Frenchie looked from side to side as he sat down, afraid. There was no rule exactly, about going to a restaurant to eat, but we both knew that we weren’t supposed to, that we should be driving straight back to our home, to the kindred, that we should be saving money and not spending it on the second order of eggs that I wouldn’t eat, or the weak black coffee that Frenchie would drink looking down into the brown pottery cup, refusing refills, feeling the hand of my husband on his shoulders, my husband’s eyes heavy at the back of his neck, and Billy’s voice, his voice always, radio-trained, pure and deep, full as thunder, round as hope. My husband’s voice was perfect as he was perfect. Made in God. My husband’s voice was redemption, a rope to hold in a whiteout. My husband’s voice would change my mind as it had before, when I got back and entered into the mellow gold light surrounding him. I would sink in, go under, resistless in the dream that he dreamed with me in it. I would be a shadow, once more, a light thrown lovingly against a wall.
I drank my coffee slowly. I had to test myself by watching how I acted in front of one of us kindred. I was glad that it was Frenchie, who wasn’t so observant. There was something scared and sidling about him, something not quite authentic. He had a handsome face if you really looked at it, nice bones, rich green eyes with thick brush eyelashes, firm mouth, straight nose. But he acted like a beaten animal — hunched, crept, spoke in an excusing lilt and never addressed you, just waited for you to speak. He took what he could get. That was his motto, I suppose. I didn’t want to make him any trouble and so I didn’t exchange more than a few polite words with another waitress I had known while employed at the 4-B’s. I paid up with extra money I had been given in Seattle and not declared, and I said that we could go now, we could go home. But just before we left, I looked around the place, and even though it was a spare room, big and functional, with orange plastic booths and the usual salad island, even though in the realm of restaurants and cafs it was nothing special, light from outside the windows falling in rich bands of smoke was almost piercing to me in its promise.
When it was over, I would return here, I decided. I would sit down and unfold the silly napkin with the black and yellow bee, spread it out carefully onto my lap. I would order the all-day breakfast for my children. They would eat. And when I saw them eating, I would be able to eat too.
Until that time, no food would cross my lips but that I needed to gain strength, no movement would be wasted, no coin, no breath. From that moment on, I was a closed secret. I was everything the mountain knew. I was the unturned stone.
And the snake under it, that too.
SOME OF US lived in chicken coops, some of us lived in storage barrels, some of us lived outdoors beneath the solstice sun. Some of us lived deep inside the hills, some of us lived out on the range with cattle, or on tractors, or in an old Burlington boxcar. Some of us lived with husbands or wives, some with children, only children. Some of us were saved in heat, some of us were saved in winter’s cold. Some of us were simply curious and had never been saved at all. Some of us lived right with Billy, back in the new log house, behind the fireplace, and all day our clothes smelled of pine pitch and smoke of midnight fires. I was his only true wife, with his name on me and my children, and that was my reward. His greater fidelity, that is — not the lesser, the procreation he quietly affirmed with others. He belonged to me in the greatest sense and held that fact to my face, a shining mirror.
By the time we got to the turn-off road, narrow and perfectly kept (not the rutted road the heavy equipment used), my hands were cold inside my knitted gloves. The ranch buildings came into distant view and, inside, I felt empty, hungry, ravenous but not for food. My skin was desperate to hold my children. We reached the guardhouse. Sweat trailed the inside of my arms. My face felt rigid with the effort of posing my features. I was cold all through, chilled to an ache, to the center. In the Manual of Discipline, to which all kindred must adhere, a guilty heart is a dead heart, burnt to a cindery knob, and it is to be rejected. Cast out. As we rode the curved drive, gravel crackling against the tires, I began to shake. My legs felt watery, unstable. My jaws hurt. I knew that Billy would look deep into me at first glance and see the black smoke, the steam, the blue radiance of betrayal. He would pray. He would look at me with triumph and take me back into our marriage, into the faith.
He called out to me, waving an arm in the air, pleased with me and pleased at the picture of the welcoming husband that he made. He was standing on the long porch of the two-story log house, the gray log house with the chinks cemented fast. He had not been waiting. He’d sent Deborah, the eternal penitent, his personal secretary. She had probably given him a blow job underneath his desk, then blotted her lips on a hankie and done the waiting. She had watched for us on the road and then summoned him from his office and the bank of phones and our all-night steno crew that never shut down. Deborah had come to get him and he had left his office, just in time to greet us, and he was impatient. I left the cab of the pickup like I was jumping off a high board into a pool of water, not knowing whether I could swim at all. Here was a new element, deep green, emotional, treacherous. I ran straight to him. Impetuous joy was what I wanted to convey. I ran to him and he held me against his tired, his soft, his body of the solid current. His was the only man’s body I had known. I felt its frightful goodness, its secret extravagance of love for me. His heart beat hard underneath my cheek. I couldn’t turn away.
Huge, soft, yet muscled with a hopeless power, Billy surrounded me. Not vast as he’d been when he’d absorbed the lightning, but big enough. I lost myself in the familiarity of flesh and voice. His voice was pink as the sky. His eagerness and pleasure at my return bloomed all around me as we went into the room where the children were playing, and where I was allowed to surprise them at their games.
I watched them for a moment, before they turned. I still had names for my children, though children’s names were now forbidden. Mine were their old names, now secret names. I think that their father had forgotten what they were called.
Judah was sand-haired and tough. It always seemed that his wires were pulled tighter, sharper, that the connections were raw and quick, that he was not just more intelligent in mind but throughout his entire body. His eyes were large, sad, warm, his father’s changing colors. Sometimes his deepened under strong emotion to a deep-set black. He had my features, people said, though I couldn’t see it. I could tell Lilith’s though; she looked like me. She looked like my grade school pictures, brows drawn together, frowning, always unprepared. She was shy and stubborn, both at once, and her sudden attacks of laziness were pure will, never helpless. I thought she was terribly intelligent, but there was no outside testing. I had no way of knowing exactly what she knew in relation to other children. Now she ran to me, gave herself to me with completeness, melting to me, smelling of salt and snow. I held them both close, put my face in the warm coarse hair. I breathed in their radiance, and we began to rise, light as cake. We hovered just an inch above the woven rug, turning, holding. From the door behind us, freezing air swirled around us and tightened.
DEEP IN THE night, every night, through the space across the great open center of the house, I woke to the comfort of the stuttering rings of telephones, the messages of the converted that came in after the monthly broadcasts that he taped here or in Grand Forks or Fargo or Winnipeg, then broadcast all over the world. Each ring brought cash. Women called to say they’d seen a light in the east, heard a voice rise from the laundry chute, felt power boil up between their knuckles, understood another exquisite language that hovered in the air all around them. Women called to say their loaves fell in the shape of Billy’s face, their uncooked raw meat muttered his name. The little notes clipped around their checks told about their children, how when changing diapers they had known the call. Or how, when baking cakes, the straw came out of the batter with a continuous musical tone that signified salvation. They answered their home phone. Their own voice said Be Saved. Their washing machines refused to wash unless Billy’s broadcast was playing. Their hands hurt with the knowledge and their sex lives were numbing them, hurting them. They were dying of dyspepsia, of cancer, of deadly warts, of an unusual virus, of hives, of internal parasites, of cerebral palsy, of cancer, of cancer.