by Alex Bledsoe
“Hi,” she managed to squeak out. Her legs wobbled in a way that had nothing to do with her injuries. Suddenly she felt hugely self-conscious, with her unwashed hair pulled haphazardly back and a baggy T-shirt that hung to her knees. She awkwardly tugged the bottom hem down, tearing it free from where it had snagged on the leg pins, to hide the fact that she hadn’t put on any shorts. And when was the last time she’d shaved her good leg?
“Thank you for seeing me. I know after yesterday you must be tired of all the attention.”
She could only nod. Parts of her that had not responded to anything in months were waking up and announcing themselves.
“Do you need to sit down?” he asked, concerned.
She shook her head. Her mouth was too dry for words.
“I won’t keep you, but I wanted to tell you, I’m available if you ever need anything before you get back on your feet. Or after, of course. I can drive you into town, pick things up for you, whatever.”
This broke through her sex-deprived stupor. “Wait, you’re offering to be my chauffeur?”
“Or run any errands you need.”
“I’m not a Methodist, Reverend.”
“No, but you’re a person in my parish who might need some help. I’m not trying to convert you, I promise. It’s just part of my job.”
“How noble of you,” she said dryly. Her physical responses couldn’t entirely overwhelm her cynicism.
“Bronwyn,” Deacon said softly, warningly. She hadn’t realized he stood just inside the screen door watching them.
“Okay, I’m sorry, I’ll take you at face value, then. Thank you. But really, I don’t need anything. Mom and Dad can do my errands, and I’m getting more and more self-sufficient all the time. I’ll have this getup off my leg so fast, you won’t believe it.”
Craig nodded. “That’s fine. You’re lucky to have such a supportive family around you. But may I ask you something a bit … esoteric?”
“Sure.”
“What about your spirit?”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve been through a lot, to put it mildly. Things like that often make people reevaluate their relationship with God.” He said this with no irony, and no trace of sarcasm. Perversely, this made him even hotter. “If you want to talk, I’ll listen. And I won’t offer advice unless you ask.”
“We take care of our own,” Deacon said to save Bronwyn the embarrassment. He spoke with no hostility, yet firmly enough to discourage any disagreement. “What we believe is private, and we worship in our own way.”
Craig nodded. “I certainly respect that, Mr. Hyatt.” He turned to Bronwyn. “But my offer to help, in any way, stands. I left my phone number with your father.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Really.” The cynical side of her nature reflected that, once you’ve been on TV, everyone was your friend. Even smoking-hot young ministers. And the help she wanted from him at that precise moment was luckily made impossible, or at least prohibitively awkward, by her injured leg.
He smiled. “I figure you’ve been buried under enough platitudes, so I won’t add to the pile. But it really is an honor and a pleasure to meet you. And—” There was just the slightest hesitation, as if he were debating adding the next comment. “—it would be a pleasure even without everything that’s happened to you.”
He nodded to Deacon and walked down the porch steps toward his car, an older-model Altima. It was, of course, white.
“Seems like a nice boy,” Deacon said.
“Yeah,” Bronwyn agreed, wondering if there was a special circle of the Christian hell for women who admired a preacher’s ass.
She needed more coffee.
* * *
Craig turned onto the highway and headed toward Needsville, but his thoughts were nowhere near the road. They remained back at the old house built into the side of the hill, where he’d just met a girl who affected him more quickly and intensely than any he’d ever encountered. Even Lucy, his first love, had not struck him straight through the heart with the urgency of this black-haired young woman.
And yet he couldn’t identify what about her had done it. She was almost ten years younger, from a completely different background, and entirely uninterested in the things that defined his life. She was world famous, for heaven’s sake, and for the rest of her life would be “that girl rescued in Iraq.” No doubt there was some young soldier out there just waiting for leave to come visit her, probably another Tufa or at least someone familiar with their ways and approved of by her family. If he didn’t get himself under control, Craig might be fated for a backwoods beating by a bunch of angry Tufa cousins in the near future.
And yet …
Those eyes. That dark hair falling from its tie in wild, loose strands around her face. Those lips, unadorned yet still full and delicious. And that voice …
He sighed. There was a time and place for everything, and this was neither. Craig was not a virgin; he’d been called to the ministry as a young adult, so he’d sowed his share of wild oats, and knew any future sex would have to wait until he found a woman he truly wanted to be his wife. He’d dated several women since deciding to be a minister, and almost married one of them. He could acknowledge the attraction, accept it, and yet not let it control his life.
But he could not understand why it had to be a battered, barely grown war hero from an obscure ethnic group. What, he thought half-seriously, was the Good Lord smoking?
6
“That was weird,” Bronwyn said as she settled in at the kitchen table and propped her crutches against it. “A preacher trying to save souls in Needsville.” The weirdest part was that the intangible defenses that kept most outsiders at a distance, like those reporters, apparently hadn’t impeded the young minister.
Her father put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her and sat down in the opposite chair. “Yeah, reckon it’s a weird time. What with that Internet and all them cell phones, Needsville’s almost part of the world these days.”
