“Maria,” he said.
No response, then or when he spoke her name a second time. It was as if she were working in a vacuum. Or a trance.
Dacy touched his arm again. “Let me try.” She went closer, to within two paces of the grave’s edge. Softly she said, “Hello, Maria.”
The pitch of another woman’s voice penetrated where his hadn’t. It didn’t startle Maria Hoxie or make her react with defensive fright; skittishness was not a part of her tonight. She merely paused with the pick’s point at shoulder level and peered around, her head cocked to one side like a bird’s.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Dacy Burgess.”
“Oh.” Then, “Somebody’s with you.”
“Jim Messenger.”
His name didn’t seem to bother her, either. She stood silently as he joined Dacy. Tree-shadow mottled her bent body and upturned face, but there was still enough light to show him the sweat-plastered black hair, the widened eyes with a little too much white visible. Working here a long time, he thought, since before nightfall. Calm enough outwardly, but on the inside? How close was she to the edge?
“I didn’t want you to come,” she said to him. She meant to Beulah in the first place, not here tonight. “I tried to make you go away, even though I knew down deep that I couldn’t. The Lord sent you, didn’t He? You’re the Lord’s Messenger.”
When he didn’t answer she said, “Yes, He sent you,” and lifted the pick high again, swung it down again.
Dacy asked, “What’re you digging there?”
“A grave. What else would I be digging?”
“For John T.?”
“No.”
“For who, then?”
“For me,” Maria said. “This is my grave.”
The flesh between Messenger’s shoulder blades bunched and rippled. Dacy edged closer to him; both hands were at her sides now. She said, “You’re not going to die, Maria.”
“Everyone dies. The Lord wants my soul too — I understand that now. That’s why He sent His Messenger to bring out the truth.”
“Suicide is a mortal sin. You know that.”
“I know. Oh yes, I know. But there are worse sins.”
“The taking of someone else’s life.”
“Even worse than that.” A shudder passed through her, visible even in the half-light, and made her pause again in her digging. She tipped her head back to peer up at the velvety sky. “It’s dark,” she said, as if she had just realized the fact. “I’d better go get a lantern.”
“Wait, Maria. Talk to us first.”
“I am talking to you.”
“About John T. About what happened last night.”
Another tremor. She dropped the pick and hugged herself. “I don’t like the dark,” she said. “I have to sleep with a light on, did you know that?”
He said gently, “What happened with John T., Maria?”
“Oh, it was his fault. Really. He made me do it.”
“He made you shoot him?”
“I thought he wanted to love me, like the other times we met up there. But he never loved me. He only wanted to hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?”
“He yelled at me and called me names. Slut, whore — terrible names. Why did I let men like Billy and Pete have my body? Why did I tell them to turn serpents loose on the Messenger? Why couldn’t I let him make the Messenger go away? Why, why, why, over and over. So I told him why. I told him everything.”
“That you were the one who killed his brother.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “He hit me. In the stomach, hard. I’ll kill you for what you did, Maria, he said, and he hit me again. But I knew about the gun, I saw it once when I was looking for tissues. I took it and I... it made a terrible noise inside the car and he...” She hugged herself more tightly. “We punished him,” she said, “God and I.”
Dacy, in a voice with a rusty edge: “Why did you set fire to the ranch?”
“God told me to. It was an evil place. Satan made evil things happen there, he made me keep coming back and doing evil things with men like John T. The only way to save my soul was to drive Satan back to the Pit. Fire to fight fire.”
“Did God tell you to shoot Dave Roebuck, too?”
“Yes.”
“Because he was evil?”
“Yes. ‘There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.’”
Messenger said, “He hurt his daughter, he made Tess pass through the fire.”
“Yes.”
“And you were a witness.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you go to his ranch that day? To see him?”
“No. To talk to his wife. To beg her forgiveness for my sin of lying with him. The night before... he was drunk and he laughed at me, he said all he ever cared about was fucking me. There was no love in him either. Only evil.”
“But Anna wasn’t there.”
“Just him. And Tess. He was drunk again. Staggering out of the barn, chasing her — that poor little naked child.”
“Tess had no clothes on?”
“Naked. Screaming ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone, I’ll tell Mommy what you did!’ She kicked him when he caught her and he yelled and picked up the rock and he... I heard the sound it made, I saw the blood when she fell. From the top of the hill by the gate. But he didn’t see me. He carried her back to the barn and I went down and the shotgun was there on the porch. God put it there for me to see, in plain sight. I took it to the barn and he was bending over the little girl, crying, saying he was sorry, he didn’t mean to hurt her. But he wasn’t sorry. He was drunk and evil and God told me to pull the trigger and I did. He was an abomination unto the Lord.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I mustn’t leave her there like that. I mustn’t. I found her clothes and took them into the house and picked out a pretty dress and covered her nakedness.”
“And after that you picked a sprig of flowers and put it in her hand. From a bush like the one you were planting here on Wednesday, on Tess’s grave.”
“Verbena. The first one I planted for her died.” Maria sat down on the low mound of dirt, placed her hands together like a supplicant. “Everything dies,” she said. “Sooner or later.”
“White dress, white verbena. White for purity.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you put her body in the well.”
“Yes. Pure water to cleanse away the evil, to prepare her for her entry into the Kingdom. She suffered, but not for long. Then she was at peace in the arms of the Lord.”
“But you’re not at peace, Maria.”
“I will be soon.”
“You suffered too, didn’t you? The same way Tess did, and for a much longer time. That’s the real reason you’re not at peace.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you did what you did at the ranch.” Has to be. It’s the only way it all makes sense. “And why you didn’t tell anyone afterward. You couldn’t talk about such things, not even to save Anna. Your father made you swear never to talk about such things, didn’t he?”
“People wouldn’t understand, he said. It wasn’t wicked, what we did together, because we loved each other. I love you more than life itself, Maria, you’re the closest to an angel God ever made. I need to show you how much I love you. I can’t stop myself, Lord help me, I can’t. That’s what he said.”
Dacy made an angry sound in her throat. Messenger said, “It wasn’t love, Maria. You know that now.”
“Yes. I know that now.”
Reverend Walter Hoxie. He was responsible for everything that Maria had done, not she. He drove her to look for his kind of love with the Roebucks and Draper and Teal and God knew how many others. He gave her a warped view of religion and sowed the seeds of murder. And at some level she’d known all along what he was and what he’d done to her. It wasn’t Dave Roebuck she’d killed in March, it was her adoptive father. It wasn’t John T. she’d shot last night, it was the man who’d begun molesting her when she was no older than Tess.