Clay County. Sam said mountain kids were sometimes given to eating clay.
In Brooklyn when he was in the second grade Pierce had dreamt, not once but several times exactly the same, that he was to be crucified alongside Mary's Son, share in His sacrifice; it was to happen on the auditorium stage of St. Simon Cyrenean's, three crucifixes set up there amid the dusty velvets before rows of kids in the fanny-polished wooden seats (Pierce himself somehow among them as well as being crucified or about to be crucified); he felt no fear or reluctance, only the grave weight of responsibility, privilege too, the same priggish satisfaction that he felt at the work of Bobby's conversion. When he recalled it—for the first time since that winter—it caused him an involuntary groan of embarrassment. How could he have.
She was gone when they looked for her again under the bungalow. The empty crawlspace smelled of her and of the food they had brought for her there. A small cold rain had begun to fall.
She wasn't in the chicken house either, or in the garage out by where the trash was burned. The rain came and ceased like sniffles; Mousie called them for supper from the kitchen. Wieners and beans, sweetened with dark Karo. They ate in silence, feeling cold darkness assemble itself around them and the house.
She was in Bird's bed, rolled in the bedspread (she hadn't seemed to understand the differences, bedspread, blanket, sheet) and asleep; when Hildy touched her she writhed as though bitten, and sat up to stare at them. Her hair was wet on her forehead. When they asked where she had been, she answered in thick gobs of language they couldn't understand and crawled again into the pillow. Then she flung the spread aside and stood, her mouth open and her breath coming harsh and quick.
"Are you sick?” Hildy put her hand on Bobby's damp forehead, but Bobby shook her off and tottered toward the bathroom (the others following) and to the sink. Wet panties lay on the floor; the toilet unflushed. Bobby opened the tap, her hands shaking, and put her mouth to it to drink.
Smacking and swallowing, she pushed unseeing through them and to the bed again, and was asleep again immediately, or at least still, face turned down, labored breathing loud. The others stood by the bed, smelling the sour odor of her sickness.
"What if she dies?” Hildy said.
All night she tossed and talked, and once again got out of bed and back in again; her frightful breathing, deep and fast like a dog's, only slowed a little toward morning. She was quiet when Pierce's alarm woke him to get to Mass.
Mousie was supposed to be up too, to pour his Cheerios and make sure his hair was brushed, but on the first morning of his weeklong early-Mass duty he had gone into the still-dark kitchen and stood waiting, listening to the upstairs alarm ring, fade and die, and silence follow it. Mousie couldn't get up fast enough, apparently, and so Pierce (unwilling to disturb her and the house's sleep by making his own breakfast) just went on, stopping at the little store, already lit, to buy orange crackers filled with gray peanut butter.
On this morning he didn't stop even there, only hurried on through the sad-breaking morning, his stomach and ribcage trembling; so he was fasting, as he wasn't usually, and when Father Midnight turned to him inquiringly after ingesting his own huge Host, he could put the paten under his own chin (he and Father Midnight being the only two present at the sacrifice, two being enough, one alone being enough for that matter). With the invariable few unintelligible words Father Midnight placed the circle on his tongue. Pierce closed his eyes, left hand pressed against his bosom and right hand still holding the paten that caught falling crumbs of God (every minute fragment, every molecule being wholly God) as the almost nonexistent sweetish circle dissolved against his palate: waiting for certainty, or at least resolve, to flow into him from its dissolution.
After Mass in the vestibule the priest removed his layers of embroidered satin and white lace one after the other, his lips moving almost indetectably in silent prayer, and kissed the stole that contained his power (Mass could be said without the rest of it, but not that) before hanging it. Pierce too hung up his white surplice and black cassock among the others, his heart beating fast and still warm from the Host he had swallowed.
"Son."
"Yes, Father."
"Do you know that when you move the book from Gospel to Epistle side, it's appropriate to kiss the page?"
"Yes, Father."
"Have we discussed this?"
"Yes, Father."
"Do you have an objection to osculation?” This said in Sam's tone, as though for the amusement of some knowing hearer not actually present. Osculation: he guessed the meaning. He had no objection; it had only seemed to him weirdly forward, extravagant, like kissing elderly relatives.
