Music for Wartime

THE MIRACLE YEARS OF LITTLE FORK

In the fourth week of drought, at the third and final performance of the Roundabout Traveling Circus, the elephant keeled over dead. Instead of stepping on the tasseled stool, she gave a thick, descending trumpet, lowered one knee, and fell sideways. The girl in the white spangled leotard screamed and backed away. The trainer dropped his stick and dashed forward with a sound to match the elephant’s. The show could not continue.

The young Reverend Hewlett was the first to stand, the first to signal toward the exits. As if he’d just sung the benediction, parents ushered their children out into the park. The Reverend stayed behind, thinking he’d be more useful here, in the thick of the panic and despair, than out at the duck pond with the dispersing families.

The trainer lifted his head from the elephant’s haunch to stare at the Reverend. He said, “Your town has no water. That’s why this happened.”

The elephant was a small one, an Asiatic one, but still the largest animal the Reverend had ever seen this close. Her skin seemed to move, and her leg, but the Reverend had watched enough deaths to know these were the shudders of a soulless body. The clowns and acrobats and musicians had circled around, but only Reverend Hewlett and the trainer were near enough to touch the leathery epidermis, the short, sharp hairs — which the Reverend did now, steadying one thin hand long enough to run it down the knobs of the creature’s spine.

The Reverend said, “There’s no water in the whole state.” He wondered at his own defensiveness, until he saw the trainer’s blue eyes, accusatory slits. He said, “I’m not in charge of the weather.”

The trainer nodded and returned his cheek to the elephant’s deflated leg. “But aren’t you in charge of the praying?”

At home in the small study, surrounded by the books the previous Reverend had left behind two years prior, Hewlett began writing out the sermon. Here we are, he planned to say, praying every week for the drought to end. And yet who among us brought an umbrella today? He would let them absorb the silence. He’d say, Who wore a raincoat?

But no, that was too sharp, too much. He began again.

The Roundabout was meant to move on to Shearerville, but now there was the matter of elephant disposal. The trainer refused to leave town till she’d been buried, which was immaterial since the rings and tent couldn’t be properly disassembled around the elephant — and even if they could, their removal would leave her exposed to the scorching sun, the birds, the coyotes and raccoons. The obvious solution was to dig a hole, a very large hole, quickly. A farmer offered his lettuce field, barren anyway. But the ground was baked hard by a month of ceaseless sun, horses couldn’t pull the diggers without water, and although the men made a start with pickaxes and shovels, they calculated that at the rate they were digging, it would take five full weeks to get an elephant-sized grave. These were the men who weren’t away at war, the lame or too-old, the too-young or asthmatic.

The elephant was six days dead. Reverend Hewlett called a meeting in the sanctuary after Sunday services, which a few of the circus folk had attended — the bearded lady, the illustrated man, the trainer himself — and now more filed in, joining the congregation. A group of dwarfs who might have been a family, some lithe women who looked like acrobats. Reverend Hewlett removed his robe and stood at the pulpit to address the crowd. He was only thirty years old, still in love with the girl he’d left in Chicago, still anxious to toss a ball on Saturdays with whoever was willing.

He looked at them, his flock. Mayor Blunt sat in the second row — the farthest forward anyone sat, except, once a year, those taking first Communion — with his wife on one side, his daughter, Stella, on the other. The mayor had decided that the burial of the dead was more a religious matter than a governmental one, and had asked Reverend Hewlett to work things out.

The Reverend said, “I’ve been charged with funeral arrangements for the elephant. For — I understand her name was Belle. We ask today for ideas and able hands. And we extend our warmest welcome to the members of the Roundabout.” In the days since the disaster, his parishioners had already opened their homes, providing food and beds. (The circus trailers were too hot, too waterless, too close to the dead elephant. And the people of Little Fork had big hearts.) The performers, in turn, had started helping in the gas station and the library and the dried-out gardens, even doing tricks for the children on the brown grass of the park. They were drinking a fair amount of alcohol, was the rumor by way of the ladies at the general store, more in this past week than the whole town of Little Fork consumed in a month.

Adolph Pitt, of Pitt’s Funeral Home, stood. “I called on my fellow at the crematorium, and he says it’s nothing doing. Not even piecemeal, even if the beast were — forgive me — even if it were dismembered.”

