She’d heard the rumblings that had been going around Pine Slopes: contamination in the aquifer, contamination in the water main. Now there was proof before her very eyes, proof enough to singe her fingers and sear its import into the flesh of her doubting hand.
By fall the state would step in, outfitting the town’s kitchens with air monitors that chirped to signal safety; too much methane in the air and the smallest spark could touch off an explosion. But Simon, who still remembered the gas developers with their long, sleek cars gliding up the road from the lowlands, was quick to dismiss Connie’s worries. “It’s all just idle talk,” he said when the gas monitor was first installed, and after an hour of its periodic beeping, he rose from the dinner table and pulled the device out of the wall.
“But just as a precaution––”
“We put ourselves in God’s hand in this house,” Simon said firmly, taking the tone not of a husband but of a preacher, “and whatever He sees fit to make happen will happen.” At this Connie lowered her head, and they did not speak of it further.
Still, she would always let any tap water she poured stand for half an hour to let the bubbles settle out before she drank it; seeing the rows of glasses lined up on the kitchen counter, she was reminded of the mason jars of lye and strychnine kept on the pulpit of the Church of the Lord with Signs Following to test the faithful. Such is the custom among Pentecostal serpent-handlers of Central Appalachia.
*
During the service, in heat or in cold, Simon wore a pressed black suit that he’d gone to Hattiesville especially to have tailored. Among the congregants––who were encouraged to dress casually, if modestly––he stood out with this crisp gesture of formality. The jacket, which made him straighten up a little, compensated for the fact that he was not, all told, a particularly tall man. And the snakeskin shoes with a modest rise in the heel––those must have helped matters, too.
Four months before the church got busted up, Simon drove Daniel into Hattiesville to get his own suit cut. Lee––who had been left behind that afternoon with her mother, making crepe-paper decorations for Easter in colors she might have described as azure, veridian, incarnadine, periwinkle, xanthic––knew there was no use trying to press her moon-eyed brother for details. It was her father to whom she pitched her questions over dinner:
“How many flavors of ice cream did they have at the Piggly Wiggly?”
“What movies were showing at the theater when you went?”
“How tall was the tallest building?”
Erica X Eisen‘s works have or are due to appear in Little Star, Pleiades, The Atticus Review, Lumen, Buffalo Almanack, The Harvard Advocate, and the Nivalis 2015 Anthology. She is a recent graduate of Harvard, where she was a two-time recipient of the Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize for best work of fiction by a female undergraduate.