Chapter 15
Chapter
I intended to give myself plenty of time to get ready.
I didn’t want to enter the pastor’s place of power looking as ragged as I felt, but in the end, I didn’t have a choice.
My barn, which was once a serene place of recovery and quiet, held more animals than it had seen in the past five years combined, and no sooner had I finished one round of cleaning, feeding, and wound-tending than the next one began.
Worse, my magic seemed to be fading, even within the sanctuary’s wards—my salves and tinctures were less effective, and the animals were more stressed, less trusting.
It took longer to dress and clean their wounds and administer antibiotics, and by the time I finished struggling with a young woodchuck over her dewormer, I had only ten minutes to get to the church.
I went into the house just long enough to re-braid my hair and wash the dirt off my face.
It still had not rained, and I found myself holding my breath every time I turned the tap.
The fawn, satiated and sleepy from her latest meal, was dozing in the living room on top of the flannel I hadn’t bothered to reclaim.
She’d been docile since I brought her into the house again, and I’d slipped back into old patterns.
I knew that her chances of being fully rehabilitated diminished each day I let this go by; at this point, she’d likely end up a lifetime, half-tame resident, the way Mac was.
If the sanctuary even survives that long.
I pushed the thought aside and ran out to the truck, gunning it down the hill and trying to calm the nerves fluttering in my stomach.
A void-black eye gazed at me from the O in the stop sign at the bottom, but it was gone after I glanced away and back again.
I felt as if I had to pry away the shadow herb’s grip on my mind finger by finger.
Coming down Main Street, I saw the street in front of the Pentecostal church had a long line of cars parked on both sides, and there was a clot of people gathered near the door.
I almost couldn’t believe this many people still lived in Burrsville—I never saw them at town council or the harvest festival or the nonstop fundraisers trying to keep the volunteer fire and EMS services afloat.
And yet, with a new pastor in town, suddenly they could all be drawn here for something as nebulous as “the future of the community.”
I went to the end of the line of cars and pulled over to the curb. My reflection in the rearview glanced at me shiftily as I unbuckled, my eyes taut and tired. I scraped back loose pieces of hair already escaped from my braid, lifted my chin, and got out.
That was when the bell rang.
It had been so long since I had heard a bell in Burrsville that I ducked instinctively, as if it were an air raid siren.
The sound came out all wrong, a tinny, discordant clang that set my teeth on edge.
The people gathered in clumps on the sidewalk looked around in confusion.
Across the street, Chief Broder stepped out of his cruiser and tipped back his hat, the folds of his face made smooth by awe.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
I followed his gaze to the bell tower of the church.
Enough of its boards were missing that you could see the stairs inside if you looked hard enough, and it had lost a chunk of its roof during a windstorm this past summer.
For weeks afterward, the church’s restoration committee had been in every grocery store and on every street corner, collecting change in buckets and never raising enough to do more than get a quote for the labor.
And yet there was someone in the tower. Someone was ringing the bell, hauling a rope that was probably frayed to mere strings. Someone had given a voice back to the church, and I knew who it was just from the breadth of the shoulders.
“Isn’t that thing condemned?” someone asked.
“Maybe they fixed it.”
“Doesn’t look like they fixed it.”
“Yeah. Kind of nice to hear the bell again, though.”
As it rang again, I made my way to the church, threading through the frozen, gawking onlookers.
As familiar as the outside of the building was, I’d never stepped a foot past this particular threshold, not in all the years I’d lived here.
I found myself tonguing the devil’s stamp on the inside of my mouth as I entered, and for a breath I wondered if the memory of God was strong enough here to reject me.
But there was no fire from heaven, no harmonized judgment from a holy choir, no shattering of stained glass—of course, there was no stained glass here, because the interior of the church was as plain and ugly as Zeke’s house.
The sanctuary had blank white walls, hard wooden pews, cheap blue carpet, and above it all, a large, unadorned cross.
There was no mystery here, nothing that spoke to me of the divine, not a single element that inspired awe or quietude.