“She,” the elephant trainer said from the back. “Not it.” The trainer still carried with him, at all times, the thin stick he’d used to guide the elephant, nudging it under her trunk, gently turning her head in the right direction. No one had yet seen him without it. Reverend Hewlett imagined he slept with it under his arm. The man slept alone in his scorching trailer, having refused all offers for a couch and plumbing. Hewlett was an expert now in grief — they hadn’t told him, at seminary, the ways his life would be soaked in grief — and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a man cling to an object. Usually he could talk to the bereaved about heaven, about the warm breast of God, about the promise of reunion. But what could he say about an elephant? The Lord loveth the beasts of the field? His eye is on the sparrow? Surely the burial would help.

Reverend Hewlett saw it as his duty to raise an unpopular option the men had been mulling over the past few days. The mayor couldn’t bring it up, because he had an election to win in the fall. But Revered Hewlett was not elected. And so he said it: “The swimming pool was never filled this summer. It’s sitting empty.”

Some of the men and women nodded, and a few of the children, catching his meaning, made sharp little noises and looked at their parents. The circus folks didn’t much respond.

“It’s an old pool,” the Reverend said, “and we can’t dig a hole this summer. We can dig a hole next summer, and that can be the new pool. This one’s too small, I’ve heard everyone say since the day I got here.”

“There’s no dirt to bury him with!” Mrs. Pipsky called.

“Maybe a tarp,” someone said.

“Or cement. Pour cement in there.”

“Cement’s half water.”

The mayor stood. “This town needs that pool,” he said. The youngest Garrett boy clapped. “We’ll find another solution.”

And before the meeting could devolve into argument, Reverend Hewlett offered up a prayer for the elephant (the Lord loveth the beasts of the field), and a prayer that a solution could be found. He invited everyone to the narthex, where the women of the Welcoming Committee had laid out a sheet cake.

The Reverend made a point of greeting each visitor in turn, asking how they were enjoying their stay in Little Fork. “Not much,” the illustrated man said.

The Reverend thought, with awe, how God had a plan for everyone. Some of these people were deformed — a man with ears like saucers, a boy with lobster-claw hands — and yet God had led them to the circus, to the place where they could find friendship and money and even love. And now He had led these people to Hewlett’s flock, and there must be a purpose for this, too.

In the corner, the fire eater chatted with the mayor’s daughter. Stella Blunt was sixteen and lovely, hair in brown waves, and he was not much older, with a small, dark beard that Hewlett figured was a liability for a fire eater. Stella leaned toward him, fascinated.

The following Sunday, most of them returned. They sang along with the hymns and closed their eyes to pray, and one of them put poker chips in the communion plate. The fire eater sat in the rear next to Stella. They looked down at something below the pew back, giggling, passing whatever it was back and forth.

Over the past week, the smell of the elephant had crept from the tent and over the center of town. It was a strangely sweet smell, at least at first, more like rotting strawberries than rotting meat.

Reverend Hewlett had planned a sermon on the beatitudes, but when the time came for prayer requests, Larry Beedleman asked everyone to pray for enough food to last his guests (all five trapeze artists were living in the Beedlemans’ attic), and Mrs. Thoms asked them to pray for the Lord to take away the stench of the elephant. Gwendolyn Lake wanted them all to beg forgiveness for the sins that had brought this trial upon them. So Reverend Hewlett preached instead about patience and forbearance.

After the service, he caught Mayor Blunt’s arm. He said, “Isn’t it time we used the pool?”

Blunt was a large man who tucked his chin into his neck when he spoke. He said, “I’ll lose the vote of every child’s mother.”

“Have you seen,” Hewlett said slowly, “the way your daughter looks at that boy?”

“We’ve taken him into our home,” the mayor said. As if that were definitive and precluded the possibility of teenage love.

“Joe,” the Reverend said. “You’ll lose more votes to scandal than to a hole in the ground.”

And so on Tuesday fifty men and women dragged the elephant to the town pool on waxed tarps and lowered her until she rolled in with a thud and a sudden release of the smell they’d all been gagging against to begin with. They covered her with cartloads of hay — everyone had a lot of hay that summer whether they wanted it or not — and they covered the hay with the gravel Tom Garrett had donated, and they covered that all with fresh tarps, held down by bricks.

