Owen hurled curses at him, kicked at the tub, and fell down on his knees beside Jo. He saw right away she wasn't breathing, or if she was, it was so shallow her chest didn't move at all.
"Please don't be dead, Jo, please."
He pressed his fingers against her throat, felt no blood move beneath her wet skin. He took her wrist and felt the same. He brought her to the floor and breathed into her mouth, as she'd done for him only recently, breathing him back to life. He pounded on her chest, and breathed again. He hadn't trained for this, was only following what they did on TV. On television, just when it seemed like she'd never wake up, Jo would turn her head and vomit up water. She'd gasp for air and look into his eyes, disoriented and relieved, and smile her dimpled smile.
He breathed and pumped. Breathed. Pumped.
"Please, Jo, please, please…" Weeping. Shuddering.
The tub made one last gurgle—a long, groaning death rattle—then fell silent.
Jo made no sound at all.
He drew her into his lap and held her. She felt brittle and jagged in his arms, not at all like she'd felt that night in the lake. He wept, loud and messily. He thundered his fist against the tub and kicked the wall until it cracked, and hurled accusations at the giant angry man in the sky. After a long while, the small room began to darken, seemingly in tandem with the light draining out of his life. He stood and hoisted Jo into his arms.
Owen brought her to the biggest bedroom—which had once been her parents, but which she must have taken for herself, since the covers were ruffled and the room looked lived in. He placed her on the bed, drew her arms across her chest, then changed his mind, not liking the gruesome image it made, and laid them at her sides. He brushed damp hair back from her face and kissed her forehead.
"It's over, now, Jo," he whispered in her ear. "Wherever you are, I hope there's no more pain."
Downstairs in the living room, he found a box of cassette tapes with hand-printed labels, the spirituals she'd mentioned before. He found one labeled The Dunsmuirs HOUSE OF MY DREAMS: DEMO and liked the sound of it, and he thought Jo might have liked it, too. The master bedroom had a stereo on the vanity. Owen inserted the tape, already wound to the beginning. He pushed play, and sat on the edge of the bed in his damp clothes, looking down at what remained of Crazy Jo Dunsmuir, his first and only real love.
A tune strummed on an acoustic guitar, both heartbreakingly sweet and hauntingly sad. Edam Dunsmuir's gravelly vibrato joined it, belting out the lyrics with a slight country twang. During the chorus, Jo's mother sang along in a pleasing falsetto.
If you stay with me tonight,
I'll swear we'll build a Heaven on Earth
How we'll live there,
I don't know
Take me down to the water
Where the green grass grow
Take me down to the house
Of my dreams
He let the tape play out, then wound it back and played it again. At first, the lyrics seemed a fitting tribute to the Dunsmuir family, though the second time through he decided Jo might not have felt the same, considering how her parents had died, he she'd died, and shut it off. He came back to her side, leaned down, and kissed her cold, blue lips. He brushed her hair away from her ear, as blonde and fine as it had been when she was a girl.
"You remember what Mr. Wickman said? Death isn't the end, Jo. Death isn't the end," he said again, sitting down beside her, trying his damnedest to make himself believe it.
CHAPTER 13
Laid to Rest
1
OWEN MADE HIS WAY down to the living room, where he'd left his cell phone. He sat on the sofa in his wet clothes, dialing the long-distance number. After four rings, his mother picked up from two-hundred kilometers away.
"Saddler residence," she said.
For a long moment Owen said nothing, didn't know how to begin. It had all come apart: all the progress he'd made, shattered in an instant of carelessness and stupidity.
"Mom," he said finally, "it's me."
"Owen." She sounded neither thrilled nor disappointed to hear his voice. "Where are you calling from? You sound odd."
"Mom, Jo is dead."
"Jo. Am I supposed to know this person?"
"Joelle Dunsmuir," Owen said, annoyed by her brusqueness.
"Joelle—" She clued in. "Little Jo? Where on earth did you…?"
