The Hallowed Ones

ambled in and lay beside me. Perhaps they liked the rhythm of Alex’s voice. I thought that he would make a good professor.

“Well, Zeus ordered the messenger god, Hermes, to kill Argus. Hermes showed up to the tree in the disguise of a shepherd. He managed to lull Argus to sleep by speaking magic incantations, then slugged him with a rock, killing him.”

“And Io? Was she free?”

“Eh. She was free but stuck in the form of a cow. Hera sent a gadfly to harass her for the remainder of her days and prevent her from resting. So, Io wandered until she came to the ends of the earth. For the ancient Greeks, that was pretty much as far as what’s now Turkey. Zeus transformed her back into a woman when Hera wasn’t looking. She conceived a daughter by Zeus’s touch. Io gave birth in secret and hid her daughter with a nymph who raised her while Io continued to flee Hera’s wrath.

“Io continued to run—ran as far as Egypt. Pimp-daddy Zeus came by and laid the golden touch on her again—bam!—and she’s pregnant with child number two. She gave birth to her son, Epaphus, in the Nile. Hera found out about this one. She had the boy abducted. But Io persevered. She searched far and wide to find him in Syria.

“By this time, Io had had truly enough of the Greek gods. She returned to Egypt and swore them off, asking instead for the protection of the Egyptian goddess Isis.”

“Isis was gentler than Hera, I’d guess.”

“Yep. Isis was a mother and nature goddess. She was all about love and kindness. Isis took her in. Io became a priestess of Isis and married an Egyptian king. She never came back to Greece.”

I sat in silence when Alex wrapped up his tale. I absorbed the whole of it, then blurted out: “That’s terrible.”

He smiled. “Those were the old gods for you, though. Wrathful. And this was how Hera treated one of her priestesses, one of her most fervent followers, who never wanted anything to do with Zeus. The part that amazes me is that it took Io so long to renounce them and switch to Team Isis. I guess you stick with what you know.”

“Ja,” I said. “You do.”

“Yeah. But the thing that I like about the story is that Io eventually gets her happy ending. I don’t know of another myth in which one of Zeus’s mortal women gets one. And she does it through sheer determination. Perseverance.”

He lapsed into silence. I stared up at the flickering lantern. Darkness had fallen soft and thick around us. The Singing was over by now, and I would be expected home.

“I should be getting back.” I stretched, stood, reached for the lantern. I felt bad taking his only good source of light. “My parents will be missing me.”

“I can walk you back,” he said.

I looked at the wound still angry on his temple. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”

“I’ll go with you part of the way.” He reached for the flashlight in the pile of his meager possessions and put it in his pocket. His sleeve hiked up as he did so, and I saw a black mark on his forearm.

I reached for his wrist. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head, smiled. “No.” He rolled his sleeve up farther for me to see. “It’s a tattoo. See?”

The black mark stretched across his forearm, up to his elbow. It looked like something architectural, a stepped tower. I squinted at it, holding my lantern high.

“What is it?”

“It is a moment of folly from spring break one year. You might consider it my own Rumspringa.” He rolled his eyes at his own foolishness. “It’s called a Djed pillar. The backbone of the Egyptian god Osiris.”

“So you do believe in a god.” My skin crawled at the idea of someone worshipping those wrathful gods of fiction—for real. I dropped his wrist.

“Maybe abstractly,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing at the tattoo.

We walked toward the mouth of the barn. I doused the lantern as he pulled the door shut.

“Osiris is a good god? Like Isis?” I wanted to believe that there was some nugget of good in Alex.

“Actually, he’s the husband of Isis. Unlike the tumult of Zeus’s relationship with Hera, there was no infidelity or jealousy between them.”

The sky was overcast, and I could smell rain coming. The night was soft and thick as lampblack, blanketing the field. I think that the crickets could sense the rain too; I couldn’t hear them.

“That’s something, at least,” I said, walking beside him. Some beauty in the fiction.

“Well, they weren’t without their challenges. Osiris was assassinated by his brother, Set. His body was torn into pieces and thrown into the Nile.”

“Again, your myths are terrible.”

I could see his teeth shining white in the darkness. “But this one has a happy ending too. Isis picked up the pieces of his body from the Nile and put him back together. Osiris was resurrected by his wife and became god of the dead and rebirth.”

I shuddered. There was something sinister about the idea of a god of the dead. “And you were moved to put his symbol on your arm?”

He shrugged. “I was going through a tough time. My grandfather had died, and I didn’t want to believe in the permanence of death.”

I thought about that. It was, in its way, similar to how Elijah was coping with the disappearance of his brothers. Trying to fight against the permanence of death. But I didn’t understand why Alex would choose something so . . . dark.

I pointed at a light in the distance. “That’s my house.”

He squinted at it. “Okay. I’ll watch from here . . . at least, as far as I can. To see that you get there.”

I smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see much of me in the dark.”

He pointed to my white prayer bonnet and apron. “I can see you for longer than you think.”

This discussion seemed like a useless display of chivalry. If there were vampires in our midst, we’d be ripped to shreds. But it seemed like a bit of ordinariness that was sorely needed.

“Good night,” I said to him.

“Good night, Bonnet.”

I walked into the darkness. I felt the splash of a raindrop against the bridge of my nose. It woke me up from that dreamy world of myth and magic I’d let Alex lead me into. I shook my head. Blasphemous stories. I should not have listened to them, the voice of the obedient Good Girl in my head insisted.

But I was not sure that I wanted to listen to that voice right now. I wanted to crawl into bed and let today go. Release it. Pretend as if it didn’t exist.

I scanned the fields as I walked. I did not see any other people coming back from the Singing; it was too dark to even see the cattle in the fields. All I could see were the shadows of trees and the lighter shadow of grass.

Something moved. I froze. I thought I saw a flash of something pale flitting at the edge of the tree and the field. It could have been an apron, a white shirt. It could have been the white horse. Or it could have been . . .

I sucked in my breath and ran.

I sprinted toward the light of my house, scrambled up the back steps. I paused with my hand on the doorknob, scanning the blackness behind me.

I saw nothing.

Maybe it was my imagination, the guilty force of too many dark stories in my mind.

I closed the door behind me, leaned against it, and prayed.

Funny how the Lord’s Prayer was the first thing to come to mind when I was afraid, even in all my rebellion.

I was a hypocrite. When the roof came down, it was going to fall on me first.