"Well then,” Father Midnight said.
Pierce pulled his jacket on.
"Thank you, son."
"Thank you, Father."
Back out through the empty church, hands in his jacket pockets, not forgetting a quick bend-of-knee when passing the inhabited altar: and to the font of pale stone by the door, filled with cold and faintly slimy water. Feeling along his back a horrid certainty that he would be caught, that he was being looked at even now by Father Midnight at least, he took from his pocket the aluminum cylinder (it was waterproof, meant to keep matches in on camping trips, though no matches had ever been put in it) and dipped it in the font. Brief endless moment while it gurgled full. Out then, capping the vial, into the day, which had grown up, while he was inside, into gray fullness.
Maybe the Communion he had taken hadn't been such a good idea after all. The warmth in his heart had overspread his chest and seemed no longer warm but caustic, angry, affronted maybe at his impertinence. His throat had filled with sour matter, and his head was light.
Hildy, white-faced and wide-eyed, looked out the window of the bungalow's door and then opened it a crack to admit him. “She threw up,” she whispered to him in awe. “Not real throwup, but this goo."
Bird sat by Bobby in her bed, holding Bobby's hand in hers and staring at her fixedly. Bobby's face seemed coated faintly in shining slime, and she stared at Pierce unseeing with eyes clouded and pale, as though cooked, like eggs. As soon as he saw her, as soon as he breathed in the sickroom odor, Pierce knew two things: that it was all up, Mousie would have to be told; and that he was sick himself. And ever after, when the onset of fever would assemble within him all the other days of fever he had ever experienced (as though fever were a different life he only sometimes lived, with its own memories as well as its own thirsts and needs and weaknesses), this morning would be one of them.
"She's got to get better she's got to she's got to,” Hildy whined softly, out of her depth and afraid.
"Okay,” Pierce said. “Okay.” He took out the vial of water from his pocket and put it on the rickety table beside Bird's bed, decals of bear and bunny, where wadded tissues and half-filled glasses of water were crowded.
"Please God get her better."
All they really had to do was nothing, which they agreed to do without speaking, to sit suspended in guilty trance between the obvious need to tell adults and the impossibility of telling, until at length Mousie opened the door.
Only it wasn't Mousie who first opened their door, but Sister Mary Philomel.
She was only taking seriously her promise to Doctor Oliphant to keep an eye on the kids, a promise Winnie had received without thinking much about it; she had a Saturday morning's work to do, and it could be done in her schoolroom as well as anywhere. Perhaps she sensed she might be trespassing here on this day, though, for she peeked around the half-open door of the bungalow more circumspectly than was usual for her.
Pierce remembered later that she did nothing foolish; she saw the sick child in Bird's bed, who was beginning to cough spasmodically as though shaken, and she came to help.
"Who is she?” Sister asked gently, sitting on the bed beside her. Bobby, still coughing, pushed weakly back into the corner as though she could push right through, staring at Sister, seeing who knew what in the black habit and wimple.
"Bobby,” said Bird, nearly weeping with grief and relief.
"Well we'll have to get a doctor for Bobby. Won't we."
"Yes'ster."
"We'll take her temperature, shall we.” Her pink hand pressed against Bobby's forehead, her arm around Bobby's trembling shoulders. For a moment Bobby ceased coughing; her eyes grew huge and crossed and her mouth opened in an unrefusable gag; she arched like a vomiting dog, and expelled a mass of yellowish sputum. Sister Mary Philomel tried to draw away, but a lashing of grue wetted her black habit as the children watched in deep horror, a horror each could recall with gleeful exactness when they were grownups: the time Bobby puked on Sister.
"I sicked up,” Bobby said weakly, her lip flecked with foam. “
Again
."
Hildy was sent to find a thermometer in the big house. Bobby, panting and swallowing, sat immobile like a caught bird in the grip of Sister Mary Philomel. At Sister's elbow was the stolen holy water; she might sense it there, Pierce felt, recognize it by some vibration it put out; in the pocket of his jacket Pierce's hand stirred of its own accord, wanting to take it back, but then Hildy returned, having met Warren and Mousie in the summer kitchen, on their way here.