Reverend Hewlett gave the funeral service right there, with the locals and circus folk in a ring around the pool. The elephant trainer sobbed into his small, calloused hands. He did not have the stick with him, for once.

Afterward, when the other circus workers went to take apart the tent, to fold up the benches and load things into their trailers, the elephant trainer stayed behind. He put his hand on Reverend Hewlett’s arm, then drew it back. And, as if it choked him, he said, “I can’t leave her here.”

“Will you pray with me?”

“I’m saying I don’t think I can leave this town.”

“My son, I won’t let anything happen to the grave.”

“I’m saying that my parents were drifters, and I’m a drifter, and I’ve never had a part of myself in the soil of a place before. And now I do, and I think I ought to stay here for the rest of my life.”

Hewlett marveled at the ways he’d misread this man. Perhaps it hadn’t been grief he’d seen in the man’s face, but thirst.

He said, “Then it must be God’s will.”

The tarp stayed put through the dry fall and the dry winter, and the smell subsided.

Before Christmas, Stella Blunt came to Reverend Hewlett for help. The fire eater was long gone, but her stomach had begun swelling and she was panicked.

The Reverend arranged, to her parents’ naive delight, for Stella to spend the spring semester doing work at the VA hospital downstate. Only she didn’t really go there; he set her up in the vestry with a bed and a little library. She wrote her parents postcards, which Reverend Hewlett would mail in an envelope to Reverend Adams down in Landry, just so Adams could drop them in the postbox and send them back to Little Fork.

Hewlett visited her three times a day, and Sheila Pipsky, who used to be a nurse and could keep a secret like a statue, stopped by twice a week. The Reverend would sit on the floor while Stella sat on the bed, legs folded. If he had time, he ate with her. They spoke French together, so she wouldn’t grow rusty. When the church was locked up for the night, he’d turn out the lights and let her know she was safe — and she’d walk around and around the pews, up to the little choir loft, down the hall to the Sunday school classrooms. As she grew bigger, less steady on her feet, he’d hold her arm so she wouldn’t trip in the dark. If he closed his eyes — which he let himself do only for a second at a time — he could believe he was walking down a Chicago street with Annette, the breeze on their chests, her hair in a clip.

“It’s funny,” Stella said to him once. They were standing in the nursery, the rocking horses and dollhouse lit with moonlight. “I thought I loved him. But if I loved him, I’d remember him better. Wouldn’t I?”

Hewlett had the utterly inappropriate urge to touch Stella’s cheek, the top of her white ear. He slowed his breath.

Stella giggled.

“What is it?” he said.

“Your shoes. They’re untied, like a little kid’s.”

In May, the doctor came in the middle of the night and delivered a healthy baby girl, and Reverend Hewlett called the Millers, who had come to him praying for a child that fall, and they were given the baby and told she came from Shearerville. They named her Eloise. Hewlett had looked away when Stella said good-bye to the baby. He muttered a prayer, but it was a pretense — he couldn’t absorb her pain just then. He chose, instead, to think of the Millers. He chose to thank the Lord. Stella stayed two more weeks in the vestry, and then she went home. Hewlett continued his nighttime circuits of the church, though. They’d become habit.

The elephant trainer worked on one of the farms, tending the cows and horses, until he decided to open a restaurant in the space left empty when Herman Burns had gone to war. He used to cook for the circus folk, after all, and he missed it. He served sandwiches and soup and meatloaf. Soon they were calling him by his name, Stanley Tack, and by June he had fallen in love with the Beedleman girl, and she with him.

It made Reverend Hewlett think, briefly, of writing home to Chicago, to Annette. He worried she was waiting for him, the way her girlfriends were waiting for their boys to return, battle-scarred and strong and ready to settle down. But the war abroad would eventually end; Hewlett’s war never would. And Annette would not join him on this particular battlefield. She’d made that clear. She would stay in Chicago, in her brownstone, and type for a firm, until he came to his senses and moved home to teach history. That she never doubted this would happen broke his heart doubly: once for himself, and once for her. She hadn’t written in three months. And he did not write to her. To do so would be to punch a hole in his own armor.

As soon as summer hit, there was torrential rain — as if all the town’s prayers from last year got to heaven at once, far too late. The bridge flooded out, and Stanley Tack’s restaurant flooded, and nearly everyone you passed, if you asked how things were, would respond, “I’m building an ark!”

