“Mighty fine grub,” Kyle said, affecting an old man’s toothless speech. The children laughed and Dale smiled. She cleared her throat and said, “Kyle, would you be interested in coming with us this morning?” Then she looked back to her plate.
Kyle sighed deep and shook his head, “I appreciate the offer, but I been to just about every church there is, and nothing I heard there ever made me want to go back.”
Dale winced and wished she hadn’t asked him in front of the children. She struggled to remember how she was supposed to handle this. Maybe if she could attend all three weekly meetings instead of just Sundays, she might be better equipped to help Kyle—and maybe even Jake.
Kyle shook a loaded fork at the children and said, “Yup, I been to most every Sunday gathering people can have, excepting maybe for Jews and Arabs. All I can say is that the Baptists feed you the best.”
He waved the fork and then swooped the food into his mouth. Justy and Lacee smiled and Micah looked confused; a smile danced in his eyes, but he frowned.
“Now, Kyle,” Dale said, standing up from the table. She leaned toward him, grinning. “You’ve never been to a Witness meeting, have you?”
Kyle shrugged and a blush spread over his wrinkled face. “I don’t need to know about them, Dale. I see you every day.” He sat up straighter.
Lacee looked at her dress and said, “Yeah, Granpa, you should go. Just to check it out.”
“That’s right,” Micah said. “Come with us.”
Kyle shook his head and laughed. “Now, now. I don’t need all of you to gang up on me.” He turned to Dale. “You expect me to go, looking like this?” He indicated the black eye and the fat lip. He stuck out his lip, making it fatter. “What will the good people think if I walk in there with you and this ugly mug?”
Dale walked to the sink. Kyle’s words had struck a buried memory and he shook his head at himself. The smile faded from his face.
“I still think you should go,” Lacee said. “If Justy and I can go wearing these things, then you can wear a black eye.”
Kyle looked at her and closed his eyes for a minute.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll go to your meeting and I’ll wear a smile. I’ve made enough mistakes this trip already.”
Dale turned to him and said, “It’d mean so much.”
***
Dale called Joella Mills to say they didn’t need a ride that morning, and Joella gently asked Dale if she was still coming.
“Oh, yes,” Dale said, surprised at how much like a little girl she felt.
They piled into Kyle’s truck—Dale on the outside, as usual—and drove through the heavy rain the twenty miles to the Kingdom Hall. On the way, Dale explained that most Witnesses had better meeting places than the Madrone congregation and that the members were saving up for what the Witnesses called a quick-build. Kyle seemed interested in this idea, that a group of people could construct a new Kingdom Hall essentially in one day. Justy watched him from Dale’s lap, realizing he didn’t have his cowboy hat on like he had every other time he left the house. She looked to the flooded landscape blurring past, wishing Jake were with them, too.
They pulled into the open space near the beauty parlor and the Kingdom Hall. Sullivan’s waited a few feet away. They climbed out of Kyle’s truck and walked past the mud-covered white Volkswagen that Mamie Harris drove. Dark green curtains hung in the side windows, and a bumper sticker said “Arms Are for Hugging.”
Dale led the way up the narrow stairs and they saw light pouring from the open door. They moved down the dark hallway, toward the light. When they entered, Lucas Mills glanced at them from the front of the room, saw Kyle and left the conversation he was having with Brother McLean. Lucas approached and extended his hand to Kyle. While they exchanged awkward hellos, Justy saw that the members of the congregation were turned backward in their seats, looking at Kyle. She saw Mamie and the twins up in the front row; Caleb waved at Micah and he waved back. The room smelled stale to Justy, and she pulled at her Creamsicle dress, already tired.
Lucas directed them to a seat and the old record player began the music—the members sang the words from the brown songbooks Sing Praises to Jehovah. Justy didn’t even mouth the words like she had in the months since she’d stopped talking, but just slipped Ochre’s stone into her mouth.
When the hymn ended, Lucas led them in a prayer and then they sat. Justy tried to pay attention, but she wandered in her thoughts. Kyle kept shifting in his seat and Justy looked beyond him, out the small window. Lucas began speaking about the shelter available through Jehovah’s love, and Justy remembered the concerned look on Ms. Long’s face and her volunteering at a shelter. Justy knew the meanings were different, but she didn’t know how.
