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She remembered the su
After that her life had changed. The Proctors took her to finish her schooling with the Christian Renunciates at their gray stone retraite in snowy Utica (New York, not Greece). She had worn gray dresses that swept the floor and she had learned the Christian panoply of gods, Archons, Demiurges, and dour apostles. And there had not been a lover since Campo, whose skin had smelled wonderfully of ci
When she was little her mother told her, “The god who lives in the forest lives in your belly and in your heart.” She wondered if her fierce scholasticism, her invasion of the masculine strongholds of library and carrel, had really been a search for that outcast god: in whose myths, villages, meadows, sacred places? Campo and Pan and the Golden Bough, she thought; everything we worshiped or should have worshiped or neglected to worship.
She tended Dexter Graham through his fever as the snow fell from the dark sky.
After a day he woke and was able to drink a bowl of soup, which Li
She thought he might have lost some of his distrust of her, and that was good, although his eyes still followed her—if not suspiciously, at least curiously—as she moved about the room.
She was away often enough to establish her presence in the civilians’ compound. In the evenings she came back. When Dex was awake, she talked to him. She asked him questions about the book, Huckleberry Fi
The decision Huck Fi
Dex said, “Do you think it’s a heresy?”
“Of course it is. Do you mean, do I think it’s true?” She lowered her voice and eyes. “Of course it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”
A week passed. The snow mounted on the sill of the window and the talk between Li
Li
When the idolatry laws were passed and the Proctors came to take her father away, he went wordlessly. A month later they came back for Li
Dex Graham talked about a wholly different childhood: suburban, fast-paced, suffused by the glow of television. It was a freer existence than Li
She asked if he had been married. He said yes, his wife had been Abigail and his son had been David. They were dead. They died in a fire. Their house had burned down.
“Were you there when it happened?”
Dex looked at the ceiling. After a long time he said, “No.”
Then: “No, that’s a lie. I was there. I was in the house when it caught fire.” She had to lean closer to hear him. “I used to drink. Sometimes I drank to excess. So one night I came home late. I went to sleep on the sofa because I didn’t want to disturb Abby. When I woke up a couple of hours later the air was full of smoke. There were flames ru
He looked at her as if he regretted saying it, or feared what she might say; so she didn’t speak, only took his hand and touched a cooling cloth to his forehead.
She came to the apartment every day, even when his recovery made it obvious she wasn’t needed. She liked being here.
The room Dex Graham occupied was sparsely furnished but oddly pleasant, especially now that the punitive week had passed and the lights were back on. It was a cloistered space, a bubble of warmth in the snow that seemed never to stop falling. Dex tolerated her presence and even appeared to welcome it, though he was often subdued, often quiet. There was a dimple of pink flesh where the bullet had entered his arm.
The wound still hurt him. He favored the arm. She had to mind the injury when she came into bed with him.
This was a sin, she reckoned, by some lights; but not a sin of the forest or the belly or the heart. The Renunciates would call it a sin. So would that Bureau ideologue, Delafleur. Let them, Li
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On the first night of that cold week, when the windows grew opaque with ice and the street was crowded with soldiers, Clifford tore up his maps and notes and flushed them down the toilet. The maps were evidence of his guilt. They might not prove anything, but they would surely get him into trouble if Luke, for instance, found them.
He couldn’t dispose of the radio sca
His mood alternated between boredom and panic. In those first days after the fire, wild rumors circulated. Clifford’s mother passed them on, absentmindedly but in meticulous detail, over the meager di