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Cold Ennaline

Page 3

by RJ Astruc


  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Piedmont strokes his chin again. I can see him mentally pairing me up with one and then the other of his sons. My plain face beside their beautiful ones.

  “Thank you for your time, Ennaline,” he says eventually, and then, “Boys,” to the twins as he steps into the temple.

  When he’s gone, I realize that I’ve been holding my breath and let it all out in a rush. The twins look at me, and I see my own nervousness reflected in their faces. I don’t blame them for being intimidated by Father Piedmont, even if he is their father.

  “So, our dad,” says Ro, shrugging. “Hope he didn’t freak you out.”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Yeah, you look fine,” says Ro sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go to the attic. We can listen to the sermon from there.”

  The temple’s roof is curved, a remnant of its history as a barn. There’s a small attic region near the very top. Only part of it has floorboards, which are roughly hammered into place. The rest is thick crossbeams, each one wider than my body. If you don’t want anyone to find you, it’s a good place to sit and listen to the goings-on in the chapel. All the conversations at floor level echo up to the ceiling, rising like hot air, but the attic is too high for anyone else to hear you talk.

  Privacy sounds like a great idea to me, so we leave our spot by the temple doors and grab a ladder. The twins let me go up the ladder first, because I’m a lady. We crawl along the crossbeams until we reach the section of the attic with a floor. We lie there, our heads peeping over the edge. Father Nerve has just begun his sermon, and the temple’s pews are crammed with the faith full. I notice there are more people than usual, even for this time of the day.

  Maybe they too have heard that the god is waking, and want to make sure they’re making the right preparations.

  Beside me, the twins yawn and stretch out their long bodies. Their movements are perfectly matched, from the pointing of their toes to their little sighs as they relax.

  “Crazy turnout,” says Ro, tuning in to my train of thought.

  “If our dad’s here, it means that something big is going to happen,” says Ray.

  “Or he wants to lock Ennaline into a marriage contract,” says Ro.

  “We can’t talk about that,” says Ray. “It’ll freak her out.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t tell me.” They’re starting to talk about me like I’m not even there. “I don’t want to pressure her.”

  “You don’t? I do! If this falls through, who knows who we’ll wind up with?” Ro puffs out his cheeks. “Linda from school? She’s so mean, half the class avoids her. Even the teachers avoid her….”

  I remember what Mrs. Fane said. I should tell them. They’re my best friends.

  “I don’t feel… attracted to you,” I say.

  The twins blink at each other.

  “What, both of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh no,” says Ro, mock-horrified. “She’s not that into us. Could have fooled me, you spend pretty much every waking moment with us.”

  “Yes. You’re my friends.” I bite my lip. It’s so hard to talk about this stuff. A life as a chaste and dedicated member of the faith hasn’t really taught me the right vocabulary for this situation. “I’m not joking about this, Ro. I don’t feel anything for you. I don’t… I don’t have any desire in that way. I’m going to make a poor wife for a faith full man.”

  And that’s the heart of my problem, really. The god is a god of fertility. He is the god of our fields and flocks. He is the god of our food and the god of our fecundity. He sleeps now, but we see his dreams around us in the birth of every child and the planting of every harvest. If I don’t have the desire to… to have sex, as Mrs. Fane crudely put it, how can I truly serve the god?

  “I don’t get it,” says Ray.

  “It’s not babies, Enna,” says Ro. “You don’t need to have babies now. It’s a betrothal. The whole… the intercourse parts come later. In four years.”

  “It’s not about babies! It’s….” I take a deep breath. “It’s about passion. Desire. Um, romance. I don’t want to… to do that kind of thing with you. And I might never want to. I’m cold.”

  “Wait, do you mean you’re a lesbian?” Ro asks uncertainly.

  That’s a word I didn’t think I’d ever hear the twins, or any faith full man, say. I shake my head.

  “Oh, okay. No girls, no boys, no us.”

