But worse was her out-of-control brain. Sometimes in the middle of the night she woke up with a head full of sharp, wordless thoughts, her pulse racing.
She hated that it was so hard to hold on to what the God communicated to her. The beginning of each communion was clear: the long wait as she lay on the table, the cold stone under her back, staring up into the dark. And then, when she’d almost convinced herself the God wasn’t going to appear this time, she’d glimpse movement in the dark and her heart would jump. The God always moved slowly, descending like a spider on a thread, and then he would reach for her. A quick sharp pain as their hands met. Then he would withdraw his limbs, slowly, slowly, and her arms would ache as that strange, gleaming sinew stretched between them, trembling and tugging. She was a puppet, a fish on the line. And then a wave of thoughts and emotions would strike her. And then, at some point, she’d pass out.
Later she’d wake up in her bedroom like a drowned sailor washed ashore, worn out and gasping and amazed at her survival. Of course it was Motty who carried her out of the cave each time, Motty who took care of her. She’d bind up Stella’s hands and mop her brow as gruffly as a cowboy branding cattle. Stella would spend days in bed, sleeping fitfully and dreaming something else’s dreams. When she opened her eyes the room quivered with meaning. Each mundane object, each book and floorboard and windowpane, seemed to be revealing itself to her: The dinner plate Motty brought her was both itself and something purer, some original form as it must have existed when God whispered the world into existence. The ruby slice of tomato came straight from the Garden of Eden.
The constant blast of secret knowledge was exhausting, yet she cried when it began to fade. And when it disappeared completely, when every object turned dumb and forgot its true self, she ached to get it back. She longed to see the God again.
But the God hadn’t come to her. Hendrick and the Uncles kept their own schedule. And she couldn’t get into the chapel on her own, because Motty had hidden the key. Everyone controlled what Stella did and when she did it, and she had no say.
Adults could do what they wanted, men especially. Hell, they could go off and marry some floozy named Marie.
Abby said, “You want to go watch Tom Acherson knock down the Ledbetter house? He’s got a big backhoe.”
“No.” That sounded too sad for words. She remembered the day she helped them pack up, and how dead Polly Ledbetter had seemed.
“Aw, come on,” Abby said. “Not every day you see a one-armed man tear down a house.”
“You go.” For months he’d been trying to draw her out. He’d offer to take her hunting, or invite her to help run batches of shine, but she’d lost all interest.
“Wait! I got it!”
“I just want to read, thank you.”
“Oh, this is miles better than any old book.” Then he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
* * *
—
she perched at the edge of the Model A’s high front seat, practically standing up, her palms slick on the steering wheel—and the car hadn’t even started yet. They were on level ground, about a mile from Motty’s. “I don’t think I’m ready for this,” she said.
“Pfff. You’re thirteen,” Abby said. “Uncle Dan learned to drive when he was in diapers.”
“Did he now?”
“Course, he was forty years old.”
“Abby!”
“Ah, there’s that smile. You ready to start ’er up? It’s very simple.”
“I’m listening.”
“Pull back on the handbrake—safety first! Good. Now step on the clutch and put her in neutral—wiggle the gearshift so you know it’s free, there you go. Make sure the fuel line is open. See that fuel line running under the dash? That little valve by your knee, turn it vertical, that lets the gas flow. This here’s the choke, you’re going to pull up on that when we start it, but not just yet. See that knob on the top of the choke? That’s the air–fuel mixture valve, turn it left, nope, not all the way, just three-quarter open—you want a pretty rich mix to start. The starter button is there on the floor, just find it with your foot—nope, that’s the gas, the little button, but don’t step on it yet. Up there on the steering column, that lever on the right, that’s your hand throttle, bring that down a couple notches to give it extra gas for the start. Now that doohickey on the left, that’s the spark lever—push it all the way up, that’s full retard. We’ll advance that when the engine’s running, get the timing right so the fire explodes when the piston’s on the upstroke, you follow?”
She glared at him. The car still wasn’t started. This device required as much ritual as running a full batch on the still.
“Here we go,” Abby said. “Press the clutch. Turn the key. Press down on that starter. Pull out the choke and push it back—just once!”
The engine thumped and shuddered. “Advance the spark! Give her some more throttle!”
The engine died with a sound like it had swallowed a chicken bone.
“Forget it,” Stella said.
“You’re doing fine. I think we gave it too much choke. Let’s try it again.”
Five minutes later she released the handbrake and got the car rolling. They went ten whole feet before it started lurching so hard it was throwing her against the steering wheel. “What’s going on?!” she shouted.
Abby laughed. “You’ve got it in rabbit gear!”
“There’s a rabbit gear?”
“Hit the clutch.” She had to pull against the steering wheel to push her foot all the way down. “Okay, let ’er out easy, easy! Give her more gas. Too much! Now advance the spark. Left hand, left hand.”
“Stop yelling at me!”
“Press the clutch, shift back to neutral, then clutch again—”
“Slow down!”
