The bumptious crowing of the rooster was the first thing camp director Debra Edwards had heard as she slipped out of her cabin and set off on her sacramental morning trek, though as she stepped deeper into the woods it faded away, overtaken by the noisy morning chatter of her beloved birds overhead. In spite of everything that has happened, Debra has done her best to keep her chin up and adhere to her daily routines. She has tended her garden daily, weather permitting, harvesting fresh fruit and vegetables for the supper table; has assisted Ludie Belle and the other women in the kitchen and Clara and the two boys in the church office; has policed the entire campgrounds at least once a week; and has—with the help of Corinne Appleby, who brings fresh beeswax to the task—kept the woodwork and furniture in the Meeting Hall polished, all the while caring daily for Colin and their own cabin home. The Blaurock children massacred her herb and flower garden out front, playing some sort of apocalypse game in which her flowers were the condemned sinners, but she has been able to rescue the hardier plants and continues to provide fresh herbs for their daily meals. The cabin is fragrant with them today, for last night she gathered herbs and flowers from her garden and from the woods and hung them on the doors and windows and over the beds, something her Swedish grandmother used to do at Midsummer—for protection, as she said, and Debra so needs protection. She has taken comfort in the camp’s dependence on her and the gratitude of all her friends here; she has also cried a lot. She is crying now. It’s not just the dead bird, it’s everything. She now avoids what was once her secret corner of the camp, but when she can, she still communes with God in her own special way each morning at daybreak, which up to today has been earlier and earlier every day. No matter. She hardly sleeps at all anyway, even when taking the little pills the camp nurse brings her in her shiny black bag. Debra used to pray for sleep; now she only prays she not be sent to prison, leaving Colin on his own.
This morning she has followed No-Name Creek downstream to an untraveled place halfway toward the beehives, and after spraying her under parts against mosquitoes, has squatted beside the creek at the foot of an old wooden footbridge canopied by small trees, out of sight from Inspiration Point, where Ben Wosznik often goes for his morning prayers, her skirt tucked up around her waist, staring in grief through her tears at the body of the little gray phoebe, no doubt another victim of the Blaurock children’s BB gun. Bernice insists she has seen fairies down here at dusk, whispering to each other amid the fireflies and dragonflies and clouds of gnats, and this little phoebe was probably one of them. Do fairies live forever, or are they mere will o’ the wisps, released like mayflies to dance one night and die? And if so, is one night, if beautiful, enough? Should they be grateful? The Blaurocks were here yesterday. Each Friday they turn up just before lunchtime, and each Friday Mrs. Blaurock is told not to come back, but she always does. It is hard to refuse such a big intimidating woman. And her silent, unsmiling husband also seems somewhat ominous. Yesterday, the oldest boy, Mattie, was shooting at birds with a BB gun and Debra took it away from him and scolded him, but his mother grabbed it roughly out of her hands, giving her a push that backed her right up against a cabin wall, and handed it back to the boy, saying she was interfering with his Second Amendment rights. He has no right to shoot my birds! she screamed, fearing she was about to break into hysterical sobs again, but Hunk Rumpel collared Mattie as he ran past, took the gun away, and snapped it in two over his knee. The children started to protest, but Hunk took one step toward them, the folded gun bits in one fist, and they scampered off. Later, they were up on the Point, throwing stones down at everybody in spite. Debra always longed for children of her own, but what if she’d got some like those? Well, the one she has is not all that easy either. She stifles her sobs, wiping her eyes and nose on her skirt hem. Colin, who collapsed after being up half the night from a nightmare about people walking around without any skin on, will be waking again soon and he will need her. Amen, she whispers, and letting her skirt fall, rises to her day.