  I’m so embarrassed. I can feel my ears and cheeks burning. It’s good to get all this off my chest, but now that it’s out in the open, it makes me feel naked. I’ve been accused more than once—although not by the twins—of putting up walls to keep people out. Now those walls have come down, but there’s nothing warm or welcoming behind them, just more walls.

  “That’s about the whole of it,” I say.

  The twins sit up a bit and start fidgeting around. I can sense them signing behind my back.

  “We love you, Enna,” says Ro, after a minute of rapid, silent discussion. “We’ll get through this.”

  “You know we’d marry you anyway,” says Ray. “Whatever happens.”

  “Thanks. But you shouldn’t.”

  The twins go quiet. I hang my head over the attic’s edge again. Below us Father Nerve is warning his flock of the signs and symbols of the rising god. Cracks in the earth. Strange winds that destroy and smash. Disfigured or burned-out livestock. Overgrowth of plants and crops. The death of dogs. Stalks of corn and other grains that set themselves alight and burn with a blue flame. And a trail of bad luck and misfortune, striking only those who worked in the fields.

  “The other day Theo was telling us that we should, you know, be careful when it came to the god,” says Ray, resting his chin on his folded hands….

  “Nice subject change,” says Ro. “Very subtle.”

  “Be nice.” I poke Ro, but I’m secretly glad we’re talking about something that’s not my coldness. It’s very like the twins to bounce from one subject to the next.

  “I’m just…. Look, I think there could be something to it, that’s all. You look at how Father Nerve’s been these past few days. He’s worried. I’ve never seen him worried before. He keeps reading his books and writing things down. I don’t think the Bishop is returning his calls.”

  “Your father doesn’t seem too worried about it,” I point out. “What does Theo know about the god, anyway? He’s not faith full. I mean, who even is that guy?”

  “He’s new to the neighborhood,” says Ray. “I think his parents moved for work, or something like that.”

  “What does he know of our lives? What does he know of the god?”

  “Uh-oh,” says Ro. “Enna thinks Theo is a bad influence on us.”

  I’d argue, but it’s true. I don’t like anything about Theo, and I’ve barely even met him. He’s arrogant and skeptical and all the things that good faith full shouldn’t be. It annoys me that the twins seem to have been taken in by him. They’re the companions of a well-respected man, and they should know better than that.

  Below us, Father Nerve’s service is ending. I close my eyes and say a prayer to the god.

  WHEN WE get down from the attic, most of the faith full have long gone. Father Nerve is waiting for us outside, his arms folded. At first I think he’s going to tell us off for missing the service, but instead he grabs the twins excitedly around the shoulders.

  “Your father came to talk to me today,” he says. “It’s true, it’s as I thought. The Bishop agrees. The god is waking. Everything will change.”

  4

  FATHER NERVE pulls us from school the very next day. We stand in the registrar’s office while he talks to the principal. The principal seems disappointed but not surprised by the decision. We hear from the receptionist that we’re the fourth faith full “family” to come in today for the exact same reason. The promise of the rising god has infected all of us.

  “Is it the end
days?” the receptionist asks, as we wait in the office for Father Nerve to finish filling out some paperwork. “Like Armageddon or something? I don’t really understand your faith—I’m Pentecostal. I didn’t even hear of the faith until I moved here.”

  “It’s not an end, it’s a beginning,” Ray explains. “The god is waking.”

  “Yeah, but what does that mean?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what your god is going to do?” The receptionist sounds skeptical.

  “No.”

  “What if he comes back and is really angry?” She chews on the end of a pencil. “I always used to worry about that as a kid. Well, I’d worry about my god. As human beings, we’ve done some really bad things. We aren’t really living in His image.”

  The twins exchange looks. I see doubt flicker in their eyes, just for a second, but it’s enough. Theo. I don’t even know the guy. I’ve barely met him, but I can see his influence on the twins as clearly as if he were standing above them, pulling them about with strings. I’ve never hated anyone before, but I think I might be very close to hating Theo.

