by S. M. Hulse
He hesitates, considering it, maybe, then shakes his head. “Your phone,” he says, and holds his free hand out. Asa reaches into his pocket, surrenders the device. “Upstairs,” my brother orders. His demeanor disconcerts me—how gently he’d said the same word last night after I woke from my nightmare—but Asa seems to expect it.
When Asa reaches the landing he doesn’t meet my eyes. Hardly looks at me at all, except to step around my chair. He turns carefully to Samuel, who nods toward my room. I follow the two men. “Stay,” Samuel orders, and the word seems directed to both me and Asa. He leaves the room, and I hear his tread on the stairs, the front door locking, shutters being yanked shut.
Asa stands in the center of the room, his expression still and unreadable. He looks oddly rested, and I wonder whether he’s finally slept now that he has no one to stay awake for, or if his grief has stripped the exhaustion out of him, so thoroughly transformed him he’s transcended any yearning for rest. He clutches something small in one hand: the plastic palomino. He sets it on the bedside table. “I wanted to bring this back.”
I almost tell him he didn’t need to do that, but of course he knows that already; it was an excuse, a reason to come see me. I realize in that moment that this man has become a friend. That in these strangest, harshest circumstances I have made a friend. Or might have, were it not for Samuel. “I found him yesterday,” I say. “I told him about Emily.”
Asa closes his eyes, not quite a wince, something deeper.
“I didn’t know where he was before,” I say. “I promise I didn’t. I tried not to. And I didn’t know for sure until I found him. Or he found me. I didn’t—”
“It’s okay, Jo.” It’s a reflexive sort of forgiveness, and it means nothing.
“I went because of Emily,” I say, and that sounds true, finally, and he looks at me for a long moment and then nods.
Samuel comes back up the stairs, his boots hitting hard on each riser, purposeful but not rushed. He goes first into his room, latches the shutters, comes back into my room and does the same. Dark again. Samuel sets a glass-sheathed votive on the table beside the palomino—his eyes glide over the model like it’s nothing—and lights the candle with a match. “Found this under the bathroom sink,” he says. “There’s one more, but that’s it, Jo. Sorry it’s not brighter.”
“I’m fine.” I’m not. I feel the panic of the darkness pressing in already, and knowing there’s daylight beyond these walls barely helps. My father died in daylight hours, and the sun was hidden from him as surely as it is from me now. The room is as airless as the closet was, as close. But I can’t say any of that in front of Asa. What’s the absence of light compared to the absence he endures?
Samuel faces Asa. Wrecked as he is, Asa still carries himself with the upright authority and presence I first noticed at the prayer service. But it’s a quiet authority, gentle, and that hardly seems enough now. My brother is a head shorter than Asa, but he stands with his feet apart and shoulders squared, giving the impression he is simultaneously grounded and coiled. I don’t like to think it, but it’s a predatory stance, and even without the rifle, Samuel would be the more imposing of the two. “You are?”
Asa looks him up and down. He must be trying to align what I told him, what he read in the newspapers, with the person standing before him. Is Samuel as Asa imagined him? Does he see the answers he’s searched for in Samuel’s eyes? “Asa Truth.” I expect him to offer his name tentatively, but he almost seems to savor it, carving the syllables sharply.
“The pastor.” Samuel waits for Asa’s nod. And then he shifts his grip to the center of the rifle, holds it at arm’s length, horizontally, so it hovers there between the two men, pointed at neither, ready to be plucked from his hand. Its strap swings beneath it, the only movement in the room.
Asa looks at the rifle, at Samuel, at the rifle again. I think he understands Samuel’s offer—Samuel’s challenge—a moment before I do. He blinks but doesn’t betray his thoughts with his features. Then I understand, and before I can gasp or object or plead I see Asa’s right hand flex. See the impulse. The yearning.
