Earthly Possessions

Twelve

When Belinda was little, I tried to tell her the truth as much as possible.

I told her that as far as I knew, when people die they die and that's the end of it. But after church one day she asked, "How come you and me just die and other people get to go to heaven?"

"Well, there you are," I told her. "You can take your choice." Selinda chose heaven. I didn't blame her. She went to all those extras that I stayed home from: prayer meetings, Family Night, and so forth. I began to notice her absence. She was seven now and a whole separate person.

Well, she always had been, really, but I thought of seven as the age when people come into their full identity. Sometimes it seemed to me that my own seven-year-old self was still looking out of its grownup hull, wary but unblinking. I asked Selinda, "Will you remember to pay me a visit now and then?"

"I live here," Selinda said.

"Oh, I forgot." Up till then, I'd thought it would be a mistake to have another child. (More to take with me when I left.) But I changed my mind. And Saul, of course, had wanted more all along. So in January of 19xx I got pregnant. By March I was buying stacks of diapers and flannel nightgowns. In April I had a. miscarriage. The doctor said it wouldn't be wise for us to try again.

Nobody knew how much Td already loved that baby. Not even Mama, who after all had never been consciously pregnant herself. She fussed around with my pillows, looking hopeful and puzzled. Miss Feather brought lots of fluids as if she thought I had a cold. Linus and Belinda acted scared of me; Julian suffered one of his lapses and lost three, hundred dollars at the Bowie Racetrack. And Saul sat beside my bed, flattening my hands between his own. He looked not at me but at my fingernails, which had a bluish tinge. He didn't say a word for hours.

Wasn't he supposed to? Wasn't it a preacher's job? I said, "Please don't tell me this was God's will."

"I wasn't going to," he said.

I said, "Oh." I felt disappointed. "Because it's not," I said. "It's biological."

"All right."

"This is just something my body did."

"All right." I studied his face. I saw that he had two sharp lines pulling down the corners of his mouth, so deep they must have been there a long time. His hair was getting thin on top and sometimes now he wore reading glasses. He was thirty-two years old, but looked more like forty-five. I didn't know why. Was it me? I started crying. I said, "Saul, do you think my body did this on purpose?"

"I don't understand."

"Because a baby would have kept me from leaving?"

"Leaving," said Saul.

"Leaving you"

"No, of course not."

"But I just keep thinking, you see. I'm so afraid that… I mean, sometimes it seems that we strain at each other so.

We're always tugging and chafing and… sometimes when we're in the pickup, that rusty, creaky pickup, and Mama's taking two thirds of the seat and Belinda's irking my lap, and I am nagging over something I don't even care about, as if I just want to see how far I can push you, and you've grown disgusted and backed off somewhere in your mind-well, then I think, 'Really, we're a very unhappy family. I don't know why it should come as any surprise,' I think. 'It feels so natural. It's my luck, I'm unlucky, I've lived in unhappy families all my life. I never really expected anything different.'" I waited to see if Saul would argue, but he didn't. He went on flattening my hands. He kept his head bowed. Already I was sorry I had said it all, but that's the way my life was: I was eternally wishing to take everything back and start over. It was hopeless. I went on.

"Well," I said, "I'm worried that my body thought, "Now, we don't want to drag this thing out. We surely don't want a baby; a baby would stop her from leaving for another whole seven years. So what we should do is just-'"

"Charlotte, you would never leave me," Saul said.

"Listen a minute. I have this check, these shoes, I-"

"But you love me,"

Saul said. "I know you do." I looked over at him, his long, steady eyes and set mouth. Why did he always put it that way? That time at the Blue Moon Motel, too.

Shouldn't he be telling me how he loved me?

But what he said was, "I am certain that you care for me, Charlotte." And another thing: how come it always worked? Td been back on my feet six weeks or so when Saul walked into the kitchen one noontime carrying a baby and a blue vinyl diaper bag. Just that suddenly. This was a large baby, several months old.

A pie-faced, stocky boy baby, looking very stem. "Here," Saul said, and held him out.

"What's that?" I asked, not taking him.

"A baby, of course."

"I'm not supposed to carry heavy things," I said, but I didn't move away. Saul shifted the baby a little higher on his shoulder. He loved children but had never got the knack of holding them right; the baby's nightgown was rucked up to his armpits and he tilted awkwardly, frowning beneath his spikes of hair like a fat blond Napoleon. "Can't you take him? He's not that heavy," Saul said.