  Father Nerve finishes his paperwork and ushers us outside. The sky above the school is a strange, green-gray color I’ve never seen before, and the clouds are swollen and lumpy like a newly sown field after a storm. The air smells different, too—it has a sweet, earthy taste to it.

  “Another sign,” mutters Father Nerve. “Get in the car, all of you.”

  “Where are we going?” Ro asks.

  “We’re going to your father’s parish,” says Father Nerve.

  “We’re going home?” the twins say in unison. Neither of them sounds particularly pleased by this news.

  “Your father has been following the movements of the god as he dreams. He’s plotted out the ripples the god has left in the earth. He believes he knows where the god is going to rise, and we should be there to meet him, in all his glory.”

  Ray shudders, and Ro quickly grasps his hand and squeezes it.

  “Something wrong, Regis?” Father Nerve asks.

  “It’s the wind,” says Ro. “The smell. It’s giving me the chills, too. It smells like something rotten, doesn’t it?”

  Now he mentions it, it does smell like something rotting. I swallow. For the first time the waking god feels real to me, really real, like something that could actually happen.

  “Just get in the car, Roland,” says Father Nerve wearily. “I’ll put on the air conditioning.”

  WE DRIVE. And drive.

  Faith full country is flat. Once we leave the village center, the fields stretch out before us in every direction. It’s impossible to judge distance; the fences and demarcation lines of different crops create a kind of optical illusion. Sitting in the passenger seat for the first time in my life, I find it hard to focus on anything between the end of the car and the horizon. When I do, my vision blurs and swirls. In addition to that, the smell of the wind has seeped into the car, and it’s making me feel nauseous.

  I wonder how Father Nerve can control the car in these conditions—it must be next to impossible to stay on the road….

  The twins sit in the backseat, still loosely holding hands. I can’t remember seeing them hold hands before, not since we were really little kids. They’re looking out the windows in opposite directions, biting their lips in identical ways. They’re scared, more scared than I am. I don’t remember ever seeing them scared before.

  After we drive for a few hours, we start to see ridges in the fields. At first they’re just little mounds or piles of earth, as if someone’s buried something. As we continue, the ridges get higher and wider, jutting up above even the highest crops, brown islands in a sea of yellow and green. It’s as if a wild and giant animal has clawed through the skin of the world.

  There are signs of overgrowth, too: whole trees sprouting from the lip of the ridges, nearby crops growing twice as tall as they should, and giant bulbous flowers spilling out across the field. The flowers are invariably pink, ugly colors, fleshy colors, and the trees have pale, almost luminescent bark. There’s something grotesque about it, something surreal.

  Sometimes we see animals by the side of the road. Some are regular roadkill, I guess, but others are positioned in such a way that we can see a strange, black ash spilling out of them. As if they’ve been burned up from the inside.

  Father Nerve’s hands are white around the steering wheel. He’s driving too fast, but this far from civilization, there’s rarely any police to slow you down. Now and then I hear him praying under his breath, prayers for the earth and the sky but also prayers for us. I want to ask him about the god, but I’ve come to understand that at this point, Father Nerve is as lost and ignorant as we are.

  We reach the Piedmonts’ property at dusk. The sky has changed color again to a yellowish-blue, like a healing bruise. We all clamber out of the car, picking at our sweaty clothes. The Piedmonts live in a long, wooden ranch house—a big house, but not the country mansion I expected—and their fields contain only grass and sheep. We wait outside the house for a few minutes, stamping our feet and casting nervous looks at the sky, until Father Piedmont arrives.

  “You came,” is the first thing he says. “Good. We’ve work to do.”

  “Is the Bishop here?” Father Nerve asks.

  “The Bishop will be coming,” says Father Piedmont. He takes a deep breath and puts his arms behind his back, drinking in the smell of the strange wind. “Can you feel the god?” he asks us. “Smell that air, taste it. He has awoken, make no mistake.”

  Ray’s face turns white, and he runs away from us, around the side of the house. Soon we hear the sound of him throwing up.