There were drowned sheep and missing fences at one farm, where the river now came to the barn door. An oak toppled in the park, roots exposed, like a loosened weed. Stella Blunt, lining up with the choir and looking through the stained glass, said, “It’s like someone’s trying to tear apart the world.”

They sang “our shelter from the stormy blast” as thunder shook the roof. They sang “There Shall be Showers of Blessings,” and some of them laughed.

Stanley Tack had come every Sunday that whole year, but always sat quizzical and silent through the prayers, the hymns. He never carried the stick anymore. He was always alone; the Beedleman girl worked the Sunday shift at the hospital. He never put anything in the offertory and he never took Communion. Reverend Hewlett started to see this as a personal challenge: Someday, he would give the sermon that would bring Stanley to his feet, that would open his blue eyes to the light shining through above the altar, that would make him pause on his way out of church and say, “Do you have a minute to talk?”

They planned, as soon as the rain let up, to pour cement into the old pool and dig the hole for the new one. But the rain never let up. On the fortieth day of rain, folks stopped Reverend Hewlett at the pharmacy and the gas pump to joke: “Tomorrow we’re due our rainbow, right? Tomorrow we get our dove?” At least no one much minded not having a pool that summer.

The Millers brought little Eloise to church, and she was baptized as Stella Blunt looked on from the choir. Reverend Hewlett poured water on the baby’s head and marveled at her angry little eyes. The daughter of a fire eater, born into a land of water.

Despite the tarp, the pool had filled around the elephant and the hay and the gravel, and if you walked by and peered through the chain-link fence, you’d see how the tarp was now sort of floating on top, how the whole pool deck was covered in an inch of water that connected with the water in the pool. The children dared each other to reach through the fence and touch the dirty elephant juice. Mrs. Thoms wondered aloud if the elephant water would go through the pool drains and into the town supply.

One day, Reverend Hewlett braved the rain to visit Stanley Tack’s restaurant. After the downstairs had flooded, Stanley had taken over the vacant apartment upstairs, cooking out of its small kitchen and serving food in what used to be the living room. On an average Saturday you’d find three or four families huddled around the tables, eating soup and listening to the rain hit the windows, but today the Reverend was the only one in the place. It seemed people were leaving their houses less. The spokes of their umbrellas were broken, and their rain boots were moldy, and they realized there wasn’t much they truly needed from out in the world. A lot of sweaters were knit that summer, a lot of books read.

The Reverend sat, and when Stanley brought his cheese sandwich and potato soup, he sat across from him. He said, “I believe this is my fault.”

The only “this” anyone in town was talking about was the rain.

Reverend Hewlett said, “My child. This weather is the will of God.”

“You preached — you gave a sermon, right after I chose to stay. And I couldn’t help thinking it was intended for me. The story of Jonah trying to sail away from Nineveh. Of God sending the storm and the whale.”

The Reverend tried his potato soup, and nodded at Stanley. The soup was good, as always. Never great, but always good. He said, “I was thinking of many things, but yes, one of them was you. The way the Lord sends us where we need to be, regardless of our plans. I was reflecting on my own life, as well. I ended up in Little Fork by chance, and in my first year, when I felt doubt, I’d think of Jonah in the belly of that fish. It was preaching, you know, that he was meant to do in Nineveh. That’s what he was running from.”

“Yes. But”—Stanley looked out the window, where the rain was slicing sideways—“what if this isn’t my Nineveh? What if this is the place I’ve run away to, and all this, all the rain, is God trying to wash me out and send me on my way? Just as he sent that storm for Jonah.”

This troubled the Reverend. He bought some time by biting into his sandwich, but then it troubled him even more. Stanley had reminded him of Annette, on the day he left Chicago, fixing him with dry eyes: “I don’t see how you’re so sure,” she’d said. And he’d said, “There’s no other way to be.” And whether or not he was truly sure back then, he’d grown sure these past three years. Or at least he’d been too busy counseling others to foster his own concerns. He’d broken down in doubt a few times — not in God so much as in his plan — when he’d had to bury a child or when soldiers came home in boxes, but he’d always returned to a place of faith. Look at little Eloise, for instance, growing plump at the Millers’ house. Exactly as it was meant to be. But somehow the elephant trainer’s question had hit a sore spot in his own soul, a bruise he hadn’t known was there.

