Lone understood these private thoughts and some of what Steward’s and Deacon’s motive might be: neither one put up with what he couldn’t control. But she could not have imagined Steward’s rancor—his bile at the thought that his grandnephew (maybe?) had surely been hurt or destroyed in that place. It was a floating blister in his bloodstream, which neither shrank nor came to a head. Nor could she have imagined how deep in the meat of his brain stem lay the memory of how close his brother came to breaking up his marriage to Soane. How off the course Deek slid when he was looking in those poison and poisoning eyes. For months the two of them had met secretly, for months Deek was distracted, making mistakes and just suppose the hussy had gotten pregnant? Had a mixed-up child? Steward seethed at the thought of that barely averted betrayal of all they owed and promised the Old Fathers. But a narrowly escaped treason against the fathers’ law, the law of continuance and multiplication, was overwhelmed by the permanent threat to his cherished view of himself and his brother. The women in the Convent were for him a flaunting parody of the nineteen Negro ladies of his and his brother’s youthful memory and perfect understanding. They were the degradation of that moment they’d shared of sunlit skin and verbena. They, with their mindless giggling, outraged the dulcet tones, the tinkling in the merry and welcoming laughter of the nineteen ladies who, scheduled to live forever in pastel shaded dreams, were now doomed to extinction by this new and obscene breed of female. He could not abide them for sullying his personal history with their streetwalkers’ clothes and whores’ appetites; mocking and desecrating the vision that carried him and his brother through a war, that imbued their marriages and strengthened their efforts to build a town where the vision could flourish. He would never forgive them that and he would not tolerate this loss of charity.
Nor did Lone know the glacier that was Deacon Morgan’s pride. Its hidden bulk, its accretion and unmovability. She knew about his long ago relationship with Consolata. But she could not have fathomed his personal shame or understood how important it was to erase both the shame and the kind of woman he believed was its source. An uncontrollable, gnawing woman who had bitten his lip just to lap the blood it shed; a beautiful, golden-skinned, outside woman with moss-green eyes that tried to trap a man, close him up in a cellar room with liquor to enfeeble him so they could do carnal things, unnatural things in the dark; a Salomé from whom he had escaped just in time or she would have had his head on a dinner plate. That ravenous ground-fucking woman who had not left his life but had weaseled her way into Soane’s affections and, he suspected, had plied her with evil potions to make her less loving than she used to be and it was not the eternal grieving for their sons that froze her but the mess she was swallowing still, given to her by the woman whose very name she herself had made into a joke and a travesty of what a woman should be.
Lone didn’t, couldn’t, know all, but she knew enough and the flashlights had revealed the equipment: handcuffs glinted, rope coiled and she did not have to guess what else they had. Stepping softly, she made her way along the edge of the stream toward her car. “Thy will. Thy will,” she whispered, convinced that what she had heard and surmised was no idleness. The men had not come there merely to rehearse. Like boot camp recruits, like invaders preparing for slaughter, they were there to rave, to heat the blood or turn it icicle cold the better to execute the mission. One thing in particular she had quickly understood: the only voice not singing belonged to the one conducting the choir.
“Where is Richard Misner?” Lone didn’t bother to say hello. She had knocked on Misner’s door, then entered his house, to find it dark and empty. Now she had roused his closest neighbor, Frances Poole DuPres, from her sleep. Frances groaned.
“What in the world is going on with you, Lone?”
“Tell me where Misner is.”
“They’re gone to Muskogee. Why?”
“They? They who?”
“Reverend Misner and Anna. A conference. What you need him for this time of night?”
“Let me in,” said Lone, and stepped past Frances into the living room.
“Come on in the kitchen,” said Frances.
“No time. Listen.” Lone described the meeting, saying, “A whole passel of menfolk planning something against the Convent. Morgans, Fleetwoods and Wisdom’s there too. They going after those women out there.”
“Lord, what kind of mess is this? They’re going to scare them off in the middle of the night?”
“Woman, listen to me. Those men got guns with sights on them.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve never seen my brother go anywhere minus his rifle, except church, and even then it’s in the car.”
“They got rope too, Frannie.”
“Rope?”
“Two-inch.”
“What’re you thinking?”
“We wasting time. Where’s Sut?”
“Sleep.”
“Wake him.”
“I’m not going to disturb my husband for some wild—”
“Wake him, Frannie. I am not a crazy woman and you know it.”
The first drops were warm and fat, carrying the scent of white loco and cholla from regions north and west. They smashed into gentian, desert trumpets and slid from chicory leaves. Plump and slippery they rolled like mercury beads over the cracked earth between garden rows. As they sat in kitchen light, Lone, Frances and Sut DuPres could see, even smell, the rainfall, but they could not hear it, so soft, so downy, were the drops.
Sut was unconvinced that Lone’s demand to rush out and stop them was called for but he did agree to speak to Reverends Pulliam and Cary in the morning. Lone said morning might be too late and took off in a huff to find somebody who didn’t talk to her as if she were a child unable to wake from a nightmare. Anna Flood was gone; she couldn’t go to Soane because of Deek; and since K.D. and Arnette had taken the house that Menus used to own, Dovey Morgan wouldn’t be in town. She thought about Kate but knew she would not go up against her father. She considered Penelope but dismissed her, since she was not only married to Wisdom, she was Sargeant’s daughter. Lone realized that she would have to go out to the ranches and farms, to people she trusted most not to let family relations cloud their minds. Working windshield wipers were an unavailable blessing, so Lone, rolling gum slowly around in her mouth, concentrated on being careful. Driving past the deserted Oven, pleased she had gotten the mayapples in time, she noticed there were no lights at Anna’s place or, way back of it, in Deek Morgan’s house. Lone squinted to negotiate the few miles of dirt road between Ruby’s and the county’s. It could be a tricky stretch because the earth was absorbing the rain now, swelling the roots of parched plants and forming rivulets wherever it could. She drove slowly, thinking if this mission was truly God’s intention, nothing could stop her. Halfway to Aaron Poole’s house the Oldsmobile halted in a roadside ditch.
Around the time Lone DuPres was trying to avoid the Early Melones sign, the men were finalizing details over coffee and something stronger for those who wished. None was a drinker, except Menus, but they did not object to lacing tonight’s coffee. Behind Sargeant’s barn-like building, where his trade took place, beyond the paddock where he once kept horses, was a shed. In it he repaired tack—a hobby now, no longer a chargeable service—ruminated and avoided the women in his family. A male cozy, it was equipped with a small stove, a freezer, a worktable and chairs, all standing on an unruinable floor. The men had just begun to blow in their cups when the rain started. After a few swallows they joined Sargeant in the yard to move sacks and cover equipment with tarpaulin. When they returned, drenched, to the shed they found themselves lighthearted and suddenly hungry. Sargeant suggested beefsteaks and went in his house to get what was needed to feed the men. Priscilla, his wife, heard him and offered to help, but he sent her back to bed, firmly. The scented rainfall drummed. The atmosphere in the shed was braced, companionable, as the men ate thick steaks prepared the old-fashioned way, fried in a piping hot skillet.
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nbsp; The rain’s perfume was stronger north of Ruby, especially at the Convent, where thick white clover and Scotch broom colonized every place but the garden. Mavis and Pallas, aroused from sleep by its aroma, rushed to tell Consolata, Grace and Seneca that the longed for rain had finally come. Gathered in the kitchen door, first they watched, then they stuck out their hands to feel. It was like lotion on their fingers so they entered it and let it pour like balm on their shaved heads and upturned faces. Consolata started it; the rest were quick to join her. There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had enchantment not been so deep. If there were any recollections of a recent warning or intimations of harm, the irresistible rain washed them away. Seneca embraced and finally let go of a dark morning in state housing. Grace witnessed the successful cleansing of a white shirt that never should have been stained. Mavis moved in the shudder of rose of Sharon petals tickling her skin. Pallas, delivered of a delicate son, held him close while the rain rinsed away a scary woman on an escalator and all fear of black water. Consolata, fully housed by the god who sought her out in the garden, was the more furious dancer, Mavis the most elegant. Seneca and Grace danced together, then parted to skip through fresh mud. Pallas, smoothing raindrops from her baby’s head, swayed like a frond.
Finally out of the ditch, Lone naturally sought out a DuPres. She had been reared in that family, rescued, then taught by one of the daughters. More than that, she knew what they were made of. Pious DuPres, son of Booker DuPres and nephew to the famous Juvenal DuPres, was her first choice. Like the Morgans and Blackhorses, they were pleased to be descendants of men who had governed in statehouses, but unlike them, they were prouder of earlier generations: artisans, gunsmiths, seamstresses, lacemakers, cobblers, ironmongers, masons whose serious work was stolen from them by white immigrants. Their deeper reverence was for the generations that had seen their shops burned and their supplies thrown overboard. Because white immigrants could not trust or survive fair competition, their people had been arrested, threatened, purged and eliminated from skilled labor and craft. But the families held on to what they could and what they had gained from 1755, when the first DuPres carried a white napkin over his arm and a prayer book in his pocket. The belief that steadied them was not grim. Virtue, unexpected goodness, made them smile. Deliberate righteousness lifted their hearts as little else could. They did not always know what it was, but they spent a lot of time trying to find out. Long before Juvenal was elected to the statehouse, supper conversation at a DuPres table focused on the problems each member was having, how each and all could handle or help. And always the turn was on the ethics of a deed, the clarity of motives, whether a behavior advanced His glory and kept His trust. None of the current DuPreses liked or approved of the Convent women, but that was way beside the point. The actions of Brood and Apollo had insulted them; Wisdom Poole was brother to their daughter-in-law, and in his participation in a group intent on hurting women—for whatever reason—they would quickly see the monster’s handiwork. And so they did. When Lone told them all she had heard and what she knew, Pious wasted no time. He instructed his wife, Melinda, to get over to the Beauchamps’ place; tell Ren and Luther to meet him. He and Lone would get to Deed Sands and Aaron Poole. Melinda said they ought to notify Dovey, but they could not agree on how to do that if Steward was there. Lone didn’t know if they had already started for the Convent or were waiting for sunrise but said someone should risk it and inform Dovey, who could, if she wanted to, let Soane know what was going on.
Tired from their night dance but happy, the women return to the house. Drying themselves, they ask Consolata to tell them again about Piedade, while they oil their heads with wintergreen.
“We sat on the shorewalk. She bathed me in emerald water. Her voice made proud women weep in the streets. Coins fell from the fingers of artists and policemen, and the country’s greatest chefs begged us to eat their food. Piedade had songs that could still a wave, make it pause in its curl listening to language it had not heard since the sea opened. Shepherds with colored birds on their shoulders came down from mountains to remember their lives in her songs. Travelers refused to board homebound ships while she sang. At night she took the stars out of her hair and wrapped me in its wool. Her breath smelled of pineapple and cashews….”
The women sleep, wake and sleep again with images of parrots, crystal seashells and a singing woman who never spoke. At four in the morning they wake to prepare for the day. One mixes dough while another lights the stove. Others gather vegetables for the noon meal, then set out the breakfast things. The bread, kneaded into mounds, is placed in baking tins to rise.
Sunlight is yearning for brilliance when the men arrive. The stone-washed blue of the sky is hard to break, but by the time the men park behind shin oak and start for the Convent, the sun has cracked through. Glorious blue. The water of the night rises as mist from puddles and flooded crevices in the road’s shoulder. When they reach the Convent, they avoid loud gravel crunch by weaving through tall grass and occasional rainbows to the front door. The claws, perhaps, snatch Steward out of the world. Mottled and glistening from rain, they flank the steps. As he mounts between them, he raises his chin and then his rifle and shoots open a door that has never been locked. It slants inward on its hinges. Sun follows him in, splashing the walls of the foyer, where sexualized infants play with one another through flaking paint. Suddenly a woman with the same white skin appears, and all Steward needs to see are her sensual appraising eyes to pull the trigger again. The other men are startled but not deterred from stepping over her. Fondling their weapons, feeling suddenly so young and good they are reminded that guns are more than decoration, intimidation or comfort. They are meant.