“Now shift to second—” The car slammed to a stop. “—gear.”
The engine died. Stella burst into tears.
“I think that went pretty well,” Abby said.
“Don’t mock me.”
“I wouldn’t do any such thing.” He opened the passenger door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve taught you the basics. The rest you can figure out on your own.”
“What?”
“Just bring it back before it runs out of gas. And stay between the fence posts.” He started walking back the way they’d come. He was whistling. Whistling.
Stella stared at her hands, then at the wheel, then at the 1,400 levers, buttons, valves, pedals, and dials. Clutch, spark, throttle, starter, choke. Clutch, spark, throttle, starter—
The engine coughed to life. She slid out the choke, increased the hand throttle, and got it up to a fast idle. Then stomped the clutch, pushed into first—and killed the engine.
She screamed into the windshield. Gosh damn it, she’d never learn to drive this thing!
* * *
—
…and then she was flying down 321 at fifty miles per hour. Abby lounged in the passenger seat with one arm behind his head and the other holding his flask, his eyes closed. The car was rattling and the wind was roaring and she was singing “Big River Blues” at the top of her lungs. Then a police car passed her going the other way. She saw it brake hard in the rearview.
“Uhm, Abby?”
He was hardly more awake when the cop ambled up to the driver’s side window. The policeman looked her over, then saw who was next to her.
“Absalom Whitt,” the cop said.
“Hey, Bobby.”
Stella said nothing. She’d broken into a sweat.
“I was surprised to see your vehicle out in daylight. Who’s this young thing?”
“My niece. Stella, say hi to Officer Reed.”
She lifted a hand. He was a handsome, narrow-faced white man with brilliant green
eyes. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Sixteen,” she lied.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Short people are allowed to drive,” Abby said.
“God almighty, Abby, are you corrupting a minor?”
“She’s not corrupt! This girl knows Shakespeare! Stella, tell him a sonnet.”
“So you aren’t making a delivery?”
“Bobby, you think I’d put an innocent girl at risk of committing a felony?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
Stella stared straight ahead. Felony?
“Show me your license, miss.”
“Bobby, you’re making her cry.”
She glared at Abby. She wasn’t crying. He made a face that said, Would it kill you to try?
To Officer Reed she said, “My grandmother doesn’t let me travel with it.”
“How’s that?”
“My license. She says it’s too valuable. She keeps it in the family Bible.”
“Family—? That’s the most—no. Who’s your grandmother?” His eyes widened. “Not—?”
Abby nodded.
“Yeah,” Stella said sadly.
“Motty and Bobby have a fraught relationship,” Abby explained to her. “Motty took a shot at him ’cause he killed a squirrel on her land.”
“I was ten years old!”
“I’m sure she’s forgiven you,” Stella said.
“But not forgotten,” Abby added.
“Open the rumble seat,” Bobby said.
“I told you, I’m not working today.”
“Open it.”
Abby got up and levered it open. The seat was empty. Officer Reed walked the perimeter of the car. Then he looked at Stella and saw that her face was crumpled like she was going to burst into tears. “Fine, fine.”
Stella went through the starting ritual and pulled back onto the highway. Officer Reed didn’t follow her.
A minute passed. Abby said, “Family Bible?”
“It was the only thing I could think of.”
“You’re a born bootlegger,” he said admiringly. “I’m taking you with me every trip.”
* * *
—
abby had promised her a hamburger and a movie—an Edward G. Robinson gangster flick was playing at the Palace theater—but they weren’t going there directly, it turned out. Five miles before Maryville, Abby guided her off the highway and down a series of winding roads, to a town almost as small as the creek it was named after. Had her pull in to a pretty little blue frame house with yellow shutters. Pee Wee Simms came out to meet them.
“Holy shit,” Pee Wee said in nasal Yankee. “This little girl’s been driving your car, Abby!”
“She’s sixteen now. Had three birthdays while we were on the road.”
“Congratulations, Miss Wallace.”
“Thank you, Mr. Simms.”
Abby asked, “My sister’s not here, is she?”
“She’s inside working. Don’t worry, a bomb could go off and she wouldn’t hear it. Even so, perhaps we should, uhm, move quickly?”
Abby lifted the high front seat and exposed the two cases of moonshine, packed in straw.
“Go on into the house,” Pee Wee said to Stella. “We’ve got lemonade in the icebox. But perhaps don’t mention…?”
“Don’t worry,” Abby said. “She can keep a secret.”
Outside the house was neat as a pin, but inside…inside it looked like two libraries had collided. A bookshelf filled each wall. The furniture was covered by the rubble of books, more books, and stacks of white papers. Here and there a dinner plate or wine bottle topped a pile. On a couch there was a space carved out between two precarious mounds for a skinny person who didn’t jiggle much. Stella picked up one of the books on top, a slim, pale thing with notes sticking out of its pages like feathers. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection by R. A. Fisher, Sc.D., F.R.S.—a name that came with its own secret code.
A voice said, “Are the boys hiding the hooch?”
