in every way, was tiny and preternaturally cute. She looked twenty-five, if that, though she was actually thirty-eight. Her face resembled a child’s, with darting, bright blue eyes; her hands were so incessantly busy they seemed to have separate agendas. Those who met her for the first time, especially in the company of her sister, often found themselves later in the day reminiscing about collector dolls—the kind that are too expensive to actually play with. Her hair sprang out of her head in curls so thick and tumultuous that, after being cut and falling to the floor, they bounced.
Most members of the Words Friends of Jesus Church assumed Olivia’s youthful appearance had something to do with having been cared for all her life. Born into a tightly knit, protective family, the cherished invalid had been passed from one relative to another. The stress of adulthood had never caught up to her, so she had naturally remained young in appearance.
In a moment of weakness, Violet had once told this to Olivia—why she looked so young—and regretted it immediately afterwards. Olivia’s reaction was so vehement and sustained that it seemed they would never get over it. She refused to eat and stopped talking altogether. For weeks, Violet found small pieces of colored paper, neatly folded and placed in the kitchen and bathroom drawers, under cushions, in the refrigerator, with carefully written quotations from Scripture, in ink.
“He looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” Mark 3:5.
“Judge not that ye be not judged” Matt. 7:1.
The pains in Violet’s chest returned, and she was reminded that at the first opportunity she and Olivia needed to have a talk. She needed to explain that it was time to begin thinking about other arrangements. She needed to guide Olivia firmly through a realistic assessment of her own situation, to remind her that many years separated them; her older sister’s health was now failing and some changes were in order.
But the opportunity seemed never to arrive, partly, Violet suspected, because she dreaded the encounter. Talking to Olivia, about anything, usually brought out one of Violet’s shortcomings: she could rarely say what she meant, or at least what she said was often not heard in the right way. Things perfectly understood in her mind came out jumbled. Olivia, on the other hand, had the gift of speaking clearly and authoritatively on practically any subject, and could run right over most people with her talking. Her uncompromising spirit flowed seamlessly into language. Despite the diminutive size of her vocal organs, her voice resonated in an astonishingly deep, full, and commanding register, imparting to her words a gravity-based sense of importance, even when they weren’t important at all.
So Violet tried to avoid thinking about her problem. But now the subject of death and its inevitability was in the air. A funeral had been scheduled for Thursday afternoon—one day away—and the basement in the Words Friends of Jesus Church was in shambles. Late summer rains and a clogged eave spout had conspired to bring three inches of water running down the foundation wall, and even after the sump pump from the Words Repair Shop had removed the muddy liquid, the church smelled of mold. Cardboard boxes filled with quilting supplies and Sunday school materials rested on dark, sagging bottoms, gaping open in places like the mouths of dead fish. To make matters worse, following the first cleanup effort someone left the back door open. Dogs came down during the night, rifled through the pantry, and left a mess that pet lovers could never adequately describe.
Yet the need for everything to look its best had never been greater. The deceased had been a long-standing member of the community, with a large family. Many people, some of them new to the church, were likely to attend. As the senior member of the Food Committee, she had made the necessary calls to coordinate main dishes, salads, and desserts, but there was still much to do.
“Nothing is more important mostly than a funeral,” Violet said as they ate a noon lunch of soup and sandwiches. “The whole point of a person’s life—or the lack of a point if it’s more or less rounded—can’t help popping out at a funeral.” She wedged the last triangular bite of wheat bread, cucumber, mayonnaise, and lettuce into her mouth and chewed deliberately.
Olivia helped herself to another puddle of tomato soup. The ladle wobbled dangerously in her small hands, and tipping the liquid into her bowl summoned a wincing blink into her face. She eased back into the wheelchair and rested before picking up her spoon and beginning her comments.
“When the end comes—for whomever it comes—it is the duty of the church to hold them up and present them to God.”
Violet picked at the bread crumbs along the edge of her plate. “Funerals remind us that nothing ever for very long has ever lasted for very long ever and always things change.”
But Olivia would have the last word. For decades, she had accepted the burden of spiritual insight, devoted herself to assiduously reading Scripture, study, and prayer, eventually gaining the respect of and measured control over her immediate family. Deciding she had eaten enough after all, she abandoned her spoon and pushed away from the table several centimeters.
“Ecclesiastes twelve-fourteen,” she said. “‘For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’” Then she added, “A funeral, Vio, is our last chance to contribute to people’s lives before they step into the past.”
But as the sisters well knew, stepping into the past did not mean Gone, and the Brasso home offered as many walkways into that frozen zone as there were stars in the southern sky. Their white clap-board house provided a veritable launching pad into the past. Every book, chair, teapot, beveled windowpane, spring-wound clock, and door frame covered in darkening layers of varnish offered direct passage into a time somehow more established, meaningful, and real than the present moment.
At the end of one long, dusky hallway was a room; in the room was a small table near a window; on the table stood a framed photograph. The picture beneath the glass had yellowed until there was no visible image, only an oblong space of cloudy mustard colors. Yet Violet and Olivia would often stare fondly into it, contemplating the likeness it had once contained.
Happenings, friends, neighbors, relatives, and others who had long ceased filling their lungs with air had left indelible clues to finding their current hiding places, and anyone able to decipher them could at once begin solving the mystery of their seeming, habitual absence. The sisters were constantly surrounded by the presence of things not there.
This was equally true of the village of Words. Like the Brasso sisters themselves, Words attached more firmly to the past than to the present, and only tentatively engaged the future. Named for the surveyor who had first donated land for the village, Elias Words, the community had little to contribute to the modern world, having already forfeited all of its inhabitants who entertained a keen interest in actually being somewhere. Indeed, the only residual relevance of Words remained more a subjective secret than an objective fact—a secret collectively shared with other small towns throughout the world.
As three generations of rural people had migrated to cities like woodland creatures fleeing fire, the current denizens of Words remained stubbornly rooted in an outdated idea. Like people who refuse to update their wardrobes, they simply ignored all evidence that their manner of living had expired. Their fierce loyalties were often provoked but never progressed, and they clung to the particular, the vernacular, in the face of ever-encroaching generalities. Consequently, they were losing their habitat, and empty buildings accumulated—somber, withered monuments lacking inscriptions—memorializing a once-functioning cheese factory, school, post office, dry goods store, lumberyard, mill, grocery, furniture store, dress-maker, garage, wagon factory, implement dealer, and gas station.
The town stood in its own shadow of better times, when families depended on agriculture for their
