by Urban Waite
He swung open the door and the light flooded inward. She could see that he would drag her past the frame and out the door. She called his name, but he did not stop and she reached and grabbed the leg of the chair then the doorjamb as she went. For a second she held on, but he kicked her then brought her up again, lifting her by the ankle so that she spun and twisted with her head dragged backwards across the floor and out of the little room.
“Drew!” she said. “Drew!”
But it was as if he didn’t hear her. He kept moving and soon they had crossed the living room. The door came open in his hand and she was yanked out after him and then let go.
She laid in the dirt and gravel of the drive. Small bits of sand against her face and in her hair. She coughed. The taste of blood from some cut she must have had inside her mouth and she coughed again then tried to look around.
John sat there waiting for her. He was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck and as she looked around, she could see the faces of many more. Men and women she had seen that day, church members.
“Hello,” John said.
She turned and got a hand behind her and tried to sit. “What is this?”
“This is the end,” John said. “This is what I’ve always wanted for you. You have been alone. You have lived without the word of The Father and now you will be alone no more.”
She tried to push herself up. She tried to fight them when they came for her. She tried to rip her arms away from their grip. But there were too many to defend from. Soon she was in the air, carried up out of the dirt and thrown down across the truck bed.
She called her brother’s name. She repeated it again and again, but she never heard any response.
III
Every one of us should be reminded how very alone we are when we indulge in sin and live without the faith that keeps the devil from our door.
—THE FATHER, EDEN’S GATE
Hope County, Montana
WHEN WILL WOKE HOLLY WAS SITTING THERE ON THE single bed opposite his own. “You ready?” Holly asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Morning time.” She had no watch to check and no phone, for there was no service even if she had one.
He pushed back the blankets then brought his feet over the edge and placed them bare upon the floor.
“Jesus, Will. You make your own underwear or something?”
He looked down to the briefs he wore. They were old and had once been black but years of washing them in the river then hanging them in the sun had turned them a sun-bleached brown. He looked up at her and smiled. “They’re just a reflection of my life.”
“Underwear are the windows to the soul.” She sat up and told him to shower and then meet her in the barn cafeteria.
He showered then dressed in his old clothes. They still smelled of the mountains, of pine and dirt and cracked rock, and of his own sweat and salt. He carried with him his rifle and backpack as he came into the cafeteria and found her waiting for him.
She gathered up a basket and put it out on the table before him and told him to go through the clothes within. “I tried to find things that I thought would fit.”
He looked in the basket and removed the first layer of clothes and set it to the side. “Where did this stuff come from?”
“Donations,” she said. “You know how it works, Will. You come to us and you donate what you have and we give to you as well. We are a communion, though I never would have called it by some hippy shit name like that.”
He picked through the clothes and found the ones he thought would work, and then he rolled them and put them down within his bag. “There’s more of this?”
“Sure,” she said.
She brought him into the long room that took up half of one of the houses and flipped on the lights. He saw the piles of clothes that stretched from one end of the room all the way to the other. There were piles of shoes as high as he was. There were gloves and hats in another pile. There were coats, pants, shirts, underwear. He walked along down the middle of them all. There was little order to it other than by article—children’s clothes thrown in among the adults. He stopped and picked up a children’s size eight set of shoes by the shoelaces that connected them. The laces white and stained with dirt, while the shoes were pink and purple.
He looked back at Holly where she stood. “The Kershaws? Lonny said they had brought them somewhere. They had a daughter and a son. But I’ve seen no children. In fact, I haven’t seen the Kershaws, either.” He stood with the shoes dangling in his hand and he ran his eyes out across the piles of clothes then back again. He was beginning to see items he recognized. Shirts that advertised the local little league team, or one that showed the emblem of the lumberyard. “What is happening here? Where is everyone?”
“I see where your mind is going, Will. But you don’t need to worry. They are with us. But they are not with us here.”
He held the shoes still. They were like something he’d once had in his own long forgotten life. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“There are other places being set up,” Holly said. “There’s a woman out east who runs our farms. She grows our food, she gives us the produce we need. The eggs. The meat from different livestock. Surely you didn’t think it was just you. The church is everywhere and there are many to feed,” she said.
“And that is where the children are?”
“Yes,” Holly said. “Everyone is safe. Everyone has their purpose. You’ll see one day.”
He dropped the shoes now and he looked around at the piles once again. “There’s so much,” he said.
“Jacob, their oldest brother, has also begun to train women and men in the mountains.”
“The mountains to the north?”
“Yes,” Holly said. “Not far off. There’s much that has changed. And I can see now that Lonny did not keep you up to speed as he should have. We are growing, Will. You and I are some of the first. But many have started to come and ask for our protection.”
“Protection?”
