David’s first reaction when he saw the snapshot of his daughter was to clench his jaws and mutter a prayer. It didn’t matter that she looked good or that her smile was more at ease than David had seen in a long time. In the photo she wore a backpack on the top of some mountain with her long hair pulled back in a purple bandana. The view behind her looked like it could be in Colorado, or maybe Utah.
It wasn’t unusual for him to get a postcard; she sent one whenever her nursing job landed her in a new location. But it had been a long time since Rebecca had written a letter. And after seeing the photo, the first he’d seen of her in nearly three years, he knew this was the one he’d been expecting, dreading for the past few months. Without reading it, he tucked it back in the envelope postmarked this time from New Mexico, and stuffed it into the pocket of his flannel shirt. He turned his four-wheeler away from the mailbox and headed toward the primitive trail he’d worn into the sage and scrub-grass covered hill behind his house.
Rebecca called every May, even though he’d stopped answering a long time ago, and her message was always the same. “Daddy, I think about you this time of year,” as though he hadn’t moved on from the accident that had happened over twenty-five years ago. She was only a toddler when her mother died, and David couldn’t understand her nostalgia for a time before her memory was fully formed. But he didn’t understand much of anything about his daughter and had long ago decided to give his relationship with her over to God. Praying for her was much easier than talking to her.
“Lord, have mercy on Rebecca,” David said between breaths as the four-wheeler started its climb up the slope. “Help her find her way back to You.”
David was anxious to get to the spot where he had been spending his afternoons lately when Vivian wanted him out of the house—to the place on the top of the hill where he could settle in for a while under the shade of an old stand of juniper trees and look across the valley to the sandstone cliffs on the other side. From there he could look down on his town, see it from a different perspective.
David had only glanced at the picture of his daughter, but her image stayed with him as he struggled to navigate the ATV over the rocky terrain. She looked so much like her mother. They had identical dimples on their right cheeks and the same slight gap between their two front teeth; big enough to make their smiles memorable, but not so wide as to render them unattractive. And it didn’t slip past David that Rebecca was older in this photo than Ivajean had ever been. He stopped part way to wipe the sweat from his forehead and take a drink of the iced-tea from the thermos Vivian had packed for him, but the heaviness of the letter against his chest persisted.
He restarted the four-wheeler and lurched forward, still awkward with the clutch even after several months of practice. “Heavenly Father, help me get to the top of this hill,” he whispered. He had spent the summer trying to make himself an outdoorsman, but he suspected it might be too late for him. He’d always felt most comfortable indoors with a stack of books and a cool glass of water nearby, not exposed on a hillside in the heat of the day.
He wished he could turn around and drive back to town—find some solace in his old church office. But he wasn’t a pastor anymore. He didn’t have any sermons to write or any parishioners to counsel and the new minister had moved in and made changes David couldn’t understand. Was it really necessary to use a slide show from a computer to keep a congregation’s attention? What was the matter with good, old-fashioned preaching? Vivian warned him about getting worked up, but he didn’t like the way things were changing, didn’t like that nothing with his daughter or with his church were as he’d imagined they’d be. But David knew things weren’t meant to be easy. He knew that with everything, there was a price to pay.
When he was young and fresh out of Bible school, David thought he was prepared to lead a quiet life, serving his congregation and setting an example of pious living. But seeing Ivajean in the second row of the choir on his first Sunday at the Billings First Assembly sent him in a direction that strayed from his best intentions. She was too beautiful to be a minister’s wife. He should have passed her over, should have paid closer attention to the girl standing beside her with the glasses and the straight brown hair, but his eyes stopped on Ivajean, her black hair, her red lips against pale skin.
He claimed it was Ivajean’s love for God that captured him, and it’s true he noticed the way she closed her eyes as she sang, true that she looked enraptured. But what he knew, and was ashamed to admit, was that seeing her in such a state made him imagine being on the receiving end of her attention, and that notion, once in his head, wasn’t something he could shake. They were married two months later and after their honeymoon in Helena, David suspected that he’d taken more than he was meant to have.
He thought the heat between them would die down, but the passion persisted, grew even, and carried over into places it shouldn’t have, like his church office, and behind the pulpit, and on the red-carpeted floor in front of the altar. One Thursday afternoon, she brought him his lunch from the parsonage, like she did every day, but this time her hair was still damp from her bath and the lavender scented powder she would often sprinkle on before bedtime caught his attention. Her crossed legs, smooth and unencumbered by stockings, beckoned to him from across his desk as he ate his sandwich. He tried to tell her about the sermon he was preparing for next Sunday’s service, and she pretended to listen for a moment, but then she raised her index finger to her mouth. “Shush, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes, let me minister to you for a while.” She pulled the curtains closed and made her way to him.
David knew that married couples would have sexual relations, and he thought he knew what that would entail, but Ivajean had a way of surprising him at every turn. That first time he let it go too far, she went to him, guided his hands up her legs to reveal that she wore nothing beneath her skirt, and before he realized what was happening, they were sprawled on the flat hard surface of his desk, doing things he knew should only happen in the marriage bed. And when they finished, and Ivajean walked toward the door with his empty brown lunch bag in her hands, David told her that what they’d done could never happen again.
But Ivajean continued to bring him his lunch several times a week, even after their daughter was born. And on the days she didn’t, David would find himself agitated with guilt and distracted by longing. Her afternoon visits only stopped when she drove away from his office that warm afternoon in May and never returned.