Bernice Filbert, fairy watcher (they are so common, she doesn’t know why everyone doesn’t see them), has risen at dawn to prepare a lunch for her brother-in-law, just as she rose each dawn to fill her coalminer husband’s lunch pail until that day the mine blew up, taking away a man she never knew beyond his mealtime druthers nor really wished to know. Now, with Lem out of the house, she is plucking her eyebrows and considering the expression she will draw there for the day, a day known for the otherworldly and the unexpected. Open-eyed curiosity perhaps, one brow arched slightly higher than the other, both slightly lengthened to suggest spiritual composure and a readiness to accept whatever might come her way. From Mr. Suggs’ viewpoint: a combination of optimism and professional concern. Bernice has kept her eyebrows plucked since she was a young girl, just like her mother. “You ever seen any of them ladies in the Bible with hairy eyebrows?” her mother would demand, pushing Bernice’s face into the Illustrated Bible pages. “It ain’t lady-like!” And it was true—they did all seem drawn or painted on. Her mother scolded Bernice for everything from uncombed hair to scuffed shoes and just about all between (but not the personal parts, her mother was fiercely silent on the matter, and once, without any explanation, slapped her for flowering her dress before Bernice understood what was happening). But she scolded everyone, it was her mother’s way. She was a permanently dissatisfied woman, as she herself often said. Start by thinking the worst, she would say, and you’re already halfway there. By studying the women in the Bible pictures, Bernice also learned how to keep her hair braided and pinned up under scarves and shawls and how to stand in company and tilt her head just so in conversation and how to make some of the dresses the ladies wore. Today she has chosen a modest but becoming dress of the sort young Esther might wear at the well, though she is thinking more about Queen Esther and how through wile and diplomacy she saved her people, so she has added a lightweight shawl made of crocheted doilies dyed golden and a necklace of colored beads, which, for all others know, might be precious gems.
Her daddy was a miner, nicer than her mother, but easily bullied like Mary’s Joseph was, and not much help when Bernice was being scolded. When he died of the black lung, her mother went to live with her mother, a crotchety old thing even bossier than she was, but by then Bernice was already a licensed practical nurse and married to Tuck Filbert, so she stayed here in West Condon. Tuck was an older fellow who knew her daddy in the mine and always admired the contents of his lunch bucket. She was well past the marrying age and no one else was interested when her daddy, who was already ill with the black lung, suggested it, so without much ado it happened, and there she was, like Ruth and Esther and so many ladies in the Bible, the young bride of an old man, arranged by another old man. Tuck did his duty by her a time or two, but he wasn’t enjoying it and neither was she, so they stopped it, and that was it, and it was enough. Tuck was not much of a husband or even a friend, but leastways he never took hickory to her as she had feared, being forewarned, though she has sometimes said he did, speaking in parables as she often does, for even if he never actually hit her, all those Filberts do lash about fiercely with the tongue, and enough to draw blood. At least to the cheeks.
Her dowry was the wardrobe of Tuck’s mother—who had gotten the flu one winter and passed away without anyone noticing until it was Sunday dinner time—together with a lot of old curtains, table cloths, and other frills the Filbert men had no use for. Bernice adapted all these things to her Illustrated Bible styles, creating interesting collars and puff sleeves and velveteen bodices made out of old pillows. She lengthened the skirts with decorative borders and used beaded cloth belts high up under the breasts with corset-like laces up the front of some of them, and added sashes and brass bracelets and head scarves and an abundance of simple flowing shawls and sashes, often cut from old bedsheets and dyed in primary colors. Her patent leather shoulder bag doesn’t exactly fit, but she needs it in her career, just as she now needs her reading spectacles, which dangle on a plasti
c chain—an accessory Rachel and Ruth probably did without; at least, it’s something you don’t see in the pictures. Because sandals are not appreciated in this part of the world, she has mostly worn high-top nurses’ shoes, though last week she found a pair of sandals in Mr. Osborne’s shoe store and he was so surprised to see them there he gave them to her for a quarter each. She has been trying them out from time to time, watching the reactions of others. Won’t do when winter comes, of course; in the Bible, it’s always summer.
