*
And then, of course, there was Simon’s boy.
They knew that baby was special from the day he was born: cauled completely, such as the doctor had never seen. It stood to reason, Simon thought, that Daniel would grow up to be a seer and a prophet. And so every Sunday Simon propped him up at the front of the Church of the Lord with Signs Following, and the boy, usually so silent and inward, would cast his eyes to the ceiling and reveal cryptic, eschatological visions that sounded like things no child could invent: four-headed beasts, lions rampant, thrones of amber and lapis worked in the most precious of metals. “I see tongues of fire, and the waters will be troubled by a dark tide,” he said, and all assembled would reach their arms out to touch the boy-prophet. Daniel with his moon eyes, Daniel with his strange whispery voice, Daniel with his pale skin despite the sun, as though still covered by the milk-colored membrane of his caul.
*
It is not an easy thing to have a prophet for a brother, but it was a cross Lee bore with a grace surprising for her slim twelve years. Like Daniel, Lee had wide eyes that were unusual in color, pale as though diluted, yet hers were mounted in a face straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Years after the Church of the Lord with Signs Following got busted up, when she thought about leaving town in earnest and started hitching rides into the city with friends to go movie-hopping and sneak into bars, that bone structure would give her away to any lowland boy who looked at her. Those cheekbones were pure Allegheny.
But at twelve Lee’s experience was still bounded by the scrim of hackmatack trees on the surrounding hills. At twelve she still finger-combed her stringy hair and wore shorts without being self-conscious of the knobbly, foal-like legs they revealed, knees scabbed from taking falls in after-school races with the boys in her class. Yet her imagination had already outgrown the streets of Pine Slopes, fed by the books she snuck out of the meager school library by zipping them into the belly of her sweatshirt. If it was a literary diet that afforded more roughage than her father’s Bibles, it was still quite narrow in scope. Her vocabulary, gleaned mostly from abridged Dickens novels and a Roget’s Thesaurus with onion-skin-thin pages, had taken on the bizarre contours of a young tree sprouted under the choking penumbra of an old-growth forest, forced to crane its trunk desperately to find the light. Those books were enough, though, to teach Lee that there was more in this world than what the sermons at her father’s church suggested––and to teach her to want more, though she was not yet old enough to reach out and take it. On afternoons when she could be decently sure her father wouldn’t come looking for her, Lee would unlatch the door of the snake hutch and read out choice passages from her collection of tatterdemalion paperbacks with theatrical swoops of her skinny arms: those grand-sounding words, set like gemstones in long, coiling sentences, gave her shivers like her brother got from the Spirit every Sunday. And the snakes, enlivened by the womblike heat of their hutch, raised their bodies from their sawdust bedding and watched the girl performing as if for them, their tongues flickering, their heads bobbing, their haws nictating open, closed, open, closed, open.
*
The first time Connie set a match to the kitchen sink was a year before her husband was arrested when the Church of the Lord with Signs Following got busted up; by that time, the ungainly drilling rig, once so alien to the landscape, had become as unremarkable as the stands of mountain firs. Lee and Daniel were at school; Simon was out back mending the fence. Alone in the house, Connie held the lick of flame to the water and watched as the entire stream flared up, an unholy amalgam of opposite with opposite that scorched the bottom of the enamel basin and threatened to leap to the flimsy kitchen curtains and set the walls alight.