Part One: The Dawn Walkers

Let what you love be what you do. There are one

hundred ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

—Rumi

There isn’t enough sex in it, thought Arista Bellefleurs, slapping the manuscript down onto the polished expanse of her cherrywood writing table in dismay. It was a fine table. It had been hand-joined, and rather too intricately carved about the legs, in Ohio, before the turn of the century, by her great-grandfather, Shadrach Brainard. Now it stood as the high altar in her comfortable, slightly worn, otherwise modern Manhattan apartment. Arista rested her cheek on the slick wooden surface next to the unfinished novel and wondered what she would do with the rest of her life now that she couldn’t write anymore.

Arista descended from long-lived people. Most of her forebears, including Great-Grandfather Shadrach, had survived into their nineties. Arista was forty-five. She sighed. The idea of living another forty-five years was exhausting; imagining, as she was, all the suffering she would necessarily witness and experience, some of which she would doubtless inflict herself, inadvertently, of course. She thought of herself as an essentially kind, but flawed person. She had battled in life, and where the scars had formed, she was insensitive. Now she was facing the accelerating decline into old age. It wouldn’t be graceful, she thought.

The subject that had most interested Arista throughout her life was sex, and there would be less and less eroticism, she knew, as the years advanced. She had hoped, at the very least, to continue writing about it. But she had been struggling now for over a year, unable to whip her current novel into any kind of passion. Worse, it was threatening to become a novel about a novelist. She loathed novels about novelists, which she judged, harshly, to be failures of sublimation.

She sat up and leafed through the pages helplessly. The book hadn’t started out autobiographically. It had begun with a modern American Indian woman, a painter. Arista had intended to send out a sparse, intense novel about the souls of artists in a soulless culture: writers to be sure, but painters and poets and dancers and actors, and even a mime, like Katelyn had been in her youth—all the delirious, dysfunctional people who inhabited Arista’s world. But the book had boomeranged back into her lap, where it now lay, limp, formless, refusing to pull itself into a seductive shape.

To her relief the doorbell rang. She admitted her friend Katelyn without ceremony. As prearranged, she handed the manuscript to Katelyn, who took it with undisguised pleasure.

“You’ve never let me read a work-in-progress before.”

“I’m desperate.”

“Thanks for asking me.”

“Katelyn, I’ve lost it.”

“Next thing you’ll say is, ‘Maybe I never had it.’”

“Christ.”

“Didn’t you say it was about religion?”

“No. About people, searching. Some people find religion.”

“Umm.”

“Umm, what?”

“Is this about that minister you had a crush on?”

“I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Then, as I promised, I will read it and let you know.”

“Thanks. I’ll make you some tea.”

“Arista, are you in it?”

“What choice have I got?”

Katelyn Wells smiled contentedly. She sank down comfortably into her accustomed place on the sofa, stretching out her long, still-graceful legs, and prepared to read. She liked Arista’s novels. She often found bits and pieces of herself strewn among the characters. This time, Arista had warned her, she had been swallowed down and coughed up whole. She squinted at the title page, sighed, rummaged through her handbag, and put on her recently acquired, but often resisted, reading glasses. At least Serena had said she looked handsome in them. Arista hadn’t remarked.

Arista Bellefleurs, having given her characters over to her friend for the day, began to putter uselessly about in the tiny kitchen. She had been hopeless as a housewife. She put on the kettle and then decided to chop some garlic for a spaghetti sauce, one of the few kitchen tasks she enjoyed. The smell of garlic on her hands reminded her of sex in Italy.

At the same time, in another world, Maggie Silvernails took hold of her hip-length hair with her strong left hand; with her right she gripped the heavy brush and began to brush rhythmically down, down, down. After three hundred strokes she began to twine and turn the thick, black strands up, up, up, into a coiling nest of braids, which she secured with a dozen glittering hairpins. She finished the arrangement with a flourish, stabbing the great twist in the back with two long, silver nails. Maggie was a beautiful woman, but there was neither a man nor a mirror for miles to tell her so.

