Mother Sophie drew her hands back in surprise. “What’d you do?”
“I felt like I needed a change,” I said. Before I left that morning I’d shaved my entire head. I liked the way the close-crop felt, how dark my hair looked in the mirror, like a winter field shaved to bone. Like a darker, harder self I’d revealed.
I hadn’t come over right away, knowing I needed to time my visit for when Elijah wouldn’t be around. Mother Sophie’s hands found my head again, lingering on the scars. “Like Ezekiel?” she said, and there was a quaver in her voice. Some new uncertainty. She hadn’t greeted me by name. Her hands felt cold and leathery against my skin.
I knew who she meant. I’d read Ezekiel along with all the other prophets, knew the passage where he shaves his head, burning a third of the leavings within the city, striking another third with a sword, letting the wind take the final portion. He does this before he curses the wayward Israelites to a time of famine and cannibalism, of parents eating children and children eating their parents. Prophets, from what I’d gathered, went around telling people what they didn’t want to hear, which I was preparing to do here. “You don’t like it?”
“I do. It’s just unexpected.” To become a true “fresh cut” among the skinheads who frequented here someone else was supposed to shave your head for you. Maybe that was the reason for her concern. Mother Sophie muttered something I couldn’t discern, took her hands away, and sat beside me on the couch. “Is there anything you would like to pray for?”
“Clarity,” I said. “I have some questions that need answering.” I had run into Bjorn on the way to Mother Sophie’s cabin and he’d said, “I guess this means you’re not just a ‘hang-around’ anymore,” and cackled hyena-like as he loped away. I didn’t know what it meant that Bjorn had returned to The Land, but they must be getting close to whatever plans they were making.
“In the Greek,” she said, “the word ‘apocalypse’ comes from ‘apokalypsis.’ It translates as having something made known. The apocalypse is the revelation. So we will pray for revelation and for God’s will to be made known.”
She went on for some time like this, her voice dark with warning, before she led me in a short prayer. Afterward, I sipped at the lemon ginger tea she’d made for me and listened to her as she carried over mementos from her trip to the Holy Lands a decade before this. She told me about the time she’d been dis-fellowshipped, how it happened when she belonged to the Worldwide Church of God. She showed me a Polaroid of herself standing before a building that had been carved from the side of a mountain, towers of basalt rising behind her. “Petra is an ancient place,” she said. “Sacred. Standing there, you breathe in the dust from which man was formed and to which he shall return.” The woman in the photograph looked much younger and thinner, her face unlined as she stared boldly back at the camera. Mother Sophie told me she was grateful she got to see the place before glaucoma stole her eyesight.
I nearly jumped when she put her hand on my leg. “Is there something wrong?”
“No,” I said. My leg had been tapping up and down, setting the couch vibrating. “I just had too much coffee this morning. Four cups of it.”
“That sounds unwise,” she said. “Jesus says, ‘Behold, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves; be wary and wise as serpents, and be innocent as doves.’ Poisoning yourself with too much caffeine is unwise. I’m gathering this is not the only thing you’ve been unwise about.”
I had kept my jacket on in case I needed to leave in a hurry and the heat in the cabin pressed upon me. Before I left earlier that morning I pocketed the agate Maura had given me for a gift the first night we were together. I took it and the note she had written me, which I had folded and unfolded so many times the paper had become tissue thin. I felt the stone’s solidity in my jacket pocket, close to my ribs. The last thing I had done was call Officer Connor Sheehan and leave a message on his voicemail. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket now, closed my fist around the agate, squeezing the stone to remind myself of my purpose.
Mother Sophie took the Polaroid from my hand and cradled it carefully in her palm before slipping it into a Bible written in Braille, where she kept envelopes with various oddments and old handwritten notes she could no longer read. I had the feeling she had looked at the Polaroid many times before she went blind, memorizing the scene. I wondered if she’d been in love with whoever snapped the shot. “We never know what life has in store for us,” she said. “That photo is from a happy time, but it didn’t last. A week later, I was accused . . . of being in an inappropriate relationship.” Mother Sophie’s eyes were glassy, and for the first time since I’d met her, she fumbled for the right words. “To be dis-fellowshipped is a little like excommunication for papists. I thought it was the end for me, but it was only the beginning. I did what any disgraced person would do. I came home, and once I quit feeling sorry for myself, I got busy. I founded my own Christian Identity church, free from the false prophecies of the Worldwide Church of God. I bought this land with family money. I had been banished from the Place of Safety, so I intended to make my own. Roland was one of my first followers. When I found him, he was living out of his truck. A homeless Purple Heart veteran down on his luck. This country under ZOG eats its own heroes. I suppose you could say we found each other. He’s been with me ever since.”
