Chapter 5
Jonah
It was gone before the last verse.
That's the part that made grown men sit down in the parking lot afterward. Not that it was there — that we'd all half prepared for. It was gone before the doors opened and nobody in a building of two hundred and eleven people saw it leave, including three of us who were looking directly at it.
Roach was down those balcony stairs before I was, and Roach is not fast.
"Back left," he was saying. "Back left, back left—"
The pew was full of the Landry family and had been the whole service, and Adele Landry looked up at us with the expression of a woman who has just watched two men fall down a staircase into her church.
"Roach Guillory."
"Ma'am."
"Are you drunk?"
"No ma'am."
"Is he drunk?"
"No ma'am," I said.
"Then why are you breathing like that in the Lord's house."
Wrenlee went past us both without a word and out the side door into the lot.
She made it as far as the gravel.
I came out and she was standing between a station wagon and Miss Ida's Buick with her arms wrapped around herself, absolutely upright, and then her knees went and I got there and she went down anyway and took me with her, and we both ended up on the gravel in the side lot of the Marrow Bend Methodist church while two hundred people sang the doxology forty feet away.
She didn't cry the way people cry.
She made almost no sound at all, and I've thought about why since, and I believe it's because a woman who spends seven years not explaining herself gets very good at not making noise.
It came out of her in these hard silent shoves, like something being pulled out of the ground by the roots, and her hands were locked in the back of my shirt hard enough that I had a bruise for a week.
"It's her."
"Wren."
"That's my mother, Jonah, that's her, that's her hands—"
"I know."
"She's been dead eleven years."
"I know."
"Then how is she standing in a pew?"
I didn't have anything for that. I put my hand on the back of her head and held it there and let the whole thing happen on my shirt, and inside the building two hundred people got to the amen and started scraping chairs.
After a while she went quiet and stayed where she was.
"They're going to come out those doors in ninety seconds," I said.
"I don't care."
"You will."
"I really don't, Jonah. I've had seven years of caring what comes out of those doors and today I've got nothing."
"All right."
"Don't move."
"I'm not moving."
And they came out those doors, and two hundred people in their good clothes saw Wrenlee Thibodeaux on the ground in the side lot with Jonah Pike's arms around her.
I watched about six of them decide what it meant.
You could see it land on their faces like weather.
Miss Ida stopped, and looked at us for four full seconds, and then turned around and started talking very loudly to the Beulah Grove bus driver about the heat, which is the closest thing to grace this town has ever extended me.
Roach found us in the lot ten minutes later and crouched down on the gravel next to us like a man visiting a fence post.
"Y'all want to hear something?"
"No," I said.
"Miss Ida's granddaughter filmed the fourth verse on her phone."
Wrenlee's head came up off my shoulder.
"There's video?"
"There's forty seconds of video."
"And?"
"And there's twelve people singing in it," Roach said, "in a room with two hundred and eleven, and if you turn the sound all the way up there's a thirteenth voice and no thirteenth mouth."
"Roach."
"I've watched it nine times. I'd like to stop."
"Send it to Teodora."
"I sent it to Teodora forty minutes ago and Teodora replied with one word."
"What word?"
"'Tenant,'" he said. "Just that. No punctuation. I'll be honest with you, the lack of punctuation is what's got me."
We sat in the truck for a while after.
The lot emptied out. Somebody's kid was hitting a hubcap with a stick somewhere and it made a sound like a slow clock.
"I need to tell you something," she said.
"Not today."
"Yes today."
"Wrenlee—"
"It's got to be today, because if I get through today it goes back in the box, and it took a dead woman in a pew to get it out." She was looking at the windshield. "Seven years ago. Ten forty-seven in the morning."
I put both hands on the wheel even though we weren't going anywhere.
"The east line broke," she said. "That morning, while I was standing in the back of that church in my mother's dress. Mile four, the exact spot it's broken now. And I was the only person alive who could feel it and the only person alive who could lay it."
"On a Sunday."
"On a Sunday with two hundred people in the building."
She told me the rest of it flat and fast, the way you read a list. The truck. The shed. Ninety pounds in nine bags. The dress off in the shed and the slip and her grandmother's work shirt, which explained a rumor I'd broken a man's nose over in 2019.
Eleven hours. Hands open from the fourth mile on.
"Tell me hour seven," I said.
"You don't want hour seven."
"Wrenlee, I have wanted hour seven for seven years and didn't know it existed. Tell me."
She looked at her hands.
"I was at the water stretch," she said. "It gets dark early down there because of the cypress even in June. And I heard somebody walking on the far side of the line, keeping pace with me, about thirty feet out."
"You didn't look."
"You don't look. That's the first thing you learn and it's the only rule that isn't about salt." She turned her palm over. "It walked with me for two miles. And then it said my name, and it said it in my mother's voice, and my mother was alive and asleep in a house four miles away."
"What did it say?"
"It said, 'Wrenlee Marie, you're going to miss it.'"
"Miss what?"
"That's exactly what I wanted to ask," she said. "That's the trap. You answer once and it's got a thread. So I laid salt and I counted out loud from one to eleven thousand and something, over and over, until it got bored."
"How long?"
"Forty minutes."
I sat there in that truck and thought about where I had been at that exact hour. Seven in the evening. Miss Ida taking the flower out of my buttonhole.
The thing that stood at the treeline in hour seven and used her mother's voice, four years before her mother was dead.
I want to be accurate about what happened in me while she talked, because everyone in this club has told me since that I handled it well and every one of them is wrong.
I got calm. I got very calm. That's the thing that happens to me and it's not a virtue, it's a shutter coming down over a window.
"Why didn't you tell me," I said.
"Because I couldn't tell you without telling you all of it."
"Why not tell me all of it?"
"Because you'd have come with me."
"Yes."
"And the east line eats Pikes, Jonah." She turned in the seat.
"Your daddy. Your uncle Ray. Both of them on the wrong side of the boundary with their boots off — do you know why the boots are off?
Because the thing out there takes them off.
It's been doing it since 1931. It's in my great-grandmother's book.
There is a list of names and four of them are yours. "
I sat with my hands on the wheel.
"So you thought—"
"I thought if he walks eleven miles of that line with me on the day he's happiest, it'll take him."
"So you left me at an altar."
"Yes."
"In front of everyone I know."
"Yes."
"And you'd do it again."
"Yes," she said. "That's the part I want you to hear correctly, because I'm not asking you to forgive it and I'm not going to sit here and let you decide it was a mistake I made in a panic.
I've had seven years. I've gone over it eleven thousand times.
It is the worst thing I have ever done and I would do it again tomorrow, and you can have whatever you want with that. "
Here's what I want on the record.
I did not feel relief.
Everyone expects that. Delphine expected it, Roach expected it, I think Wrenlee expected it — the story goes that the man finds out she had a reason and the weight comes off him.
The weight didn't come off. The weight moved.
Because for seven years the thing I'd been carrying was she didn't want me enough to stay, and that's terrible but it's simple, and you can build a life on a simple terrible thing. Men do it constantly.
What she handed me instead was: she wanted you so much she went out alone into the dark and bled from the hands for eleven hours, and then decided that being hated by an entire town was a fair price for you not knowing.
And she did it by herself.
That's what got me. Not the leaving. The alone.
"Say something," she said.
"I'm working on it."
"Jonah—"
"Wrenlee, I need you to give me a second, because the first thing that comes out is going to be true and I'd like it to also be fair, and those two aren't lined up yet."
She waited. I'll give her that. She waited the whole way through and she didn't fill it.
"You were on your knees in the dark at mile seven," I said.
"Yes."
"With your hands split."
"Yes."
"And something out there was using your mother's voice on you."
"Yes."
"And I was in a suit."
Her face did something.
"I was in a suit," I said, and I heard my own voice come up and I couldn't get it back down, and I have raised my voice four times in my adult life and this is the only one I don't regret.
"I was standing in a heated building in a suit with a flower on it while you were out there bleeding into the ground for this town, and you decided — you decided — that I'd rather be comfortable than know. "
"That's not—"
"That is exactly what you decided."
"I decided you'd be alive!"
"I didn't ask to be!"
It rang around in that cab.
"I've spent nineteen years doing the ugly thing so nobody else has to," I said, quieter.
"That's my whole job. That is the entire content of my life, Wrenlee.
And the one time in that life somebody I loved was carrying something ugly, she looked at me and thought — no, not him, he's the good one, he stands at the front and waits. "
"Jonah—"