“So, whatcha reckon, old fella? Am I justified? Ain’t we taught to hate evil and cleanse the world of it and ain’t them biker boys worse’n devils?” In the past, when troubled, Ben Wosznik always talked things out with Rocky, and sitting alongside the dog’s grave on the backside of the mine hill, having hiked over here from the camp as the midsummer dawn opened up the sky, he is doing so now, his dog as good a listener dead as he was alive. Though he misses the reassurance of Rocky’s wagging tail. I love you, it had said. You are right. You are always right. But is he? He’s not sure. Hating is one thing, already a sin, but acting on that hate? Doing something that can’t be taken back? Even if it feels like a holy thing to do? “Catholic folks has a halfway place t’go, Rocky. Maybe they’ll let us in and you’n me’ll meet up there.” He gazes affectionately at the grave and then notices that the small wooden cross he carved for it is standing there all right, but at the foot instead of the head, where he put it. And sideways. He gazes off past the big earth-moving machines (they went away for a day and came back again; old man Suggs must be getting better) toward the old tipple and mine buildings, thinking about this, and sees something he hasn’t noticed before. A bone. They ate a lot of chicken up here, but that’s not a chicken bone. His heart sinks. He knows he is going to have to open up the grave. He might be able to claw it away with his fingers, but if Rocky’s still down there, it’s not really something he wants to get his hands into. He wanders over to the mine buildings to see what he can find and under the tipple, where the old rusty railroad tracks pass through, leaning up against a timber, he comes upon a shovel. New one, still shiny. Like the ones he bought for the camp. He already knows what he is going to find.
“Yo, wake up, little Suzie. Let’s think about livin’…”
“I am awake, Duke. And already thinking. You reckon we could maybe pay a visit to the old Bruno house?”
“Now that’s a early mornin’ cogitation t’stir the dust in the attic, Patti Jo. What’s sparked it up?”
“A dream I just woked up from. Or else I woked up first and then I had the dream. It was about playing with Marcella in her bedroom, like we used to do. And there was something she couldn’t find. She wants me to go look for it.”
“Well, bless her little phantom heart, what was it?”
“I don’t know. Just something. I guess I’ll know when I get there. Since your fire chief friend told you where she was buried, it just seems something I gotta do. We can take it and put it on her grave.”
“But didn’t you tell me that Bruno place was fenced off?”
“Yes, but I don’t think the fence is in very good shape. You can see people have been in there, messing around, wrecking stuff.”
“So, a out’n-out burgle, y’mean. You kin tell what day a the year it is by the craziness it sets off. My ma useta keep me home such days. Said it was the day of the swamp demons. But, heck, why not? Sonuvagun, sounds like fun, so long’s nobody don’t start shootin’ at us. Tonight though’s our big night. The live recordin’ session. Don’t wanta die before we’ve played this ballgame to the last out.”
“I know. Maybe afterwards, if we’re on a high and feel like it. Or after Franny Baxter’s wedding tomorrow. We still gotta choose our songs for that, too. Whaddaya think? ‘A Stranger in My Arms’?”
“I was figgerin’ on ‘You Ain’t Nuthin but a Houn’ Dog.’”
“That should do it. Or how about ‘Face on the Barroom Floor’?”
“‘Sixteen Tons’?”
“Oh my! You do know how to hurt a girl. But we shouldn’t make fun, I guess. Not everybody’s so lucky as you and me. You know, I do admire this pretty thing of yours, Duke. It has always stood me in good stead, as you might say, reliable as the old Orange Blossom Special and quite a ticket when it gets up a head of steam. But it’s got appeal when it’s soft like this, too. Like a hank of warm rope.”
“Won’t stay thataway, you keep tryin’ t’knot it.”
“Mmm, yeah, look a-yonder comin’. Whoo-whoo! Up you go! The rush of the mighty engine! These eggs are something, too. Look at ’em! Never seen any hung so low and mighty.”
