he was any use nipping it in the bud, God love him. The sheriff’s best guess was the car actually came straight from his own shop that night. But your uncle Roy could snore his way through the Rapture itself. One of these days he’ll wake up already in glory, never even know how he got there.
“Good Lord chose to preserve him, though. Houston, I mean. Not a scratch on him, broken window and all. Like I said, the Lord has big plans.”
This time Annelise actually thought about stopping herself. But her stinger had already risen. “Maybe he’ll fly Bibles. To the children, in Africa?”
Aunt Gloria smiled again. “You never do know. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.” She looked at Annelise dead-on now, and she held her gaze good and hard. “Part of me thinks that if God wanted us to fly, He’d have given us feathers. But I also know you can’t stop progress, and I’m not totally ignorant, regardless of how things around here might seem. Or how you may be inclined to think of me. Heavens, Orville and Wilbur Wright were a minister’s sons. Did you know that?”
Annelise admitted she did not.
“But you did know Sister drove an automobile across the entire country when hardly anyone had. So a car can be, well, stolen by that boy of mine and used to pull a glider in the middle of the night, or a car can be a vehicle for the work of the Lord. Same with an airplane, I should imagine. Sister’s been in one of those, too. Did you know that?”
“The Heavenly Aeroplane,” said Annelise.
“The very one. Your mother did her job, I should say. That’s a famous sermon, of course.”
And an old one, from ten or twelve years back. Annelise had been a little girl the first time she’d heard it. Sister Aimee had chartered a ship to get from one revival to another, and in the usual fashion turned the departure into a publicity spectacle, only to crash and burst into flames on the runway. She got out unscathed and promptly, in the usual fashion, boarded a second plane that flew off without a hitch.
And in the usual fashion, she turned the incident into a sermon the following Sunday. “One plane piloted by the devil,” Annelise remembered, “the other piloted by God.”
“Gives me hope.”
“The Heavenly Aeroplane?”
“No, child. Your mother. She did her job.”
Annelise remembered as well an entirely different spectacle, from just about the same time as the famous sermon. Aimee Semple McPherson had vanished while swimming off a Los Angeles beach. Initially feared drowned, she did eventually resurface—but weeks later and a thousand miles away, dragging herself out of the Mexican desert with claims she’d been chloroformed, spirited away, and held for ransom in a Sonoran hovel.
Meanwhile, critics of religion in general, and Sister’s many ministerial rivals in particular, mounted a sort of strange-bedfellows’ assault on the entire tale. She faced accusations of everything from staging an elaborate publicity stunt to conducting a secret affair with her married radio technician.
To her most ardent followers, the outcry and insinuations were little more than the devil’s usual sabotage of an otherwise righteous Christian soldier. Annelise’s mother, for example, had never wavered in her allegiance, although Annelise herself had long ago learned to use the whole flap as her own sort of sabotage, the surest bomb to send her mother writhing and clawing for defensive ground.
Because even though Sister not only survived a grand jury inquiry but used it, in the usual fashion, to her advantage, no actual evidence ever surfaced to bolster the kidnapping story. Worse, the rumors of her dalliance with the radio man remained neither proven nor disproven—and as it turned out, he’d gone conspicuously missing himself during the same span of time. Annelise wasn’t afraid to wield any of it.
Until now, when she was supposed to be choosing battles. Much as she hated to, she forced herself to avert her eyes from her aunt’s, forced herself to look at the dark bulb in the ceiling and the milk crates on the wall and finally down at the ridiculous cuffs in her overalls. Aunt Gloria may as well have read her mind.
“She never was one of the lazy folks. Your mother, I mean. Energy to rival Sister’s, if that’s possible. That God-given fire, you know. Lord, I wish I had half of it.
“That may be Sister’s greatest gift, actually. You can smother a lot, even the plain truth now and again, but a fire like that? That can’t be damped down. Not by any slandering panel of men, anyway.” Annelise could feel her aunt’s eyes upon her. “Although plenty enough have tried.”
Annelise finally made eye contact, for the briefest moment only, but long enough to catch a clear challenge in Aunt Gloria’s gaze. She shifted her eyes back to the window, watched the daylight sparkle and flash on the bright plumage of another pheasant pecking at the edge of the trees. A handful of much plainer birds pecked in the same fashion, all mottled dun feathering, no white ringneck and no brilliant red comb around the eye. Hens, she realized. She said, “I remember. I live there.”
“Oldest trick there is, with men. Especially the sanctimonious ones. Fastest way to kill a woman is by tarnishing her reputation. Throw judgment at her, bring judgment on her. That’s a thing you need to remember.”
“Well,” said Annelise finally, “that’s no doubt true. But in my experience, some of the worst judges of women tend to be other women.”
Now Aunt Gloria said nothing, and Annelise waited in the rising tick of the stove. She looked back from the window and the pheasants and saw that her aunt no longer glared at her, was not in fact watching her at all.
Aunt Gloria had her head bowed. She pressed hard at her eyes with a finger and thumb.
“We need to get chores done,” she said. “I’ve got a headache coming.”
6
“Cy’s hard to read, always has been. Cotter pin.”
Huck shook the hubcap like a gold pan, watched the nuts and washers roll around and reshuffle until the pin revealed itself. He plucked it out.
Pop leaned in under the hood.
Afternoon was nearly gone, the body hauled in from the river and a Billings newsman already back to the city with his scoop. Huck and Raleigh stood to get their names and pictures in the paper, but the sheriff had seemed downright sour about the whole business.
Pop had returned from the ranch and barely determined that neither Huck nor old Mr. Neuman’s rattletrap was anywhere to be found before Cy Gleason roared in waving his arms about a gunshot cadaver, and why in the hell weren’t those damn kids in school in the first place, and so on.
“You’ll have to log some time in the classroom now, I’ll tell you what,” Pop told him. He’d pulled the linkage apart, rethreaded a stripped keeper, and about had it all together again.
“We thought we were getting on his good side,” said Huck. The REO sat half in and half out of the shop, and it was colder inside at the moment than in the lean yellow sunlight beyond the bay door. He could feel the watch in his pocket, and all he wanted to do was put a fire in the stove and build wing ribs. “Maybe should’ve just left the thing to wash down the dern river. Saved ourselves the trouble.”
“No, you did the right thing, and Cy knows it. He’s a classical hard-ass, but put yourself in his position.
