The next couple of days passed in a slow march of corn harvesting and the rush of nights spent on the farmhouse porch talking quietly with Mary. She looked away from every glance and the two of us blushed at every comment. We tried to ignore the old men and women who often sat rocking in their chairs on the porch. Sometimes we sat together on the steps, other times with our legs hanging off the porch and sometimes we’d have a couple of chairs for ourselves. The nights were clear with the moon and stars hanging just out of reach over the glint of the camp’s tin roofs. We’d sit and shiver and chat our voices hanging in puffs of fog in front of our faces.
As near as anyone could tell Mary was near twenty and she’d never known anything but the camp and its people. Her mother and father had died when she’d been a young girl and after their passing, she and her brother had taken care of one another on the treacherous migrations. She described the camp as a godsend, a shelter and a rock against the storms that ravaged the outside world and my brother was practically a god, their savior, only eclipsed by the memory of old John. Prior to my brother’s arrival the people of the camp had been nomadic farmers who’d scattered seed in the spring and then marched north into the lake country. Often vamps raided them just as they were preparing for their migration and some years, they would come back to find that only weeds had taken root in their fields.
“Why would you come back year after year to the same place if you know that vampires were going to be waiting for you?” I’d asked.
“Oh, we didn’t come back to the same exact place, sometimes it was farther west, sometimes farther south. Still they always seemed to find us.” I thought of the camp without the vampires and their weaponry and I nodded. “Old John would help us even though he said we were foolish. He’d come in out of the forest, his necklace of dried vampire tongues grown larger and his beard grayer. He used to say, ‘I always liked stubbornness.’ Then he’d help us fight off the vampires for a time before our march north. I’ll never forget him walking into the camp where I was crouched over a campfire one night. They were walking arm and arm as if they were drunk, the two of them grinning and laughing hysterically. What a sight that was, old John all in his leathers and furs and my brother in a pair of holey sneakers. As my brother recounted the tale of Old John saving him from a vamp’s bite, he strung his prize tongue over the fire and let it dry in the smoke. He never went north with us though. Said it was a might bit cold for him.
“Sounds like a hell of a man,” I’d said imagining a grizzled old man version of my mother. “What happened to him?”
Her face went dark and her eyes glistened briefly, and I regretted asking the question.
“He died,” she said simply, and the conversation lapsed into silence. I thought about telling her about my mother but the idea of telling Mary of her death was too painful and I sat stiffly.
Nowhere in the village was my mother’s presence more heavily palpable than at the small wooden chapel that sat on the village square across from the farmhouse. It was a simple structure of smooth white boards, longer than it was wide and taller than the shacks and cabins of the rest of the village. Facing the square at the top of its peaked roof sitting over a large door an unadorned wooden cross sat that was visible from almost anywhere in the village and the surrounding fields. In its plain way it was more beautiful than any other building in the village, even the farmhouse, and less haphazardly constructed than all but the farmhouse which had obviously survived from the time before the vampires. The chapel embodied a concerted effort outside of my brother’s direction by the people of the village to build something that was not necessary for their survival and was used solely for the purpose of worship. For all the meals I’d taken at the farmhouse and the few precious nights I’d spent talking with Mary no one had ever entered outside of services except for a pair of elderly women who swept and polished the building. Several villagers had invited me to services or to worship though none had felt the need to illuminate the term and I had declined until after the preacher’s son had approached me with his father’s wishes. No one had seemed to mind when I’d rejected their offer, my brother never attended services so it seemed natural that I would refuse as well, but they seemed genuinely happy when I changed my mind.
It wasn’t until I was waiting for Mary on the porch the night prior to my first Sabbath in
