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THAT EVENING IRENIE SCRAPED THE LEAVINGS FROM the dishes and promised herself to do it. There was no good in waiting. She didn’t even have to mention Mrs. Furman.
Brodis was leaning against the back of his chair, a penny already gripped between his thumb and index finger, now tapping absently against the tabletop. For years, he’d been paying Matthew a cent for each passage, though she and he both knew it wasn’t the money that mattered. It was the ceremony the boy wanted, Brodis taking the coin from the glass jar, his hand holding Matthew’s while the other pressed the penny into the boy’s palm, Brodis peering all solemn into his son’s face.
Good job.
This evening her husband seemed relaxed. He was even humming, tapping and humming. Then out of nowhere his mind seemed to circle back to something he’d forgot to be curious about. But his question was loose. “What did you and that agent talk about yesterday?” From the sound of his voice, he hadn’t even turned around.
Irenie stopped scraping plates. Then, before she had time to make a plan, the answer slid right out of her. “Matthew.” As if she’d been telling fibs all her life. “We talked about Matthew.”
Her son yanked his head in her direction, waiting for more.
“She said you were one of the most intelligent boys she’d ever met.”
Did her son really and truly straighten or was it something she couldn’t help but imagine? Either way it was a great new pleasure, this ability to bequeath to him a stranger’s admiring words.
Brodis grunted. “We didn’t need a outsider come from another state to tell us that.”
The boy flushed from his collarbone straight up to his hairline.
Brodis didn’t seem to notice. “Besides. It only struck her that way because it wasn’t what she expected to find here.” It was only one sentence, but somehow it made everything she’d tried to do smaller.
“You think she’s judging us.”
“I do. She may know how to teach reading and toothbrushing, but it don’t mean she knows how to live better than other people.”
And she might have said it then, fertile ground or no. But it didn’t seem fair to bring it up in front of Matthew. There was never a time when he wasn’t paying attention.
Brodis wasn’t finished. “And she’s going to want the same as everybody else from a distance, same as the missionaries or the census takers or the regulators or anyone else from the government. Every single one of them wants you to change in some way.”
As if he already knew what Irenie was going to ask. As if he were closing the door before she even got to the threshold. But there was still time. Wait until they’d both undressed and slid under the quilts. She could bring it to him then, like a gift she hoped he would receive. And he might. He might.
Now Matthew folded his arms behind his back and lowered his head, his eyes watching his father from beneath his lashes. His hair was so fair that his brows blazed white against the pink of his skin. And already he was tall. Already the floorboards jumped when he walked across the kitchen to lift the lid of the stew pot and ask what was for dinner.
Brodis cued him. “All right.”
Irenie turned back to the sink and reached for the next plate on the stack.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Her son’s voice was as slim as a girl’s, flinching when it stood before Brodis. Tonight it seemed especially thin. “If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
Her husband was still, a man who was never in a rush. He was preaching in three churches each month now, with tent revivals and camp meetings in the summer, and there were those who came specific to hear him. But a strange thing happened when a man reached the place he was trying to get. His thinking set, like a churn of milk gone to butter. It took the shape it was going to take, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that was going to change it short of melting or breaking into pieces either one. It was what it was. Only a man whose believing had hardened to certainty would turn in his wife’s cousin for making stump whiskey. Only a man who was sure of his place next to Jesus would have drawn a map and marked the location.
Matthew’s voice floated toward the ceiling boards above his father’s head. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again. And receive you unto myself.”
Brodis grunted the way a man did when the evidence in front of him confirmed everything he already thought. And when she’d said it was only a bit of liquor and that it was more hobby than business, he’d told her she’d do better to stay away from the issue on account of her moral judgment being clouded anymore.
That was years ago. It was the first time she’d noticed herself receding. Even then it was more like a recognition of something that’d been happening for a long time, a kind of drawback, the way a lake sank down in a dry spell, shrinking into itself bit by bit, and so slow that you didn’t notice it—until one day you looked up and there was your husband, the same beautiful and forthright man he’d always been, but so far away up the bank that his shape could be the shape of anyone. And him not noticing how wide the distance had become.
Instead she stayed alert among other women, hoping to hear that the shrinking wasn’t happening to her alone. But most of them talked about other people, not themselves. If they had a name for the hurt she felt, they weren’t telling it in public. Or maybe they didn’t have the energy to ask questions, whenever every bit of effort went to the feeding of mouths. And maybe one day they looked up to find their lives had fled them.
Matthew’s voice quavered and rushed. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” But something was different, as if some other task urged him forward, as if he’d already seen the new-built school. As if he knew too that every boy there would have read Treasure Island as many times as he had, that they too had stashed the book under their pillows for months before returning it late to the library. “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.”
Irenie turned from the sink.
Brodis seemed to sense a difference too because he nodded and said something that sounded like, “Getting too easy for you now.”
And perhaps it was that break from routine that gave their son permission to say it, the boy taking the opening that his father had given him. “Daddy?”
“What.” The word that ought to have ended on an upswing finished flat as a command.
“I have a question.” Her son looked bright and quick, the same way he’d looked whenever he’d discovered the arrowheads, impatient to show her the thing he’d spied half buried in the earth. And for a moment, she felt it too.
For a moment. But she’d already pre-planned the conversation about the school. She didn’t want to wait another day. She gave her son a hard look, but the boy’s attention was on his father.
Brodis’s tone was bored, as if he’d already heard every question there was to ask. “What is it.”
Her son seemed to straighten. “When he says no man cometh unto the Father except by me, that means that you got to have Jesus in order to get into Heaven, right?”
“Unh huh.”
Matthew’s eyes skipped from his father to the table and back. “What I don’t get is the part in Luke where the lawyer—.”
“What part in Luke?” Brodis’s voice quickened. Irenie couldn’t see his face, but she could guess the walled expression there.
“Chapter ten, I think twenty-five or twenty-six, where the lawyer asks him how to get eternal life.” Matthew’s eyes swept the table now, and Irenie willed him to change his mind. The desks in the new school would be golden with linseed oil varnish, their surfaces