***
After the public talk, the Watchtower study began. Kyle looked at the magazine in Dale’s lap as the discussion went on. She had all the answers underlined, but she kept her hand down when the conducting brother asked the appropriate questions. When Micah raised his hand to answer, she smiled at him, then at Kyle, as if proving a point. Lacee and Justy shared a magazine and both tried to pay attention. Every few minutes Justy closed her eyes, hoping Jehovah had found a way into her murky waters. She supposed it would happen someday, maybe when Jake and Dale and Kyle left her alone and became their own people again.
The congregation stood again to sing, and Dale’s voice began to fill the room without her seeming to be aware of it. Justy saw that people around Dale, including Kyle, only pretended to sing, listening to Dale’s voice grow in force. Lacee sang, too, but her voice seemed small—nothing like the day Kyle arrived. The song finished, Lucas said a closing prayer, and the meeting was over. Justy wanted to go home and get out of the dress and watch the rain through the living room windows. A few men introduced themselves to Kyle, and he shook hands and smiled like he’d be back.
The twins approached with Mamie, who reached out a hand to Dale. Mamie smelled strongly of cinnamon and her stringy blond hair reminded Justy of Sunshine’s. Her dress was tie-dyed, and she wore socks with her sandals. Justy noticed none of the other women in the congregation wore similar shoes. Dale thanked her for the most recent bag of clothes, and Mamie waved her hand.
“It’s nothing, Dale. I’m just glad to see you can use them.” Justy went out into the hall, looking for Micah and the twins. They were sitting at the head of the stairs, talking about when they would get baptized. Sky Harris looked at Justy and then turned her red hair and green eyes away.
***
They rode back in silence, a Sunday newspaper from San Francisco on Justy’s lap. On the outside were comics that didn’t make sense to Justy; she flipped through the pages until she reached the front one. The headline said the Vietnamese government had returned the bodies of two American men. She thought of Paco and wondered where his body was. She looked to the blond fields filled with rain. If she understood it right, bodies should remain in the ground until after Armageddon.
She held the paper so Micah and Lacee could see the headline, but neither of them seemed to notice. Lacee held another book, Watership Down, and Micah looked to be in a daze, as he usually did after meeting. She handed him the comics and he took them, coming back into his body. Justy looked to Kyle, but he just stared at the road, lost in his own thoughts. The Witnesses believed there were seven signs until the end of the world, and she thought the dead being unearthed was one of them. It didn’t make sense—how life was going to stop at any moment but everyone around her seemed to carry on as if these were ordinary times.
The road curved up a hill, and at the top, she could see the Eel again. It made her relax, but still she wanted to yell at her family because they didn’t know a thing about what was going on. It started with Jake and Dale and how they thought they didn’t love each other anymore. If she could make it right between them again, the other things would fall in place. The mine woul
dn’t go through and they’d have a place to live forever until Jehovah’s New Kingdom. The trees would grow back and the forests would sing again. She sighed and Dale adjusted her on her lap. The road turned into a four-lane highway until Kyle took the off-ramp that led to their dirt road, then home.
***
Jake sat at the kitchen table, eating the pancakes Dale had left warming on the woodstove. His jaw still hurt from where Kyle’s fist had caught him, so he chewed carefully, thinking about how his fists flew out from his body sometimes before he was even aware of them. Jake had heard of blackout alcoholics, and he knew he might fall into that category, but what scared him more was that he was something different and that he had no words for it. When the anger came on, all his thinking just left him. He looked at his hands, saw again the limbless trees bending over his knuckles, and he cursed them. The fork looked like a weapon, so he set it down and turned over his hands to study his palms. Calluses lined the pads and his fingers curled toward him. Sometimes it felt like all he had in the world were these two hands, his strong back and the deep ache for land. Maybe in the end, these wouldn’t be enough.
