1.

He gives her a cabin. He gives her a gun. He gives her a barking dog. He gives her multiple orgasms.

He gives her four nights a week in the cabin between Evergreen Valley and Moontown, and on these nights, they seldom sleep.

He does things to her, things that stop time and make the moon fog over, and sometimes she will open her eyes and find herself weeping, singing, quoting French philosophers, as the dog barks and barks.

He cherishes her. He wants her dead. These two things are one and the same, on the hard, rustic bed with the embroidered linen. ‘I should kill you, ugly white bitch,’ he says, but also, ‘Mmmm, sweetheart. Your skin is so soft.’ She sees her own body from afar — the flattened breasts and nipples like berries and glacier of white skin over sternum. She sees him licking, sucking, biting, burrowing, his black head between her thighs as powerful as a totem. She is alive, but how and when and on what planet, she cannot say.

He tells her stories from before she was born, about a boy called Jimmy Jones whom nobody loved. He tells her how little Jimmy once healed a cat he found maimed in a ditch. How he once killed a cat, because he felt sorry for it and to see if he could. How he almost drowned a rich kid once, because he could and because that rich sonofabitch deserved it. He tells her of the dust, the crops that failed, the screaming freight trains and lone water tower, the pain that comes whenever he thinks of that miserable one-horse town in Southern Indiana.

He tells her stories from the future. How the ghettoes will be fenced in barbed wire and converted into concentration camps. How America will set fire to itself, mushroom clouds over every major city and years of no sun. How they will find themselves a hot green paradise somewhere by the equator, and eat fruit off the trees, and care for all the animals and the children and the elderly.

He tells her other things: ‘We’re the same, honey,’ and, ‘I never had nothing like this,’ and, ‘Nobody else understands.’ He holds her dark hair up to the firelight, admires the secret threads of red, closes his eyes and smells it, sighs, croons. ‘I’d be here all the time, baby, if I didn’t have so much on me. So many askin’ for me …’ He kisses the downy hair at her temple, the pulse of her neck, squeezes her white hands, loves her, loves her. ‘I’d like, oh, I’d like to marry you. That’s what I’d do. Only, baby, I know you know we’re married in a deeper sense.’

He asks her for things: cold water, warm milk, little white pills. He asks her to check his car, to check the locks, to check that rustling outside, to take the gun. He asks her to rub his feet — ‘If you’ll do that small thing for me, darlin’,’ — to rub his shoulders — ‘I got a crick, goddamn crick in my neck,’ — to suck his cock — ‘Your lips, honey, oh your lips right now would be so sweet.’ He asks her to pour pretty words into his ears — poems, hymns, folk songs — and dozes off while she does, waking with a start minutes or hours later and in the mood to talk again. He asks her questions that have just one answer: does she love him, has he given her life meaning, would she die for him?

‘Yes,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘Yes. Yes.’

Then there is the morning where she wakes from two hours of sleep with a black eye, because of things that had happened the night before. Miraculous things. A miraculous thought that came unbidden at the sight of his strong, ministering hands on her body: How beautiful it would be to have him hurt me. And just like that, he’d brought the heel of his hand briskly down on her cheekbone, cuffed her hard enough to elicit a strained-startled cry, like no sound she’d ever made before. She could see from his face that the action had given him no personal pleasure; that he was simply responding to a need in her, deep and wordless.

In the raw-wood kitchen, Evelyn applies a bag of frozen peas to the swelling, shuffles around in her shawl and slippers as the dog snuffles over his breakfast and the coffee brews. Just a few months earlier, all she and Jim had shared was coffee on his pastoral visits. Now they share everything: meals, dreams, fluids, a black-and-white dog named Picnic. They share past lives and futures, a Temple where more gather every week to hear him speak, unspoken communication, a god who isn’t in the sky, a higher plane, a Cause.

Water wells beneath her eye. In this life, she will only cry tears of bliss. She lifts the bag, dabs the wetness away, smarts, smiles. Then she catches sight of the Christmas card on the windowsill and feels something stone-like and brutal in her chest. Hurt me. She takes the coffee off the stove, takes up the card. There are impulses that will only cause pain, if indulged.

Merry Christmas Evie & Lenny!

The card shows a cute seasonal scene: apple-cheeked child in mittens, snowflakes, deer, other woodland creatures. Evelyn likes the card. She likes ‘Evie’, the name only used by her closest family. But she doesn’t like ‘Lenny’, not in this context, and hasn’t yet brought herself to read the three-page letter that Sister Phyllis forwarded with it.

Picnic has licked his bowl clean and is scraping it noisily along the floor when Jim lumbers in, looks her up and down with something like pride, and crows, ‘G’mornin’, Sonny Liston.’ Evelyn laughs, feeling something like pride herself: his black hair is perfect, despite the night they’ve had; his body, though dressed quite absurdly in Y-fronts and a striped pajama top, is perfect; those lovely muscular thighs and calves, so perfect. Every woman in this church wants you, Jim. Every man, too. He pulls up a chair and sits back as she sets down the coffee, the eggs, the piled toast, the grilled tomatoes, the bottle of ketchup — a breakfast fit for a king or a truck driver. Then, just as she’s about to double back to the kitchen bench, he catches her jaw in his hand, tilts it up to examine her under-eye. ‘Mmm. That’s red.’

