Maggie Rayburn had just come from eating birthday cake in the employees’ lunchroom when a document sitting in plain sight on her boss’s desk caught her eye. It was one o’clock, and a shaft of late-winter sun was stabbing through the plate-glass window behind the desk, blinding her enough so that at first she wasn’t sure exactly what was signified by the thick red border on the document’s cover or by the stern capital letters or the string of acronyms and slashes. Curiosity—was it a useful trait or a dangerous one? But who isn’t curious, she thought as she lifted the cover and peered inside: Discredit the doctors, she read. Flood the system with contradictory reports.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor, causing a shiver to prickle her neck. She glanced out the window and cocked her head to listen. It was getting brighter out—or no, it wasn’t really, but now and then a band of light cut through the pervasive cloud cover and illuminated the stretch of farmland she had been looking at for what seemed like a thousand years. It was gray and frozen now, but in a few more months it would burst with life, aided by the antlike tractors that crawled along the corn rows and the spindly wheeled irrigation contraption and, a few months later, the big green harvesting machines. And in the distance…
But she didn’t have time to think about the distance, where the corn gave way to wheat and where a phalanx of oil rigs were drilling into the sub-shelf of the Arkoma Basin, and beyond the oil rigs, Oklahoma City, and beyond that…
Beyond that, an entire world she had never seen.
The footsteps were coming closer, pausing—surely they belonged to Mr. Winslow, who would have finished up his meeting with the army brass by now—and anyway, there was never time. There were documents to be typed and filed, telephones to be answered, an outfit to be chosen for the special birthday dinner Lyle was planning for her—in secret, he thought, but Lyle was an open book. The more furtive his movements, the easier it was to guess what he was up to. All of the hours in the day were spoken for!
Unless she made time. Unless she announced: “Thursday evening you boys are on your own” and went to get her nails done or meet up with True and Misty for a girls’ night out.
But today something was different. Whatever it was caused Maggie’s heart to clench with a dangerous possibility, and before she knew what she was doing, the document was in her hands, and then it was tucked up inside the baggy sweater Lyle and Will had given her that morning for her birthday—Lyle, who had no fashion sense! Will, who wanted her to be presentable, but not the kind of mother his friends eyed from under the brims of their baseball caps. Where had the years gone? She might as well slap a used-up mother sign on her forehead if she was going to wear a sweater like that.
But as she stood in a stray shaft of February sunlight, watching the distant oil rigs pump their greasy dollars out of the ground, she wondered if certain seemingly indelible aspects of her life and personality might change. If Lyle might become her accomplice in whatever lay in wait for her as the earth made its lonely way around the sun and Will spun off into ever-farther orbits and she took another step along the Path to Becoming, which was something she had read about in a magazine she had bought herself as a birthday treat just, coincidentally, the day before.
She was thirty-nine. In another year she would be forty—she still had time. Time for what? was the obvious question, but like all the other big questions, it couldn’t be easily answered, if it could be answered at all. The author of the magazine article had stressed boldness of action in the process of becoming, so Maggie, who had been struck by the aptness of the advice for her stage in life, heard Mr. Winslow hesitate and reached for the document almost without thinking. Almost without realizing that the acronyms and slashes referred to control systems and compartments, which were divided into sub-control systems and sub-compartments as part of a security clearance system she knew about but didn’t completely understand. Almost without looking over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, but in the back of her mind picturing a letter she had received out of the blue several weeks before.
She moved some papers into the blank spot where the document had been before scurrying back to the secretarial bay, and at the end of the day she took it home with her and hid it away in the tall mahogany chest of drawers that had been handed down from her grandmother to her mother and from her mother to her, not daring to look beyond the cover with its red TOP SECRET banner for another week and a half, but now and then catching her own eye in the mirror that sat atop the old chest and seeing there—if not exactly boldness and youth, then not timidity and middle age either. She had never been timid, but maybe she was a little too predictable. Or a little too content. A little too willing to be what other people wanted her to be.
On the first Saturday in March, Lyle announced that he was going to drive Will to the tryouts for the baseball team just the way he had always driven him, but instead of quietly acquiescing, Will planted his feet on the speckled linoleum and said, “Thanks anyway, Dad, but now that I have my license, I can drive myself.”
“I’ll tag along,” said Lyle. “You know I like to watch.”
“Okay, Dad, okay. But after today, I drive myself.”
“Unless I need the truck,” said Lyle, winning a small battle in the unwinnable war of keeping Will from growing up. “Or maybe you happen to have a little money stashed away and can buy your own set of wheels.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” said Will, sounding just like his father as he said it. The money from his summer job had run out months before, and now that baseball season was starting up, there was no chance of working on the weekends for a little pocket cash.
Maggie listened to the sound of the tires spinning down the gravel driveway and out onto Old Oak Road before sitting down on a scrap of carpet she had hooked in what seemed like a previous lifetime. Her hands trembled as she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and tried to understand the difference between alpha particles, which persisted in the environment upon detonation, and gamma and neutron radiation, which quickly dissipated but were extremely destructive before that point. The document, which was called Countering Misconceptions, made the point in no uncertain terms that the weapons manufactured by the company she worked for had no unintended health effects on the people who made, transported, or deployed them. They were perfectly safe. People who said otherwise were misguided or politically motivated or, in some cases, mentally ill. Here were ten talking points on the subject along with four things to do if a colleague poked his nose where it didn’t belong.
That night, Maggie and Lyle lay with their arms around each other and talked about their son. “He’s all grown up,” said Lyle wistfully.
“Yes,” said Maggie. “He certainly is.”
“He’s a nice young man,” said Lyle. After a moment he added, “I think we’ve done a good job at being parents.”
This was not a new conversation, and always before, Maggie had gone to sleep feeling satisfied that she and Lyle had done their best. “He’s a fine-looking boy,” they would remark in the darkness of their bedroom, and occasionally one or the other of them would say, “He’s an old soul. It’s almost as if he’s been here before.”