She pulled on a pair of battered jeans and buttoned up a soft flannel shirt against the chill morning air. Clasping a cup of coffee, black and strong as grief, she stepped out onto the sloping front porch to assess the colors of the desert dawn—apple pink peeling into rose with a vein of blue purple at the horizon. There was a dusting of silver frost over the earth. Pleased, finding a place within herself corresponding to the morning’s pallet, she swallowed down the remaining coffee, then leaving the cabin door ajar in case Fatpaws returned home, she grabbed her paints and water bottle from the back of the pickup truck and headed toward the sunrise. She would eat wild today, if she remembered to eat at all.

The desert surrounding her cabin was different in a hundred minute ways from the tribal lands half a state away to the west, though the desolation would look the same to white men’s eyes. Maggie knew the differences—in sand and dirt, in the color of lizards’ eyes, and in the length of cactus spines—the myriad differences that estranged her from this place. Yet she felt no desire to return to a life on the Zuni reservation, where, though she saw no one for weeks on end, everyone knew her business. Here, in this wilderness, there was only Maggie to study Maggie.

She had returned to her Zuni homeland many years before, leaving New York City abruptly and without a trace; but she had known that Luke would eventually come to the reservation to search her out, so she had disappeared again, disappeared deeper, this time into the desert, leaving deliberate traces that would read to any Indian that Maggie Silvernails wasn’t dead, but wished to appear so to the white man’s world. Had Luke been fooled? He was no Indian, but he was also no fool. Luke found it impossible to be unaware of the fact that his followers thought of him as a living saint. He was no saint, God knew. So did Luke.

He opened one eye to test the day. Sunlight had spilled onto the rumpled bed through the open window. He wallowed in its warmth for a while, aware that his old bones would have to wait out the crisp April day to find such comfort again.

A raucous blue jay commanded the attention of both his eyes as it lit upon the bird feeder outside his window, found exactly the kind of seed it most preferred, and let out an exuberant cry of delight. Tchaikovsky, the rooster in the barnyard, was periodically calling out the familiar notes of the 1812 Overture—Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Tum Tum Tum—the last note in each repetition ending with a sour squawk. Sparrows, robins, and chickadees wove arias in the dawn.

“Hoot,” hooted Luke, in what he considered to be a pretty good imitation of a large snowy owl. It gave the local birds a moment’s pause—and one small hoot made getting up a little easier. He stretched luxuriously and sat up awkwardly, succeeding in pulling back the quilt and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet sank down into the thick carpet. It was not easy being old, he mused, but it was interesting. Except for some mild arthritis and a few extra pounds he was, at seventy, in relatively good health and reasonable masculine shape. But his energies gathered slowly in the mornings now.

It was Sunday. One of his gatherings was scheduled for today. A dozen tense and troubled people would arrive in the late morning and form an anxious group at his feet. He was mildly embarrassed by the arrangement. But his stiffening back required a chair. The people who came inevitably declined the chairs and sat on the floor. People needed to look up. One by one, as the day progressed into evening, these shy communicants would move forward from their places in the circle and talk of their troubles. And then, sometime late tonight, relaxed and relieved, wheeling in change, and struggling with new hope, they would disperse, wondering how Luke Sevensons had touched the very place within their souls that needed to be touched, and had to be turned. It was his one gift. He could help people.

Except for Maggie Silvernails. “I am taking a day off from our love affair,” Maggie had announced. But she didn’t come back on the next day, or any day. He had waited many years. So had Jamie Callahan. Was she dead? Eventually Luke had ridden the long, slow train west to the reservation. There, Deerfinder had told him with steady eyes and inflectionless voice that she had wandered into the desert and gotten lost and died. Luke didn’t believe that old coyote. In Luke’s experience Maggie Silvernails never got lost. But now, after such an eternity of emptiness, he sometimes doubted his doubt. Perhaps she had, after all, come to dust, joined her breath with the wind and broken her body into motes. Perhaps there were sparkling particles of Maggie Silvernails dancing before him in this morning’s stream of sunlight. That would be just like her, he decided, beckoning, teasing. Get up old man, she would say, and join this day. Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Tum Tum Squawk.

Winter and summer Luke slept in the nude. He liked the feel of the smooth sheets around him and the freedom to move, like in a good skinny-dip, without the constraint of human clothing. Mariah the cat usually slept with him, warm and sleek against his leg, but she had long since awakened and jumped out the window in search of dewy adventures.