I can’t even blame him. I’m furious with Samuel, not Asa; what right does my brother have to lay his life before another this way? Maybe he thinks Asa won’t take the rifle because he’s a pastor, but Samuel wasn’t there when Asa cried for his daughter. He hasn’t watched him be whittled down by diminishing hope and grief. He doesn’t realize what temptation he’s placed before the other man. Or maybe Samuel thinks Asa will take the rifle; that’s worse. Does Samuel believe that’s atonement? Does he think it’s that easy, that simple? He knows what it would do to Asa to take a life. He knows what he’s offering isn’t peace.
Words feel dangerous, as though they might entice a finger to curl around a trigger. I can see what Asa wants, feel how much he wants it. What would lead Asa from this temptation? An appeal to his daughter’s memory? To his God? Either could backfire. Either could release him from the control I see him battling to hold on to. Does he care enough about me that he’d listen if I begged him not to make me watch my brother die?
I don’t think I move, but Asa glances at me then, meets my eyes for the first time. If the pain and fire in his own soften, I don’t see it, but he looks back at Samuel and after several more seconds—long seconds—relaxes his hand. He takes a single step backward and shakes his head ever so slightly, and with a grimace, like the movement causes him pain.
Samuel drops the rifle to his side. I study his face for relief, anger, contempt, see none of those. His features are closed, set into an expression I’ve become regrettably familiar with over the years. It looks hard, steely, but I know it shields doubt. It’s the expression he wears when he’s made a decision I disagree with, when he expects to have to fight for something he doesn’t entirely believe in himself.
I move my chair toward him. “Samuel,” I say. Wait until he looks at me. “You should let him go.”
“You know I can’t.” His voice is soft, almost tender. The voice of an adult denying the impossible, innocently fanciful request of a child.
“There’s no reason to make him stay.” I take a breath, meet his eyes. “Samuel, I told Hawkins you’re here.”
“I know.” My stomach lurches, and then again when I realize it’s from fear, that I’m afraid of my own brother. Of Samuel. “I found the phone last night.”
He might be saying, I found these candles. I found some granola bars. Like it doesn’t matter. Like he isn’t angry. But I don’t trust that tone, the calm it implies. Can’t. I didn’t know about the bomb. Don’t know what he’s going to do now, next. “Why didn’t you leave?” I ask. “If you knew, why are you still here?”
“Because I told you I’d be here in the morning,” he says. “I promised.”
* * *
A little while later a phone rings, and Samuel pulls it out of his pocket: mine. He squints at the screen, holds it toward me: just a number, no name. “Will Devin,” I tell him. Never wanted to put his name into the phone, make it seem like a permanent relationship. “He’s FBI.”
Samuel taps the answer key, says, “This is Samuel Faber. I have my sister and the preacher with me.” Hangs up without listening for a response.
I wonder what Devin makes of that, if being hung up on angers or concerns him. Maybe it just fits the profile. I wish I knew whether he’s in charge now, or if they call in someone else for situations like this. I can’t say I like Devin, and I worry about him making a miscalculation with Samuel like he made when he threatened to charge me, but he is at least familiar.
Asa doesn’t seem to have paid any attention to the phone call. He’s taken a seat on the edge of my bed, elbows on his knees. I wonder if he regrets refusing the rifle; his eyes are on it. I notice his shirt is studded with fading damp spots, and I listen and hear the rain again. Asa glances at Samuel, looks away when he sees my brother watching him.
“What’s the plan here, Samuel?” I try to keep the words casual, but the situation mak
es the lightness in my voice sound like a lie.
He hesitates, a pause so slight I doubt Asa will notice it. “They have no right to take this house.”
“That’s not even a losing battle, Samuel; it’s lost.”
“You don’t have anywhere to go.”
“There are lots of places to go.” The phone rings again, and I wait, but Samuel ignores it. I try to figure out how to handle this. Usually my brother is the one insisting there’s always another plan, always more to be done. The one asserting facts must be faced, solutions found. It worries me to hear him mired in these stale concerns. “Hawkins is leaving town. Offered his house to me for a song.”
“You’re going to live on thirty hours a week at Fuel Stop.”
I take care to keep my expression and voice calm. “It’s closing. I told you that.”