But now Maggie sweated and tossed and thought about the world Will was entering, how filled it was with hidden dangers. She wondered what it would be like with Will gone off to college or wherever his own path led him—would she be able to escape the gravity of her role as wife and mother, or would she collapse into herself, becoming hard and dense and dying? She thought about the article on becoming, which stressed the need for agency, and about the letter from a person named Dolly, who had decided not to sit idly by, and about how any person could point to a handful of moments that changed everything: The first was when her father had slammed out the door for the last time. The second was the evening she had taken her sister’s turn at washing dishes so that she could wash them with Lyle, who up until then had been her brother’s friend. The third was the moment the footsteps paused, giving her an opportunity to take the document that now lay pulsing beneath the sweaters in her bottom drawer.
Dolly Jackson worked as a midwife at a women’s health clinic, and because of the clinic’s location near a large VA hospital, it attracted a lot of veterans and veterans’ wives. She loved her job despite the fact that her family had tried to dissuade her from entering the field. “You’re doing a doctor’s job, but you’re getting paid worse than a nurse,” they said when Dolly went home for Easter or Christmas.
It was true, but Dolly didn’t care. More and more women were joining the armed services, and she liked to think of herself as soldiering bravely on the battlefield of women’s rights. She also liked to think she was helping her boyfriend, Danny Joiner, who had enlisted in the army when his college scholarship ran out and whom she hoped someday to marry. Her work allowed some of the women to have their babies at home, where Dolly lit candles and soothed them with soft music. “I’d like to see a man go through this,” she’d whisper to the women, and when the babies plunged mewling from their mothers’ wombs, their first glimpse of the world was softly lit and rose scented and the first thing they heard were the violins and cymbals of Appalachian Spring if they were white babies and the Oklahoma City Gospel Choir if they were black. “It’s a beautiful world!” Dolly told the babies. “Me oh my, it’s a beautiful world!”
She taught the husbands and boyfriends how to help the women breathe, and then she wrapped the babies up in soft cotton blankets and placed them in their mothers’ arms. But lately, Dolly’s work had taken a frightening twist. Three babies in the past year had been born with horrendous defects. One had been born without a face. The head was the size of a grapefruit; its only feature was an open mouth, and out of the mouth a tumor protruded, purple as a plum and big as an orange. She deserved to go to hell for wishing the baby would die. She wished it would die quickly, before the mother saw it. What else could she wish for?
Over the next few days, she tried excising the thoughts as neatly as the pediatric surgeon had excised the tumor, but ugly images kept penetrating her resolve. She saw ripe fruit everywhere, even in her sleep. She sat bolt upright in bed with the words of the attending obstetrician ringing unbidden in her head: “Why in the world did you let the mother see it?” As if it were somehow her fault for wanting everything to be perfect in a world where nothing was.
I wish that baby would die, she had thought then, and she thought it again whenever the horrendous image of a baby with a head like an orange and a grapefruit stuck together popped onto the screen of her inner vision. It had been the worst moment of her life when, in the soft winking light of the candles, with Copeland’s magnificent crescendo evoking the thrust of new life from the earth, she had said to the mother, “We need to call the doctor,” and the mother had taken the baby in her arms and screamed and fainted, and only Dolly’s quick thinking had prevented the baby from falling to the floor.
The grandmother, who had been waiting in the next room, rushed in when she heard her daughter scream. “What’s going on here?” she shouted as the father grabbed at the soft bundle, and Dolly had allowed him to take it from her.
She was glad when the baby’s tiny weight was no longer in her grasp. She had hurried out of the room to use the telephone—to call the doctor, of course, but also to evade the family’s dawn of understanding. When she returned, she announced, “The doctor will be here in twenty minutes.” During those long minutes, Dolly didn’t know what else to say. She pretended to be busy with her bag of instruments and then with the mother and the blood pressure cuff, but she could tell that the family blamed her for the baby’s condition—not because it was her fault, but because there was no one else to blame.
Dolly wished the doctor would hurry. She knew he had a new car with a powerful engine, and she wished he would use it as aggressively that night as he used it to get to his weekend trysts in Norman or Shawnee. She wanted a second set of shoulders for the burden of blame the father and grandmother had handed over the way she had handed over the baby, but she wondered if they would feel the same way about the doctor, who hadn’t been complicit in the actual birth—and also, the doctor was a man. Dolly knew people preferred to blame women if there was a choice. For one thing, women were smaller and presented a lesser physical threat, and for another, the women she knew, herself included, were more than eager to blame themselves.
That had been the worst night of her life until the sunstruck October evening less than two months later when a baby had been born covered with a cracked white coating, a coating like a potter’s glaze, a powdery white crust crazed by deep black gashes where there should have been skin. Dolly could hold her tongue no longer. “Don’t we need to tell someone?” she had asked as carefully as she could. Long ago, she had learned which things would encourage the doctor to speak and which would cause him to say, “So you can see that I’m a busy man, with no time for idle chatter.” She kept her voice low, which made it hard to get the tone right. “About the birth defects, I mean. That’s two now, just eight weeks apart.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said the doctor, stroking the stethoscope that hung around his neck and giving the appearance of listening.
In a normal conversation, that’s when Dolly would have said something, and the conversation would have proceeded with the usual back-and-forth rhythm. But Dolly didn’t have normal conversations with the doctor, and she knew silence didn’t mean he was waiting for her to speak. He was merely pausing for effect. He was merely letting the tension build to make adequate space for his next pronouncement. But she liked it when he talked as if she wasn’t there. That was when she learned things.
“You’re thinking there are multiple factors to take into consideration—genetics, parental health and drug use, environmental toxins, both naturally occurring and man-made. And you can’t forget about random mutation and plain old bad luck. Not to mention that these women neglected to get adequate prenatal care.”
The doctor thrust the file he was holding at her, indicating the end of the discussion. But then he muttered, almost to himself, “And then there’s the concern about munitions safety. I’ve been sent an eye-opening report.”
