When he has done that and refilled and covered up the old place like it was before, he heads back to the house trailer. It’s late in the day. The trailer’s empty. Clara and Elaine are gone. He sees Mabel Hall through the kitchenette window hurrying over from her caravan looking fretful. His chest tightening, he steps outside to meet her.
I have not been a good mother. This is the despairing thought that Clara, seated beside her daughter’s hospital bed, is thinking. I have not paid enough attention. Though it is to herself she speaks, praying the while for guidance and forgiveness, she hopes Ely is listening. She does not feel him nearby, has not for some time now, but she believes he must be, for Elaine’s sake if not her own. They both need him now. Clara has given herself heart and soul to her church mission, which she has always thought of as Ely’s mission, too, and Elaine’s as well, her task to guide her daughter, hand in hand, toward redemption, the end so near upon them. But there was always so much to do, Elaine’s hand was not in hers too much of the time — how much of her devotion to this sacred calling, she wonders, has been worldly pride and vanity? — and now see here, her emaciated child, broken, embittered, lost, her hands shackled, her nose violated by the tube that, seemingly against her will, is keeping her alive. Often during the past few weeks, watching her daughter’s frightening decline, beset by doubt and weariness, Clara has thought she should ask someone else to take over. Hiram maybe. Or her new director of National Media, the bishop of the Eastern Seaboard. She even had a word with him about it. Did Jesus’ mother, cradling her son’s ravaged body, suffer the same doubts, the same regrets? What, at such a moment, does one care about the salvation of the world? She wishes she still had that little porcelain statue of Mary with her bleeding heart on her breast that Elaine gave her. It would speak to her now.
Purity of heart. Something Ely once said in a sermon, asking God he be granted it, and this has been her prayer as well and is now. What Ely meant by it was doing one thing in life and doing it right. It should be a grand thing and a noble thing and a holy thing, but one thing. It’s what true devotion is. On the road out east, between one church and another, she talked about it with Ben. He said he couldn’t define purity, but he knew how it felt. When they moved here to the camp they had it. Often, before that, in the early years, out on the road, too. But it was gone now. It’s still gone.
Bernice lifted her spectacles and took only one look at Elaine back at the trailer and said they had to get her to the hospital. Now. That child is dying. Ben was nowhere to be found. They rushed here in Bernice’s car, Elaine too feeble to resist. The doctor, too, was alarmed. The nurses took measures: emergency measures that Clara should perhaps have disallowed, but she was confused, ashamed, frightened, exhausted herself, the doctor taking note of that, asking questions, personal questions that she brushed aside or answered only in part, growing angry, then apologizing for that, trying not to break into tears, her daughter needing her strength, having so little of her own.
Her worst failing: Elaine has suffered so, and she has not known how to console her.
They left the camp, went east ostensibly to visit the churches there, sing and preach in them and bring the news, but primarily for Elaine’s sake, to distance her from the scene of her ordeal, spend more time together, attempt a healing. Though it was good to get back on the road again, good for her and Ben, Elaine remained tucked darkly into herself, refusing to speak, eating almost nothing. It just takes time, Clara supposed. Time and love. The movement, she saw, was strong and healthy. There were large, enthusiastic crowds wherever they went, and they even thought about settling out there, turning the Wilderness Camp over to those folks still living here. Maybe trying to build this administrative center was a mistake, for them at least; they were missionaries, not office workers. That’s how they were thinking. But word got around about Elaine wasting away and people began to get curious. They started comparing her to Marcella, only a legend to them, but a saintly one, and they wanted to see her, to pray in her company and to hear what she had to say. She had nothing to say, but that seemed to fascinate them all the more. Sick people turned up, asking to be cured. It got to be a little like a traveling freak show, which is how Ben put it one day in anger, chasing a crowd of them away from their house trailer, and they decided to return to the camp, fearful of the effect it might have on Elaine but not knowing where else to go. Besides, there was the Temple of Light cornerstone laying ceremony coming up; people would not understand why she who had brought all this about was not here. Even Ely, though mostly absent, seemed to be insisting on her return. The cornerstone was his tombstone, after all. But the trip back was long and Elaine, now refusing to leave her bed, worsened by the hour, as if the camp, as they drew nearer to it, were drawing the lifeblood out of her.
Ben arrives. He brings a chair over and sits beside her and takes her hand and asks clumsily how the girl is. He can see how she is. “How is it that something so good and holy can turn so bad?” he asks, not of her, just of the room. Of God. “I don’t hardly know what to do,” he says. And then he starts to cry. And she starts to cry. And they sit there for a while, two old people, weeping.
“Boy, this little lady kin sure flap, rare back’n cut down on a ballad! Jist give her a buncha words’n git outa the way! ‘The Trailer Camp Blues!’ So new it ain’t hardly got notes yet and ye heerd it here first in the ole Blue Moon, hottest spot the back side a Nashville! ‘Lost her name in a poker game!’ But she ain’t lost hers! Patti Jo Glover, folks, that’s whom she am! That’s right, give her a big hand, lemme hear it! I love her! And hey, ifn y’ain’t lovin’, y’ain’t livin’! Am I right? So kiss a face there! Go ahead! Won’t do ye no more harm’n a fever blister! And dontcha leave now, ya big sissies, hang in there to the end, cuz we got another big clump a Sattiday night honkytonk, hankypanky, hoedowns’n heartbreak a-comin’ your way soon’s we wet the whustle…
“That was beautiful, sweet thing! Y’really crunched it! Done me proud!”
“Well, I wish I could sing, Duke, and not only hoot and yip. Funny how you can make something just about bearable by only singing about it. And this one’s kinda comical like I guess my life was, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Thanks for that. And thanks for the beer, too.”