Stella thought, They don’t want me to go into the chapel—for years? “I ain’t afraid,” Stella said.
“I can see you’re fearless,” Hendrick said.
“Hush, both of you,” Motty said. To Hendrick she said, “You’ve set eyes on her, you want anything else?”
Uncle Hendrick took Stella’s hands again, this time at the wrists. He pursed his lips, stared at her for close to a minute. Were his eyes misting up? “Stella,” he said finally. “Oh, Stella.” His voice was hoarse with emotion.
Stella nodded slowly. Yes, that was her name.
“I’ve brought you something.” He nodded to Ruth, who opened the green suitcase. She handed him a leather-bound book.
“This is The Book of Clara,” he said. “Do you know who Clara is?”
“My great-great-grandmother. She was there when the bushwhackers came.”
Hendrick was delighted. “Ha! Yes, she was! But nobody knows what really happened—nobody but us.” He put the book in her hands. It was thin, and the deep red cover was blank. On the first page it said:
The Book of Clara
Being the First Volume of a New Revelation
From the God in the Mountain
To Clara Birch, Recorded by Russell Birch, her Husband
with Commentary and Clarifications
by Hendrick Birch
“Russell Birch kept a diary, documenting everything that Clara saw and experienced in those years. This isn’t the original, of course, that’s in safekeeping. But I’ve had it typed up, and this book includes the commentaries—special explanatory text that I’ve written.”
Motty snorted.
Stella sat down and began turning the thin pages. The text was typeset like a library book. The first twenty or so pages were walls of text, and didn’t look like a diary so much as a history book. Then the pages changed to have two columns.
Hendrick had moved to hover over her. “Those are the things Russell recorded on the left, and my commentary on the right.” The right-hand column was much wider than the left.
“It starts with the story of the night the Rebels came to this farm,” Hendrick said. “This is the story of the first time a Birch met the God in the Mountain.”
The God in the Mountain. That was what she’d seen.
She began to flip through the pages, not reading, but looking at the diary entries. Phrases popped out at her: “the old woman of the cave”; “stone clad yet not stone cold”; “without a visible wound.”
“She called it a woman,” Stella said.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Hendrick said. “Clara was confused. She didn’t commune with it, not true communion as we now know it—that was Esther, her daughter—so of course she got some things wrong. That’s why there are commentaries.”
“Did you bring Esther’s book, too?”
Hendrick drew back. “Aren’t you eager! No, I want you to read The Book of Clara, and when I come back I’ll answer all your questions. All right?”
“But there are more books, right? Does Motty have a book?”
“That ain’t for you,” Motty growled.
Hendrick glanced at his sister, and then said to Stella, “There are certain rules. We don’t share the books of anyone living. Their story’s not finished.”
“What about my mama, then?” Stella asked.
“Her neither,” Motty said.
This made no sense to Stella. Hendrick looked apologetic. “Motty’s the eldest. She has say on what you’re ready for. But for now, let’s start with Clara! You’re about to learn how special your family is, and the great things the God has promised us.”
“One body, ever blooming,” Aunt Ruth intoned.
“One body, ever blooming,” Hendrick repeated. Stella had no idea what they were talking about, but she was alarmed to see that it had caused a tear to well up in his eye. “You don’t even know what you’re capable of, do you?”
She tried to answer, but then it happened: that fat tear blooped over his eyelid and ran down his cheek. He didn’t even wipe at it.
“I’m ashamed to say it, I’m a little jealous of you, Stella. You have a great calling, and I’m just a…” He shook his head, unable to come up with a suitably humble word. “A disciple. I want to bring the word. But you, Stella, you’re the one who can receive the word directly. Someday it will be revealed to you.” He glanced at Motty. “Someday soon.”
Motty said, “All right, all right. Everybody’s very happy. Did you bring what was on my shopping list?”
Uncle Hendrick didn’t respond; he was gazing at Stella with a rapturous expression that gave her the heebie-jeebies. Aunt Ruth said, “Please, Mathilda. The groceries are all in the car. Can’t you give us a moment?”
Stella froze. Hendrick slowly turned his eyes toward Ruth. Even Veronica sensed that her mother had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Motty didn’t say another word. But in two minutes they were gone, driven like swallows before a storm.
Her grandmother stayed in a foul mood the rest of the day, but Stella was impervious to it. She went back to her chores, almost singing to herself, You don’t even know what you’re capable of.
* * *
—
if it hadn’t been the night before her first day of school, she might never have heard Motty leave the house. But Stella had been tossing and turning, imagining cruel children and stern teachers. She was worried she’d get lost on the way to the schoolhouse. She was petrified that she’d look like a pauper in her cheap dress and worn shoes. She distracted herself by rereading her favorite passages from The Book of Clara.
Each thin page was split into two columns, everything done on typewriter so it looked official. The left was Russell Birch’s words, and the right showed Hendrick’s commentary.