That was the night Dolly started to look into things. That was when she started to listen extra carefully whenever the doctor was on the phone. But it wasn’t until January, when she heard about a baby that had been born with cleft ears and no eyes, that she started writing letters and emails. She wrote to politicians and to captains of industry and to the heads of research institutes, and when she didn’t receive any satisfactory replies from those people, she wrote to their secretaries and administrative assistants. She even put a classified notice in the newspaper, but six weeks had passed since then, and she had yet to receive even a single form letter in reply. Now she guessed she never would.
Will Rayburn slouched in front of the television set and watched the penguins string out single file across the ice. Each step transformed four or five inches of the snowy expanse in front of them into the snowy expanse behind as the sturdy bodies trudged across the ice floe, shuffling footstep after shuffling footstep, a testament to survival through unquestioning singleness of purpose. The scenery was bleak—gorgeous and deadly. The narrator announced that the temperature was eighty degrees below zero, that Antarctic winds rose regularly to one hundred miles per hour, and still the penguins put one stubby leg in front of the other as they made their way back to the ancestral birthplace—home! Will’s blue eyes watered to think of it. There was honor in conformity, beauty in unquestioning obedience to instinct, comfort in knowing what the next step was, even if it was genetically programmed and identical to the last million steps, which, he calculated in his head, was how many four-inch increments it was from the edge of the ice to the inland nesting ground.
A commercial for deodorant came on just as his mother entered the room. “Are you crying?” she asked. “What are you crying for?”
“Just something in my eye,” said Will without looking up. It certainly wasn’t because he, too, struggled with hormonally induced odor or because neither of his parents had thought to clue him in about bodily changes in general or about the difference between antiperspirant and deodorant in particular, both of which it appeared he needed, or because Tula Santos had turned him down that afternoon when he’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask her out.
“Here, let me see.”
“No, no, it’s gone now,” said Will, batting her hand away and sinking farther into the shapeless cushions of the couch.
“Well, you can’t sit in front of the television all day. Don’t you have homework?”
“Okay, okay,” said Will, hoping she would leave the room. He liked to be alone. He liked to think of himself as coming from and going nowhere—untethered, unaffiliated, even unnamed. But he couldn’t figure out whether conformity or nonconformity was what he wanted. Of course he wanted to be an individual, of course he wanted to do something no human being had ever before done, but he also wanted to fit in. He wanted to merge with something bigger than himself, to be an integral part of something transformative and grand, though he also wanted to be completely recognizable and unique in case Tula ever looked in his direction and said “Hey” in the breathy way Sammi Green said “Hey” to whichever of the football players she was dating at the time.
“Look, Will. This letter is addressed to you.”
His mother was going on about something from the state university she had found among the junk mail and bills, an envelope with his name on it—what did it have to do with him! The show was coming on again, a distant shot of a lone penguin, a tiny black speck against the ice. Just as the narrator, his voice heavy with inevitability, started to explain what happened to stragglers, his mother hit the off button and repeated, “You can’t sit here all day.” Then she went out of the room, leaving Will behind to ponder what lessons the penguin’s plight might hold for his own.
He couldn’t sit there all day.
He knew he couldn’t, but somehow he was powerless to move. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, he told himself the way his parents had always told him, as if his name conferred special powers, but all he could do was twitch his wrist in the direction of the remote control, which had fallen to the floor on top of the envelope from the university. Not that he had any doubt about what happened to stragglers and not that the next day wouldn’t find him going through the motions at school—not because of some burning desire to better himself, but because he didn’t know what else to do. Sitting on the worn corduroy couch, he was suddenly assailed by questions of free will and self-determination that couldn’t be easily answered, not by the narrator, who was clearly reading from a script, and not by people who willfully stepped out of line but who were still completely bound by convention—if not the convention of going along with everyone else, then the convention of reacting against them—the way they were all bound—or were they? Suddenly the answers to such questions seemed critical before Will was able even to consider taking the next step.
He sat for a while deciding what he would need to survive in the Antarctic, what he would take with him if he had only a sled dog and a sled to carry his gear, or if he had only snowshoes and a backpack and the clothes on his back—no dog, no sled, and certainly no GPS. He would take a down parka with a fur-lined hood, a box of matches, a compass, a pair of sturdy boots, a sharp knife in a leather sheath. He would take a magnifying glass because he liked magnifying things and because a full-sized microscope probably wouldn’t fit. Then, with a huge effort of will, he bent forward and stretched his right hand toward the remote control, clawing until he could just reach the edge of the envelope it had fallen on and slide it toward him, inch by inch, until both the remote and the envelope were cradled in his big outstretched hand.
As a young girl, Tula Santos had been able to convince herself that her lowly birth was an advantage, that her feet were firmly planted on the hard rock of existence instead of on unstable elevations, but at sixteen, she knew she was deluding herself. She now suspected that she had been invited to join the Order of the Rainbow for Girls more as an experiment or an act of charity than as a statement of equality, and that her mother’s employer, who was next in line for the position of Mother Advisor and who had no children of her own, thought of her as a project. “I am fortunate to be in a position to give back,” Mrs. August Winslow would proclaim whenever the spotlight shone on her silken shoulders and well-coiffed head. Tula knew that Mrs. Winslow wouldn’t have chosen a project who was ugly or blemished, which is why she spent her pocket money on lotions and oils—not out of vanity, as her friend Sammi Green did, but out of self-preservation, as a stay against the sucking circumstances of her birth.
It was her induction as a Rainbow Girl five years before that had first allowed Tula to see being fatherless as an advantage, for the Rainbow organization was meant to celebrate womanly virtues, and who was more womanly, a girl who spent her days in a house ruled by a man or a girl who had been raised solely by women?
