According to the article, one of the other women had found the courage to turn Stephen in. On the night he learned he was going to be arrested, Stephen went out to the orchard to pray. When he wasn’t back by morning, they went out after him and found him hanging by his neck from a tree.
Later, I went to the public library and found the article myself. There were pictures of Stephen and some of the others, but no sign or mention of Paul. He must already have left—perhaps, I hoped, because he had come to accept that Leigh was telling the truth about Stephen. Maybe he had gone after her. But that couldn’t have been the case; he would have known where she was going.
“When I read that story, it was like I was going through it all over again,” she said. “I had to get up and walk out of the salon. I thought I was going to have another one of my episodes right there.”
Episodes? I wondered.
“Anyway, New Nazareth dissolved. I don’t know what became of the property. I imagine it’s still there, rusted over and deserted.”
I tried to imagine where Paul would have gone; how long he stayed; how long it had taken him to believe Leigh; whether he’d had to see it himself; whether he left out of horror, or revulsion, or just because.
She held her hand out to me, motioning for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. I gave them to her, and this time, she pulled out another and lit it on her own.
“Anyway,” she said, “I thought you deserved to know.”
And here’s the rub. In spite of how I pitied her—who wouldn’t pity the poor girl after hearing such a woeful tale?—when Leigh told me she thought I deserved to know, I agreed with her. I felt entitled to the information.
She sat silently smoking for a while, her mind still adrift, presumably back in New Mexico, or in Paris, or perhaps on her back on a table in the Monacan Mountain Rehabilitation Center, her legs aloft, waiting for her belly to burst.
Then she was back. She turned toward me, her eyes narrowed.
“I understand why you would want to hurt me,” she said. “I deserved that. But what she’s doing—it isn’t what you think it is, Rocky.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Once she found out about Paul, that was it. From the moment she saw how I reacted when you ran out to meet us at the fence, I could hear the wheels spinning in her vicious little head.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“You’re not the only one, you know,” she said, a hint of taunting in her voice. “Quite a few others have seen the inside of her hayloft.”
“You’re making that up,” I said. “Why is it any of your business anyway?”
“Maybe it’s not,” she said. “It never seems to help anything, does it?”
“What?”
“Tampering in the lives of others.”
I had forgotten that, before I had fallen for Patricia, the whole point of coming to work for the Culvers had been to meddle in Leigh’s life.
“I better get home,” she said. “People might be wondering if I’ve turned into a runaway bride.”
“Me too,” I said. “It’s almost dinnertime.”
“Rocky?” she asked, her voice plaintive and tremulous.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
But was her secret safe with me? I knew even then that it wasn’t. Even if I had meant it when I said it—and I don’t think I ever truly did—Patricia had no trouble getting whatever she wanted out of me.
We fell into gloomy silence as Leigh guided the car down through the mountains. At one point she turned on the radio. A Whitney Houston song came on—“I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Leigh turned it off and lit a cigarette.
It was completely dark when Leigh pulled her car to a stop at the end of my driveway. Without a word I opened the door and stepped out. I peered back in at her.
“Tell your mom and dad I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” I asked.
“Making you late for dinner.”
“Oh,” I said. “OK.”
“Good-bye, Rocky.”
I felt a sense of permanence in the words, as if she meant for this to be the last time we spoke or even saw each other. Still, I could muster nothing more than the feeblest of replies.
“Bye,” I said.
I shut the door. She drove away, her car rising and falling across the rolling line of the road until it disappeared from sight. I glanced across the field toward the dell and the stables, wondering whether Patricia was still there, waiting for me. But there was no time—I would have to wait to see her again.
That night after dinner, I dropped the needle on an old, familiar record—Tonight’s the Night. I lay across the bed and thought about Paul out west on an alpine desert dressed in coarse linen robes, his hair and beard long and full, grooving to the music in front of a smoking, burning bush.
10
I CAN’T HELP THINKING that Leigh knew I wouldn’t keep her secret. At the least, she should have expected me to tell the Old Man, on the off chance that the story might help lead him to Paul. Given her opinion of Patricia and her conviction that I was being toyed with, she could hardly have chosen anyone less trustworthy to confide in. But maybe that was the point; maybe Leigh was using me to expose herself so that, once she was officially revealed as damaged goods, Charles would call the whole thing off and spare her direct responsibility for disappointing her father yet again. Still, I cringe every time I think of how carelessly and eagerly I betrayed Leigh Bowman, the first girl I had ever loved.
“My God,” Patricia said. “That poor girl.”
“I know,” I said.
She stood and walked toward the open door of the hayloft and peered out into the darkness.
“It’s a pity that this had to happen now,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know what I mean, Rocky.”
She came back and sat down next to me on the blanket. She inched her body closer, drawing the tips of her fingers across my bare chest. I pulled the blanket back over us, and we lay there huddled together in our woolen cocoon, starting at the occasional noise from the horses.
“It means we’re going to have to put an end to this part of our friendship,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“You know why, Rocky,” she said wearily.