  “Weak,” Father Piedmont mutters, and Ro winces. Clearly despairing of his sons, Father Piedmont turns to me. “What do you think of this all, Ennaline Whitehall?”

  “I can smell it,” I say. I try to keep a grateful smile on my face, but it’s hard. I’m struck suddenly by how unprepared I am for this adventure. I don’t know how long we’re going to be here. I haven’t brought any changes of clothes. I don’t even have a toothbrush. I’m sweaty and my hair is filthy and the twins are scared and sick and I don’t know what to do at all.

  “Come with me, Ennaline.”

  Father Piedmont takes my arm and leads me away from the house and into the fields. Wordlessly he points north. I realize that a big rise in the distance, a rise that’s big enough to be a cliff, is actually another ridge. Its surface is lush with greenery and jungle-like plants: ferns and flesh-colored flowers. The ridge is only a few hundred feet away from the Piedmonts’ house.

  How close is the god to us now? I wonder. Is he right under our feet?

  I’m amazed we haven’t felt or seen the god moving the earth by this stage. There have been no earthquakes, nothing that would suggest a giant being is trying to force their way out of the earth. I think about the silly tricks we used to do to get people to believe in the god, to confirm their faith: the lightbulbs and string and hidden recording equipment. We just wanted to give people evidence that the god was there. And now here we are, with the marks of the god scratched indelibly across our country, as bold a proof as anyone could make for the existence of the god.

  I wish I could be truly happy about it.

  I wish I wasn’t so scared.

  “When did it happen?” I ask.

  “It appeared after I woke up. Sometime between breakfast and second prayers.” Father Piedmont’s handsome face is almost rapturous. “We measured it—it’s fifty feet long, and thirty high, and at its center is a deep chasm. The flowers grew as we walked up the chasm. The god has blessed my land.”

  “I felt an evil,” says Father Nerve. “When I first saw a hole like that. The growths, the plants, too. They’re unnatural. They aren’t from our world.”

  “They are gifts,” says Father Piedmont. “Gifts from the god.”

  “They’re killing other crops,” says Father Nerve. “We saw them as we drove he
re. They’re destroying everything in their way. They grow unchecked and quickly.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Father Piedmont snaps.

  “Cancer grows like that,” says Ro.

  Father Piedmont smacks him across the face.

  The sound seems as loud as a gunshot in the heavy air.

  “You won’t speak to me like that,” Father Piedmont shouts, red-faced, spitting in his rage. “You won’t speak of the god like that! You will pray to him. You will worship him. You will know him. Get on your knees, boy.”

  Ro folds over onto the earth, presses his hands together, and begins to pray.

  He’s crying. I’m crying a bit too. I don’t know what to do at all.

  IT SEEMS that we’re going to stay at the Piedmont ranch for as long as it takes for the god to wake. Mrs. Piedmont, a woman as severe and beautiful as her husband is intimidatingly handsome, shows us to a guest room. There are two bunk beds there, and no sheets. Ray asks his mother meekly about the other rooms in the house, but apparently the Piedmonts are expecting other faith full to arrive soon.

  By the afternoon the Piedmonts’ driveway is full of cars, mostly station wagons. Faith full folk mill about outside, looking simultaneously lost and beatific. Many of them have brought their dogs and some have even brought sheep and horses. Standing by the door, I hear them talk of the god—of the god’s plans, of the god’s dreams, of the god’s ineffable ways. They don’t sound fearful; they sound exhilarated.

  I don’t share their excitement. A day ago I was worried about marriage plans and letting down the twins and the god. Now I’m wondering if I’m going to survive this at all. The smell in the air is worse—it’s rot, it’s definitely rot, a deep, earthy rot of something that has been decaying for a long time in a closed space. It makes me want to gag, and I can’t bring myself to eat dinner.

  Flies start to appear, and then mosquitoes, and then ugly black beetles with spade-shaped bodies and horned heads.

  The faith full pray.

 

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