A Hidden Place

The wind tore at her.

He watched from the bridge as Nancy stalked away through the prairie grass. Part of him wanted to follow her. To apologize.

But he could not forget what had happened in the switchman’s shack. The thing A

To the west, workmen were erecting a tent for the traveling revival. A clanking and the cry of muted voices came across the prairie. The tent revivals always came to Haute Montagne in the autumn, Nancy had said. It was a signal of impending winter, as unmistakable as the racing of the dark clouds across the sky.

There was nothing left for him but to move on … to move on the way these other men did, riding the boxcars and the flatcars. Racing the snow, looking for work. Travis had resigned himself to it.

But not yet, he thought, though he could not explain even to himself why he felt that way: not just yet.

He would stay here a while. Off west, the fluttering ba

He thought: There is unfinished business here.

Chapter Nine

Creath Burack, dressing for the tent revival, regarded himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, she is gone.

The mirror was cracked where Travis Fisher had broken it in their scuffle. Weeks had passed, but Creath had not been able to summon the energy to make repairs. A sliver of glass, stiletto-shaped, had fallen away from the backing; a black fissure divided his reflection.

She was gone. He could not erase that single terrible thought from his mind.

It should not matter. He had told himself so. If anything, things had improved. Liza was bustling in the bedroom, singing to herself… and when had he last heard her sing? A year ago, two, three? And he knew—it was impossible not to know—that it was A

But he thought, She is gone. Sweating, he moved the shaving brush in its cup and methodically lathered his jaw.

Well, he told himself firmly, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Not A

But in some strange way it was not the sex he missed. Pausing, his eyes on his own eyes in the broken mirror, he allowed himself to remember.

With her, everything had been different.

There was a sweetness in her, Creath thought, remembering the touch of her body impossibly smooth against his own. It had made him cry out against his will, sobbing with the sweetness of it. It was a pleasure that cut deep, that stirred him in secret places and made him aware of all the things he had lost. Not just the failing of the ice business or the disappointments of his marriage, but a broader loss: in her arms he felt, too keenly, the narrowing of life itself. You start out, Creath thought, you are a river in full flood; but life meets you with its dams and deadfalls and all its interminable arid places. You lose speed, depth, urgency, desire. You become a trickle in a desert.

He had been borrowing against the wellspring of her, he realized now: stealing back a facsimile of his youth; reveling, in those clumsy bedroom moments, in all the things he might have been and wasn’t.

Now there was nothing left in him but the loss. Only that painful awareness.

He loved her. He hated her. He—but it was a thought he suppressed, grinding his teeth together— God forgive him, he wanted her back.

Liza tapped at the door. “Don’t want to be late!” she called out.

He had allowed Liza to talk him into driving her to the tent revival. There was not the strength in him to resist her anymore. And, in truth, he was not strongly opposed to the idea. These last few weeks memories had seemed to shake loose like autumn leaves inside him, and one memory that came often was of the revivals he had ridden to as a child in his father’s horse-drawn wagon, excited at first by the bustle of it and then, in the hot cavern of the tent, caught up in some itinerant preacher’s evocation of the afterlife, intoxicated by the choral voices, until he imagined he could see that golden city glittering in front of him, until it shone in his dreams, benevolent and full of solace. But the solace, like the dreams, faded,- and then there had been only real life, grindingly ordinary, powerful and familiar. The dreams were a cheat, and he had taught himself to despise them.

Now, in some essential way alone, he longed for that consolation.

“In a minute,” Creath called through the door. “I’m shaving.”

“I’ll wait in the truck,” Liza said.

He made his mind blank, shaved himself thoroughly and rinsed his face, and then turned away from the fractured mirror with an unspeakable sense of relief.

They parked in the meadow and walked to the tent at dusk, Liza beaming and nodding hellos. Tent revivals always made her think of heaven.

Everything was just the way she imagined heaven would be: the glad greetings, the tremor of excitement, the sweet voices raised in song. Lantern light suffused the high spaces of the tent, and the mingled smell of canvas and naphtha rose up like incense. She arranged herself on a bench with Creath beside her in his red-checked coat.

She was still astonished that he had agreed to come. Ordinarily, he displayed a vulgar disdain for spiritual matters. He was religious, she had observed, only among the Rotarians, and that only perfunctorily: the Christ-the-businessman school of doctrine. And even that had lapsed with the demoralization of the ice business. For years Liza had tried to lead him into something deeper, but until now she had not succeeded.

But maybe his presence here was not so shocking. Since the fight with Travis and the departure of A

She was shed of A

The song leader conducted them through “The Old Rugged Cross,” leaning on the beats so that the music swayed with a ponderous grace, like a sailing ship moving in a gentle swell. Liza, singing, seemed to rise and spread out. Creath only mumbled the verses, dutiful and uncertain, but Liza rang them out clear and high, each word a tolling bell.

Two benches ahead, Faye Wilcox turned and cast a furtive glance backward. Liza pretended to ignore her, stretching out an amen sonorously. Faye looked distracted, she thought, even disheveled. Not to mention jealous.

But that was logical. The Baptist Women’s executive committee was holding its elections next week, and for the first time in years, Liza had been nominated for the post of chairwoman. The nomination had been seconded; she had already begun preparing a speech. She was a new woman. Her life had begun again.

The other candidate was Faye Wilcox.

Liza sat with her arm entwined with Creath’s. The music faded. Briefly, the only sound was the autumn wind whipping the canvas suspensions. Then the preacher entered: a tall, somber, hawk-faced man bent aggressively at the waist. He gazed at the crowd, a Bible poised in the crook of his left arm, rimless eyeglasses glittering in the lantern light. His theme, the paper handouts said, was “What Have You Done For Jesus Lately?”—and when he spoke his words lashed out like lightning.