Tula had often fantasized about an eighth bow station with white as its color. There were already stations for virtues like love and patriotism. The eighth station would stand for purity, which in Tula’s mind was the epitome of the female principle, unmixed with anything hard or protruding or loud. She had harbored this idea ever since the Virgin Mary had come to her in a dream, but she was waiting until the end-of-summer ceremony to bring it up. If all went well, her idea would be adopted for the all-assembly project, which would solidify her position as a leader and set her up for eventual election as a jewel officer. She was confident that her plan for establishing an eighth bow station would far surpass the offerings of the other girls, who came up with ambitious but predictable projects like sending clothing to remote corners of South America or tutoring people with skin even darker than Tula’s skin while they cooed over them and called them cute. One of the girls wanted to plant a garden of biblical herbs in a weedy patch of land behind the church, and Sammi Green talked about honoring the famous men of Red Bud with handmade plaques describing their heroic deeds.
“What about the women?” asked Tula.
“Of course I’ll honor the famous women too—if there are any,” said Sammi.
“Don’t forget Sandra Day O’Connor,” said Mrs. Winslow when Sammi bragged about how many influential men she knew. “She was the first female Supreme Court Justice, and once upon a time she was a Rainbow Girl too.”
“I’m talking about local heroes,” said Sammi. “They can be men or women, but they have to be from around here.”
Most of the proposals seemed derivative to Tula, while her own, which she kept secret even from Mrs. Winslow and her mother, had never been attempted before—never even thought of!—while still being in keeping with the spirit of the founding charter. Her idea would change the very structure of the order—or not really change it, but build on what was already there, making it better for future generations of Rainbow Girls and freeing them from their subjugation to men.
From the time she was a middle schooler, Tula had seen how Sammi and her friends curried favor with boys—some of them in a very direct and obvious way. Even Sammi, who was athletic and strong and mostly resistant to peer pressure, rolled the waistband of her skirt so that the slightest lifting breeze would have shown the edges of her panties if Sammi had worn the kind of panties Tula wore underneath the pleated skirts that even the updated version of the Rainbow Handbook said were supposed to come within two inches of the knees.
But Tula didn’t. Tula, who was modest inside and out, could only marvel as Sammi teased the boys by flexing her abdominal muscles and arching her back. Even when Tula stood alone in front of her full-length mirror, she couldn’t twitch in a way that made her skirt swing from side to side the way Sammi’s did, so she watched uneasily as the boys and girls paired off and wondered how their behavior fit with their avowed submission to a patriarchal religion. Tula herself had sworn fealty to the same God and Savior, but in her heart she revered the Virgin Mother above all other deities and saints. Who was more pure than Mary, the mother of Jesus? She knew from the stories her own mother told her when they lay together at night, unable to sleep because the full moon, which her mother said was male, was pulling at the female tides within them the way men had always pulled at women, causing the tides to shift the way women had always shifted—even physically fit women like Sammi shifted, women with rock-hard abdominal muscles and intelligence. They all shifted like the tide the minute a handsome man winked in their direction.
After such a night, it was a relief when the sun rose, restoring to earth the female principle of sunlight and, even Tula had to admit, fertility. When Tula had mentioned the gravitational effect of the male moon to her benefactress, Mrs. Winslow had smiled indulgently and said, “You have it backwards, darling. The moon is the female principle. It is we women who affect the tides of men!”
Tula was still trying to figure out which made more sense, but whichever it was, she knew she owed it to the Virgin Mother, who smiled down at her from the niche above her bed, to resist the male principle for as long as she could. So she said no when Will Rayburn asked her out. She said no out of principle, but she also said it because Will Rayburn scared her. Or it wasn’t really Will who scared her, it was the feeling of the tides within her shifting whenever Will walked by.
The cherry trees on Main Street were blooming big and pink when Maggie decided she could no longer continue in her current line of work. “You’ll lose your pension,” warned her friend Misty Mills, and True Cunningham added, “You don’t actually shoot the bullets, do you? Technically, you don’t even make them.”
“Bullets,” said Maggie as the three friends stepped from the cool aluminum shadow cast by the munitions plant onto the crazed asphalt surface of the parking lot. She stopped short of saying that she might have been able to make her peace with bullets, but the company they worked for produced everything from missile components to armor-piercing artillery shells, and the solid core of the shells was made of a toxic substance that had a half-life of four and a half billion years.
“We’re not the only ones making bombs,” said Misty. “We’re making bombs in a world where other people are making bombs. Do you really want to live in a country that doesn’t have them?”
“You don’t even work on the line—you work in the office,” put in True, but nothing anyone said would change her mind.
“Does that mean we won’t drive to work together anymore?” asked Lyle, and Maggie replied, “No.”
“No, we won’t drive together or no, that isn’t what it means?” asked Lyle.
“We won’t drive together anymore, Lyle. That’s the part that breaks my heart.”
When Lyle had lost his job at the prison, it was Maggie who persuaded him to apply for a job at the munitions plant, and for the past four years she had packed turkey and cheese sandwiches for Lyle and Will and turkey without cheese for herself, and then squeezed her knees against the truck’s gearshift until they dropped Will off at his school before continuing down the New Road, past the turnoff to the Choctaw Casino and along the New Road extension to the plant, but now she wondered how she could have been so glibly confident when she had said to Lyle, “Come work with me! You’ll know half the people there, and you won’t have to worry that an inmate will take you hostage if you make a mistake or turn your back.” Years before, there had been a riot at the prison, and people still talked about it as an ominous and continuing threat.
“What will you do?” asked Lyle, his eyes wide with love and regret as he and Maggie ate their last sad sandwiches in the munitions plant lunchroom, where they were constantly interrupted by people who stopped by their table to ask Maggie questions or offer advice.
“I’ll find a different job,” said Maggie with her old optimism, but it went without saying that her job perks and benefits would be hard to replace. In fifteen years, she had risen to the position of administrative assistant to Mr. August Winslow, civilian chief of operations, which gave her a far greater status than Lyle and their friends who worked in shipping or production. And if she were to stay on for another ten, she would get lifetime health care and a burnished wooden plaque.
“I guess you know that good jobs are hard to find,” said Lyle.
“I do,” Maggie replied.
“It seems like you’re giving up an awful lot.” But once Maggie had made her decision, she wouldn’t reconsider.
Lyle wasn’t the sort of person to ask “Why?” but that was the first word out of Will’s mouth when Maggie could no longer put off telling him about her plans.
Maggie was proud of her big, strapping son, who took in bits of information and then, when no one was expecting it, let them out again, rearranged. Like the time he asked Pastor Price if the identical Farley twins each had only half a soul and the time he asked if it was a sin to starve your children. “It’s not only a sin, it’s illegal,” said the pastor, which prompted Will to ask, “Then why is it also a sin and illegal for people without any money to steal?” The teachers in the lower school still talked about the day Will had surprised them by standing up at quiet time and asking if spilling seed was tantamount to murder. “Tantamount!” said the teacher gaily. “Now there’s a big word. Let’s all take out our dictionaries and look it up!”
“I’ve made my decision,” said Maggie, gently setting out the chipped rose-pattern dessert plates and a cinnamon raisin cake with drizzle icing. “I can’t pretend I don’t know what the bombs and bullets are used for. I can’t pretend innocent people aren’t getting killed.”
This led to a discussion of duty and if it was based on a person’s own imperfect sense of things or handed down by a greater authority.
“What you’re saying is that because a person can’t know everything, that person is obligated to do as he or she is told,” said Maggie.
But Will and Lyle insisted that wasn’t what they were saying.
“It’s just that each person is looking through a tiny peephole,” said Will, which was a reference to how, in years past, Lyle had taken his young son to look through the circular holes cut in the plywood barricade whenever there was a construction project in town.
“Two heads are better than one,” added Lyle.
“Is mine one of those heads?” asked Maggie. “Or is it everybody else but me? Anyway, I haven’t suddenly become a fanatic, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
But she didn’t tell them about the top-secret document she had taken from Mr. Winslow’s desk or about the letter from the Department of Defense she found and copied a few days later or about the book she had subsequently checked out of the library, which was called The Economics of Nuclear Waste and which made a connection between the waste disposal problem of nuclear energy facilities and the need of the munitions industry for cheap and lethal raw materials. She didn’t tell them how 40 percent of the dart-shaped bullet tips broke off before impact, causing secondary explosions and widespread dispersal of radioactive dust or about the Internet articles documenting the effects of radiation poisoning on unborn babies in Iraq or about the ones questioning whether their own drinking water supply was safe. Will was optimistic and she wanted him to stay that way, so she didn’t tell him that she sometimes wondered if the earth was the thing with a soul and if human beings were a boon to the planet or a curse.
“I love you too much to make a product designed to harm somebody else’s child,” she said as she cleared away the rest of the cake.
“Don’t make this about me,” said Will, getting up to do his homework. “Tell her, Dad. Tell her this has nothing to do with me.”
Maggie didn’t say, It’s always been about you, Will, ever since the day you were born, but she smiled to recall the day she and Lyle had brought Will home from the hospital in his blue-striped cap and how they had worried when he never cried. “Do you think it’s normal?” asked Lyle. Maggie replied that she wouldn’t have married Lyle if she’d thought he would father a normal son. “He’s going to do something good in this world,” she had said. “Maybe even something great.” But now it seemed to Maggie that it was unfair to pin the burden of her hopes and dreams on Will. Parents had a duty to lead by example, and that was all she was trying to do.
Two nights later, Maggie unintentionally let it slip to Lyle about the Iraqi babies, and Lyle must have let it slip to Pastor Price, because the pastor cornered her at Sunday coffee and exclaimed, “What’s this I hear about quitting your job?”
“I want to set a good example for Will,” said Maggie. “Besides, if I had to live my life over again, I wouldn’t want to regret my decisions—or worse, to feel ashamed.”
Rain was pelting the tall parish hall windows, and a flash of lightning made the bulbs in the sconces flicker as if God was trying to tell them something. Maggie was a believer, but she wasn’t the sort of person God spoke to, so she figured He must be communicating with Pastor Price.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the pastor said after Maggie had explained everything to him as well as she could. “I’ll support you any way I can, but monkeying about with definitions can lead a person seriously astray.”
Maggie didn’t think she had monkeyed about with anything unless it was Mr. Winslow’s files. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said, hoping old Mrs. Farnsworth would come forward with one of her questions about adultery and lust, but Mrs. F. was eyeing the donuts and eavesdropping while she patiently awaited her turn.
“Exactly!” said the pastor. “We run the risk of hubris whenever we think we understand.”
Even though he said “we,” Maggie knew he wasn’t talking about himself. Still, she thought it best to admit she understood very little and would be extra careful of hubris in the future, whatever that was.
“We run the risk of heeding false prophets,” said the pastor, and Maggie merely nodded her head and said she had to follow her heart.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Pastor Price said sternly, “but following your heart can be a tricky business, especially for a woman with a heart as big as yours.”
The next Sunday, the pastor and his wife Tiffany approached Maggie after services. “Lex Lexington told me one of his administrative assistants up at the prison is leaving,” said the pastor. “If you’re interested, I can put in a good word for you.”
“The prison!” Maggie didn’t like to think about the fortress filled with the nameless and forgotten where her father had worked when she was a child.
“If there’s one place on earth that needs someone like you, it’s that prison,” said Tiffany. “Besides, my Mothers of Mercy group is conducting an education outreach for the inmates, and we need a few dedicated people on the inside.”
“On the inside!” exclaimed Maggie. “That makes it sound so dangerous.”
“It’s one thing to avoid doing harm in this big old world,” said Tiffany. “But it’s quite another to do some good. That’s what the education outreach is all about. Believe me, that prison is just crying out for people like you.”
“Just so long as your expectations for what you can accomplish are modest,” said the pastor. “Don’t get me wrong—Tiffany can work miracles when she puts her mind to it. But if you set your expectations low enough, you won’t be disappointed.”
