Jonathan pressed his lips together. So what will happen to him then?
He’ll cut himself.
Jonathan nodded. So he’ll cut himself. He’ll fall to the bottom of the wheel. He’ll have to drop his swords and might cut himself and maybe even somebody else. But it’s good that the swords fall—it’s the balance that’s the problem. But something will shake him up from that complacency. The wheel will swing and he’ll be on the bottom.
So the question is, does somebody else spin the wheel? Do you have to throw that lightning that breaks the tower? Is this something that you are supposed to do?
She looked up. Why would it be me?
He shrugged. You seem to care. You seem to think you need to do something. Does anyone else care?
Everyone cares, she said. Pastor Levi cares. Even Colleen cares. Everyone cares.
Jonathan had flared up a nascent sense of pride of place. The feeling was strange and thrilling. She wouldn’t speak badly of it, now that she knew it was her own. The pride surprised her and made her even sicker. She did care. She cared about this place. But she wasn’t really from here. She felt silly; how brazen, to think that she would be the one to save the day.
People care, she said again. They just can’t see from the outside. I feel like I’m both from the inside and the outside. My mother came from here, and so it’s inside me, but I don’t know this place.
They paused for a moment, listening to the sound of the rain, which had regained its torrential power.
She shook her head and busied her hands by pointed to a figure farther out from the scene than the others in the Tower card. The figure was kneeling, his hands on the ground, his head uplifted to the sight before him of the tower cracked and tumbling and bodies twisted from falling a great distance.
I’m this person, Emily said, covering the figure completely with her finger. I’m there but not quite there. I can see what’s happening, but I’m not part of it. Look, this person is about to run, but only after they’ve bowed to whatever is happening. They know it’s terrible and important and but also that they should run as far as possible in the other direction.
Jonathan nodded. So it’s right to run?
She paused again, running her finger over the man on
the ground.
Pull me another card, she said. What do you call it—a
clarifying card.
He nodded and held the deck in his palms for a moment before halving it.
The six of swords, he said, setting it down before her.
She’d had this card before, in her previous reading.
Water, she said. I have to cross the water. In the card, a woman held her wrapped-up child in a boat, six swords in a bundle at the back of the boat and a man at the helm, moving them through a storm.
What does that mean? He asked.
She shrugged. I think I need to do something for myself, I have to cross the water. I need to worry about my own Tower before I can take care of anyone else’s.
•
So you really don’t mind coming tonight? She asked over her shoulder.
He nodded, looking up from the paper. He lifted it so she could see the front page, the second headline down from the first.
FREE WILL BAPTIST CHURCH TO HOLD
TOWN MEETING ABOUT MURDERS
Looks like it’s the biggest event happening this weekend. He smiled, folding his hands over the newsprint. I think it’s a good idea that we go.
She opened her mouth, but he had already turned to the paper. He went to the comics page, where he found the word puzzle he did daily. To sharpen his mind, he told her, and she had an image of him as an old man, completing the puzzle each morning over coffee, his hairline receeding, his face lined and rough and no longer quite the face she knew. But his mind would be sharp. She wondered if she would still know him then or if he would be a memory: maybe she’d remember him like this, young, still a stranger to her, mostly, drinking her coffee in her small kitchen.
6
Levi asked the church party committee to set out tables full of food—marshmallow-covered sweet-potato slices, carrot cakes with cream cheese icing, fried okra, chicken-fried steaks laid out in slices, a whole tub of white gravy, biscuits, tater tots and ranch dressing, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese made with 50% velveeta and 50% cheddar (which was Colleen’s specialty). and two enormous plastic bowls full of pink ambrosia, the chunks of fruit suspended in pink-stained cottage cheese. Despite the dampness of the ground and the yet-again impending rain (the sky was heavy but ambiguous in intent, still grayer than the blue-black of imminent rain), he expected a large crowd. The rain had kept everyone in for two days, flooding the roads and swelling the creeks up past the barriers. Now that the rain had stopped and the ground was only marshy, not soaked, people wanted to get out of their houses, to open the windows and be in the outdoors.
Inside, his mind rioted and his stomach roiled, but he was surprised at himself: the whole morning and afternoon, his hands had not shaken and his voice had betrayed very little of his fear.
I am a practiced liar, he thought. I have been practicing deception for my entire life. It’s no wonder that even my body knows how to deceive.
He placed the hairnet in the cabinet below the podium, on top of a stack of King James Bibles they had taken from the pews once the NIV came out. The people here had never liked the King James. They thanked him profusely the when the church finally made the switch. Levi missed the cadences of that archaic language, though. How could he abandon
As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God for As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God?
The first sounded like a cry out to a lover, the second like a perfunctory bit of metaphor, clumping along in dead, toneless language. But he had exchanged them, and since he prepared his lessons for them, he now read the newer version in its flat, obvious language and sometimes could not remember what he was missing.
Soon, he’d be able to read whatever he wanted. He imagined himself in the cell, reading his King James. So much time. No responsibility to anyone but God.
He took his NIV and went to his study. In this moment, he needed words that they could all understand.
Emily and Jonathan arrived early.
Where’s Pastor Richardson? Emily asked a young man who was pouring drinks at the end of the table.