Silence, filled by the hiss of dead air. "Mom."
"You're there now, aren't you? You went up to that awful place—"
"Mom, I have a right to know—"
"You have no idea what I went through to get you away from that damned place, and you had the nerve to go back? Just when were you planning to tell me, hmm? After what happened to—" She made herself finish it, "to your sister. How could you, Owen? How could you?"
He held the phone away, her scream ringing in his ear. It was the most emotion he'd gotten out of his mother in years, since the days he used to argue and fight with everyone; he hadn't sought out anger, but it was better than the flat tone she'd taken before. Now that Jo had died he'd been stumbling around on autopilot, like a man in a dream. Night had slipped its cold hands over the world without him noticing, the windows now entirely black. Anyone could be out there in the dark, with the cicadas and the frogs chirping out spirituals of their own. Their somber music helped him focus his thoughts.
"Lori came up here for me, Mom. Because of my depression."
"Pish posh."
"She was looking for my father," he said, becoming angry. "For Crouch."
A long pause, the hiss of distance between them: metaphorical and physical. "And I suppose she found him," his mother said after a time.
"In a way. He's dead. He's been dead for years, Mom. Since the day we left."
"What do you mean? Your father's not dead."
"Mom, I was down there in that church—"
"You went down there?"
"Twice. The people we left behind drowned down there. They meant to kill themselves, but I think they changed their mind at the last moment. Somebody murdered them."
Margaret Saddler clucked her tongue.
"Mom."
"You can't possibly know all that. How could you know all that?" she said, as if asking herself.
"What do you think I've been doing up here, taking a vacation? I've been researching. I've been diving. I found a journal Lori wrote to me, Mom, and I met Jo Dunsmuir and we…" He swallowed his sadness. "…and now she's, she's dead, Mom. Because of Crouch. Because of the lies you told me."
The distant hiss. "You blame me. Well, I'm sorry, Owen. I'm sorry that had to happen to your little friend. She was a fine girl. Your father—" She seemed to choke on her own words, sorrow cracking the veneer. "Your father loved her very much. He loved both of you. But he was sick. He'd been sick for quite a while. I saw the signs—I should have, I transcribed all his sermons—but I chose to ignore them."
She cupped the receiver to politely blow her nose. "You don't remember how he was," she said when she came back. "His fury. He never struck either of us, not with his fists. He wielded God's Word like a weapon, bullying us into submission with Eternal Damnation and Hellfire, abusing and demoralizing us with scripture. Not just the two of us, Owen, but the whole church. The whole town. He was sick, your father. Sick."
"He should've been on medication."
"I suggested it, when the worst of it began. He spat at my feet. On the kitchen floor he did this, Owen. 'Many are the afflictions of the righteous,' he said, 'but the Lord delivers him from them all!' And I told him, 'Shepherd the flock that is among you, not domineering over those in your charge, but being an example to the flock.' We went on and on like that. Everett would say 'Those who are well do not need a physician. Do you not know the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?' I reminded him God's ways are not our ways, and if we were expected to follow everything the Old Testament told us to the letter, we'd all be out toiling in the fields and stoning hippies to death for smelling like patch
ouli."
Odd as it was to hear his mother quote scripture, even odder was the tone in which she spoke about her relationship with his father. She was angry, impassioned—but affection trickled through the bitterness. It hadn't all been bad times in the Crouch house, after all. They'd been a family. There'd been love.
"He used to like that we could debate religion," she said. "But that night I think I must have pushed him over the edge. It was Woodrow's influence, I don't fully blame Everett."
"Brother Woodrow?"
"That's what Everett called him," she said. "We'd been arguing for hours before you wandered into the kitchen in your pajamas. It was the first time I saw venom in your father's eyes, every bit of it aimed at you. Three years old at the time, you were. It was the first time he truly frightened me. He'd always been a passionate man, I'd known that from the moment I met him. It's what fueled his sermons. It put butts in the seats. But rage? Toward his own flesh and blood?"
