by Urban Waite
“You did good,” John said. “Mary May is with us now. You helped to save her.”
Will turned. John stood there looking at him. Farther on, back by the road his men were standing, all of them with their weapons held crossways in their arms. Tired looking but at rest. “And Lonny?” Will asked. “He said he meant to kill her.”
“Yes,” John said. “I saw how he was going. I should have seen it sooner.”
“Sooner?”
“His drinking. The loosening of his faith. He was not a true believer,” John said. “He was breaking away from us, breaking away and falling in among his own past sins.”
“That’s why you tracked us? That’s why you followed us up the mountain?”
“Yes,” John said. “I could not trust him. I did not know if I could trust you. Lonny used to say you were an enigma.”
A leaf fell again, and it fluttered and flipped, end over end, then came to rest between them. “Enigma?”
“It was not the word he used,” John said. “But I see now that he was the one that could not be trusted. I should have seen it earlier. I should have known all of it, all he said and all he did, was all leading up to this.”
“I did not mean to kill him.”
“You didn’t kill him,” John said. “You would have never done a thing like that. He simply fell. He toppled over a cliff and he fell and broke his neck. It was an accident and all of us could see that clearly. His blood is not on your hands.”
Will locked eyes with John as he put a hand to Will’s shoulder.
“You are still with us. You are part of who we are. You have provided us with a service and we are thankful for you and all you do. There is no shame in this. Once you had owed us everything, but that time has long passed and it is us who now owe you. We will take you back to Eden’s Gate and there you will receive your blessing and we will give you a place to rest and help you just as you have helped us. You are still with us, aren’t you, Will?”
“Of course,” Will said, not knowing what else he could say.
“We have given you salvation. But you too have given us your soul.”
“Yes,” Will said. “I know that. I never stopped knowing that.”
“Good,” John said. “The Father will be glad to hear it. He waits for you. He waits to give you his blessing once again. You will stay at Eden’s Gate tonight and you will be my guest and The Father’s.” John took his arm away, he turned to go.
Will stopped him. “What about Mary May?”
“You don’t need to worry about her,” John said. “You may well see her soon enough. She is with us now. She is with us just as she is with her brother. Both of them are now a part of us.”
* * *
SHE LOOKED AT DREW AND WAITED ON HIM TO SAY SOMETHING to her, but he never did. He just kept driving. They were headed down the mountain. All she could see when she looked out at the blur of forest as they passed it by was her own reflection staring darkly back at her.
“Where have you been?” she said.
He turned for a moment to look at her. He was now more man than he was boy and she wondered briefly when and how that had come to be. “I’ve been here and there,” he said. “Working, I guess is what you might call it.”
She sat and stared at him, she was scared to ask. “Working?” she said.
“They’ve been good to me up here.”
“That right?”
“That’s right.” He glanced her way again then put his eyes back on the road. “You don’t trust them, do you?”
“We were raised not to. And some would say for good reason, too.”
“You’re talking about Daddy and Mamma, aren’t you?”
“Who else,” she said. “John and them have been scaring off our distributors. They’ve been trying to shut us down.”
“You still selling alcohol?”
“Not much of a bar without it.”
“There’s reasons for what they do. There’s good reasons.”
She shook her head. “You sound just like them.”
“There’s good reasons for that, too,” he said.
They had come down the mountain about five miles and he turned the wheel. The truck tires came off the pavement and she could hear the gravel beneath the tires and small rocks hitting in the wheel wells.
“What’s this?” she said. “You said you’d take us home.”
He looked over at her but did not say anything. She leaned forward now and peered ahead, trying to decipher their route from the darkness.
“I said I’d take you home,” he said. “I didn’t mean your home, or Mamma’s and Daddy’s home.”
Up ahead she could see cement blocks to either side of the road and the gate there. The gate now opening to take them in. Church members waited on either side and she could see the guns they carried and the eyes they laid upon her as they passed.
She sat there watching them as they went. And as Drew brought the truck forward, she turned and saw that same gate close behind her. “Drew?” she said.
“Don’t you worry.”
She reached behind her and brought up the .38, holding it at her side just out of sight.
She could see buildings now and lights and the spire of a church. Outside the night seemed to grow darker as they drove, the lake there only distinguished from the night by the reflection of their headlights. She could tell beyond the buildings and the church the land was a mix of trees and grass that came up from the lakeshore and rose toward the mountains.
Drew pulled the truck around and brought it to a stop. He leaned forward and brought the transmission into park, then he took the keys. The engine stopped working and for a moment she felt very alone there in the truck, as if her brother were not there, and she had been left now completely on her own.
“Is that Daddy’s .38?” Drew asked. He turned now and looked to where she held the gun, then he looked to see what she would say.
“It’s his.”
“I wondered if he still had it.”