“The world ain’t ready for us, Daddy,” she said with certainty. “I’ve been out there and seen it. We’d be like tulips in a windstorm.”
He nodded. “Can’t say I’d be sorry to go back to the way things were ’bout twenty years ago.”
“Before I was born?” she teased. “Am I that bad?”
He looked at her evenly. “Might do it differently with you if I could start over.”
“Daddy, you did fine. Some things are just born wild, and it takes a while for ’em to run it off.”
“You run yours off yet?”
She looked down at the coffee. From this angle, it reflected her father’s face. “I sure ain’t feeling too wild these days. Don’t know if it’ll come back or not. Part of me hopes it does, the rest of me…” She trailed off with a shrug, then took another sip of her drink. “I don’t even know where the rest of me is right now.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said with certainty. “Although I’m worried to hear you paraphrasin’ Ronald Reagan.”
Bronwyn smiled, then looked around. “Hey, where’s Mom?”
“She went out to check something in the garden. Said she’d be right back.”
She looked out the window. Her mother was on her knees at the bottom of the yard, picking the beginnings of weeds from the dirt. Her autoharp rested on a folding chair nearby. A mockingbird flew down, perched on the chair, and pecked once at the instrument’s strings.
Bronwyn couldn’t hear the sound, but the scene made her smile. As a little girl she’d sat in that same chair plucking those same strings, aching for the day she could coax music from them and fly on the night wind.
“I can carry you out there,” Deacon said. “Or push your wheelchair.”
She shook her head. “No thanks. It ain’t that. It’s…”
“Couldn’t play Magda?”
She nodded. “How’d you know?”
“Expected to hear you playing last night, and didn’t.” And it was normally
true: a full-blood Tufa who’d been away from home all this time would’ve spent half the night playing. The silence once her door closed told her family everything.
“It ain’t that I can’t play,” Bronwyn said quietly. “Everything works. This hole in my arm went right through, so it healed up pretty quick, like you said.”
“It’s the hole in your head giving you trouble?”
She smiled. Many times in her youth, her father had accused her of having extra holes in her head. “I wasn’t shot in the head, Daddy, I had a skull fracture and concussion from the IED. It makes some things … fuzzy.”
“Like what things?”
“Like … music.”
They were both quiet for a long moment. “You tell your mama?” he asked finally, no accusation or judgment, just a question.
She shook her head. “You gonna tell her?”
“One of us is.”
“Okay, okay. I will.” She sipped her coffee and watched the porch chimes wave in the breeze without quite sounding. “Did I hear the phone ring before I got up?”
“It was that Major Maitland. He’s a slippery fella, isn’t he?”
“He may be president someday. What’d he want?”
“See how you were. See if them reporters was still around. I don’t think he believed me when I told him they wasn’t. I reckon he suspects they’re hanging out in the trees like squirrels.”
“That’s what he’s used to,” she said. “He’ll never understand this place.”
“Not many from the outside would. He said people from Hollywood are calling. I got the idea lots of money was involved.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I’d tell you he called.”
Chloe entered through the back door, stepped out of her sandals, and went to the sink. As she washed a pair of fresh tomatoes she said, “Bliss Overbay’ll be stopping by to see you.”
“Good, I ain’t seen her in weeks,” Deacon deadpanned.
“Not you,” Chloe scolded. “Girl like Bliss ain’t got time for an old man like you.”
“That’s ’cause I’d flat wear her out,” Deacon said with a grin.
Bronwyn recalled the bird, the bells, and the haint she’d put off last night. “Bliss is coming to talk to me?”
“Course. You saw her yesterday, so you knew she would.”
“Didn’t know it’d be right away. Thought she might give me some time to settle in.”
“It’s your home,” Chloe said as she dried her fingers. “How settled do you need to be?”
Bronwyn sighed. “Reckon you’re right.” But she knew Bliss would not be making a simple social call. In the hidden, complex world of Tufa authority, Bliss Overbay wielded a mighty stick, and when she swung it, all the Tufa ducked. There was etiquette to a meeting like this, and Bronwyn would have to at least try to fulfill her part of things.
Chloe poured herself a cup of coffee. She kissed Deacon on the cheek as she passed him, then sat in the only other open chair. “You’ll have to talk to that haint tonight, too.”
“I will. Damn, Mom, I just got out of the hospital.”
Her mother slapped her hand on the table so loud and hard, it was like a pistol shot; in fact, Bronwyn might’ve reflexively jumped aside if she hadn’t been trapped by the pin frame. Her chest constricted and her eyes went wide.
Even Deacon looked surprised. “Honey?” he said to his wife.
Chloe’s voice shook with suppressed anger. “Yes, I know, I’ve heard all about your sacrifices, your injuries, all about what a hero you are. And you know what? I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve spent the last two years playacting, and now that you’re home where the real work is, you’re trying to avoid it. You will see Bliss when she comes, and you will listen to your haint tonight. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Bronwyn could barely breathe. A new image, one she’d never recalled before, came unbidden through her fog of memory, shaken loose by her mother’s slap. It was the same flash of orange light, but then it turned white, and she realized it was a flashlight. Beyond it was a swarthy face with a jet-black mustache and dark, panicky eyes. He said something she couldn’t catch—her Arabic was terrible—and then reached for her.