Alone in the chill air, Luke reached for his sweatsuit and running shoes, and a moment later he was out on his morning walk. He barked sharply, bringing Raindrop and her puppies out of the barn in a joyful tumble. He greeted each dog with pats and nuzzles: Raindrop, Puddles, Splash, and Drip. Then he set out with the romping dogs to explore their farm.

He missed his young friend Buff Carrington. The dogs missed Greta Garbo. They had all gotten on well together, dogs and men, during the late-winter months, in spite of the thick snow that had surrounded them and the thick terror that Buff had brought congealed inside himself. Where was the terror now? Melted, spilled, evaporated? Dancing in the sunlight with Maggie Silvernails? Luke didn’t know. A transformation had occurred, so Buff had announced, and then he had returned to New York with a calm heart, Greta Garbo leading the way. Luke would see them both, man and dog, on his next visit east. Or perhaps he wouldn’t.

A blue jay darted through a stand of scrawny pines demanding his attention. Softly Luke intoned a singsong chant that he had learned from Maggie:

Come, you wing-eds

Tell me what I need to know

Show me where I need to go

Come, flying things . . .

The jay cocked his head and, beady-eyed, considered the singing man; then, melting its sky-blue wings into the sky-blue sky, it flew a short distance south to the apple orchard, where Luke was glad to follow. The plump green buds were bursting with blossoms, and tips of tiny tender leaves had begun to appear. When he was deep in the grove and surrounded in scent, Luke stood motionless, letting the dogs and the breeze be his progress and the tree be his silence. He was green and white and coming once again into new life. He was surging through the grasses and the first fallen blossoms yelping with youth. He was flowing with invisible strength. His roots went deep. He held the blue jay on his budding branch. He snuffled at his own trunk and barked at his own bark. He absorbed sunlight.

“Come, flying things . . .”

As the chant continued, his thoughts flew forward—to the day ahead, to the work, to the people who would come to work with him: local people, Ohio people, housewives, salesmen, teachers. Small, kind, desperate—those whom history would not record. Not like the tough, wily ones who had found him in New York City, the poets and the painters, the dreamers and the schemers who congregated in America’s great shakra.

He would return to New York later this month, gather them about, and struggle with their metropolitan demons. Would he hole up alone at the Algonquin Hotel, communing with literary ghosts, or would he stay with Jamie Callahan, that old roan stallion, and tie one on? Arista Bellefleurs had offered Luke the use of her apartment, but he was nervous about staying in her home.

Arista reminded him of Maggie Silvernails. There was a deep knowing in Arista that she did not yet know. Her unborn wisdom pushed at her consciousness, forced her to constant questioning, sent her searching. It lodged behind her intelligent eyes—those two heavy brown stones that held the rest of her fragile body on the earth—waiting for its time.

Arista Bellefleurs stirred up wonderful ancient feelings in Luke, desires that, once indulged, might become painful longing, and Luke had longed long enough. He was unsure if her invitation had included any such indulgences. He was too old to be thought of as a sexual being by most people. But perhaps Arista had seen through the wrinkled ruse of age to the youthful man who flared within.

She was a woman yet asleep to herself, but perceptive of others. She had taken hard bites out of life and life had bitten her back. She lacked spirituality, considered herself a realist, an atheist with a propensity for the dramatic and a love of the ironic, but sitting quietly in the midst of the Old Gray Presbyterian congregation, she gave every appearance of a good Christian woman attentive to the reading of the Scripture. In truth, she was ruthlessly sizing up herself as she sized up the service.

“This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Good, she thought, approving of the minister’s decision to read from the King James Version. The seventeenth century had been a magnificent era for the English language. The text itself she found distressing, as usual, disconcerting. Did she have a friend for whom she would lay down her life, or one that would lay down a life for her? She thought not. Certainly not Clayton Grant! Not failing Jerry Phails. Not Buff Carrington or Quentin Cox, though she loved them dearly. Katelyn Wells, her oldest friend in New York, was precious to her. But would she die for Katelyn? Not on her life!

It was Katelyn’s fault that she was in this alien enclave. Arista shivered, chilled and damp from the short walk through quiet Greenwich Village on this drizzly April morning. The neighborhood had seemed like an abandoned stage set, left over as it was from the glittering gods of Saturday night. Or maybe it was Luke’s fault that she was here. Luke Sevensons had set her searching for something. Unknown. She knew, of course, that it was her own damned fault. She had, long ago, learned to hold herself accountable for life. It was an annoying truth. It was as if her relentless, bedeviling curiosity returned her each Sunday, like a renewed library book, to this shadowy church full of well-scrubbed Protestant people, and their ancient ghosts, so long resisted.