Jake and Kyle fell into a rhythm as they dug up the cemetery, rising early and leaving before the children were fully awake. The men didn’t talk during the day, sifting through the earth and finding ashy bones. In one grave there were only two finger bones, a button and a ring. It got to Jake. As he dug each day, he wanted to know what had happened to the rest of the skeleton. The nearly empty box sat with the others under the tarp near the entrance to the cemetery, and he paused each time he walked past the pile. He thought about his own wedding ring, lost in the woods on a job, before he knew it wasn’t smart to wear it when he was working, back when even if he’d known the danger, he still would have worn it.
Justy remained quiet, and Ms. Long kept an eye on her but stopped asking her to speak in the story circle, stopped asking what was wrong. Justy did her work, did it well and fast, and often sat with her eyes closed, aware of the sound of Ochre’s pencil hitting the desk, aware of Dale’s lonely wanderings in the house and Jake’s smoldering anger. Rain fell from the gray skies, and Justy wished for it to stop. She wanted the smell of spring and heat to coax the trees to form new buds.
***
Dale pulled the lemon meringue pie from the oven, and it dazzled the children from where they sat eating a lunch of split pea soup. Jake and Kyle were already in town, helping to set up the senior class trapshoot. The browned tips of the meringue reminded Justy of the Pacific and the storms that stirred up whitecaps. The kitchen smelled deeply of lemon and crust. Dale smiled at the pie as she set it on the counter.
“Looks good, Mama,” Micah said, between slurps of soup. Lacee nodded and Justy wished her stringy hair would braid as nicely as Lacee’s did. Lacee had learned to French-braid, and that’s how she’d worn her long hair for six days now.
“Thanks,” Dale said, and washed her hands. She went into the bedroom she and Jake shared and changed into warmer clothes. When the kids had washed their bowls, they walked to the Willys, a cardboard box holding the pie. Lacee arranged it on her legs. Dale changed the truck’s gears with authority, and they curved onto the old road. The Eel was calming down a little, the letup in the rain the past two days helping to clear her out, and the color of the trees leading down to the river was almost like the color of the water.
Dale guided the truck onto the road that led back to the shooting range. Cars and trucks lined the dirt parking lot, and Justy was disappointed not to see the Volvo. Harris’s red Toyota sat next to Kyle’s tired-looking Chevy. She didn’t know some of the vehicles and realized that people from River Fork and Madrone must have come. A gray Chevy had a small bumper sticker in the window that read, “Insured by Smith & Wesson,” and Justy wondered who they were.
She looked for Jake and Kyle but couldn’t see them. The family climbed out, Dale carrying the pie and heading toward the knot of people gathered around the two tables with donated cakes, pies and frozen turkeys. The senior class—all fifteen of them—were trying to raise enough money to take a trip to Disneyland. Dale handed the pie to Lacee, who boldly walked through the people and offered it to the two women in charge of the trapshoot prizes. Justy gazed at the food while the women talked, wishing she could take all of the prizes home and fill up the empty spaces.
“This looks lovely,” said Connie Fry, who was Jordan’s mother and also had a son in the senior class. Lacee nodded and turned to seek Dale, who approached with a slight blush budding on her fair face. The other woman at the table was the school cook, Sally Ferris. Her husband, Fred, was a faller, too.
“Thanks,” Dale said, and smiled. The two women knew Dale only from the stories told about Jake and her appearance at their doors on infrequent Sunday afternoons, holding the Watchtower and Awake! in her hands while Joella Mills spoke to them. Justy had seen Connie at Hilltop, laughing and drinking. She looked better in the sunlight, her red hair curled and her makeup all in place. Dale and her girls walked toward the cement strip where the shooters would stand. Micah had disappeared, and Justy was torn between looking for him and studying the shotguns lined up in a row, leaning against a low wooden barrier. The guns were all oiled and shined, and their barrels reflected the spring sun. Gil Walker sat in a wheelchair at the edge of the strip. He couldn’t read or write, but he carried a whole different kind of knowledge in his old body. Jake always said he was the best faller in the state, even though he spent most of his time these days in the wheelchair.
Justy closed her eyes and sensed Jake in the small cement building that was half buried in the ground forty feet in front of the rifles. When she opened her eyes, she saw Jake, Kyle, Micah and Jeff Harris walking back to the crowd. Jake held an orange disk in his hand and tossed it as he walked. He stopped in front of Dale and said, “Glad to see you made it.” Harris kept walking, not acknowledging Dale or the girls, his left foot leaving a slight trail behind him.
