping by the next few months. Lillian was one of his best customers and kept him busy through November doing odd jobs. She was a Methodist widow, stocky and brusque, but for all that she was attractive and only a decade or so older than David. During the summer, whenever the heat drove him to remove his shirt, she always seemed to pop up with a glass of iced tea. In the autumn, she often worked alongside him, not afraid to get her knees dirty.
Today she was busy feeding the two goats she kept in a pen on her two-acre property. Her place was bordered by two large stretches of pasture but couldn't rightly be considered a farm, though she had numerous flower gardens, with strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries, and a couple of dozen apple trees. She was a postal carrier in the next county and had to work most Saturdays, though she claimed the federal holidays made up for the aggravation. David rested against his pitchfork and watched her sprinkling hay into the pen.