Abandon

He closed the book when he thought she’d fallen asleep, but as he tried to extricate himself without waking her, Harriet’s eyes fluttered open and she said, “What happened to Miss Madsen?”

Stephen touched the back of his hand to the young girl’s face. It was soft and cool. He gently wound one of her pitch-black ringlets around his finger. “Molly was very sick,” he said.

“Like scarlet fever?”

“No, in her head. God told me to end her suffering, so I did.”

“How did you?”

“Do you know how a gun works?”

“They hurt you.”

“They can. I shot a bullet into the back of Molly’s head so she wouldn’t be sick or sad anymore.”

“Did it hurt her?”

“It killed her body, but her soul never felt a thing.”

“You gonna shoot me in my head so I go to Jesus?”

“No, Harriet. You’ve got a long and happy life ahead of you.”

She closed her eyes.

Stephen ran his fingers through her hair until she fell asleep.

Harriet awoke. The fire was dying, and though her feet were cold, she could still feel the warmth of the flames on her face. The sound that had roused her from the dream came again. She sat up on the lumpy mattress, looked over her shoulder at Mr. Cole’s bed in the corner against the wall. The preacher had buried his face into his pillow, and he made strange, sad sounds.

Harriet took her doll and got up from the mattress and walked over to his bedside. “Hey,” she said.

Mr. Cole lifted his head off the pillow. Even in the low light of the cabin, she could see the wetness on his face, knew what it was.

“What are you doing up?”

“I heard you bein sad. Is the wet because everyone’s gone?”

Stephen wiped his eyes and sat up against the wall, his long legs hanging off the bed, feet touching the freezing dirt floor.

Harriet climbed onto the mattress with him.

“I’m sad for a lot of reasons.”

“Like what reasons?”

“Well, mainly because God told me to do a very hard thing, something I didn’t think He was capable of. Or me, for that matter. But I did it, because we have to obey God. Always. And now, I um . . .” He wept again. “I feel like I don’t know Him anymore. Like He isn’t who I thought He was. And that’s fine. He’s perfect, whatever He is. That’s my failure, to make naïve assumptions about His nature.

“Then the dev il constantly tells me these lies, whispers in my ear that maybe it wasn’t God who spoke to me. That it was actually him, the evil one. Or that this horrible winter, this town, the thin air, the greed—all that took my mind from me.”

Harriet pried open the fingers of his right hand. “What’s that?”

In Stephen’s sweaty palm lay an ornate sterling silver hairpin. He let Harriet hold it. “It’s a hairpin,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A piece of jewelry a woman uses to hold up her hair.”

“Why you got one?”

He smiled. “Fair question. It belonged to a woman named Eleanor.”

“Was she your wife?”

“No.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, Eleanor isn’t dead. You know, you kind of favor her. She had black curls like yours. Dark eyes.”

“Did she give you this?”

“We were picnicking on the beach late one afternoon. This was ten years ago, second-worst day of my life. I had taken her there to tell her I couldn’t marry her.”

“Why?”

“Because God told me to go to divinity school instead. To spend my life serving Him. It was a windy day and the wind kept blowing her hair loose, so she pulled out her two hairpins and stuck them in the sand. I swiped one when she wasn’t looking. I suppose I shouldn’t have. You know how you hold Samantha at night, and she makes you feel better? Safer?”

The child nodded.

“That hairpin is my Samantha. When I hold it, on hard nights, lonely nights like this, it makes me remember things about Eleanor—her eyes, the way she smelled, the sound of her laugh. And it makes me sad, makes me miss her, but it also reminds me that I was a very happy man once.”

“You wish you stayed on the beach with Eleanor?”

Stephen gathered his hair and tied it up in a ponytail.

“No, Harriet, I don’t wish that, because that would be wanting something in conflict with God’s will. But I’ll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor’s finger instead.”

“Maybe you can still go back.”

“Eleanor’s married to a lawyer named Benjamin. They live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with four children, last I heard.”

Stephen lay back on his side, his head on the pillow, watching fire shadows move like black ghosts along the walls of his wretched cabin. He managed to cry softly this time, Harriet patting his back, telling him with the simplistic, heartfelt wisdom of a six-year-old that he would wake up in the morning feeling brand-new and happy again, how sometimes her daddy made her very sad and lonely and afraid, but that the feeling always passed, and that it would be the same way for him.

They slept in Stephen’s bed and neither woke until just before dawn, and only because the fire had gone out, turned the cabin cold.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Lana Hartman had gone without food and water for two full days. She lay against the cold rock floor, watching the sole light source burn in the middle of the cavern—a miner’s friend too weak to reach the gaunt and hollowed faces that lined the walls.

That first night locked in the mountain, the noise had been maddening—miners trying to beat the door down, quarreling, guns firing, children wailing. But most of the miners had left in search of water, and with the cavern quieted down, she now strained to hear the hushed voices—crying, prayers for deliverance, some praising God, others cursing Him, a pair of longhairs debating philosophy, theories concerning the soul after death.

Lana closed her eyes.

Sleep came in intermittent bursts of nightmare and fever dream. When she awoke, the thunder in her head had increased twofold, and Joss Maddox knelt beside her, stroking her hair. It took her a moment to latch onto Joss’s voice.

“. . . the worst of it. Wish Cole hadn’t met with a skull cracker. Love to hear him defend the behavior of his lovin God. He cares so much for us, this is one antigodlin f**kin way a showin it. You’re hurtin, and you ain’t done shit to deserve this hard f**kin deal. If I could do somethin for you, Lana, swear to holy Christ I would.