His hand tight around the rifle. Something in his eyes that will look cold to Asa but looks desperate to me. Just as dangerous. A chill centers itself in my chest, spreads outward. Surely Samuel knows I can take care of myself; he’s the one who taught me how. But what did he say when I asked about his plan? He had no real answer. Just a grievance. There’s no good way out of this situation, and that means it isn’t safe to be in this situation with him. It’s never occurred to me before today that he might hurt me. He’s spent his entire life protecting me; it seems unfathomable he could become the danger. But if he feels there are no options. If he feels leaving me alone is the worst thing he could do.
“I’ll find something else,” I tell him. Try not to rush the words. To sound afraid. “Or if I don’t I’ll go to Split Creek. Maybe Elk Fork. Martha asked if I’d teach a class at the art supply shop a couple times a week. My last painting sold for more than I earn at Fuel Stop in a month. And a gallery in Whitefish offered me a show.” I don’t tell him I turned it down, or why. “I’ll be okay, Samuel.”
“You don’t need me.” Challenge more than question. Here a new danger. Abandon me, reject me. Lose himself along the way.
“You’re her family,” Asa says quietly. “Of course she needs you.”
The phone rings again, and Samuel lets it. He stares at Asa, and I fervently wish my brother’s face would soften, even break, that he would apologize for what he has done, or if not apologize at least acknowledge. I wish I could take his desperation and reshape it into regret, sorrow, grief. All the things one should feel when one has caused a child’s death. It would hurt him—he deserves to have it hurt him—but it would be better than this hard-edged despair. But I can’t compel him to apologize, and even if I could, I couldn’t make it mean anything. I can’t force him to feel what he doesn’t feel.
He’s still looking at Asa, and this time the other man doesn’t look away. “Do you still believe in God, Preacher?” It could have been a goading question, but it comes out genuine. Almost gentle, had the words issued from someone else’s lips.
“I don’t know.” A bewildered, brutal honesty.
The phone again. Samuel taps it. Silence.
“I think it’s easy to believe when life is comfortable,” Samuel says. “It was easy when I was young. Even after our father died—Jo was too young to remember, but I was eight, and that’s a hard age for a boy to lose his father—it still seemed possible. You expect to lose your parents. Not so early, but it doesn’t upset the order of things.” I think of Asa’s mother, her illness, the father it left him with. “He died in the mines. There was hope they might be alive at first. A rescue mission that went on too long, a second collapse, a couple rescuers dead. They had to give up then. And as I got older I started thinking about all that time we were hoping, because I came to understand that while I was hoping, my father was dying. Maybe he was dead already, maybe he died in the collapse, but he might have been trapped and waiting, and I wonder when he realized no one was coming. At the memorial service the pastor said God had been with the men. That he had waited with them, comforted them. It was a nice idea, one I clung to for a long time. But then Ben Archer killed my mother and there was no time for God to be with her. There were only a few seconds of terror and then she was dead. And there was no time for God to comfort me, because Archer had shot my sister and was going to kill her unless I killed him first, so I did.” He pauses, and I see his eyes flick toward the door, the hall, all that lies below. So quick I almost miss it. His gaze already back on Asa. “And it’s not just us, is it? There are people who have suffered worse and suffered longer, and they’re not rare. I’m not an idiot, Preacher. I didn’t throw away faith on a whim. But—”
“But you don’t understand how a loving Father could allow such things to happen to His children if He had the power to spare them.” Asa recites the words as though they are as familiar to him as scripture. He clasps his hands, leans over his knees in a stance I would say looked like prayer if he didn’t seem so crushed beneath a weight I cannot see. “And so you decided there is no loving Father.”
Samuel tugs at the cuffs of his shirt. A nervous gesture I remember from childhood. “If you care to change my mind.”
A long silence. Long enough I think maybe this is it, maybe this is the moment it will be okay. Maybe this is when Asa will reach out, and Samuel will reach back, and things will work out, somehow.
“A month ago I might have tried,” Asa says at last. He looks toward the shuttered window, stares at it as though he can see what lies beyond. “Now I don’t know what you think I have left to offer.”
* * *
I’ve been hearing sirens all morning, and vehicles crunching gravel near the house, and now the unmistakable chop of a helicopter, the sound of its rotors rebounding off the mountain slopes.