“You wondered?”
“I just thought about it sometimes. I’ve thought about a lot of things while I’ve been up here.”
“I wish Daddy would have found you,” she said. “I wish he’d had a chance to talk to you.”
“You think it would have changed some things?”
“I think it would have. I wish you two could have worked it out.”
“He never really gave me much of any kind of chance,” Drew said. “You know that just as well as me.”
She studied his face in profile. “He was stubborn but it didn’t mean he didn’t care.”
“I get it,” Drew said. “Look, they put this place aside for you.” He nodded toward the little house that sat before them. “You’ll be able to shower. You’ll be able to rest. I’m sure you’re tired. I’m sure you could use a little time.”
“Time for what? I never asked to come here. I don’t want to be here. I want you to take me home. Not here but home. Our home.”
“There’s people who want to meet you, Mary May. You understand you are a guest. They only want to talk to you.”
“They can come into the bar if that’s what they want,” she said. “We’re open every day from noon to two.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “I don’t want you being rude.”
She gave her brother a hard stare. “You know they shot at me? You know they shot at me just this afternoon?”
“I think that was just a misunderstanding,” Drew said. “They’re good folk up here. You’ll see.”
She didn’t take her eyes off him.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t shoot no one. They want to talk to you. That’s not going to hurt you none. And when it’s all done you’ll go back down to Fall’s End and your bar.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“You should come back to town with me, Drew. That’s what Daddy and Mamma would have wanted.”
“That’s kind of you to
say, but you and I both know there’s not much truth in that.”
* * *
WILL RODE IN THE BACK OF THE PICKUP WITH THE FOUR OTHER men. All of them were thirty to forty years younger than him and tattooed and pierced in ways that Will had never even thought of. None of them said anything to him, but he could see their eyes rest on him and on his rifle from time to time before they moved on again, back out to the forest beyond and the night that now came on toward them forty miles per hour at a time. No one talked. The wind was rushing with a fierceness as they came down the highway road then turned down the gravel lane and came to Eden’s Gate.
John rode shotgun and Will watched him lean and talk with one of the guards. The guard bent down to talk with John and then pointed out ahead of him to where the buildings sat.
It had been three weeks since he’d been here and he could see the metal fence posts were beginning to go in at the perimeter of the property. A new house was going up as well. One of many smaller houses that made up this community, some still unpainted, half salvaged and half built of roughly sawn wood and plank that had been erected down the gravel drives that composed this place. There were fires burning in many places and he watched the people who stood around them, men and women, some he knew by name but many he didn’t.
The driver took them down through the houses and small outbuildings and Will looked toward the pickup he thought he’d seen Drew driving. It sat in front of a small house with white clapboard siding and a single light on within. He could see nothing of the inside through the curtains save the light.
“Is she in there?” he asked, turning to the man who sat closest to him.
The man only nodded, the pickup coming to a stop now just before the church.
John was up out of the truck, and he came around thumping his hands along the top of the bed. He gave Will a pat on the back and told him to follow him.
They moved back through the compound until they found the square tractor barn that had sat there always. John led him inside the aluminum-sided barn that sat atop a wood frame and that served as the mess hall for all of the compound.
“You’ll see some things have changed,” John said.
It was dark in many places and their feet rang out in the emptiness of the place as they walked. Above, lights hung from the rafters, a chord suspending a single bulb within the green cone of a shade. All of it gave the place a washed-out tone. In one corner, leading down and then out of sight were the collected pipes and wirings that provided water and electricity to the houses and church.
Will kept walking. He followed John a little farther and he was led among a collection of long wooden picnic benches. John told Will to sit.
Like much of the place seen at night, this place was poorly lit and he sat and set his bag down then put his rifle atop the table. John had disappeared through another door about three quarters of the way down one wall of the converted tractor barn and Will put his eyes upon it.
He did not wait long before the door opened and a woman came out carrying a tray of food and a glass of water. He knew her almost as soon as he saw her and he stood and watched her come toward him across the floor.
He took off his hat and she leaned in and looked at him then set the tray on the table right between them. “That’s some of that buck you shot last week. Thought you might appreciate it.”
He thanked her and waited for her to sit before taking his own seat across from her. “You eat already?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They have it all set up like clockwork around here. That there in front of you is almost the last of it. It doesn’t take long for us to get through just about anything these days. All these new faces around here and all of them young and hungry.” She watched him dip his fork into the meat. It had been cooked slow and he could see they’d put some fat to it.
When he looked up at her she was watching him. “How are you doing, Holly?”
“Better than I was outside this place.”
“Uh huh,” he said. He ate some more of the meat. She’d put a slab of cornbread on the side and it dripped with butter. He picked that up and ate it too.
“I like to watch a man eat,” she said.
