[phoebe]
She sat in a rocking-chair, reading the Old Testament by the flinching, pale light of a candle – the shadows contracting, a twist and hump, cradling the sparse light, reaching out, but never touching, never daring. The strict croak of the chair. The night hot and full of crickets. The sound of the freight train running on the outskirts of town, low and lonesome, like a mourning dove.
Phoebe was at peace. A strange, foreign feeling. She got it rarely, and usually while reading the words of the lord. There she sat. The words scuttling on the page in the poor light. The peace sat heavy on her. Her face muscles loosened. Psalms twenty-three on her lips and tasted in her mouth. Real, true words. Nothing manufactured or hollow about them. A nakedness about them; a faded, slithering voice out of eden.
“'The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.'”
She read it out loud.
“'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside still waters.'”
Phoebe looked up and thought about her conversation with Pastor Franklin. She had always had suspicions about him. A soulless, greedy man. Breathing lies from the pulpit, seeding them to the crowd. Didn't mean what he said, never did. Nervous at the serious things. His collar unbuttoned and his gut rubbing against his desk, clean, respectable hands folded together, a guilty weakness about him. Slimy, gutless man. His words like snake-oil. Fake, juiceless medicine.
“'He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake'”
So often she felt like the last woman standing in a hushed gathering of faceless salt pillars. The last one with the light of Christ carried in her hands. Delicate. Condensed. A frail, hungry thing resting in her palms. And there was no rest. Never any rest. She was the last champion holding the last candle. A glum light perched in the dark, a fidgeting bulb, pressed upon by the heavy, bony fingers of the earth and hell.
She looked back down at the page.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
I will fear no evil.
Phoebe felt a strange emotion drawing up through her chest, a hopeful grassfire. She touched the words with her fingertips. She closed her eyes. She rocked, rocked, rocked. For thou art with me. Warm words. Starlit words. She read the verse again.
Through the valley of the shadow of death.
Death and his speculation.
And with death all around her. Staring at her. A voiceless companion. A perfect gentleman, but pulling on her gently, a simple reminder, with the creak of her joints and the brittleness in her chest. His presence felt in every shadow and in every mirror. Gaping, childish grin. His teeth evenly spaced, his breath cold and carved in her bones, like initials carved in the belly of a tree. His fingers light and rustling as dead insects.
But God.
The Lord God was with her.
Always.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Eternity, warm and wet as a womb. And holding her. There she would be happy. There she would be free from the sins of the world. There was where she had always been. Away from where the sex and the glitz lit the horizon with crooked glamor. A purity in blood. A luminescence in the flesh. And twining on and on forever, through the valleys and the shadows and the death.
Phoebe realized that she had to do something. The town was broken and ill. She could feel the sin and the decay under her feet, in the land. She could feel the curse in the heat. She could see the shadows in her neighbors' faces. She could taste the sex and the lies in the air.
She had to do something.
A cleansing. A baptism.
She closed the bible. She stood and placed in on the chair. She lifted the candle and shone it one Charlotte's body, lying on the bed in front of her. So peaceful. Her purple eyelids rested and still. Her hands crossed across her chest, the face only slightly troubled by the absence of breath. The cyanide on her dead lips. Her veins blue and thick, like lines on a map.
Phoebe was sure she was happier now. She had done her a service.
Happier in death and in the shadows and in the valley, then she had ever been in her sins.
After gently adjusting Charlotte's dress, she picked up the little brown-glassed bottle of poison, put in her pocket. She walked out of the room, the floorboards bending and speaking under her steps.
A baptism.
The heat loitered.
[jerry]
Jerry was crossing the street when he heard the shouting start.
The establishments and aging houses lined up alongside the street, stared out towards the thin, poor horizon like old, toothless men sitting on a front porch and talking about the weather. Black, windowed eyes. Wood sagging and rotting slowly. Old dreams and faded arguments and tired love affairs plastered on their walls along with their flower-print paper and the glue. They observed the town and the people wordlessly, without judgment. Like ageless elders. They didn't even stir when the old whore was pushed and fell on her face in the middle of main street.
Jerry stopped and looked at the sound. Two women and three men standing over Charity, the old whore, lying in the dust. Cussing at her and throwing pebbles. The old whore cowering, hands up, crying and shaking and breathing webs of spit and snot. Her clothes were gray and patched. Her streaked hair hung down her face, sloppy and curled vainly. Her little, darting eyes were hard as fleas. She looked like she could have been pretty at one time, but now she was used and shucked and barely worked anymore, like an old, flat junkyard car. Banging and wheezing in the street. Screaming, “Stop, for God's sake! Come on! I dint do nothin. Jeez, you – oh!”
