spread across the sheets and over my bare belly, a thing not possible in a Baptist house with sisters crowded in a bed.
Later that year, when the Germans surrendered, the whole mill fell silent. Then a cheer burst from the office and rolled through the workers who ran outside, whooping and hollering, kissing and hugging each other. Kids poured out of the schools. I wasn’t there. Everyone told me about it later.
But up on the farm, I heard the car horns blasting. Church bells clanged. The mill horn blew as if calling God Himself to the cotton. I stopped mucking the barn stalls and dashed outside to the road. Louellen McAvery, who lived down the hill, knelt in the middle of Clear Lake Road, praying. Her boy, Tom, was still overseas. When she finished with God, she jumped up, danced a little jig, and waved to me, shouting. The war was over!
I jumped and ran back to the barn to tell—tell who? The chickens? The cows? The chickens, the sky, the barn were all the same, as indifferent to the end of the war as they had been to the war itself. I stopped halfway across the yard. The land I had worked stretched out before me and the blind sky above.
The horns and bells continued. The people celebrating below were people I knew. I knew their sons far away at war or fresh in their graves. They’d eaten the beans and corn my family grew and brought them back to us in heaped bowls when someone got sick, or died. The boy who would dig my grave was probably out there among those cheering.
We were under the same sky, breathing the same air. All of us. And not just us. The Germans and the Japanese, too.
In the months after the victory of war, a stunned quiet followed, then the town leapt into optimistic giddiness. Everyone everywhere seemed relieved, fatigued, excited. The world seemed wide-open. At church, at the feed store, in the shops downtown, and on the streets of the mill-village, expectation and relief blossomed into robust intent. Any moment things could burst out of themselves. I felt it in the long bones and muscles of my arms and legs.
Even in the quiet of Sunday morning, returned to us now that the war was over and the mill no longer ran seven days a week, I woke aware of the people down the hill, my family still warm in their beds, sleeping the sound sleep of victors.
Downtown one Saturday, I saw a woman open a newspaper. The headline declared the liberation of the death camps. The photograph showed gaunt, skeletal Jews. She studied the front page and crossed herself.
A violent scorn rose up in me. “Fool,” I thought. “You have the same God as the Germans.” I imagined a Nazi crossing himself before he turned on the gas.
I stood outside Bun’s Café, about to cross the street. Then, like a slap, the thought came: I, too, had the same God as the Nazis. I stepped away and turned my back to the busy street. I saw my face mirrored in the window of the café. The reflection of a passing car slid over the backs of the men eating inside at the counter. They were—we all were—Christians. Good Christian people.
A door shut in my mind. My heart tilted.
I kept that moment, running my hands over the worry stone of it. Church was not the same after that. I sat at the same pew every Sunday. My family expected me to be there and I did not want to disappoint my mother, but my throat could not be open as it had once been to those old familiar hymns.
A few weeks later, one rare day when I had finished my morning chores early, I took my lunch and walked down to Clear Lake. A snake the color of the water undulated near the shore, barely disturbing the reflection of clouds on the water’s surface. Trying to move with the same deftness, I followed on the lake’s bank as the snake paralleled the shore. After a few minutes, the snake turned toward the deeper waters of the lake. I watched its silent swiftness until it was lost in the glare of the sun. I longed to move through the world like that, deliberate and certain, the waters folding around me, wakeless.
I felt I could wander, seduced, into the woods and forget myself, leave my hair uncombed and let my name fall