“Don’t know why them things should hang at all; never did find a pair a pants t’hold ’em right.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t ought to wear pants, honey. Just let ’em swing free like those Scottish mountain fellas do.”
“Well, that’s okay, I reckon, providin’ it ain’t freezin’ out nor not mosquita season. But awright, all aboard, little darlin’. Ready t’git rollin’ down the line. You tell your friend t’close her eyes now…”
Bride-to-be Franny Baxter has asked Duke and Patti Jo to sing “My Happiness” at her wedding tomorrow because it best describes the mood she’s in, except for the lines in it about evening shadows make me blue, for her lover is lying at her side and she is not blue at all. “Whether skies are gray or blue, any place on earth will do, just as long as I’m with you,” that’s her happiness, a happiness she never thought would be hers. She was unlucky to be born a Baxter, unlucky to be fat and homely and redheaded and kept ignorant all her life, unlucky to grow up with God against her, humiliating her and whipping her for reasons she could never understand except maybe she had just been born bad and because she was a she. For a long time Franny did not think of it as suffering because it was all she knew, but you have to be as mental as her sister to stay dumb forever. And now her miserable Baxter life is over. Though she didn’t think so at the time, coming back here to West Condon was the luckiest thing that ever happened to her. She doesn’t believe in fate, doesn’t believe in anything, but she almost could, so perfect has everything worked out. “I never knowed I could ever be so happy.”
“Me neither, sweetie,” says Tessie Lawson, and she squeezes where she has her hand. “Now all we need is a baby. Let’s see if we cain’t make us one. Startin’ tonight after the stag party. I’ll help out.”
The Honey Moon—the full moon of midsummer—has just begun to wane and is still plainly visible in the early morning sky. Will they see another? the Applebys ask themselves on their way to their hives. Whether they do or not, Cecil says, he is certain the bees will; for what would the Heavenly Kingdom be without honey? Isn’t that the Gospel promise: milk and honey? “I wonder,” Corinne wonders, “if they will still have their stingers there?” It is the time of year when the hives are rich to overflowing, which is how the moon got its name. The camp table can use only a small portion of the bounty, so they sell the excess at local markets, tithing to the camp from the profits. Their hand-lettered labels this year say “Wilderness Camp Honey,” and there is a simple line drawing of a cross in a circle. Cecil’s artwork. Corinne has added her usual line from Proverbs: “Eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste.” On their way to the hives, holding hands as they often do, they come upon Mrs. Edwards, looking somewhat woebegone, poor thing, though she greets them cheerfully and they wish her God’s blessings. When she has passed, Cecil remarks on her devotion to the camp and to the Brunist faith and the price she is paying for that. “Not all devotion is holy,” Corinne says mysteriously.
For an interpreter of dreams to wake from a dream in which she is dreaming of the present reality—that her children are playing on the floor of their house trailer, building a toy church camp with blocks and sticks and scraps of paper and cardboard, and that her husband is brushing his teeth in the shower room, as each are—means that the interpreter’s mind is rejecting the efficacy of symbols an
d her powers of analysis are fading. As she rises and pulls on her bathrobe and pads to the kitchenette to start breakfast, she realizes she has been dreaming about rising and donning a bathrobe and reaching for the skillet that she is now reaching for. It’s as if she were still in the dream, though she knows she is not. It does, however, make her feel like she is living simultaneously within two realities, which are nevertheless the same in all respects except that they exist in two different places—one inner, one outer—and are running at slightly different speeds, neither more real than the other. This is not like double vision (she has only one eye, after all) but more like a single vision with two surfaces. And Glenda Oakes knows that she will be living in these paired realities all day, the longest and most testing of the year.
Welford emerges from the bathroom in his shorts and undershirt with a good-morning smile on his face, humming an old church tune, one learned in childhood, and she finds herself thinking about it as if it too were from a dream and not really happening. An omen of some sort… And He walks with me, and He talks with me… Perhaps it will not be a good day. But then, few are.
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