The red church (3 page)

His teeth were showing. Broad and blunt. Pressed together so tightly that his jaw trembled. Linda scooted along the edge of the table to her right. There was a knife on the counter, a skin of dried cheese dulling the flash of the blade. If she had to—

But David turned away, slumped, his shoulders quivering.

David never cried, at least not in front of her. But since he'd found the letters, he was doing a lot of things he'd never done before. Like drinking heavily. Like leaving her.

"Hon—" She caught herself. "David?"

His work boots drummed the floor as he strode away. He paused at the back door and turned, look-ing down at the letters in his hand. Tears had shim-mied down one side of his face, but his voice was quiet, resigned. "Archer McFall. Pretty funny. Who'd you put up to doing it?"

"Doing what?"

"We both know it ain't Archer, so quit lying. Is it one of your buddies from California?" Linda shook her head.
He doesn't understand. And I had hopes that he would join us.
"No, it's nobody."

"Nobody?
Nobody
who's been writing you letters while dumb-and-happy David Day runs a hammer and eats sawdust for ten hours a day, only
he
don't mind because he's got a wonderful family waiting at home each night waiting to shower him with love and bullshit?"

His bulk filled the door frame, blocking her view of the barn and the pasture beyond. The room dark-ened as a cloud passed over the sun. "I told you, it's not the way you think," she said.

"Sure. Archer McFall just happened to walk back into your life at the exact same time that you started to get the letters. That's a mighty big coincidence."

"This isn't about Archer or the Temple. It's about
us."

He flapped the letters again. "If it's about us, how come you didn't tell me about these?"

"I was going to."

"When? After hell finished freezing over?"

"When I thought you were ready to listen."

"You mean when I was ready to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. And get reeled into that mess the same as you. I thought you learned your lesson the last time."

The cloud passed, and the sun lit up the mottled spots on the window. She looked past them to the reddish square of the garden, at the little rows of green that were starting their seasonal push to the sky, then looked beyond to the wedge of mountains that kept North Carolina from slopping over into Tennessee. Two hundred acres of Gregg land, every inch of it stony and stained, every ash and birch and poplar stitched to her skin, every gallon of creek water running through her veins like blood. She was as old-family as anybody, and the old families be-longed to the McFalls.

"It's only letters," she said. "That doesn't mean I'm going back in."

"Why did you ever have to fall for it in the first place?"

"That was nearly twenty years ago. I was a different person then.
We
were different people."

"No,
you
were different. I'm still the same. Just a mountain hick who thinks that if you say your prayers and live right, then nobody can break you down. But I reckon I was wrong."

"You can't still blame me for that, can you?" But his eyes answered her question by becoming hard and narrow. "Don't you know how terrible I thought it was to be trapped here in Whispering Pines for-ever?

Stay around and squirt out seven kids with nothing to look forward to but the next growing sea-son? To be like my mother with her fingers as knobby as pea pods from all the canning she did? What kind of life is
that?"

"It's good enough for me. I didn't need to run off to California."

"I must have asked you a dozen times to come with me."

"And I asked you a dozen and one times to stay."

"You were just afraid you'd lose me."

He hung his head and shook it slowly. "I reckon I did," he said, barely above a whisper. "Only it took me this long to find out."

"The kids will be home soon," she said. "Ronnie's been looking forward to seeing you." He held up the letters again. "You're not going to drag them into this mess, are you? Because, so help me, if you do—"

The threat hung in the air like an ax.

"Archer's not like that." Linda said it as if she only half-believed her own words.

"You said the group broke up."

"I . . . Most of us left. I don't know. When they said he was dead, I—"

"He's dead. Now, the question is, who's trying to bring back
this
?" David held up one of the letters, more for effect than anything. Because Linda knew perfectly well what was on the letter. She could see the symbol from across the room, even though it was bunched into the top right cor-ner. It looked like one of those Egyptian symbols, only the cross was topped with two loops. Two suns. The Temple of the Two Suns.

Not that she needed to see it, because she was sure now that it had been seared into her brain, that its power had reached over years and across three thou-sand miles and through the thick white walls of her renewed faith in Jesus. Because, after all, there was only one true savior. And his name was Archer McFall.

If only David would open his heart. Sure, he'd been born with Baptist blood, he'd been dipped in the river below the red church so that his sins would be washed away, he'd given his ten percent, but there was so much more to faith than the rituals and scrip-tures and prayers. Her own heart was swelling again, budding, unfolding like a flower under a bright sun. No, under two suns. Twice the love. If only she could share that with David. But he wouldn't understand. He was as blinded by Jesus as everybody else was. David watched her carefully
,
waiting for her reaction. She swallowed her smile and let her face slacken.

"The Temple," he said in a sneer. "You promised you were over it. But I guess I'm the fool."

"He's not asking for money."

David laughed, a bitter sound. He rubbed his fore-head with his right hand. "Probably the only thing he's not asking for, whoever it is."

"Since you read the letters, you know exactly what he wants."

"Yeah." He held up one of the letters. " 'We've missed you, sister,' " he read.

"And that's all."

" 'There will come great trials, but we bathe in the light of faith.' " He shuffled to the next letter. " 'The stone is rolled away.' "

"Where's the love in that?" Linda was straining to show disinterest. David wasn't from one of the old families. She had been a fool to think Archer would accept him, anyway.

"Where's the love? Where's the
love?
Why, right there on the bottom, where it says 'Forever Yours, Archer McFall.' On every single one of them."