"But I… my hands are cold."

"Guess what, Charlotte? We're going to keep him a while."

"All, Saul," I said. You think I wasn't expecting that? Nothing could surprise me any more. In this impermanent state of mine, events drifted in like passing seaweed and brushed my cheek and drifted out again. I saw them clearly from a great distance, both coming and going. "Thank you for the thought," I said, "but it wouldn't be possible," and I moved on around the table, serenely setting out soupbowls.

"Charlotte, he hasn't got a father, his mother ran off and left him with his grandmother, and this morning we found the grandmother dead. I assumed you'd want him."

"But then his mother will come back," I said. "We could lose him at any moment." I started folding napkins.

"We could lose anybody at any moment. We could lose Selinda."

"You know what I mean," I said. "He isn't ours."

"Nobody's ours," said Saul.

So I finished folding the last of the napkins, and warmed my hands in my apron a minute, and came back to where Saul was standing. There was some comfort in knowing I had no choice. Everything had been settled for me. Even the baby seemed to see that, and leaned forward as if he'd expected me all along and dropped like a stone into my waiting arms.

We called him Jiggs. His real name was something poor-white that I tried not ever to think about, and Jiggs seemed better suited anyway to his stubby shape and the thick, clear-rimmed spectacles that he very soon had to start wearing.

Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.

We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. "Is he yours?" a customer might ask, and I would say "Oh no, that's Jiggs."

"Ah." And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.

For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father's formal composition. During the years stray props had moved it: flowers, swords, Ping-Pong paddles, overflow from Alberta's clutter. People had a way of picking up odd objects when they entered, and then they got attached to them.

They would sit down still holding them, absent-mindedly, and half the time I never even noticed. I wasn't a chatty, personal kind of photographer. I would be occupied judging the light, struggling with the camera that had grown more crotchety than ever. Its bellows were all patched with little squares of electrical tape. Its cloth was so frayed and dusty I got sneezing fits. Often I would have gone as far as printing up a negative before I really saw what I had taken. "Why," I would say to Linus. "What on earth…?" Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta's sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.

In the fall of 19xx, Alberta died. We got a telegram from her father-in-law.

YOUB MOTHEK DEAD OF HEART FAILURE FUNERAL A. M. WEDNESDAY. When he read it, Saul turned grim but said nothing. Later he called Linus and Julian into the sunporch and they held a conference with the doors closed. I hung around outside, fiddling with strands of my hair. When it came to matters of importance, I thought, I was not remotely a part of that family. Here I assumed I had broken into their circle, found myself some niche in the shelter of Alberta's shadow, but it turned out the Emorys were as shut away as ever and Alberta had gone and died. Underneath I had always expected her back, I believe. I wanted her approval; she was so much braver, freer, stronger than I had turned out to be.

There were a thousand things I had planned on holding up for her to pass judgment on. Now it seemed that these things had no point any more, and I thought of them all-even the children- with a certain flat dislike.

I went to find my mother, who was knitting in front of the TV. "Alberta has died," I told her.

"Oh, my soul," said Mama, not missing a stitch. But then she never had thought much of her. "Well, I suppose the men will be going to the funeral." But they didn't, as it happened. That was the subject of the conference. Saul had told them he wasn't going, and he didn't think they should either, but that was up to them. They discussed it carefully, examining all the issues. This was what they'd come to: her gloriously ~wicked sons, now aging and balding and troubled by pathetic, minor errors. In her absence, their colors had faded. People are only reflections in other people's eyes, it turns out. In Alberta's absence her house had crumbled and vanished, her belongings had taken on a rusty smell. (She told me once that the Emorys had always been killed by horses; that was their mode of dying. But in her absence it emerged that only one had been: a distant uncle. The others had passed away in their beds, puny deaths they would have been spared if Alberta had only stayed around.) Julian said he wouldn't attend the funeral either. That left Linus, the only one who might have liked to go, but everybody knew that he wouldn't defy his brothers. (Linus had a beard because he never had shaved, not ever, since the day his first whiskers grew in.

That was how little he fought things.) "Ill just stay at home and say a prayer for her in my mind," he told Saul.