Jake and Kyle had had no trace of the fight in their faces for weeks now. But Dale still looked for it, grateful it was not her own skin that purpled, then yellowed, then betrayed by returning to its normal tone. Jake held the orange disk out to Micah, told him he could have the pigeon and followed Harris to sign up for the first shoot.
Mark Sloan, another faller and Jennifer’s grandfather, stepped forward and called for the first round to begin. He told the men to make sure they’d paid and to check their guns. Six men stepped from the crowd and picked shotguns from the row. Dale pulled her children back from the cement strip onto the dirt where the majority of the crowd stood. Shelby Gaines readied himself first, cigarette hanging from his lip. He brought the gun to his shoulder and sighted just above the cement building. He yelled “Pull,” and a clay pigeon flew from the building off to the right, and Gaines fired, blowing it to pieces. Justy’s head hurt from the gun’s blast, and she worked her way back through the crowd, plugging her ears. She saw Ms. Long’s green Subaru pull into the parking lot, and Justy stepped next to Gaines’s white Ford to avoid her.
The teacher climbed out, a clipboard and a pen in one hand, a brown folding chair in the other. Another shotgun fired, and Justy could tell from the crowd’s reaction that the shooter had missed. Ms. Long flinched as she walked toward the crowd, and Justy smiled at her faded jeans, white turtleneck and green vest. Her flowerless hair frizzed more wildly than on a school day, and she wore heavy hiking boots. She walked past Justy to the tables where the prizes waited.
A third man yelled “Pull” and Justy plugged her ears again, starting to understand the rhythm of the gunfire. The image of Ochre’s denim jacket with the bright circle and the four spokes inside glimmered through her mind. Maybe that’s why the Ravens weren’t here, because of the peace sign. She felt her pocket for the stone, knowing if she wanted to speak, she could place it in her mouth. After the shot, she stepped forward to see Ms. Long talking to Sally Ferris. Justy moved along the front
end of the trucks and kneeled when she got within earshot. Ms. Long thumped the clipboard and said something about the community taking a stand. Sally Ferris told her she didn’t think this was the best place to introduce the petition, and Ms. Long responded with facts about erosion and salmon habitat. Sally looked at Connie, who sucked on a cigarette and looked at Ms. Long as if she weren’t human.
Justy heard Kyle yell, “Pull” and plugged her ears. She could tell from the crowd that he’d hit the pigeon. Connie whispered to Sally, and Ms. Long smiled at them. It was her circle-time smile, her exasperated but patient look. When Connie pulled away from Sally, Ms. Long opened her mouth, paused and then closed it.
“If you want to cook your own goose, go ahead,” Sally said and picked at the ice on a thawing turkey. Connie snorted and took another pull on her cigarette.
“Thanks,” Ms. Long said and set her chair up at the other table, pushing back baked goods to make room for the clipboard and her elbows. Justy watched the men take turns shooting and Mark Sloan tabulating scores on a piece of paper he held in his wrinkled hands. Jenny tapped her grandfather on the leg, but he waved her away. On cue, Justy plugged her ears again as Jake trained Kyle’s shotgun on the flying clay pigeon. She felt the recoil of the shotgun on his shoulder and rubbed at her arm. He also hit the target, Dale and Lacee stood on the outskirts of the crowd, off to the left. Ms. Long flinched each time a gun went off, and Connie smirked at her.
The round ended and Gaines won, his prize a ten-pound turkey. He lit up a cigarette and swaggered over to the tables. Ms. Long sat up straighter and tried to catch his eye, but he ignored her and stopped in front of Connie and Sally.
“Nice work, Gaines,” Sally said.
“Thanks, there.” He and Connie puffed on their cigarettes while he looked over the three turkeys, examining each dead, thawing bird as if it would be his first and last meal. Justy’s legs grew tired from crouching, and she stood, getting ready to walk back to the Willys and wait out the gunfire. Gaines finally chose a bird and Sally wrote his name on the list of prizes. He turned away.
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