“Yes,” Holly said. “From their own lives, just like you. Just like when you came to Eden’s Gate and gave up the bottle and gave up sin. Others come because they need financial help. Others come because they have lost the faith. But, regardless of how they come to us, they all need our help. Souls do not save themselves,” Holly said.
Will watched her. He looked once more across the piles of clothes, then he turned to her again. “I think I’m ready,” he said. But he could see in her face that she had unsettled something within him, and that she knew it.
“We’re building toward something here,” Holly said.
“I know. I get it. I can see that now.” He grabbed his bag then took the rifle and put the strap over his shoulder.
She led him out of the room and they came out of the small, wooden clapboard house into the morning light. “Throw your bag back there,” she said as they came to the pickup she must have pulled around earlier.
He put the bag into the bed then walked to the door and pulled it open. No one was about and only far down the drive, past the small wooden houses and outbuildings, did he see another soul. Two guards stood at the gate and he watched them for a time and watched the weapons on their shoulders.
When he opened the truck door and climbed inside, she was waiting for him and she turned and cranked the engine. “It’s been good to see you, Will.”
He looked over at her. He still held the rifle and he settled it now between his legs. “It’s been good to see you, too, Holly.”
She pushed down on the pedal and they went on down the gravel road. “You really shouldn’t be a stranger anymore, Will. Even when you’re here once a month you are a stranger. I can see that now. I’m going to make sure I come and see you. John asked me to. He asked me to be the one to keep track of you now that Lonny’s gone. I’ll be coming by.”
“I’d like that,” Will said. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking at the h
ouses. Many were painted crudely white, like the church behind them. Others were simply rough wood, stained to keep the weather out. They kept driving and his eyes landed on one and he could not take his eyes away. In big painted letters that had run and dripped down the white siding was the single word, SINNER, written across the front, just beside the door.
His head moved to take the house in even as they passed and he turned in the seat and watched as the house receded behind them. He could not remember the same word being there the day before. He turned back now and looked out the front windshield, but in the side mirror he could still see the house and he watched it and then when he turned to say something to Holly, she instead began to speak.
“It’s been weeks since you’ve been here last,” Holly said. “You should come once a week at least. If you’re with us you should come to the Sunday services, Will. You should hear The Father’s sermons. The way he speaks. The power of his thoughts and the message he gives to us from deep within his soul.”
“I will,” he said. “I have missed too many.”
* * *
HOLLY LET HIM OUT IN FRONT OF THE GENERAL STORE IN TOWN and he thanked her and climbed from inside the cab and grabbed his bag. When he came back down along the truck she called out to him through the open window of the cab. “You sure you don’t want me to bring you all the way up to your place?”
“No,” he said. “I need new snares and new traps and I need some more cartridges for the rifle. Most of my snares are probably gone by now, torn up or dragged clear across the fields.”
“Okay,” she said. “And you’ll get a ride with someone going up that way?”
He nodded. “It’s no trouble. Thank you, Holly.”
She looked at him for a time and then leaned to the open window. “I’m trying to help you out here,” she said.
“I get it. I’ll be okay on my own.”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Holly said. “I’ve been trying to tell you how things are changing. Eden’s Gate, The Father, John, all of it. I see you and I worry about you, Will. You’re going to get left behind or pushed aside if you don’t start making the effort.”
Her talk had riled him up a bit. He didn’t like being told what to do, or to have his actions questioned. “Like you?” Will said.
“Yes, like me, Will. I might not like everything that’s going on up there but I know who butters my bread. I can see you still making your mind up about that.”
Will cracked a smile. “Well I’m not going to start sleeping with John if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Fuck you,” Holly said. She wasn’t smiling about it and she put her hands up on the wheel for a second and looked on down the road. When she turned and met his eyes again, she said, “I might not agree with everything they do but I owe them my life. And you owe them yours. You understand? I might criticize them but I’m on their side always. It’s your choice, Will. I already made mine.”
She opened her mouth to say something more, but instead she simply turned the key and started the engine again.
He stood there for a while, feeling a little dumbfounded, as he watched her pull around in the street then head back the way she’d come. He felt bad about what he’d said to Holly, but there was nothing he could do for it now.
He went inside the general store and bought his cartridges and a couple hundred feet of twenty-four-gauge snare wire. He bought needle-nose pliers and wire cutters because his had started to rust from the use he gave them, working in the open with the rain and snow that saturated the fields every spring and winter. He put everything on the tab that Lonny had set up for him a while back, and he thought now whether Holly would know to pay it for him. He was standing at the counter when he thought about the bear cub and asked the clerk about the beaver traps and the small floats that went along with them. He bought five and he came out of the store with most of it stuffed down inside his bag, and the traps that he could not fit strapped along the side.
He walked to the end of the block then stopped and stared into an empty window. He placed his hands to the glass and peered inside: dust and empty booths and barren tables. There had been a café here only a year before and he wondered now when it had closed and where the people who had owned it had gone. He walked a little more, then crossed the street. The bar sat there in front of him, just the same as it had always looked.
