He went in the kitchen. Mazda was cooking something on the oil stove, an oil lamp burning dimly on the table beside her. The kitchen smelled good.
“Hello, Clem,” she said, turning to face him. She smiled at him. “Did you get the berries for the tea?”
“Yes, dear.” He handed her the three branches of mistletoe. “Make it good and strong this time, dear. I just want to see if there’s anything in my little idea.”
“About mistletoe being the common element in all religions? Sure.”
He watched her as she went to fill the teakettle at the sink. She was a tall woman, with masses of puffy ginger hair and a very fair skin. Her figure was excellent, though rangy, and he always enjoyed watching her.
Most of the time Mazda’s being in the cabin seemed so ordinary, so fitting (she was remarkably domestic, when you got to know her), that he simply didn’t think about it. But there were moments, like the present, when her physical immediacy seemed to catch him in the solar plexus. Then he could only stand and look at her and draw deep, surprised breaths.
It wasn’t so much his living with her, in the technical sense, that troubled him. He hadn’t even tried to feel guilty about that. It seemed at once so extraordinary, and so perfectly natural, that it wasn’t something his conscience could get a grip on. No, it was Mazda’s being in the cabin at all that was the surprising thing.
Where had she come from, anyhow? He’d gone outside one morning early in September, meaning to walk up and down in the sand while he put the finishing touches on his sermon for next week, and there she had been, sitting quietly under a Joshua tree.
She couldn’t have been there for more than ten minutes: her skin, as he had come to know later, was extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight, and she was wearing the skimpiest Bikini imaginable. She’d have been sunburned all over if she’d been there for any length of time. And how had she got there? There’d been no sign of a car in any direction, and he hadn’t even heard the noise of a plane or a copter in the sky. Had she walked over from Parker? In a Bikini? Five miles?
He knew so little about her—no more now, really, than he had known on that first day when she had said, “Hi,” and gone in the house. It wasn’t that she was close-mouthed or sullen—she just didn’t talk about herself. Once only, when he had been elaborating his idea that the use of mistletoe might be the common element behind all religion, had she come out with anything that might be a personal remark. He’d spoken of the use of mistletoe in classical paganism, in druidism, in Christian festival, in the old Norse religion, in Zoroastrianism—Her lower lip had begun to protrude defiantly. “There’s no mistletoe in Zoroastrianism,” she had cut in sharply. “I know.”
Well? It wasn’t much for the fruit of more than three months.
He couldn’t help wondering about Mazda sometimes, though he didn’t want to fail in Christian charity. But he knew he had his enemies. Could she possibly be a Retail Merchants Association spy?
The teakettle was beginning to hum. Mazda gave the pot of string beans on the stove a stir with a wooden spoon. “How did you come out with your sermon, Clem?” she asked.
“Eh? Oh, spendidly. The ending, I really think, will have an effect. There are some striking passages. The ravens were quite impressed.” He smiled at his little joke.
“Ravens?” She turned to face him. “Were there ravens outside when you were rehearsing your speech?”
“Yes, indeed. We have ravens all the time here now. There were even ravens in the apple tree when I was cutting the mistletoe.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh…” she said thoughtfully.
“I fear I chased them away a little too vehemently,” he said, becoming serious. “Ravens, after all, are the Lord’s creatures too.”
“Not those ravens,” Mazda said.
There was a very brief pause. Mazda fingered the bracelet on her left wrist. Then she said, “Listen, Clem, I know you’ve talked about it, but I guess I’m just dumb. Why are you so down on modern Christmases, anyway?”
“My dear, if you’d ever attend the Temple service…” the Reverend Adelburg said in gentle reproof. “But I’ll try to make my point of view, which I humbly trust is also the Lord’s point of view, clear to you.” He began to talk.
He was an excellent talker. Phrases like “star in the darkness,” “the silent night of Bethlehem,” “pagan glitter,” “corruption,” “perversion,” “truer values,” “an old-time America,” “Myrrh, frankincense,” and “1776,” seemed to shimmer in the air between them. Mazda listened, nodding from time to time or prodding the potatoes in the saucepan with a two-tined kitchen fork.
At last he appeared to have finished. Mazda nodded for the last time. “Um-hum,” she said. “But you know what I think, Clem? I think you just don’t like lights. When it’s dark, you want it to be dark. It’s reasonable enough—you’re a different guy once the sun goes down.”
“I don’t like the false lights of modernity,” the Reverend said with a touch of stiffness. “As I intend to make abundantly clear in my sermon tomorrow.”
“Um-hum. You’re a wonderful talker… I never thought I’d get fond of somebody who didn’t like light.”
“I like some kinds of light,” said the Reverend Adelburg. “I like fires.”
Mazda drew a deep breath. “You’d better wash up before supper, Clem,” she said. “You’ve got rosin on you from the apple tree.”
“All right, dear.” He kissed her on the cheek and then—she had seductive shoulders, despite her ranginess—on the upper arm.
“Mmmmmmmm,” Mazda said.
When he had gone into the pantry to wash, she looked after him slantingly. Her caramel-colored eyebrows drew together in a frown. She had already scalded out the teapot. Now she reached into the drawer of the kitchen table and drew out a handful of what looked like small mushrooms. They were, as a matter of fact, mescal buttons, and she had gathered them last week from the top of a plant of Lophophora Williamsii herself.
She cut them up neatly with a paring knife and dropped them into the teapot. She put the mistletoe berries in on top of the mescal buttons. Then she filled the teapot with boiling water. When the Reverend got back from his washing, the teapot was steaming domestically on the table beside the string beans.
He said grace and poured himself a cup of the tea.
“Goodness, but it’s bitter,” he observed, sipping. “Not at all like it was the first time. What a difference putting in more mistletoe has made!”
Mazda looked down. She passed him the sugar bowl. He sweetened the tea lavishly. “You haven’t set a cup for yourself, dear,” he said, suddenly solicitous.
“…There isn’t much tea. You said to make it strong.”
“Yes, honey, but if there’s any good in the tea, I want you to share it. Get another cup.”
He looked across the table at her, brightly and affectionately. There was a faint flush in Mazda’s cheeks as she obeyed.
Supper was over and Mazda was washing the dishes when the Reverend Clem said suddenly, “How fast you’re moving, Mazda! I never saw anything like the way you’re getting through those dishes. I can hardly see your hands, they’re moving so fast.”
“Fast?” Mazda echoed. She sounded bewildered. She held up a spoon and polished its bowl languidly in the light of the oil lamp. “Why, I’m not moving fast. I’ve been standing here by the sink for hours and hours, washing one dish. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wish I could move fast.”