The pastor had a habit of saying “don’t get me wrong” the way Misty Mills said “no offense.” The phrase proved so useful to him that Maggie started using it herself. She said it when she went to collect her final paycheck and the payroll clerk said, “I hear you’re taking matters into your own hands.” She said it when Misty Mills called her high and mighty. And she said it when Mr. Winslow lectured her about patriotism and exploding weapons. “Why, they even talk about shrapnel bombs in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” he said. “They’re as American as apple pie.”
Even though he vowed that his growing church and weekly radio show wouldn’t change the way he looked at other people, Houston Price couldn’t deny that he sometimes felt a slight sense of superiority as he watched the solid citizens of Red Bud file into his church every Sunday morning. There was Garner Hicks, pressed and frayed and dying of cancer but hopeful of reprieve, just as they were all dying and hopeful. Behind Garner tiptoed Mrs. Farnsworth, iridescent in her polyester pants suit and squinting about for telltale clues of sexual indiscretion. Her eyes lit on Lily De Luca, who was all dolled up and ready to flirt if the opportunity arose, which, for Lily, it always did. There was the new baby Hollister, born out of wedlock but saved just the week before through the holy baptism of the Redeemer. Edging away from the baby and its mother was Tyler Hicks, who only came to church to snitch from the collection plate, and behind Tyler was Sammi Green, surpassingly sulky and adolescent until things got going and she started to stretch her hands up to heaven and shimmy mightily in a show of what God could do with bodily glory when he chose.
He had outdone himself in that regard when He created the pastor’s wife. Tiffany was the daughter of the largest landowner in the county, so marrying her had turned out to be as much an alliance as a love match. The union had led to the donation of the land the new church building was sitting on, the one condition being that Tiffany would participate in the design consultations and take charge of a healthy budget for good works. And if Tiffany had progressive ideas about the relationship between buildings and the earth, she also had progressive ideas about intimate relations, which more than made up for any architectural compromises the building committee had to make.
Before each service, Tiffany arranged a clean surplice on the back of a chair and set out the scented powder that kept the pastor’s feet from sweating. “Sealed with a kiss” was always the last thing she said before he walked out into the swoop-ceilinged nave, and thrusting her tongue in his mouth was always the last thing she did. She did it, they both agreed, in order to free his spirit from his body for the task ahead, and it always worked—if he could resist Tiffany, he could resist anything.
“Bless you my child,” he always said when she handed him his prayer book and leaned in for the freeing kiss, careful not to stand where people passing by the door to the sacristy could see them.
“Sealed with a kiss,” she always said, but sometimes instead of kissing him, she just gazed into his eyes as she put his fingers on her breast, right where the nipple poked through the lacy cloth of the undergarments she wore beneath her choir robe. All of that added spice to the weekday humdrum of his job: the marital spats he had to adjudicate, the patient explication of texts to people who wanted to use the Bible to prove this or disprove that, and the more delicate approach he needed when the town scions he depended on for his livelihood sought his support for their favorite political causes.
It was six minutes to ten on a bright spring morning, but now, instead of Tiffany rushing into the sacristy and apologizing for her tardiness, it was August Winslow who filled the doorway. Winslow, who was not only civilian director of the munitions plant and husband to the Woodford oil fields heiress, but also a senior member of the pastoral council, now came charging in demanding to talk about Maggie Rayburn and how a reporter from the Sentinel wanted to write a story about her. “I called the publisher and put a stop to it,” bellowed Winslow. “There’s no sense giving the woman a megaphone. There’s no sense giving all of my other employees ideas.”
“I hope you handled the reporter carefully,” said the pastor. “That kind of thing can backfire.”
“Of course I handled him carefully. It was the publisher’s nephew who apparently had the bright idea for the article, but I have no doubt we can count on the Fitches to do what’s right for the town.”
“I’ve already had a talk with the Rayburn woman,” said the pastor, who had come to rely on what Tiffany called his pre-game routine and who was sweating because things were sliding off track. According to the sunburst-shaped clock on the wall, there were less than five minutes left, and if the pastor was known for anything, it was for exploding through the curtain at exactly ten o’clock on a crescendo from the organ, just when the stage lighting went from an expectant blue to a pulsating blaze of silver magnificence, and once his lighting manager had surprised him with giant sparklers and another time with a crazy purple fog. His entrance was hardly the most important part of the service, but it pleased him when Tiffany said he got a ten for showmanship on top of his ten for execution.
Winslow was saying, “She’s a loose cannon. She worries me, to tell the truth.”
“She’s lost her way, but with a little help and understanding, she’ll be back on track before you know it.”
Back on track is where the pastor wanted to be. Three minutes to showtime, and his body was still fused to his spirit. His feet weren’t the only thing sweating. Even his tongue felt coated and thick.
“Excellent, excellent. But I was hoping you could talk to Fitch.”
Winslow showed no signs of leaving, so the pastor said, “Call me tomorrow. We can talk about it then.” Panic was gathering in his bowels in spite of the fact that another thing he was known for was what Tiffany called his grace under fire.
She must have been detained. The women of the parish were always coming up to her with ideas for the ladies’ outreach, and the men were always coming up to her because even standing next to Tiff was its own reward. With less than sixty seconds left, he’d have to oust all bodily concerns himself. He could do it—Tiffany hadn’t always been there to help him. They hadn’t even celebrated their three-year anniversary.
Winslow finally said, “Okay, okay,” and backed out the door, leaving the pastor with the troublesome notion that his talk with Maggie hadn’t seemed to resolve things. He had forty-five seconds to clear his mind. He closed his eyes. He kept a mental box for occasions like this. In his imagination, the box was made of inlaid precious materials like lapis lazuli and ivory and rare endangered woods from the Brazilian rain forest. Now he put his earthly concerns into the box so he could take them out again later. It was a beautiful box, but strong as steel, and once a worry had been locked inside, nothing could let it out again except the pastor himself. He was ready. The crescendo came. The flash of lights.