"Whatever you like," Saul said.

It was Linus I heard this from, of course. Never Saul. Linus sat on a kitchen chair later, sanding a piece of wood the size of a postage stamp. For a couple of years now, he had been building doflhouse furniture. I don't know why.

And all of a sudden he said to me, "In my opinion, he should forgive her."

"What?"

"Saul," said Linus, "should forgive our mother."

"Oh well, let Turn have one sin."

"On the sunporch he said, 'What makes me laugh is, that crazy old man outlived her after all.' Grandpa, he meant. Then he really did laugh. Threw back his head and laughed out loud. What do you make of that?"

"Nothing," I said. "I don't even try. Leave him alone." So Linus blew a speck of sawdust away, and wiped his forehead with one veiny brown arm and fell silent He was used to my protecting him, not Saul. He didn't guess how often I had asked myself the same question: What do you make of Saul?

Saul had become a man of blacks and whites. In the pulpit, looming black robe with a wide white neckband; the rest of the time, cheap black suit and white shirt. Often, while buying groceries or walking with the children, I would catch sight of him striding through the town on some wild mission-larger than life, with his unbuttoned suit coat billowing out behind him, trouser cuffs flapping, tie fluttering, strings of neglected hair feathering over his collar.

He carried a Bible, always, and wore a dark, intense expression, as if narrowing in on something. Most of the time, he didn't even see us.

Was he just a fanatical preacher, bent on converting the world?

But sometimes when giving his sermons he stumbled and halted, and appeared to be considering the words he had just spoken. Then I would have to consider them myself, trying to discover what truth might lie within them. Sometimes, while lashing out against the same old evils, he would stop in mid-sentence and sag and shake his head and walk away, forgetting to say the benediction. Then his bewildered, ever smaller flock would rustle in their pews, and I would sit gripping my gloves. Should I run after him?

Should I let him be? I pictured some great substructure shifting and creaking inside him. I felt my own jagged edges grinding together as they settled into new positions. At night, I often woke with a start and pressed my face against his damp, matted chest. Even his heartbeat seemed muffled and secret. I never was able to imagine what he dreamed.

I was moving around the kitchen one day in the spring of, serving up breakfast to a man from the mourners' bench. Dr. Sisk. I was trying to hurry Jiggs along because it was nearly time for kindergarten and he was just sitting there with one sock on and nothing else. I was tripping over the dog, this terrible dog that Belinda had brought home from Girl Scouts. It wasn't one of my quieter times, in other words. So it took me a minute to notice what I assumed to be Saul from another age, leaning in the doorway-the Saul I married, with a calmer face and no lines around his mouth, a little more hair on top, easier and looser and less preoccupied. He wore faded, tattered jeans and carried an Army surplus knapsack. He watched me with a kind of wry amusement that Saul had long ago lost. Well, I wasn't so very surprised. In fact I'd already thought of an explanation for it (some simple time warp, nothing to get alarmed about) when he spoke. "I knocked but nobody answered," he said.

It wasn't Saul's voice at all, and never had been; didn't have that echo behind it. I said, "AmosI"

"How you doing, Charlotte?" He straightened up and came to offer me his hand. By now I was so used to various people wandering in it didn't occur to me to ask why he was here. (I'd been expecting him for years, to tell the truth. Wondered what was keeping him.) But Amos seemed to think he had to tell me. "Hear Clarion High School is looting for a music teacher," he said. "I thought I might apply. I guess I should've dropped a line ahead of time but I'm not too much of a letter writer." He had sent us fifteen letters in all the time we'd been married-if you count a Hallmark wedding card and about fourteen of those printed change-of-address notices that you pick up free from the post office. But that's the way the Emorys did things. I said, "Never mind, have some breakfast. Meet Jiggs and Dr. Sisk." Jiggs stood up in his one striped sock and shook hands. He was always a dignified child, even naked, and looked like a kindly little old man in his stodgy glasses. I was proud to show him off.

But Amos gave him a puzzled stare and said, "Jiggs?" Then Dr. Sisk rose too, jarring the table, and leaned across the scrambled eggs to offer one freckled, webby hand, "Arthur Sisk," he said. "From the mourners' bench."

"Mourners' bench," said Amos, still waiting.

