the window up. “Lenore,” she called out, and it was then, her calls met only with the stillness of the Crippled Eighty, the quiet noise the land had likely been making for centuries, that she first felt the loss of her daughter. She felt it in her stomach, a quick rush. She listened closer, trying to convince herself that the sound of the wind brushing the pasture grass was Lenore walking slowly up from the creek, knee-deep in the weeds. Her heart leaped with relief with the noise of a bird that sounded like a toy, the wings clacking, slapping, like wings made of wood.
“Lenore,” Daisy shouted, wanting Lenore to hear the shake in her voice so she’d know she’d gone too far with her hide-and-seek. Daisy cried as she circled the house twice, casting her sight everywhere, trying to look at every inch of every acre. “I’m so angry right now, Lenore,” she shouted, but she wasn’t. She was terrified. Elvis’s attention to Lenore took on a different tenor in her memory. I could just eat you up, he’d say, pinching her cheek. You deserve the best of everything, he’d say.
· 16 ·
Within the thick of a cornfield, the musk of vegetation filled her mouth with breath almost too damp for her lungs to take in, and Daisy feared she’d never get to the outer edge. She felt covered in insects, even tasted them, and as she stomped through the dirt, cutting the skin of her bare feet, she slapped away the spotted, lime-colored rootworm beetles crawling on her arms and neck and legs. She picked them from her tongue and her teeth. The cornstalks, so tall and peaceful, rattling only gently with the slight wind and Daisy’s movement, sliced at her, their smooth leaves leaving paper-cut slashes across her flesh.
When Daisy stepped from the cornfield, she could’ve gone left or she could’ve gone right. If she’d gone right, her story would’ve changed so radically that there might’ve been no story at all. It would’ve been so easy to dismiss her had she gone right, a little less than forty feet down the highway, to one of our town’s oldest institutions: “Peeping” Tom’s Liquor and Discount Cigarettes. “Peeping” Tom’s that fateful day was staffed solely by a twenty-two-year-old who spent his work hours eating Cherry Mash candy and leaving his chocolate fingerprints on the pages of the store’s dirty magazines.
But Daisy didn’t go right; she went left, to the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, even though it was much farther away, practically a quarter mile, and the black asphalt of the highway felt like a hot iron pressed against her bare, bleeding feet.
The church’s Board of Elders, a claque of old men, happened to be meeting that morning, and they happened to be meeting in the chapel, not the fellowship hall as usual, rendering Daisy’s entrance into their lives all the more dramatic. They’d gone into the chapel, in their finest suits and newest ties, to confront the young minister, who was at the lectern rehearsing his sermon, a particularly rabid piece of fire-and-brimstone in which he intended to blame us all for all the recent acts of God—tornadoes that had decimated area farms in May, more tornadoes that had killed two teenagers who’d parked to neck near a creek in June, a fire that had consumed the north side of our town square in early July.
Had Daisy not arrived to weaken among the pews, Reverend Most may not ever have had a chance to deliver that sermon the following Sunday; the seven men of the Board of Elders had marched up the aisle with the intention of demanding that the minister relinquish his collar right then and there. In the six months that the curly-headed twenty-nine-year-old minister had been at the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, the congregation had dropped by half. The church had hired Reverend Most to bring a young man’s vigor to the pulpit, but all it had gotten was a young man’s arrogance, and all he’d done was deny and stifle. He’d even, in one sermon, condemned the Miranda-and-Desiree books as “sick lullabies for our children, sung with the devil’s tongue.”
“My wife won’t even come to church with me anymore,” said Elder Dunleavy, his high-pitched, womanly voice scratched from years of puffing on cheap cigars every evening with a juice glass of happy-hour brandy. “She stays home to listen to the preachers on the AM radio.”
Reverend Most, in T-shirt and jeans, just glanced down at the elders from the altar, his hands clutching both sides of the blond-wood pulpit. He stepped from the pulpit, down from the altar, and past the old men, even giving a few of them an impolite and superior shove. The elders’ eyes followed after him, and that was when they saw a woman none of them had ever seen before weaving like a drunkard up the aisle.
A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don’t dance, they don’t sway. That’s not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God’s love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself. You don’t leap to your feet, your tongue wrapping around the rapid gibberish of glossolalia; ministers don’t slap your forehead to lift you, healed, from your wheelchair. There’s never rending of garments or gnashing of teeth, and no one’s ever dunked, wailing and baptized, into a country river.
So to have Daisy collapse against them, as battered and sweaty as a Baptist, her arms stretched out crucifixion-style, her eyes rolling back into her head, put some extra beats into the elderly hearts of the Board of Elders. Daisy’s strangeness was charismatic; her blood on their hands was beautiful. And, for the first time, if they could admit it to themselves, the men felt their religion. They learned in that moment to love the circus that worship can be. Finally they could save someone from something terrible.
· 17 ·
As Daisy arrived in the chapel, Abby Most, the minister’s wife, sat on pillows in the attic of the parish house, reading by the sunlight let in by a little half circle of window. She ate a pear, its juice sticky on her chin and fingers and spotting the pages of the Miranda-and-Desiree open in her lap: The Mermaid Ghost, the tenth book in the series.
Abby Most had listened to her husband’s recent sermon on the corrupting influence of the Miranda-and-Desirees with guilt, her face burning bright pink. She’d leaned forward so her hair would drop and hide her blushing. Mrs. Bledsoe of her book club—for which they’d recently discussed the ninth book, The Tattooed Spider—had sat only a few pews up, and she’d glanced back to cast a cranky look at Abby. The people of the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church detest me, Abby had thought, wringing her Kleenex to shreds in her fists, even more than they detest the reverend, because they could see, in Abby, a reasonable woman. How can a wife stomach just sitting idly by? they likely all wondered. But they simply didn’t know Sammy in the late hours, all his virulent bedtime prayers whispered away into his folded hands, releasing his worry and anxiety over the sinful so he could sleep well and fight the devil again in the daylight. And, easefully and kindly, he’d hold Abby in his arms, becoming just as lost as everyone else, just as blind in the dark.
The Miranda-and-Desiree condemnation had proven his most notorious. We’d found it offensive and disrespectful, and a few of us had even left in the middle of it. In our town, we felt almost motherly toward the books, as many of us had been playing some part in printing them ever since Doc had signed the contract, back with the ninth in the series.
“Why isn’t our factory printing the Bible?” the reverend had whined, indiscreetly, we’d thought. He’d held his own Bible up, shaking it evangelist-style. “This book, I happen to know, was printed in China. A godless country. The company that printed this book prints one million Bibles every month. If the world needs one million Bibles, then why can’t we be the ones printing them? Think of the pride we could take in our work. Think how exciting it would be for our tiny little town to take the Bible-making industry away from the communists. And we wouldn’t have to keep it secret. I say you should refuse to print the eleventh book. Strike. Sit down, stand up, whatever you have to do, but don’t be a cog in the machinery of evil.”
And it had seemed cruel to us that the minister should have chosen that particular Sunday to speak out against the Miranda-and-Desirees,