But like a born preacher, Simon knew how to sculpt the rhythm and flow of a telling, what to hold onto and what to lay down right away. He held court with the story of their big day in the city, rationing it out over the course of several dinners, and then he would stop himself, sometimes in the middle of describing something, as though it had only just occurred to him how long he had been talking. “Well, Lee, that’s enough for one night,” he’d say, closing the lid on the conversation until the next day’s dinner, and his daughter saw there was no use pressing things further. That Sunday, when Daniel wore his new suit for the first time––deep black with thin lapels, the image of his father’s––he looked so well in it that it was almost a shame to see it wrinkle when he started with his holy fits.
Years later, after Lee started rouging her cheeks and going with Ruby and Mayella on their night drives down from the mountains to kick things up, she found herself in Hattiesville and was surprised to see that it was only a little larger than Pine Slopes, only a few streets wider. The once-new theater where her father and brother had gone to see a matinee was boarded shut.
*
The contamination that had leaked into the water and air could not be gotten rid of by pulling the gas monitors out of the wall. That spring, a TV crew came rolling into Pine Slopes, pressing microphones into people’s faces, asking questions. How long had the gas field been there? And who built it? And did they know what the latest research said about exposure to pollutants? Did they know how many parts per billion were safe to drink? To breathe? To let your child bathe in?
Simon beat back the reporters and the cameras and encouraged his flock to do the same, but the doubts they had sown were harder to uproot. When one Sunday a man came to the Church of the Lord with Signs Following with lungs so poor he wore an oxygen mask, Simon prayed over him; he laid on hands as he had done so many times. Yet the air did not clear, and in the days that followed it came to pass that the man’s health showed no improvement and had in fact begun to worsen, and the congregation heard that he had been taken to the hospital in the valley, due to the gravity of his untreated ailment.
The coming weeks would see the beginning of Simon’s decline among the churchgoers of Pine Slopes. Week by week congregants were picked off, and week by week those that remained showed less conviction, less devotion to their preacher. In public sometimes there were incidents: people who made a point of crossing the road to avoid him, or else those who went right up to him as he walked, their fists balled, fire in their blood. On one occasion a neighbor spat on Simon as he passed him in the street; it is to the preacher’s credit that he still managed to drag up a Biblical counter: “No prophet is accepted in his own hometown.”
The year the church got busted up, mountain-town doctors reported a rash of unnatural births: moon-eyed, feeble-limbed infants who convulsed with something that was not the Spirit, that would not let them go.
*
If Connie’s outward appearance was perfectly Pentecostal, inwardly she harbored a religion that was less formalized, less sure-footed in its narrative than her husband’s Sunday sermons. The private, primordial thoughts she occupied herself with tended not toward Heaven but toward the hills around her. For, unlike Lee, Connie would readily call herself a Mountain Person, without irony or shame but also without any fierceness or special pride, just as others might call themselves right- or left-handed. She knew that her family’s roots in Pine Slopes ran deep, and she had no desire to dig them up. If Simon tended snakes, Connie tended heirlooms, keeping drawers and boxes full of sentimental clutter (which Lee might have variously described as a gallimaufry, a farrago, a salmagundi) to be fussed over in idle hours. Water-stained photographs, undeveloped film. The remnants of an old dinner service, too cracked to use but too precious to do away with. Chipped glass jewelry. Even her name was a hand-me-down, the tatty remainder of a fur-trapper’s Spanish wife, a Consuelo or Concepción whose husband had generations ago trekked her up the Appalachians looking for beaver pelts and never managed to trek his way back down. She did not regard the past with the romanticism of those white lowland Virginians who were apt, by careful pruning and selective attention, to create for themselves magnolia-scented personal histories with room for stately plantation manors but not the hands that built and sustained them. Connie knew exactly where her heritage lay, and it was beyond the power of pruning to redeem: her birth-right was forged by the unremarkable toil of hunting and hiding, coaxing a crop out of flinty mountain soil, waging a losing war against the inexorable progress of the chestnut blight.