He walked up and saw the beer lights were off, a “Closed” sign sitting in the window. He set his bag down to the side of the door then walked along the outside. He could see only shadow and outlines of things through the dark windows. He stood there and thought it through. He was no fool and he’d never been one.
Holly had told him that Mary May and her brother had come down that very morning and he had sat and thought about that and he had thought about the fresh paint he’d seen there on the side of the small house. Wondering the whole while if it was the same house he had asked about the day before—the house in which Mary May had been.
Will also thought about how the bullshit alone could only be piled so high before one thing or another broke beneath its weight. He turned and looked back across the town. He saw that many of the buildings were boarded up now and he remembered a time when every one of them had been open and behind every door and every window was a business or a neighbor. He did not know when that had changed, and he did not know when he had stopped noticing, though he certainly noticed it now.
He put his hands to the window again and tried to see inside. There was nothing to see except his own mirrored face looking back at him. He moved back to where his bag sat. He put a hand out and tried the door. It was locked. He stepped back a little, turned again and walked the length of the bar and then, at the corner, he went down the side of the bar and came around the back.
There were trashcans there and a storage shed and halfway down he saw the wooden service door. He walked past the trashcans and tried the door. He was surprised at first when he found it was unlocked. He still carried his rifle with him and he took it off his shoulder now and held it in his hand. In no way did he think that he would use it, but he also was aware that he was going into someone else’s bar, that there might be some consequences for his actions.
He cracked the door and looked in on the kitchen that sat just behind the bar. Close by, just at the point where the white linoleum ended, he could see the wooden barroom floor. He could see chairs atop tables and the shadowed light that was let in through the darkened windows.
He could hear voices now and he stopped with his hand still on the doorknob. Inside and very close there was a man’s voice and then, softer now, a woman’s voice responding. Will leaned and pushed the door open then went inside.
Sitting at a stainless-steel prep table was a man, stocky, wearing a white chef’s coat, stained in many places. Just beside him, around the adjoining corner of the table was a young girl, who Will guessed could be no more than twenty-one. Both turned and stared at him, their conversation cut short.
The chef stood and Will shifted and moved the rifle, but then thought better of it, knowing now who stood before him, “Hello, Casey,” Will said. “You cook here now?”
The cook, who had been a few years behind Will at high school, took a step then stopped just at the head of the table. It was obvious he was still trying to determine what this was. A half second passed while the girl looked to Will then back at Casey. Finally, Casey said, “Will?”
* * *
THE ARTICLE WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE LOCAL NEWSpaper. A paper that held little content usually, and that most in town stockpiled and simply used as fuel for their wood-burning stoves. The back section of The Chronicle was for selling tractors or fly-casting lessons, and the front section was mostly just pieces regarding the local weather, or the annual log jamboree, or what was going on that week at the VFW. Casey handed him the paper. He stood behind the bar and Janet, the waitress, sat a couple stools down and looked Will’s way.
“Saloon owner found dea
d,” Will said, reading the headline of the article aloud. He looked up at Casey. “Gary died?”
“Irene died two weeks before him.”
Will’s mind raced. He was thinking about them both. Gary and Irene. They were parents to Mary May and Drew. They were the owners of this bar. They were friends, or they had been until Will had gone and disappeared twelve years before.
“Last week we had the funeral for Gary,” Casey said. “A week before we had one for Irene. They’re out there in the cemetery, side by side. The grass hasn’t even had a chance to root.”
Will read the article. He looked back up at Casey then looked down the bar to Janet. “Where’s Mary May?” he asked. “Or Drew?”
“Drew?” Casey said. “We haven’t seen Drew in months, maybe even longer.”
“And Mary May?”
Janet spoke up, she was watching Casey as if maybe she should get permission, but then she ran her eyes to Will and said, “We haven’t seen her in a couple days. She closed the bar. She said for us to come back in and see her today and that’s what we were doing when you came in. We were waiting. We thought maybe it was time to get back to work.”
Will looked from Janet to Casey, then he turned and looked around the bar. He hadn’t been in here in twelve years, but nothing that he could see had changed. The same dark paint, wood paneling, and beer signs, the same dust in the corners of the room.
He brought his eyes back around on Casey. “Gary and Irene are buried over at the cemetery? The one here in town?”
* * *
WILL LOOKED DOWN AT THE GRAVESTONES. HE HELD HIS HAT IN one hand and his rifle in the other. The earth had barely even sunk in, mounded and fresh there atop the graves. He scanned his eyes out across the rest. Names he’d known. Names he recognized. He stared off toward the two he knew, his wife and daughter. It seemed to him that this place was dying. It seemed to him that every soul he’d known was here.