Sourland

my father’s bedside. I was desperate to return to my father’s bedside. Before Mr. Carmichael brought the station wagon to a full stop in the parking lot, I had jumped out, I was making my way into the chill of the hospital that never changes, taking the stairs two at a time to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, avoiding the elevator out of a morbid fear that, at this crucial time, the elevator might stall between floors, now breathless from the stairs and my heart pounding in my chest as if it might burst —

Still alive! From the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

Bounty Hunter

Is there a soul I have to wonder. Look inside myself like leaning over the rim of an old stone well and the danger is, you might lose your balance and fall and there is no water inside to break your fall. Hello? Hello? Anybody there? Old stone well with a broken hand pump, I’m thinking of. That well was old when I was a kid. My grandfather’s farm that’s just “acreage” now north of Herkimer waiting to be sold, how many years. Nobody wants to live in the country now, we’ve all moved to town.

It’s a fact: there’s fewer people living in the country in this century than fifty years ago. New houses and a shopping mall going up south of Herkimer and along the highway halfway to Sparta. The new Church of the Risen Christ like a great shining ark rising out of the moldered earth, sailing the waves of the righteous as our pastor says. From the outside the prow of the ark is a beacon of light, inside there is a dazzle of shining surfaces, pinewood pews in long curving rows too many to count and in the balcony more pews rising farther than you can see. At the front of the ark is a great floating gold cross illuminated in light. Each service, three thousand individuals worship here. The Church of the Risen Christ is the fastest-growing church in all the Adirondack region. Started in a store front in downtown Herkimer, now there’s people coming from as far away as Utica, Rome, Watertown, Potsdam. Our tabernacle choir is on cable TV each Sunday morning. What is beautiful is the congregation singing hymns. Nobody laughs at my voice here. My voice is wavering as a girl’s but gains strength from the voices close about me, I am not so self-conscious here. Shut your eyes in the Church of the Risen Christ you could be any of these.

In this pew with strangers but we are all children of God. Feeling my heart quicken because this is a secret time for me. My husband is not a churchgoer. I have not yet brought the girls, they would be restless and it makes me angry to see restless children at church. Is there a soul is a question I ask myself when I am alone, I am afraid of my thoughts when I am alone. One Sunday I asked Reverend Loomis and he gripped my hand in both his hands smiling he saying Who is it who asks this question, Diane? Who is it looks through your eyes that are such beautiful eyes? My face flushed like sunburn. My eyes filled with tears. It was after the service, so many of us anxious to speak with Reverend Loomis and waiting in the aisle for him to take our hands, ask our names and repeat our names as a blessing. So many of us and most of us are women wishing to “seek counsel” with our pastor but Reverend Rob Loomis’s time is limited. His special smile for women like me, oh God I hope it isn’t pity.

A wife and mother, not yet thirty-five. Yet not young. You feel it at the waist, a bulge of flesh. Turning, and in the mirror a ridge of fat at the small of the back, a crease beneath my chin, I felt so hurt! — betrayed! — until the girls, until I got pregnant, I’d been lean like a boy. Is there a soul because if there is and I am lacking a soul, just this body going to fat, I am not like other people but a freak. But if there is a soul and there is one inside me waiting to emerge into the light this is a thing that scares me more.

So what my cousin Michie Dungarve would say. Who gives a damn, why’s it a big deal. Michie who’d been in the navy and then apprenticed to a bail bondsman/bounty hunter up in Watertown, it would be said of him he was a cold-blooded killer without a soul and Michie conceded that was probably a fact.

In the Church of the Risen Christ, three thousand of us lift our voices in a joyful noise to the Lord and to His Only Begotten Son that Jesus will drive out the devils from us and dwell in our hearts forever-more and I know this to be true. Rock of ages we are singing cleft for me let me hide myself in thee we are singing. I feel the waves buoying our ark, I feel how we are lifted like the gold cross floating in air. Reverend Loomis teaches us to laugh at sin, laugh away Satan for he is helpless in the face of Jesus. There is not a thing to regret nor even to remember once Jesus is in your heart. Like a light so bright and blinding why’d you even make an effort to see. I tell myself Jesus understands, He was in my heart even then.

When I was DeeDee Kinzie. That long ago.

This thing that happened when we were kids living out north of Herkimer. The Rapids it was called, where we lived that wasn’t a town but had a post office and a volunteer fire company that shared the building. We went to school at Rapids Elementary then at Rapids Junior-Senior High. My cousin Michie Dungarve who was two years older than me but just one year ahead of me in school. These guys he hung out with in eighth grade, Steve Hauser and Dan Burney. And me. This thing that happened.

Like a sudden storm, like lightning striking. You can be standing on a porch watching the rain out of a boiling-dark sky like my mother’s older sister Elsie smoking a cigarette and there’s a flash of something like fire and a booming noise so loud it near-about knocked her over, lightning had struck the porch post and splinters shot into the side of her face like buckshot. Happened that fast, my aunt would tell that story the rest of her life thanking God, He had spared her blindness, or worse.

This thing that happened. Except I guess it had to be something we made happen. Not like a lightning storm that’s an act of God out of the empty sky.

This single time I was granted an appointment with Reverend Loomis asking why you would call some terrible thing an act of God, for isn’t everything that happens an act of God. And Reverend Loomis gives me this frowning smile saying an “act of God” means a great cataclysm beyond any mortal to control. And I say yes, Reverend. But why.

There is something dogged about me, I know. Seeing how our pastor smiled harder at me, that I was a challenge to his kindly nature. I was trying not to stammer saying what I meant is, if God did not wish a terrible thing to happen, why’d He let it happen?

Reverend Loomis spoke calmly and carefully as you would speak to a child. Saying we can’t demand such questions of God, he grants us freedom of will to sin or not to sin. Freedom of will to take sin into our hearts or cast it from us. You don’t need theology to know this, Mrs. Schmidt!

I felt the man’s warmth touch my heart that has such a chill upon it like an old spell.

But needing to say, I wasn’t speaking of myself but of this boy that something happened to. When we were children out in the Rapids.

My voice cracked then. For why’d I say that: children. We were not young children, none of us. And why say the Rapids. Reverend Loomis has family in Watertown, he would scarcely know rural Herkimer County.

Somehow I was talking fast. I was nervous, and I was anxious, and I was missing my painkillers, that keep my heart from racing and sweat from prickling in my armpits. Saying I don’t understand, Reverend. See, I don’t understand!

Reverend said let us pray together, Diane. Then you will understand.

Reverend smiled and touched my arm. His smile is a flash of white flame, each night following I will sink into sleep into that white flame.

My cousin Michie said it’s good to have a little evil in you, people know not to fuck with you. Like a vaccination where they put germs in you, to make your blood stronger.

This swampy woods off the logging road. A thing that scares me is snakes. When we were kids, tramping through the woods back of our houses and after a heavy rainfall or the thaw in spring there’d be sheets of water in the woods, the creeks overflowing, the ditches, even the ravine and afterward a deposit of mud, silt, storm debris. Snakes in the swampy woods and some of them water moccasins. Four feet long and thick as a man’s leg. I never