She had been coming to the Sunday services, with increasing frequency, since last December, when, at her friend Katelyn’s prompting, they had attended a Christmas Eve service—candles, carols—an alternative to the secular massacres taking place in department stores all across the city.

The suggestion had seemed harmless enough at the time. Arista had not attended church in over twenty years; oh, perhaps for a wedding or a funeral here and there, but not for real. The Christmas season was a lonely time for her. Most of her friends for whom she would not die were visiting their families. Arista had no family. Even Clayton had been out of town on a ski trip; dear deficient Clayton, who was almost handsome and moderately talented and very self-involved and very, very young. These days Arista purposely pursued romances that were, unbeknownst to her lovers, destined to brevity, thereby avoiding unpleasant shocks.

She and Katelyn had chosen a pew high in the gallery, where, during the organ prelude, they had alternated between companionable silence and whispered conversation. Katelyn, who had for so long been drawn up into herself, seemed miraculously happy and sociable that evening, and her cheerfulness had, in turn, warmed Arista, who had lately been feeling as cold and brittle as the December night.

She hoped that Katelyn was finally returning to life after the deadliness of her nervous breakdown, if it was a breakdown. In Arista’s judgment it was Katelyn’s heart, not her nerves, that had broken. And her mind was more than a little warped. She had been crying for the last five years. Any reminder of Nelson Little would set her off. And the city they had roamed together was land-mined with his memory. Buildings they had once entered together became shrines of remorse that had to be avoided at the cost of long, inconvenient detours. An accidentally overheard melody that had once accompanied their lovemaking could send her to bed for days. Once, choking with sobs over a bowl of fettuccine, she explained that Nelson had once enjoyed that particular sauce. Perhaps, Arista had dared to think, on this cold Christmas Eve half a decade away, the evil spell cast by Nelson Little on his way out the door was finally over. Then, in the midst of the singing, Katelyn had burst into tears.

“What is it, Katelyn?” she whispered. They couldn’t have sung Christmas carols together, thought Arista. Nelson Little was a depressed and unharmonious Jew.

Katelyn tried to speak, but heaved and gasped instead. What was it? Arista wondered. Then she realized. They were singing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

The Christmas service had progressed, Katelyn now sniffing and blowing in her accustomed way. Arista, after consoling her friend as best she could, found herself watching the religious rites somewhat like a traveler in a primitive, foreign country—fascinated but not awed, sometimes slightly amused as the preacher went on about Christ moving among us, or through us, or in us. Then to her surprise he said something that moved her. Something she would be embarrassed to repeat, and so she had, to this day, repressed it. Damn, she had said to herself as she responded to the sermon, as the tears welled up in her eyes. Not this, not now. But there had been a whisper.

The following Sunday, she was drawn back to the church—almost, it seemed, against her own will. The handsome minister spoke of Christ’s quiet, mysterious shepherding of lost souls. A whisper was one thing, but the possibility that she was being herded, like some fat sheep, into faith horrified Arista. Sheep were stupid. She was not a herd animal. She didn’t believe in souls. She was not yet ready to think of herself as lost. She did not wish to be found. She did not wish to be hooked, like a failing vaudeville comedienne, and dragged from the stage of secular life at the whim of a long-dead, gravely misunderstood rabbi. She had, after all, Clayton. Clayton, insubstantial as he was, represented her claim to a place in the rational, solid, sensual world. The real world.

Nevertheless, the Reverend Christian Davies, with his shock of snow-white hair and his shocking faith in the goodness of God, was making a formidable claim on her attention. From childhood, she had been drawn to such men—to professors or activists or politicians—men who dared to stand up before other men and declare their beliefs. Men she could look up to. There were fewer and fewer such men as she got older and taller. But a preacher? A magician? Never! Well, not since her grandfather, who was, no doubt, the model on which all her other men were made. Grandpa Brainard, the Reverend Elam Brainard, had saved her from her father, the only saving she had ever wanted, or ever needed.