Through the gap between a pair of French doors she could see a white woman leaning back in a swivel chair, her legs up on a rolltop desk. Legs in pants. A notebook lay open on her lap. Glasses hung from a chain on her neck.
Stella didn’t want to lie. “They’re doing something.”
The woman liked that. “You must be Stella.” She swung her legs down, stepped over a knee-high wall of books, and offered her hand. “I’m Merle Whitt.”
Stella didn’t raise her arm. There were scabs on her palms. Merle smoothly turned her handshake into a wave at the room. “Sorry about the mess.”
“No!” Stella said. “This is—” She struggled for a word. “Perfect.”
“No one’s ever used that word for here.” Merle produced a cigarette from behind her ear, lit it. She was as tall as Abby, but with curly hazelnut hair and olive skin. She wore what looked like a man’s leather belt with extra notches to cinch her waist, and a thick wristwatch. Stella was confused by her last name. How could she have kept Whitt if she’d married a Simms?
Merle said, “Are you a student of evolution?”
Oh. The book in her hand. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have moved it.”
“Or maybe they don’t teach that in the cove.”
“My teacher says it’s not godly.”
“He’s right about that.”
“Can I ask why’re you keeping a frog?”
Merle turned to see where she was looking and laughed. “C’mere.”
On one of the few bookshelves not crammed higgledy-piggledy with books was a set of glass objects, lined up smallest to biggest, from small rectangles to that jar containing a spotted frog, floating in clear liquid. “Rana pipiens,” Merle said. “The northern leopard frog. It starts off as just one little cell, and then…” She picked up one of the smallest glass rectangles and put it in Stella’s hands. “That slide holds a single blastula, just thirty-two little cells. We’ll have to get my microscope out to see it.”
Stella was scared she’d drop it. “You have a microscope?”
“Oh sure. The little fella takes about thirty hours to get to the gastrula stage, then the neurula…” More slides. “And then after eighty-four hours you get the tail bud—can you see that?”
Inside a tiny vial was a dark shape as big as a splinter. The next biggest jar was a tadpole; Stella had seen plenty of those on her own. But it was amazing to see one so clear, so still. “Is this water?” Stella asked. “How do you—?”
“Alcohol, nearly pure. There’s more than one use for it, you know.” She laughed. “I don’t know why I hold on to these. I made them for a project in grad school. It’s nice that you noticed them.”
“Can we…? If it’s okay…”
“Get out the microscope? Of course. First, let’s get something to drink. What’ll you have?”
“I shouldn’t. I have to drive.”
Merle’s laugh was a bold-print exclamation mark.
* * *
—
abby drove back to the cove. Stella walked into the house carrying a paper sack that held three science books. Three!
Motty was waiting for her in the living room, a glass in one hand and a willow switch across her lap. Rumors of Stella’s near arrest had beaten them back to the cove. But how? Motty didn’t even have a telephone.
“I’m too old for a switch,” Stella said.
“You think so, do you?”
* * *
—
that night she lay in bed reading from her new stock, one ear cocked to the sounds of Motty moving around the house. Two of the books were biology textbooks, and one was a journal with different articles in it. All of them were hard reading, but the journal especially. Her favorite article so far was called “Artificial Transmuta
tion of the Gene,” which was all about using X-rays to mutate genes in fruit flies, real mad scientist stuff. She was on her third run at the text when she finally heard the old woman go to bed. Stella waited a half hour more, then eased open the door.
Find the key. The thought had been echoing around her head all night.
Stella had already searched Motty’s room a few times, finding nothing but old clothes and an even older carpetbag, disappointingly empty. For a while she fantasized that it was Esther’s bag, somehow returned to the family after Esther’s disappearance. She’d never figured out how to ask Motty about it without giving herself up as a snoop. The only remaining place to check was the kitchen.
Stella moved into the room like a thief. She slid open drawers, moved aside spoons and forks and cutlery, all as quietly as possible. She searched behind the store-bought canned goods and home-canned vegetables, lifted aside the bags of dried beans and salt and cornmeal. Nothing. She checked under the apple corer, inside the ice cream bucket, under each of the three black laundry irons, through the cleaning rags. Then she remembered the night four years ago, when she first saw Motty with the chapel key.
Stella picked up one of the cane-back kitchen chairs, set it down quietly in front of the cupboards, and stepped up. The highest shelf held the specialty glass, the “Princess Pink” dishes and bowls, Motty’s most precious possessions, after the guns. Stella reached—and from the front room came a grunt. She froze. Waited. Twenty, thirty seconds later, Motty began to snore.
Stella found the key in the sugar bowl, half buried. Ha!
She wet the steel between her lips and dipped it again, then slipped out of the house sucking on it like a lollipop.
* * *
—
once in the chapel she didn’t dare light a candle. She moved through the dark, hand touching each pew back, until her feet found the raised platform. It took a while to find the recessed handle in the panel that covered the hole, but then she pulled with both hands. The screech of wood was thunderous. She froze, suddenly afraid.
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