"Maybe he didn't die. Or maybe somebody started up the group again and is using his name. That's all it is. I don't care one way or another."

But I
do
care. I've always cared, even when you thought you and your Christian friends had "cured" me.
There was always a little room in my heart tucked away for nobody but Archer.
David's eyes had cleared a little as he sobered, but kept their bright ferocity. "You don't care so much that you didn't even bother to throw the letters away, huh?"

"Don't matter none to me."

"That so?" David started to crumple the letters into a ball.

Linda's mouth opened, and her arm reached out of its own accord.

David smiled, but it was a sick smile, the kind worn by a reluctant martyr. He crushed the paper into a hard wad of pulp and tossed it on the floor at her feet. "I seen him come around. Last week. Laid out of work just so I could hide up in the hills and watch the house. Just me and a six-pack. Mostly I was curi-ous if you were sending out any letters yourself."

"You bastard."

David licked his lips. "Is ten o'clock the regular meeting time?"

Linda felt the blood drain from her face. How much did he know?

"Got himself a Mercedes. I guess this 'cult' busi-ness pays pretty good."

"It wasn't—" Linda started.

David nodded. "I know. It wasn't Archer McFall. Then why don't you tell me who it really was?" Linda wondered how many times David had watched the house from the woods. Or if she could trust anything he said.

Trust. That was a good one.

David slowly approached her. She was like a deer frozen in the headlights of his hate. She looked down just as his boot flattened the wad of letters.

"How long?" he said, and his eyes were welling with tears again. As if the reservoir had been filling all his life and, finally full, now had to leak a little or bust.

"It's not like that." She looked again at the butcher knife on the counter, close to tears herself. He took another menacing step. "I wondered why you been acting strange lately. And why you ain't been up to going to church."

Linda grabbed a gulp of air and scooted from the table to the kitchen counter. David was close behind her and caught her when she spun. His hands were like steel hooks in her upper arms, holding her firmly but not squeezing hard enough to bruise.

She stared at his stranger's face with its wide eyes. She'd never noticed how deep the two creases on his forehead were. The hard planes of his cheeks were patched with stubble. He looked old, as if all his thirty-seven years had dog-piled him these last few weeks.

"Tell me who it is," he said.

She shuddered with the force of his grip. Those hands had touched her so tenderly in the night, had softly stroked her belly when she was pregnant with the boys, had tucked daisies behind her ears when they fooled around in the hayfield. But now they were cruel, the caresses forgotten, the passion in them of a different kind.

She turned her face away, afraid that he'd see the fear in her eyes. The knife was beside a bowl of melted ice cream, within reach. But David grabbed her chin and twisted her eyes back to his. Archer had warned her what the price of belief would be. Persecution. Pain. The loss of everything human. She could hear Archer's voice now, pouring from the geysers of her heart.
There will come great
trials. And great sacrifices. Because sacrifice is the currency of God.

But the reward was greater than the sacrifice. Be-lief paid back a hundredfold. Devotion now brought Archer's steadfast love unto the fourth generation. Surrendering to him meant that her offspring would reap the harvest. She had been telling herself that ever since Archer and the Temple of the Two Suns reclaimed her heart. And she reminded herself now, locked in David's grip.

He'd never hurt her before. But Archer said those who didn't understand always fell back on violence, because violence was the way of their God. That was why the world had to end. From the ashes of their heavenfire would come—

"Who
is
it?" he asked.

She grunted through her clenched teeth. David relaxed his grip until her mouth could move. "Ahh—

Archer."

"Archer. Don't lie to me, damn it." He clamped his fingers tight again. She fumbled with her left hand, running it along the edge of the counter. She felt the cool rim of the bowl. If only she could keep him talking. "It is. And he doesn't want me . . . that way."

"It can't be Archer."

"He's come back."

David choked on a laugh. "The second coming. They really
do
have you again, don't they?"

"No, I meant he's come back to Whispering Pines." Her hand went around the bowl and touched wood. Her fingers crawled along the knife's handle. Archer said sometimes you had to fight fire with fire, even if it meant descending down to their level. Even if it was a sin.

"You said he was
dead."

"They said ... I thought ... I never saw his body."

"It's not Archer."

"It
is
. You know I'd never cheat on you."

He released her arm with his left hand and drew his arm back. He was going to hit her. She snatched at the butcher knife, then had it in her palm, her fingers around it, and all the old memories flooded back, all the energy and power and purity that Archer promised and delivered. She raised the knife. David saw it and stepped away easily. The blade sliced the air a foot from his face. He lurched for-ward and caught her wrist on the downstroke. The knife clattered to the floor.

They both looked at it. Silence crowded the room like death crowded a coffin. A chicken clucked out in the barnyard. Some-where over the hill, in the direction of the Potter farm, a hound dog let out one brassy howl. A tractor engine murmured in the far distance. The clock in the living room ticked six times, seven, eight. David reached out with the toe of his boot and kicked the knife into the corner.

He exhaled, deflating his rage. "So it's come to this."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Is that what they preach? Stabbing your own hus-band?"

"I . . . you scared me." The tears erupted from her eyes even as David's tears dried up, probably for good. "I thought you were going to hit me."

"Yeah." He was calm again, walking dead, a man who wouldn't harm a fly. "I guess you never could trust me, could you? Not the way you could trust them."

"I didn't lie to you."

"Which time?"

Archer was right. Pain was a steep price. Faith re-quired sacrifice. "When we got married, and I said I was through. I believed it then."