He didn’t remember August Winslow or Maggie Rayburn until that evening over hot compote and potpie. “What does it mean,” he asked his wife, “that some of my own parishioners have heard the Truth and rejected it? What does it say about them, but more importantly, what does it say about me?”
“Not everything is about you, baby,” said Tiffany, and she was right. Hubris was an occupational hazard, and the pastor vowed to guard against it. But first, he had to reconnect his body to his spirit, and he needed Tiffany for that.
It was the information age, but Lyle Rayburn had been left behind by it. He had dropped out of school just before his fifteenth birthday, which had left him with deep insecurities about his ability to know or understand.
“I won’t try to convince you,” Maggie told him. “I have my reasons, that’s all.”
Lyle was happy to let silence do the work of words, to stare open-mouthed through the windshield and express his injury by lingering at the Main Street intersection long after the light had changed and the cars behind them had started to honk. It was Will who piped up from where he was pressed against the passenger-side door. “If you really wanted to make a difference, Mom, you’d have to convince other people. That’s what they tell us in church. That we have to witness to other people if we want to be saved.”
“This isn’t about saving myself,” said Maggie. “This is about saving other people. This is about doing the right thing.”
“But what makes you right and everybody else wrong? What if other people know something you don’t?”
“Those are good questions. But if I had to have answers to everything, I’d never even get out of bed.”
“Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” asked Lyle over the efficient sound of the turn signal and the crunch of gravel under the tires as they made the final turn toward the high school. “We can’t afford to buy another car, and we’ll need one if you’re going off in some completely different direction every day.”
“I have the bicycle, and if I get the job at the prison, I can take the bus.”
“What if it rains?” Lyle wanted to know. And then he added gravely, “What if it snows?”
“I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” said Maggie.
“Well, don’t you think you should?” The closest Lyle ever came to getting angry was to suggest there was something that was not being done. He liked things to be squared away and he counted on Maggie to square them, even though he usually stopped short of assigning actual blame.
Lyle had known Maggie Sterling since before he had dropped out of school. He had been friends with her older brother and had taken to stopping by in the afternoons, not so much on the brother’s account or even on Maggie’s, but because of the rambling house where no shouting was allowed. “My mother is allergic to shouting,” Maggie’s brother told him. “It literally makes her sick.”
Lyle, who thought he might be allergic to shouting too, started going there regularly to escape his own household, which was so full of siblings and cousins that Lyle was never missed. He took to showing up at dinnertime and standing at the screen door until the old flop-eared dog awoke from its nap and barked at him before going back to sleep or until one of the four Sterling children noticed him and let him in. He was careful not to let the screen door slam behind him, for when he did, Maggie’s mother would scurry from the quiet depths of the house with an alarmed expression on her face and ask in a hoarse whisper what all the commotion was about.
Over the years, Lyle came to associate the comfortable chairs and steaming bowls of spaghetti with Maggie, and one day, instead of going to sit on the corner chair in the TV room after dinner, he had gone into the kitchen to help with the dishes, and Maggie had pushed her sister out of the way and said, “Isn’t it your night to clear?” Their hands had bumped under the soapy water, and Maggie had splashed some bubbles into Lyle’s hair. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” she had asked him.
“Niagara Falls,” replied Lyle without hesitation. He had heard about a man going over the falls inside a rubber ball named the Plunge-O-Sphere. It seemed like a crazy thing to do, but also brave, and the idea of doing something like that on purpose filled him with curiosity and dread. “What about you?” he asked Maggie.
“The Grand Canyon,” said Maggie. “I want to see what’s inside the earth—what you’d find if you dug deep down.”
“I hear you can ride donkeys all the way to the bottom,” said Lyle.
“Donkeys!” cried Maggie, her eyes sparkling as if Lyle had said something shocking or funny or wise—he had never been sure which, but his heart soared to know he could have such an effect on her.
The answers to the travel game had changed over the years, and now it was Will who was apt to choose somewhere dangerous or impossible, while Maggie and Lyle were drawn to major cities and beach resorts. Now and then Lyle would catch Maggie’s eye and say, “Where would you go?” not because he wanted an answer, but to remind her about how the game had started and about everything that had happened since. Six months after they first washed dishes together, Lyle dropped to his knees during a commercial break to ask her to marry him, and right in front of her gaping family, she said yes.
When they reached the school, Will clambered out of the car, grabbing his backpack and sack lunch out of the truck bed as he did five days out of seven. Also as usual, Maggie blew him a kiss good-bye and Will ignored her, hoisting the pack to his shoulders and hunching slightly under its weight. Now that Will had been safely delivered and he didn’t have to concentrate so hard on the road, Lyle was able to glance across at Maggie, who still could melt his heart with a look.
“Oh, Lyle!” cried Maggie. “It’s just that…” But instead of finishing her thought, she laughed, filling Lyle with the hope that his wife had been playing a practical joke on him or that she saw something he didn’t see, and that if Lyle didn’t see it now, he soon would—the way Maggie always heard the freight train coming before Lyle did, or said what he was thinking before he could find the words and get them out. “We’re on the same wavelength,” they liked to say whenever that happened, but sometimes, lately, he wondered if they were.
I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” Maggie said again at dinner. Again she burst into laughter, partly because Lyle looked so sad and funny and partly because the crushing weight of indecision had finally lifted from her soul.
But Lyle only turned his face, still sagging with disbelief, toward Will, as if he might find the answer there. He bumped his glass up and down on the varnished tabletop and asked again, “Well, don’t you think you should? Before certain actions are taken, I mean? Actions, I mean, that can’t be taken back?”