“Were you ever married?” This felt like a natural lead-in for the question I needed to ask her. The question I had come here for. I felt certain she knew something about Maura.
Mother Sophie sighed. “You could say God’s timing and my timing didn’t always align. Sometimes you find the right person, but it’s too late or the time is wrong.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, thinking of Maura. More than you know, really. I decided to abandon any false mention of creating a website or a game that advanced their cause. It was time for me to say it. “That’s the whole reason I’m here this morning.”
“I know why you’re here,” she said, cutting me off. “Roland’s been with me from the beginning. If some of us are to remain innocent as doves, then I have to let the serpents loose to do their work. You could say he’s one of my serpents. Roland told me who you are and what you’ve done.”
“What’d he say?” She didn’t sound angry so much as disappointed. How much had he told her?
“I’m also telling you goodbye, Meshach. You don’t belong here. Even after Roland told me what he knows about you, I didn’t want to see you get hurt. You are not wise as a serpent or innocent as any dove. You are not even one of God’s sheep. You . . . you’re one of the wolves, and Roland has a way of dealing with wolves that you won’t like.”
I didn’t stand up or move. “Meshach isn’t my name,” I said.
“I don’t want to know you by any other,” she said, her voice sharpening. “You go on now. The apocalypse is coming and you’ll be on your own when it does. That’s punishment enough.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I need to know what I came here to ask.”
She was quiet for a long time. The police scanner squawked and went silent on the shelf. I studied my surroundings, the gleam of aluminum sheeting, the logs and white mortar, the homey woodstove and the Confederate flag and muskets on the mantel. Despite the strangeness of their belief system I was going to miss coming here. Outside a car door slammed, the metal ringing. Elijah? I hoped he wasn’t back yet. I needed more time.
“Elijah’s wife, Maura,” I said. “I knew her. I worked with her at the bank.”
Mother Sophie’s jaw tightened.
“Meshach is who I wanted to be. It’s what Maura would’ve named her child. If she had a boy. She was pregnant when I saw her last.”
Mother Sophie’s grayish tongue licked out to touch her cracked lips. “Pregnant?” I saw the surprise register, the short, shivery breath that ran through her and set her wrinkles trembling.
“But I don’t think she ran away,” I continued. “Even if she hated this place. She wouldn’t leave her daughter behind. Maura wouldn’t abandon Sarah.”
Her blue eyes bore into mine. “Sarah is well cared for. She has a better life now. She has a future in the world that’s coming.”
Footsteps in the snow outside, the burr of rough male voices coming this way.
“She was pregnant with my child, I believe.”
Mother Sophie settled back against the couch. “Oh, child. I was wrong about you. How could I be so wrong about you? I thought God sent you, but it must have been the devil. You stupid, stupid boy. You don’t even know what you’ve done.”
The footsteps thudded on the creaking porch and the front door swung open. Elijah stepped into the room, still dressed in his quilted coveralls with his company’s insignia on it. Snow sluiced from his cap. Roland came in behind him, his jacket open to his holster.
“I thought I told you not to come back here,” Elijah said.
I stood, facing him. “I came back for answers. Where’s Maura, Elijah? What happened to her?”
Elijah’s face blanched. The question caught him off guard.
“You shut your mouth,” Roland said, stepping around Elijah. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Not here,” Mother Sophie said in a firm voice. “The children will be released for their playtime soon. Take him somewhere else.”
“You hear that?” Elijah stepped closer. “You and me, we’re going for a walk.”
A walk. It had the ring of finality. I might get what answers I needed from him, and then I would tell him I had alerted the police in case anything happened to me. And yet I saw my fate in his eyes. That smell of gasoline burning that had come over me in church when I heard him speak of the dead, a searing memory from my car accident, my body pinned to the seat in a crush of metal as flames lapped at the fuel line. All I knew of hell.
“I’ll come, too,” Roland said. “He was lying to all of us.”
“No.” Elijah spat the words out. “It’s my wife he’s asking about. My wife he was involved with. He answers to me.” He spoke in a low, angry whisper. Outside the voices of children shouted as they poured out of the trailer where they went to school. “You really didn’t know her. You thought you did, but you didn’t know her at all. Let’s go.”
“Elijah,” Mother Sophie called from the couch, where she had not otherwise stirred. “We can’t have any undue attention placed upon us at this crucial hour. Whatever you do, be discreet about it.”
Elijah pulled me in front of him. As we headed toward the door I heard Mother Sophie say, “Revelation also means an ending. Goodbye, Meshach.”