Russell, Stella thought, wasn’t much of a writer. He was vague when she craved details, and unrelentingly specific about things she didn’t care about, like the amount of seed they’d planted in spring and the number of pigs they slaughtered in the fall. He also seemed pretty confused by what his wife was up to. Clara had found a cave a year earlier, the entrance “not much bigger than a bobcat’s den.” She’d spent hours widening the hole and exploring the chambers inside. Russell avoided the place and only went in as far as the first chamber. As the war progressed Clara spent more and more time there, maybe grieving for her son, who joined the Confederate army.
October 23rd, 1864
Clara’s worries continue and I cannot do much with her. Six or perhaps seven Rebels rode into the cove two nights ago and carried off much of D. Whitehead’s stores as well as one ham. He rang the bell and several came running but we were too late. They are hungry and will return. Clara has said that our home guard of old men and women is inadequate and our root cellar no good. She has decided that the cave is to become our warehouse, unknown to the Rebels, even our son. She has already tucked away all of our potatoes and onions and cornmeal in this new hole. She means to put the pig in there too but I will not allow that. I think she would burrow in as well, with me or without me.
Russell never said why he didn’t go in, but Hendrick’s commentary explained it:
Russell, unlike Clara, sensed the sacred nature of the place and was afraid, for good reason! Russell no doubt remembered the Lord’s command to Moses to let no one go up Mount Sinai: “Whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death.”
Stella paged ahead to her favorite part, when the bushwhackers showed up to the Birch farm on a December night. It wasn’t at all how Abby had told it. The four Rebels were led to the farm by Russell and Clara’s own son, Cyril, which “about broke Clara’s heart.” This was late in the war and her son and his fellow soldiers were a scrawny and scraggly bunch, without even a uniform between them. The strangers got angry when the root cellar was empty,
and one of them pointed a rifle at Russell. It was then that Clara confessed where their food was kept and led them to the cave. Said, “Here, take it.”
As the men climbed down into the hole, Clara put a hand on their son’s shoulder and held him back. Russell wrote:
We heard a couple of them holler and laugh when they found our whiskey. Soon all talk ceased. We waited a long time over that hole, not hearing nothing. Cyril called down and started to go in after them, and Clara grabbed on to his arm and would not let go. She told him those boys weren’t coming back. This place belonged to him now. Cyril asked who she meant, and she said its secret name.
Oh, that secret name. Hendrick’s commentary said that Russell never recorded the name, but perhaps it was one of the Hebrew names for God. Stella pondered the mystery for hours, trying out syllables on her own.
Stella was rereading that last bit of the diary—about the end of the war and Clara making the children promise not to talk about the cave—when she heard the back door creak open, then close with a careful tock.
Stella told herself it was just Motty heading for the outhouse, despite there being a night pan for exactly these emergencies. But it was strange that Motty had closed the door so quietly. The Book of Clara had put Stella in a suspicious state of mind.
Stella opened her door and crept to the kitchen. The air was cold; the wood floor colder. A cabinet drawer hung open, and a kitchen chair was out of place, standing by itself near the cupboards. That was strange. Motty liked everything in its place, and Stella herself had been the one to clean up after supper.
She went to the small window. Motty was crossing the yard in the bright moonlight. Her grandmother wore only her housedress and a shawl. Her feet were bare, which must have stung on the cold ground; the grass gleamed silver, dew about to become frost. Just before she reached the tree line above the barn, she looked back at the house.
Stella jerked her head away from the window. For a terrifying moment she thought she’d been seen.
When she next had the courage to look, Motty was gone.
Stella stood there, shifting from foot to foot, studying that patch of moonlight. Motty didn’t appear.
She thought, You don’t even know what you’re capable of. Then she ran back to her room and pulled on her shoes, not bothering with the laces.
The chapel door hung open. She stopped well back from the doorway, listening and trembling in the cold. Finally she crept forward.
At the far end of the room, two fat candles on the floor lit the edges of the cave mouth. The boards had been pushed aside. Motty was nowhere to be seen.
Stella tiptoed forward, imagining that her steps would be heard below. When she was almost to the platform, a sound arose from the hole. Motty, pleading. It was a tone Stella had never heard before in her grandmother’s voice.
Stella took a step, then another. It was as if someone else controlled her body, someone braver. At the entrance to the cave she knelt down. Slowly leaned over.
Lantern light, swaying and throwing jagged shadows against the wall. Motty’s voice floated out of the dark. “Please,” she said. “Please—” And then she said a word, three syllables.
A chirp of surprise escaped Stella’s throat.
The shadows at the base of the steps suddenly changed size. Stella jerked back her head. She ran, trying to keep her steps light as a deer’s. Jumped through the doorway onto the slick grass. And in her head she chanted those syllables: Ghostdaddy, Ghostdaddy, Ghostdaddy.
Knowing that name changed nothing about her situation, but it made her feel differently about everything. It was not just that she shared a secret with Clara and Motty. It was that she knew something that Uncle Hendrick didn’t.