"I was contemplating suicide. Preacher up and offered me an alternative solution."

"Have some more eggs," I told Dr. Sisk.

"No thank you, darlin', maybe later," he said. He turned back to Amos. "Life was getting me down. Grinding on so. The tedium! I'm a G. P. All those infants with upper respiratory infections, Vicks VapoRub smeared on their chests.

Stethoscope goes 'Sppk!' when you pull it away. I thought of suicide."

"Is that so," said Amos.

"Preacher talked me out of it. Recommended I give my life to Christ, instead. Well, I liked the way he put it. I mean, just to hand my life over.

Isn't that true, my dear," he said to me.

"Well," I said, "but you still have income tax and license renewals."

"Beg pardon?"

"Still have bank statements and dental appointments and erroneous bills," I said. "If it were all that easy, don't you think I'd long ago have handed my life over?" Dr. Sisk sat down and started pulling at his nose. "Help yourself to some eggs," I told Amos. "What?" Amos said. "Oh… no, really I…"

"Saul is paying a hospital visit, he ought to be back before long."

"Well, do… I mean, funny, I thought it was a daughter you had," Amos said. He took a handful of his hair. "Didn't you send me a birth announcement? Daughter named Catherine."

"Oh yes, that would be Belinda," I said. "She's already left for school."

"Belinda."

"This is Jiggs."

"I see. Jiggs," said Amos. He let go of his hair but continued looking confused.

Then Jiggs seemed to feel he had to stand up all over again, flashing white moons off his fingerprinted spectacles. "Jiggs, please," I said. "In fifteen minutes you have to be ready to leave. Would you like some coffee, Amos?"

"No, thanks, I stopped for breakfast in Holgate."

"Well, come and sit in the living room," I said, and I led him down the hall, untying my apron as I went. "I hope you don't mind the mess. It's still a little early in the day." There was a mess, but nothing that would clear up as the day went on. Some guests can make you see these things. I had never realized, for instance, how very much dollhouse furniture Linus had produced in the last few years. People kept offering to buy it from him for fabulous amounts, but he wouldn't sell. It was all for me, he said. Now on every tabletop there were other tables, two inches high. Also breakfronts, cupboards, and bureaus, as well as couches upholstered in velvet and dining room chairs with needlepoint seats. And each tiny surface bore its own accessories: lamps with toothpaste-cap shades, books made from snippets of magazine bindings, and single wooden beads containing arrangements of dried baby's breath. Entire roomfuls were grouped beneath the desk and under the piano. I could see that Amos was startled. "They're Linus's," I told him.

"He makes them."

"Oh, yes," said Amos. He sat down on the couch, letting his moccasins sprawl out across the rug. "How is Linus these days?"

"He's fine."

"No more of his… trouble?"

"Oh no, he seems very steady. Right now he's over at the laundromat with Mama."

"And is Julian in these parts?"

"He's down at the shop already," I said.

"What shop?" The radio shop."

"Dot's radio shop?"

"Well, where have you been?" I 'asked. "Doesn't Saul keep in touch?"

"At Christmas he just sends this card from the church," said Amos, "telling me to bear in mind the true meaning."

"Oh, I see," I said. "Well, Julian works at the radio shop. It's TV now, mostly, but we still call it the radio shop. He's doing just fine. I really believe his lapses are going to get fewer."

"Is that right," said Amos. He drummed his fingers on his knapsack. _ "Pretty soon well start trusting him with money again, but meanwhile the customers just come by here and pay Miss Feather instead."

"Miss…?' "But what about you?" I asked. "Do you think you'll get this job?"

"Oh, sure, the principal wrote and told me it's mine if I want it.

And I guess I do want it. Tve been in one place too long; it's time for a change. And I'd just broken off with this girl, felt ready to… though I'm not so certain that I could take Clarion again. I wish this offer had turned up someplace else."

"There's nothing wrong with Clarion," I said. (I don't know why.) "No, of course not, it's fine," said Amos. "I didn't mean it wasn't." He hooked his thumbs in his belt and tipped his head back against the couch, closing the conversation. I remembered that Amos used to be the Emory who ran away. Maybe he still was. Weaknesses came one to a person in that family, and could be conquered but not destroyed; they merely moved on to someone else. To Julian. Julian was collecting weaknesses like so many coins or postage stamps.