On the Sunday after Christmas she was back. She had taken Communion on New Year’s Eve because she had wanted to see the preacher up close—wanted to see the lines around his eyes, hear his breathing—wished for some form of communion with Christian Davies. She had taken the soggy wafer, which was all that was offered. She had begun to want to know what this strange man would say about life and how he would say it.

Once, in her bathtub, she imagined that she was a believer, that she had bought the whole kit and caboodle: the angel, the virgin, the manger, three wise men, God walking the earth as a man—the whole nine yards—even resurrection; and though it was impossible for her to believe, she noticed a subtle change in her feelings as she entered into the fantasy of faith. She felt calmer, open, responsive, warmer. Her characteristic tenseness—a guardedness, a fear that her mind would be torn away from her—had, during the moments of her daydream, lessened. From time to time over the next few months she had tried the fabrication on, like a hat. Once she even looked into the mirror as she did so. Yes, her features softened, not in stupidity, but in relief. The imagination of faith gentled her. Belief was out of the question, of course. Reason simply had to prevail, even if, especially if, it was tougher.

The sermon had begun. Reverend Davies was telling his congregation about his childhood; about bluebells and little girls in Ireland. Arista arched an eyebrow. There were no bluebells in the fields of her youth. She remembered goldenrods and golden buttercups, black-eyed Susans with yellow-gold petals, daisies with yellow-gold centers and white petals to be torn off, one by one. He loves me, he loves me not. And wasn’t there something about holding buttercups under your chin? She was called Abigail then.

She and Ted Hackett had made love for the first time among the wildflowers. She had liked it. Ted had been allergic to all the pollen and had sneezed repeatedly and his eyes had puffed up, so after that first fondling in the fields they had made love in the backseat of Ted’s parents’ car, like all the other teenagers in all the other backseats of all the other cars belonging to all the other parents. Arista had missed the feel of the earth at her back, the beating of birds’ wings above them, and the sun-saturated air. She had been carefully conditioned by years of parsonage life to believe that sex was sinful, and she had tried and tried to feel guilty about it. But she couldn’t. Sex, she discovered, was too glorious to be sin. In Ted’s arms she began to resent religion with all its rules and restraints. She soon detested her grandfather’s sermons, which had, until the loss of her virginity, intrigued her.

Ted had been more tentative about sex than she, a characteristic she would discover in many men over the years to come. Yet those first caresses had, in some gentle way, been more exciting than all the lovemaking that had followed. She could not forget him. He could not forget her. Could any man? Ted looked out across the lake where he had first made love to Abigail, who was now Arista, in the hot, dry, flower-filled fields that had long since been plowed up and flooded over and now rippled with sky-blue water.

Why was he thinking of her at all? It must be twenty years since she had left him and Boar’s Wood, Ohio, for New York City and yet she had appeared in the dawn as if she, and not a dream, had entered his bed.

“You’ll be back in a month,” he had said to her years ago, helping her up onto the train. She had smiled a pensive smile from the clouded train window, waved once, and was gone. She had written to him for a while, and in spite of her artful, vivid descriptions of galleries and coffeehouses and walk-up apartments, he couldn’t imagine where in the world she was. He could only think of her here, in her hometown, in the high school they had attended together, in the strange parsonage where she had lived with all the old Bible thumpers, and in the fields. He remembered her most vividly in the fields. Later, in the dark backseats of automobiles, she had seemed hidden from him, though she was always quick to disrobe. Ted Hackett had not replied to her letters. He realized now how monstrously angry he had been with her for the abandonment. At the time he had thought his refusal to write was just a shrewd move; that she would come to miss him and would return to him. But she hadn’t and she didn’t. He had waited. Then he didn’t. He had married Ivy Sue and been unusually happy—usually.

Ted returned to his gardening, but soon found himself staring again at the lake, trying to see back through time and down through depths to where he and Abigail-Arista had been young and tender lovers. The water was almost still, reflecting the sky, revealing nothing.

“How’s it going?” shouted Ivy Sue from the deck.

“How about a weeping cherry right here?”

“Good idea.”

The earth waited. Ted dug deeper. What, he wondered, had possessed Abigail to change her name? He liked Abigail. He liked calling her Abigail when everyone else had called her Abby. And how was it that his wife, even now, knew so much about the woman who had once been her high-school rival?

