Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

one knee, and there, like suitors, knelt before their elders. Without thinking, Brodis kneeled at the pan of water in front of Haver Brooks, as his conscience had called him. Haver’s feet had troll-like knobs at the sides of the toes and sprouts of black hair at the center of each digit. Brodis had forgotten how they appalled him. It wasn’t his own filth, but worse, the wretchedness of someone else’s. But the feet were also old, and the heels had cracked so deep that he could spy the red insides, like the split hooves of horses. It had to hurt. Brodis cupped a fissured heel in his left hand and scooped the water in his right. Embrace the ruin of the physical. A fellow had to pass through it to get to the other side. The lighter grace-lit side.

      Lem called for the washers and the washed to switch places, and now the elderly knelt before their younger neighbors. Then Lem Thompson stepped in front of Brodis, steadying himself with one hand on Haver’s shoulder, grunting. He rested on one knee, and Brodis found himself looking at the top of Lem’s bowed head, his white hair transparent, the pink scalp showing beneath. The old man breathed heavy. Brodis wondered had Lem seen the corrosion of his childish resentment. Lem lifted his foot and began washing. And maybe it was the warmth of the water that started it. The swell came from his toes, an effulgent good will like the effect of blockade whiskey rising up his legs, energizing his thighs and into his torso and his heart.

      And there. Beyond Lem’s bent head, the lady agent sat pin-straight, her head cocked to one side, as if she were watching a pair of rabbits japing. And the Spirit rose right up and spoke through Brodis. “There may be some who haven’t let Him into their hearts. For those people, now is the opportunity.” The government agent didn’t blink. He let his gaze sweep the rest of the sinners. “Is there anyone here who is ready to walk the aisle?”

      There was a movement in the back, near the boys, a slight figure in overalls. Howard Gooch. No obvious signs of drunkenness this morning. Today Mr. Gooch walked steady, then eager. Then he was throwing himself at the mourner’s bench, his knees hitting the wooden floorboards so hard that the chair Brodis was sitting in quivered too. Mr. Gooch looked straight up at the electric bulb. Brodis stood then, never mind his wet feet. Mr. Gooch was breathing, “Aaahh, please help me, please help,” the loose skin of his neck trembling. Brodis reached for the man’s hands, the skin light and crumbly in recent years, as if his body were sloughing away. Mr. Gooch had come under conviction years before, but the Lord had not yet seen fit to save him, probably because he hadn’t succeeded in changing his life for more than a couple weeks at a time. His backsliding was famous. To Brodis, the man’s temptations seemed puny. For Brodis, giving up music and swearing and drink had been easy. But that was him. He pressed Howard Gooch’s flaking hands and understood that if he was to squeeze them too hard he would crush them. The man was weeping and muttering for help.

      “Lord grant it,” someone called from the men’s side, and others echoed with prayers that threaded among and across them, the weft of them supporting the slight weight of Howard Gooch. Leastways for now.

      Haver began singing, “Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy Blood was shed for me.” The other voices joined in, “And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come.”

      Mr. Gooch closed his eyes and muttered something, but Brodis couldn’t make out the paper-whisper. Then, out of the blue, he did. “Oh, Lamb of God, I come.” And the sound was so frail that some part of Brodis that had been frozen loosened, and he forgot about the leprous feel of Howard Gooch’s skin and raised their four hands aloft, and his own soul rose up too, breaking a little free from the beastly shape he’d been born to, and from that small height he saw that his own challenge was different. He saw himself for what he was, a man who figured to outsharp the God that had made him. His task was his own: to lay down the questions and the pride because here was Howard Gooch, a drunk with a mountain to climb, willing to throw down his body and his soul for God. Again.

      The congregation held them up, the voices welling as if in one accord, and soared, and glided, the cadence rising and falling in waves of sound that carried away pettiness and grief, now weaving together again, now carrying the promise of the Holy Spirit, and the richness of life, and the nearness of joy, and Brodis became once again his younger stronger self. Here in the church, among these white enameled pans and this tender flock kneeling in the blanched light, he was his best self. This was the meaning of Grace. These were his people, and this was what Heaven must be like.

       CHAPTER TWO

      IRENIE PAUSED ON THE PORCH TO LISTEN. IT WAS PAST midnight. She pulled shut the door and held her breath against the likely of whining hinges. If he was to rouse, she could say that her bowels had run away with her and she was headed to the privy.

      She eased the latch into place.

      The night air was an ally: sharp, alive, alert. She stretched her hands into the army overcoat and pushed the eagled brass buttons through the holes.

      Best to wait one, two, ten minutes, in case he had waked. Ice skinned the washing tub, and frost dusted the stacks of wood, the cut and the uncut, both of them outsized by the great frosted pile of coal. And the new school glowed up hot in Irenie’s mind. Though she’d kept it to herself all day, she hadn’t for a moment forgot it was waiting, like a live fire hiding under a heap of ash in the morning fireplace. You slid the shovel under the gray until you heard the grate of iron on stone. Then, when you flipped it, the coal kindled up orange in the dark.

      She listened. But there was only the ghost of her own breath hanging in the stillness, and beyond that the persistent march of water from the springhouse to the branch, its hurry to the base of the mountain, to the place where it joined the river under the white arms of calicoed sycamores. Scram and Lacy and Stomper opened their eyes and watched, but it was the redbone Fortune who lifted her head and cocked her ears. Irenie considered the dog for a moment but motioned her to stay. On warmer nights, yes, but not now.

      Winter didn’t need dogs. The earth was packaged yet, drum-tight. Its creatures still slept, the white-footed mice curled into the cracks of the barn, the voles buried beneath the beech leaves, the yellow-painted box turtles drawn up tight under winter-rotted logs, the snakes like hairballs in the roots of trees. Likewise the bears suckling their newborns high in the silver-lichened beeches—and her son sleeping his odd, fitful sleep, clutching and unclutching. The world was hers, at least for an hour or two. Brodis was safe accounted for in their bed, under the quilts she’d sewn, dreaming virtuous dreams.

      It was strange. She’d married him in part because he’d seen the world, and she’d thought a life with him would open her up too. But somehow the opposite had happened. They’d set up housekeeping so close to home that the land was part of her great grandfather’s original parcel, and to this day she hadn’t figured out how the wide place that had been her growing up had shrunk so tight that she found herself lonely in it. She’d come to hate the root cellar. All winter she’d inventoried there, sitting in the dank with the fust and the mold nudging at the door. Cull the apples, unwrap the sweet potatoes, put the potatoes by, set the squash out for cooking before it was too late, all the while Brodis roaming the ridge to gather and salt the stock, or chasing game and checking rabbit boxes and taking the saddle horse into town for shoes. But she was the keeper of the house and the yard and the fields. She’d cooked and put up all manner of food. In the root cellar, in the weak air, the lamp guttered and the flame bowed and whickered. Only the bluest center stayed constant, low between the lamp’s brass thumbs, and on days when she overspent her time there, she found herself staring into its gentian eye.

      She was tired of being inside.

      The walks were the only part of her life that belonged to her alone, when she wasn’t obliged to chores nor mothering nor livestock. Matthew was old enough to take care of himself, and the black of night had become a time of possibility. If she didn’t spend it sleeping, well sir, that was hers to say.

      Or maybe it was curiosity, a dare to herself to see could she get away with it.

      And what would it mean if she did?

      Now she stepped