“The, uh, prisoner,” Jane Ann said, disliking the sound of the word.
Brother Asa then nodded and directed her to a room in a distant part of the building. She found her way there through eerily familiar hallways she had not been in since her only child, Evan, was a student there, before the school shut down for good. Elements of the original decor remained, for instance the sea-foam green tiles in the entrance lobby and the halls, but several classrooms were turned into workshops and she saw signs of reconstruction at every turn. She knew from talking with Robert Earle that the old gymnasium had been converted into a labyrinth of chambers for the mysterious woman they called the Queen Bee, who was never seen in public, and her attendants. Portraits of Jesus Christ hung conspicuously in the hallway while candles burned in wall fixtures, giving the place the air of a monastery. She thought of Rome and all the ancient buildings that had been used for different purposes over the centuries. It made her sad to think she would never see Italy again. The building was quite warm. She knew that the group had a way with practical things. They’d rigged the old hot water radiators to a wood-burning furnace in the basement. Several members had been engineers in the old times. They’d helped fix the town’s decrepit water system only weeks after they arrived the previous spring. Now, they were partnering with her husband, Loren, and Robert Earle to build a community laundry in the old Union-Wayland paper mill on the Battenkill, the river that ran through town.
Jane Ann could hear choral singing distantly. This Christmas night, most of the brothers and sisters were at their devotions in the old school auditorium. As she made her way through the hallways, she passed classrooms converted into dormitories. They were extraordinarily neat and orderly. She wondered if it was fun to live that way. It reminded her of boarding school, which she had loved. When she reached her destination, she came upon one Brother Enos posted in a chair beside the door there. He stood up.
“Why, you’re the first of her people to visit,” he said.
“Is that so?” Jane Ann said. She did not know who Mandy Stokes’s friends in town were, or if she had any at all. “My husband is the Congregational minister.”
“I know, ma’am.”
“How do you know that?” Jane Ann said. She was sincerely curious.
“We was there last night at your church, some of us, for the music.”
“Oh? Did you enjoy it?”
“Very much. You got a different spirit than us, more like the old times. Are you here in an official capacity, then?”
“I make calls sometimes.”
“Have you got something for the poor lady in there?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’ll have to peek inside your basket, ma’a . . .”
“It’s just some things to eat.”
“. . . case you might be trying to bust her out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Two lives have been taken, ma’am” he said, lowly.
Jane Ann regretted snapping at him. She held out the basket. Brother Enos inspected the contents, finding a jar of currant preserves along with little fruit and nut cakes and cornmeal cookies in the shape of crescent moons.
“I can’t let this jar in there,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s glass. She could break it and hurt herself with a piece of it.”
“I see.”
“You can have it back when you leave.”
“Okay.”
He looked back up at her. His demeanor had changed. “Do you s’pose I can have one of them cookies?” he asked.
His plea was so much like that of a small boy’s. It was Christmas night, after all.
“Take two,” she said. He smiled and helped himself and made to unbar the door to the room. Jane Ann stepped past him.
It was dim inside. Twilight came in from the high clerestory window. There were no candles or lanterns. It appeared not so much a prisoner’s cell as a kind of austere guest room. Mandy had been lying on her side in the dwindling light with her face turned to the outside wall. After Jane Ann entered the room, she stirred, rolled over, swept the hair out of her eyes, and propped herself up watching Jane Ann but saying nothing.
“May I sit down?” Jane Ann asked. Mandy offered no visible clue to her disposition. Jane Ann had been advised by Loren about Mandy’s state of mind. She pulled a plain wooden school chair closer to the bed, sat down with the basket on her lap, shrugging off her cloak so that it fell over the chair back. She explained who she was and proffered the basket, but Mandy just stared back.
“Has anyone been to see you?” Mandy did not respond. “No? I’m sorry about that. I don’t know who your friends are. Have any of them been here? Who are your friends? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Mandy sighed and swung her legs around so she was now sitting primly on the edge of the bed. She gazed down at the floor and seemed to struggle with her thoughts. Over the previous two days, these thoughts had changed from an overwhelming barrage of fierce instructions and imprecations issued by invasive malign personages extrinsic to her essential self to a dull roar like tinnitus in a low register. A change was coming over her, the resolution of the symptomatic aftereffects of meningitis. The oncoming clarity frightened her as much as the mental confusion she was leaving behind.
Frustrated, Jane Ann went to the door and tried to open it but it was barred again.
“Open this up!” she cried and hit the door twice with the heel of her hand. Mandy looked up.
“Is that you, ma’am?” Brother Enos said.
“Of course it’s me.”
He opened it a crack.
“Can I have a candle, please.”
“I can’t leave my post.”
“Why isn’t there one in here?”
Brother Enos put his face right up against the slot between the open door and the wall. “Ma’am,” he said, whispering.
“What?”
“We have to be careful,” he said. “She might burn the building down.”
“Oh . . .”
“For now, she has to make do with the natural daylight,” he said.
“There’s hardly any left.”
“I’m sorry,” Brother Enos said. “Mebbe you can come back another time when it’s not so dark.” He craned his neck around and peered inside, holding a candle aloft. Flickering light seeped into the room. He made eye contact with the prisoner. She held him in her gaze and it seemed to affect him. “Lookit,” he said. “You take this here candle. It’s my own personal one. Just don’t be too long, now. I’ll be out here in the dark, waiting.”
“Thank you,” Jane Ann said.
She returned to the chair, set the candleholder on the table, and rummaged in the basket for one of the little fruit and nut cakes, which she held out for Mandy.
“I have some sweet things for you to eat.”
Mandy’s eyes turned up into Jane Ann’s. A fraught gleam came into them and Mandy seemed to try to form a word. She raised her hand tentatively, took the little square of cake, and began to eat it daintily without having said anything.
“There are more in here,” Jane Ann said. Mandy chewed the cake slowly and deliberately, as if sampling something good for the first time ever. When she was finished, she reached for the basket and put it on her lap. She tried a cookie, then several more. The speed of her eating increased markedly the more she ate, until she couldn’t cram the next one in fast enough. Jane Ann was a little unnerved. Then, Mandy suddenly stopped and passed the basket back to Jane Ann. When Mandy was finished, Jane Ann poured water from a white enameled metal pitcher into the metal cup on the table and gave it to Mandy. She took it and drank, looking at the floor. Then her lips moved as if she were forming words but no sound came out. She handed the cup back to Jane Ann and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweater. Her gaze returned to Jane Ann again and she reached tentatively toward Jane Ann’s face. Jane Ann made a conscious effort not to recoil from Mandy’s reach. Mandy touched the long, thick braid in which Jane Ann wore her gold and silver hair. She touched the braid the same way she ate her first nut cake, daintily. Jane Ann took a chance, left her chair, and sat beside Mandy on the bed.
“Here, let me braid yours,” Jane Ann said, and began working Mandy’s lush dark brown hair into a single braid, like hers. She worked quickly, being well practiced. She could not help noticing the acrid odor of Mandy’s body. In these new times people did not bathe often, and they had no manufactured cosmetics, colognes, or deodorants. The people in trouble or in sickness who Jane Ann made ministerial visits to often smelled ripe. Jane Ann recognized it over the years as the odor of human despair. Mandy submitted docilely to having her hair braided, just sitting still while Jane Ann worked. When she was finished, Jane Ann sat quietly next to Mandy for a while. It was now dark outside the clerestory window, and the candle on the floor shed a weird flickering uplight over the two women in the bare room, like the lighting in a horror movie of the previous century.
“I had a cat once,” Mandy said clearly, out of nowhere, gazing into the floor. “Oh, how I miss him.”
Jane Ann was startled to hear Mandy speak. Her voice was throaty, musical, not what she expected. She was not sure how to respond to her.
“What was his name?” Jane Ann said.
Mandy didn’t answer. Jane Ann repeated her question more than once, and asked a few other questions about it, but Mandy continued to stare into the rug on the floor.
Jane Ann rose from beside Mandy on the bed. She gathered up her cloak from the chair and the basket and picked up the candle on the floor.
“His name was Sweetie-pie,” Mandy said. Her head remained lowered.
Jane Ann waited a moment but Mandy said no more.
“I’ll come back soon,” Jane Ann said and moved to the door and knocked on it.
Brother Enos cracked it open.
“Everything okay in there?” he asked.
Jane Ann didn’t know how to answer that. She felt tears coming on.
“I’ll be going now.”
Brother Enos opened the door wider and she squeezed through.
“Thank you for lending us your light.”
“Thank you for the treats,” he said.
T
WENTY-SEVEN
“You know nothing,” Daniel Earle said “Nothing!” The vehement utterance, apparently from a bad dream, startled his father, Robert, who sat half asleep, squinting at his book in a battered but comfortable wing chair beside Daniel’s sickbed in the first-floor parlor. It was late Christmas night. The clock on the mantel read 11:35. Britney had gone to bed, but Robert wouldn’t leave Daniel’s bedside. Daniel had been sleeping for almost twenty-four hours. He still had an intravenous line in his arm. The doctor had left more bottles of prepared fluid and shown Robert how to change them. Now Robert watched Daniel claw ineffectually at the IV cannula just below his elbow. Robert put his book down and moved to sit on the bed beside Daniel. He held Daniel’s arm to prevent him from ripping out the IV line and was surprised at the size of his son’s hands, and how hairy they were, and the sinewy strength of his arms. Daniel was no longer a boy in any sense. As he struggled, Daniel opened his eyes and appeared to take in his surroundings for the first time. “Ohmigod . . .”
“It’s all right,” Robert said. “You’re home.”
“Oh . . .” Daniel let out a deep groan. “Father.”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“When did I . . . get here?”
Robert told him and explained about the IV lines and the doctor’s instructions.
“Aren’t I a mess, though,” Daniel said.
“You were a sight,” Robert said. “Like a walking hairball.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“Being disgusting.”
“You’re okay now. You’re going to be all right.”
“I walked so far.”
“What happened to Evan?”
“He didn’t make it.”
“Oh God.”
A shimmery veil of beaded sweat had formed on Daniel’s face.
“I’m so hungry, Dad.”
“What can I get you?”
“Anything.”
“Okay,” Robert said, standing up. “Leave that IV line in your arm alone. The doctor is coming back to see you in the morning.”
“Is there something . . . down there?”
“It’s a catheter, so you don’t piss the bed. Leave it alone too.”
Robert hurried out to the kitchen, found some cheese, cut a large chunk into bite-sized pieces, cut some large squares of corn bread and slathered them with butter that was soft from sitting out on the counter, and brought it all back to Daniel in the parlor. Daniel struggled to elevate himself but there was no headboard. Robert fetched a nearby sofa cushion and wedged it behind Daniel as his son hunched forward.
“There.”
“Oh, that’s better,” Daniel said.
“See if you can get this down,” Robert said, handing Daniel the plate of bread and cheese, which he rested on his lap. Daniel devoured the food rapidly and systematically, as though it were a job that urgently needed to be done.
“You’re so much older,” Robert remarked.
“Yeah, I’ve about caught up to you, feels like,” Daniel said with his mouth full.