The Used World (6 page)

The Haddington Church of the Brethren was completely silent when Amos stopped speaking. Claudia didn’t dare look around, but she wondered what the other parishioners were thinking as they listened. At the time she didn’t even know what Brethren meant, except that she never thought about her clothes when she was there, and no one and nothing but Amos Townsend and this church really interested her.

After that Sunday, Claudia thought often of the phrase ‘He created for Himself a kind of daily compassion,’ and she tried to do the same, even though she lacked power, divinity, wisdom, grace. She walked through the grocery store, or stepped into a gas station, and when the toothless women in sweatshirts, their bodies and hair reeking of cigarette smoke and fast food, stared at her cruelly or even went so far as to make a comment, she no longer thought,
They hate me.
Now she tried to remind herself that if we don’t feel the weight of the human condition, we must not be fully human. She thought instead,
They hate themselves. They hate being alive. They hate their Fathers.

As she walked to the car, the feeling in her chest was atmospheric, a pinching there not unlike excitement. The silence was so thick Claudia became aware of her own breathing, and of the sensation that she was actually
in
the sky. The sky was no longer above her, or the clouds at a safe distance. As she loaded her groceries the snow began to fall, heavy flakes at first, but by the time she started the car and turned on the lights, the wind had picked up and the six miles ahead of her seemed too long. She had the second bag of food, the things she’d thought she might leave for Millie, but knew she’d never get to her sister’s house and back home before the storm struck. As she made her way through the north end of Jonah, she decided to leave them at Rebekah’s; the old house where Rebekah lived with her father was on the way.

The porch light burned at the Shooks’, but Rebekah’s car wasn’t there, and there was no sign of Vernon. Claudia trudged up the sidewalk, the heavy bag obscuring her vision. Rebekah’s neighborhood felt abandoned—there were no dogs barking, no movement. She left the bag in front of the wooden screen door, under the porch light, as she would have at Millie’s, with just these words written on the outside of the bag:
For Rebekah, a cold night.

By the time Claudia reached Old 73, heading east toward home, hers was the only car on the road, or the only one she could see. There was a little visibility to the south, but almost none in the north; she could make out the houses, the convenience store, the used car lot to the right of the road, but nothing on the left. She knew her right turn was coming up, and began to look for the mailbox that signaled the V of the additional lane—just a little turn lane a quarter of a mile long. She was too familiar with the road, had driven it too many times, and tended to sail into the turn lane at top speed, then slow down quickly in order to make the turn. Indiana country roads have that effect on most people, Claudia thought; they breed a false security, because the world seems so flat and manageable, the sight line so clean. She didn’t see the mailbox and then she saw just the outline of it, and some part of her body led into the swerve to the right, but something else, a voice, cautioned her to flash her high beams into the lane, just in case. There in the lane was a man, dressed in a black coat and walking shoulder-hunched against the blowing snow. Claudia jerked the wheel of the old Cherokee too hard to the left; too late realized her error. The back fishtailed with a skating, liquid ease, and Claudia took her hands off the wheel. She spun in a full circle, then half of another, and when the tires found some purchase, she gently turned the wheel into the spin and felt the truck shudder in her hands.

She could no longer see anything. Her headlights were pointing west, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The walking man was gone, had vanished as if into smoke, or a high tide. She had to get off the highway—whoever she couldn’t see wouldn’t see her, so she drove a few feet, then recognized the iron gate of the old nursing home, empty for the past three years. Bear Creek, her road, was due south—so she turned and drove tentatively over what she hoped was the road. By now there was nothing, no shoulder, no fencerow, nothing to indicate if she was still on pavement or heading toward the culvert. Two miles yet from home, and she’d left earlier that day without either boots or gloves, another bit of typical Hoosier folly.

Sometimes the snow blew horizontally across her headlights, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. She’d gone nearly half a mile when she saw something off to her right, at the edge of the headlight beam. She angled the Cherokee toward the shape just slightly, just enough to cast light upon it, and got out of the truck. The wind and snow hit her face like an open hand, rocketing into her coat, and for a moment she thought of how silly this was, a woman like Claudia undone by a winter storm. She’d lived on this road her whole life; how could she possibly fail to get home? The wind sang in her ears, rising and falling, and a stand of trees outside her sight moaned along in time.

“Hello?” Her voice seemed to stop in her mouth. The wind had blown it back at her.

There, then: a set of eyes caught green in the halogen light. Claudia took a step backward, saw another set, a third, the vague impression of fur. Three dogs, she thought, long-muzzled, gray. She imagined more than she saw. Three dogs lying on the frozen ground, snow blown up against their sides, the brutal wind. Before she could decide what to do, all three animals rose and ran away from her, deep into the pounding whiteness, the black ground of the field on which they could run all night.

The snow was blinding by the time Rebekah drove home, leaning close to the steering wheel, as if that would help. When she finally reached her house, she parked the car in the general vicinity of other car-shaped, snow-covered mounds, hoping she wasn’t actually on the sidewalk, or in somebody’s yard. She’d left the porch light on by accident that morning, and now it was the only guide to her door—the too bright bulb her father insisted on and that she usually found distressing.

It was Friday, so Vernon would be at the Governance Council Meeting until it was over, snowstorm or not. Rebekah didn’t worry about him driving or becoming stranded; to do so would have been a betrayal of who he was to her, and who he believed himself to be. He had, Rebekah knew, thrived in storms far worse than this, once traveling seven miles on horseback in a blizzard because he’d intended to propose to her mother and would not wait.

Constance Ruth Harrison, called Ruthie, had been seventeen years old in 1958, had known nothing of the world when Vernon set his cap for her. They’d met when Vernon responded to a call from the pulpit to help get a neighbor’s crops in; Ruthie’s father, Elder Harrison, had fallen to pneumonia, and his family was in trouble. They weren’t Prophetic, the Harrisons, but belonged to a radical Holiness sect that had broken away from the larger body and set up worship in a barn on Elder Harrison’s land. At first they called themselves Children of the Blood of the Lamb, and then Children of the Blood, and finally, just The Blood. That was where the truth lay, they believed, in the old story. For some groups it was in Christ’s miracles, for some it was the Resurrection. (The Mission preached that demonic sects like the Catholics worshiped only Mary and a group of Mafia-connected cardinals in Italy who carried submachine guns under their red robes, and who communicated with the Underworld through a code involving sunglasses.) But the Harrisons and their little ragtag army, which had remained isolated as long as Elder Harrison lived, believed that the divine message of Jesus was in His Blood, the blood He shared with the Master Creator Father God, and the blood He spilled on the cross to redeem humanity. In them, the Blood rose up and spoke; it told them of the End Times, it said there would be a worldwide slaughter of the unconverted Jews. As the Children of the Blood married and mingled with the Prophetic Mission, and as the secular world slouched toward them, they realized there would need to be a worldwide slaughter of other groups as well. No
hope
of conversion would be offered to Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindoos, the Godless Buddhists. A special trampling under the hooves of the Four Horsemen was reserved for Unitarians, and a spectacle of Holy Execution for the mortal enemies of The Blood, the Mormons. The old peace churches, the Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Brethren, would be mown down, but gently, like wheat, as the members of The Blood respected their work ethic. Jesus would smite the proclaimers of the Pentecost with a special vengeance, including the Nazarenes, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God, because their worldliness was evidence of a silent affiliation with Satan. Any branch of the crooked tree that called itself Pentecostalism, then built its ministry around cavorting with prostitutes and self-glorification, had not merely gone astray. It had become a carrier of the Disease.

Until five years ago Rebekah had thought it all perfectly normal, what went on in that barn with her Granddad Elder, her child mother, the members of the fugitive group. It was Worship as they Worshiped. Of course there would be no Children of the Blood without blood, there would be no life, there would be no eternity. The barn was their Temple, and its altar was stained, as had been all the altars of the seven tribes of Israel. And her father riding his great horse Michael over miles of snow-blanketed fields to claim Ruthie as his own—that had sounded normal, too. Ruth had had no say in the matter, wouldn’t have dreamed of making any claim to her life or liberty. She’d told Rebekah at the end, lying in the hospital bed the Mission had rented and set up in her bedroom, that although she couldn’t say she’d loved Vernon at seventeen, there had been something in the cruel set of his jaw that had thrilled her and made her want to go away with him. So she’d been willing, in her way, then he took her and married her, and it hadn’t been her family or her childhood she’d mourned, it had been her girlfriends in the church, whom Ruthie had taken for granted, considered permanent. They’d never been together as a group again, never walked across a field or gathered around a porch swing, never spent the night in the same bed or talked for hours about nothing, chattering like magpies, as the men used to say. All those girls were married off eventually, scattered to the winds, kept behind closed doors.

Rebekah hadn’t worn boots to work, and so was forced to make her way down the sidewalk in mincing steps, reaching out for trees. She imagined someone watched her do this. Hazel’s voice suddenly entered her head, saying,
Oh look, a little redheaded stepchild has escaped from under the porch.
Rebekah laughed aloud, lost her footing, righted herself. She could just see, in front of the screen door, a bag from Parker’s Supermarket. When she reached it, she looked inside before picking it up, but it was just what it appeared to be. Who would have done such a thing? Who would have thought of her, now that she’d lost her cousins and all her extended family, the church she’d grown up in, and the love of her father?

The front door opened into a sitting room that contained a piano no one had played since her mother died, but which Vernon had tuned once a year because that’s what one did: tune the piano. The walls were painted pale green and decorated with the acceptable notions: family pictures, a print of Jesus knocking on the door—everyone knew the image of Him knocking on the door and awaiting admittance. Jesus knocks, was what the print was trying to say, He doesn’t just walk in and help Himself to your old mess. Above the piano was a counted-cross-stitch sampler Ruthie had made that read
JESUS IS THE SONG IN MY HEART.
The same could be said of everything in the parlor: the bench on which no one sat, the piano no one played, the two wing chairs gathered around the little table on which Ruth had placed her knickknacks and doilies—all of these things were somehow connected to Jesus. It was a wonder to consider, the experiment to make Jesus everything, the effort it contained.

Rebekah unloaded the groceries on the butcher block table in the kitchen as if compiling the clues to a mystery. Milk, eggs, bread, orange juice—that could be anyone. But this French cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate, buttermilk bath salts in what was supposed to look like an antique milk jug? And all this fruit: oranges, grapes, apples, as if it were a different season altogether. For a single fluttery moment she thought Peter must have left it, he must have been worried about her, and then she saw the note:
For Rebekah, a cold night.
Claudia’s handwriting.

The oranges looked so good she decided to eat one right away—she would puzzle over Claudia’s gesture later—but then saw again the bath salts, so she carried them both into the bathroom, ran hot water. She took off her clothes without looking in the mirror, as her mother had taught her, poured part of the milk container into the tub. The salt didn’t smell like buttermilk (thank goodness) but it was that color, and the water became creamy, slightly foamy. Rebekah climbed in, surprised by the silky feeling of the water, and leaned back. The water lapped over her, rose and fell as she breathed, leaving a sheen of sweet-smelling oil on her skin. Rebekah closed her eyes and thought of Peter; he had glanced at Hazel and she saw his face again, everything around and behind him gone dark in her memory. She focused on nothing but the color of his skin and the shape of his mouth and the length of his eyelashes. But she couldn’t hold on to the image; she kept seeing Claudia’s handwriting, the span of Claudia’s hand on the glass countertop of the Used World. Span. It was a biblical word for time, Rebekah thought. The smell of the orange rose up in the heat of the room. Water continued to pour from the tap as she claimed the orange from the countertop, thrust her thumb under the skin around the navel. She pulled off large sections of peel and dropped them in the water, where they floated, riding the crests of the small waves around her body. She hummed a bit of Artie Shaw’s “My Heart Stood Still” as she peeled the orange clean, then pulled it apart harder than she meant to, not bothering to divide it into neat sections, and ate the whole thing in quick, big bites.