Chapter 11 Una
Una
That Sunday, Una and Kristofer were the greeters for the early worship service at the Cold Harbor United Methodist Church.
For most of the year, this service was primarily attended by the oldest church members. They’d shuffle in, eager to get a
seat in one of the stiff-backed pews near the front, as if proximity to the shining altar cross could erase their sins as
their Day of Judgment grew closer and closer.
On summer Sundays, the grannies and grandpas at the early service were joined by the sailing families. They showed up at the
last minute, damp-haired and harried, hoping to cross piety off their list before hustling home to change clothes and then
jump back in the car and speed to one of the many North Shore yacht clubs.
For now, the church building was still dozing. The organ was silent. The wooden pews weren’t groaning. The bells had yet to
toll the hour.
Una grabbed a handful of programs from the wooden table in the entranceway and took her place outside the chapel doors. It
wasn’t even nine in the morning and already the air was sticky with humidity.
There was no sign of the sun. Clouds drooped from a gray sky, and mist crept over the grass, as diaphanous as a bridal veil. The world felt hushed and heavy.
“You’re pretty as a picture,” Kristofer said as he took up his position across the sidewalk from his wife.
Una crinkled her right eye in the briefest of winks as the first worshippers headed their way.
Having been a member for years, Una was able to welcome most people by name followed by a “nice to see you” or “I’m happy
you’re here.”
The older women asked after Gunnar or shared a tidbit or two about their own children or grandchildren. Their husbands talked
to Kristofer about last night’s game, grumbling over the ump’s call in the sixth inning.
When the sailing families arrived, the parents took the proffered program and ushered their children into the church without
pausing to socialize.
Occasionally, a woman would hold Una’s hand a little too tightly while whispering, “I’m still waiting for an opening in your schedule.”
Extricating herself from the woman’s press-on-nails grip, Una would say, “I’m still booked, but you’re first on the list.”
“There’s always that one person,” Kristofer said after the entrants had trailed off. “Dale Berger asked me if I look through
people’s magazines before I put them in the mailbox. Fred Carter wanted to know if I’d been chased by any dogs this week.
Then he barked at me as he walked away.”
“I heard him. He sounded like a seal.”
When it was almost time for the bells to ring, Una saw the Scott family spill out of their station wagon.
Justin grabbed Jill’s hand and tugged her toward the church.
J.J. followed behind, his hands plunged deep in his pants pockets.
Natalie smoothed her dress and threaded her arm through Jimmy’s.
He seemed pleasantly surprised by the gesture.
“Una!” Justin ran down the path and flung his arms around Una’s hips.
“Hello, little bee,” she said, kissing his plump cheek.
“Why am I a bee?”
Jill tugged on her baby brother’s shirt. “Because your shirt is yellow with stripes.”
“Then what’s Jilly?” Justin asked Una.
Una made a show of studying Jill from head to toe. Jill wore a floral sundress and white sandals. Her hair was parted in the
middle and pulled back into ribbon barrettes. The ribbons were blue and white and nearly the same length as Jill’s hair.
“Jill’s a fairy queen,” said Una.
Beaming, Jill took a program and tried to pull Justin away from Una. “Come on. We’re gonna be late for Sunday school.”
“But I want to stay with Una,” Justin whined.
“I wish I could go to Sunday school,” Una said. “You’re making pinwheels today. And Mrs. Drew baked chocolate chip cookies
for snack. With extra chips.”
That was all Justin needed to hear. He sprinted inside the church.
J.J. smiled shyly as he shook Una’s hand, glowing when she remarked that he had a strong grip. A man’s grip.
“I bet it helps you when you race today,” she added.
J.J. glanced at the trees in the churchyard. “There’s hardly any wind.”
“You could always pray for wind,” Jimmy said as he moved to shake Kristofer’s outstretched hand.
Natalie hung back until the rest of her family had disappeared inside. After making sure no one was around, she leaned close to Una and whispered, “You’ll never believe this, but Elaine got a letter from Mrs. Smith.”
At the sound of Mrs. Smith’s name, the air turned leaden. It pressed down on Una’s shoulders and sat heavily on the crown
of her head.