A slight, cold woman kicked her in the stomach. Jerry recognized her as Mrs. Winston. She was yelling and her fists were clumped and her arms were swinging in the air. Her delicate lady-lips were frothed with pink spit. Hair listless in the air. The other four started kicking the old whore, too.
“You godforsaken stain! You scummy sinner! You sit there in your dark house with your candy and your godlessness, rotting in damnation, luring our children away! Lazy, good for nothing! You take our savior's goodness and mercy and you treat it like triviality!”
She threw a stone at the woman's head and kicked her again.
Jerry stood there. A little shocked, a little thrilled, sort of like he was watching a dirty picture. Mrs. Winston's foot thrusting into the old whore's rubber fat and blood mixing with the dust and more people joining in. Laughing and swearing and throwing bottle caps and stones and trash. Some kind of riotous arena. The screams titillating the crowd. Jerry moved in closer. Someone ran passed him and knocked him over. He scraped the palms of his hands.
“Devilish harlot! Won't stand for no more of your godawful sin!”
Charity's face was bloody and shocked and stupid. Her mouth gaping open. Her voice rising as a dissonant solo from the blistering, churn of bodies and arms and righteousness. Jerry couldn't resist squeezing in between the bodies and watching her writhe and twist like a fat, overturned beetle. People either joining or watching, but mostly joining. Someone was shouting for the sheriff. Her screams were more earnest now. Guttural, bloodied. Condemnations in the air. People sweating and swearing, lashing out with their feet, a strange puppetry.
The sticky heat itching, irritating. Squatting there like a kid, disturbing a line of frantic ants with a stick.
And Phoebe Winston transformed into a prophetess. Chest thrust forward, hair in the wind, teeth rusty and screwed, face blotched. Her eyes spooked and rolling. Speaking in tongues. Wild, stiff gestures. Her whole body dancing in some kind of ancient strut and break and pull. Manipulating the crowd. Voodoo fingers. Holy, screeching voice. Damn the sinner! Deliver her up into the hands of Lucifer!
Jerry found himself laughing and drawing blood from Charity's nose with the heel of his sneaker.
A man's voice – Pastor Franklin's – suddenly behind him, “What the hell is going – ! Wha – Lord in heaven! Get away from her! Get the children! What are you people doing?”
He pulled Jerry out of the crowd by the waist and threw him into the dust. The smell of blood in the air, rouge on the face of the sky. Franklin pushed through the people and they pushed back. His collar and neat jacket flying, face purple and hot as a love potion. He swung a fist at Dawson, the town drunk, and broke his nose and pushed a woman into the street. “Get off of her! For the love of God, stop!”
They were beating a dead body. Blood sap in the street. The old whore swollen and bruised, like a tick pulled off of a dog. Tongue lolling. Mrs. Winston screaming. Someone punched Pastor Franklin in the gut and he folded under the fist. Feeble suddenly. A wilted man, pressed between the pages of the bible.
“Hypocrite!” Phoebe screamed and dove at Pastor Franklin, pushing him to the ground, clawing at his face and shirt with slender, soap-scrubbed fingers. He yelled, tried to push her off, beat at her skull with his fist, but she clung on, incensed by the blood. They squirmed like maggots. The crowd turned from the whore to the preacher. The thin, delicate splinter sound of breaking bones. A pounding migraine of heat and blood. Thick movements. Tearing off the Pastor's clothes and ripping out clumps of hair. His belly twisted and sunken in the sun, revealed like the face of a bride. His own nose stomped on and broken. Moaning, drinking his own blood. Phoebe Winston scrambling on top of him, hitting his face, and prophesying, and the crowd eating her words.
Jerry got to his feet and ran to the lip of grocery store where the clerk was watching through the curtains and pried up one of the big rocks under the porch. He hefted it up – heavy, heavy – and stumbled back to the circle of frenzied bodies, screaming, “Here, here! Hit him with this! Hit the bastard with this!”
Pushing through the crowd. Street and shoes muddy with blood. A sick circus, fingers sticky. He nudged through the crushing hips. There was Mrs. Winston. Spitting. Lips curled. Chin sharp. Eyes black as the witching hour. Incantation on her mouth.
“Here!” screamed Jerry. “Here!”
He dropped the rock.
It smashed against Pastor Franklin's skull.
His screams cut off, as if by the silencing of a conductor. Open, black mouth, red as a berrystain. Munched skull. Crunched skull. Phoebe triumphant and laughing and smiling and slowly stepping off of the body.
It's all yours.
The crowd churned and toiled around the bodies until Sheriff Mathis came and fired his gun in the air. When things quieted down, Phoebe Winston was nowhere to be found. The air was poison and secret, like a stolen kiss.
The pastor and the whore. Reposing and simple under the sun.
The heat hushed.
You might say 'Charity' after the first reference to her or something, unless you're set on repeating that specific phrase. It just seems so clunky to me. C: