There’s a storm coming, Rose told herself sternly. Then she started to hurry, to hurry and hurry, because if she didn’t hurry she would think, and if she thought she would go crazy.
She was already going crazy, and she thought it might be killing her.
3
STEPHEN HARROW SAW CAROL Littleton come out of Rose MacNeill’s big Victorian house, carrying a flat brown paper bag, but the vision didn’t register. Stephen was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Methodist Church, looking up at the bell tower and worrying. The wind was whistling and rattling in the trees. The few thin strands of sandy hair that were still left on his head were jerking violently across his scalp. In spite of the fact that he was only thirty-two, Stephen felt very old and very stupid. This wasn’t the first time he had wished that he belonged to a denomination whose ministers wore backwards collars. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense to him, being any kind of minister at all. When it got very dark at night, he would try to remember how he had made his decision. He would see himself, all alone in the attic bedroom of his parents’ house in Greenville, Massachusetts. If there was a God, Stephen Harrow had never met Him. If Christ had really risen from the dead, Stephen didn’t think there would be so many different Christian denominations now or so many people who didn’t believe in Him. This was the kind of thing that was understood implicitly in Massachusetts. At the seminary where Stephen had trained, there wasn’t a single professor who would have argued for the literal divinity of Jesus. It was different down here. All of his parishioners in Bellerton believed that Jesus Christ was really and truly God incarnate. All of them believed that there would be a last day of judgment with the righteous taken bodily into Heaven along with their immortal souls. Half of them believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis. When Stephen preached a sermon that mentioned evolution, or used it as a metaphor for the spiritual life, he always got a dozen phone calls, complaining about his lack of commitment to the inerrant Word of God. God, these people seemed to think, was a ghostly CEO, dictating letters to His tireless secretaries, wearing out the girls in the typing pool, insisting on His words being accepted without correction. Stephen couldn’t remember when he had started to hate it here, but it was soon after he came. If it hadn’t been for his wife, he would have left months ago. By now he even hated the accents these people had, and the way they walked down the street. He wanted to go home.
The parsonage was a big white farmhouse-style house right next to the church itself. As Stephen stepped back to the curb to look at the bell tower’s roof, the parsonage’s front door opened and his wife walked out onto the porch. She was wearing one of those thin flowered dresses she had taken to as soon as they moved down here. If she had had a hat with flowers on it, she would have looked like one of the garden party ladies in The Manchurian Candidate. Her name was Lisa; and back when Stephen was in the seminary she used to wear short skirts with lace panels on the sides of them and thick black tights. She would come to the room he had rented and spend the weekend. She would drink Tequila Sunrises until her lips were red with cold. Stephen had had no way of knowing that this was not the person she really was.
Lisa turned to look up Main Street and then came across the porch and down the steps to the sidewalk. She came close enough to him to be heard but not close enough for him to reach out and touch her.
“Is that Carol Littleton I see with the brown paper bag?” she asked. “What did she want in this weather?”
“She wasn’t here.” Stephen went back to looking at the bell tower. “She was at Rose’s. I think she bought something.”
“Now?”
“Rose seems to be open, Lisa. If Rose is open, Carol Littleton can buy something.”
“You’d think they would all have left town by now, for God’s sake. Why do you think they stay? It can’t be comfortable for them here.”
“Maybe they have nowhere else to go.”
“Carol Littleton might not have anyplace to go to, but Zhondra Meyer does. She’s rich as Croesus. She’s only here to bother us. She wants to enlighten the poor benighted yokels.”
“Enlighten us about what?”
“Gay rights. Tolerance and diversity. All that kind of thing. You know: We’ve all been colonized by a white male culture. We have to throw off the chains that bind our imaginations and remythologize our lives into paradigms of true equality. That kind of thing.”
“Really.”
Lisa made a face. “She talked to the library reading group last week. That was Maggie Kelleher’s idea, of course. God, but she’s been a strange woman since she came back from New York. I wonder what happened to her there.”