by Roxane Gay
Wade points him toward the road with a ranger-like warning: “Try to avoid the thin ice.” Then he looks at you and says, “Come on, Officer Dove, let’s get a look at that bull.”
For a moment it feels like Wade may be extending his hand—but the point is, he’s not. Not really.
“What for?” you say. “He doesn’t even have his antlers anymore.” You help the greenhorn to his feet. “Come on, Gavin, let’s get you home.”
By the time you reach the road and see the greenhorn shakily off, you’ve imagined it all differently. You’ve imagined the climb up the hill in the bitter cold, a furrowed track near the summit, a glimpse of hide through the trees.
By the time the newspapers are detailing Antlerdam’s arrest, this is no longer imagination, but memory.
And by the time your husband is moving toward you with the ladle, asking, “What’s wrong? Who is it, Syl?” it’s no longer memory, but truth: the great, unrealized love of your youth ends with a sighting of the last bull elk in Fell Gulch, his huge, black head in full sylvan splendor.
So of course, of course you sound exactly the same. So does Wade. And it shouldn’t really surprise you that even after everything—after the bust; and Kenny’s move to Michigan; and your return to ecology; and your years on the same kelp rigs that will eventually lure at least one of your sons; and the great, wild-easy love of your marriage; and life here in Grey’s County; and the eventual death of your father (not from cancer, but pneumonia, of all things, at the age of eighty-three); and so many iterations of disappointment and hope—all it takes is the sound of Wade’s voice to unearth that other part of you: clenched around your guttering twenty-year-old heart, intact, still and always in that moment, in that clearing, raw and sweet, right down to the marrow.
Ron Rash
The Baptism
from The Southern Review
Reverend Yates had awaited his coming, first for hours, then days and weeks. Now it was December and as cold as any in memory. When he’d lowered the metal well bucket, it clanged as if hitting iron. It took a leashed pitchfork, cast like a harpoon, to finally break the ice. He was bringing the water back to the manse when Jason Gunter came out of the woods on horseback. Reverend Yates took the water inside and returned with a shotgun that, until this moment, had never been aimed at anything other than a squirrel or rabbit.
Gunter saw the weapon but did not turn the horse. Even in the saddle the younger man swaggered, the reins loosely held, body rocking side to side. Not yet thirty, but already responsible for one wife’s death, nearly a second.
“That’s a mighty unneighborly way to be greeted,” Gunter said, smiling as he dismounted, “especially by a man of the cloth.”
“I figured it would be one you understood,” Reverend Yates replied.
Gunter opened his frock coat to show the absence of knife or pistol.
“I didn’t come for a tussle, Preacher.”
Gunter was dressed in much the same attire he’d arrived in four years ago—leather boots and wool breeches, white linen shirt and frogged gray coat. As then, his black hair was slicked back and glistening with oil, his fingernails trimmed, undarkened by dirt. A dandy, people had assumed, which caused many to expect Gunter to fail miserably when he’d bought the farm adjoining Eliza Vaughn’s property. But that hadn’t been the case at all. He had brought his wife with him, a woman clearly once attractive but now hunch-shouldered. Her eyes were striking, the color of wisteria, though she seldom raised them when in town. A month after they had come, she’d hanged herself from a crossbeam in the barn, or so the county sheriff concluded.
Reverend Yates lowered the shotgun so it rested in the crook of his arm, but the barrel still pointed in Gunter’s direction.
“If it’s about where Susanna is . . .”
“It ain’t about knowing where she is,” Gunter answered. “That’s over and done with.”
“What is it then?”
“I got need to be baptized.”
When Reverend Yates didn’t respond, the younger man quit smiling. For a few moments they stared at each other.
“If you want someone to baptize you,” Reverend Yates said, “there are plenty of other preachers who can do it.”
“Who said I wanted it?”
Gunter turned and placed two fingers in his mouth and gave a sharp whistle. Eliza Vaughn and her fourteen-year-old daughter Pearl came out of the woods and stood silently beside the horse’s haunches. Reverend Yates stared at her questioningly but she would not meet his gaze. Beneath a coat once worn by her husband, the woman shivered, and perhaps not just from the cold. He had warned her not to let Susanna marry Gunter, but despite what had happened to Gunter’s first wife, Eliza did not stop the marriage. Widowed, she’d been forced to raise her daughters on her own. Gunter was a broad-shouldered man strong enough to keep the farm running. The first wife’s death hadn’t been Gunter’s doing, Eliza claimed. He ain’t never drank a drop of liquor, she’d said, as if all men needed alcohol to summon their perfidy. After the marriage, Gunter helped support Eliza and Pearl, keeping them in firewood, helping plant and harvest crops, digging a new well.
But there had been a price. First a pumpknot swelling Susanna’s left brow, then two weeks later an arm so wrenched out of the socket that it hung useless at her side for weeks. Susanna did not claim she’d bumped her head entering a root cellar or twisted her arm restraining a rambunctious cow. She offered no explanation, nor did her mother or sister, even after several women in the congregation, out of curiosity or compassion, inquired. Her lot in life was to suffer, Susanna appeared to believe. But on that Sunday, watching her wince each time she moved the arm, Reverend Yates told her it was not her duty to suffer. Even then, Susanna had said nothing. She’d turned and walked back through town, past the manse and up the wooded path to where Gunter waited.
“Is this about your daughter, Eliza?” Reverend Yates asked sharply, “because if it is, I swore I’d never tell where she went, and I’ll honor that, even with her own mother.”
“It ain’t about that hussy that you helped run off from me,” Gunter said, looking at Eliza. “You tell him. You’re the one says I got to do it.”
“I want you to baptize Mr. Gunter,” Eliza said.
“Why would you want that, Eliza?” Reverend Yates asked.
“To marry Pearl,” the widow answered softly.
“She’s of a mind it’ll wash any devilment right out of me,” Gunter said. “I don’t think much is in me but it seems some folks do. Anyway, if getting doused puts a mother’s mind at ease I’ll abide it.”
“Pearl is a child,” Reverend Yates said. He looked at the girl, wrapped in a quilt she cinched tight around her neck. Like her mother, she stared at the ground.
“There’s many been married at her age, Preacher,” Gunter said. “There’s one in your own congregation.”
Reverend Yates looked at Pearl. She was not shivering but her cheeks glowed from the cold. He had baptized her and Susanna on the same July Sunday five years ago. A thin, delicate child, one often sick. He remembered how light she’d felt as he took her in his arms and lowered her into the river.
“You and your mother come into the house, child.”
“Nah,” Gunter said. “We need to be getting back. Some of us has to work more than just on Sundays.”
“Eliza,” Reverend Yates said.
She looked at him now, her pale face blank.
“This Sunday, Preacher,” Gunter said. “Douse me in the morning and me and Pearl will get the justice of the peace to marry us right after. I done got that set up.”
“Our baptisms are held in warmer weather.”
“I know for a fact you baptized Henry Cope last winter,” Gunter challenged.
“He was dying,” Reverend Yates answered. “Even then it wasn’t this cold.”
“I know that water will be cold,” Gunter said, grinning now, “but I figure Pearl will warm me up real good later.”
“It isn’
t just the water that cleanses a man,” Reverend Yates answered. “It’s what is in the heart.”
“I know that, Preacher.”
“What if I won’t do it?”
“We’ll go to Boone,” Gunter answered. “There’s more than one preacher in this county. Of course that’s a mighty long walk for Eliza and Pearl, especially with the chance of more snow coming.” Gunter turned and nodded at Eliza and Pearl. “Go on now,” he said.
Reverend Yates watched mother and child walk out of the yard and into the woods, stepping in their earlier footprints as if in Gunter’s presence they dare not even disturb the snow.
“We’ll be seeing you Sunday, Preacher,” Gunter said, raising finger and thumb to tip his hat. He nodded at the shotgun. “I’m a forgiving man, maybe you ought be the same, especially since I wouldn’t be needing a wife if you’d not meddled in another man’s business.”
“I know my business, Gunter,” Reverend Yates replied, but the words sounded feeble.
“Good,” Gunter replied. “Do it come Sunday.”
Gunter jerked the reins and the horse turned. He kicked a bootheel against its flank and went back up the path. Even when Gunter was out of sight, Reverend Yates heard the crunching of snow under the horse’s hooves. He stared at the woods, the bare gray branches reaching upward like wailing women.
Susanna had come in the middle of night, knocking frantically on the front door. Looking out the manse’s window, he’d seen her silhouetted behind a lantern’s glow. When Reverend Yates ushered her in, he saw she was barefoot and dressed only in a shift. Susanna raised the lantern to show the red and purple marks where his fingers had grasped.
“All I done was be late fixing his bath,” Susanna pleaded, terror in her eyes. “He said next time it’d be a rope around my neck, not a hand. He’d do it, Reverend. You know he would.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Get me away from here, someplace he’ll never find me.”
“What of your mother and sister?”
The fear in Susanna’s eyes dimmed.
“They ain’t able to stop him from killing me,” she answered, a sudden coldness in her voice.
Whether she had or had not understood the intent of his question, Reverend Yates would never know. She’d asked for his help, he told himself, so how could he not give it? Was there a relative who could take her in, he asked, one not close by but that she could get to by train. Susanna nodded. He’d put a quilt around her and they walked down the street to Marvin Birch’s house. The three of them had gone to Marvin’s dry goods to purchase Susanna shoes, clothes, and undergarments, enough to wear and also fill a carpetbag. Marvin was known as a skinflint, but he refused any money. Which was all to the good, because it left twenty dollars to give her after Reverend Yates paid for the ticket to Johnson City. She could get to her final destination from there, he’d told her.
Afterward, he’d returned to the manse and waited for Gunter to show up, the shotgun by the door, unloaded but Gunter would not know that. But it was Eliza who’d come on that October morning. Reverend Yates told her he didn’t know where Susanna was and would swear so on a Bible if need be. Without another word Eliza walked back up the path to her farm. Except for some glares when they’d passed each other in the street, Gunter did nothing. Perhaps he believed, as Reverend Yates feared, Susanna would return on her own. He’d seen it before, women or children fleeing and then returning not out of corporal need but some darker necessity. At such times, he feared some malevolent counterpoint to grace operated in the world. But Susanna had not returned. Gunter obtained a divorce on grounds of abandonment.
A polite knock interrupted Reverend Yates’s reverie. Opening the door, he found four congregation members on his porch, in the forefront Marvin Birch. He invited them in. Birch seemed reluctant but the others eagerly left the cold, though no one sat when offered a chair.
“We have heard about Gunter’s latest outrage,” Birch said. “If I had known this was the purpose of his divorce I would have ensured Judge Lingard did not grant it. What Gunter proposes, surely you will not allow?”
“If you mean the marriage itself, I have no part in it. He says he will go to the justice of the peace.”
“But the baptism,” Birch said. “What of it?”
“If I don’t, Gunter told me he’ll go elsewhere,” Reverend Yates answered.
“But if you do so,” Birch sputtered, “it would mean the community condones this abomination.”
“It was Eliza, a member of our congregation, not Gunter, who asked this of me.”
“That is of no importance, Reverend.” The storekeeper bristled. “Let them go elsewhere.”
“He will make them walk there, Marvin, and in this weather such a trek could give a girl with her delicate constitution the whooping cough or influenza. Would you want that on your conscience?”
“Doubtful, I say,” Birch answered. “And if so, might not death be better for the child than being wedded to that blackguard?”
“There is something else,” Reverend Yates said, his voice more reflective. “What if the act itself, despite Gunter’s lack of sincerity, were to truly cleanse the man?”
For a few moments the only sound was the crackle and hiss of the hearth’s burning wood.
“You believe Gunter capable of such change?”
“No,” Reverend Yates answered, “but God is capable. It is the mystery of grace. I cannot be true to my responsibilities if I doubt the possibility.”
“But our responsibility as town elders is different, Reverend. We cannot permit this.”
“So you question God’s wisdom in worldly matters?”
“God allows us the ability to discern evil, Reverend, and the strength to defy it.”
“Yet not in this matter,” Reverend Yates replied, with less certainty than he would have wished. “Be assured, I have not made my decision lightly, gentlemen. I appreciate and understand your concern, but the baptism must be allowed.”
