was hazy and out of focus. This muddled goal was what bothered me most.
In all my not knowing, I decided it must be something that would eventually occur within me, like Lyle had hinted at. Some heart change, some transfer of power that would give me a higher order of gifting. I knew through my romances that real sex caused a quickening of the love pulse, made you moan in pleasure. Made your body swell and burst.
He pulled his shirt over his head. The shed walls seemed to pour heat on us. Grampa Jackie’s old rodeo posters had peeled and died, their pictures gone, just browned paper now. It was midday and the sun sat meanly overhead, finding its way in through the slits in the ceiling. Sweat had dripped from Lyle’s forehead onto my chest and mixed with my own. I needed cool water to cleanse me. I dabbed at the sweat but stopped. What if we were to be married? I had better get used to his sweat. I tried to picture myself in a white dress, saying Are you sure? to God, hoping that maybe everyone could forget we were cousins after all. That fact embarrassed me. I supposed I could learn to love Lyle. It would happen with time, with God’s help, all things were possible. Weren’t they? But Lyle shook me from my daydream.
“Our work is done. You aren’t the only one I’m making holy with my seed. I have a quiver full of arrows.”
A tightening ran through my ribs. I braced both hands on the floor.
“Vern said you’re a full-moon bleeder,” he went on. “Now we’ve done all there is to do and we’ve done it at the right time. There’s gonna be rewards beyond our wildest dreams. Rain like you wouldn’t believe. Get your umbrella ready, Lacey May.”
I reached up and my hand gripped the neck of his shirt. “Who else?”
“Are you jealous? Of your own cousin? That’s just sad.”
“You’ve been with more than just me? Is this a big joke?” Blood throbbed in my ears. I felt ordinary then, utterly unspecial. I had thought myself supremely chosen, but now I wasn’t the only one. “I’ll tell Cherry what you’ve done.”
“You mean what we’ve done.”
Full-moon bleeder. I remembered how Vern had lifted my bloody tissue to his nose. How my mother had told me to wait. Not to go. And I’d disobeyed her immediately.
“By the time everything is revealed,” he said. “You, too, will believe in the white light that came upon you in the dark, in your bed while you were alone in prayer.”
Chapter 11
Days and days and days of heat. I tried to remember what a chill felt like to the skin, but I could not. No sun like this anywhere else in the world . . .
August left us and by mid-September my mother had still not called. This was no vacation she was on. My meager fantasies about what this was were no longer holding up. This was abandonment.
Stew-brown water sludged from the faucet and we gave up on trying at all. Our toilets were useless bowls, and Cherry instructed as I dug a basin in the backyard and we propped a rusted lawn chair over it and cut a hole out of the seat. There was talk that someone would deliver barrels of rationed water each week but when I asked Cherry where they were, she said it wasn’t the will of God that we would allow some infidel from the next unholy town to bring in our blessing on four wheels. We’d rather be a believing town, waterless, but believing.
But it was hard to keep believing when the stench of the filthy Body during church services was enough to send us girls outside to vomit in the dead grass. As it splashed on my feet I wondered how it was that no men seemed to need to throw up from the smell. Denay leaned against the wall hunched over and groaning while Taffy petted her and dry heaved, a worse punishment, pain with no release. Sharon retched and moaned and her vomit came out in thick globs like oatmeal.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I’m gonna crawl out of this town and hope a truck runs me down or picks me up. I don’t even care which.”
“My mom said it ain’t that bad,” said Maisie Lynn, a beanpole of a girl with a frizz of black hair. “I told her to take a hike and she