“What could they do to us?” I asked.
“To you? Nothing. To me, on the other hand—people go to prison for this sort of thing, you know.”
I thought about how my mother would react if she found out about me and Patricia. I thought about how the blathering gossipmongers of Spencerville would salivate over every detail, true or not. Naturally these reflections completely disregarded my hypocrisy on the subject of gossip.
“You knew this time was coming,” Patricia said. “It just seems to have arrived a little sooner than we had hoped.”
I laughed bitterly.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ve never been dumped before,” I said.
“Don’t think of it that way,” she said.
“How should I think of it?”
“As part of your education,” she said.
I could object no further, already stiff in her hand as I was.
“Now,” she said. “Once more, with feeling.”
THE NEXT DAY, it was my mother’s turn to host the weekly Bible study led by Miss Anita Holt. The group met every Friday, rotating from home to home. The hostess served an afternoon tea, which often included a bottle or two of chardonnay. It was a wonderful thing for my mother. She’d never had many friends.
Miss Anita Holt came from an old Spencerville family that had made a fortune in the furniture business. The widow of a prominent attorney and former city councilman, she was regarded as a personage of near saintly authority in the halls of Holy Comforter, not least because she was known to have “visions”—dreams, apprehensions, and instinctive know
ledge of things that had not yet come to pass. Miss Anita’s visions were rarely concrete; rather, they were just images or feelings about something or someone. A man at church might be out of work, for instance. On Sunday, Miss Anita would approach him and engage him in conversation after the service. “I had a dream about you,” she might say. She’d tell him about how she had seen him in a peculiar building, or show him a drawing of some image that had lingered in her mind when she thought of him: a triangular design, say, and a picture of a hillside decorated with three narrow pylon-shaped objects. The next week, the man might be offered a job in a building like the one Miss Anita had described, for a company with a triangular logo, on a construction or engineering project involving a trio of plant or reactor buildings set on a green hillside.
Sometimes, Miss Anita’s premonitions related to people she didn’t know. A few years prior, the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl had made the national news. The girl had vanished from her family home while her parents were out at the movies. The night her disappearance was reported on television, my mother received a call from Miss Anita Holt.
“Alice,” Miss Anita said breathlessly, “the moment her picture came on the screen, I saw that girl’s body buried under a pile of dirt and leaves.”
A few days later, the girl was found as Miss Anita had described, less than a mile from her parents’ home. But Miss Anita couldn’t see what had happened to her, or who had put her there. There were apparent limitations to her gift.
Nevertheless, her legendary spiritual prowess had earned Miss Anita a discipleship. The weekly Bible study group was a mixed bag of odd ducks, ranging from the elderly dowagers to middle-aged moms like mine to virtuous young protégés. There was a scripture lesson, typically led by Miss Anita, followed by an open discussion of “prayer needs,” which devolved rather directly into the primary purpose of these kinds of gatherings. Apparently it’s not sinful to gossip about people so long as you are praying for them.
They were already in conference when I arrived home from school, dropped off, as always, at the head of the driveway by Macon’s day-student bus. I crept in the front door and tried to make my way to the kitchen unnoticed, but Miss Anita Holt’s holy radar must have been up.
“Richard,” she called.
Miss Anita had one of those lovely old Virginia Piedmont accents—the kind where “Richard” is “Rich-uhd” and “water” is “war-ter.”
“Rich-uhd,” Miss Anita called again, “come he-ah so I can see you.”
I walked into the living room to find them gathered in a circle around the coffee table. At the center of the cream-colored couch sat Miss Anita, flanked by my mother and Kiki Baumberger, Anita’s closest friend and rival; Rosa Lee Baldwin and Lottie Honig, a pair of old spinsters who had managed to be “roommates” for longer than I’d been alive without drawing any suspicion; Laura Hearne and Eleanor Sanders, two of the younger women; and, to my surprise, a rather pale and unsettled-looking Jane Culver.
“Come here, sweetie,” Miss Anita said.
I walked over and bent to her upraised arms, returning her gentle hug and cheek kiss and exchanging another with my mother.
“How are you, Miss Anita?” I asked.
“Fine, darling, fine,” she said.
She asked me the typical questions an old woman asks a teenage boy. The other women smiled and nodded as if they were interested—all except my mother and Jane Culver. I could sense the tension in the room. Jane Culver stared at the wall behind Miss Anita’s head as if she could see through the plaster to something grave and alarming on the other side of it.
To my knowledge, Jane Culver had never attended the Bible study before. I could recall seeing her at church two or three times at the most, and always without her husband or daughter. “Daddy thinks that any decent God would rather that we didn’t waste two hours of a good Sunday morning keeping up appearances,” Patricia had explained.
Jane Culver looked exceedingly uncomfortable. What on earth was she doing at a Bible study just a few hours before her stepson’s wedding rehearsal dinner?