“I wonder what happened to Abigail Brainard,” he had mused over their leisurely Sunday breakfast.

“She doesn’t exist anymore,” Ivy Sue had replied.

“What do you mean? She’s not dead, is she?”

“Sort of. She changed her name to Arista Bellefleurs.”

“Pretty.”

“Pretty pretentious.”

“I wonder why she changed it.”

“She’s a writer now.”

“She always was, Ivy Sue.”

“Well, that’s what she calls herself now. And every year she either gets married or divorced or takes another lover.”

“And how is it that you know these interesting tidbits?”

“Grapevine.”

“Gossip.”

“Are you looking for an argument, Ted?”

“No. But changing your name isn’t the same as committing suicide.”

After breakfast Ted Hackett lingered in the breakfast nook, watching as his wife took down the family portraits one at a time. They were all lovingly preserved in matching brass frames with nonglare glass. She sprayed Lemon Pledge on the paneling and polished the wall carefully; then she sprayed Windex on each of the pictures and polished the glass; then she rehung the pictures. There were all the Hacketts, hanging before him: young Ivy Sues and Teds, smiling through college graduation and courtship and marriage. There was Seth as a happy infant, and Holly, also an infant though less happy; the two kids, older, posed together, looking strained; the four of them together, arranged in a traditional family group looking out at life with nonglare eyes. He felt a moment’s pride for his well-polished family. His exactly-as-he-had-been-raised-to-believe-a-family-should-be family.

Ted sighed. Except for Seth. Seth was exceptional. Music had bubbled up and spilled out of the boy since infancy. Seth had come into the world singing. A toy piano had given way to a real one by the time he was three. There had followed a succession of horns and stringed instruments, all of which hurried into melody at his touch. His final choice, a flute, now sent up strains of Mozart from the music room in the basement as it did during most hours of the weekend.

“You know, you didn’t do a very good job with the soundproofing in the cellar, Ted,” Ivy Sue complained. “Holly has taken to wearing earplugs when she’s not wearing her Walkman. And I may invest in a pair myself.”

“I’ll get some more acoustical tiles and put them up next weekend,” he promised, knowing he wouldn’t, for in truth, he loved to hear the kid play. He wished he could communicate better with Seth, but the music made a distance between them. Ted couldn’t read, let alone play, a note himself. He could not carry a tune and had difficulty remembering one. He had no knowledge of the grand and complex world that his son inhabited, no language in which to speak to him. Seth, for his part, had shown no interest in business or sports or hobbies or television, the natural items of discourse between father and son; so they seldom spoke to each other except out of necessity and then, awkwardly—about Seth’s schoolwork, which presented no problems, or to arrange the day’s mundane activities. He hoped that Seth wasn’t gay.

Ivy Sue got out the vacuum cleaner. The Saint of Ceaseless Sanitation. Ted suddenly felt the need to move.

“Where are you going, Ted?”

“I thought I would dig out the dead evergreen in the backyard.”

“Good idea.”

It didn’t seem like an idea to Ted. It felt like an escape, though he didn’t know the name of his enclosure. He was glad now to be at work in the earth. The roots of the tree went deep and the ground was hard. He remembered that as an adolescent, hired about the neighborhood to do yard work, he had planned to be a gardener. Now he noticed he had worked up a sweat in spite of the chilly morning air, and his breath came heavy. He was out of shape. Too much success had weakened him. What would Arista think of him now? What would she say if she came home for a visit?

He rested on the shovel again and cataloged his kingdom. She would see a convenient, conventional ranch-style house, a white gravel driveway looping toward the double garage holding matching Mercedeses, acres of well-kept lawn, hedges, hillocks covered in domesticated flowers; a dock covered in AstroTurf jutting out from the edge of the lawn into the private lake; a small Sailfish tethered to the dock; snowmobiles parked in the town garage awaiting the white, cold pleasures of winter. These were not the accomplishments of a gardener. His successful real-estate business was elaborating into a regional chain. He should be content. She should be impressed.

“You live your life like a laundry list, Ted,” Abigail-Arista had once said to him. He had been very angry. She had been very angry. He couldn’t remember why.

He stepped hard onto the shovel. Damn it. This was no list. This was the best place to live in Boar’s Wood, Ohio—and he was glad he had stayed. His life made a recognizable kind of sense. The television sets in the corners of all the major rooms reflected his life like mirrors.