Getting remarried after Ivajean died was the right thing to do. David would never have been able to raise a child on his own, or keep up with the demands of his church without Vivian. She was always ready with a snack or a cool drink if a church member stopped by, and she could pull together a hot dish on short notice if there was a death or a new baby in the congregation. And it didn’t take long for him to see that Vivian was a better homemaker than Ivajean had been. She knew how to discipline Rebecca and how to time supper just right so it was ready for him when he came home from the office. Vivian seemed to delight in housekeeping, whereas Ivajean, who had been known to let Rebecca run wild while she spend hours flipping through magazines, showed little interest in domestic chores.
With Vivian, David could concentrate on the plans God had in store for him. He didn’t have to worry about church members knocking on his office door at inopportune times, or spend hours praying for forgiveness. He could put his energy into compelling sermons and community outreach. In fact, he noticed that his congregation began to grow shortly after Ivajean’s death. He wondered if the vibrancy of his church meant that God had not forsaken him. Ivajean was gone, and that was his cross to bear for the way he’d allowed her to distract him from his church, but maybe he was still a part of God’s plan.
David finally reached the top of the mesa where the trail flattened out. His breathing returned to normal with the difficult portion of the ride behind him and his destination only a few hundred feet away. He kept a folding chair there and always brought along the tuna fish sandwich that Vivian packed for him. Sometimes he would hike around, looking for arrowheads or deer antlers, but mostly he just sat and talked with God. He felt powerful up there where he could look down on the town and pray for God’s protection over the schools and the churches and the business district. And he knew he was making a difference. Just a couple of months ago, the school board passed a resolution stating it wouldn’t allow evolution to be taught without the mention of Creationism. He had hoped his prayers for Rebecca would be so potent, but as far as he could tell, nothing with her had changed.
He may not have noticed it on his own, but Vivian, always more observant, began to see signs when Rebecca was in high school. For one, she never seemed interested in babies. While the other teenaged girls relished every opportunity to help out in the church nursery, Rebecca kept her distance. And she didn’t care about the normal girl things, like fashion, or boys. At first David was angry with Vivian for suggesting such a thing about his daughter, but he began to think she might be right when Rebecca, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, left town with a woman five years her senior.
The letter in his breast pocket, the one he had been dreading, was long, and David knew what it would say. She’d given him some warning of what was to come when she mentioned her friend Molly in the last three postcards. They were traveling together, she’d written, and looking for a more permanent place to settle down. It was her way of telling him, without telling him, and now he wished that would have been enough.
God could change Rebecca. David believed it without a doubt. But so far, his prayers had gone unanswered. As he parked his four-wheeler in its usual spot beside the trees, he wondered why God would care more about his concerns for the school board than the situation with his daughter. He sat in his folding chair, relieved to be still for a moment after his journey up the hill. “What more can I do, Lord?” he asked out loud, leaning back in the chair to let the early afternoon breeze drift over him.
If it hadn’t been for the breeze, David probably wouldn’t have noticed the fire. But as it was, a small southerly gust caused the fire to crackle, which in turn caught David’s attention. On closer inspection, he could see the most subtle drift of smoke arising from the charcoaled log that sat in the fire pit.
In the spring, when the mornings were still damp and cool, David sometimes built a small fire and drank his coffee while he waited for the day to warm. But his last fire was several months ago. He put his hand next to the coals to see if his eyes were tricking him. He felt heat. He got up to look around for more evidence of the trespassers—food wrappers or footprints, perhaps. At first glance, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but when he was about to return to his chair, he noticed a brown-and-black checkered blanket folded in the shade of the oldest juniper tree. It was camouflaged by shadows. He saw it only because of a small speck of red sticking out from between its folds. David walked over, stood above it, and with the point of his cowboy boot kicked open the blanket to reveal a small box of condoms.
He knelt down to inspect the package and was relieved to find it unopened. Clearly though, someone left the condoms with a plan of coming back. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help imagining a young couple, intertwined and fumbling, shameless with just the thin, checkered blanket between their bodies and the soft earth. Maybe the girl was a dark-haired beauty with pale skin. Maybe the boy was tall and skinny—his back covered in acne like his own had been when he was first out of Bible school.
He thought of throwing the blanket and its contents into the fire or strewing the lovers’ belongings around in an attempt to shame them upon their return. But instead, he found himself refolding the blanket, tucking the box back into the folds, taking great care to leave his discovery exactly as he’d found it.
Back in his chair, David bowed his head to pray. He meant to plead for their salvation, but the words he spoke were different than he intended. “Dear God, protect them.”
Down the hillside and inside his home, Vivian worked hard to keep everything in order. She vacuumed the already clean carpets. She balanced the checkbook to account for each penny.
Below, in town, anonymous cars ferried people to and from their jobs. Indistinguishable children ran and yelled in the schoolyard.
As David reached for the letter in his pocket, he remembered the first time he held Rebecca—her rose petal lips suckling at the air, the tight grasp of her delicate fingers around his own. With the memory of that tiny, perfect child in his arms, David felt a swell of heat come over him, not from the fire, not from the sun. With the surge, which lasted for only the smallest of moments, came questions. Was it possible that God wasn’t trying to punish him? Was Ivajean’s death simply an accident without any kind of a lesson attached? Was Rebecca living her life exactly as God had intended?
Then David, afraid of the ideas that were multiplying in his mind, stopped himself. He tucked the letter back inside his pocket, bowed his head into that familiar pose, and asked God to forgive him, one more time, for his sins.