“A letter?”
Natalie watched Kristofer hand a program to the manager of the local bank. She waited for him to enter the church before saying,
“Elaine wrote her first.”
As she spoke about vines and fireworks, Una glanced up at the sky. The clouds reminded her of Amma’s sheep. Their long fleece
was dark gray or jet black, but Amma’s favorite, a ram with double curled horns, was dual coated. His fleece was a dirty white
and gray. His eyes were black as flint. He was the biggest ram in her herd, and the most aggressive. He’d charge any human
who came near, and when a neighbor’s ram strayed onto Amma’s land, her ram had headbutted the creature to death.
The neighbor had called him Púki, which meant demon.
Amma embraced the name, boasting of her ram’s spiteful nature, until he killed a young ewe in her own herd.
“He cannot help his nature,” Una’s amma had said. “But he is a danger to the others and must be destroyed.”
Though Una was elsewhere when Púki was butchered, she sat at the table on the summer solstice as his meat was served for the
Feast of the Midnight Sun. It bobbed in a soup of potatoes, carrots, turnips, and herbs. The meat felt slimy on Una’s tongue.
When she bit down, her mouth was flooded by a sour, rancid flavor, and she spit the half-masticated piece back into her bowl.
Púki’s head had been prepared especially for Pappi. Svie was one of his favorite dishes, and he grinned with glee when Amma placed it in front of him. After his brains had been scraped out, Púki’s head had been cut in half and boiled for an hour.
Without his horns and black eyes, he looked sad and diminished.
Una turned away when her father stuck his fork behind Púki’s cheek and scooped out a hunk of flesh. After one bite, he told
Amma that the meat was rotten and gave it to the dogs.
They sniffed and pawed at it but refused to eat it. By the time the sun set and rose again, a legion of black flies had found
Púki’s discarded head. It was a long time before Una could eat lamb again.
Now the sky above the Cold Harbor United Methodist Church was the color of Púki’s fleece, and the buzz of Natalie’s voice
in Una’s ear sounded like a mass of black flies.
“What did the letter say?” she asked Natalie.
Natalie’s eyes were feverishly bright. “She agreed to Elaine’s requests on two conditions. The first is that she wants to
hire Charles, J.J., and Jill to work in her yard. She offered a very generous wage.”
“No,” Una whispered.
Misinterpreting Una’s objection as surprise, Natalie barreled on. “I couldn’t believe it, either, but I’m thrilled.”
Una wanted to dig her nails into Natalie’s shoulders. “The children—they’re going to work for her?”
“Yes, but don’t say anything to them. We need to get through this regatta first.”
A woman in a green paisley print dress hurried up the sidewalk. She took a program from Kristofer and then put a hand on Natalie’s
arm. “Hey! Long time no see. Are you going in?”
“In a minute,” Natalie said. “I need to finish up with Una. Let’s catch up after the service, okay?”
The woman looked down her nose at Una and then entered the church.
“I need to tell you the second condition. It’s even more unbelievable than the first one.” Natalie sounded breathless—overexcited—like
a child who’d eaten too much sugar. “She wants an invitation to Charles’s bar mitzvah!”
Una stared at Natalie in shock.
“That was my reaction, too! I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.” Natalie glanced at her watch and began to edge toward
the entrance. “I guess we’re finally going to see the mysterious Mrs. Smith in the flesh.”
Suddenly, the church bells began to peal.
Una tried to open herself up to the melody. “How Great Thou Art” was one of her favorite hymns, but the music failed to reach
her. Her head felt thick. Like the cross on the steeple had pierced the clouds and they had fallen around her, cocooning her
in a gray miasma.
But then, Kristofer was taking her by hand and leading her into the sanctuary. “You’re white as the snow on Snaefellsjokull. What did she say?”
“It was nothing,” Una said as she slid into the pew reserved for greeters and ushers.
How can she send the children to that house? she thought as the minister asked the congregation to rise for the processional hymn. Doesn’t she feel the presence there?
As the service progressed, Una stood up or sat down along with everyone else. She closed her eyes when she was supposed to
be praying and sang along with the hymns, but none of the messages sank in. It was as if a fog had invaded her mind.