Saul's old trouble with girls was Julian's now and so was Linus's tendency to break down. We all loved Julian a lot, and no wonder. We were fond of his smudgy, weary eyes and exhausted good looks, and if "he took on Amos's habit of running away then we would be in trouble. I said, "Amos, do you still run away?"

He seemed to have been caught off-guard. "What?" he said. "Well, no, for heaven's sake, why would you ask a thing like that? Of course not"

"Where did it go?" I asked him.

"What?" But before I could explain, in came Saul, stooping automatically in the doorway. He stopped. "Amos?" he said.

Amos stood up and said, "Hello, Saul."

"We've waited a long time for you,"

Saul told him, and set a hand on his shoulder. I was smiling as I watched, but what I wondered was: why did Amos look so much younger, when he was the oldest of the Emory boys?

Now they were complete, the four of them under one roof again. Amos's job didn't start till fall, so meanwhile he helped at the radio shop. Also, he got our old piano tuned and practiced every day. It never failed to amaze me that Amos had become a musician. Having barely scraped through school, he'd fallen into music like a duck finally hitting water and worked his way gladly through the Peabody Institute. Amos Emory! He sat hunched at the yellow-toothed piano playing Chopin, his moccasins set gingerly among the dollhouse furniture, elbows close to his sides as if he feared to damage the keys with his huge square hands. A rag of black hair fell over his forehead. "This has got to be the worst piano I've ever come across," he told me, but he continued pulling in its faded, tinny, long-ago notes.

Unfortunately, I don't like piano. Something about it has always irritated me. But Mama loved to hear him; she'd been musical herself once, she said. And Belinda often paused on her way to someplace else and listened from the door.

She was thirteen that summer and had suddenly turned beautiful. Her hair was blonder from the sun and she had these burnished, threadlike eyebrows and dusty freckles. And close behind her you'd generally find Jiggs, who came running from anywhere as soon as he heard music. He coaxed lessons from Amos and then practiced what he learned for hours at a time-plodding about on the keys, breathing through his mouth, fogging up his spectacles. Whenever I passed through the living room, I would smile at the back of his soft fair head and make "my eternal, evil wish: Please let his mother drop dead somewhere, I never hope for anything else in my life.

At dinner I could look down a straight row of Emory boys (skipping Dr. Sisk, who poked in everywhere) and see four variations on a single theme-all those large, sober faces, Saul in black, Julian in a flashy turtleneck, Linus wearing something limp and unnoticeable and Amos in tatters of denim, like an easygoing, good-natured hitch-hiker. Well, he was easygoing. He was good-natured. Then why did he get on my nerves so?

He was always asking me questions. What I thought of Holy Basis; why we had so much furniture; how I could stand so many strangers coming through. "What strangers?" I said.

"Oh, Miss Feather, Dr. Sisk."

"Miss Feather's been with us near as long as Selinda. I wouldn't really call her a stranger."

"And what causes Saul to look the way he does?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"He's got so… shadowed, he's got this haunted look. Is everything all right?"

"Of course it's all right, don't be silly," I said.

He studied the ceiling a while. "I don't suppose it's easy, being a preacher's wife," he said.

"Why would you think that?"

"Well, having him so, well, saintly. Right?" I stared straight through him.

"Or for him, either; it wouldn't be easy married to you. Belinda says you aren't religious. Doesn't that scare him?"

"Scare him? It makes him angry," I said.

"It scares him. Of course it does, the way you coast along, no faith, all capability, your… sparseness, and you're the one that makes the soup while he just brings home the sinners to eat it. Isn't that so? He forever has to keep wrestling with the thoughts that you put in his mind."

"I don't! I never touch his mind! I deliberately keep back from it," I said.

"He wrestles anyway," said Amos. He grinned. "His private devil." Then he grew serious. He said, "I don't understand married people."

"Evidently not," I told him, stiffly.

"How they can keep on keeping together. Though it's admirable, of course."

What he meant was, it might be admirable but he didn't admire it. Well, I didn't admire him, either. I disliked the careless way he moved around the room, examining various cabinets no bigger than matchboxes. Faced with Amos's scorn, I underwent some subtle change; I grew loyal, stubborn. I forgot the plans for my trip, I reflected that it would be pointless: no matter where I went, Saul would be striding forever down the alleys of my mind, slapping his Bible against his thigh. "You don't know the first thing about it," I told Amos.