The solution to the mystery so thrilled her that it was two days later before she stopped to wonder about a much larger mystery: What was it that Motty was asking the Ghostdaddy for?
4
1948
Seeing absalom whitt was like standing high above a fast river on a hot day. Stella wanted nothing more than to let herself go, but she couldn’t help thinking of rocks.
“So,” he said. Still filling that doorway. “I suppose the prayer chain’s still working.”
“The pony keg express.”
He chuckled dryly. Back when Abby ran whiskey, up here in the cove with no telephone, there was a kind of postal service made up of moonshiners, drinkers, good ol’ boys, guitar players, and Baptist backsliders that relayed orders from his customers and allowed Abby to let them know when he’d deliver.
“I appreciated you putting out the word.” She walked toward him between the pews. He was tall as ever, but thin, so thin. Had prison done that to him? She didn’t want to think about that. “I came as soon as I could.”
“You sure did. Didn’t expect you till morning, or, well…”
Or, well, if she’d come at all. He didn’t have to say it for it to hurt. She said, “I saw the girl. At least I’m pretty sure.”
“She’s shy.”
“And stays up awful late, too.”
“It’s true, she don’t sleep much.”
“So you been watching out for her?”
He stepped back out of the doorway, scratched the back of his head, looked off toward the trees. Abby had two speeds. Sober you couldn’t rush him, drunk you couldn’t keep up.
“She came up to my place, after what happened with Motty. I let her sleep on the couch.”
“You got a couch? That’s practically civilized.”
“My bony butt got too old for wooden chairs all the time.”
Stella wondered if that change came from prison, too. In the moonlight his face was haggard. He was the closest thing to a father she’d ever had, a man who’d paid a huge price to protect her—and in return she’d done him nothing but wrong.
“Uncle Hendrick’s got to be on his way,” Stella said. “I’d appreciate knowing how Motty died.”
His eyes stayed on the treetops. There were two ways to Abby’s shack from here—go up a ways to the ridge and follow that west, or head down to Motty’s, cross the yard, and start back up the other side.
He said, “Let me walk you down.”
Abby, being Abby, didn’t speak till they’d reached Motty’s barn.
“There’s where she fell,” Abby said, pointing to a spot behind the house.
“You found her?”
“I came down to check on them, saw her there. I carried her into the house.”
“And there wasn’t anything—anyone around?”
He gave her a look. Maybe he heard the tension in her voice. “It was just her,” he said. “Figure it was a heart attack or a stroke. Hard to say.”
Stella nodded at the house. “Who set out the Bible?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.” If it wasn’t Abby, it was Sunny. Stella had plenty more important questions for Abby, and not much time before Hendrick spoiled everything. “You might as well stay up now,” Stella said. “Let me make you some coffee.”
“Naw, I better get back. Get that girl to bed.”
He promised he’d be down in a while but wasn’t sure if Sunny would come with him. “Like I said. Shy.”
“Has Uncle Hendrick met her?”
Abby was surprised. “Of course he has.”
“Really?”
“He stops by every few months. Like he does.”
Fuck me, Stella thought.
“You don’t have to worry about him,” Abby said. “Hendrick is Hendrick, and he ain’t—”
“Has he held a service for her? In this chapel?”
Abby gawped at her.
“Tell me,” Stella said.
“I don’t know anything about that. You know I don’t get involved.”
“You’re involved enough to cemen
t over that hole. Come on, I know Motty didn’t do it herself, that’s what she has you for.”
“She asked me to do it, and I did it.”
“When was this?”
“Just last week.”
So Hendrick didn’t know about that yet. “Did she say why she wanted to seal it off?”
“I didn’t ask. I don’t have anything to do with that Birchy churchy stuff.”
“Birchy churchy?” Stella laughed. “Is that what you call it?”
He looked pained, and she regretted the laugh. Abby had never been a professional at hiding his emotions, but there was a nakedness to him now. She’d have to be careful with him.
He said, “You should talk to Sunny.”
“Maybe if she stops running away from me.”
Stella stepped onto the back porch. Stared at the roller washer, the bane of her childhood. She’d spent hours cranking that thing.
“So what are you going to do?” Abby asked.
Her breath caught. Stella waved a hand without turning around. “I’m just trying to get through the funeral.” That wasn’t what he was asking, and she knew it.
“You’re all she’s got,” he said.
“She’s got you.”
“Stella.”
She looked at him. “She obviously trusts you. We could work something out. I could help support her.”
“It ain’t my place,” Abby said. “Motty wanted you.”
“She say that in her will and testament? Otherwise…”
“You know Motty. She never wrote anything down.”
“Well, I can’t take her.”
Abby didn’t answer.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Besides, she probably hates me.”
“Sunny don’t hate you. She don’t know you.”
“Those’re the easiest people to hate.”
“You need to get to know her is all. Come over to my place with me, I’ll introduce you.”
Stella felt the back of her neck go cold.
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