Focusing on the program, she saw that there was to be a baptism today. A baby boy would be received into the church fold and
the entire congregation would promise to serve as his guardians.
As the parents walked up the center aisle—the mother in a white dress with padded shoulders and the father in a smoke-gray suit—the baby turned his head and looked right at Una.
His eyes were almost the same blue as her own. They were just a fraction darker, as if a fleck of black had been mixed in
with the blue.
The baby’s eyes looked exactly like Svana’s eyes.
When the family reached the altar, the baby began to cry. He wriggled in his mother’s arms, and she tried to soothe him while
straightening his christening gown. He pedaled his legs in protest, kicking her in the chest until one of his white socks
came loose and fluttered to the crimson carpet.
Una stared at the sock. It looked like a giant’s tooth. One of Goliath’s, perhaps, knocked out by David’s stone.
Una imagined the thwap of David’s slingshot as his stones rocketed through the air, catching the giant in the nose, the eye, the cheek. She could
almost hear the crunch of bone and the sonic boom of the giant’s body as it crashed to the ground.
He probably hadn’t died right away. He’d probably lain there in the dust, his mouth open in anguish, his broken teeth floating
over his tongue until a stream of blood deposited them on the ground by his shattered face.
In the front of the sanctuary, the baby wailed. He was in the minister’s arms now, enduring the shock of water on his forehead.
Congregants tittered in amusement as the water fanned out over his skull, darkening his hair and soaking the collar of his
gown.
“Robert Phillip Peterson,” intoned the minister. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit.”
When the rites were completed and the boy was returned to his mother, red-faced and squalling, the organist struck up the
opening chords of “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”
As the family returned to the back of the sanctuary with as much speed and dignity as possible, Una looked at the words in her hymnal.
“All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.”
As the second stanza began, Una’s gaze strayed to the stained-glass window to her right. It was a portrait of a robed man
with a shepherd’s crook. The Good Shepherd, surrounded by his sheep, had stopped under the shelter of a tree to pray. The
shepherd’s hands were clasped in front of his chest. His chin was lifted to the heavens, and his eyes were fixed on a point
somewhere above the tree branches. Behind his head was a disc of light. Una thought it was meant to be a halo, but to her,
it looked like a setting sun. Below the disc was a body of water made of graduating blues.
The shepherd wore dull colors, so it was the golden disc and the striations of blue that captivated the viewer. The lightest
blue was closest to the shore. The deep, dark blue was right below the sun. The wavy pieces of glass gave the impression of
a current, and the longer Una stared at the swath of midnight blue, the more she wondered if something was in the water, watching
the shepherd. Waiting to take him unawares.
Next to her, Kristofer sang the chorus in his rich baritone.
“All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.”
Why, Lord? Una thought as she turned the page of her hymnal. The music notes bobbed across the creamy paper like black jellyfish. Why did you make monsters?
After Svana was lost to the ocean, Una’s mother found comfort in scripture. Una preferred Amma’s stories. In her worlds, Svana’s
bones weren’t stuck in the sand, down in a cold, lightless place. She was with the fairies, dancing on rainbows and making
flower crowns.
Una’s gaze shifted to the window showing a crucified Jesus. His face was mournful. A crown of thorns dug into his flesh.
Mrs. Smith’s yard is full of thorns.
Una had to do something to keep the children away from that house. The woman in the photograph, the woman with the black eyes,
had left her mark on that place. It was cursed. It was full of shadows. And the woman inside was one of those shadows.
Una had never seen this woman, but she’d felt her dark presence for years. Now, after all this time, Mrs. Smith was interacting
with the people around her. She wanted to hire the Scott children. She wanted to attend Charles’s party.
Monsters could wear human faces, Una knew. She needed to look at Mrs. Smith. She needed to see her eyes. She had to do this
for the children.
She turned back to the window of the Good Shepherd, and this time, when she took a long, hard look at the sheep, she saw that
their eyes were black with fear. Their shepherd wasn’t paying attention, and they were in danger.
Whatever was in the water was coming for them, and by the time the shepherd realized what was happening, it would be too late
to save them all.