“You should talk to them,” I say, when the phone rings again. Asa’s had started ringing, too, and Samuel shut it off, but he’s left mine on. “At least talk to Hawkins. Tell them you’ll only speak to him. That’s what I did.”
Samuel glances at me, something like approval crossing his face for the briefest moment. “What would I say?”
“I don’t think it really matters, as long as you say something.” I pause, weigh the urgency of the situation against that frightening desperation. “They’re not going to wait forever.”
“I thought they’d have used tear gas or something by now.” A contribution from Asa. I’m relieved to hear it; in the hours since his conversation with Samuel, he’s remained hunched on the edge of my bed, head bowed.
“They won’t want to use gas with Jo in here if they can help it.” I frown at my brother. Hate to think he planned on taking advantage of the fact that they’ll worry about my inability to walk and whether my injury has compromised my lung function. “Also,” he adds plainly, casting a glance at Asa, “they’re afraid I’ll shoot you.” Asa doesn’t react.
I want again to ask Samuel how he thinks this can possibly end, but bite back the words. No good will come of highlighting the circumstances. “Is this what you wanted?” I ask instead. The words could sound like a challenge, but I think he’ll hear that the question is sincere.
“I wanted them to leave us alone,” Samuel says, but then he shakes his head, closes his eyes. I glance at the rifle, but his hand is still closed tightly over the stock. He sits silently for several seconds. “I wanted…” Eyes still shut. The phone again, muted before it finishes sounding a single ring. Another several seconds. They slide by more slowly than usual, and I have time to notice the things that usually slip by too quickly on ordinary days: the way Samuel’s eyes move feverishly beneath their fragile lids; the hard arch of the tendons in his neck; the color of a candle flame, colors, really, because like all light it contains all of them at once; the groan of the building wind against the eaves, the way it sounds just as I once imagined ghosts did.
I wait. Listen to the rain on the roof. Wait some more. After a while Samuel opens his eyes, but he keeps them cast toward the floor. He does not speak.
* * *
I tell him to go downstairs to my room. I tell him there is a painting
there, on paper, not canvas. Not the house, another one. Smaller. I tell him to bring it here.
Samuel looks closely at me—I’ve never been the type to give commands, always more willing to discuss, to edge into a topic sideways—but he stands. Stares hard at Asa. “You’re going to stay.” Asa nods, a single dip of his head.
“Thank you for not taking the rifle when he offered,” I say quietly, when he has gone.
“I wanted to.”
“I know you did.” The candle on the table hasn’t burned down as much as I would have guessed. Not so much time gone by as it seems. Those slow seconds again. I feel a sudden impulse to push it over, let its flames lick at the bedding, the curtains, consume the room. Burn the house and settle it once and for all. It seems a melodramatic thought even in these circumstances, and I let the candle be. “I think he would have let you.”
Asa pushes both hands through his hair but doesn’t say anything.
Samuel’s footsteps come back along the downstairs hall. He was a long time in my room, and hardly anything in it. The painting stopped him, then.
He appears in the doorway. He’s slung the rifle over his shoulder again, cradles the sheet of paper in his upturned palms. He looks at me first. “It’s for Asa,” I tell him.
Samuel presents the painting to him carefully, still balanced flat on his hands. I almost tell him he doesn’t need to be so careful; it’s heavyweight paper, the pigment safe beneath a fixative, but of course it isn’t the painting itself he regards as fragile, but its subject. Asa takes the sheet, his hands folding possessively around its edges. He tips it toward himself so Samuel and I can’t see it. I watch as he studies the portrait I painted of his daughter. The way his own eyes soften when he looks at hers, the way his mouth so briefly curves to match her smile.
He angles the paper toward the candle, holds it at a protective distance that would be safe for its living subject. She is happy in the portrait, because I could not give her to her father any other way, but there are shadows in the painting, too, the shadows I’ve learned can’t be denied if they are to cast the light into brightest relief. I painted it after the hospital, after he wanted me to see her. I wanted to show him I had.