“Well, I like to watch a woman from time to time too,” he said.
She smiled at him. “You’re still a charmer, Will. But old as you are I doubt you got much left in the tank for me.”
He smiled back at her then picked up his glass and drank it halfway empty. She was nearly thirty years younger than him and for a time she’d been his closest neighbor. But her husband had beat on her and Will had gone over there almost weekly just to check on her and see that she was okay. After Will’s wife and daughter died he had not seen much of Holly for four or five years, then one day she just showed up at the gates of the church saying her husband had disappeared, but Will had always thought Holly had been the one to make him disappear.
“John said maybe we’d be seeing more of you now that Lonny’s gone,” Holly said.
Will coughed and put a hand to his mouth, almost choking on the meat. “Word travels fast,” Will said.
“John just told me. He said Lonny had himself an accident. I can’t say I mind that he is gone. He was an asshole to begin with. Always trying to fuck every single one of us.”
“That right?” Will asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “So you think you’ll start to come around more often? I’ve got to tell you it’s starting to get a little weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah,” she said, lowering her voice a little. She leaned in now and looked him in the eye. “I fuck John from time to time and he tells me shit. He tells me shit I shouldn’t hear. I don’t have a fucking clue about half of it, but the other half is fucking out there. The Father and his scripture and all this shit about the prophet and the coming fire of Hell. Sinners and saints. Salvation and damnation.”
“That’s nothing new,” Will said. He finished off his plate of food then pushed the tray a little way across the table. “That’s just what passes for conversation around these parts.”
“You’re a hardened old cowboy,” Holly said. “I always liked that about you. But just be careful you don’t become an old fool like so many other fool men I’ve known.”
He looked at her and she didn’t say a thing. After a while, he said, “Tell it to me then.”
Holly looked behind at the door she had come out of. Then she turned and sat a bit straighter in her seat. “Where to start,” she said. “Guns, weapons, most of these kids my age and even younger on this shit they’re calling Bliss. They suck it up their noses. It helps them do the things they have to do I guess.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Most of them would kill their mothers if it meant they could get another hit. But the shit they’re pulling on these farmers out here, on people we used to know, it’s shameful,” she said. “It’s not the kind of scripture either of us remember from back in town. They’ll find your weakness and then they’ll start to push. They push and push and they keep adding on the weight. Eventually one thing has got to give.”
He looked at her and waited on her to tell him more. “You still a believer?” he asked.
She laughed. “You are asking me? You? The one who would rather spend three weeks out of every month alone in the woods trapping rabbits and hunting bucks than sit here and have a conversation with another human being.”
“We all serve our purpose.”
“Yes, we do,” she said, smiling at him. “Yes, we do at that. I believe in The Father. I believe in what he sees. In his words and what is coming. But sometimes—” She stopped. Behind, heard through the kitchen door were footsteps. She stood and took the tray up and as she turned Will saw John step through, then pass her by.
“You want anything else, Will?”
Will raised up his hand. “I’m done,” he said.
“Good,” John said. “You’re going to need your strength, The Father asked to see you alone i
n his church. He wants to put his hands upon you and thank you personally for all you’ve done.”
* * *
MARY MAY SHOWERED. WHEN SHE WAS DONE SHE DRESSED herself in the clothes her brother had left for her and she came out into the small living room where Drew was waiting.
He stood when she came in.
“I’m glad you found me,” she said.
“I’m glad I found you, too.”
She looked around. It was a small place, the living room and kitchen all one room.
“You ready?” he asked.
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I think we should just get out of here. Go home.”
“You’re a guest here, Mary May. Our parents always taught us not to be rude.” He looked her over like he was waiting for her to say more. Then he said, “Don’t be rude.”
* * *
“MERCY HAS BEEN GIVEN TO MANY ONLY AFTER THEY WERE MADE to suffer. It was their lot to suffer. It was a choice. A conscious decision. Into this chasm they walked and the darkness closed in about them and only through their faith did they find salvation, walking forth from that chasm unharmed.”
Will opened his eyes as soon as he felt The Father’s hands leave his shoulders. He had been led into the church by John and then told to kneel. Alone he had waited there, looking about the place. The symbol of the church seen in every window and a large American flag hanging down the front of the church with the cross and rays of Eden’s Gate there at its center amid the stars.
The Father had come in shortly after, his steps sounding on the wooden floor before he came and stood in front of Will. He wore jeans and a shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. Like all the rest of his congregation he was bearded, and though he looked much like his brother, John, he was a little taller and a little wider through the chest and shoulders. His hair was pulled back behind his head and his eyes met Will’s and held him while he talked.
“Life has tested you, Will. You must believe that now. You must believe that you’re here for a reason. Chosen for the good of our kind. There are dark times ahead. Dark times to come and we shall be like a light in those dark times.”