He went to his study to prepare, he said. The boy had acne along his jawline, the kind of acne that would scar him for life and leave his face lightly pitted, the texture of a palm after being pressed hard against gravel. His hair was slicked up in spikes. Emily watched him and the other teenagers, a group of them gathered around the ambrosia, the girls making faces at the clots of cottage cheese clumped along the edges of the glass bowls.She watched Jonathan spoon sweet potatoes onto his bowl and felt how delicate humans are—to think that something so soft and flimsy as sweet potatoes soaked in sugar syrup could keep us alive. It seemed strange that these perfumed and sauced and cooked to mush collections of colors on our plates could really be the fuel of life. It should take something more substantial to keep humans alive, she thought, like oil, or minerals.
The church, small, only two stories, was tall from her
perspective, seated below at one of the long tables. Emily half-listened to Jonathan explain to a youngish deacon in a plain white shirt and black slacks that no, he was not a regular churchgoer, and that he did know about Jesus, thank you. She looked away from the deacon, hoping that he would not try to catch her eye. She looked up at the sky. The small steeple seemed enormous, liable to fall. Emily couldn’t keep her leg from making compulsive little kicks and jiggling her knees when she crossed them, so she put both feet on the ground and leaned her elbows on her lap.
Levi stepped out at the appointed time, spooned his food onto his plate, said hello to the people that required hellos. He nodded at Emily and the man she’d brought, a young man of around thirty who wore smart, wire-framed glasses and spiky, short hair. He wore silvers and grays and blacks and Levi found his stomach hurt to look at this man. This was the kind of man that Levi had admired from a distance for years. A kind of intellectual type, somebody who might bring a book along to a doctor’s appointment so he wouldn’t get bored in the waiting room.
He’d thought that Emily would be the barrier, the thing he would have to overcome in order to give his speech, to say the thing he had to say to make the town realize what it needed, realize that it needed a reckoning. But this man made his hands shake. Now, everything inside of him that he wanted to hide was close to being laid bare. And here was this new person, somebody he would have hoped to impress, here to witness the lowest moment of his life.
He could be in the presence of men who worked the oil fields, with their tattoos and their muscles and their hard beer guts and hair that peeked out from the edges of their ball caps: they did not do much for him. But this was the kind of man who made his knees weak.
In the moment, he was more afraid of this man than of what he’d done, what he had to tell them. The feeling was even worse, wasn’t it? Not a heat-of-the-moment thing, but a stain he’d always had, something that couldn’t be absolved away or cured by time.
He didn’t look at Emily and the man. He turned his back to them and ate his food quickly. He ran through three napkins in his haste, wiping up the loose confetti of coleslaw and bloody lumps of ambrosia from his lap. He imagined the teenagers noticed him fumbling, as lidless-eyed as they were, always watching for something to point out and repeat amongst themselves later.
When he finally finished eating and mopped away the mess, he nodded to the youth pastor, who was waiting for his signal.
When he stood up at the podium and looked out at them, he saw their faces opened—not just in the metaphorical sense, open to the Lord or The Word or open to his ideas and his thoughts. He really saw their faces open and their thoughts pouring out—Colleen, her knotted hands working beyond her control, hoping that the speech would be over soon so she could get home, he could see it in the pinch of her face. The teenagers were thinking of each other, of how to please each other by being the most God-fearing, by loving Jesus the most (soon, they would realize that other avenues were the best route to the heart, but for now, they seemed to be in a cocoon of safety). The families worried about themselves, their little units. They worried about their safety and hoped he had something to say that would make them fear less or help them to know what they could do. We are all so small, he thought, so concerned with our own safety, our own appearance, our own ability to impress. We don’t understand that something larger than us might come and sweep all of that away.
Emily waited for Levi to speak. At the podium, he seemed larger, and she remembered the feeling she’d had at church, that he was better at what he did than she’d taken him for, that he had a natural authority that she hadn’t understood. He was not just a lonely man who clung to religion for some anchor, a man who couldn’t stand to keep a dirty dish in his house because of some pathology that religion served to escalate, as she’d thought before. That man dissolved as he stood before them. He looked out at the crowd, half-smiling, one hand casually on the podium, the other in his pocket. He watched them until they grew quiet. He made them wait for his words, and they waited in silence until he spoke, the only sound the shuffling of feet under chairs and the tiny clicks and clinks of plastic cutlery against cardboard and teeth.
He cleared his throat. He had only one piece of paper, which he had taken out of his breast pocket. The paper was lined and folded into a small square, which he unfolded and smoothed on the podium.
Welcome, everyone, he said, leaning forward, the staticky mike squealing lightly.
I’m happy to see so many of you here—people from the community, regular churchgoers, and newcomers to our community. We’ve had a church meeting about this subject before, but I thought it appropriate to work with our local community leaders to gather up more people, to work together to take back Heartshorne for the Lord.
But you might wonder why I invited people outside of church families, too. The community of people who do not attend, and even unbelievers. I’ve called you all here today. Levi paused and, for the first time, looked down at the paper he had smoothed out on the pedestal before him.
It’s because this problem, what’s happening, requires all of our attention. It isn’t a chance event, not something that was visited upon us for no reason. And I think we all know this.
Emily wanted to turn to see the faces behind her. She could feel them staring and shuffling, no longer scratching at the paper plates with their forks.
Emily held her breath. He was going to bring down the Tower.
In this town, people disappear, he said. Probably more than in other places.
Emily sat up straight and touched Jonathan’s knee under the table. He placed his hand on hers and squeezed.