He said, “All we can do is pray, and ask that God make clear the path.”

“And how, exactly, would He make it clear?”

“If you listen, God will speak.”

Most always, when he said something like this, his parishioners smiled as if assured they’d hear the voice of God that very night. Sometimes he even had to clarify: “This is not the age of miracles, you realize. His voice won’t boom from the clouds. You’ll have to listen. You’ll have to look.” And they’d leave to await the message.

What Stanley said was, “God doesn’t talk.” It wasn’t something Reverend Hewlett was used to hearing in this town. And then, in all seriousness, he said, “I think I’ve broken the universe.”

Reverend Hewlett looked at his own hands, the veins and creases. He imagined they might crack open like the parched earth had last summer. Or at least, he felt a small crack somewhere inside, one that didn’t hurt but was letting in a bit of air. All he could think to say was, “It’s raining in the next town over, too. And in the next town beyond that.”

Reverend Hewlett’s name was Jack. This was increasingly easy for him to forget. He’d become John, and then — in the bulletins and on the sign outside the church — Rev. J. Hewlett, and since there was no one in Little Fork who didn’t know him as the Reverend, since even the few Catholics who drove to services in Shearerville greeted him as “Rev” or sometimes, slipping, as “Father,” he hadn’t heard his own name in three years. Annette no longer wrote to him at all, no longer extended the tail of the J down like the first letter of a chapter.

And why had he left her? And why had he come here? Because he was needed. Because his mentor at seminary had said, “God is calling you there. God is calling me to send you there.”

And that man, with his great beard, his walls of books, his faith in the hand of God, could not have been wrong.

That night there was a dance at the Garden Club, on the east end of town. It was Little Fork’s version of a debutante ball, the same youngsters debuting themselves each year, in the same white dresses, until they were too old for these things, or married. Only tonight they were soaked through. Reverend Hewlett stood against the wall watching — his mere presence, everyone agreed, was salubrious — and observed the boys in their sopping bowties, hair plastered to their heads, and the girls wrapped against their will in their mothers’ shawls. No boy would see through a wet dress tonight. Heaps of galoshes and umbrellas by the door.

They coupled and uncoupled in patterns that seemed casual, chaotic, but of course were not. Every move, every flick of the eyes, was finely orchestrated. There were hearts being broken tonight. You just couldn’t tell whose.

Gordon Pipsky sidled up and offered a sip from his flask. Gordon’s son was out there dancing, a girl on each arm. When Hewlett accepted, Gordon winked and grinned. “I’ll never tell,” he said. Even though he saw the Reverend take the Eucharist every Sunday. Perhaps what he meant was, “I’ll never tell that you’re just a man like me.”

Was it a secret, really? He’d never been anything else.

He had felt like an impostor when he first put on his robe — but then everyone felt like an impostor, he’d learned in seminary. And now, after all this time, he rarely considered himself a fraud. But nothing had changed, really. Except that he had grown used to that robe, that second skin, just as he’d grown used to God’s silent ways.

There was Stella Blunt, dancing in white. A debutante still.

The next morning, the rain stopped. Not the kind of pause that makes you worry the sky is just gathering more water, but a true, clear stop, the air bright and clean and dry.

And then the wind started.

For the first few hours, it just shook the windows and door hinges and made people sneeze — all that new mold now flying through the air — but by nightfall, it was bringing down tree branches and shingles. By morning, it had knocked down phone lines and garden fences and was tearing at the awnings on Center Street.

And worse: By late afternoon, with most of the surface water gone (blown to Shearerville, everyone said), the tarp blew off the old pool. No one was outside to see that part, but a fair number were witness to it flying smack up against the library, five blocks south, before continuing on its way. It took folks a while to realize what it was — and by that point, there was gravel skittering down the streets nearest the pool. There was moldy hay in everyone’s yard.

Gwendolyn Lake came banging on the parsonage door to tell Reverend Hewlett. His first thought was to run and see if the elephant was uncovered, but his second thought was of Stanley, who should be kept from the pool. Stanley, who would want to run there but would regret it later. Who might take it all as some sort of sign.