"So it's true," Owen said. "He really was going to murder me."
"Oh, no. No, no, I don't think he'd ever have gone that far. When you were very little, Everett baptised you," she explained. "You nearly died. We would only ever do full-body immersions. When Philip baptized the Ethiopian, he took him down into the water. He didn't just sprinkle water from the font on the man's forehead. So that's what we did in the Blessed Trinity. It was the same ceremony for adults as it was for the children.
"By the time we started this, you were barely a year old. You didn't like the water, not one bit. Not the bath, and especially not the river. And you struggled. You screamed bloody murder. Everett used… a little more force than he'd meant to, I think—I hope that's what it was, because the alternative scares the life out of me."
Owen pictured Crouch pushing him under the water, the great holy glory in his eyes. The scene came back to him in a flash, Crouch pushing him down, smiling darkly, the pocket watch hung from a chain in his pocket, the men and women whose faces he recognized: Dink Deakins, and Edam and Joan Dunsmuir, who'd rejoined their brethren and sistren in death, and the little blonde girl who was Jo, he knew that now, the same child Woodrow had been baptizing in the lake, held in her parents' loving arms. She'd been with them all along, had spent her entire life living under the shadow of that terrible church, living just like the dead, and now she was back in the tender bosom of her loving family.
"Secondary drowning, the doctors said," his mother was saying. "They were able to save you, by some miracle. The dam was proposed near about the same time; I suppose Everett must have made a connection between the two. Thinking perhaps it wasn't God's Will that saved you, but Man's intervention, and maybe you were meant to have drowned that day. That maybe God was testing him, like He'd tested Job and Abraham. That if he'd sacrificed you, if he'd drowned you, in the same water that would soon come to destroy his church, that God would spare it. Of course it was insane. Muddy thinking."
"Jo thinks—" He corrected himself with a morose glance up the stairs toward her bedroom, where her remains cooled and stiffened on the bedspread. "Jo thought the same thing. She thought he was schizophrenic."
"She always was smart as a whip, that Jo. In any case, I don't think he could have gone through with it. I don't think so. But I wasn't about to give him the chance to change his mind."
"Why didn't the others see it? Couldn't you have rallied them against him?"
"By that point, he'd built up their passion to a fever pitch. He'd passed on his delusions to the rest of us, like he was passing on a cold. We yearned for confrontation. I know that now. Having to defend your beliefs only makes them stronger. We weren't chaining ourselves to trees to stop some men in bulldozers, like your sister might've done. We were standing in front of a tidal wave, praying for a trickle." She chuckled softly, laughing at her own blindness. "It wasn't even all that difficult to convince them to do it, either. And once you've been convinced of such insanity, it's often harder to turn back than to see the madness through to the end. Turning back doesn't just mean you were wrong, it means you were duped. You have to admit you've been a fool, and that's difficult for most people to do."
"Where was Brother Woodrow during all this?"
"Oh, he was there with Everett. He was always there, whispering in his ear. Like Rasputin."
"So he died with Crouch."
"If it's true your father died down there, Woodrow died with him, I've no doubt of that." She fell silent. The mechanical hiss filled it.
"So why did we leave that day? Why didn't you stay, if you thought there'd be a miracle?"
"Because I never believed," she said.
"You didn't?"
"I transcribed every one of Everett's tapes myself. If nothing else, it gave me a front row seat to his machinations. I saw what he was doing somewhere along the line, the only thing I didn't know was whether he'd been doing it purposefully or not. Was it the man, or the sickness? Your father used to say, 'Every man has two selves—"
"'—the man who is, and the man he's meant to be,'" Owen finished for her.
"Precisely. Perhaps if I'd understood he'd meant it literally, I could have done more for him. For them. I suppose that's my cross to bear. I loved those people, and I loved him, in spite of it. He was your father, my husband. In sickness and in health, I'd made those vows. There were moments of tenderness, when I'd find it difficult to remember the bad times. I still love him dearly, as crazy as it sounds."