The next morning at the service, Gunter sat with Eliza and Pearl on the back pew. Reverend Yates had contemplated altering the sermon he’d written out Thursday night, but found himself too vexed to do so. As planned, he spoke of Moses, and how he’d led his people to the Promised Land though unable to enter that place himself. He read the sermon with as little attentiveness as his congregation offered in their listening, Gunter’s presence casting a pall over the whole church.
Reverend Yates did not announce the baptism. Instead, he waited until the church emptied but for Gunter, Eliza, Pearl, and himself.
“This weather, surely . . .”
“We got quilts and dry clothes, even a sheet if you ain’t got me a gown,” Gunter said. “I’m going to have a fire on the bank, too. Got my wood and kindling and flint rock already waiting. So we’ll go on out there, Preacher. Have you a fire going so you don’t catch cold.”
Reverend Yates went to the manse and changed into the cotton trousers and white linen shirt he always wore for baptisms. He put on a wool scarf and his heaviest overcoat. The water might rise to his hips but the pants would dry quickly by the fire, so he took no change of clothes, only a drying cloth. The baptism pool was a quarter mile away. Reverend Yates saddled his horse and followed Eliza’s and Pearl’s footprints in the snow, unsurprised when the hoofprints of Gunter’s mount, which preceded the woman and child, merged with those of other horses.
The trail curved and the river lay before him. A man-high fire blazed at the forest’s edge, stoked with enough wood to burn for hours. Pearl and Eliza huddled beside it, Gunter close by. Reverend Yates dismounted and tethered his horse to a dogwood branch sleeved with ice. The elders stood on the riverbank. In the crook of Marvin Birch’s right arm was a rifle.
As Reverend Yates approached, Birch stepped aside so he could see the river.
“Tell me that ain’t a sign from God, Reverend,” the store owner said, facing the river as well.
The river’s deep bend that served as
the baptism pool was completely iced over, the snow-limned surface unmarked but for the tracks of a single raccoon. Had Reverend Yates not known otherwise, he’d have thought a meadow or pasture lay before him.
“When have you ever seen it covered like this?” Birch asked, his thumb on the rifle’s trigger guard. “Never a one of us has. It’s a sign to us all and I’ll abide no man to profane it.”
Reverend Yates turned and looked at Gunter, who appeared in deep reflection as he, too, stared at the frozen river.
“Marvin’s right,” another elder said. “It’s surely a sign from God, Reverend.”
The other elders nodded their assent. For a few moments the only sound was the crackle of the fire.
“There will be no baptism today,” Reverend Yates finally said.
Only then did Gunter rouse himself. He shook his shoulders as if to cast off some burden.
“It’s just ice,” he said, and walked to the river’s edge. He placed a foot on the ice, pressed his bootheel more firmly until his full weight was upon it.
“Fetch me a stout tree limb, woman,” Gunter said to Eliza.
As Eliza turned from the fire, Marvin Birch stepped close to Gunter. He gripped the rifle on the upper stock and held it out.
“God won’t let you break that ice even with this, Gunter,” the store owner announced, nodding at the butt end, “and it made of hickory.”
“We’ll see about that, damn you,” the younger man replied, grabbing the rifle barrel with both hands and thrusting the butt downward.
The sharp report of shattered ice was instantly followed by a louder crack. The sounds crossed the river, echoed back. Gunter still gripped the iron barrel. He appeared to stare down at it intently as skeins of gray smoke encircled his head. He gave a violent shudder and fell forward, the webbed ice opening to accept the body. Gunter slowly sank. Soon the only sign of him was the water’s pinkish tinge.
In the months following Gunter’s death, the community made certain that Eliza and Pearl were cared for. Spring crops were planted and harvested, wood for winter set by. At sixteen, Pearl married Lewis Hampton, whose father owned the valley’s best bottomland, ensuring Eliza as well as her daughter would never again go wanting. Susanna learned of Gunter’s death through relatives and returned for Pearl’s wedding, though she did not stay, having made a life elsewhere. But Susanna and her family visited yearly even after Eliza died. On such Sundays, the sisters and their husbands and children filled a pew.