She opened the door wide, solemn, all secrets patent now, and stepped aside for Mousie to enter.
"There she is."
Mousie's hands rose slowly to her cheeks, her white fingers fencing her open mouth, looking from the child to the nun to the fouled towels on the floor and the tortuous spotted sheets where Bobby lay: more stricken even than the children could know, for she had grieved and worried ever since she had so high-handedly turned the child away, no place for such a one in the household that had been entrusted to her, afraid of the chaos Bobby might cause, nothing this bad though, what on earth.
Bobby, who had at first not even seemed to recognize Mousie, now broke at last; she seemed to arise or descend again into her body, she lifted her hands to Mousie as though they burned, she began to sob in the quick, panting rhythm of a baby.
"Now what on earth,” Mousie said, sitting with her and pushing the damp hair from her brow as Bobby clung to her sobbing. “Now what on God's green earth."
She turned then, and Sister Mary Philomel did too, to Pierce, who was now, he knew, to begin the explaining; but in the moment's silence that fell came the sound of a car door slammed, so distinctly that it could only be in their own driveway.
"Daddy's here,” Warren at the window said.
"Well,” said Sister Mary Philomel, “well there,” with a smile breaking on her face of a sort the children knew well, whose obvious import they would not at that moment have wanted to dispute: prayer answered, in so drastic a form they might have wished it not answered, but answered for sure. “The doctor's here,” she said cheerfully to Bobby. “It's all right now."
Then Sam and Winnie were in the breezeway; the door opened, and the children jumped, as though they were as startled as their parents were. Sam and Winnie (their faces unwontedly orange, hands too, as though colored with movie makeup) looked around the room, and for an immeasurable time no one spoke; Pierce waited with held breath for Bobby to be instantly ordered out of the house, and maybe himself finally as well, Sam's house and his perfect right after all and Pierce with nothing to say.
"Dad!” Warren whispered. “Can we keep her?"
"Warren!” Hildy warned.
"But can we? If we don't she'll die and go to hell."
Somehow, wonderfully, they weren't ever really interrogated about Bobby, how she had come to be there, what they had done with or to her in that time; Sam and Winnie had automatically held Mousie responsible for her, and anyway she was so sick that the first thing was to see to her, and ask questions later, by which time the children had their exculpations and evasions ready.
As soon as Sam returned from fetching his black bag from the car, the two women stepped aside for him, and he concentrated solely on Bobby, calming her with quick skill and an astonishing firm gentleness even as he learned what was up with her. Pierce, seeing Sam for the first time as doctor and not as uncle, seemed to be seeing him turned inside out or reversed back to front, a different person entirely, not teasing, tired, fussy, but full of knowledge, full of compassionate regard. Bobby looked not at the instruments he used but at his eyes, and his eyes, though Pierce couldn't see them, must have reassured her, for she didn't shrink from him.
"And what about everybody else?” Sam asked, not looking away from Bobby. “All okay?"
"Okay,” said Hildy.
"Okay,” said Bird.
"Okay,” said Warren.
"I don't feel so hot,” Pierce said, “actually."
He was sent to his room, to wait for his examination, and everybody else was ordered out; and he lay afloat on his bed, no longer himself, and said in his heart over and over Thank you thank you thank you: though to whom and for what he could not have said.
Bobby got a shot—the word spread quickly from Hildy at the bungalow door to the others who had been excluded. Through the flimsy wall that separated their rooms, Pierce witnessed the procedure, which Bobby apparently didn't even know enough to protest; he heard Sam move aside the matter on the bedside table (among which was Pierce's match case and its unsuspected contents), and ready himself. Afterwards, she would be given the minute plastic box with neat snap closures in which the ampoule had come, almost recompense for the pain. Pierce, knowing he was next, lay with his buttocks clenched, waiting for the cry he knew she wouldn't be able to withhold when she was pierced.
Through that day and night he and Bobby lay quarantined in the bungalow; from far within his mounting fever Pierce heard someone, Winnie, come in and clean up in Bobby's room, and he saw Bobby pass in a nightdress of Bird's through his room to the bathroom, or maybe he imagined that.