Hewlett told Gwendolyn to get her brothers. “Use sheets,” he said, “and bricks.” He himself ran in the opposite direction, toward Center Street. The wind wasn’t constant but came in great lumps: Every three or four seconds, a pocket of air would hit him, would lift him from beneath. If he’d had an open umbrella, he’d have left the ground. Trees were down, garbage blew through the streets, the bench in front of the barbershop was overturned.

Sally Thoms ran crying down the other side of the road, blond hair sucked straight up like a sail. “My cat blew away!” she cried. “He was in a tree and he just blew away!”

“I’ll pray for you!” the Reverend called, but the wind ate his words.

He pulled with his full weight on the door beside the one that read STANLEY’S DINER, the door that everyone knew led up to the real place. Stanley stood in the kitchen, peeling carrots.

He said, “You’re early for lunch, Rev.”

For some reason — even later he couldn’t figure out what had possessed him — the Reverend said, “I’d be happy if you called me Jack.”

“Sure,” Stanley said, and laughed. “Jack. You want to peel me some carrots, Jack?”

They stood side by side at the counter, working.

“What do you make of this apocalypse, Jack?”

He began to answer as he always did of late — something about God wanting to test us now and then, maybe something about Job — but instead he found himself telling a joke. “You hear about the man who couldn’t see what the weather was like, because it was too foggy?”

“Ha!” He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Stanley laugh before. It was more a word than a laugh. Stanley said, “I know an old circus one. Why’d the sword swallower swallow an umbrella?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“Wanted to put something away for a rainy day.”

It was a terrible joke, but Hewlett started laughing and couldn’t stop — perhaps because he was picturing Stella Blunt’s bearded fire eater, an umbrella blossoming in his throat just as the baby had stretched Stella’s figure. This wasn’t funny either, but the laughter came anyway.

He went to the sink for a glass of water, to cure his laugh and the cough that followed it. As he drank, he looked out the back window, over the yards behind Fifth Street and the abutting yards behind Sixth Street. Down below, on the other side of the block-long stockade fence, the Miller family had ventured out into the yard with baby Eloise. In the time between gusts, they were examining the damage to the old well, the top of which had tumbled into a pile of stones. A summer of baking and a summer of rain must have loosened everything, and all it took was a day of wind to knock things about. There was Ed Miller, peering down the hole, and there was Alice Miller, holding the baby, when a blast of wind — up here Jack Hewlett could see and hear but not feel it — tore limbs from trees and tore shutters from houses and tore Eloise from her mother’s arms and into the air and across the yard. He must have made a noise, because Stanley rushed to peer over his shoulder just in time to see the baby, her pink face and her white dress, go flying over the garden and over the next yard and finally into the Blunts’ yard, where, just as she arced down, there he was, Mayor Blunt, running toward the child. He caught her in his arms.

Hewlett heard Stanley inhale sharply. Neither man moved.

The mayor had been outside alone — presumably inspecting the maple that had fallen across his yard, the one that, were it still standing, the baby would have blown straight into — but now his wife ran out, and his son, and Stella. The two men watched from above as Stella leaned over the baby, covering her own mouth. Her mother’s hand was on her back, and Hewlett wondered if she was crying, and — if she was — how she’d explain it. Well, who wouldn’t cry at a baby landing in their yard?

The wind took a break, and Mayor Blunt handed the baby to Stella and wrapped his coat around her front, covering them both. Hewlett imagined what the man would have said: something about “You know I can never hold a baby right.” Or “This should be good practice for you!” And the mayor led a procession around the front of the house and down the street to the Millers’. Hewlett hadn’t thought to look back to the Millers for a while — they weren’t in their yard. Ed Miller had scaled the fence to the lawn between his and the Blunts’ and was running through the bushes, around the trees, behind the shed. Alice Miller stood out front, hands to her head, shouting for help. She ran toward the Blunts when she saw them, but she couldn’t have known what was under Stella’s coat until the mayor pulled it back, chest puffed out, proud of his miracle. He handed the baby back himself. Alice Miller covered the infant with kisses and raced her into the house, Mayor and Mrs. Blunt following. Stella stayed out on the walk a minute, looking at the sky. What she was thinking, Hewlett couldn’t even guess.

“Well,” Stanley said. “Pardon the expression, but Jesus Christ.” The carrot and peeler, still in his hands, were shaking.