"Love is crazy," he said, thinking of Jo, of the easy way they'd fallen into step with each other. "Did he—" He found himself swallowing back tears at the thought. "Mom, do you think he ever loved me?"
"Owen," she said, her tone reproachful. "Of course he loved you. He was your father."
"So was Gerald."
"And he loved you too, in his way. He always said you reminded him of himself when he was young. So stubborn and impulsive."
"Gerald said that?"
"Mm-hmm."
It wasn't exactly a compliment, but maybe he hadn't given Gerald the chance he'd needed to be a father figure. Maybe he'd shut Gerald out because of the way Crouch had abandoned them, which in the end had turned out to be untrue. "You know, I think that's the first time I've heard you say something nice about him," Owen remarked.
"Gerald was sick too, in his way," she said wearily. "I hadn't the strength to see him through it. I'd already tried to save one husband. You know now how that turned out. I certainly wasn't ready to try it again."
"I don't blame you."
"I spent years waiting for the man Everett meant himself to be to step into the light. But the other man had taken him over, and he was ugly, Owen. The Devil wears many faces. Often it's a face you know too well. Still, I'm not sure I would have had the courage to go if not for Howard. He was the angel on my shoulder. He was our lawyer—"
"I know."
"Did he tell you I used to work for him? I was his legal secretary before I met Everett."
"He never said that, no."
"He didn't like me going to that church, and he sure didn't like me getting close to Everett. He tried to argue me out of making a 'life-altering decision,' as he called it, but I was just as stubborn as your father. As you are. I suppose when he saw he couldn't beat me, he joined me. He joined us. He was there for all the picnics and the sermons and the squabbling, but he never believed in Everett, not like the rest of them. He helped us as far as he could with the legal troubles, after what people in town started referring to as the Schism—what your father called the Purification—but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.
"He hadn't gone to a sermon in over a year when he came back one Sunday and sat himself down in the back row. Your father was reciting his speech about you, the one in which God told him to sacrifice his firstborn son to save the church, and Howard stood up and called him a liar. The whole church, there wasn't much left of us by then, but we all turned around to gawk. He was drunk as a skunk and swaying on his feet. He called your father a fraud, a wolf in sheep's clothing,
and told the rest of us we were following Everett straight to Hell."
"Wow."
"He'd stood idly by, he said, but he couldn't do it any longer, and anyone who wanted to leave could come with him right then and never look back. 'Like Lot from Sodom,' he said, and that got Everett going, I think. Your father said, 'Nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.' And Howard made a raspberry, thumbing his nose at all of us, I think, and stumbled outside."
"Nobody followed him?"
"Not right then. But I could tell the Dunsmuirs were considering it, because when he said the thing about Sodom, they hugged Little Joelle up tight, and the next Sunday Joan was too sick to attend, and the Sunday after that they had to visit their dying aunt in the town named after Edam's family.
"After the incident in the church, Howard got drunker and drunker, stewing in booze and his own embarrassment. He resigned, he never said another word to me until the night before the valley was to be flooded, when he crept up to the back door. Your father was going back and forth with Woodrow in his office upstairs. It was cold that night, it'd been a crisp fall day and the trees were just about bare, but I wouldn't let Howard inside, and I'm not sure he would have come in if I'd asked him.
"He was drunk, slurring his words, but they struck me as clearly as if they'd been spoken by God Himself. 'Don't do it for me,' he said, 'don't do it for either of us. Do it for the boy. That church is nothing but death, Maggie,' he said. 'The boy is life.' And he was right, Owen. All the arguments we've had over the years, all the screaming and pushing back at each other, you gave me life. Without you and your sister to care for, I might as well have locked myself in that church with the rest of them."
A flood of emotion overcame him. Tears welled in his eyes, and he let them fall.
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