I answered Miss Anita’s questions as casually and politely as I could, trying to stifle my creeping panic. Jane Culver had somehow discovered what had been going on in her hayloft for the past few weeks, I thought. Miss Anita had called me into the room so that I could be forced to come clean and allow them all to lay on hands and speak in tongues as they prayed for the healing of my debauched, corrupted soul.
“It’s wonderful to see you, dear,” Miss Anita said. “You’re becoming such a handsome young man.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I waited, gazing back at Miss Anita so as to avoid making eye contact with my mother or Jane Culver. The other women—including my mother—remained silent. I shrank from the room and made a show of loudly tramping upstairs. I took my shoes off, and after as long a pause as I could stand, I crept back down on tiptoes, drew up to the closed door of the living room, and pressed my ear against the door.
“What do you plan to do, dear?” I heard Miss Anita ask.
“We’ll have to go on with it,” Jane Culver said. “Too many people have gone to too much trouble. Besides, we don’t even know for certain that any of it is true.”
“If she is already married, you can’t just go through with it,” said one of them—Kiki Baumberger, I think.
“I don’t see why not,” Jane Culver said. “They can just get an annulment afterward, if that’s what they decide.”
“You can’t do that,” Kiki Baumberger protested.
“Hush, Kiki,” Miss Anita said.
“I’m just thinking about the church, Anita,” she said.
“Think about the child,” Miss Anita said. “What she’s suffered.”
“Why doesn’t someone just ask her?” Laura Hearne asked.
“Great idea,” Kiki Baumberger dryly remarked. “Why, Leigh, honey, don’t you look beautiful in that white dress? And what an exquisite bouquet! By the way, is it true that you had a hippie marriage eight years ago to your old high school boyfriend and a secret abortion in the nuthouse?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Laura Hearne murmured.
“We know that, honey,” Miss Anita said. “You were trying to be helpful.”
Once, about a year or two back, while sitting next to me in the pew during Sunday service at Holy Comforter, the Old Man suffered a bout of vertigo. He’d been dealing for some time with inner ear problems resulting from hearing damage he’d suffered during his war service, so he knew what was happening to him, but he was still powerless to stop it. His knees twisted beneath him; his face blanching with terror, he clutched my shoulder and the edge of the pew, trying to regain his bearings as his vision whirled and the floor seemed to drop away. I could never comprehend how that spinning sensation must have felt to him until that moment outside the living room door. Panic, dread, guilt, fear—all the demons set upon me with crippling velocity. I clenched my fists and waited, listening.
“I’m sorry, Jane,” someone said.
It was my mother. I almost didn’t recognize her voice, so low and cold and resigned did it seem to be.
“What have you got to be sorry for, Alice?” Jane Culver asked.
“It was Paul, don’t you see?” my mother said. “This would never have happened if it weren’t for Paul, that stupid, stupid, selfish boy.”
Paul! Old or young, here or gone, dead or alive, Paul would always be available for my mother to blame.
“Please, Alice,” Miss Anita said. “That’s all in the past now.”
“The past is never really behind us, is it, Miss Anita?” my mother asked.
“Not entirely,” Miss Anita answered. “But we can be free of it.”
“We knew Leigh had a bit of a history, but she just seemed so lovely,” Jane Culver said.
“A bit of a history?” my mother said incredulously.
“I never dreamed anything like this might have happened,” Jane Culver protested.<
br />
“Oh, please,” my mother said. It was one of her classic retorts, along with “Buck up” and “Choose your battles.”
“What have I done to make you so angry, Alice?” Jane Culver said.
“I just find it hard to believe that you, of all people, could be so naive.”
“Is that an accusation?” Jane Culver asked, a hint of ire creeping into her voice.
“Alice, honey,” Miss Anita said. “This isn’t helping.”
A tense moment of silence followed.
“I’m sorry, Jane,” my mother said, without much more sincerity than an impish brat being ordered to apologize for kicking his sister.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Jane Culver said.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Miss Anita said. “Come on, now. Let’s pray for Leigh Bowman, and for Charles, and for Jane.”
There was a rustling of movement. I pictured the women reaching to clasp hands in a circle.
“Heavenly Father,” Miss Anita began.
I cast my own silent plea up with theirs. Dear God, I prayed, please don’t let me get caught.
The doorbell rang. I felt as if God were answering my request instantly, in the negative.
Though I feared what might await me at the front door, I knew if I didn’t answer it, my mother would. So I darted from my hiding place outside the living room and out to the front hall. When I opened the door, I almost gasped at the sight of Brad Culver, dressed in sharply creased black slacks, a herringbone sport coat, and a pressed white shirt and reeking of scotch.
“Hello, there, young Richard,” Culver said.
I had never been capable of greeting the man without a shudder. He would always be at the edge of every nightmare I would ever have.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
His eyes swam up and down, as if he’d forgotten what he’d come for.
“Would you mind if I came in?” he asked.
I was afraid to answer. It felt like inviting a vampire into the house.
“Is Mrs. Culver around?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Culver stepped past me into the entrance hall. No magic prevented him from entering without invitation.
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