Maggie had seen it many times before: Lyle’s anger short-circuiting before it could gain steam and the passive voice pointing a vague finger while absolving everyone present from responsibility, because the minute he started to criticize someone else, he would be reminded of his own shortcomings, which invariably caused him to think, Who am I to say! Sometimes he said it out loud: “Who am I to say!” On those occasions Maggie would stroke his hair and croon, “You have as much right as anyone, honeybun.” Humility was one of the things she had always loved about her husband, but now all she felt was irritation. “If your car was headed at a crowded sidewalk, you wouldn’t work out all the details before you turned the wheel!” she exclaimed.
But Lyle said thoughtfully that yes, he would. “There’d be no sense turning it toward a more crowded sidewalk, now, would there?”
He laid his heavy hands on the table and examined his fingernails, which were dirty and chipped. Maggie had never before noticed how blocky his hands were, how his fingers were all nearly the same length, as if they had been cut from the same chunk of wood as the table and never properly shaped. “If I was headed toward the sidewalk outside the Multiplex on a Saturday, I’d turn the wheel toward the Merry Maid, but if I was on Main Street during the homecoming parade…”
“You wouldn’t aim it at a more crowded sidewalk!” said Maggie impatiently. “You’d aim it at a less crowded one!”
“Exactly which sidewalk are we talking about?”
Lyle was like one of the heavy hand trucks they used to move ordnance at the plant—slow moving and hard to turn. Maggie could tell from his expression that he was trying to come up with some way to justify doing nothing, some way to put himself in the passenger seat and so be absolved of having to steer. She tried to catch Will’s eye the way Will always caught hers when the subject of the conversation was Will. The boy was poking at his uneaten vegetables when, suddenly, he came out with a justification of his own. “It’s the lesser of two evils,” he said slowly, looking up from under his pale eyebrows at his dad.
Maggie swelled with pride in her first and only born. How many times had she stuck up for Will to Lyle or the teachers at the school? And now, just when she needed him, Will was sticking up for her. “You see!” she crowed. “Will knows what I’m talking about!”
But Will surprised her again by saying, “I’m not talking about the crowded sidewalk. I’m talking about the munitions plant. I’m talking about guns and even about killing people. That’s the thing that’s the lesser of two evils. Do you really want us to wait for the terrorists to use their weapons on us?”
“Lesser evils—” began Maggie, but for the first time in many years, the proper words came to Lyle before they came to her.
“I think your mother just wants to do something she can believe in,” he said.
But that wasn’t quite it either—there was more to it than that.
After the dishes were washed and put away, Maggie took one of the Internet articles out of the dresser drawer where she kept a brown accordion file of what she had begun to think of as her evidence and showed it to Will and Lyle. “I wanted you to see this,” she said, spreading the printouts on the table, and to Will she added, “I think you’re old enough.”
“They haven’t proved the birth defects are caused by the depleted uranium, have they?” asked Will, so Maggie showed him a newspaper article about the strange freaks of nature being spawned in their own backyard.
“There are frogs with eight legs!” she whispered, sounding exactly like her own mother, who had taken to whispering after Maggie’s father had left, as if that would somehow cancel out the years of arguments and shouting.
Will offered up a scientific theorem about causation and correlation. “Not to mention reverse causation and coincidence. Umbrellas don’t make it rain,” he said.
Lyle nodded his head and said, “Tell me something I don’t know,” as if Will had taken the words right out of his mouth. Lyle was always saying “tell me something I don’t know” the way Pastor Price said “don’t get me wrong” and Misty Mills said “no offense,” but for Lyle, the phrase was a way to avoid having to comment on subjects he knew nothing about.
“Oh, Lyle!” cried Maggie in frustration.
“We’re only saying that you don’t have all the facts,” said Will.
“Who in tarnation does?” asked Maggie. “What does anyone base a decision on? Partial knowledge, that’s what.” She had practiced the line, but now it sounded flat and inadequate. Even Lyle could poke holes in it.
“That’s what we have experts for,” he said.
Of course other people knew more than Maggie did, but that didn’t absolve her. “That doesn’t absolve me,” she said. “I have a duty to act.” She wanted to add something about wisdom, about how it didn’t always depend on facts. She wanted to say that the more facts people knew, the more they were blinded by them, but Lyle interrupted her.
“Lay off, Will,” said Lyle. “Can’t you see your mother’s upset?”
This only increased Maggie’s aggravation. Her family was allied against her, both coddling her and making a joke of her determination. It was as if Lyle had grabbed on to her sleeve and was pulling her back from an important edge.
Maggie had shown Lyle and Will the newspaper article, but she didn’t show them the document she had taken from Mr. Winslow’s desk that remained hidden in a separate folder at the very bottom of the evidence pile. She didn’t even like to think of it, yellowing there beneath her sweaters and flannel nightshirts, yellowing except for the crimson border and the threatening red letters marching across the top of the page—and tucked just inside the cover, the letter from the Department of Defense.
Tucked inside the folder too was the letter from Dolly Jackson describing her experiences as a midwife at a women’s clinic and asking Maggie if she had ever come across evidence that the munitions produced at the plant were making people sick, and if she had, could she copy it and send it on. Maggie hadn’t bothered to write back saying she hadn’t and she wouldn’t—of course she wouldn’t take something that wasn’t hers! But she had. She had, and now she had to do something with the evidence—evidence that was more like ammunition than she liked to think.
When True came up to her at her going-away party, which was no more than Dr Pepper and a store-bought sheet cake in the lunchroom, and said, “So, you think you’re better than us, do you?” Maggie only had to put her hand on True’s sharp little shoulder blade and say, “Don’t get me wrong,” for True to burst into tears and splutter, “I’m going to miss you, Maggie! Of course I’ll still have Misty, but you know how bossy Misty is.”
“I suppose you’re going to work at that chicken farm out by the highway,” said Misty, covering up her own dismay with her usual air of superiority.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Maggie. “I can’t take a job that will bring suffering to someone else.”
“Someone! Chickens aren’t people!” True and Misty laughed ’til they cried over that, and the story spread like wildfire throughout Red Bud and north to Glorietta that Maggie Rayburn was giving up everything to live a moral life.