It reeked of animal crackers and sweat, and the hum of voices felt like bees under my skin.
When the Catholic church had closed—sometime in the nineties—I had gone in out of pure curiosity.
I hadn’t seen the inside of a church since my teens, and the few times we had gone, my mother shook like a leaf in the pew beside me the entire service.
I had felt no guilt as I jimmied open the padlock, but was brought up short by the sight of the devil, standing before a stained glass window and letting the bejeweled light play over his hands.
“Come to dance on the grave with me?” he’d asked.
But instead of dancing, we sat in companionable silence, watching motes of dust drift like smoke from a thurible. He disappeared between one breath and another, and it was only then I saw the glass visage of the Virgin Mary was gaping in a silent scream.
I longed for silence and companionship now.
I loitered in the foyer of the Pentecostal church for as long as I could, afraid that the lingering remnants of the belladonna would seize on my anxiety, afraid of what I would see and what I would do.
I didn’t want to cram myself into a pew with strangers, and as it turned out, I couldn’t anyway; it was standing room only by the time the clock struck seven, and my cheeks were flushed with the heat of other bodies.
I kept half an eye on the door, expecting to see my friends come through, but there was no sign of them.
The constant buzz of voices became overwhelming, a serration of sound that itched behind my eyes.
It had probably been years since most of these people were in a church, but the voices lulled immediately when the door at the back of the stage—the one that led to the bell tower—opened.
A piece of caution tape fluttered in Zeke’s wake and was pinned between the door and its frame as he shut it.
He lumbered to the podium, his face shining with sweat and ecstasy.
“Please, be seated,” he said, and everyone who had managed to find a space in a pew did so.
Finally, I saw my friends—Georgie, Evelyn, Christine, and Max, all right up front.
They were gazing up at Zeke expectantly, and I saw no caution in their expressions, no skepticism.
Their faces were open and waiting, anticipatory.
“Friends, thank you for coming here today,” the pastor began.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Zeke Abdee, the new pastor of this church.
This is quite a turnout, and it brings me joy to see how many of you are invested in your community—how many are willing to come together to fight for it.
It brings me hope, because make no mistake, we will have to fight for it. ”
A murmur circled the room. There were a couple of chairs placed off to the side of the stage, and I saw there was only one person not watching Zeke with rapt attention: David.
Tension tightened his jaw, and there were ink-dark circles beneath his eyes.
He was watching me through the forest of other bodies, and when our gazes met, his swollen tongue slid from the corner of his mouth and crawled up his cheek toward his eye.
I looked away before the belladonna twisted his skin inside out, and returned my attention to the pastor.
In that short time he’d been warming to his cause, and the hard lines of his face had melted away—eyes wide, brows lifted, mouth supple and expressive.
He was like a stage actor stepping into character, drawing power from his audience.
“Friends, as I mentioned, my family and I are new to Burrsville. We came because I felt God was calling me here. It’s only been a short time, but we’ve been welcomed with open arms, and I started to wonder if this was God’s way of giving me a nice little retirement.
” He chuckled at this, and everyone else laughed too, polite and sycophantic.
“But,” he added, and his face morphed again, deep furrows working into his brow, “I was wrong.”
The tittering cut off abruptly, the light mood dissipating.
People leaned forward in the pews, gazing at him with concern.
Even the people standing around me tipped toward him as if drawn by magnets, and I became conscious of my stillness, the gaps it created with my neighbors, the way it made me stand out.
“Burrsville is the kind of place you don’t see much anymore,” he said. “A quiet town full of good, hardworking people. It’s not full of breweries or yoga studios or tourist traps, the way so many other little villages are—you have everything you need and nothing more.”
I glanced at Evelyn, wondering how this would sit with her given all the years she’d spent trying to lure breweries and yoga studios to Burrsville, the times she’d stay up all night perfecting grant proposals for artists’ collectives and co-ops for heirloom vegetable growers.
But she looked untroubled, serene, as if her entire life’s work hadn’t just been dismissed.