Hewlett wanted to run down, to see if Stella was all right, to make sure the baby wasn’t hurt. But he wasn’t a doctor. And he couldn’t leave Stanley alone, couldn’t let him think of checking on the pool. So he just said, “I think we’ve seen the hand of God.” He wasn’t at all sure this was true. Part of him wondered if he hadn’t seen a miracle at all but its precise and brutal opposite — a failure of some kind, or the evidence of chaos. Whatever he’d just seen, it troubled him deeply. Was God in the wind, blowing that baby back to Stella where she belonged? Or was God in the catch, in the impossible coincidence of the mayor being in the right spot, in the return of the child to the Millers? Or — and this was the thing about a crack in faith, he knew, the way one small fissure could spread and crumble the whole thing into a pile of rocks — was God in neither place?

Stanley put his carrot down and turned. His face was soft and astonished, blue eyes open wider than Hewlett had ever seen them. He looked like a man who’d just survived an auto crash, a man who’d taken part in something bizarre and terrifying, not just witnessed it from above. “It’s not true, is it?” Stanley spoke slowly, working something out. “What I said before, about Nineveh. We’re — we’re all where we’re supposed to be. I was supposed to wind up here.” He braced himself on the counter, as if he expected God to blow him across town next. “A beast brought Jonah to Nineveh, and a beast brought me here.”

Hewlett said what he’d said so many times before. “The thing is to be listening when God speaks.”

By the time Reverend Hewlett walked home that night by way of the old pool, Davis Thoms and Bernie Lake were down there mixing batch after batch of cement and pouring it into the hole. For the first time in more than a year, there was both enough water to mix the stuff, and not so much water falling from the sky that it would turn to soup.

He continued toward the parsonage. The wind was done. It had simply left town.

It was so strange to be outside without the roar of wind or rain, without the feel of air or water ripping at his skin, that Reverend Hewlett stood awhile on his own porch feeling that he was floating in the midst of vast and empty space. Everywhere he turned, there was nothing. No baking sun, no drenching storm, no raging wind. There were people coming out of houses, and people going into houses, and people walking from one store to the next. And people picking up branches, and people sweeping up glass. As if they’d been directed to do these things.

All this happened a very long time ago. And it’s hard now to argue that what happened so far back wasn’t inevitable. If the elephant hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be, on top of the old swimming pool, the playground that originally had some other name but quickly became known as Elephant Park; and the Little Fork High School football team would not be the Mammoths; and Stanley Tack wouldn’t have stayed in town, and the son he had with the Beedleman girl (she was expecting already that day of the windstorm, she just hadn’t told him yet) wouldn’t have married Eloise Miller, and today the town of Little Fork wouldn’t be half-full of Tacks of various generations, all descended (though they none of them know it) from a fire eater.

Jack Hewlett might not have given up the cloth and returned home to be with his girl, with Annette, who’d waited for him even after her letters stopped — only to be drafted two months later, no longer clergy, no longer exempt from war. He might not have died in France, a bullet through his lung. But who’s to say that the outcome of that battle — even of the entire war — hadn’t hinged, in one way or another, on the bravery of one man? He was, after all, an exceptional soldier. He took orders well.

Or at least it can be said: This world is the one made by the death of that elephant.

The Sunday following the storm, Reverend Hewlett looked out from the pulpit at his battered congregation. There were black eyes and broken arms from the wind, and the women with husbands stationed overseas were exhausted from cleaning up their own yards and their elderly neighbors’ besides. It was a good town that way. These people believed in things. Eloise Miller, unhurt and pink, slept in her mother’s arms through the service. A green bonnet framed her face.

Hewlett, under his robe, was thin. He’d lost five pounds that week. His stomach felt empty even when it was full, so why bother to fill it?

Stanley Tack held hands with the Beedleman girl. For the first time, he joined the hymns. He opened the book of prayer.

Stella Blunt looked pale and tired. Hewlett tried to catch her eye. He felt he owed her at least a look, one she’d be able to interpret later, tomorrow morning, or whenever it was that the citizens of Little Fork would find the parsonage deserted.

If he owed anything to Stanley Tack, he’d already given it. Hadn’t he handed the man his own faith? It was in safer hands now than his own.

He said, “Let us read from Paul’s letter to the Romans: Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”

He said, “Let us lift up our hearts.”