“You wear the golden handcuffs like a whore wears a rhinestone bracelet,” she had taunted him in a dream. A nightmare; for Arista could get angry, but she wasn’t vicious. They were different sorts of people. That was all. He just wasn’t like Arista. He didn’t court fear. And she, underneath her quiet resolution, had been frightened to leave their hometown. She wouldn’t admit it, but he had sensed it, and those city letters full of the picturesque and the optimistic, had beat, beneath the upbeat, with a pulse of fear.

Before she had left town, her great-uncle Meshach had given her a gun, a small two-shot derringer with a mother-of-pearl handle; and he had taught her how to shoot it. She became skilled at hitting the empty Coke bottles lined up on the fence out behind the shed, enjoying the explosions as they shattered into aqua shards of light. The derringer wouldn’t kill a rapist, Uncle Meshach had explained, but it would slow the bastard down. A woman had a right to defend herself. Arista wondered what had become of the little gun. Had she hidden it in some forgotten cranny or tossed it away into the trash? In those first weeks after her arrival in New York the gun had been a comfort to her. Arista recalled its reassuring weight in the palm of her hand as she crept down the darkened hall of the Ashcraft Hotel on her way to the bathroom in the dark middle of a hot Manhattan night.

The hotel, her first residence, was located just off Times Square and was cheap—full of weak, old people and tough, old whores. She had been scared to death, but determined to live here, in spite of her fears, in spite of the terrible aching loneliness, even longing, for home, and Ted, and the safe familiar lanes of Boar’s Wood. Yet she knew she had to be in New York. She had imagined, with the romantic truth of youth, that this city held her destiny, that she must experience and suffer and persevere in this place; and then write and write and write. Ted had no experience with inspiration.

It was right that he had stayed behind. He would not have been happy. They would not have been happy. Of course, she had not been happy. Writers are not happy people, she reminded herself. Narrative, like silk, is spun by the worm of pain. There were other examples besides herself. Her friend Katelyn was another proof of Arista’s theory. Through all the long years that Katelyn Wells had been miserable over Nelson Little, Katelyn’s poems had improved, as if she had scratched out her lines with blood and a used razor blade.

The new minister startled Arista back into the present moment with a burst of William Butler Yeats, the randy, rascally Irishman who was as good as they got:

Red Rose, proud Rose, Sad Rose of all my days!

Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways . . .

All the men she had ever loved, loved Yeats.

She realized that while her thoughts had been wandering she had been staring blankly at the man in the pulpit, and as a result her eyes were playing tricks with the light. The Reverend Christian Davies, in the center of her vision, was clear to her—glowing, haloed—while the periphery of her vision had become misty and dim. Her eyes watered and her face warmed. He truly was a handsome devil. And he knew it, by the look of it. Strong, even features, prematurely white hair edged in black, black robes edged in white. Coincidence? She thought not. There was a theatrical surge to his speech. He had carefully kept his Irish brogue. There was a glint of gold on the third finger of his left hand.

Arista Bellefleurs at forty-five years of age, with her cynicism honed by the slow surcease of her biological clock, two marriages, a half-dozen love affairs, and one middle-aged passion, all failed, all behind her, was finding her way to yet another man. If Christ was indeed moving within her, she thought, Christ had a genuinely strange sense of humor, causing her to fall in love again and again like the devout, demented schoolgirl she had once been.

When Katelyn found out about this particular crush, she would laugh and shake her head disapprovingly at Arista. They were not, either of them, lucky in love.

He’s killed himself, Katelyn was thinking. He’s not actual anymore. It’s not just that he’s hidden. He’s dead. Am I responsible? I cannot be without guilt. Katelyn had reached out and taken hold of Nelson Little’s limp left hand and felt nothing. Nothing at all.

She had, throughout her life, felt responsible for the failures of her men; thinking if only she had loved them more or understood them better, they would have flourished. She imagined that loving men was her vocation, one in which she constantly fell short. Arista had often chided her about this belief and the waves of disappointment that followed inevitably in its wake. “You can’t make up a man like you can make up a poem,” she declared. “They don’t scan.” Still, nothing in Katelyn’s history had prepared her for the shock of Nelson’s deflation.

In the Country of the Great King

Contents

Part One: The Dawn Walkers