‘It’s not so bad,’ Evelyn says quietly. He presses the thin skin and she flinches.

‘You need some healing, honey.’

‘Oh — no.’

‘Father’s gonna make it better. Sit tight.’

He scoops her onto his knee, and she sighs his name, ‘Jim,’ almost ready to let his fingers perform another miracle. But there’s a mental picture that stops her: the Temple, Sunday morning, packed full of people screaming for his touch. Evelyn turns her face away from his caress and slips off his lap, escapes to the bowl of lemons and the citrus squeezer. ‘You need to conserve your psychic energies. And your eggs are getting cold.’

‘She don’t wanna be healed ’cause the eggs might get cold. Goddamn woman.’

Evelyn smiles. She likes ‘goddamn woman’. She likes the weight of the knife in her hand, the precision of the blade through skin and flesh. She likes the Kremlin-like glass dome, pressing the lemon halves into it until they’re slack and furred with pulp. The citrus squeezer was a gift from her parents, like so many things in this cabin and the white house before it.

Merry Christmas Evie & Lenny!

Picnic has abandoned his clean bowl to beg off Jim. Picnic loves Jim. Picnic knows Jim is a friend to all animals. Evelyn adds a touch of honey, ginger, turmeric to the lemon juice and places it in front of Jim: a nice, healthy tonic, good for his metabolism and immune system; he truly does need to keep up his strength. He ignores the tonic; dumps ketchup over his meal, spears a tomato, slurps his coffee. He’s as intent on his plate as he was on her body last night, and as impassive as when he hit her. But he feels her gaze, and Picnic’s. He sneaks a crescent of toast under the table, then wipes Picnic’s drool off his hands using the ‘L.L.’ monogrammed napkin — not a gift from her parents, but from Lenny’s, who are just the kind of people to give monograms.

‘You got the agenda for the meeting tonight?’

Evelyn looks into the neatly-lined notebook of her mind. ‘We’re collecting Christmas gifts for the orphanage at seven. At seven-thirty, we’ll open to discussion of seasonal events. After that, confrontation. We’re bringing up Oscar Hurmerinta for wife-beating, Johnny Bronco for womanizing, Kay Harris—’

‘Horse-faced bitch.’

‘— for racist comments. Also Ike Dickerson. He needs to take a share of responsibility for Lenny’s relapse, though we mustn’t discourage people from reporting that kind of thing. You might want to commend him on that.’

Jim snorts. ‘Lenny needs a reason not to smoke, and Ike ain’t it.’

‘You’re right, of course.’ This topic isn’t on the agenda, but Evelyn knows where it’s going. ‘And of course she’s a beautiful girl, and has made wonderful progress. It’s just, what Lenny really needs is someone who can keep him grounded—’

‘Are you being objective?’

‘I’ve been considering this objectively, yes.’ Evelyn straightens her face. ‘My concern is, she isn’t ready for a relationship. It’s quite clear she has issues with men, what with her making a pass at Gene Luce and his son.’ She smiles wryly at the incredible fact that anyone would want to make a pass at Eugene Luce. ‘Besides, she and Lenny are far too similar. How do we know they won’t both just spark up and float off to space?’

‘Are you being objective, baby?’

Jim is smiling, a crooked sideways smile she’s seen often, usually while he’s wearing his sunglasses and usually in the presence of less intelligent people. Or in the bedroom, before calling her ‘white bitch’. Lenny never smiled at her that way. Such a smile wasn’t even in Lenny’s repertoire. Perhaps it’s this thought, or perhaps the sight of the L.L. napkin stained with ketchup, that makes Evelyn lower her eyes. ‘I guess I’m not completely objective.’

Jim nods his beautiful black head. ‘Thank you, darlin’, for being truthful.’ He leans forward and smiles a different sort of smile, calm and soft-eyed. ‘Ain’t easy, I know. And I know you want what’s best. Now, I’m not gonna send blondie to Reno ’less you’re on board … but I happen to think they’d be well-matched, and I’m told I’m a fair match-maker.’

He’s watching her face with his soft eyes; her soulmate, her perfect match. ‘Well,’ Evelyn tries, ‘if they can be anywhere nearly as happy together as we are—’

‘Nobody’s gonna be happy as us.’

It strikes Evelyn that this isn’t a very socialist thing to say. Jim reaches out and touches her under-eye again. This time, she doesn’t flinch. ‘I want Lenny to be happy,’ she says, and already she’s feeling more distant, objective, fluttering her eyelashes against Jim’s fingertip. ‘And, of course, I will assist with all the necessary arrangements …’