stood from the table. Her cropped curls had already dried from the roaring blast of the stove. Sister Aimee had a voice like no other, and she used it now to recall the days of her famous Gospel Car, to illustrate the two-sided sword of progress, with its treacherous roads and broad highways to sin, undercut nonetheless with unswerving opportunities for faith.
“She was the first person to drive from one coast to the other,” Aunt Gloria told her. “Not to set a record or to gain for herself, but for the glory of Jesus. Your mother and I, we were touched by that car ourselves when we were girls. Moved by it, you might say, even though we never actually laid eyes on it.”
“The first woman, you mean. She was the first woman to drive across the country.”
To Annelise’s bafflement, Aunt Gloria had laid out a pair of her cousin’s overalls and a flannel work shirt after her bath, both heavily patched and smelling, like most everything in the house, of stove smoke and lamp oil. She had to roll the legs with cuffs the size of a bucket, and her slim form fairly swam in them otherwise. With her short hair, Annelise knew that from any distance, she must surely look more boy than girl.
“That’s right. The first woman.” Aunt Gloria held her hands over the hot plate of the stove. The massive Angelus Temple pipe organ had started up behind Sister’s voice and, in a moment of simultaneous fadeaway and crescendo, replaced it altogether. “People accuse her of theatrics or sensation. But how do you question the results? She’s healed thousands. And saved probably millions.”
She rubbed her hands over the heat, and Annelise realized that despite the kitchen’s swelter, her mother’s sister was actually cold. Something else struck her: Aunt Gloria was not so old as she appeared, although she may well have been exactly as frail. Though her hair had years ago turned snowflake white, she was younger than Annelise’s mother, herself just barely forty and though blonde-headed, a ringer for Myrna Loy.
The pipe organ faded out in turn and the Angelus Temple choir started in. Annelise knew the song well—one of Sister’s originals called “I Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve.” Sister sang lead. Annelise gave up hope of hearing any news out of Hawaii. She took the pail and went out to the yard.
She walked off the porch and around the side of the house to the well pump and its concrete pad. She heard that odd weather vane, humming and humming at the ridge of the roof.
She’d already fetched one bucket earlier, to replenish the galvanized water dispenser in a corner of the kitchen. She noticed then that this side of the house, unlike the whitewashed front, was more weather-beaten, with paint peeling like sunburned skin and bare gray siding showing through in patches and streaks. But the pump handle levered and plunged with little more than a squeak, and she could see where grease had been applied to the joints and shaft not long before.
Annelise had always had a vague notion of Gloria’s health troubles. Blinding headaches since she was a girl, problems with her back and hips. A near-deadly bout with the Spanish flu at age eighteen that, among other lingering effects, turned her hair permanently the color of raw cotton.
Her sister, Annelise’s mother, was by contrast a study in Teutonic vigor, throwing herself tirelessly at luncheons and causes and committees and hardly seeming to sleep. Annelise worked the lever and watched the gush of water splash into the pail and considered with some irritation that under different circumstances, her mother would herself have made quite a distance flier, at least so far as general constitution went.
It was common family knowledge that Aunt Gloria had always been the frail one. The sisters were still close, in a fashion, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. They did write back and forth and spoke by telephone every month or so, always on a Sunday afternoon and no doubt, it occurred to Annelise only now, when Aunt Gloria went to Big Coulee for church and thus had available service.
So how on earth could the Philco radio work? Kerosene lamps and a wood-burning stove, although now that she thought about it, a single bare bulb did hang from the kitchen ceiling. Annelise finished filling the pail and left it beneath the pump. She marched in Houston’s overalls around the back of the house.
She faintly heard the pulse of the song again from indoors, the lyrics jingling in her head by familiarity more than anything truly audible through the walls.
You can’t get to heaven in a rocking chair
The Lord won’t have any lazy folks there . . .
The outhouse stood a little way off, amid a cluster of thorn-studded shrubbery. Earlier when she made her first inglorious trip to the thing, an enormous cock pheasant erupted out of the brush like a Chinese rocket, just about the time she mustered the resolve to reach for the door. She’d practically wet herself then, and the memory now made the pressure in her bladder balloon yet again. She ignored it and turned back to the house.
She looked out the lane to the county road. A weathered barn with a tremendous pitch to the roof sat fifty yards or so north and a little east of the house, with two horses in a fenced lot. A squat chicken hutch slouched nearer still, with maybe twenty hens and an enormous copper-colored rooster pecking about in the run. Not a power pole anywhere, and no lines to the house from any direction. An island unto itself. She went back for the pail.
The cold breeze had fallen off completely and the hum of the blades above the ridge of the roof fell, too. The sound of the radio carried on.
Oh some of these mornings bright and fair,
I’ll don my wings and fly the air . . .
She stopped so abruptly the pail sloshed. She stood there with water on Houston’s overalls, water on his cast-off galoshes—stood there with her eyes clamped shut. She’d forgotten all about that line, and had she still believed in God, she would’ve taken it as a slap. She held the dripping pail against her leg until the song ended.
She opened her eyes again, stared at the sky, with its powdered late-morning haze. The moon was still up over the long bench east of the farm, small and white and barely a ghost.
The rooster crowed in his run, and she watched him chase down and pin a darting hen. He flapped atop her and went into a sort of brief if somewhat violent electric spasm, then hopped off and puffed up and preened. The hen shook dust in a burst from her plumage and went casually back to pecking. Annelise collected herself and stepped to the porch.
She set the pail by the door and went to free a foot from its rubber boot.
“Keep it on,” Gloria told her. She moved away from the stove and took a scarf from a hook by the door. She wrapped her head and ears and eased into a chair. “Hand me those other galoshes. Please.”
Annelise looked down and saw what she’d taken earlier for a child’s pair of rubber rain boots, mud- and manure-flecked but much smaller than the ones she herself now wore. She stayed on the floor mat and stretched to pass them over.
“Got chickens to feed now. Horses. A few other chores. Lord won’t have any lazy folks.”
“Like the song says.”
“Just like the song says. I’m glad you paid attention.”
Annelise looked up at the bulb dangling from its wire in the ceiling and not aglow at the moment. “How exactly does the radio play? A battery or something?”
Aunt Gloria beamed at her spattered galoshes. With her house slippers dropped away, her feet appeared tiny. “That Houston of mine. That’s his doing.” She slipped a foot into a boot, easy as a silk slipper. “Uncle’s too, but Houston—that boy’s a wizard. Three years ago, when he was just little.”
She tugged on the other boot and creaked around in the chair to look at the squat Philco on the table. Sister’s voice had begun to garble, popping and snapping with static and suffering bursts of interference from another broadcast, what sounded like Benny Goodman or the Dorseys, Annelise couldn’t quite tell from the snippets. Gloria half stood and gripped the edge of the table with one hand, reached across and moved the tuner.
Benny Goodman, loud and clear. “Moonglow,” a song Annelise