to death, the last breath squeezed out of his lungs as a bloody foam.

Virgil’s phone rang again and he opened it and said, “I’m okay. Miz Flood just shot and killed Wally Rooney. Everybody sit tight, we’re talking.”

Helen said from her chair, about Rooney, “He looks awful.”

“That’s because your mother just shot him in the face,” Einstadt said. “Look at that. That’s what she’s threatening to do to your grandpa. Shoot him just like a sick horse.”

Edna said, “I like him better this way.”

“He was sick. He was sick in the head,” Alma said. “He needed to be put down, just like you’d do with a sick dog. A dog that’s got rabies.”

“You’ve got rabies,” Einstadt said. “Killing an old friend.”

“It’s time to talk about you, Father,” Alma said. She looked over at Virgil. “I want to be fair, and since you’re the law around here, and you want to do everything proper, I appoint you the defense attorney. You can say what you want in his defense, and I will listen to every word. How’s that for fair?”

“Hell, he wants me dead,” Einstadt said. He wiggled in his chair, and the shotgun muzzle, which had been an inch off line, came up.

VIRGIL WAS LOOKING at Rooney, at the mess that used to be Rooney before Rooney left the building. He thought that he might do a tap dance, stalling for time, because the longer they sat looking at the dead man, the more oppressive the body would become. So he asked, looking at Alma, and then at Einstadt, “How did this happen? How did you get here? I can understand, a hundred years ago, it might be all right to marry off young girls, but even then, this wasn’t all right. What happened?”

Alma said, “The church got taken over by perverts, including my own father. And grandfather. I don’t think it was like that before then.”

Einstadt said, “No TV.”

Virgil: “What?”

“Sex was what they had before electricity out here until after World War Two. So every night was dark, or lit by lanterns, and there just wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. Hard to read. They were poor, didn’t have much in the way of musical instruments. In the wintertime, you just couldn’t get anywhere, and everybody in the church was really close. . . . I don’t know when it started, but it might have gone right back to the beginning, in Germany. Exchanging wives and some of the wives were young, like you said. Thirteen. Boys were men when they were fourteen, and set to work. Hell, some famous rock-and-roll star married a thirteen-year-old girl back in the sixties, because it was done even then, wasn’t no hundred years ago....”

“But how did that fit with the idea of a church?” Virgil asked.

“You can read the Bible any way you want, and they did,” Alma said.

“No, no, no,” Einstadt said impatiently. “It’s all there, what they did, the patriarchs, and it went unpunished, because it wasn’t wrong. Look at Lot. It’s beautiful. The World of Law says it’s all right to go to Iraq and kill a hundred thousand people, but it’s wrong to have sex with people close to you? Does that sound even a little bit reasonable? What we did was all right—”

“What you did was probably the most fucked-up crime in the history of the state of Minnesota,” Virgil said. “Pardon the language. And to tell the truth, I’m not all that happy with the war in Iraq, but there are arguments for and against it, greater evil versus lesser evil, and unless you’re a simpleminded moron, you can’t make the kind of comparison you just did.”

“We didn’t live in your World of Law,” Einstadt said. “We lived in the World of Spirit, and it was better. It is better, and it’ll be better again. We’ll make some changes—”

“You won’t be making any changes; you’re going to be in prison,” Virgil said.

“It’s a religion,” Einstadt said. “You’re going to persecute us because of our religion?”

“Damn straight,” Virgil said.

ALMA HAD BEEN STARING at her father, and now she turned to look at Virgil, her dark eyes glittering in the light from the muted television. She said, “Not everybody in the church were involved. Some pulled back, and some left the church entirely and moved away, so it’s not all the church. It’s people in the church.”

Virgil said, “But if people knew what was going on, even if they didn’t take part, then they’re to blame,