DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (31 page)

There was a church being built up on a mountain there—foolish, people said, to build it so far from the valley and the folks
who might come there; but the minister, who had preached in backyards and dwelling houses long enough, had a call to build
it there, a real churchhouse. He was one who took her in. She helped him and his young wife: she minded the other young children
while the woman, her stomach big, sewed curtains and cloths for the church on a pedal machine; she sang in it too when it
was done and prayed and shouted with the others. And because he really had a true call, and because people heard
about the call and came to see a man crazy or blessed enough to build a church where no people were, he filled his new church
on Sundays and revival nights for a whole summer.

The preacher said she had a hungry for God, that’s why she had found her way to his church. She knew she had a hungry, but
God would not satisfy it. In their daylong meetings and nightlong revivals, God was invited, awaited, solicited to appear
among them or to send his power in, and in it came almost every time, manifested in someone, sometimes in many, the preacher
laboring over each one, his shirt drenched in sweat, or himself slain in the spirit and falling to his knees to gabble and
prophesy, tears flowing down his cheeks. She never. He worried over her, that she never got a blessing as others did, but
she told him that to see others get a blessing—to catch them as they staggered, seized; keep them from falling into the hot
stove or hitting their heads—that was a blessing too: and he said well yes it was. And pondered her.

Open your hearts, he cried to them in the church, where the velvet tapestry of Christ’s sharing at the Last Supper hung on
the wall. Hearts, he cried, hearts is where God dwells in this world, the only place he can dwell. Open your hearts and let
the power of God pass in and out. But her heart could only open to let things in; within that small secret box they disappeared.
Nothing ever came out.

She never did get a blessing, but at that church-house, on the fullmoon night after she first found herself bleeding (stanch
it with a warsh-rag, honey, the preacher’s wife told her, we’ll go down to the store tomorrow), she left her bed when all
were asleep, and went out and up the track to the church-house. And she had not gone very far up that way before she saw that
there were folks at the shut door waiting to go in. When she came closer she saw that she knew them: they were people of this
church, a family that had recently gone all together in their truck off a gullied mountain road in the dark into the holler
below and been killed, mother son and grandma. And she saw there was another woman there too, an old woman lately taken up
in Christ, who looked at the child coming up the path, patient, curious, or perhaps wondering: has she come to unlock the
door for us?

But she could not help them: she wanted to say so but could not, wanted to say something to their faces, strange patient asking
faces like the faces in old tintypes shut up in their carved cases, dead faces, as these were. I can’t help you I can’t. And
she knew (though she did not dare to turn her head to see) that others were coming up the path to the church behind her, a
great number, she alone alive among them.

She couldn’t remember later on how she had returned to her own bed, where she found herself next morning. Probably she had
taken the
way she would later learn she must go: not back but farther forward into that land, until she came once again to her own door
or window.

She asked the preacher: Where are the dead now? And he answered that they were in heaven if they had been saved, and in the
other place if they had not been saved; and their bodies were in the earth, to be lifted up on the Last Day and made whole,
to be joined again with their souls. He said he thought often about that meeting—about the soul’s long wait, none knew how
long it would be, though surely it might not be much longer now; and the reunion with the newmade body, the joy. He studied
her to see if he had answered the question she had asked him, and must have seen in her face that he had not; but she asked
no more.

Four more times she saw them in that year, almost able to know before she lay down to sleep the nights on which she would
walk out, but unable, when she was abroad and going up the trail toward the church or down toward the river, to remember what
she was about, asking
Why am I here, who’s called me
, until she began to see them. She told no one; could not even bring herself to give news of those she saw to the ones they
had left behind.

On the night of midsummer, shortest of the year, while the preacher and his wife coupled with suppressed cries in the next
bedroom (preaching made him eager and loving in all ways, she had learned that) she lay long awake, afraid to sleep, knowing
that if she did she would go down into that land; and when dark was deep she arose, packed her clothes silently in a sack,
took from the tin box all the money that had been collected in the church that evening, and slipped barefoot from the house.
She didn’t know where she would go. She had heard that up the mountain, far from towns and off the roads, there lived people
whose gospel was more perfect even than the preacher’s with whom she had stayed. They had no church at all, only their own
bodies, wherein they kept the truths they knew. It was told they ate no flesh; and when they decided that their time here
below was done, they ceased to eat at all, until they died. She thought about them as she stood in the darkness at the end
of the path, and it was as though she could see them and hear their voices. It could be that she ought now to go and see if
she could find them, and ask them about herself, learn whether in their more perfect gospel she was known about; or prove
to herself that after all they didn’t exist.

She had to have something to do. From where she stood, where the path met the road, she could go up, or she could go back
down, toward the valley of the No Name River, to her father’s house: she could ask him too, where the dead were, whether the
more-perfects were real and could be found. Mock him if he didn’t know. She was walking down
along the road, though not having actually decided, when dawn came. A car pulled up alongside her. It was a sedan whose back
end had been cut away to make a truck bed, and in it was a refrigerator, tied down with straw rope. She wondered why it is
that people cart refrigerators around the world so much, and the thought made her laugh just as the driver (a lean lined man,
but not old, with a cigarette burned down almost to his fingers) looked out at her. He slowed, and kept on looking out at
her, and kept pace beside her for a long ways, until she stopped; then so did he.

She named her child by him Roberta, which was the secret name those Yankee children in Bondieu had bestowed upon her when
they baptized her with a trickle of water stolen from the nuns’ church—Roberta, the name of the power that had been in that
baptizing, in that water and the words in another language that the boy said. Each of those children had had their secret
name, which they said they received in a church—not the little white church-house in Bondieu but a real church with a bishop:
Bobby saw in her mind when she thought of it a place as high and stony as a mine was deep, and dark as the pines beyond her
grandfather’s house. The eldest girl’s name was Hildy and her secret name was Teresa; the boy’s name was Pierce and his secret
name (not yet bestowed) was to be John Bosco, like the chocolate drink. He had showed her a picture of this John Bosco, in
white lace and a red robe, looking heavenward. He had showed her a lot of pictures.

Their house on a hill, that was a place she never once thought of going back to, as though it couldn’t be found, as though
it was a story like the story of the more perfect gospel teachers, though it had really happened to her. So had the meetings
with the dead happened to her. She went the other way, away from stories.

Her secret name hadn’t saved Roberta, baby Roberta, who died when she was four. That was in Pikeville after Randy left for
Detroit. Died of what? Bobby didn’t have a name for it, and later would resent the way city people looked at her when she
said she didn’t know; so she came to call it by the names of various illnesses she learned about as a nurse’s aide, each different
name with a different story, so that Roberta went farther away with each telling.

And Bobby too moved farther away. Whenever she lived in any place long enough and knew it well enough to be able to say My
home, my church, my neighbors, she would begin to see their dead: those who should not have died, those who had been rapt
away from life before their time; and she would move again. There were towns and cities and mountain farms and a hospital
where a judge sent her and where she
recovered from TB; there she learned she had no fear of the sick and the dying, and could make her own living among them.
She did not turn to the Word again, though, until the morning after the night when her daughter Roberta found her again, in
Conurbana two hundred miles from her grave in Breshy County, Roberta still four years old, in her nightdress stained and foul:
came to stand in her door, to look at her and try to take her hand.

Two vans from The Woods were ranked in the parking lot of the Bypass Inn with cars and busses from other places. On an easel
by the front desk the name was stuck up in white letters on the black notice board along with Bears Boosters and Avon and
some others. Powerhouse International. They didn’t believe in churches; wherever two or three are gathered together in My
name. Bobby was told that when they had bought an abandoned Bible college out in the Midwest somewhere to be their headquarters,
first thing they had done was to take down the cross over the chapel: the symbol of a cult, they said, not for them, the only
true uninterpreted unreconstructed Christians.

In the Empire Room they were just finishing the first half of the meeting—time for a break for a while, food and drink, people
could only mind for so long, no matter how caught up. She looked in: people were pushing back their folding chairs, looking
(some of them) as though they were rising from a deep pool, opening their eyes after long immersion. Mostly though like kids
done with school. Ray Honeybeare sat on the dais, still, his arms across his breast, hands cupping his elbows, his eyes looking
inward and his mouth downdrawn, a look she knew. Pitt Thurston, who had been preaching (you were not to call it preaching,
she had been told that more than once) listened, grinning intently, to a woman who had come up to speak to him. Dark circles
of sweat under his arms when he removed his nice sport coat. Working hard. Bobby could hear his strong heartbeat: almost thought
she could.

Seeing him changed her mind: she wouldn’t tell him what she had seen. If she did the whole story would come unasked from her
mouth, and that would prove to him and to all of them that she wasn’t what she wanted to be, what they had all worked so hard
to make her: it would prove that she remained what she had been, a thing worse than they could imagine, and unable to be changed
or touched.

People milled out into the foyer where a long table clothed in white had been set up with a bunch of chrome coffeepots, two
women readying them and some trays of cookies, their own baking for sure. Bobby recognized one of the women, young and dark
and
tall. She had prayed with her: one of those who had come in vans from The Woods.

“Got you helpn, huh.”

“Oh. Oh hi. Yes.”

“Bobby.”

“Yes, sure. Rose.” She gave a little wave in lieu of a handshake, busy, unsteady it seemed on her low heels.

“Need some help?”

“I think I.”

Rose bent to lift from a serving cart a big tray of small creamers, all full. Never been a waitress, for sure. Bobby without
time to stop it saw her heft the tray wrong at the same moment as her heel turned under her; the tray had almost reached shoulder
height when the girl’s body folded beneath it, and as she tried to keep from sinking and Bobby reached to right it, the little
round creamers like passengers on a sinking ship rattled all together down the tilting tray and off: Rose trying to avoid
them slipped and sat down, gathering most of them in her lap.

“Oh boy,” Bobby said. “Oh Lord.”

Rose was on her feet again, face shocked, betrayed, afraid. Cream ran down her blouse and dripped from her fingertips; wetness
like a bad kid’s accident spread over her skirt.

The other woman serving hurried to wipe Rose with stiff motel napkins but made little difference. Bobby turned and saw Pitt
Thurston’s wife at the meeting-room doorway and—only needing to point for an explanation—got from her the key to one of the
rooms she knew the group would have rented for the night.

“Come on, honey,” she said to Rose. “Quick.”

She could hear the squish of cream in Rose’s shoe as she led her to the elevator. The elevator’s ceiling was mirrored, like
a whore’s bedroom, and Rose looked up at herself, and laughed and wept, holding out her hands helplessly.

The room was filled with bags and knapsacks, a cot unfolded and unmade, fast-food bags unremoved. More important things to
do than tidy. They found the bathroom.

“God, this never happened before. I feel so stupid.”

“I seen it,” Bobby said. She had seen it a lot: how for a good while after you accepted and were cleansed, you could feel
that giddy sensation of having been emptied and then refilled with something softer, lighter, new and unknown, and how hard
it was to manage your newness sometimes. If you were out in the world, and you fell down the stairs or something, you’d talk
about Satan’s powers that were around you, tripping you up. Maybe so.

“Don’t mind me if I help,” Bobby said. She sought the catch of Rose’s skirt, slippery, hard to get a grip on, like a kid’s
wet snowpants. “‘Cause I’m a nurse,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. “Comes naturally.”

“No sure thanks. Really thanks.” Bewildered apparently still. Beneath the skirt, panty hose, wet too, and pale peach underpants,
tiny and fine—a surprise, for some reason. Rose, her face a mask of disgust, was trying to undo the buttons of her blouse
without handling the sodden silky material.