Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

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      OVER THE PLAIN HOUSES

      Copyright © 2016

      Julia Franks

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Cover and book design: Meg Reid

      Proofreaders: Beverly Knight & Rachel Richardson

      Cover painting: J. Chris Wilson

      Spillway at Highlands Country Club, 2005

      oil on canvas

      in situ Highlands Country Club, Highlands, N.C.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Franks, Julia, 1964-

      Over the plain houses / Julia Franks.

      pages cm

      ISBN 978-1-938235-21-4 (alk. paper)

      1. Married people—Fiction.

      2. Farm life—North Carolina—Fiction.

      3. Fundamentalists—North Carolina—Fiction.

      I. Title.

      PS3606.R422575O84 2016

      813’.6—dc23

      2015032618

      186 W. Main Street

      Spartanburg, SC 29306

      864.577.9349

       www.hubcity.org

       CONTENTS

       Part One: End of March

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Part Two: End of May

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Acknowledgements

      HER KIND

       I have gone out, a possessed witch,

       haunting the black air, braver at night;

       dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

       over the plain houses, light by light:

       lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

       A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

       I have been her kind.

       I have found the warm caves in the woods,

       filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

       closets, silks, innumerable goods;

       fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

       whining, rearranging the disaligned.

       A woman like that is misunderstood.

       I have been her kind.

       I have ridden in your cart, driver,

       waved my nude arms at villages going by,

       learning the last bright routes, survivor

       where your flames still bite my thigh

       and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

       A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

       I have been her kind.

       —ANNE SEXTON

       PART ONE

       End of March

       CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE EASTER WHEN THE LADY agent first showed up to church. When the gray coupe rolled past, the first thing Irenie Lambey noticed wasn’t that a woman was driving but that a sculpted angel leapt straight out from the grill, her head raised and her back arched, silvery wings sweeping behind her as if she were about to take flight.

      Later, after the agent and her husband were dead and the Department of Agriculture had closed its extension office for good, there were those who held out that her first day had been sometime in the summer.

      But Irenie knew different. She knew on account of the birds. It was that moment in the year when winter still tightened the earth but spring snuck in from overhead. Robins and warblers and purple martins were back, and the flax birds had switched out their gray feathers for yellow. The trunks of the sassafras and sourwood ran wet and black with sap, and the fingers of the service trees had swelled but not budded. It had to be the Last Supper service because her sister wore her blue muslin, and there were those who turned out for the first time since the fall, and the whole fray about