She shivered, and realized she was sweating. When she looked up, Chloe and Deacon both stared at her. “One of them flashbacks?” her father asked softly.
She nodded. She could still smell both the gasoline from the wrecked truck and the burning flesh of the man trapped behind her. “One of the Iraqis was trying to get me out of the truck.”
Deacon’s voice changed very slightly, but it was enough to express his sincere, extreme concern. “You sure it was a real thing, and not just something you imagined?”
“No,” she said bitterly. “I’m not sure. You hear about something enough, your brain starts to believe it. The whole time I was in the hospital, I heard about how the Iraqis pulled me out of the wreck and then … well … did stuff to me.” She actually blushed, something she hadn’t done in years, at talking about this in front of her parents. “But I don’t know if it’s true.”
“There’s ways to find out,” Chloe said quietly. “If it matters.”
“No,” Bronwyn said. “It doesn’t, really. I’ve got enough pain that I can remember.” She shifted her weight, wishing she’d brought a pillow to put beneath her butt on the hard chair.
Aiden finally emerged from his bedroom. “Did I hear a gunshot?”
“Your mama was just making a point,” Deacon said, his gaze on Chloe. He kissed her on the cheek and went outside. Chloe turned on the water and began washing the breakfast dishes. She kept her back to her children.
Aiden leaned close to Bronwyn and said, “I hear you’ve got a haint.”
“You hear a lot,” she said. For just a moment, her old big-sister annoyance with Aiden threatened to appear, but it faded. Would she be numb this way forever?
“Well, if you want, I can sit up with you and run it off when it shows up again.”
She snorted. “You’d pee your pants if you saw a ghost. You know you would.”
“Uh-uh. I’d look it right in the eye and say, ‘Hey, leave my sister alone, she’s a war hero.’ Then I’d chase it with a hatchet.”
“What if it didn’t have any eyes? What if it just had big black sockets where its eyes used to be?”
He thought this over. In utter deadpan he said, “Then instead of a hatchet, I’d use a socket wrench.”
They both burst into giggles. Without turning Chloe said, “Aiden Hyatt, get down to the bus stop now. Nobody’s got time to drive you in to school if you miss it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a full-body shrug. He grabbed his book bag and dragged it across the floor behind him as he slouched out the door.
As Bronwyn watched her brother leave, something swaying in the breeze caught her eye. Through the screen door she saw a bundle of feathers tied together with hexwound guitar string and hung from a wind chime’s clapper, giving extra purchase to the wind and producing a constant, soft tinkling.
She frowned. She knew what this was … didn’t she? The hawk feathers, mixed with those of a crow and tied to the clapper between three chimes that, in the right order, played … what song? What did it mean?
Her father must’ve built it; he loved putting chimes together in different musical combinations, and had racks of aluminum and wooden tubes in the shed. But she wouldn’t ask him, because goddammit, she should know. She was a Tufa, a First Daughter, heir to the songs and rider on the night wind.
At last she said, “I think I’m going to lay down for a while. I’ll see you at lunch.”
* * *
In her room, she once again opened the mandolin case. The instrument gleamed in the sun coming through the window; its finish reflected the red, white, and blue from the curtains. She rested her fingertips lightly on the strings.
The calluses she’d earned had softened a little in the time she’d been a
way, but her skin still seemed to hold the memory. Her thumb curled as it would to pluck a string. But the experiences that connected these things, that allowed her to coax music from Magda, were still missing.
Because of her sudden media notoriety, the military doctor who’d tended her when she arrived stateside from Iraq had tried to be kind, but clearly lacked experience in real doctor–patient relations. “You may have some memory loss. Most of it will be connected directly with the accident, when your brain suffered its trauma. But it could crop up with other things. You may forget people you’ve known all your life, how to do certain tasks, and so forth. You can relearn the skills; the memories may or may not return.”
Since she’d been semiconscious with a feeding tube down her throat, she’d only been able to nod. Really, though, what other response could there be?
She turned the mandolin in her hands. It was light, and felt fragile compared to the heavy, solid things she’d handled for the past two years. She had refused to take it with her to basic training, and from there to her deployment in Iraq, because she wanted nothing to remind her of Needsville. But now it was more tangible than the metal guns, equipment, and vehicles she’d gotten to know intimately.
“Shit,” she sighed, and felt her eyes itch as tears tried to form. But like her memories, they never quite appeared.
7
Don Swayback sat down at his mother’s kitchen table. He used to think of it as his table, too, but since he’d grown up, he had a hard time feeling connected to this old house, these old things, even this old woman now settling into her own seat across from him. Even the town, Rossell, had grown and expanded until it was unfamiliar and alien.
“It’s good to see you, son,” his mother said. Her name was Gloriana, although everyone called her Glory. “And it’s not even Mother’s Day. Shouldn’t you be at work? You didn’t get fired, did you?”
“You know, if you keep picking on me, I’ll stop coming at all,” he teased.