But Amos just said, "No, probably I don't," and went on easily to something new. "Whose dog is that?"

"Selinda's."

"Peculiar kind of animal." Well, it's true that Ernest wasn't worth much. He was a mongrel-a huge black beast, going gray, with long tangled hair and a mop-shaped head. When Ernest wagged his tail, everything at his end of the room fell and broke. Some form of hearing loss led him to believe that we were calling him whenever we called Amos or Linus, and he always arrived drooling and panting, withering us with his fish-market breath, skidding and crashing into things and scraping the floor with his toe-nails.

Also, he'd become unduly attached to me and any time I left him alone he lost control of his bladder. Oh, I admit he wasn't perfect.

Still, I didn't see what business it was of Amos's. "Tell me," I said, "is there one single thing here you approve of? Shall we throw the whole place out and start over?" Then Amos held up one hand, backing off, and said, "All right, all right, don't take it wrong." He was smiling his shy, sweet, hitch-hiker's smile, lowering his head, looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. Instantly I felt sorry for him. He was just new here, that was all. He had left home longer ago than his brothers, traveled farther, forgotten more. Forgotten that in every family there are certain ways you shrink and stretch to accommodate other people. Why, Linus for instance could remember back to his nursing days (Alberta's nipple like a mouthful 'of crumpled seersucker, he claimed) but Amos couldn't stand to remember and told me so, outright. He hadn't liked being a child, he said. Their mother had been pushy, clamorous, violent, taking over their lives, meddling in. their brains, demanding a constant torrent of admiration and gaiety. Her sons had winced when she burst into their rooms. She breathed her hot breath on them, she laughed her harsh laugh. She called for parties! Dancing! let's show a little life here! Given anything less than what she needed, he said (and she was always given less, she could never get enough), she turned mocking and contemptuous. She had a tongue like a knife. The sharp, insistent colors of her clothes and even of her skin, her hair, were painful to her children's eyes. They had hated her. They had wished her dead.

Alberta?

"Why are you surprised?" Amos asked me. "Do we look like four normal, happy men? Hasn't it occurred to you? The other three can't even seem to leave Clarion; and I'm not much better, hopping around like something in a skillet, running before the school year's even finished half the time and breaking with whoever gets close to me. Three of us have never married; the fourth chose somebody guaranteed to let him keep his doors shut." I stared at him.

"Isn't it true? You don't know a thought in his head, never asked. If you had, none of this would come as any surprise to you. Saul hates Alberta worse than any of us."

"But… no, that's only because of…" I didn't want to come right out and say it.

"Because of Grandpa?" Amos asked. "Face it: single events don't cause that kind of effect. It took Saul years and years to get as bitter as he is. He's come away from her in shreds; all of us have. He and the others just sit here in Clarion circling her grave and picking at her bones, trying to sort it through, but not me. I gave up. I don't remember. Tve forgotten." And he did, in fact, smile at me with the clear, blank eyes of a man without a past. I could tell he had truly forgotten. He had twisted every bit of it, muddled his facts hopelessly. There was no point in trying to set him straight I took him with us to church. He sat beside me, dressed in a borrowed suit, scrubbed and subdued.

But even here, he seemed to be asking his questions. The moment Saul announced his text-Matthew:, "He that is not with me is against me" Amos shifted his feet, as if about to lean forward and shoot up a hand and shout, "Objection!"

But he didn't, of course. It was all in my mind. He sat there as quiet as anyone, with his fingers laced. I don't know how he managed to annoy me so.

That night I dreamed that Saul and I had found ourselves a bedroom of a watery green color, like an aquarium. We were making love under flickering shadows, and for once there was no tiny knock on our door, no sad little voice: Tim lonesome," no church members phoning with deaths and diseases. Saul looked down at my face with a peculiarly focused, thoughtful look, as if he had some plan in mind for me. I decided the new bedroom was a wonderful idea. Then Onus stretched out alongside me and covered me with soft, bearded kisses, and Julian arrived in his gambling clothes which he slowly took off, one by one, smiling at me all the while. I was circled by love, protected on every side. The only Emory who wasn't there was Amos, and he was who they were protecting me from.